The Washington Post, by Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan

By Kevin Sullivan

Washington Post Foreign Service

DOS RIOS, Mexico -- Teofilo Gonzalez Cano stabbed his cousin to death with two quick jabs to the heart.

They had been the best of friends, growing up together in the same mud-brick house in this tiny village in southern Mexico. But one night they drank themselves nearly blind on homemade grain alcohol. An argument about nothing got out of hand, and soon Vicente Gonzalez Santiago lay dead in the dirt.

Teofilo ran. They found him at dawn, sitting in a forest clutching his empty bottle. The local farmer who served as village constable, another cousin of Teofilo's, bound his hands behind his back and brought him in.

The whole village was waiting, more than 300 people. They forced Teofilo to lie facedown next to Vicente's corpse. They shouted at him, called him a murderer. His mother sat in the dirt next to her son, pleading for mercy.

The nearest police were more than two hours' drive away and there was no telephone in Dos Rios, hidden in rugged mountains 180 miles southwest of Mexico City. Justice in this backwater belongs to a half-dozen town elders, who stood over the two cousins in their early thirties, one dead and one accused, and debated the punishment that day in 1999. Finally they agreed.

"They said the two of them should be buried together," said Catarina Cano Santiago, Teofilo's mother.

According to Cano, other Dos Rios residents and human rights investigators, the elders enlisted villagers to carry out the sentence. Some of the men hacked a grave in the rocky soil of the village cemetery. Someone banged together a flimsy wooden coffin, and the villagers put Vicente's body in it. They hoisted the box and began a procession down a narrow cow path to the graveyard. Others dragged Teofilo by the arms. Women and children followed, marching under a hot sun past fields of dead corn.

They placed Vicente's coffin in the hole, then threw Teofilo in on top, with his arms and legs tied together. He screamed and begged for his life, calling out to his mother, "Please don't let them do this to me!" She tried to help him, but her neighbors and friends held her back. The law had spoken, and no one would stand in its way.

Twenty men started throwing dirt into the hole with shovels and sticks. Teofilo, screaming, tried to climb out. His 14-year-old son, Felipe, ran to him and tried to hug him and pull him up. Someone tossed a lasso around Teofilo's neck and jerked him back into the grave, ripping him from his boy's embrace. They pulled the crying youth away from his father as the dirt piled higher and higher on top of him, until he disappeared into the ground.

"When they finished," said his mother, "you could still hear him screaming under the ground."

Challenge of Modernization

Dos Rios is a dusty wisp of a village clinging to a mountainside in Guerrero state. It takes 12 hours to drive there from the capital, down a road that turns from pavement to dirt to a harrowing path that drops thousands of feet on either side.

Fewer than 400 people live in Dos Rios, in a cluster of soft-brick huts baked by a close, heavy sun. There is no electricity, not a light bulb in town. The only vehicle is an old Ford pickup truck. A priest comes once a year to say Mass in the crumbling Roman Catholic church. It has been months since a police patrol passed through.

As Mexico seeks to modernize, setting up a formal justice system in places like this is one of its most difficult challenges.

Mexico has more than 148,000 communities with fewer than 100 residents, many of them isolated in the vast stretches of mountains and deserts that cover much of this country. By comparison, the United States, which has five times more land area, has fewer than 2,000 towns with populations under 100.

More than 25 million Mexicans -- a quarter of the population -- live in communities of 2,500 people or fewer. Government officials say it is simply too expensive to run roads and electric lines to many of them, let alone provide police, prosecutors and judges. As a result, millions of Mexicans live in places that remain largely beyond the law.

"The rule of law is absent in these towns. The level of impunity is extremely high," said Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, Mexico's new ambassador to the United Nations, who served until recently as national security adviser.

He said the administration of President Vicente Fox is working to equip rural police with satellite communication systems and create more uniform police coverage around the country. But he said many state and local government officials have resisted that idea because they still operate under the practices that dominated during seven decades of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party. For years, he said, the PRI encouraged powerful local bosses to handle justice in their own way.

Abel Barrera, a human rights activist based in Tlapa, near Dos Rios, called justice in Mexico "unbalanced."

"Things have changed in the cities, but in parts of the country like this, here in the countryside, violence is still the accepted mechanism of justice," said Barrera, who investigated the Teofilo Gonzalez Cano case. "It's still the law of the jungle."

There is no formal accounting of how many people are killed in Mexico's rough rural justice every year. But human rights groups estimate that hundreds have been killed and hundreds more beaten over the years in punishments meted out beyond official scrutiny. Barrera said at least 10 people a year are killed in the region around Dos Rios in a form of local justice.

"People here have not yet taken notice that Mexico is changing," Barrera said.

Equal protection under the law does not exist. Sentences are given out on the judgment of a few men, who often have little education and no legal training. Their decisions are effectively beyond the oversight of federal, state and municipal governments.

In some cases, their punishment is far more harsh than the formal legal system requires. For example, Mexico has no death penalty or life sentences, but the Dos Rios villagers buried Teofilo alive.

In other cases, local elders are far more lenient than judges. Town elders in Dos Rios said they would punish a rapist with "a few hours" in the town's small jail cell, plus a restitution payment of perhaps $100 to the victim's family. They recalled one case in which the rapist was forced to pay for a party that the victim's family was planning.

Dos Rios is a Mixtec Indian community, governed by traditional practices. Mexico has long debated how far to go in allowing its 10 million Indians to run their own judicial systems. Critics argue that all Mexicans should be governed by the same legal system. But Dos Rios remains one of many places -- Indian and non-Indian -- set apart from mainstream justice in Mexico.

With each passing decade, roads and other public services creep closer to these self-ruled villages. Ten years ago, the road into Dos Rios was little more than a donkey path used largely by farmers hauling their opium poppies to market. Today, trucks hauling beer and Pepsi lumber down the roads, supplying villages with the syrupy smack of globalization.

But the rule of law cannot be loaded onto a delivery truck, and the protection of police and courts still barely exists.

"We can't get everywhere," said Isidro Basurto Mendoz, the official in charge of police in Metlatonoc, the municipal seat, which is three hours from Dos Rios by car and 10 on foot. "The distances are too great, and we have no communications. The problem is that when we can't get there, people take justice into their own hands."

Basurto said he has 18 police officers and one pickup truck to cover 30,000 people in 156 small communities spread over an area about the size of Montgomery County. Most are reachable only by four-wheel-drive vehicles. In the rainy season they are cut off by impassable roads.

As Basurto spoke, word filtered in that two men had been killed the night before in a village a couple of hours' drive into the mountains. A dozen of Basurto's officers grabbed their shotguns and hopped into the back of the police pickup. Despite the display of firepower, Basurto said he and his men would almost certainly not solve the crime.

"I'm going to get the information, give the bodies to the families for burial, then I'll come back to do the paperwork," he said.

Basurto said it was unlikely that any suspect would ever be convicted. He said his officers are not trained to gather or handle evidence. Witnesses would need to drive for hours or walk for days to give testimony before a judge. He said people have no money to make such a trip, and would fear retaliation.

Two suspects were recently arrested and charged with murder in a nearby village. Basurto turned them over to regional prosecutors, but they were free within three months. He suspects they paid a bribe to get the charges dropped. Now, he said, they are back in their village, threatening to kill those who identified them.

Basurto said that case is unusual because the suspects were charged and turned over to prosecutors. "Usually by the time we find out about a case, it's already been resolved," he said. "Or we don't find out about it at all."

Growing Up Together

Teofilo and Vicente grew up the way all children do here: poorly nourished, without shoes and with little knowledge of the outside world. They played among the chickens and mango trees, and they were lucky to survive. Elders here say that until a state government doctor began making regular visits a few years ago, many children died for lack of medicine and basic care.

The two boys were reared in one of the village's small red-brown cubes of mud. Together, working the fields of corn and beans, they grew into men. There are no known photos of either cousin in this village, where cameras are rare. Their families describe them as typical in every way, two sturdy farmhands.

They both married and had the same kind of families: three sons and a daughter. Then things went sour for Teofilo. His wife died in childbirth. He remarried, but his second wife died of a fever about five years ago. He was raising his children alone.

Vicente was building his own house, next to a shady grove of banana trees where he was raised. His uncle lived there, too. It was in his house that Vicente and Teofilo started drinking one afternoon in March 1999. They drank all night. Some here say that Vicente began making jokes about Teofilo's two dead wives. All that is known for sure is that sometime after midnight, Teofilo pulled out a small knife and stabbed Vicente twice in the chest.

By 8 a.m. Teofilo had been brought in and the two men lay side by side on the dirt floor of Vicente's house, with the six elders standing over them, discussing their fate. Vicente's brother, who declined to give his name in an effort to avoid drawing more attention to the case, said the elders made the decision to bury Teofilo alive.

The town elders also wish to avoid attention. Asked about the case one recent morning, Juan Gonzalez Ruiz, the comisario, or head of the local government, switched out of Spanish and consulted with the five other elders, all men in their forties and fifties sitting outside the village hall. They debated for 20 minutes in their Indian language. According to a local schoolteacher who speaks both languages, Gonzalez wanted to tell the truth but the elders instructed him to lie. They said they did not want any more trouble.

Following their orders, Gonzalez told a reporter that Vicente had died in an accident and that Teofilo had run away. The elders nodded in agreement.

The comisario is elected by village residents, and the elders are former comisarios. They said their main goal was to find negotiated solutions to crimes and disputes. They have 10 unpaid "community police" officers, whose duties include helping to keep the peace at festivals and tracking down stolen animals.

