US, Mexico finally drug-war allies

After years at cross purposes, Mexico and the US are entering a new era of cooperation in fighting the narcotics trade.

Cartels have been gutted and record quantities of narcotics seized. The list of those arrested or dead reads like a 'Who's Who' of Mexico's drug underworld – evidence that two years after President Vicente Fox vowed to win the war on drug trafficking, he is making headway.

"The Fox government just continues going," says Donald Thornhill Jr., a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration in San Diego. "And we are working with them in an unprecedented manner."

"Mexico has done an outstanding job," said US drug czar John Walters on a recent visit here in late June. "They are ahead of us in attacking this problem."

Mr. Walters cited a 9 percent decline in cocaine purity in the US drug market as evidence that fewer drug shipments are making their way across the shared 2,000-mile border. Progress is also being made in slowing supplies of heroin, marijuana, Ecstasy, and meta-amphetamines, among other narcotics, Mexican records show.

Officials on both sides of the border credit the slowed flow of drugs to a closer relationship between US and Mexican antidrug agents who share information – and then act on it. US and Mexican officials say shared intelligence was crucial to the March 9 arrest of drug lord Benjamín Arellano Félix.

Drug Enforcement Administration Director Asa Hutchinson also credited joint investigation efforts for the indictment last month of senior leaders of Mexico's powerful southeast cartel. He said joint efforts toppled Consuelo Marquez, a former Lehman Brothers account representative in New York charged with participating in the laundering of millions of dollars of drug money.

Past Mexican administrations often ignored advice from the US, and in some cases, corrupt officials used it to help drug bosses steer clear of problems.

Mexican Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha described Mexico's former policing and investigation network as "structurally dysfunctional" and said reforms put in place were slowly turning it into "a professional police corporation," less susceptible to corruption.

Fox has sent in federal police and the military to make arrests or to intervene in locations where local police were considered too deeply corrupted, officials say. In April, for example, soldiers and federal officers detained more than 100 police officers in the border town of Tijuana on charges they took bribes and helped drug cartels. More than 50 were flown to Mexico City under heavy guard.

"The tempo and magnitude of disruption and arrests of leaders of these organizations is like we have never seen before – in any country," Walters said.

In all, Mexican government documents say, more than 11,350 drug-trafficking arrests have been made since Fox took power in December 2000, including a dozen drug bosses and almost 200 of their deputies, assassins, and financiers.

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