GOVERNMENT IN MEXICO HITTING CARTELS EFFECTIVELY

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, and Adan Medrano Rodriguez, known as the
Gulf cartel's operations chief.

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
U.S. 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."