Justice varies greatly by community. In some villages, stealing an animal has led to hanging. But here, Gonzalez said, the penalty for stealing a cow is a few hours in jail. He said he or the elders go to the cell and ask the thief why he stole. They try to impress on him that stealing is bad.

Education is sorely lacking. Sixty-seven children study in the village school, which goes to the sixth grade. Only a few children finish all six years. If they wanted to continue their schooling, they would have to drive three hours to Metlatonoc. No one can remember anyone ever doing that.

The people are accustomed to accepting the punishments meted out by the elders. But Teofilo's case shocked many residents. Guadalupe Martinez Castillo, who said she is about 40, said she still cannot believe what her town did.

"It frightens me because I think the same could happen to me, my children, my family," she said. "Everyone lives in fear because they didn't do that to an animal, they killed a person."

Cano, Teofilo's mother, said she lives with fear and regret. From her home, she can just about see the village's hilltop cemetery, where the two cousins are buried in a grave marked by a single anonymous slab of wood jammed into the rocky ground.

Sitting in the red dirt at her house, Cano said she wished she had filed some kind of complaint about her son's death. But she is afraid to challenge the men who run Dos Rios.

"I don't have the courage to confront them," she said. "If I were a man, it might be different. But people here don't know who to go to for justice."

Francisco Estrada Rojas, who teaches at the elementary school, said the elders ordered Teofilo to be buried alive to "teach a big lesson."

He said there had been several murders in Dos Rios in the years leading up to Teofilo's execution. He said that, in the absence of police, disputes over land, family matters, a few cattle or other minor issues often ended in bloodshed. He said few of those killers were caught, and when they were, they almost always seemed to be able to bribe police or prosecutors to let them off.

"That's why people take justice into their own hands," Estrada said. "This happened because the community had been beaten down by so many crimes without punishment."

Estrada said that when the police arrived a day after the murders, they wanted to dig up the men to see for themselves what had happened, and to put the two men in separate graves. But local officials told the police that no one in town would help them. Estrada said they told the police: "You'll have to pay for the food and drink of the laborers, and no one wants to do that kind of work."

Several people in the community said the police stayed only a few minutes longer. There is a widespread belief here that the officers were paid a bribe to forget about the whole thing.

"They didn't arrest anybody," Estrada said. "Because they would have had to arrest the whole community."

By Mary Jordan

Washington Post Foreign Service

The cop looked Jimmy Salguero in the eyes and asked the question that would change his life.

"What's your name?" he said.

"Jimmy Salguero," said Jimmy Salguero.

The officer clicked a few keys on his computer keyboard.

"No, you're Jaime Garcia," he said.

"No I'm not," he insisted.

But it was no use. It was a Friday night, and the police would look good ending the week with a prize arrest. So a Guatemalan painter named Jimmy Salguero became Tijuana robber Jaime Garcia.

Telling the story later, Salguero, 32, said that he had been just another face in Tijuana, living in a Salvation Army shelter and trying to scheme his way across the border into the United States.

To pick up some cash, he had taken a job painting apartments. As he left work that evening in May 2000, the police stopped him and four Mexican painters and asked for their identification. The others produced ID cards. Salguero had none.

The officers whispered among themselves, then hauled him to the station, gave him a new name and sent him to La Mesa, one of the most notorious prisons in Latin America.

When Salguero protested, the cops punched him. They told him to shut up.

Behind bars, month after month, everyone called him Jaime.

Learning the Hard Way

The presumption of innocence and the right to see an attorney have long been written into Mexican law. But in practice those protections are often available only to those who can afford them.

President Vicente Fox, who took office nearly 16 months ago promising to spread democratic protections to all, has sought to end government abuse of individuals, and in particular to end a tradition of arbitrary, sloppy and corrupt police practices.

But injustice has deep roots in Mexico's justice system. There are still two legal systems in the country: one for those with money and connections, and one for the poor.

Salguero said he saw that up close on the ride to the police station, when one of the officers offered him the opportunity to buy his way out of trouble.

"I hear it costs about $1,500 to $2,000 to cross the border," the officer said slyly, Salguero recalled, referring to the going rate for a smuggler to guide immigrants into the United States. Salguero said he understood the deal being offered: Turn over your travel money and you can go home. But he had no cash.

"I just asked, 'How long will I be in this place?' " Salguero said. When the police officers realized they were squeezing an empty wallet, they turned cold. "They told me, 'It will be one to three months before the judge sees you.' "

As an undocumented migrant, Salguero was particularly vulnerable to police abuse. But he figured one person could surely help him: his older sister Ericka, a successful office clerk who lives in Rockville, Md.

He placed a collect phone call from the station. To his relief, she answered. He was certain that his sister, an 18-year resident of the United States with legal status there, could convince the Tijuana police that he was Guatemalan.

Salguero handed the phone to the officer on duty. "Please talk to my sister," he said.

The officer grabbed the phone and hung up.

"The line just cut off," his sister recalled. "They just didn't care who he was."

Still, she figured the police would correct their mistake: "You take someone's fingerprints and you find out who he is, or who he is not. How hard is that?"

But everything got harder.

'You Pay for Everything'

At first, Salguero didn't have a bed in prison. He needed cash for that. In La Mesa, as in many Mexican prisons, inmates pay for their accommodations. How well you sleep, eat and live depends on how much money you have. The divide between rich and poor so prevalent in Latin America is exaggerated inside that giant cage.

The night Salguero arrived in the spring of 2000, he was broke. In La Mesa, penniless can mean homeless. Night after night, he joined other poor inmates searching for a patch of hard ground on the basketball court. "There was no mattress, but somehow I got a blanket," Salguero said.

He soon learned that the thin blanket was one of the rare comforts provided free of charge. Even visiting rights and toilet paper would cost him.

From his concrete bed, Salguero could see the prison's version of luxury. The central section of the prison was filled with more than 400 small wooden houses, many with windows, balconies and stereos. The richer inmates live there.

The warden, Carlos Lugo Felix, said it was his understanding that the top price for one of the little houses was $1,500. But inmates and human rights advocates, including Cesar Barros Leal, a Brazilian law professor who visited La Mesa in December, said the black market price is as high as $30,000 for the finest homes. Middle-class prisoners sleep in relatively uncrowded cells, sharing one with perhaps six others. And the poorest sleep on the ground, Barros said.

Prison officials, trying to squeeze 5,500 inmates into a space built with a tiny budget for 2,800, allowed prisoners to build their own tiny houses years ago. Officials also allowed inmates to open kiosks, where they sell shrimp cocktails, hamburgers, tacos and burritos, and even rent videos. Inmates without cash do without.

Family is a kind of wealth here, too. By long-established custom in Mexico, prisons do not provide all of an inmate's food and supplies. An inmate's family is expected to make frequent visits and provide milk, meat, shampoo, jeans, shirts and medicine -- or the money to buy them.

Five days a week, Salguero watched a parade of more than 2,000 visitors enter La Mesa, lugging bags of supplies. Some men around him ate as well as they would at home, with enchiladas one day and fried chicken the next. But Salguero, with no family in Mexico, survived mainly on the gruel that was wheeled around the prison in vats.

All around him, families spent nights together: More than 500 wives and several hundred children spend at least a few nights a week inside the prison. But nobody visited Salguero, and no one threw anything over the wall for him at night in what is known as the "rain of objects."

With the guards paid off to look the other way, family members and friends tossed packages over the prison wall, often at times and places arranged on smuggled cell phones. Even cocaine and heroin stuffed inside soccer balls were thrown over the wall.

Salguero's thoughts were consumed by earning money. He needed to eat and to bribe guards. So he worked for other inmates who ran shoeshining and laundry businesses. And he carved wooden ships and picture frames and sold them to inmates and visitors.

"You pay for everything, even for water," he said. "To not have money in prison is like being out on the street without anything, with nothing to wear, no way to bathe yourself."

Inmates have even divided the territory inside the prison and set up what amounts to a system of tollbooths. When Salguero wanted to use a pay phone, he paid a gatekeeper about five cents in pesos. When he wanted to go into the visitors' area to try to talk to someone else's attorney, he forked over 20 cents.

What really drained his finances was the roll-call bribe. Every night, when the prisoners lined up to be counted, Salguero had to slip a guard 50 cents to be marked present on the attendance sheet. The days inmates spend in prison are recorded only when they are marked present; missing roll call means spending more time in prison. Guards have turned that into a big moneymaker. With more than 5,000 inmates in La Mesa, the total take from the shakedown could reach $2,500 or more a day.

Salguero paid his 50 cents nearly every night. Each time he did, Jaime Garcia got credit for another day in prison. Garcia, a convicted robber, was being sought for violating parole when Salguero was arrested. Now Salguero was serving out the remainder of Garcia's five-year term.

The injustice tore at him.

"I kept saying 'I want to see a judge or a lawyer,' " he said. "But nobody paid any attention to me."

"Other guys in jail said to me, 'Welcome to Mexico. That's how justice is.' "

'Invisible' Inmates

Salguero was not the only inmate serving time unjustly in Mexico. Human rights advocates and Mexican law enforcement officials said there have been many cases in which the wrong person has served time. Record-keeping has been so sloppy in prisons that officials have not even known the actual identities of inmates, or how many there are. Most prisons lack computerized databases of criminals' fingerprints or mug shots.

Some inmates who cannot afford a lawyer have been kept in prison beyond their sentences. And fugitives wanted for serious crimes have been discovered in prison serving time for petty offenses under assumed names.

A spokesman for the state police in Tijuana said he was unaware of Salguero's case and could not comment on it. Lugo, the warden, said that since he took over four months ago, he has established new procedures for registering and tracking inmates.

