By Douglas Farah and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, February 26 1998; Page A01

The U.S. Army is providing training to Mexican soldiers for the first time in an effort to create an elite counter-narcotics unit that U.S. officials say has become the leading force in Mexico's fight against international drug trafficking.

The program, started 18 months ago, includes training some 1,067 Mexican officers a year at more than a dozen bases across the United States, according to U.S. officials and congressional documents. In addition, the CIA is giving extensive intelligence courses to a group of about 90 Mexican officers who will become part of the new counter-drug force, according to military and law enforcement officials.

As a result of the programs, Mexicans make up the largest group of foreign soldiers receiving U.S. military instruction. The growing ties between the two militaries are a sign of how counter-drug efforts in the hemisphere have replaced wars against leftist guerrillas as the common ground for armed forces redefining their missions since the end of the Cold War.

Although the training and equipping of the Mexican units is not secret, the program has been played down on both sides of the border because of Mexican sensitivities to a political backlash over the extent of the aid. Because it is illegal under Mexican law for military units to be trained outside Mexico, U.S. and Mexican officials said, officers are chosen from different units and sent to the United States as "groups."

U.S. and Mexican officials said they have turned to the Mexican army because of rampant corruption among Mexico's civilian law enforcement agencies. But the programs have been criticized in the U.S. Congress and by human rights groups here and in Mexico, which argue that while the military's lead role in counter-drug efforts is being portrayed as a temporary measure, the influx of resources will give it enduring authority over newly created, more accountable civilian law enforcement organizations.

Officials involved in the program acknowledge that in order to secure Mexican participation they agreed there would be no formal U.S. monitoring of the performance of groups that receive U.S. training. As a result, there is little oversight of how the training and intelligence is used in Mexico by a military with a long history of corruption, much of it drug-related, and human rights abuses.

"I think few members of Congress are aware of the extent of the training and military assistance in Mexico and the fact there is no meaningful follow-up or monitoring of what these people do once they get back," Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said in an interview.

Joy Olson, director of the Latin American Working Group, which has been monitoring military aid to Mexico, said, "Our main concern is that this is a very large program and we don't have much knowledge of it."

The programs reflect an upsurge in overall U.S. counter-drug aid to Mexico, which has grown from $10 million in 1995 to $78 million last year, according to State Department figures. An estimated 60 percent of the cocaine on the streets of the United States has been shipped through Mexico and across the 2,000-mile Mexico-U.S. border, according to law enforcement officials.

Mexican and U.S. officials say they envision the Mexican military taking the lead in anti-narcotics efforts only in the short run, until police and civilian authorities have the means to confront powerful drug cartels. One senior Defense Department official involved in the program said promoting the Mexican military's involvement was necessary to avoid "the complete criminalization of their state."

According to an account provided by U.S. military officials, Mexican officers are being trained at 17 U.S. bases, in courses ranging from officer training at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga., to helicopter instruction at Fort Rucker, Ala., and intelligence at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, D.C.

The most specialized of the field training is provided here by the U.S. 7th Special Forces Group. A total of 252 Mexican army officers have taken the 12-week course, divided into six groups of 42 men each, over the past 18 months. Another 156 officers are scheduled to be trained this year. Their curriculum includes helicopter assault tactics, explosives, rural and urban warfare, and operational intelligence gathering and planning.

Officers graduating from the Fort Bragg courses are the backbone of a new elite Mexican unit, the Airmobile Special Forces, known by its Spanish acronym GAFE. According to the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy in a September 1997 report to Congress, the units are modeled after the U.S. Army Special Forces, which are trained to conduct low-intensity, covert operations.

Col. Ed F. Phillips, commander of the 7th Special Forces Group, said in a briefing that the training is "expressly counter-narcotics, because we are not allowed to do" counterinsurgency training. But other U.S. officials acknowledge that the tactics taught are similar to counterinsurgency methods imparted in training of Latin American officers during the Cold War.

These elite troops return to Mexico to train rapid reaction groups there. In the past year, according to a senior Pentagon official, the number of 100-man units deployed by the Mexican Army has risen from 12 to 42.

In addition to the training of officers, the United States has provided the Mexican military with 73 Huey UH-1H helicopters and four C-26 airplanes for surveillance. Mexico has purchased two U.S. Knox-class frigates, according to the White House drug office.

