MEXICAN AND U.S. ATTORNEYS GENERAL CONFER TO STRENGTHEN COOPERATION
ON DRUG VIOLENCE

MEXICO CITY - At the end of two days of meetings with Mexican
officials, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said that cooperation
between the United States and Mexico was stronger and "fundamentally
different than that which existed in the past."

In an interview on Friday before meeting with President Felipe
Calderon of Mexico, Mr. Holder and his Mexican counterpart, Eduardo
Medina-Mora, said the stakes of their new efforts to stem the drug
violence wreaking havoc in Mexico were high for both countries. Both
men dismissed assertions in a Pentagon report in December that the
crisis had pushed Mexico to the verge of becoming a failed state.

Mr. Medina-Mora, however, raised images of Colombia, where corruption
and insecurity were so rampant that the leader of the powerful
Medellin cartel, Pablo Escobar, was elected to Congress. And Mr.
Holder recalled the years when the crack epidemic caused a crisis of
crime and corruption in the United States.

"Mexico has never been a weak state," Mr. Medina-Mora said. "It is not
today. It will never be in the future. We have faced even more
difficult problems than this one. And it is relevant to put this in
perspective."

But he added: "What is at stake is the ability of Mexico to keep peace
and tranquillity for its citizens. That is why our objective is not
ending drug trafficking. It is to remove power from these groups and
remove their ability to seize and to kidnap our right to live in peace."

Talking about the efforts of Mexican law enforcement officials to end
the drug trade, Mr. Holder pounded his hand on the table and said,
"People have to understand this, people really have to get this: they
are putting their lives on the line in a fundamental way."

In their meetings with Mr. Calderon, Mr. Holder and the secretary of
homeland security, Janet Napolitano, discussed plans to provide
training to Mexican canine teams, and to increase cooperation between
the United States Coast Guard and the Mexican Navy to stop the
increasing numbers of illegal immigrants and drug smugglers using the
Pacific Ocean as a result of increased enforcement along the land border.

"We are going to operate almost like a vise," Ms. Napolitano said of
the United States and Mexico, after the meeting with Mr. Calderon.
"We're going to take out the cartels that have been plaguing our
communities for far too long."

In the interview, Mr. Holder said he was sending an additional 100
agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to
the southern border to crack down on the so-called straw gun purchases
- - in which one person submits to the federal background checks to
obtain guns for someone else - that fuel much of the southbound
smuggling. And with marijuana sales central to the drug trade, Mr.
Holder said he was exploring ways to lower the minimum amount required
for the federal prosecution of possession cases.

"The reality of the level of cooperation that now exists is
fundamentally different from that which existed in the past," he said.
The current Mexican administration, he said, was "in a fundamentally
different place, and the possibilities of cooperation, as a result,
are substantially greater, and they will show results."

Mr. Medina-Mora said Mexico and the United States were working on ways
to cooperate in the investigation and prosecution of smuggling and
violent crimes, so that when there was a choice of jurisdiction,
trials would be held in the country with the toughest applicable laws
and penalties.

He said that all federal agents involved in investigating and
enforcing laws on organized crime were being vetted by both Mexican
and American investigators. And he said that the government was
upgrading most of its law enforcement infrastructure and technology to
make it easier to oversee officers' activities and detect
irregularities, which he said may occur because of "technical reasons
or because of corruption."