Salguero, a quiet, serious man, became withdrawn as time passed. On good days he dreamed of getting out and going back to school to learn automobile engineering. He wanted to build cars in the United States. He had only finished primary school in Puerto Barrios, his home town in Guatemala, 2,600 miles southeast of here.

He joined a Bible study group. His new friends got him off the ground and into a bunk. They paid for his new quarters and later, when he had money, they charged him a small fee each week. But they offered no hope.

"Even my brothers in the Christian group told me, 'You will be here for a long time.' I asked their visitors to help me but they didn't. Maybe they were scared or maybe they thought I was lying. Even a pastor told me I was paying for some debt I probably owed."

Christmas 2000 came and went.

"In my solitude, I would read the Bible," he said. "It was the only thing that consoled me. I felt invisible."

Dispatching Help

In Rockville, Ericka Salguero was frantic. With three small children, a new mortgage and a demanding job, she couldn't afford the 2,800-mile trip to Tijuana. Her pleas for help from the Guatemalan embassies in the United States and Mexico went nowhere. She arranged for a relative in Los Angeles to take the three-hour bus trip across the border to give Salguero money and new clothes. She was worried because when she had last spoken to her brother he had said: "Send money so I won't get beaten."

Ericka's mother-in-law arrived at La Mesa and waited nervously in the long visitors' line. The sight of police in bulletproof vests on the roof made her jittery; the smell of sewage and the picture of too many people behind chain-link fences made her sad.

When she finally arrived at the visitors' window, she asked to see Salguero -- using the name Jaime Garcia. She didn't know it, but she had just fallen into another moneymaking racket. The inmates who control the visitors' area charge a fee to find the inmate being summoned. And often, they charge the inmates for the "privilege" of seeing their visitors.

She didn't know that she was supposed to pay. Salguero never appeared. The inmates persuaded her to leave the package of clothes and money with them; they said they would deliver it. But Salguero said he never received the package or a message that a visitor had come.

"I wanted to scream. I wanted to say, 'I am not this person,' " he said. But complaints earned him a beating or, from the gentler guards, these words: "Then prove it."

Salguero couldn't. So he carved boats. When he had the extra pesos, he paid to get into the visitors' area to beg a few words with other inmates' visitors and attorneys. No one took him seriously.

Finally, one visitor gave him what turned out to be a golden brushoff. If you think you have a real gripe, call the human rights office in Tijuana, he said. The man passed him the phone number.

Salguero was excited about the new lead, but he needed $3 for a phone card to pursue it. He worked and saved, ate less, and finally bought a shiny new phone card.

It had been more than a year since his arrest.

He slipped the card into a phone, dialed the number, and Luis Hernandez picked up.

Finding a Way Out

Hernandez, a 22-year-old lawyer, had been working in the human rights office for four months. He was fielding five or six calls a day from prisoners in La Mesa, all with horror stories. On May 25, 2001, he visited Salguero. After they talked, Hernandez went to the court to see the file of Jaime Garcia.

"I was stunned," he said.

The man in the photo in Garcia's file was obviously not Salguero. He was older, taller and fatter. He had dark skin and curly hair, not the fair skin and straight hair of the man Hernandez had just visited. And he had drug needle marks running up and down his arms; Salguero did not.

Hernandez wrote to the judge in Garcia's case.

On June 5, as Jimmy Salguero neared the end of his 13th month in prison, he was summoned to the office of the deputy prison director.

"Are you Jaime Garcia?" the man asked.

"That is what they call me here. My real name is Jimmy Salguero. I am not Mexican."

The official, who, along with other top management has since left the prison, was quiet. He told him to wait. An hour later he returned and said only this: "I have good news. You are free to leave."

In minutes Salguero was on the street.

He raced to find Hernandez.

"Jimmy walked in and was in disbelief. His face was blank. No one told him why they released him," said the lawyer, reached in Spain, where he is now studying for a doctorate in human rights. He said he believed Salguero should sue the Tijuana police.

Ericka Salguero said he should receive an apology, at least. "They stole a year of his life, and it is not good enough to say, 'Bye, bye,' as if nothing happened," she said.

But Salguero's thoughts are already in Canada. They make cars there, too, and since Sept. 11, it's easier to go there than to the United States. He spends his days painting cars in Tijuana, saving his money.

Researcher Laurie Freeman contributed to this report.

© 2002, The Washington Post Company

By Kevin Sullivan

Washington Post Foreign Service

Reenactments are a common technique in Mexican criminal investigations and are often accepted as evidence in trials, although they are based on nothing more than a prosecutor's version of events. 

PACHUCA, Mexico -- Alfonso Martin del Campo Dodd stood naked in the basement of a Mexico City police station, where he said cops took turns punching him and slapping him, kicking him in the groin and screaming at him.

His sister and her husband had just been murdered in their sleep, stabbed a total of 64 times, and the police wanted Martin del Campo to confess. They waved a typewritten statement in his face and ordered him to sign it. He told them he didn't kill anybody and wasn't going to sign anything.

Then came the plastic bag.

According to Martin del Campo, whose story was corroborated under oath by an officer who was suspended for torturing him, two cops held him by the arms while another put the bag over his head. "That's one minute," he remembers the officer saying. "Next we'll do it for two minutes, then three, until you confess." They put the bag over his head again and again.

"I was sure they were going to kill me," Martin del Campo said.

So naked, bleeding and gasping for breath, he scratched his name at the bottom of a confession he did not write and had never read, admitting to a crime he said he did not commit. Based on that document and no direct physical evidence -- no witnesses, fingerprints, bloodstains, hairs or clothing fibers -- a judge convicted him of the double murder and sentenced him to 50 years in prison.

That was 10 years ago.

Martin del Campo, a U.S. citizen born in Chicago, now sits in prison in this city 40 miles north of Mexico City. His appeals are exhausted. Four different judges ruled that his allegations of torture were irrelevant. Confessions obtained by torture are not necessarily false, they ruled, repeating a conclusion reached frequently by Mexican judges.

The principle that someone charged with a crime is innocent until proven guilty does not exist in Mexico. Until 1984, federal law explicitly said a defendant was guilty until proven innocent. Although the presumption of guilt was later removed, it remains the practice -- defendants must still prove their innocence. Martin del Campo could not.

He is 37 now, and his hair is tinged with gray. His father moved to this small city to be near him, and he visits every day; his mother, who lives in Mexico City, comes on weekends. They said losing a daughter was devastating enough, and they want their son back.

"I have been legally kidnapped here, and I want to be free," Martin del Campo said, sitting in his tiny cell. "The worst of this is losing my sister. But I am dead, too. I am dead in life."

Confronting a Dark Legacy

Martin del Campo is a ghost in Mexico's closet, haunting this country as it tries to move beyond a history of authoritarian abuses. Even now, Mexico's record on torture is one of the worst in the world, according to the United Nations, Amnesty International and other groups.

It is a legacy that built up over generations. For much of the 20th century, Mexico was run by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. Under its rigid system, from the president's gilded office to thousands of rural villages run by strong-arm political bosses, official power was wielded as a blunt and often brutal tool of control.

In a rule-of-law state, the law is a higher authority than the arbitrary actions of any individual, whether a police officer or president. But throughout recent Mexican history, it was the other way around: Party bosses were above the law. Police departments, especially in the countryside, were developed largely as political security forces to support local bosses, and not as investigative law enforcement units to solve crimes.

Fists and kicks and plastic bags have long been standard practice for solving cases. The innocent and the guilty have confessed simply to stop the pain. Prosecutors have been neglected. There has been little need to professionalize them when their chief function has been to present confessions to judges. "They just look for a quick, easy solution to a crime, rather than the truth," said Emma Maza of the Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez Human Rights Center in Mexico City.

Mexican judges have also been part of the system that ruled above the law. The goal has been to keep the political bosses satisfied, resolving cases by whatever means necessary. "To keep their jobs, they have to do what they are told," said human rights lawyer Pilar Noriega. Defense lawyers also have seen little chance to buck the system. Public defenders have been even more poorly trained and less likely to serve their clients well.

The PRI era ended in December 2000 with the swearing-in of President Vicente Fox, who was elected by voters fed up with the abuses and corruption of the PRI system. Fox has promised to clean up Mexico's human rights record, but Amnesty International and even Fox's top human rights adviser, Mariclaire Acosta, acknowledge that torture continues. Acosta said Fox's government was trying to pass new anti-torture laws, train police and soldiers not to beat confessions out of suspects, and enact reforms to prevent judges from accepting torture-induced confessions. But, she said: "Those are still common practices. It's an abomination."

Theoretically, torture is illegal in Mexico. The constitution prohibits "all incommunicado detention, intimidation or torture" and states that confessions made before anyone other than a prosecutor or a judge are not admissible in court. In 1986, Mexico began enacting laws to punish torture, and to make torture-induced confessions inadmissible in court. In addition, in 1987, Mexico ratified a U.N. convention against torture. Fox has invited U.N. human rights officials to set up an office in Mexico.

But Mexico is slow to change, and torture is still a common tool of the authorities. Last month, in Nuevo Leon state, a man suspected of robbing an ATM died of asphyxiation while in police custody. The state attorney general's office said it believed he died as the result of torture, and the case is under investigation. On Wednesday, the Durango state human rights commission concluded that five state police officers had tortured three murder suspects in March. Two weeks ago, the national human rights commission concluded that a suspected kidnapper who died in custody of federal police in March was beaten to death.

The challenge facing Mexico today is not only to enforce the ban on torture but to change the mind-set of a generation of police, prosecutors and judges, whose practices and beliefs were set in an earlier era. Acosta said the government faces enormous obstacles, including decades of official indifference to torture and other abuses. Just as important as preventing torture in the future, she added, is redressing wrongs of the past -- including victims of torture locked away in prisons.

