MEXICO SHUTS DOWN ANTI-DRUG AGENCY; NEW UNIT PLANNED.

Byline: Sam Dillon The New York Times

Mexico on Wednesday dismantled its main anti-drug force, which was disgraced in February when its director and many of its agents were discovered to be working for traffickers, and announced that it had been replaced by a new organization to be built from a small nucleus of trusted agents.

The new agency will be headed by its current chief, and the 1,100 officers who worked for the old agency will be eligible, alongside new people, to apply for work in the reconstituted force.

But all of these applicants will be put through a battery of drug, polygraph and other tests to certify their trustworthiness before they are hired, said Attorney General Jorge Madrazo Cuellar. Such screening of agents is new.

The new agency, to be known as the Special Prosecutor's Office for Attention to Drug Crimes, will occupy the same downtown Mexico City headquarters as the organization it will replace, which was known as the Institute for Combating Drugs.

Wednesday's inauguration of the new Special Prosecutor's Office appeared to have been timed, at least in part, to give a sense of momentum in the war on drugs five days before President Clinton is scheduled to arrive for his first state visit.

The new Special Prosecutor's Office is part of a law enforcement shake-up Madrazo has been carrying out, largely in secret, in recent weeks, in an effort to curtail the influence of traffickers and organized crime.

Another new agency whose formal creation was announced Wednesday, the Organized Crime Unit, is to bring together trusted investigators to combat not only drug smugglers but also money launderers and arms dealers.

Despite security precautions, however, questions already have been raised about the ability of the new units to be effective.

Two police investigators assigned to one of the recently-organized specialized anti-drug units were kidnapped earlier this month and found dead Friday in the trunk of a car in Mexico City. Authorities said the two officers had been pursuing the trafficker Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

U.S. Ambassador James R. Jones said Wednesday that in response to a plea from Mexico for investigative help, two agents from the FBI arrived in Mexico City on Sunday to examine evidence relating to the murder of the Mexican officers. Jones said a hypothesis was that the two officers had been murdered by traffickers.

``They seem to have been honest cops who were doing their work and were found out and were killed,'' Jones said.

The two officers join a long list of agents killed in recent drug violence; 200 Mexican officers were killed in the year that ended last Oct. 1, American officials said.

The creation of the new office appears to be the most ambitious law enforcement shake-up here since 1993, when the Institute for Combating Drugs was created.

But how much more effective the new anti-drug organizations will be than the ones they are replacing remains to be seen. When the government created the Institute for Combating Drugs in June 1993 with technical help from American drug agents, Mexican and American officials hailed it as a great advance over other law enforcement organizations that had been corrupted by traffickers.

On Wednesday, Madrazo said the institute was being abolished partly because of ``the well-documented corruption in which public servants from that organization have fallen.''

The institute's director from December until his dismissal in February was Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, whom the government has charged with drug crimes and has described as a longtime associate of Carrillo Fuentes. The man who replaced Gutierrez after his arrest, Mariano Herran Salvatti, will be director of the new organization.

Madrazo said that last month he had organized a Center for Confidence Control, consisting of physicians, psychologists, social workers and polygraph technicians, to administer the drug and security tests required of agents joining the new Special Prosecutor's Office. The new agents also will receive salary increases, pensions and other benefits in order to ``stimulate decent and honorable work,'' he said.

Madrazo did not indicate the size of such raises, but Mexican and American officials have acknowledged that they cannot remotely compete with the size of bribes often available from drug traffickers.

A senior American law enforcement official acknowledged Wednesday that U.S. officials, including Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, erred last month when they publicly accused Mexican officials of bungling or subverting a money-laundering investigation.

The American official said the accusations had been made because U.S. investigators misinterpreted a suspected traffickers' banking records, which were provided by Mexican officials working with them in a laundering investigation in the northern Mexican state of Sonora.

American officials originally accused Mexican officials of failing to seize $160 million in 15 bank accounts, but now have acknowledged that the accounts never contained more than $16 million.