U.S. WIDENS ROLE IN BATTLE AGAINST MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS

WASHINGTON - The United States is expanding its role in Mexico's
bloody fight against drug trafficking organizations, sending new
C.I.A. operatives and retired military personnel to the country and
considering plans to deploy private security contractors in hopes of
turning around a multibillion-dollar effort that so far has shown few
results.

In recent weeks, small numbers of C.I.A. operatives and American
civilian military employees have been posted at a Mexican military
base, where, for the first time, security officials from both
countries work side by side in collecting information about drug
cartels and helping plan operations. Officials are also looking into
embedding a team of American contractors inside a specially vetted
Mexican counternarcotics police unit.

Officials on both sides of the border say the new efforts have been
devised to get around Mexican laws that prohibit foreign military and
police from operating on its soil, and to prevent advanced American
surveillance technology from falling under the control of Mexican
security agencies with long histories of corruption.

"A sea change has occurred over the past years in how effective Mexico
and U.S. intelligence exchanges have become," said Arturo Sarukhan,
Mexico's ambassador to the United States. "It is underpinned by the
understanding that transnational organized crime can only be
successfully confronted by working hand in hand, and that the outcome
is as simple as it is compelling: we will together succeed or together
fail."

The latest steps come three years after the United States began
increasing its security assistance to Mexico with the $1.4 billion
Merida Initiative and tens of millions of dollars from the Defense
Department. They also come a year before elections in both countries,
when President Obama may confront questions about the threat of
violence spilling over the border, and President Felipe Calderon's
political party faces a Mexican electorate that is almost certainly
going to ask why it should stick with a fight that has left nearly
45,000 people dead.

"The pressure is going to be especially strong in Mexico, where I
expect there will be a lot more raids, a lot more arrests and a lot
more parading drug traffickers in front of cameras," said Vanda
Felbab-Brown, a counternarcotics expert at the Brookings Institution.
"But I would also expect a lot of questioning of Merida, and some
people asking about the way the money is spent, or demanding that the
government send it back to the gringos."

Mexico has become ground zero in the American counternarcotics fight
since its cartels have cornered the market and are responsible for
more than 80 percent of the drugs that enter the United States.
American counternarcotics assistance there has grown faster in recent
years than to Afghanistan and Colombia. And in the last three years,
officials said, exchanges of intelligence between the United States
and Mexico have helped security forces there capture or kill some 30
mid-to high-level drug traffickers, compared with just two such
arrests in the previous five years.

The United States has trained nearly 4,500 new federal police agents
and assisted in conducting wiretaps, running informants and
interrogating suspects. The Pentagon has provided sophisticated
equipment, including Black Hawk helicopters, and in recent months it
has begun flying unarmed surveillance drones over Mexican soil to
track drug kingpins.

Still, it is hard to say much real progress has been made in crippling
the brutal cartels or stemming the flow of drugs and guns across the
border. Mexico's justice system remains so weakened by corruption that
even the most notorious criminals have not been successfully prosecuted.

"The government has argued that the number of deaths in Mexico is
proof positive that the strategy is working and that the cartels are
being weakened," said Nik Steinberg, a specialist on Mexico at Human
Rights Watch. "But the data is indisputable - the violence is
increasing, human rights abuses have skyrocketed and accountability
both for officials who commit abuses and alleged criminals is at rock
bottom."

Mexican and American officials involved in the fight against organized
crime do not see it that way. They say the efforts begun under
President Obama are only a few years old, and that it is too soon for
final judgments. Dan Restrepo, Mr. Obama's senior Latin American
adviser, refused to talk about operational changes in the security
relationship, but said, "I think we are in a fundamentally different
place than we were three years ago."

A senior Mexican official, speaking on condition of anonymity, agreed.
"This is the game-changer in degrading transnational organized crime,"
he said, adding: "It can't be a two-, three-, four-, five-or six-year
policy. For this policy investment to work, it has to be sustained
long-term."

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mexico's federal police
chief, Genaro Garci a Luna, in Mexico City in 2009 against a backdrop
of an American Black Hawk helicopter.