Indelible Night

Sitting in his cell, next to a dirt field where other inmates played soccer, Martin del Campo, who has a round face and a soft voice, recounted the story he has told many times, about the early morning hours of May 30, 1992:

He woke to the sound of his sister, Patricia, screaming his name. She and her husband, Gerardo Zamudio Aldaba, slept in another bedroom in the Mexico City apartment they shared. The two men were partners in two businesses: importing carpets, and operating buses for the city. Patricia, 33, worked as a waitress and took care of the couple's three daughters, then 6, 4 and 2, who were sleeping in the next room.

Martin del Campo ran toward the screams. He was met at his bedroom door by two men with stockings over their heads. They called him by his nickname, Chacho, then, he remembers, they beat him. They forced him downstairs and threw him into the trunk of a car. They drove for about 30 minutes, until the car came to a crashing stop.

Martin del Campo heard the two men get out and run. He said he found a tire iron, smashed out a brake light and saw that he was on a highway, where the car had crashed into the concrete barrier dividing the road. He fiddled with a lock until the trunk popped open.

He flagged down a passing bus and rode it to the first tollbooth, where he ran to some police officers and told them what happened. The police drove him to the crashed car, where they found a bloody knife and started asking questions. They drove him back to his apartment, now surrounded by police cars and ambulances. A neighbor's teenage son told him that his sister and Zamudio were dead.

Police drove Martin del Campo to the station, where, he said, he was taken to a basement room and surrounded by a dozen police officers. The officer in charge, later identified to him as Sotero Galvan Gutierrez, asked him to tell his story. Martin del Campo said he told them everything. They made him tell the same story at least four times. Nobody wrote anything down, he recalled, and there was no tape recorder.

Finally, he said, one officer started hitting him, swore at him and said, "Tell us how you did it -- how did you kill them?"

Martin del Campo said he was shocked. Then all the officers started taking turns hitting and kicking him. They made him strip naked and kept hitting him, some with wet towels wrapped around their fists to leave fewer marks. Eventually, he said, Galvan came to him with a typed statement and demanded he sign. He still refused.

Then came the plastic bag. And he finally signed.

"That made them very happy," he said.

Missing Pieces

The case against Martin del Campo, who had no previous criminal record, was made largely by Galvan, according to the court file. In Galvan's version, described in his investigative report, Martin del Campo was drunk and killed his sister and her husband because he was angry with his brother-in-law over a $70 car repair bill. He waited until the two were asleep, then stabbed them with kitchen knives. He smashed his own head and face, hard enough to cause deep cuts, and staged a phony kidnapping to cover up his crime, Galvan said in the report.

But hundreds of pages of court documents contain no evidence to support Galvan's version. They don't prove Martin del Campo's innocence either. But the record shows blood tests indicate he was not drunk. Lab tests showed that hairs found in the clenched fist of his sister when she died, presumably from her killer, were not Martin del Campo's. There were no witnesses, no blood-soaked clothes. There was no motive offered for why he would kill his sister.

Galvan offered as evidence a reconstruction of the events, based on his theory. Officers brought Martin del Campo back to the apartment, over his objections, and took 85 photos as they made him reach for knives in the kitchen, and forced him to pretend to stab the victims, played by two police officers posing in the bloody bed.

Reenactments are a common technique in Mexican criminal investigations and are often accepted as evidence in trials, although they are based on nothing more than a prosecutor's version of events. The trial judge, and several judges who considered Martin del Campo's appeals, cited the reenactment photos as evidence of his guilt, and an appeals judge called it "convincing" evidence, according to court documents.

Galvan said Martin del Campo was represented by a public defender during thereenactment. But the person listed by Galvan as defender was a police department computer specialist, court documents subsequently showed. The record also shows that a public defender eventually assigned to his case never argued that the confession should be excluded because of torture. An appeals court judge called the confession "the only relevant piece of evidence" against him.

During the trial, Martin del Campo was given the opportunity to question Galvan directly. He asked him if he and other officers had stripped him, beaten him, suffocated him with a plastic bag. The court record shows that, under oath, Galvan acknowledged that he had done it.

But the judge accepted the confession anyway, noting, as the appellate judges also did, that in Mexico, confessions obtained by torture are often still considered as evidence, despite the laws that say confessions obtained by torture are inadmissible.

In April 1993, Galvan shot and killed an unarmed man while on duty. He was convicted of murder, fired from the police force and sentenced to 10 years in prison. After serving five years, he was released for "health reasons."

In October 1994, acting as a result of Galvan's admission in the trial, the Mexico City attorney general's office punished Galvan for violating Martin del Campo's human rights. Although he had already been fired, his punishment was a three-year suspension from the police force. The notice was delivered to him in prison.

Galvan, in response to a message sent through an intermediary, said he would not comment on the case.

Martin del Campo also filed a complaint seeking criminal torture charges against Galvan. But prosecutors closed the case in 2000, saying there wasn't enough evidence, despite Galvan's admission that he had tortured Martin del Campo.

Enrique Flota, a top official in the prosecutor's office, was asked why Galvan didn't face criminal prosecution. "That question has no answer," he said. "It's something that we are going to look into. We are very worried that there were irregularities."

In one sign of the potential for change, the leadership of the city attorney general's office has changed hands since 2000, when a new mayor was elected. In an office that had long been suspected of covering up abuses, several former private-sector human rights activists have been hired to high positions. Flota, for example, was previously a private defense lawyer who specialized in human rights cases.

Flota, who started his job in January, said he and others in his office were just now beginning to confront abuses from the past. They plan a complete review of Martin del Campo's case. "There was a frequent practice of torture and irregularities by the police, we all know that," Flota said. "In this case, we have to find out exactly what happened. We have many doubts about this case."

Flota also said he planned to review why his predecessors never investigated a 1998 complaint filed by Martin del Campo's relatives in which they offered another version of the case. The complaint alleged that Zamudio's family arranged the murders to collect his inheritance. It also alleged that Patricia was killed to prevent her from inheriting her husband's assets, and Martin del Campo was spared so he would be blamed.

The complaint includes documents showing that Zamudio's brother and his mother ended up with all of his assets, as well as Martin del Campo's share of two small businesses in which he and Zamudio were partners.

Martin del Campo, speaking in the fluent English he picked up as a child in Chicago, said no one has ever investigated what he said was the obvious line of inquiry: "In murder cases, the first question you ask is, 'Who benefited?' " he said. "Look at me. Did I benefit?"

Waiting for an End

With no legal appeals left, Martin del Campo has thrown his fate to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, an arm of the Organization of American States, which is reviewing his case to determine if the Mexican judicial system violated his rights. The commission's report is due by the end of the year. If it recommends his release, Acosta said, Fox would find a way to comply.

Martin del Campo has asked the U.S. government for help, but so far it has given him only vitamins and copies of Sports Illustrated, delivered every three months by an embassy official who checks on all U.S. citizens in Mexican prisons.

With 40 years left in his sentence, Martin del Campo passes his days working at a little snack shop in the prison. His father, 68, works alongside him during his daily visits. His mother, 67, spends much of her time trying to find her orphaned granddaughters, who are now 16, 14 and 12. A court awarded her custody of the girls in 1995, but she said Zamudio's family has them and she does not know where they are. "This has all been the worst thing anyone could imagine," she said. "It has been hell."

Earlier last month, Martin del Campo married his longtime girlfriend, Janeth, in the prison. They had been dating at the time of the murders.

At the ceremony, they stood in a bare prison room before a priest, nuzzling and giggling and pledging to spend their lives together. It was almost normal, except that the photographer was a convicted drug dealer and the honeymoon trip was a walk past the guard tower to a prison cell.

"It's not how I'd like it to be," Martin del Campo said. "But time is passing. I've had a lot of years of bad news. Now I want to have children, and a life."

--Researcher Laurie Freeman in Mexico City contributed to this report.

© 2002, The Washington Post Company

By Mary Jordan

Washington Post Foreign Service

REYESHOGPAN, Mexico -- These gorgeous mountain slopes in central Mexico, blooming with black pepper plants and golden cornstalks, camouflage the sorrow of the two silent sisters. Antonia and Isabel Francisco Melendez, who were born deaf, are nine months pregnant, and the doctors treating them say they were raped.

The sisters, who cannot speak, cry and crumple, and literally fold up, when asked how they got pregnant. Their babies are due at the same time, within a week or so. Do they know the man? Did it happen in the fields on their way home from school? Isabel seemed to try to answer once, to her grandmother, by pointing to a spot high on a mountainside before tears streamed down her face and she turned away again.

Antonia is 13 years old, and Isabel 16. Perhaps if they were older, the pregnancies would have been easier to keep secret, the way rapes and beatings of women are usually dealt with in Mexico. But in this little town of fewer than 500 people, a place where the church bells toll every afternoon at 5 to call everyone to say the rosary, the reality is hard to hide. The girls' tiny frames swell more each day. Their backs and legs are sore -- not from playing tag with schoolmates, but because their bodies are telling them they will soon be mothers.

"This is a crime and there should be an investigation," said Juana Maria Diego Victor, a community leader in this village 85 miles northeast of Puebla city. "Someone should protect these girls."

Mexico is struggling to modernize its justice system, but when it comes to punishing sexual violence against women, surprisingly little has changed in a century. In many parts of Mexico, the penalty for stealing a cow is harsher than the punishment for rape.

Although the law calls for tough penalties for rape -- up to 20 years in prison -- only rarely is there an investigation into even the most barbaric of sexual violence. Women's groups estimate that perhaps 1 percent of rapes are ever punished. Although the two girls' medical charts say their pregnancies were the "product of rape," no police authority has looked into the case.

