Decision Met With Relief in Mexico, Ire in Colombia

MEXICO CITY —  The Clinton administration’s Friday ruling on which nations are cooperating with the United States in the war on drugs met with righteous relief in Mexico and resigned resentment in Colombia, even as the two nations that supply up to 75% of the cocaine and much of the marijuana consumed in the United States struggled to intensify their anti-narcotics battles.

President Ernesto Zedillo’s office reacted to President Clinton’s action by issuing a five-page statement emphasizing that Mexico will keep cracking down on its rich, powerful drug cartels because it must, because it is the right thing to do for Mexico--and not because of American pressure.

“The Mexican government is firmly committed to the battle against drug trafficking . . . the most serious threat to [Mexico’s] national security, public health and peace of society,” the statement declared.

Most analysts here agreed Friday that U.S. officials would have faced dire consequences had they denied Mexico its drug-fighting certification.

“It would have been demoralizing for counter-narcotics operations,” said Celia Toro, a Colegio de Mexico professor who specializes in analyzing the drug trade. “It would have created an even more negative climate in all the police forces and in the attorney general’s office.”

Still, other analysts noted that Mexican efforts to combat drugs remain in shambles, its intelligence compromised and concerns about its integrity in doubt after the recent arrest on drug charges of Jose de Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, the onetime army general who briefly led Mexico’s version of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Deeply wounded by last week’s arrest of the anti-drug czar, Mexican officials--in the eleventh hour before the American evaluation--announced the capture of a man they called a leader of a significant Mexican narcotics cartel.

At midnight Thursday, Mexico’s attorney general’s office announced that Oscar Malherbe de Leon, reputedly a major cocaine trafficker who has been wanted on U.S. drug conspiracy charges for more than seven years, had been nabbed.

By Friday, the attorney general was acknowledging that Malherbe actually had been arrested two days earlier in a shopping center in the capital.

Malherbe was indicted--along with Mexican Gulf cartel boss Juan Garcia Abrego--by a Houston federal grand jury in September 1993.

Mexican and U.S. law enforcement officials say Malherbe has been running the cartel’s drug-smuggling operations and maintaining its ties to Colombian drug gangs. He did this even after Garcia Abrego’s January 1996 arrest, deportation to the United States and subsequent conviction were seen to have hurt the traffickers and their organization.

Garcia Abrego, Malherbe and the cartel were prime targets of the U.S. Justice Department, which put Garcia Abrego on the FBI’s 10 most-wanted list and offered a $2 million reward for his capture.

His dramatic expulsion from Mexico City to Texas appeared to be timed to last year’s certification process: Zedillo personally ordered it just weeks before the 1996 certification deadline, and the Clinton administration hailed it Friday in justifying its approval of Mexico’s anti-drug efforts.

A federal jury convicted Garcia Abrego in October on sweeping charges that he smuggled tons of Colombian cocaine and Mexican marijuana into the United States and tens of millions of dollars in drug proceeds back to Mexico.

He was found guilty after a three-week trial that included testimony about Malherbe’s key role in the operation. Garcia Abrego was sentenced to life in prison and fined $128 million in January.

Among the witnesses who testified against the narcotics kingpin were former cartel members who said Malherbe, to protect the drug operations, had paid millions of dollars in bribes to public officials and law enforcement officers on both sides of the border.

The revelations from the Garcia Abrego case and public attention to high-level Mexican corruption made it all the more difficult for Clinton officials to wrestle with the certification process.

U.S. documents leaked here included allegations that the Gulf cartel had bribed top Mexican officials and raised doubts about family members of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

Gutierrez was accused of conspiring with and receiving bribes from the nation’s largest drug mafia, the Juarez cartel, allegedly led by Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

Despite Malherbe’s arrest and Mexico’s promised continued crackdown on drugs, it was unclear whether Mexican drug enforcement agencies are anywhere close to arresting Carrillo, dubbed “Lord of the Skies” for his sophisticated air-smuggling operations.

Meanwhile, in Colombia, where investigators say farmers grow most of the cocaine that is then smuggled through Mexico into the United States, officials were stunned by Clinton’s decision to deny their nation an anti-narcotics certification for a second straight year.

“The government considers the decertification applied to our country demoralizing and unjust,” President Ernesto Samper said.

Colombia’s anti-drug czar called the decision “totally unjust.” He argued that Washington had ignored tough narcotics-fighting measures that the Bogota government put in force last year, as well as Colombians’ efforts to imprison drug cartel chiefs.

Friday’s decision will not cut the flow of American counter-narcotics aid to Bogota, which actually doubled to $44 million in 1997. Additionally, $37.5 million was allocated from a separate discretionary fund.

Still, Colombia’s outraged labor minister, Orlando Obregon Sabogal, said the 11-year-old American certification process is hypocritical and a violation of Latin American nations’ sovereignty.

“The marijuana smoke [in the White House] doesn’t allow them to see Colombia’s reality clearly,” he said.

Times staff writer Juanita Darling in San Salvador contributed to this report, as did special correspondent Steven Ambrus in Bogota.