July 31, 1995
To Help Keep Mexico Stable, U.S. Soft-Pedaled Drug War
By TIM GOLDEN
Soon after becoming President at the end of 1988, Carlos Salinas de Gortari sent his new drug-enforcement chief to help rescue Mexico's troubled relationship with the United States.
The official, Javier Coello Trejo, quickly formed a 1,200-member task force, seized tons of drugs and put the most-wanted cocaine smuggler in Mexico behind bars. He brought the Government within reach of its broader goal, sufficiently impressing American officials with Mr. Salinas's resolve to dislodge the drug issue as an obstacle to closer ties between the countries.
But six years and much American praise later, law-enforcement officials say that Mexico's traffickers have grown more powerful and that their protection in the security forces remains widespread. Mr. Coello, removed from his post in 1990, was merely the first in a new series of Mexican officials to promise a tougher fight against the traffickers and then be accused of taking their bribes.
While the United States' influence in Mexico has risen steadily in recent years, interviews with dozens of current and former officials and a series of American government documents indicate that Washington has treated Mexico's drug problem as a special case.
Concerned for Mexican stability and the fate of the North American Free Trade Agreement, officials said, the United States often exaggerated the Mexican Government's progress in the fight against drugs, playing down corruption and glossing over failures.
Just as American pressure helped to force the Colombian Government's recent crackdown against the Cali cartel, many of these officials said, the United States might have done much more to block the rise of a new generation of Mexican drug lords.
Major Mexican traffickers were sometimes captured and let go without a public word from American diplomats, the officials said. Slow movement by the Mexican Government to stop the laundering of drug profits was accepted almost patiently. Rather than push for the prosecution of the drug-related corruption, they added, American officials usually wrote off such episodes as unavoidable bumps in a long, bumpy road. Washington's approach was in part a result of misplaced trust, bureaucratic infighting and an abiding fear that Mexican leaders would react to perceived meddling in their affairs by curbing American drug enforcement here, officials said.
Above all, though, American officials said they were kept in check by the desire of the Clinton and Bush Administrations to keep problems of drugs and corruption from jeopardizing the trade accord and the new economic partnership it symbolized.
"People desperately wanted drugs not to become a complicating factor for Nafta," said John P. Walters, a senior official for international drug policy in the Bush White House. "There was a degree of illicit activity that was just accepted."
Some American officials argue that the approach was justified by the greater role that the trade accord has given the United States in Mexico's future. Others say that to have applied greater diplomatic pressure on a problem that is rooted fundamentally in Americans' demand for illegal drugs would have endangered the two countries' improving relationship.
Mr. Salinas's successor, Ernesto Zedillo, has made reform of the legal system a central goal for his six-year term, which began in December. During a surge of Congressional attention to the drug issue as Mexico sought billions of dollars in foreign loans last winter, Mr. Zedillo also agreed privately to a handful of new counternarcotics measures sought by the United States.
Some American drug-enforcement officials now say they have never worked more closely with their Mexican counterparts. But even so, many of the United States officials who deal most closely with the drug issue are pessimistic about Washington's focus and Mexico's future.
"Billions of dollars are flooding into Mexico, and it's going to corrupt everything, and that's not even popping up on peoples' radar screens," said a senior counternarcotics official in Washington. "We spend more time talking about Rwanda."
Salinas's Start Despite Gains, Dark Figures Lurk
By comparison, more experienced officials recall, Mr. Salinas's start was even more impressive.
Eager to renegotiate a $100 billion foreign debt and warned by American officials that stronger ties would require stronger Mexican efforts to stop drugs, Mr. Salinas turned to Mr. Coello, a tough-talking former aide to one of the more feared military governors of southern Chiapas state.
As Mexico's first assistant attorney general for drug enforcement, Mr. Coello called on the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's office in Mexico City, Edward Heath, and they began planning the capture of Mexico's two most notorious traffickers.
One of Mr. Coello's teams was to hunt for Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, then the reputed godfather of Mexican cocaine trafficking and a fugitive in the slaying four years earlier in Guadalajara of an American drug-enforcement agent, Enrique S. Camarena. Another was to go after Manuel Salcido, a particularly violent Felix Gallardo associate known as El Cochiloco, or the Mad Pig.