In recent decades, Mexico has made strides to improve women's rights and opportunities. Mexican women still have much higher illiteracy rates than men, but that is slowly changing as young girls are staying in school longer. During the 1990s, laws that trampled women's rights were abolished, such as those that said married women needed their husband's permission to hold a job outside the home.

But in the country that made the term "machismo" famous, where women were given the right to vote only in 1953, women's rights advocates said rape and other violence against women are still not treated as serious crimes. And they said police, prosecutors and judges often show indifference or hostility toward women who claim rape -- such as in the case of Yessica Yadira Diaz Cazares.

Diaz testified that three police officers raped her in 1997, when she was 16, as she was on her way home from school in the northern city of Durango. She then did a rare thing: She tried to punish her attackers.

When she went to the police station with her mother, she was jeered and then jailed overnight. They forced her, as is mandatory in Mexico, to have a physical vaginal exam by a government doctor. They made her submit to eight separate blood tests, telling her, falsely, that the tests would determine whether she had been raped. But no one ever told her what the lab results were.

When the teenager did not back off, even after her family received death threats, a prosecutor told her that to identify the officers who attacked her, she must physically lay her hand on them. It was not good enough to point out her attackers. She needed to touch them, she was instructed. When she reached out and touched an officer, he taunted her and told her she was crazy.

Finally she gave up. She told her sister she was tired of seeking justice. Three months later, the young girl with big brown eyes and long, wavy hair killed herself with an overdose of prescription drugs. After her burial, the national human rights commission took up her case and helped convict two officers of rape.

"They make the few women who dare to report rape give up," said Yessica's mother, Maria Eugenia Cazares, who said her daughter's rape and death shattered the family's life. After her daughter's suicide, she moved her family to Canada where, she said, there are more enlightened laws to protect women.

"In 90 percent of the cases of rape, the Mexican police blame the women," she said in an interview. "In the few cases where they know the man is guilty, they let him 'fix' it with money."

She said she believes that a "machismo culture," instilled through what is learned in the home, school and church, has allowed many men to "believe they are superior and dominant, and that women are an object." She said that mind-set has contributed to making many men -- including policemen, prosecutors, judges and others in positions of authority -- believe that sexual violence against women is no big deal.

"The thinking is 'she's a woman, so she deserved it,' or 'he's a man, so what do you expect?' " said Cazares.

Rape in Mexico is prosecuted at the state level, and state laws vary. A review of criminal laws in all 31 Mexican states showed that many states require that if a 12-year-old girl wants to accuse an adult man of statutory rape, she must first prove she is "chaste and pure." Nineteen of the states require that statutory rape charges be dropped if the rapist agrees to marry his victim.

"What message is this? That the crime is not serious," said Elena Azaola, author of "The Crime of Being a Women," a book about how the Mexican justice system discriminates against women.

In order for a woman to file a criminal complaint alleging rape, she must submit to a medical exam by a doctor assigned by the prosecutor's office. Patricia Duarte, president of the Mexican Association Against Violence Against Women, said these exams, routinely conducted in the prosecutor's office, are often carried out with little sensitivity or privacy. The exams, she said, are an obstacle to reporting rape that contributes to "impunity of rapists" in Mexico.

Fighting Old Customs

Whatever problems women face in the cities and towns, they are compounded in small villages where old customs are still the only true law. Ten million Mexicans are indigenous, as are most of the people in these highlands of the Sierra Madre. In Mexico's march toward modernity, there is great tension here between protecting women from violence and honoring indigenous customs.

In many of the thousands of indigenous communities, by longstanding custom, women are essentially servants of their fathers, brothers and husbands. In many villages around Reyeshogpan, women are forbidden to go out after dusk without their husband or their husband's permission. After 7 p.m., streets in village after village are populated by men only, many of them drunk. Alcoholism is another problem that contributes to violence against women.

Town elders who act as judges in local criminal matters are invariably men. In one village in Guerrero state, elders were recently asked how they punish rape. The six men looked confused, as if they did not know what the term meant. When it was explained to them, they all laughed and said it sounded more like a courting ritual than a crime.

When they stopped laughing, they said a rapist would probably get a few hours in the local jail, or he might have to pay the victim's family a $10 or $20 fine, but that all would be forgotten if he and the victim got married.

In the case of a cow thief, they said, the robber would be jailed. And, unlike the rapist, a cow thief would be brought before the elders for a lecture about the severity of the crime.

In the southern state of Oaxaca last summer, the one-year-old, government-funded Oaxacan Women's Institute persuaded the legislature to pass heavy criminal penalties against a practice known as "rapto." Laws in most Mexican states define rapto as a case where a man kidnaps a woman not for ransom, but with the intent of marrying her or to satisfy his "erotic sexual desire." The new law championed by the women's group established penalties of at least 10 years in prison.

But in March, the state legislature reversed itself and again made the practice a minor infraction. A key legislator -- a man -- argued for the reduction, calling the practice harmless and "romantic."

Human rights groups disagree. They say it is not charming for a man to spot a woman he fancies sitting in a park, pick her up and carry her away to have sex with her. Yet to this day, that is still how some women meet their husbands. The attorney general's office said there have been 137 criminal complaints of rapto in the state of Puebla since January 2000.

Complete statistics are impossible to find, because most cases are settled between the two families involved and never reported. Because rapto implies that the girl was taken away for sex, her parents want to avoid the shame associated with making a public complaint to police.

In some cases, the girls voluntarily go with the man as a way to elope to avoid wedding expenses. But Gabriela Gutierrez Kleman, a lawyer with the Oaxacan Women's Institute, said in many cases the women are taken against their will.

Gutierrez said it is hard to ask girls to complain about rapto, to buck a system that has changed little since their great-grandmother's time. If they do, she said, the family or the community often "treats them as outcasts."

Marriage as a Remedy

The regional maternity hospital in Zacapoaxtla caters to women and children from scores of villages in the highlands here in the northeast corner of Puebla state. White-coated doctors and nurses scurry about among the crying children, past brightly painted walls decorated with basic information about nutrition, breast-feeding and sanitation.

About 220 babies are born there each month, many of them to mothers who are children themselves. Hospital officials said babies are born there frequently to girls as young as 12, many of whom do not understand that intercourse caused their pregnancy.

The pregnancy of a child that age implies a crime: In Puebla, it is illegal to have sex with a person younger than 18. But only rarely are rape charges filed in these cases.

Teresa Arrieta Martinez, 13, petite and hugely pregnant, cringed as a nurse took a blood sample as part of her prenatal care. Her boyfriend, Eliazar Hernandez Martinez, a 20-year-old grocery store manager, stood outside in the waiting room.

About seven months ago, when Teresa was 12, Hernandez had sex with her and she became pregnant. Because of her age, the law says that Hernandez committed statutory rape. But it was not the police who came after him; it was Teresa's mother, Maria Juana Martinez.

"He could go to jail. If he doesn't carry through on his promise to marry her, I'll have to report him," she said. "I'll sue him if he fails her."

In most states marriage is a legal remedy for statutory rape. Women's groups say if the penalties were harsher, statutory rape cases would not be so common. As it is now, a man can agree to a wedding to avoid going to jail, and then abandon the woman. Social workers say many unhappy, abusive marriages begin with statutory rape.

Any day, Antonia and Isabel, the two deaf sisters, are due to deliver their babies at the same hospital. Antonia, the 13-year-old, lives with her mother in a small house near the main road of Reyeshogpan, a tiny village with little more than a church, basketball court and general store. Antonia is carrying her baby in the breach position, so her doctors expect a difficult delivery.

Isabel, 16, lives with her 95-year-old grandfather in a small wooden house nearby. It is at the bottom of a ravine lined with cornstalks, a challenging 30-minute climb straight down from where her mother, stepfather and sister live. No one seems quite sure how Isabel will be able to make the climb up to get to the hospital once she is in labor.

Isabel passes her days sitting on a log at her front door, staring off into the cornfields or embroidering. She wears her silky brown hair neatly tied up, her white dress and apron are impeccably clean and she folds her hands nervously over her huge belly.

The girls' mother, Ventura Melendez, 35, communicates with them using rudimentary sign language and drawings. When she asked Isabel if she had any pain, the girl put her arm against her lower back. She nodded when asked if she is scared about being such a young mother.

Melendez said she prefers not to dwell on how they got pregnant. "What happened to them happens to a lot of girls," she said. "We don't want justice. We don't want trouble."

But Diego Victor, the neighbor who has known the girls since they were born, said she is angry that what happened to the girls will never be punished.

"They deserve better," she said.

--Researcher Laurie Freeman in Mexico City contributed to this report.

© 2002, The Washington Post Company

By Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan

Washington Post Foreign Service

A former employer lent him more than $1,500 to pay his fines, allowing him to avoid a prison sentence that would have kept him locked up until 2006. That makes him luckier than most. But it will take every peso of his earnings -- and his mother's -- for more than a year to pay back his debt.

MEXICO CITY -- Giovanni Hurtado Aviles was hurrying to his engineering class when he realized he didn't have the two pesos -- about 20 cents -- for the subway. When he tried to use somebody's else's pass to get on, he was caught and hauled to jail. "I made a mistake. I am really sorry. I won't do it again," Hurtado, 20, said he told the guard who nabbed him that January morning.

But the Mexican justice system, which often fails to punish serious criminals, zealously prosecutes the most minor of offenders. So the college student with no criminal record was denied bail and forced to mop floors for 12 hours a day for two months while he awaited trial.

