CORRUPT BUT CERTIFIED

The political stakes were clear from the clout of the participants. Included at the Friday White House sitdown were President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, antidrug czar General Barry McCaffrey and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger. The issue: whether to certify Mexico as cooperative in the war against drugs.

All week long the President had been bombarded with contradictory signals from his political staff, a chorus of denunciations of Mexico from Congress and warnings of retaliation from the Mexican government should Clinton make the wrong choice. Among the threats were cancellation of Clinton's scheduled April trip to Mexico and summary ejection from the country of all U.S. drug agents. Albright, McCaffrey and Attorney General Janet Reno cautioned that the anti-U.S. backlash from a decision to cast Mexico into the outer darkness would outweigh any potential political gain.

In the end, Clinton decided to certify Mexico as a willing partner in the drug fight. At a press conference, Albright admitted that "corruption is deeply rooted in Mexican counterdrug institutions," but she added that President Ernesto Zedillo "has responded to this crisis with integrity and candor."

Certification, required by Congress each year for nations that are transit or production sites for illegal drugs, would have been a matter of routine for Mexico before the stunning arrest two weeks ago of General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, chief of the country's antidrug agency, who had been praised by McCaffrey as a fount of integrity. Gutierrez, who was formally indicted for corruption last week, had allegedly been on the payroll of drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes since 1993. His detention hit the Clinton Administration like an "earthquake," said State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns. "It sent shock waves through the State Department."

An angry Clinton, convinced that the Gutierrez arrest could not be ignored, was initially inclined to yank Mexico's certification, with a waiver of the economic sanctions that have been imposed on other decertified nations such as Colombia and Burma. But diplomats warned that such a move could ruin U.S.-Mexican relations. Clinton's political choice was made doubly agonizing by a tide of anti-Mexico sentiment from Republicans and Democrats alike. In the debate leading up to the decision, not a single member of Congress vocally defended certification. To label Mexico cooperative, declared Senator Paul Coverdell, the Republican chairman of the Senate subcommittee on western hemisphere affairs, "would make whatever credibility the process had a total hypocrisy."

On the Democratic side, Mexico's most outspoken adversary was Senator Dianne Feinstein of California. In advocating decertification with a waiver of economic sanctions, Feinstein said, "I believe President Zedillo's efforts to fight drug trafficking have been totally overwhelmed by pervasive, endemic corruption throughout the Mexican government, police and military." On Thursday she presented the White House with a letter signed by 40 Senators urging decertification.