LAPSE IN MEXICO IS HIDDEN FROM U.S.

ESCAPE OF CARTEL CHIEF'S BROTHER IS REPORTED ONLY AFTER CERTIFICATION

A man accused of being the top money launderer for one of
Mexico's major drug trafficking cartels has escaped
''inexplicably'' from police custody, Mexican officials
said, but the authorities failed to disclose the incident
until hours after President Bill Clinton decided to certify
Mexico as a full ally in the war on drugs. Humberto
Garcia Abrego, the brother of Juan Garcia Abrego, a
convicted cocaine trafficker imprisoned in the United
States, slipped away from police officers assigned to guard
him during questioning at government offices in central
Mexico City sometime Wednesday or Thursday, the Mexican
attorney general's office said.

''Inexplicably, the official in charge of the
investigation informed his superiors that Humberto Garcia
Abrego had gone from the National Institute for Combating
Drugs,'' before the questioning was completed, the attorney
general's office said in a confused statement.

The incident is the second during the twoweek lobbying
campaign that preceded the Friday certification decision in
which Mexican officials withheld disclosure of an
embarrassing development, even as administration officials
were lauding them for their sincerity and wholehearted
cooperation.

After the arrest Feb. 6 of the country's top
anti-narcotics official, General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo,
on charges of collaborating with the top trafficker,
Mexican officials kept his detention secret for 12 days.
They announced it only after newspapers reported that
antinarcotics troops had searched several of the general's
homes. Humberto Garcia Abrego, the younger brother of the
trafficker who controlled the narcotics organization that
dominated northeastern Mexico and southern Texas, known as
the Gulf Cartel, was arrested in July, accused of
overseeing the cartel's billiondollar money laundering
operations.

He spent six months in a federal prison in Mexico City,
a spell interrupted briefly in September when his lawyers
persuaded a rural judge to order his release. That order
was overturned when prosecutors rearrested him.

A similar scenario played itself out starting late
Tuesday, when another rural judge, from the northeastern
state of Tamaulipas again ordered Mr. Garcia Abrego's
release from the Northern Penitentiary on the basis of a
constitutional appeal, according to the attorney general's
statement.

Anti-drug officers immediately rearrested him, but a
judicial order required them to come up with new charges
within 48 hours or release him, the statement said. He was
taken to the offices of the National Institute for
Combating Drugs for questioning but escaped.

The two drug agents who were questioning him were put
under house arrest, the government statement said.