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. - --- MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens