Presidents Join in Declaring War on Drugs

MEXICO CITY — It took 15 months of charges, countercharges, scandals and suspicion between the world’s largest consumer of illegal drugs and the neighbor that supplies much of them.

But in a garden ceremony Tuesday, the presidents of Mexico and the United States issued a joint declaration of war on the drug gangs that feed America’s $49-billion-a-year habit. Ernesto Zedillo and Bill Clinton signed a 97-page document that paints a stark and candid picture of a narcotics trade that has defied both nations’ efforts to stop it, and promises a joint strategy to combat it by the end of the year.

“Let’s be frank here,” Clinton declared after the signing ceremony. “On the American side, the problem is we have less than 5% of the world’s population and we consume half the drugs. . . . Our second problem is that while we are increasing our capacity to deal with it, we have not succeeded in reducing the demand or completely controlling the border on our side.

“Now, the Mexican problem is that narco-traffickers can destroy the fabric of civil society. . . . They’ll go after places with open spaces and a vulnerability to organized money and violence.”

It took the two governments more than a year of wrangling to admit the scope of the problem. The process leading up to the “U.S.-Mexico Binational Drug Threat Assessment” that Clinton and Zedillo signed spoke volumes about the sensitivities of the issue.

“When we started this, we were at loggerheads,” a Clinton administration official said of the joint effort merely to assess the drug threat, let alone to overcome it. The first few sessions were characterized by traditional finger-pointing, with Mexico blaming America’s drug habit and U.S. officials citing widespread Mexican corruption as the biggest cause of the vast supply of drugs in U.S. cities.

The document originally was due out in February--the same week Mexico’s top counter-narcotics official was arrested and accused of collaborating with Mexico’s most powerful drug cartel. But again, the politics of drugs intervened: That arrest, just weeks before Clinton had to certify to the U.S. Congress whether Mexico was cooperating as an ally in the drug war, drove official U.S. concerns about Mexican corruption to new heights and delayed the report.

The final report handed to Zedillo and Clinton by U.S. anti-drug czar Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey and Mexican Atty. Gen. Jorge Madrazo Cuellar is a candid assessment of a problem that both leaders conceded neither country can solve independently.

One sentence in the report sums up the confessions of both nations: “While the United States has one of the greatest problems of drug abuse in the world, Mexico has grown to be one of the world’s most significant drug producing and transit countries.”

The U.S. position in the report asserts that cocaine use in America has declined by 50% from its 1979 peak but concedes: “The central issue for the United States is that the rate of drug use involving young people between the ages of 12 and 20 has been rising since 1991.”

Of the $49 billion Americans spent on illegal drugs in 1993--the last year for which data are available--it states that $31 billion went for cocaine, $7 billion for heroin, $9 billion for marijuana and $2 billion for other illegal drugs.

The “globalized” industry generates tens of billions of dollars in illicit profits every year.

Although the report details dozens of federally funded U.S. programs to reduce the demand for illegal drugs, it stresses that far more must be done.

As for demand south of the border, the report notes that consumption here traditionally has been among the world’s lowest but “the problem of [drug] consumption and dependence is increasing in Mexico.”

It is Mexico’s role as a drug supplier that the threat-assessment addresses in the most candid terms. It describes the Mexican drug gangs that are instrumental in meeting U.S. demand--citing Amado Carrillo Fuentes as “the most powerful drug trafficker operating from Mexico.” And it details some of the corruption that has helped traffickers flourish.

The report cites official corruption cases such as that of former Mexican anti-drug czar Gen. Jose de Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo as “a key component in the drug traffickers’ strategy.”

“Drug trafficking . . . poses a clear threat to national security, as well as generating corruption by incorporating public servants in their efforts,” the report states. “The tremendous wealth and power of the narco-traffickers threaten to undermine the legitimacy and effectiveness of law-enforcement.”

In gauging the importance of Tuesday’s assessment, though, an administration official concluded: “We’ve got a common threat assessment. Now we need a common strategy.”