DRUG CZAR PRAISES MEXICO

'Enormous Successes' Noted In Battle Against Trafficking

WASHINGTON - Mexico is chalking up ''enormous successes'' in battling
narcotics trafficking, causing ''a disruption that we have not seen
before'' in cocaine smuggling around the hemisphere, the White House drug
czar said Tuesday.

Mexico's sweeping actions against drug smuggling are forcing U.S. dealers
to dilute the quality of cocaine on U.S. streets, said John Walters,
director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The
purity of street-level cocaine in the United States fell nine percent last
year, he said.

Walters' extraordinary praise of Mexico -- a nation that Washington largely
treated as a corrupt and unworthy ally in the drug war in the 1990s --
coincided with the apparent arrest in Mexico of several Colombians with
alleged ties both to Colombia's largest rebel group and the Tijuana Cartel,
a new sign of what the Bush administration asserts is a link between
terrorist groups and drug trafficking.

The Mexican attorney general's office did not say how many Colombians were
arrested, but the detentions fueled speculation in the Mexican press that
guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia were
establishing ties to Mexico's drug traffickers.

Walters, who took over as President Bush's drug czar eight months ago, said
Mexico's ''historic'' achievement in dismantling several drug gangs this
year has earned it a new role as an anti-drug leader.

''Mexico, I believe, is further ahead than any other nation, including the
United States, in this hemisphere,'' Walters said at a press conference.

Colombia Affected

Walters, who recently returned from a swing through South America, said
Mexico's efforts at smashing drug rings is reverberating back to Colombia,
the source of most of the world's cocaine.

''The reports we have are that many Colombia-based organizations are no
longer providing cocaine on credit to Mexican organizations because of
cash-flow problems,'' Walters said. ``There's a lot of destabilization in
these markets.''

Mexican traffickers may move into marijuana to ''make up cash flow,'' he said.

''We want to make the market instable. That's the way you destroy
markets,'' he said.

President Vicente Fox, who came to office in December 2000, has carried out
on his pledge to attack drug gangs and police corruption that allowed it to
flourish. In a February shootout in Mazatlán, police killed Ramón Arellano
Félix, the enforcer of the Tijuana Cartel who was on the FBI's 10 most
wanted list. Weeks later, police arrested the cartel's chief operations
officer, Benjamín Arellano Félix, in the city of Puebla, and captured the
cartel's chief smuggler.

About 65 percent of the cocaine entering the United States is believed to
pass through the 2,000-mile border with Mexico.

Walters, who attended the inaugurations of new presidents in Colombia and
Bolivia last week, strongly defended a state of emergency imposed Monday in
Colombia that allows for restrictions on civil liberties. He said the South
American nation's incoming president, Alvaro Uribe, confronts spreading
lawlessness by the FARC rebels and needs a free hand to bring order and
political reform to his country.

Uribe, whose inauguration was greeted by a surge of rebel violence, had
adopted ''a dramatic agenda that will be ambitious and difficult,'' Walters
said. ``The new government has set not only an ambitious security agenda
for itself, but an ambitious domestic reform agenda, spreading the burden
of taxation throughout society, in addition to raising revenues, reforming
public institutions of education, of health and social welfare.''

Flights May Resume

On another counternarcotics issue, Walters said Colombia and Peru are
likely to renew a suspended U.S.-coordinated program to intercept
drug-laden airplanes in mid-autumn. The Bush administration suspended the
program in April, 2001, after Peruvian jetfighters fired on a U.S.
missionary airplane over the Amazon River, mistaking it for a
cocaine-smuggling aircraft.

A U.S. missionary and her infant daughter were killed in that interception.

U.S. officials are engaging in joint exercises and refining procedures in
both Andean countries to avoid a repeat of the tragedy, he said.