Pubdate: Thu, 15 Aug 2002
Source: Miami Herald (FL)
Copyright: 2002 The Miami Herald
Contact:  http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/262
Author: Tim Johnson

DRUG CZAR PRAISES MEXICO

'Enormous Successes' Noted In Battle Against Trafficking

WASHINGTON - Mexico is chalking up ''enormous successes'' in battling 
narcotics trafficking, causing ''a disruption that we have not seen 
before'' in cocaine smuggling around the hemisphere, the White House drug 
czar said Tuesday.

Mexico's sweeping actions against drug smuggling are forcing U.S. dealers 
to dilute the quality of cocaine on U.S. streets, said John Walters, 
director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The 
purity of street-level cocaine in the United States fell nine percent last 
year, he said.

Walters' extraordinary praise of Mexico -- a nation that Washington largely 
treated as a corrupt and unworthy ally in the drug war in the 1990s -- 
coincided with the apparent arrest in Mexico of several Colombians with 
alleged ties both to Colombia's largest rebel group and the Tijuana Cartel, 
a new sign of what the Bush administration asserts is a link between 
terrorist groups and drug trafficking.

The Mexican attorney general's office did not say how many Colombians were 
arrested, but the detentions fueled speculation in the Mexican press that 
guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia were 
establishing ties to Mexico's drug traffickers.

Walters, who took over as President Bush's drug czar eight months ago, said 
Mexico's ''historic'' achievement in dismantling several drug gangs this 
year has earned it a new role as an anti-drug leader.

''Mexico, I believe, is further ahead than any other nation, including the 
United States, in this hemisphere,'' Walters said at a press conference.

Colombia Affected

Walters, who recently returned from a swing through South America, said 
Mexico's efforts at smashing drug rings is reverberating back to Colombia, 
the source of most of the world's cocaine.

''The reports we have are that many Colombia-based organizations are no 
longer providing cocaine on credit to Mexican organizations because of 
cash-flow problems,'' Walters said. ``There's a lot of destabilization in 
these markets.''

Mexican traffickers may move into marijuana to ''make up cash flow,'' he said.

''We want to make the market instable. That's the way you destroy 
markets,'' he said.

President Vicente Fox, who came to office in December 2000, has carried out 
on his pledge to attack drug gangs and police corruption that allowed it to 
flourish. In a February shootout in Mazatlán, police killed Ramón Arellano 
Félix, the enforcer of the Tijuana Cartel who was on the FBI's 10 most 
wanted list. Weeks later, police arrested the cartel's chief operations 
officer, Benjamín Arellano Félix, in the city of Puebla, and captured the 
cartel's chief smuggler.

About 65 percent of the cocaine entering the United States is believed to 
pass through the 2,000-mile border with Mexico.

Walters, who attended the inaugurations of new presidents in Colombia and 
Bolivia last week, strongly defended a state of emergency imposed Monday in 
Colombia that allows for restrictions on civil liberties. He said the South 
American nation's incoming president, Alvaro Uribe, confronts spreading 
lawlessness by the FARC rebels and needs a free hand to bring order and 
political reform to his country.

Uribe, whose inauguration was greeted by a surge of rebel violence, had 
adopted ''a dramatic agenda that will be ambitious and difficult,'' Walters 
said. ``The new government has set not only an ambitious security agenda 
for itself, but an ambitious domestic reform agenda, spreading the burden 
of taxation throughout society, in addition to raising revenues, reforming 
public institutions of education, of health and social welfare.''

Flights May Resume

On another counternarcotics issue, Walters said Colombia and Peru are 
likely to renew a suspended U.S.-coordinated program to intercept 
drug-laden airplanes in mid-autumn. The Bush administration suspended the 
program in April, 2001, after Peruvian jetfighters fired on a U.S. 
missionary airplane over the Amazon River, mistaking it for a 
cocaine-smuggling aircraft.

A U.S. missionary and her infant daughter were killed in that interception.

U.S. officials are engaging in joint exercises and refining procedures in 
both Andean countries to avoid a repeat of the tragedy, he said.
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens