US, MEXICO FINALLY DRUG-WAR ALLIES

President Vicente Fox's Unprecedented Cooperation With The Us Yields Big
Blows To Latin Narcotraffickers

MEXICO CITY - After years at cross purposes, Mexico and the US are entering
a new era of cooperation in fighting the narcotics trade.

Cartels have been gutted and record quantities of narcotics seized. The
list of those arrested or dead reads like a 'Who's Who' of Mexico's drug
underworld - evidence that two years after President Vicente Fox vowed to
win the war on drug trafficking, he is making headway.

"The Fox government just continues going," says Donald Thornhill Jr., a
spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration in San Diego. "And we are
working with them in an unprecedented manner."

"Mexico has done an outstanding job," said US drug czar John Walters on a
recent visit here in late June. "They are ahead of us in attacking this
problem."

Mr. Walters cited a 9 percent decline in cocaine purity in the US drug
market as evidence that fewer drug shipments are making their way across
the shared 2,000-mile border. Progress is also being made in slowing
supplies of heroin, marijuana, Ecstasy, and meta-amphetamines, among other
narcotics, Mexican records show.

Officials on both sides of the border credit the slowed flow of drugs to a
closer relationship between US and Mexican antidrug agents who share
information - and then act on it. US and Mexican officials say shared
intelligence was crucial to the March 9 arrest of drug lord Benjamin
Arellano Felix.

Drug Enforcement Administration Director Asa Hutchinson also credited joint
investigation efforts for the indictment last month of senior leaders of
Mexico's powerful southeast cartel. He said joint efforts toppled Consuelo
Marquez, a former Lehman Brothers account representative in New York
charged with participating in the laundering of millions of dollars of drug
money.

Past Mexican administrations often ignored advice from the US, and in some
cases, corrupt officials used it to help drug bosses steer clear of problems.

Mexican Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha described Mexico's
former policing and investigation network as "structurally dysfunctional"
and said reforms put in place were slowly turning it into "a professional
police corporation," less susceptible to corruption.

Fox has sent in federal police and the military to make arrests or to
intervene in locations where local police were considered too deeply
corrupted, officials say. In April, for example, soldiers and federal
officers detained more than 100 police officers in the border town of
Tijuana on charges they took bribes and helped drug cartels. More than 50
were flown to Mexico City under heavy guard.

"The tempo and magnitude of disruption and arrests of leaders of these
organizations is like we have never seen before - in any country," Walters
said.

In all, Mexican government documents say, more than 11,350 drug-
trafficking arrests have been made since Fox took power in December 2000,
including a dozen drug bosses and almost 200 of their deputies, assassins,
and financiers.

The high-profile arrests include:

* Benjamin Arellano Felix, the leader of the multibillion-dollar Arellano
Felix Organization (AFO) arrested in March.

* Adan Medrano Rodriguez, known as operations chief of the Matamoros- based
Gulf Cartel, arrested in March.

* Albino Quintero Meraz, arrested in late May. Mr. Meraz, and other drug
bosses ran a multi-billion-dollar operation that once trafficked more than
10 percent of all the cocaine sold in the US.

Some evidence shows that South American cocaine growers are concerned.
Colombian cartels, says experts, are no longer willing to provide drugs on
a credit basis.

That prompted one US law enforcement official to compare the troubled
Arellano Felix Organization with the bankrupt energy firm Enron.

"Investors don't want to put money into a company if they don't think
they'll get their money back," the US official says. "All of a sudden, AFO
looks like a pretty bad investment, just like Enron."

And though authorities here and in the US say the gouging of Mexico's
cartels will continue, they also say it looks as if certain leagues are
regrouping, and that some drug lords are moving in on - or fighting over -
newly available turf.

Authorities in Mexico and the US say Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, a drug boss
operating out of eastern Sinaloa state, appears to be battling for key drug
routes to the lucrative California market with hangers-on from the AFO. The
Gulf Cartel, though weakened, is still operational.

Officials say that the war on drugs has yet to be won in Mexico, still
considered the major transit point for the majority of the billions of
dollars of illicit narcotics that reach the US annually.

Indeed, last week authorities seized some 5,000 pounds of marijuana at
three sites in Tijuana, a sign that there's still a long way to go.

"You do the math," says Mr. Thornhill. "They still have lots of worker bees."

Some experts predict a geographic shift in drug trafficking. If Mexico
becomes too dangerous for drug cartels, they may rely more on ocean routes
in the Pacific and Caribbean, which are harder to patrol.

Others compare what's happening in Mexico to the dismantling of Colombia's
Cali and Medellin cartels in the early 1990s.Though the demise of drug
lords like Pablo Escobar briefly brought down levels of cocaine moving to
the US market, the megacartels were eventually replaced by smaller, less
visible operations.

"This makes it harder to chase them down because they are less
identifiable," says Jorge Chabat, a Mexico City expert on organized crime.
"But it makes it easier to keep down the level of general violence."

Fox, in the end, may be the biggest winner - in the political arena.

"There is a very large political value to this since it gives more
legitimacy to the Mexican government to negotiate with the US," says Mr.
Chabat. "That is great for Mexico."