U.S. ROLE IN MEXICO DRUG WAR GROWS

WASHINGTON The United States is expanding its role in Mexico's bloody
fight against drug trafficking organizations, sending new CIA
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 CIA operatives and U.S. civilian
military employees have been posted at a Mexican military base, where,
for the first time, security officials from both countries are working
side by side in collecting information about drug cartels and helping
plan operations. Officials are also looking into embedding a team of
U.S. contractors inside a specially vetted Mexican counternarcotics
police unit.

Officials on both sides of the border said the new efforts have been
designed to get around Mexican laws that prohibit foreign military and
police from operating on its soil and to prevent advanced U.S.
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 Barack Obama may face questions about the threat of
violence spilling over the border, and Mexican President Felipe
Calderon's political party faces an electorate that is almost
certainly going to ask why it should stick with a fight that has left
nearly 45,000 people dead.

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 midlevel 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 U.S. officials involved in the fight against organized
crime do not see it that way. They say the efforts begun under Obama
are only a few years old, and that it is too soon for final judgments.

When violence spiked last year around Mexico's industrial capital,
Monterrey,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.

U.S. officials declined to provide details about the work being done
by the U.S. team of fewer than two dozen Drug Enforcement
Administration agents, CIA officials and retired military personnel
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 that 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.

In an operation last week, the Drug Enforcement Administration and a
Mexican counternarcotics police unit collaborated on an operation that
led to the arrest of a suspected drug trafficker named Jose Antonio
Hernandez Acosta.

While DEA 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 step of the five-hour
manhunt, according to a senior U.S. 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 DEA
officials said the two countries were considering a proposal to embed
a group of private security contractors including retired DEA 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 U.S. law enforcement official familiar with the unit
described it as one good apple in a barrel of bad ones.

Some of the officers had not been issued weapons, and those who had
guns had not been properly trained to use them. During an intense
gunbattle 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."