It took Mr. Coello's agents barely four months to bring in Mr. Felix Gallardo and raise drug seizures sharply. With the United States Congress debating Mexico's cooperation in anti-drug efforts, Mr. Heath told reporters that "President Salinas de Gortari means business."
Despite the optimism generated in Washington by the notion that young, honest technocrats had taken power in Mexico City, former Bush Administration officials now say they remained concerned about Mr. Salinas's dependence on some of the darker characters of the old regime.
Mr. Salinas's first Attorney General had been Governor of western Jalisco state when Mr. Camarena was kidnapped there by traffickers and state policemen. His Education Minister, Manuel Bartlett Diaz, had been implicated in the case while serving as Interior Minister.
Former officials said the Justice Department at one point considered trying to indict Mr. Bartlett in connection with the murder. But some officials questioned the evidence, which came from wiretaps, confidential informants and two former drug traffickers. Others said any action against Mr. Bartlett could destabilize the Salinas Government. It was also noted, former officials said, that in his previous job, Mr. Bartlett had helped United States intelligence agencies on matters ranging from the activities of leftist groups in Central America to the local operations of the Soviet and Cuban intelligence agencies.
What may have taken some pressure off the Salinas Government was the Medellin Cartel.
With Colombia racked by the terrorism of its cocaine traffickers, Bolivia struggling with its coca growers and Peru threatened by both drug traffickers and leftist guerrillas, the Bush Administration's drug policy had centered on the Andes from the start. Compared with the $2.2 billion it sought for drug programs there, its investment in Mexico was minimal.
"Mexico was an afterthought," one of the senior officials in charge of the strategy said. "We thought that if we could crush the problem in the Andes and reduce demand here, the corruption problem in Mexico would go down as the transit of drugs went down."
According to officials and drug-policy documents released under the Freedom of Information Act to the National Security Archive, a private research group, the goals of American efforts in Mexico were comparatively mundane: to work more closely with Mexican officials, to establish an operation to track drug-smuggling flights across Mexico and to provide helicopters to ferry Mexican police on drug operations.
The tracking operation was seen as a particular success. But in the long list of goals, several American officials complained that more basic aims like arresting big traffickers and cracking down on corrupt officials often seemed to get lost.
"We all kind of got seduced by certain things that Salinas appeared to be doing," a former Pentagon official said. "Their willingness to take helicopters from us -- it was amazing how their acceptance of this was taken as proof that they were taking the drug threat seriously."
Arrests Some Traffickers Were Shielded
Though Mr. Felix Gallardo was captured in 1989, few other kingpins followed him to jail.
Among the more notable drug figures arrested during the next three years was a lieutenant to the Gulf-coast trafficker Juan Garcia Abrego, who was later charged in Texas with paying some $25 million to bribe high-ranking Mexican officials. Testifying in a separate case last year, another aide to Mr. Garcia Abrego said some of the money had gone to Mr. Coello, the drug-enforcement chief.
Despite accusations of human rights abuses against Mr. Coello and his agents, a classified cablegram to Washington from the United States Ambassador to Mexico, John D. Negroponte, reported that he left office in late 1990 "with an excellent record." Other officials said they saw Mr. Coello as part of a pattern in which Mexican commanders would strike at some traffickers while staying away from others who had presumably bought their protection.
Mr. Garcia Abrego seemed to go especially neglected, officials said. Mr. Salcido was finally killed in 1991, and his death exposed an embarrassing disguise: He had been living on a luxurious ranch in the western state of Colima, breeding horses and entertaining his friend the Governor.
In a report to Congress on Mexico's drug efforts in March 1991, the State Department asserted, "All but two of the major drug traffickers in Mexico have been jailed."
Several officials based in Mexico at the time said that no matter how old the list of traffickers from which the report's authors might have been working, the idea was absurd. Mexican and American officials also acknowledged that at least half a dozen top-level traffickers, including the man now considered Mexico's most powerful cocaine smuggler, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, were arrested during the Salinas Government and quietly freed by corrupt judges or the police.
In the case of Mr. Felix Gallardo, for three years after his arrest in 1989, the "godfather" and his associates were allowed cellular telephones and fax machines to run their smuggling operations from a well-appointed suite cells in a Mexico City jail. Revolving Door Corrupt Officials Merely Retired
While the system of drug corruption largely persisted under Mr. Salinas, its faces often changed. And with each reshuffling, government documents suggest, American hopes were revived.