"Our justice system is not just," said the Rev. Jose Luis Tellez, a Roman Catholic priest and lawyer who tries to get such prisoners freed. "The real criminals are at home in their houses while these people are in jail."

Mexico's courts and jails are clogged with people like Hurtado, people who stole a bicycle, bread, shampoo, subway fare. More than half of the 22,000 prisoners in Mexico City's jails are there for offenses so slight that human rights advocates -- and increasingly, city officials -- say they never should have been jailed in the first place.

According to recent testimony to the Mexican Congress by top law enforcement officials, well over 90 percent of serious crime goes unpunished. In a nation with one of the world's highest kidnapping rates, much drug-related bloodshed and a chilling level of violence on the streets of the capital, the prisons are choked with people who stole to eat. Tellez said a man who stole a Gansito, similar to a Twinkie, was released in November after spending three years in jail. He said another man who stole bread worth about $4 was sentenced to six years.

Public opinion polls show that Mexicans are fed up with their justice system. One of the key complaints is that it thunders down so hard on petty criminals. At every turn, the system is consumed with the smallest crimes: Poorly trained police focus on the easiest crimes to solve; corrupt officers, often paid to look the other way when there is more serious crime, have no such incentive to let small-time offenders go. Legislators under political pressure to combat rising crime rates have set tough minimum sentences for the smallest of robberies.

The result is that in many cases, as with Hurtado, the subway cheater, judges are forced by the law to hand down sentences they believe are unfair. Judges in Mexico have almost no discretionary authority. The Mexican legal system, based in 19th century Napoleonic Code, deliberately limits the role of judges. The theory is that legislators should craft penalties and judges should simply impose them.

The judge in Hurtado's case wanted to be lenient but said the law would not let him. He convicted Hurtado of "using a false document" -- showing a subway worker's pass that Hurtado said he had found on the floor. That is the equivalent of a felony, a crime considered too grave to warrant bail, punishable by a minimum of four years in prison. Behind bars, Hurtado vomited from nervousness. He fell far behind on his class work and lost wages from an after-school job.

"What my son did wasn't a crime; it was a mistake," said his mother, Laura Aviles Rodriguez. "Who would call this justice?"

A Well-Connected Defendant

Behind the high brick walls of a Mexico City development called Poinsettia, amid gardens of purple bougainvillea and expensive SUVs parked in a row on the cobblestones, Oscar Espinosa Villareal lives the life of an accused embezzler with means.

Espinosa, Mexico City's mayor from 1994 to 1997, is accused of illegally diverting $45 million that was never accounted for during his term. When a judge issued a warrant for his arrest in August 2000, he did what many wealthy Mexicans do in the same situation: He bought a plane ticket and fled the country. His top aide is still a fugitive.

Espinosa flew to Canada and then Nicaragua, where he was caught. He maintains he has done nothing illegal and that he is the victim of a revenge campaign by his political enemies. He fought extradition on grounds that the case against him amounted to political persecution, but the Nicaraguans sent him home.

Espinosa is part of the well-connected old guard of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ran Mexico from 1929 to 2000. He served as campaign finance manager for his old friend, Ernesto Zedillo, who became president and rewarded Espinosa with the mayor's job, a presidentially appointed position until 1997. When Espinosa's term expired, Zedillo appointed him to serve as national tourism minister from 1997 to 2000.

When Espinosa arrived back in Mexico on a federal police jet from Nicaragua, his wealth and connections kicked in. He hired one of Mexico's leading lawyers, who persuaded a federal judge to issue an order forbidding his arrest and detention, allowing him to remain free pending trial. Espinosa was ordered to post bail of about $400,000. He paid about $12,000 in cash, put up his house to cover the balance, and then went home.

Based on Mexico's long history of elites beating criminal charges, few here believe Espinosa will ever be convicted. It is a story Mexicans know well: Accused of stealing $45 million, Espinosa sleeps in his own bed at night, while Hurtado, who sneaked a 20-cent subway ride, was forced to sleep on a jailhouse cot for months awaiting trial.

Francisco Garduno, the former head of prisons for Mexico City, has given speeches to inmates citing Espinosa as an example of how those accused of major crimes get better treatment than minor offenders, who are invariably poor. "The road to justice opens up wide for them," Garduno said. "But for the poor it is very narrow."

Behind Bars for Lack of Funds

Far from Espinosa's hillside retreat, in a rough neighborhood in the southeast side of the city, Tellez, the Catholic priest, runs a church program to get minor offenders out of jail.

Frustrated with the government's approach to petty criminals, the church has quietly begun its own effort to help. The church pays fines and bail for thousands of nonviolent petty criminals, most of them first offenders. People convicted of a crime are often allowed to choose jail time or a fine. Tellez said he has handled cases of many who could have avoided jail or served less time by paying a fine of as little as $25.

"It absolutely is unfair that money determines freedom," Tellez said.

Church lawyers last year reviewed the files of 11,000 prisoners in Mexico City jails, half the city's inmates. They concluded that at least 4,000 were minor offenders stuck behind bars because they could not afford to pay fines or bail. In all, the church has arranged for the release of 4,100 people.

A private foundation, supported by Telefonos de Mexico, or Telmex, the country's largest telephone company, has paid for the release of 20,000 minor offenders in the last five years.

The foundation spokesman, Mario Cobo Trujillo, said cases have included a man, charged with injuring another man in a fight, who spent eight months in jail awaiting trial until the foundation paid his $25 bail. Cobo said another man spent more than 18 months awaiting trial for want of $100 for bail.

Mexico's culture of official secrecy has kept the extent of the problem hidden. Until recently all prison records in Mexico were considered confidential, and they are still difficult to obtain. That has made it hard to document how the system has been primarily focused on the least significant crimes.

But now that church lawyers and human rights workers are being given access, members of the public are getting their first glimpses at the make-up of the prison population. What they are finding has sparked a drive to substitute restitution and community service for prison time for minor offenders.

Laws Limit Judges' Authority

Hurtado's case was handled by Judge Eduardo Mata, a chain-smoking former prosecutor. "Ever since I got this case, I thought it was a shame," Mata said in an interview in his glass-walled courthouse office. "He just did something stupid. But there was nothing I could do."

Mata, who has been a judge for nine years, said the case was a frustrating reminder of the strict limits on his authority and how minor offenders end up behind bars.

"I think we need reforms that give judges more freedom," he said. "We don't have the flexibility we need."

A Mexican judge's main task is to read files and issue a sentence that falls between the minimum and maximum penalty established in the criminal codes. In Mexico there are no jury trials. And in many cases, the judge never even sees the defendant, issuing his decision based on the written record. Limiting the judge's authority is meant to limit bribery and other corruption on the bench.

"Our hands are tied by the law," Mata said. "We can't do anything if we think the minimum sentence is unfair."

Mata recalled a case in which a young man stole a bag of bread from a woman in a Mexico City market. Police grabbed him immediately, and they and the thief discovered that the woman had also stuffed 40,000 pesos -- about $4,500 -- into the bag after a trip to the bank.

Mata said he wanted to sentence the man based on his intention, which he said was to steal a loaf of bread. But because the man had committed a major robbery, even unwittingly, Mata said, the law required him to sentence him to several years in prison.

In Hurtado's case, Mata said the best he could do was issue the minimum sentence for his crime: four years in prison and a fine of about $950. Mata said he then used the only wiggle room the law allowed him, letting Hurtado substitute an additional fine of about $560 for his prison time.

"He didn't damage society in any way," Mata said. "I didn't like the sentence I had to give him. Our laws aren't that fair."

Gaunt and defeated, Hurtado walked out of jail on March 13 after 63 days behind bars.

A former employer lent him more than $1,500 to pay his fines, allowing him to avoid a prison sentence that would have kept him locked up until 2006. That makes him luckier than most. But it will take every peso of his earnings -- and his mother's -- for more than a year to pay back his debt.

Former prison chief Garduno, who now runs the city's transportation department, is outraged at how the system treated Hurtado and how it punishes the wrong people. So he gave him a city job to help him pay off his debts.

"I am trying to repair the damage done to our society," Garduno said. "I am trying to rectify something that has happened to thousands of people in Mexico."

Researcher Laurie Freeman in Mexico City contributed to this report.

© 2002, The Washington Post Company

By Kevin Sullivan

Washington Post Foreign Service

MEXICO CITY -- The videotapes and photos arrived every few days. They showed a young woman, bound and scared, crying out as her kidnappers slapped her face and beat her. The pictures, the sounds of pain, tore at her uncle Gerardo like a dull razor.

"When do you want us to stop?" the kidnappers asked on the tapes, and in phone calls that always came between 2 and 4 in the morning. They threatened that the next time they would send her tongue, her eye, her ears, her fingers. They wanted $5 million in ransom, and they offered specific suggestions about which of Gerardo's properties and businesses he could sell to raise it.

He didn't call the police. The kidnappers said they would kill his niece, his mother, his children if he did. From the extent of the kidnappers' information about him, he suspected that the police were involved anyway, as they are in so many cases here. Police cars parked outside his office and his mother's house seemed like a warning he didn't dare ignore.

Gerardo said he considers himself brave, a steel-spined businessman, tough as his Lebanese grandparents who moved to Mexico at the turn of the last century. But the cries of his 19-year-old niece, kidnapped at the point of a machine gun as she walked to school, were more than he could take. And, he said, the words -- "When do you want us to stop?" -- haunted him.

"They get one of your kids and they finish you," he said.

At least once a day in Mexico, someone is kidnapped for ransom, ruining lives and extracting a punishing economic cost from the victims and their companies. It has become so common here that being abducted at gunpoint and held for weeks or months has become part of the fabric of life, an accepted risk, a simple cost of doing business.

