U.S., MEXICO ALIGN AGAINST COMMON FOE: BRUTAL NARCOTICS TRADE

After Long Era of Mistrust, Nations Merge Training, Intelligence and Technology

MEXICO CITY -- To avenge the arrest of their leader, Mexican drug
cartel commandos went on a rampage this summer across the lawless
state of Michoacan, seizing 12 Mexican police officers and dumping
their bound and stripped corpses in a pile beside a busy highway.

The slaughtered federal agents, it later emerged, had something in
common: All had been vetted and trained by the U.S. government to
work alongside its anti-narcotics agents. Officials said the American
connection made them high-value targets for the cartels, which are
lashing back ruthlessly against a military crackdown involving
unprecedented cooperation between the two countries.

After decades of mistrust and sometimes betrayal, Mexican and U.S.
authorities are increasingly setting aside their differences to unite
against a common enemy. According to interviews in Washington and
Mexico City, the two countries are sharing sensitive intelligence and
computer technology, military hardware and, perhaps most importantly,
U.S. know-how to train and vet Mexican agents. Police and soldiers
secretly on the cartels' payroll have long poisoned efforts at
cross-border cooperation against some of the world's most dangerous
criminal organizations.

"The recognition by both sides, at the highest levels, that we have a
shared responsibility for drug trafficking and serious crime in
Mexico is a watershed change," said John Feeley, the deputy chief of
mission at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico.

The newly robust partnership is still risky, uneasy and freighted
with old suspicions. U.S. law enforcement officials said it is being
forged with the assurance by the U.S. State Department that Mexico's
weak law enforcement agencies will overcome a history of incompetence
and corruption, and that the closed ranks of the Mexican military,
which operates with virtual impunity, can get past its hostility to outsiders.

U.S. officials also acknowledge that the growing cooperation is still
a gamble. With their almost limitless resources, drug traffickers
have corrupted top crime fighters in President Felipe Calderon's
administration, including the head of the attorney general's
organized-crime unit. A cartel spy penetrated the Interpol office
here and claims to have worked inside the U.S. Embassy to steal
secrets from the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The new relationship goes well beyond, and builds upon, the Merida
Initiative, the $1.4 billion U.S. anti-narcotics package to Mexico
launched by the Bush administration. That three-year agreement
includes the promise of Black Hawk helicopters, night-vision goggles
and gamma-ray scanners to search for guns and cash at the U.S.-Mexico border.

But now, for the first time, the U.S. and Mexican armed forces
regularly exchange classified intelligence in real time, often
through Mexican officers embedded at the U.S. Northern Command in
Colorado Springs and at an interagency task force in Key West, Fla.
The task force, which is responsible for military satellite and
maritime surveillance over the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, relays
information to the Mexican navy and air force to interdict drugs moving north.

In addition, Mexican technicians are using U.S. government software
to help build Platform Mexico, a computer network housed in a new
five-story bunker at the edge of Mexico City. When the facility opens
next week, the network will connect Mexican authorities with U.S. law
enforcement databases. The most useful information, such as traces of
weapons used in crimes, is being translated into Spanish.

"This is one of our most important reforms because if you don't have
the intelligence, the information, you are just reacting. This will
make us proactive," said Jose Francisco Niembro Gonzalez, director of
Platform Mexico.

While hardware and technology are important, senior officials in both
governments describe the vetting program as the linchpin for their
new levels of information sharing. Under an agreement with the
Mexican government, U.S. agencies administer lie-detector tests and
background checks for hundreds of Mexican agents now working with
U.S. counterparts. These vetted units, which include elements in the
Mexican military, are cleared to receive U.S. intelligence, including
access to undercover agents and confidential informants.

The murder of the 12 agents in Michoacan represents the deadliest
attack against the Mexican federal police in the modern era. The
officers were ambushed just as they were about to launch an operation
against a leader of La Familia, one of Mexico's newest and most
violent drug mafias. Instead, in the middle of the night, 20 heavily
armed men, dressed in stolen uniforms and impersonating federal
officers, burst into their rented house and kidnapped them.

The Mexican agents were betrayed by local residents and captured by
the trafficker they sought, Servando "La Tuta" Gomez-Martinez, who
then ordered the 12 officers executed, according to an account given
to The Washington Post by Ramon Eduardo Pequeno, a top official in
the federal police who commanded the slain agents.

These were not the first federal police officers vetted by the United
States to have been assassinated by traffickers, said a U.S. source
familiar with the program. But U.S. and Mexican officials remain
convinced of its effectiveness.

Last month, vetted Mexican agents provided information that helped
lead to the arrest of more than 300 U.S.-based suppliers for La
Familia, according to U.S. officials.

"I would take an oath in court that those vetted units have been the
key to a number of arrests in Mexico and the United States," said
Anthony Placido, the DEA's chief of intelligence. "What it's
basically enabled us to do is play Ping-Pong: They share information
with us, we share it with them, and we all use it to make cases. We
arrest people and flip them, and then pass information down to them."

Prosecutors say that Mexican traffickers fear life sentences in U.S.
prisons more than death.

Mexican authorities are now arresting their own citizens in drug
trafficking cases developed by the U.S. Justice Department and
transferring defendants north for trial -- which would have been seen
as an unthinkable breach of Mexican sovereignty just a few years ago.
Mexico has extradited a record 284 defendants for prosecution in the
United States over the past three years, fulfilling a treaty
obligation that was ignored until Calderon took office in December 2006.

The reputed leader of the Gulf cartel, Osiel Cardenas, was flown to
Houston in shackles in 2007. This summer his trial was abruptly
cancelled without explanation, as rumors swirl that Cardenas, known
as "the Killer of Friends," cut a deal with the DEA to provide information.

As the drug wars rage, leaving more than 16,000 dead in three years,
the United States and Mexico are desperate to get more federal agents
on the streets. By spring, the two governments hope to graduate more
than 10,000 cadets from a new U.S.-funded training academy in San Luis Potosi.

The cadets are required to complete a seven-week crash course in
basic detective work taught by instructors from the United States,
Canada and Colombia working alongside Mexican agents.

The academy recruits college graduates, and classrooms and firing
ranges on the manicured campus are filled with young lawyers,
engineers, biochemists and computer scientists who study a curriculum
developed by retired FBI agents and taught by active-duty officers
borrowed from the Secret Service, DEA, the Marshals Service and the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives."Our new training
will create a new, better federal police force with new values," said
Mauricio Sanchez Rincon, 23, who has a college degree in computer
science and is one of the 3,259 fresh-faced cadets. "Those values are
discipline, respect, and honesty. That's going to be important in
convincing people they can have faith in us, that they can approach
us and not be afraid."

U.S. and Mexican officials trace the change in the relationship to
Calderon, who put the Mexican army in charge of fighting the drug war
and approached the Bush administration with the proposal for a
partnership that became the Merida Initiative.

For the first time, the Mexican navy participated in joint military
exercises with the United States earlier this year. Frank Mora, U.S.
deputy assistant secretary of defense for Western Hemispheric
affairs, said the military-to-military cooperation has expanded to
include counternarcotics, intelligence analysis and helicopter pilot training.

"It's not just the Mexicans needing us," he said. "It is us needing
the Mexicans."