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Last month, in the home state of Mexico's leading drug
trafficker, about 100 state officials, police commanders,
military officers, and cadets gathered on a barren soccer
field for an extraordinary event: the incineration of about
five tons of marijuana, cocaine, and other illegal drugs. A
high school band played the national anthem. The state
attorney general read a speech. Then selected officials,
standing upwind, hurled torches into the small mountain of
seized narcotics, still packed in the suitcases and corn
sacks and cellophane bricks used by traffickers to smuggle
the drugs into the United States, their final destination.

To anyone who has witnessed this ritual, common
throughout Mexico, it is clear that this is now a country
overrun by drugs. But it appears to have taken President
Clinton's decision last week to certify that Mexico is a
full ally in the drug war to drive home how deeply the
traffickers and their billions have penetrated Mexican
society.

"Make no mistake about it, Mexico has a serious drug
problem," Clinton said over the weekend while defending his
decision.

Because of trade and political concerns, both the Bush
and Clinton administrations had largely ignored Mexico's
rise as a drug superpower. Certification, a crude exercise
seemingly taken from Imperialism 101, appears to have
forced both the administration and Congress to acknowledge
that violent and powerful drug cartels sit directly on the
US border. Taken at face value, the president's
decertification of Colombia for the second straight year
would seem to indicate that Mexico's drugtrafficking
problem is not as severe as Colombia's. Colombia is a
socalled "source" country, whose traffickers employ Mexico
as a conduit for about twothirds of all cocaine entering
the United States.

The argument against Colombia is based largely on its
president, Ernesto Samper. There appears to be no doubt
that Samper knowingly took millions of dollars in campaign
money from the leaders of the powerful Cali cartel. That
act has tainted Colombia, even though Samper's antidrug
forces have subsequently jailed most of the cartel's
hierarchy.

Mexico's executive branch thus far has remained clean.
But there are increasing indications that the traffickers,
taking advantage of a culture in which corruption is a way
of life, now control large swaths of the country by
coopting public officials, antidrug officers, judges,
federal and state police, and local populations.

"We have knowledge of whole states that are
extraordinarily corrupt," said Senator John F. Kerry,
ranking minority member of the Subcommittee on
International Operations, which oversees narcotics policy
for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Kerry favors
overturning the president's certification of Mexico with a
national interest waiver that would allow the country to
escape economic sanctions.

US and Mexican authorities are investigating possible
ties between drug traffickers and the family of former
President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Salinas' brother,
Raul, is in prison facing charges that he helped to plot
the murder of a ruling party official. Salinas is living in
selfimposed exile in Ireland.

Revelations surrounding the muchanticipated
certification date have indicated that there are no limits
to the traffickers' power to corrupt. The Mexico City daily
Reforma yesterday published photos taken from the apartment
of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the leader of the Juarez cartel
who allegedly had the country's antidrug commander in his
employ.

Carrillo, according to the Secretariat of National
Defense, whose troops raided the apartment, quietly
inhabited apartment 2A in a luxury building in an
exclusive Mexico City neighborhood. He is seen in the
photos with his wife, his mistress, and his mother, Aurora,
who according to news reports is considering a run for
Congress in Carrillo's home state of Sinaloa in
northwestern Mexico. General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, the
drug czar imprisoned last month for allegedly taking bribes
from Carrillo, lived in apartment 6A, according to the
military.

Carrillo long has been considered the most powerful
trafficker in Mexico. However, there are no
drugtrafficking charges outstanding against him here. His
lawyer last week appeared to win an injunction against the
one weapons charge against him, which a US drug official
once described as "the equivalent of spitting on the
sidewalk."

In Morelos, a state south of Mexico City, Carrillo
maintains several properties, including a mansion in the
same neighborhood as Governor Jorge Carrillo Olea,
according to US officials. A recent report in The New York
Times tied Carrillo Olea, who is not related to the
trafficker, and Sonora Governor Manlio Fabio Beltrones, to
drug trafficking.

Residents of Cuernavaca, the capital of Morelos, said
they can feel their city being transformed by the presence
of drug traffickers. "I've never seen him, but I can feel
he's here," said Jose Martinez, who heads the state's
Independent Human Rights Commission, when asked if he had
ever seen Carrillo Fuentes and his rumored entourage. "I
know he's here." The evidence, he and others said, is the
torrent of cashonly purchases and property development in
the traffickers' flamboyant style.

"The narco can't hide," said Graco Ramirez, a Morelos
congressman. "There's a new type of art: artnarco. You
have pop art, artdeco and now you have artnarco. They buy
gold, they buy silver, they buy ostriches, lions, tigers."

Even Carrillo Olea, while denying any connection to drug
trafficking, offered an oftrepeated Morelos joke that
plays off the fact that the governor and the narco share
the same last name: "There are two Carrillos in Morelos: El
Amado" The Beloved "and El Odeado" The Hated the
governor said, laughing.

The Mexican government tried to put a lid on the
corruption reports during the certification debate, but it
couldn't stop the corruption from happening. Authorities
are still trying to figure out how alleged top money
launderer Humberto Garcia Abrego "inexplicably" escaped
from the federal drug agency last week.

There was rampant speculation that Garcia Abrego, whose
brother Juan is imprisoned in the United States on
drugtrafficking charges, paid several million dollars for
his release from Mexico's Reclusorio Norte prison, where
until Tuesday he lived in a sixcell abode equipped with
cellular phones, cable television, and a separate kitchen,
according to inmates.

A judge from Garcia Abrego's home state, citing lack of
probable cause on a moneylaundering charge, released him
from Reclusorio Norte. But antidrug officials, apparently
fearing the embarrassment his release would cause,
immediately detained him and inexplicably took him to the
offices of the federal drug agency while preparing new
charges.

Sometime Wednesday or Thursday, he walked out the door
into a waiting MercedesBenz.