BIG VICTORIES FOR MEXICO AGAINST DRUG CARTELS

MEXICO CITY, March 30 -- 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 anticrime 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 Rodriguez, known as the
Gulf cartel's operations chief, on March 27.

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. Working up the
cartels' chains of command, Mexico has been breaking down the doors of the
nation's biggest drug chiefs.

"The quality of the intelligence has gone up," Asa Hutchinson, chief of the
United States Drug Enforcement Administration, said in a telephone
interview on Friday. "These building blocks of intelligence let us get to
the highest-level traffickers."

Last year's decision by Mexico's 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."

Now turf wars and fratricide are breaking out among the cartels. "We see a
scattering within the organizations," said Jose Santiago Vasconcelos, chief
of Mexico's federal organized-crime unit. "We're seeing an internal struggle."

Senior Mexican and American law enforcement officials meet at least once a
month to plot strategy. They sometimes convene in "the bubble" -- a secure
room run by the Central Intelligence Agency's Mexico City station and
shielded from electronic surveillance.

Mexico's organized-crime unit and a commando squad of soldiers act on the
intelligence. Their members are vigorously vetted, and the commandos are
purposely isolated.

"We feel confident sharing very sensitive intelligence with these special
vetted units, and they send us key information as well," Mr. Hutchinson said.

In the past, traffickers have bought off some of the Mexican generals
leading the drug war. But the military commandos work in a world unto
themselves. "Communication between these units and the main body of the
army is almost nonexistent," Mr. Vasconcelos said. "This has decreased
corruption."

Nobody here or in Washington is proclaiming victory in the drug war. But
the attack on the Mexican cartels could be compared "to the dismantling of
Mafia crime families in the United States," Mr. Hutchinson said. "What
seemed to be untouchable for decades ultimately came down."