U.S. DRUG CZAR LAUDS MEXICO'S EFFORTS

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 9 percent last
year, he said.

Walters' praise of Mexico - a nation that Washington largely treated as a
corrupt and unworthy ally in the drug war in the 1990s - was both lavish
and unprecedented. It coincided with the apparent arrest in Mexico of
several Colombians with alleged ties 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 farther ahead than any other nation, including the
United States, in this hemisphere at this point," Walters told a news
conference limited to foreign journalists in Washington. A transcript of
the news conference was later issued.

Walters, who recently returned from a trip through South America, said
Mexico's effectiveness at smashing drug rings was disrupting traffickers in
Colombia, 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."

He said Mexican traffickers may move into marijuana to "make up cash flow."

"We want to make the market (unstable). That's the way you destroy
markets," he said. "Our goal in the United States and working with our
allies is to create and sustain fundamental instabilities in the drug markets."

Mexican President Vicente Fox, who came into office in December 2000, is
credited with carrying out his pledge to attack drug gangs and police
corruption that allowed traffickers to flourish.

In a February shootout in Mazatlan, police killed Ramon Arellano Felix, 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,
Benjamin Arellano Felix, in the city of Puebla, and captured the cartel's
chief smuggler.

Some 65 percent of the cocaine entering the United States is believed to
penetrate by land though 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," he said.

On another counternarcotics issue, Walters said Colombia and Peru are
likely to renew in mid-autumn a suspended U.S.-coordinated program to
intercept drug-laden airplanes.

The Bush administration suspended the program in April 2001 after Peruvian
jet fighters 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.

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

"We understand this is not a risk-free activity," he said, "but we want to
minimize to the absolute extent possible the risk of innocent lives being
put in jeopardy."