But the funneling of illicit profits to terror groups still a concern

  BY TIM JOHNSON

  WASHINGTON - U.S. officials are getting unprecedented counter-drug cooperation from Mexico, but they are increasingly concerned about the flow of drug money to terror groups in Colombia and the Middle East, the nation's top drug fighter said Wednesday.

  A once-deep U.S. mistrust of Mexican efforts on drug issues has evaporated, said Asa Hutchinson, the outgoing chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

  ''The cooperation was almost nonexistent, quite frankly, prior to President Vicente Fox, and [it] has been built astronomically,'' Hutchinson said in a wide-ranging talk with journalists before a likely transfer to a senior post in the new Department of Homeland Security.

  The Fox government, in office for two years, has sent Washington positive signals on a request to augment the number of DEA agents in Mexico, Hutchinson said, and the two nations are haggling over whether U.S. counter-drug agents dispatched to Mexico may carry weapons.

  While Mexican police have smashed the violent Tijuana Cartel, capturing one of its leaders, Benjamín Arrellano-Félix, 10 months ago, new leaders and drug gangs have emerged.

  ''They are alive and functioning,'' Hutchinson said.

  Once-powerful Colombian cartels maintain strong links with Mexican drug organizations, letting Mexicans handle some distribution of cocaine and heroin into U.S. markets, DEA officials said.

  Colombian traffickers particularly fear U.S. indictments and extradition to stand trial in the States, officials said. Colombia has sent about 30 accused traffickers to U.S. jails since 1999.

  ''They are definitely afraid of extradition because in the United States they'll get the same cell everybody else gets,'' said Rogelio E. Guevara, DEA's operations director. ``One of the things they are doing is actually fronting the Mexican trafficking organizations more. The Mexicans are moving large amounts of cocaine into the United States. It's of Colombian origin.''

  Mexican traffickers employ increasingly sophisticated tactics, Hutchinson said.

  Over the past nine months, DEA investigations have found evidence of six separate tunnels burrowed under the border, up from 11 found during the past 10 to 12 years, Hutchinson said.

  ''Some of these tunnels are so sophisticated that they can cost between $1 [million] to $2 million to build,'' Hutchinson said.

  ``[It's] a great concern to us both from a drug standpoint but also from a homeland security standpoint.''

  Cooperation with a variety of other Latin governments has improved and strengthened.

  ''I couldn't point to very many countries right now where the law enforcement cooperation is going in the wrong direction,'' Hutchinson said, although Brazil remains a weak point.

  U.S. drug agents are seeing drugs being used as a ''currency'' by terrorist and violent organizations, including for the purchase of weapons in the United States, he said.

  Last January, during sprawling multistate and international raids known as Operation Mountain Express, drug agents discovered that some profits from methamphetamine sales in the United States were heading to the Middle East, Hutchinson said.

  ''Some of those funds went into the hands of terrorist organizations, such as Hezbollah,'' he said, offering no further details.

  A separate operation in November uncovered a cocaine-for-weapons scheme out of Houston that involved a brutal right-wing militia known as the Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, he said.

  On another matter, Hutchinson said the illicit poppy crops that fuel the heroin trade in Afghanistan have surged following a lull during the U.S. war to oust the Taliban regime.

  ''We are seeing the poppy crop, to our regret, come back to the same levels prior to the dismantling of the Taliban regime,'' Hutchinson said.

  Asked to forecast the main trend in illicit drug use in the United States, Hutchinson said it was ''a trend toward synthetic drugs'' distributed in clubs and bearing an alphabet soup of labels.

  During the past year, clandestine narcotics laboratories have moved from producing GHB, which was popular at teen ''raves,'' to other chemicals with labels like GBL and 14BD.

  ''They are simply tweaking with the same type of drug to make it a little bit different, thinking that they're going to avoid the impact of law enforcement,'' Hutchinson said.