Mexico Busts General For Drug Bribe He’s Second Arrested In Month

For the second time in a month, federal authorities here Monday announced the arrest of a Mexican army general on drug charges, accusing the senior officer of offering $1 million a month to Mexico’s top counter-narcotics official in Tijuana to protect one of the country’s largest narcotics cartels - and of threatening to kill him and his family if he refused.

Mexico’s attorney general’s office announced late Monday that Brig. Gen. Alfredo Navarro Lara had been charged with drug corruption, bribery and criminal association and jailed earlier in the day just outside Mexico City in the Almoloya de Juarez high-security federal prison.

On Feb. 18, Gen. Jose de Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, then Mexico’s anti-drug czar, had been sent to Almoloya after he was charged with taking bribes to protect the nation’s most powerful drug-trafficking cartel, headed by alleged drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

Gutierrez’s arrest stunned a nation unaccustomed to drug corruption within its army and sent shock waves as far as Washington just two weeks before the Clinton administration recertified Mexico as a U.S. ally in the drug war. President Clinton cited the arrest as evidence that Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo is committed to rooting out drug corruption - even in the nation’s powerful army.

But congressional concerns that wide-spread official drug corruption here had compromised U.S. intelligence and drug-enforcement helped drive the House to pass a resolution decertifying Mexico last week.

As the U.S. Senate begins debate this week on that decertification resolution - which Clinton has vowed to veto - Navarro’s arrest Monday further demonstrated the depth of drug corruption in Mexico and Zedillo’s resolve to punish it.

The attorney general’s office in Mexico City said the general is accused of criminal links to a second major Mexican drug mafia based in Tijuana - this one headed by the Arellano Felix brothers. But the official account of the investigation that led to Navarro’s arrest also appeared to link his capture directly to Zedillo’s increasing use of the Mexican military to combat a drug trade that U.S. officials say supplies up to 75 percent of the cocaine sold in America.