Pubdate: Mon,  9 Jul 2001
Source: Reuters (Wire)
Copyright: 2001 Reuters Limited
Author: Kieran Murray

INTERVIEW-MEXICO SAYS DRUG TRADE CHANGING, WARNS OF VIOLENCE

MEXICO CITY, July 5 (Reuters) - Mexico's national security adviser 
believes recent strikes against leading drug cartels have caused a 
fragmentation of the cocaine trade but warns they could also lead to 
a new round of violent turf battles.

Adolfo Aguilar Zinser said the cartels were being forced to split up 
different parts of their business in response to an assault on their 
networks by U.S. and Mexican forces, now working closer with each 
other than ever before.

He said the emergence of smaller drug gangs and independent operators 
showed the cartels were in trouble but he stopped well short of 
claiming victory in the war on drugs and said there could be a surge 
of violence if rival traffickers go after each other.

"If the business of the cartels is breaking down and the number of 
people entering into the different sectors rises, there could also be 
an increase in violence," Aguilar Zinser told Reuters in an interview 
late on Wednesday.

"You have more players stepping on each other's territory."

About two-thirds of the Colombian cocaine sold in the United States 
passes through Mexico and that transshipment trade has for long been 
controlled by a handful of cartels which ruthlessly stamped out 
upstart competitors.

But violence can surge whenever a cartel is in crisis.

In the year after the notorious drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes died 
while undergoing plastic surgery in 1997, his Juarez cartel imploded 
in a power struggle that claimed about 60 lives in and around the 
border city of Ciudad Juarez.

The seven-month-old government of President Vicente Fox has won 
praise for arresting several high-profile drug traffickers and a 
former state governor as well as disrupting some key smuggling routes 
with a series of sweep operations.

New Players

Aguilar Zinser said the government was already seeing clear evidence 
that those successes had helped disrupt and fragment the cocaine 
trade, inadvertently allowing new players to assert themselves.

Although he warned of violent turf disputes, he said they might also 
represent an opportunity for security forces on both sides of the 
U.S.-Mexico border.

"When they (the drug traffickers) are fighting each other, then it 
could indicate they are more vulnerable."

U.S. officials speak glowingly of the Fox government's commitment to 
the war on drugs and Aguilar Zinser said the result was a more 
balanced relationship in which a "vicious cycle" of suspicion and 
bitterness had been replaced by trust.

U.S. President George W. Bush has stressed the need to reduce cocaine 
consumption in the United States rather than simply demanding that 
producer nations cut the flow of cocaine, heroin, amphetamines and 
marijuana.

Aguilar Zinser said that, even as Mexico and the United States work 
together against the cartels, they need to "evaluate where all of 
this is taking us" because traffickers would still find a way to 
supply U.S. cities even if the trade was wiped out in Mexico.

But he insisted the drugs war was still a top priority for Fox's 
government because it needs to regain control of security forces and 
public institutions corrupted by the cartels.

"This is a fight against corruption," he said, adding that Mexico was 
also seeing a rise in drug addiction rates.

"It is a function of the breakdown of the cartels and the entry into 
the market of smaller independents who are being paid with drugs and 
sell them in the Mexican market," he said.

"Cocaine in urban centers was always for the higher-income brackets 
but now we are seeing it going down to lower income groups."
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MAP posted-by: Josh Sutcliffe