Officials are also looking into embedding a team of US contractors inside a specially vetted Mexican counternarcotics police unit. Officials on both sides of the border said the new efforts have been designed to get around Mexican laws that prohibit foreign military and police from operating on its soil, and to prevent advanced US surveillance technology from falling under the control of Mexican security agencies with long histories of corruption.
“A sea change has occurred over the past years in how effective Mexico and US intelligence exchanges have become,’’ said Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico’s ambassador to the United States. “It is underpinned by the understanding that transnational organized crime can only be successfully confronted by working hand in hand, and that the outcome is as simple as it is compelling: we will together succeed or together fail.’’
The latest steps come three years after the United States began increasing its security assistance to Mexico with the $1.4 billion Merida Initiative and tens of millions of dollars from the Defense Department.
They also come a year before elections in both countries, when President Obama may face questions about the threat of violence spilling over the border, and President Felipe Calderon’s political party in Mexico faces an electorate that is almost certainly going to ask why it should stick with a fight that has left nearly 45,000 people dead.
In the last three years, officials said, exchanges of intelligence between the United States and Mexico have helped security forces there capture or kill some 30 mid- to high-level drug traffickers, compared with two such arrests in the previous five years.
The United States has trained nearly 4,500 new federal police agents and assisted in conducting wiretaps, running informants, and interrogating suspects. The Pentagon has provided sophisticated equipment, including Black Hawk helicopters, and in recent months it has begun flying unarmed surveillance drones over Mexican soil to track drug kingpins.
