Mexico Replaces Inept, Corrupt Anti-Drug Force

MEXICO CITY — The Mexican government scrapped its corruption-ridden anti-drug force Wednesday, purging its 1,100 agents and replacing them with a specially trained, rigorously tested and better paid anti-narcotics unit directly under command of the attorney general.

Unveiling the new drug enforcement plan at a news conference here, Atty. Gen. Jorge Madrazo Cuellar said it was merely the first in a series of sweeping law enforcement reforms ordered by President Ernesto Zedillo to win back Mexicans’ confidence in their criminal justice system.

The new agents, he said, are required to take psychological, drug-detection and lie-detector tests and open their personal finances to investigators--an effort to combat the corruption that he said had compromised the 4-year-old National Institute to Combat Drugs, or INCD.

Members of the new unit, he said, also will be given “substantial” pay raises, expanded life insurance and better medical and retirement benefits--additional hedges against the billions of dollars in bribes that Mexico’s drug cartels have paid officials to allow the smuggling of South American cocaine across the U.S. border.

When asked how many agents the new unit has, Madrazo said only 60 of the 107 agents who applied for the jobs have passed the tests. U.S. and Mexican officials privately have said the new anti-drug squad will have at least 1,000 agents when it is complete.

In discarding the INCD--created under a similar restructuring in 1993--Madrazo cited the agency’s “advanced state of deterioration,” “documented corruption” within its ranks and its “proven inability to dismantle the drug cartels.”

Madrazo said the INCD’s current director, Mariano Herran Salvatti--a career prosecutor who was the first to pass the stringent new tests in March--also will head the new drug unit, officially dubbed the Special Prosecutors Office for Crimes Against Health--Mexico’s terminology for drug crimes.

Madrazo’s reorganization came just five days before President Clinton is due to arrive for the first U.S. presidential visit here in nearly two decades. The attorney general denied that the two events are linked.

“This reform has absolutely nothing to do with bilateral relations with the United States,” Madrazo said, detailing the months of study that went into it. But he added, “After this, we hope that these measures will make [the relationship] even better.”

Establishing better cooperation between the two countries in combating a drug trade that supplies up to three-quarters of the cocaine sold in the United States and generates an estimated $30 billion a year in illicit profits will be high on the agenda when Clinton, Zedillo and their key cabinet members meet here next week.

U.S. officials, who privately hailed Madrazo’s new program, have been pressing Mexico City for radical reforms in its drug enforcement operations since the Feb. 18 arrest of Mexico’s anti-drug czar, Gen. Jose de Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo. Gutierrez headed the INCD when he was jailed along with two of his top lieutenants and charged with collaborating with Mexico’s most powerful drug cartel.

Gutierrez, an army general, was arrested just days before Clinton certified Mexico as an ally in the drug war. The arrest raised fears of intelligence leaks in joint U.S.-Mexican drug-enforcement operations and triggered a failed attempt in the U.S. House of Representatives to overturn Clinton’s certification of Mexico.

But officials in Washington also took steps Wednesday to clear the air on the drug front in advance of Clinton’s May 5-7 visit.

A U.S. official said the Clinton administration had dropped formal protests it filed with Mexico in March on a major drug-money laundering case, which touched off a series of charges and countercharges between Mexico City and Washington.

A senior U.S. law enforcement official conceded that Washington was wrong in alleging that Mexico had seized only a tenth of an estimated $183 million in suspected drug proceeds that U.S. investigators said were in the Mexican bank accounts of Rigoberto Gaxiola Medina, who is under indictment for drug trafficking in Detroit.

The U.S. official, who asked not to be named, told reporters Wednesday that Mexico, in fact, had frozen all $16 million that was in the accounts at the time, as Mexico had asserted all along. The $183 million, he said, represented the total in suspected drug money that had passed through the accounts.

“The [U.S.] protests were based on a misunderstanding,” the official said. Explaining the timing of the Clinton administration’s apology--delivered formally to the Zedillo administration here last week--he added: “I’m not going to say this was unrelated to the president’s trip. But these are areas [we] want to make progress on throughout.”

Meanwhile in Washington, the House International Relations Committee voted Wednesday to abolish the drug certification program that has angered the United States’ southern neighbors and rejected an effort to tie U.S. aid to how a country votes in the United Nations.

The votes came as members began work on a sweeping foreign affairs bill that seeks to make changes at the State Department and the United Nations. The panel voted 24-18 for an amendment to eliminate the certification program. This year’s certification process, which approved Mexico and disapproved Colombia, brought calls for changes in the process.

Times staff writer Mary Beth Sheridan contributed to this report.