Several Mexican and American security analysts compared the challenges
of helping Mexico rebuild its security forces and civil institutions -
crippled by more than seven decades under authoritarian rule - to
similar tests in Afghanistan. They see the United States fighting
alongside a partner it needs but does not completely trust.

Though the new United States ambassador to Mexico was plucked from an
assignment in Kabul, Afghanistan, the Obama administration bristles at
such comparisons, saying Mexico's growing economy and functioning,
though fragile, institutions put it far ahead of Afghanistan. Instead,
administration officials more frequently compare Mexico's struggle to
the one Colombia began some 15 years ago.

Among the most important lessons they have learned, they say, is that
in almost any fight against organized crime, things tend to get worse
before they get better.

When violence spiked last year around Mexico's industrial capital,
Monterrey, Mr. Calderon's government asked the United States for more
access to sophisticated surveillance technology and expertise. After
months of negotiations, the United States established an intelligence
post on a northern Mexican military base, moving Washington beyond its
traditional role of sharing information to being more directly
involved in gathering it.

American officials declined to provide details about the work being
done by the American team of fewer than two dozen Drug Enforcement
Administration agents, C.I.A. officials and retired military personnel
members from the Pentagon's Northern Command. For security reasons,
they asked The New York Times not to disclose the location of the compound.

But the officials said the compound had been modeled after "fusion
intelligence centers" that the United States operates in Iraq and
Afghanistan to monitor insurgent groups, and that the United States
would strictly play a supporting role.

"The Mexicans are in charge," said one American military official.
"It's their show. We're all about technical support."

The two countries have worked in lock step on numerous high-profile
operations, including the continuing investigation of the February
murder of Jaime J. Zapata, an American Immigration and Customs
Enforcement agent.

Mexico's federal police chief, Genaro Garcia Luna, put a helicopter in
the air within five minutes after receiving a call for help from Mr.
Zapata's partner, the authorities said. Then he invited American
officials to the police intelligence center - an underground location
known as "the bunker" - to work directly with Mexican security forces
in tracking down the suspects.

Mexican officials hand-carried shell casings recovered from the scene
of the shooting to Washington for forensics tests, allowed American
officials to conduct their own autopsy of the agent's body and shipped
the agent's bullet-battered car to the United States for inspection.

In another operation last week, the Drug Enforcement Administration
and a Mexican counternarcotics police unit collaborated on an
operation that led to the arrest of Jose Antonio Hernandez Acosta, a
suspected drug trafficker. The authorities believe he is responsible
for hundreds of deaths in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico,
including the murders of two Americans employed at the United States
Consulate there.

While D.E.A. field officers were not on the scene - the Mexicans still
draw the line at that - the Americans helped develop tips and were in
contact with the Mexican unit almost every minute of the five-hour
manhunt, according to a senior American official in Mexico. The unit,
of about 50 officers, is the focus of another potentially
ground-breaking plan that has not yet won approval. Several former
D.E.A. officials said the two countries were considering a proposal to
embed a group of private security contractors - including retired
D.E.A. agents and former Special Forces officers - inside the unit to
conduct an on-the-job training academy that would offer guidance in
conducting operations so that suspects can be successfully taken to
court. Mexican prosecutors would also work with the unit, the
Americans said.

But a former American law enforcement official familiar with the unit
described it as one good apple in a barrel of bad ones. He said it was
based on a compound with dozens of other nonvetted officers, who
provided a window on the challenges that the Mexican police continue
to face.

Some of the officers had not been issued weapons, and those who had
guns had not been properly trained to use them. They were required to
pay for their helmets and bulletproof vests out of their own pockets.
And during an intense gun battle against one of Mexico's most vicious
cartels, they had to communicate with one another on their cellphones
because they had not been issued police radios. "It's sort of
shocking," said Eric Olson of the Woodrow Wilson Center. "Mexico is
just now learning how to fight crime in the midst of a major crime
wave. It's like trying to saddle your horse while running the Kentucky
Derby."