Mexican businessmen are overwhelmingly the victims, largely because Mexico has developed a culture in which ransoms are quickly paid and the police are rarely notified. According to court records and interviews with victims and security specialists, police are often involved in kidnappings, and a weak and corrupt judicial system often means they won't be caught.

This article is another in an occasional series about how Mexico remains a nation lacking rule of law. President Vicente Fox took office almost two years ago promising to tackle the legacy of corruption that developed during seven decades of authoritarian one-party rule. But as he struggles against these deeply entrenched forces, Mexico is still a place where criminals carry out the cruelest of acts knowing they are safely beyond the law.

"Criminals do risk analysis," said Jorge Septien, a private security specialist. "They know that less than 1 percent of criminals end up in jail because there's so much corruption and impunity. The government is giving the message to criminals that crime is a good business."

Fifteen years ago, kidnapping barely existed here. But crime began increasing here in the 1980s and an economic crash in 1994-95 seemed to make fundamental changes in Mexico, turning kidnapping -- and crime generally -- into a growth industry. Kidnappings decreased some in the late 1990s, but analysts said they are again increasing in a society where people feel the authorities do not protect them.

Last year, businessman Eduardo Gallo conducted his own investigation into the kidnapping and murder of his 25-year-old daughter, Paola. Furious with police inaction, Gallo began a private probe that eventually nabbed the killers. He recently published a book on his travails called "Paola: Denunciation of a Kidnapping and of a Corrupt Society."

Officials at Coparmex, the country's largest and most influential employers' association, said they know of at least 360 kidnappings last year; they already know of 331 in the first eight months of this year. There are no reliable and complete statistics available. But security firms say the actual numbers are many times higher than what Coparmex has recorded, leaving Mexico and Colombia in a league of their own in Latin American kidnappings.

Kidnapping has become such an industry in Mexico that no one is immune: Maids are held for $500 in ransom; a 12-year-old Tijuana girl was kidnapped this year by college students trying to raise money for school; people fake their own kidnappings to collect from their own families or businesses.

Executives are still the most lucrative target, including foreigners. The daughter of the local head of a Japanese tire manufacturer was kidnapped in 2000, and the company paid more than $1 million in ransom. The chief of a German car manufacturer's Mexican operation left the country about 18 months ago after his wife was kidnapped and a $1 million ransom was paid. A Spanish banker left this summer after he was kidnapped and released.

"It's not unusual for people to take their whole families and leave the country," said the president of Coparmex, Jorge Espina Reyes. "Once someone suffers a kidnapping in their family, it affects them for the rest of their lives. They're willing to do anything, leave their country and their business, so that they won't ever have to live through that experience again."

An Unending Ordeal

Six months after the kidnapping, Gerardo said he is still too frightened of the kidnappers to allow his last name to be used in this article. He said his niece, an architecture student, was held for more than a month in a small, dark room with the television turned up loud day and night. She told him four of her captors slept in the room with her. They never sexually assaulted her, but their presence in the flickering light of the TV every night added to her terror.

Another kidnapping victim, a teenage boy, was being held in the same house. The niece told Gerardo that she never saw him, but she could hear him, listening through the wall as the kidnappers stripped him and beat him until he cried, and videotaped it all for his parents. As they hit the boy, over and over, she heard them say the words her own family had come to dread: "When do you want us to stop?"

As the patriarch of an extended family, and as the clear target of the kidnappers' demands, it fell to Gerardo to negotiate. He said he eventually paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom, but he would not say exactly how much.

He got his niece back in March, but the ordeal didn't end. He said the kidnappers kept calling him, threatening to kill his children if he made trouble for them, if he called the police. Once, he said, they called to let him know they were sitting outside his mother's house. They described the place to him, told him what his mother was doing just then. And they said they were going to kill her.

"You go crazy," Gerardo said. He said he bought a gun.

Then a few weeks ago he sold his Mercedes, put his house on the market and moved his family permanently to Boca Raton, Fla., unable to endure the insecurity he felt constantly in the country where he was born. His niece is now studying architecture in Florida and his children are in school there.

"I can't live here anymore," said Gerardo, 45, a fit and trim marathon runner, as he sat among boxes in his Mexico City office on the day before he left. "We have to change our lives. I have a 5-year-old boy. I can't risk him."

He said the businesses he built over a lifetime, manufacturing and selling auto parts and selling real estate, will surely go bankrupt and his 35 employees will lose their jobs. He said he would try to manage his businesses from Florida and with discreet return trips every few months. But he said they require more hands-on management than that, and that the kidnappers have forced him into ruin.

He said he spent $150,000 to hire two private investigators to look into his case, and they told him his niece was abducted by a well-organized gang led by state and local police officers. They were too well-connected and too organized to fight, he concluded. "You can buy anyone with the money they are making," he said.

They have taunted him on the phone, telling him, "You will never catch us, we know too much," he recalled. And they did know a lot. "They taped our phone conversations about two or three months before the kidnapping and replayed them for us. They checked our property records, they knew about our cars and houses. They did an inventory. They said, 'Tell your mother to sell her condo to pay the ransom.' "

Gerardo said he was angry, that he would like to kill someone. But he said the forces against him were too strong to fight, so his only option was to run. He has never reported the case to the police.

"You work, you study, you get married, have kids, a life, stability," he said. "I was going to stay here always. But now we and our money are leaving Mexico."

High Cost to Victims

Pedro Fletes Renteria, director of a private school in Mexico City, was kidnapped as he arrived for work at 6 a.m. on March 1, 2001. Masked men with pistols forced him into a car and put him facedown on the floor with a gun to his neck. He was held for 59 days.

Fletes said he was kept for most of that time in a five-foot-square closet, with a bucket to use as a toilet. He was allowed to bathe every three days. Outside, he could hear children playing, families having parties -- the sounds of Mexico City's warm springtime.

Fletes, 54, said the kidnappers knew everything about him, including his children's names and his schedule. He said the only thing they didn't seem to understand was his business: Their $5 million ransom demand was more than the school's total worth.

"I felt every emotion you can imagine, in cycles: anguish, desperation, thinking badly of my family, thinking I would die, crying," said Fletes, whose face is soft and round beneath a salt-and-pepper beard. "It was so inhumane."

After almost two months, after his family paid a ransom he won't disclose, the kidnappers drove him to a busy downtown intersection and let him out. They gave him back the suit he was wearing on the day he was taken. It had been cleaned and pressed.

Fletes said the kidnapping nearly broke him financially. He said his wife, five daughters and a son spent thousands of dollars for bodyguards and armored cars after he was kidnapped. After he was released, he hired a team of bodyguards to protect him for several months.

"But I got rid of all that," he said, tapping the desk with his hands, which flutter around him constantly like nervous birds. "It was too expensive, and I didn't want to live that way."

The costs to his school, which runs from elementary grades through high school, continue. Since his kidnapping, he has paid more than $18,000 to install a closed-circuit television security system and motion-sensing alarms. He pays more than $5,500 a month for security measures he never took before, including new guards at the doors and new identification cards and security procedures for his 1,200 students.

He said he'd rather spend that money for a new language laboratory, paint for the school's cracked yellow walls and upgrades to the school's 40 outdated computers.

"If we didn't have to spend so much for security now," he said, "we could make everything here better."

Investing in Security

Companies in Mexico pay dearly to protect themselves because the government doesn't. Analysts said big companies typically spend between 5 percent and 15 percent of their annual budgets on security -- sometimes $2 million or more.

In a country where more than 54 million people -- more than half the population -- live on less than $4.50 a day, business leaders said their heavy spending on security represents lost jobs and lost opportunities.

"Instead of investing in security, they could be investing in new factories or new lines of products," said Javier Prieto de la Fuente, president of Concamin, Mexico's Industrial Chamber of Commerce. "When you are dealing with global markets, even 1 percent is important. We are losing our competitive edge because of these concerns."

While many parts of Mexico are relatively safe from the kidnapping epidemic, problems are severe in Mexico City, Guadalajara, Puebla and U.S. border areas where much of the nation's manufacturing is located. Many Japanese executives at factories near the border are forbidden by their companies to drive in private cars. Buses with armed guards carry Japanese executives between their homes in the San Diego suburbs and their factories around Tijuana.

Foreign companies pay premiums -- the equivalent of hazard pay -- to lure top executives to Mexico. Foreign and Mexican firms often must buy kidnapping insurance for their top corporate officers. The problem is severe enough that a company here has begun offering surgical implants of devices that could help locate people using satellite technology, although as of recently it had no takers.

Few, if any, companies have left the country strictly over security concerns, as Mexico is simply too big and attractive a market to abandon. Foreign direct investment continues to grow, but many here say kidnappings and other crimes are a key reason Mexico's economy has not grown faster.

Kidnapping has become so common that Fox mentioned it prominently in his annual state of the nation address this month. Crime analysts say the federal government's new elite anti-kidnapping unit is an important step. But even Fox conceded that wiping out the "scourge" of insecurity was still "an outstanding debt to our citizens."

'We Don't Trust the Police'

Fletes said he never wanted the police involved in his case.

"We don't trust the police, and we want to protect our families," he said. "I know of two other kidnapping cases right now, and neither of them has been reported."

But he said that at the moment he was kidnapped, one of the kidnappers fired shots -- perhaps as a warning. That caused so much commotion that police came, and an investigation was started.

Fletes said the Federal Preventative Police was the lead agency in the investigation. But Fletes said his brother negotiated directly with the kidnappers, without any police involvement, and eventually paid the ransom himself.

Once Fletes was returned, the search for the kidnappers was turned over to the Mexico City attorney general's office, which has a special unit dedicated to kidnapping investigations.

