MEXICO GAINS AGAINST THE DRUG LORDS

Traffickers, Fearing Extradition, Lead Authorities To Bosses

MEXICO CITY Outgunned and outspent, the Mexican government is nonetheless
scoring striking victories against the drug cartels that have corrupted the
country for two decades.

More than 20 of Mexico's most-wanted men have been arrested in recent
months in an anti-crime wave without real precedent. The accused drug lords
are reputed to have controlled billions of dollars in cocaine and paid
bribes to thousands of police officers, prosecutors and judges.

The latest suspects to fall were Benjamin Arellano Felix, charged as the
leader of the Tijuana drug cartel, on March 9, and Adan Medrano, known as
the Gulf cartel's operations chief, last Wednesday.

What changed? A handful of traffickers became government informants,
officials said. The information led to arrests, and some of those arrested
turned into informants, leading to many more arrests.

"The quality of the intelligence has gone up," said Asa Hutchinson, chief
of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. "These building blocks of
intelligence let us get to the highest-level traffickers."

A decision last year by the Mexican Supreme Court to allow the extradition
of arrested suspects to the United States made some traffickers "so nervous
that they are reaching out and trying to cut deals," a senior law
enforcement official in Mexico said.

American trust in Mexican officials - a trust that did not exist two years
ago - is deepening with each new arrest. The United States is channeling
secret intelligence to Mexico without fearing that corrupt agents will sell
it to traffickers.

Still, the quantity of drugs that reaches American streets from Mexico is
undiminished. The traffickers shrug off seizures of multimillion- dollar
cocaine shipments. They have "an unlimited ability to lose tons of dope and
still make a profit," the senior law enforcement official in Mexico said.

But the arrests have had an effect in Mexico. The chiefs of the Tijuana and
Sinaloa cartels are in prison. So are the two top lieutenants of the Gulf
cartel and the operations chief of the Juarez cartel. All this has happened
in the last 11 months.

"The trick is to take down the people," the senior law enforcement official
in Mexico said. "It's one thing to lose your money, your property, your
residence. It's another to lose your life or your freedom."