When Mr. Coello was replaced at the Attorney General's office by a retired army general, Jorge Carrillo Olea, a State Department report predicted that the move "should improve cooperation" between the Mexican military and federal drug agents under the Attorney General.
But soon after the report appeared, American officials found themselves in the midst of one of the more serious drug incidents of the Salinas administration when army soldiers killed seven federal drug agents who had chased a planeload of drugs to a remote airstrip in the eastern state of Veracruz.
A videotape shot by United States Customs pilots who followed the agents to the scene appeared to show that the soldiers had been protecting the shipment. Autopsy reports showed that some of the agents had been shot dead at point-blank range.
Yet even when the Mexican Government initially tried to cover up the episode, American diplomats bent over backwards to avoid contradicting it, motivated by what one former official called concern for "the bigger picture."
In declassified notes from a closed Congressional briefing, one senior State Department official said the incident exposed the dangers of using "fixed-wing aircraft" instead of helicopters in the drug fight. Ambassador Negroponte called the shootings "a regrettable accident."
Other American officials eventually leaked the true story.
As the political fight over the free trade agreement grew more intense in Washington, the weight of "the bigger picture" on drug controversies grew heavier, many current and former officials said.
"Once Bush and Salinas decided to go with Nafta as the No. 1 goal, then everything else had to be made manageable," said a United States official who dealt extensively with the Mexicans. "On the issue of high-level officials being involved in drugs, we said, 'Carlos, as long as we are getting results, we are not going to micromanage.' "
Some former officials said they had argued that Mr. Salinas's pursuit of the trade pact gave the United States a unique opportunity to press Mexico for stronger measures on corruption and drugs, as it ultimately did on labor and the environment.
"They said we could not make drugs part of the debate," the former Customs Commissioner, Carol B. Hallett, recalled, referring to other senior Bush Administration officials. "I think it was a terrible mistake not to tie the two together."
Some officials question whether a more drastic American stance might have had the desired effect. "Say you got them to remove a few corrupt officials," said a former National Security Council official, "then other ones come in?"
But by a similar logic, other officials argued, the persistence of corruption in the Mexican police and military undermined drug-enforcement efforts to the point of almost making them futile. Operations based on D.E.A. intelligence were so often compromised by corrupt Mexican officials, officials said, that D.E.A. agents refused to work with many federal police commanders.
Mr. Salinas's attorneys general said hundreds of Mexican police agents were dismissed for suspected corruption. The attorneys general themselves were replaced four times in six years. Criminal prosecutions were so rare, however, that some American officials came to view the policy as simply a different form of impunity.
"The strategy was to retire people rather than prosecute them, and we told the Mexicans that that concerned us," said William J. Olson, a former senior State Department counternarcotics official. "They would say, 'Give us information that we can use.' But we were very concerned about compromising our sources and methods by turning over solid intelligence information."
New President Rising Hopes And Some Doubts
Clinton Administration officials said they hoped that they had turned an important page on the drug problem in Mexico when Mr. Zedillo was inaugurated as President on Dec. 1.
In a highly unusual action shortly before the inauguration, officials said the American Ambassador, James R. Jones, presented the new Government with a list of about 15 active and former Mexican officials whom the United States suspected of corruption and hoped not to see in the new administration. An American official said none of those on the list joined the new Government.
Still, American officials who interpreted the Zedillo response to the list as a sign of new times might consult Glenn W. MacTaggart, a Federal prosecutor in San Antonio who wrote to Mexican officials this year requesting the removal of the Mexican Attorney General's attache there.
According to a copy of the confidential letter given to a reporter by a Mexican official, Mr. MacTaggart said the attache had socialized with a suspected drug trafficker, withheld information about the sighting of a political-murder suspect and apparently tried to block the extradition of a Mexican lawyer charged with paying off judges to free the convicted rapist of a young girl.
The attache's conduct, Mr. MacTaggart wrote, "has raised serious security concerns and precludes our willingness to conduct business with him on future law-enforcement matters in this district."
The attache was eventually transferred to Guatemala. But even then, the Zedillo Government would not acknowledge that he had done anything wrong.
A senior Mexican official dismissed Mr. MacTaggart's concerns as the product of unspecified "personal differences" that he said the prosecutor had had with the attache. The attache, who has never denied the accusations, could not be reached. Mr. MacTaggart declined to comment on the incident, except to say, "The letter pretty well speaks for itself."