The helicopters are part of a foreign assistance package that is subject to stiff congressional scrutiny and can be used only for counter-drug activities. However, the funds for training the special forces, $28 million in 1997, are provided under a provision that gives the Defense Department wide discretion in spending the money in support of counter-drug activities, with no congressional oversight.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a member of the Appropriations Committee who chairs the subcommittee on foreign operations, said he was frustrated by the lack of knowledge of the scope of the programs.

"We can't get the answers to such simple things as which agencies are in there [Mexico], how much money are they spending and what are they doing," he said in an interview.

The U.S.-Mexican cooperation is a stark contrast to the distrust that had long existed between the two militaries, which had virtually no direct contacts until recently. Relations between the civilian agencies in charge of anti-drug operations on both sides of the border also soured in 1993, when Mexico rejected most U.S. aid in favor of a policy of "Mexicanization" of the war on drugs. Overall U.S. counter-narcotics aid plunged from $45 million in 1992 to about $10 million in 1995, according to U.S. officials.

But in 1996, with Mexican drug trafficking organizations growing in strength and rivaling the traditional Colombian cartels for primacy in the U.S. market, then-Secretary of Defense William J. Perry requested the Mexicans allow military training, and the aid rapidly resumed, reaching a high point in 1997. Aid has been maintained at the same level for 1998.

Barry R. McCaffrey, the Clinton administration's drug control policy director, said the current policy does not intend to "militarize" the counter-drug effort in Mexico. He acknowledged there was no follow-up on what the U.S.-trained forces did once they returned home.

"It should not be my business how foreign countries organize internally for their counter-narcotics strategy," McCaffrey said.

A Mexican official said any U.S. attempts to monitor the personnel and how they were deployed would place "a completely unacceptable condition" on cooperation.

"The government cannot accept any limitation on the use of its troops, just because they spent 12 weeks training in the United States," the official said. "The army has more of a role in fighting drug trafficking than even the Mexican government would like, but we are a sovereign nation."

Examples abound of drug-related corruption in the Mexican military. Last year, Mexico's anti-drug director, army Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was arrested and charged with protecting and aiding Amado Carrillo Fuentes, at the time one of Mexico's most important drug traffickers. Last September, two U.S.-trained pilots who were part of an elite air interdiction force were among 18 members of an anti-drug unit arrested for using a government airplane to transport cocaine from the state of Chiapas to a private hangar in Mexico City.

Before Mexican officers are admitted to any training in the United States, their names are reviewed in a vetting process conducted by a task force in the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, sources familiar with the process said. The names are checked using several databases, including comparing the names against lists of drug trafficking suspects kept by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, the sources said.

The Pentagon and other agencies insisted on being able to approve participants as a condition for the training to go forward, U.S. officials said. But officials familiar with the program said its effectiveness is undermined by incomplete and new databases, and the ability of drug traffickers to infiltrate the military as well as other Mexican institutions.

"They don't conduct a thorough background investigation of anybody," said one U.S. military source familiar with the process. "They circulate the names to see if they ring any bells. Very rarely will one pop up."

To limit the chances of information leaks due to corruption, U.S. officials said, the special airborne units were set up to respond directly to orders from Mexico City, bypassing the local commanders in the country's 40 military zones. But Mexican officials disputed that description. They said the units are in fact under the control of the regional commander.

Overall, numerous U.S. officials familiar with the program now question whether the units are making much of a difference reducing the production or trafficking of drugs.

One U.S. source involved in interdiction said that, in the past year, he had not seen a single report of the special forces making an important arrest or seizure. To illustrate his point, he cited a September 1997 report to Congress by McCaffrey's office that limited the accomplishments of the groups to spotting clandestine airstrips, locating marijuana fields and seizures of marijuana.

"You will notice there is not one seizure of cocaine or heroin or the capture of a kingpin," the source said. "That is more than a little disturbing. The obvious question is what the hell are they doing?"

A Mexican official said that because many of the special forces support other units, the results on paper did not accurately reflect their contribution.

While much less visible, sources familiar with the counter-drug program in Mexico said, an equally important element is the elite 90-person intelligence unit within the army that is being trained by the CIA.

U.S. and Mexican officials say the CIA-trained unit could have a more important long-range impact than the special forces or other ground troops because it is crucial to developing the intelligence that is essential to identify the drug leaders and their chief lieutenants and develop a strategy for dismantling trafficking organizations.

But two sources familiar with the intelligence operation said the intelligence passed on to the Mexican unit is carefully screened because of the residual mistrust that still exists between the two countries.

"While intelligence sharing is significant, there is no free flow," said one U.S. source. "We send information that has been scrubbed, that safeguards our interests. I imagine they have the same scrubbing process on their side."