"I can say they are very friendly, but not very effective," Fletes said. "I think their attitude is that once the victim is returned, the case is solved."

His own private investigators turned up evidence that top Mexico City police officers might have been involved in the case. Fletes's attorney, Jose Antonio Ortega, a prominent lawyer who heads the security committee of Coparmex, said telephone records show that the cell phone used by the kidnappers was also used to make calls to the home of a top official from the department's anti-kidnapping unit.

Jesus Jimenez Granados, head of the attorney general's anti-kidnapping unit, said he investigated the claims and found no evidence that the police had been involved. But he said the officers suspected of involvement had been transferred to another unit anyway. He said that on a matter as delicate as kidnapping investigations, police and investigators had to be totally beyond suspicion.

"People have to trust us," said Jimenez, a stocky bull of a man in a suit made for someone taller. "We think we're giving citizens results and earning their trust."

Jimenez said his office received 149 complaints of kidnappings last year and solved 70 percent of them. Jimenez also said police had a suspect in custody who may have been involved in Fletes's kidnapping. "It's about to be resolved completely," he said.

But Fletes remained skeptical, and scared. Sitting in his office, just a few feet from the street where he was kidnapped, Fletes said the police officers he suspects were involved in his kidnapping could "come back at any time."

Fletes said Fox's election two years ago was a positive sign, and that some things are beginning to change. But he said Mexico is still a land too often governed more by force and intimidation than by laws. He said his nephew had been "express kidnapped" this month by abductors who held him for a few hours and forced him to withdraw money with his ATM card -- a common crime in Mexico City that is almost never solved.

"We've had a political transition," Fletes said. "But Mexico still needs a transition of justice."

© 2002, The Washington Post Company

By Mary Jordan

Washington Post Foreign Service

MERIDA, Mexico -- The walls are 15 feet high and topped with jagged glass and barbed wire, ugly keepers of ugly secrets. For years they stood sentry over abuses of scores of children in state care, who were forced to eat pig food, beaten, even tied to trees for days at a time.

Beto, a homeless boy, was 10 years old when the police brought him here after they caught him stealing two shiny gold buttons from a store bin. He thought he might be going somewhere better than the street.

Instead, Betulio Chi Tzec spent the next five years behind the walls of the Yucatan state juvenile correctional facility, a little boy locked in a dormitory room with two teenagers convicted of rape.

Beto, as well as a teacher and a physician who worked there, said the woman who ran the youth detention home regularly beat the 50 children in her care. They said she kicked the children in the genitals, slapped them and sheared off their hair in fits of rage. Beto said she told the children, "You are all going to rot here," and he came to believe she was right.

According to youths who have spent time inside the system, as well as parents, government officials and many experts here, children are frequently mistreated, abused and forgotten in Mexico's "little jails," as the youth lockups are known. Officially called "schools for young offenders," many of these places are nothing more than cold prisons where classroom teaching is rare.

There are 4,200 children living in dozens of detention centers across Mexico. Conditions vary, and some centers are well run. But many operate the same way they did a century ago: out of public view and with little or no internal regulation or outside supervision. Parents are often barred from entering, though they are encouraged to slip money to guards to prevent harsher treatment of their children.

The Mexican government, battered by crime, has displayed little concern or tolerance for children who break the law. That indifference, as well as the secrecy that shrouds the detention centers, has perpetuated shoddy and often cruel practices, according to those with firsthand experience in the troubled system.

"These institutions are horrible," said Elena Azaola, a criminal justice specialist who has conducted studies of the juvenile centers. "The children live in misery."

Mexico relies on an informal and largely unregulated system of juvenile justice that has existed for decades. Children who break the law often have no access to an attorney. Administrative judges who handle juvenile cases set sentences, but there is often no judicial follow-up once children are sent to detention homes.

The real power is held by the directors of the centers. They effectively decide how long a child will be held and under what conditions. The directors are appointed by governors or other top officials in each of Mexico's 31 states.

"For children there is no system of justice. They are the victims of arbitrary decisions by those in charge," said Guillermo Alonso Angulo, a consultant for UNICEF in Yucatan state.

A system that abuses children and fails to punish the abusers is a legacy of the one-party rule that dominated Mexico for most of the 20th century. From 1929 until 2000, Mexico's presidents, and most of its governors, mayors, police and local officials -- including those in charge of youth programs -- belonged to the Institutional Revolutionary Party.

During that era, government jobs were dispensed more out of political loyalty than expertise. People running programs intended to benefit society often did little other than steal agency funds. Because of the party's hammerlock on power, they rarely had to answer to the public.

President Vicente Fox, who took office in 2000, has promised to create a new day for justice in Mexico. He has vowed that the law, not the personal or political whims of officials, will reign.

Now, the children locked away in detention centers are trying to hold him to his word.

Nearly every week recently, youths have climbed onto the roofs of their detention homes, setting fires and starting small riots to draw attention to their living conditions. When reporters arrive, the children yell over the wall that they have been beaten with brooms and belts.

On Oct. 2, in the western state of Nayarit, 37 children took over a detention center, throwing stones and screaming that they were "tired of the beatings." The day before, in the northern state of Sonora, 40 children brawled with their keepers, complaining about brutality. Similar uprisings have occurred in six other states and Mexico City this year, as angry children demand better treatment in their little jails.

Allegations of Cruelty

Mexico is struggling to transform itself into a nation where people feel protected -- not menaced -- by the law. Yet old ways prevail, as seen in the horrors of the Yucatan detention center.

The director, Maria del Rocio Martel Lopez, was a physician who had superb local political connections. Some who knew her recalled that she was tall, thin, blond and impeccably dressed.

Dozens of children under her care have now come forward to say she brutalized them. According to the findings of an investigation by the National Human Rights Commission, which issued a report in April, Martel presided for four years over an institution with "cruel and degrading treatment" of children, which included "denigrating punishments, humiliations, beatings and mistreatment."

Allegations of cruelty by Martel were reported to the governor's office as early as 1999. But the powerful, longtime governor who appointed her, Victor Cervera Pacheco, did nothing. Many here attribute his inaction to Martel's social and political standing; she is the widow of a former powerful party boss in the state.

A Merida radio station aired a report in 1999 about the allegations against Martel, but the reporter, Jose Luis Preciado, said he was pressured by state officials to drop the matter.

"Sometimes she would tell boys to pull down their pants and she would kick them in their private parts until they cried," Beto said of Martel, echoing testimony given to human rights investigators by people who worked at the center.

Psychologists and teachers, in interviews and in their statements to investigators and police, said that Martel beat children until they bled. Several recalled how she forced one homosexual boy to dress like a girl.

Many of Martel's accusers cited the case of a teenage orphan, Catalina Gijon Granados. She was held in the center for four years, often in windowless isolation, even though she had committed no crime.

Dulce Maria Alavez Soberanes, who taught crafts at the detention center, called Martel's treatment of Catalina "unforgivable." She said that Catalina was beautiful, sweet and relatively well-adjusted until she landed on Martel's bad side. After months of mistreatment, Alavez said Catalina appeared lost and disoriented and became a chronic bed-wetter, a skinny girl with sickly yellow hollow eyes.

"She was locked up for almost two months in a room without a window, given just one meal a day," Alavez said. "When she was let out, it was as if she was drugged."

For two years, Yucatan human rights lawyers complained without success to the governor and other officials. Then they called the human rights commission in Mexico City. On an August day in 2001, the commission arrived at the center to investigate. That day Martel quit her job and walked out the door.

A criminal investigation was later opened, but no charges have been filed.

Martel's answer to the allegations against her is unknown. Efforts to locate her were unsuccessful. Several months ago, neighbors said they saw a moving van pull up to her house, and they haven't seen her since. Officials at the state attorney general's office said they did not know where she was, and that she was being sought for questioning.

Rights workers here in Merida said the government allowed Martel to slip away to avoid the embarrassment of a messy trial with potentially nasty political implications. Mexico has a long history of looking the other way at official misconduct.

"They would rather bury this part," said Angulo, the UNICEF consultant. "I think there should be a criminal trial. But I don't think there ever will be."

Sleeping With Pigs

When Isis Maria Velazquez was 13, she recalled, her mother became exasperated with her misbehavior and turned her over to state care. She spent the next two years in Martel's facility.

The dates of her mistreatment remain etched in her memory. On July 27, 1999, she entered the center, and Martel chopped off most of her long, shiny brown hair, leaving it a short-cropped ugly nest. On May 9, 2000, she said, Martel forced her into a muddy, filthy pen where she spent the next three nights sleeping with 15 pigs.

"She shoved pig food in my face," Isis said. "She was crazy."

Her father, Lucio Jesus Velazquez, a retired night watchman, said poor people in Mexico are accustomed to being powerless. He said he paid staff at the center so he could visit Isis and tried to buy better treatment for her. He said Mexicans know they have to pay bribes to get service from the government, and that complaining often gets them nothing but more abuse.

"I don't know the laws," Velazquez said. "I'm not educated in them." He said that until a human rights lawyer told him the state had no right to treat his daughter as it did, he did not realize that what happened to her might have been illegal.

Isis said she watched as other children were beaten with rubber tubes and wooden sticks. She said some boys were tied to trees, blasted with cold water from a hose and left to sleep standing up.

Those allegations have been backed up by others who have complained to police and human rights officials, including Sylvia Zenteno Ruano, a physician hired by the state to make weekly visits to the center. She said she is still haunted by what she found one day: four boys tied to trees, rope wound around them from their necks to their knees.

"There was urine and excrement in their clothes so they must have been there for a while," she said. Zenteno filed a complaint with the police and waited. They did not return her call for nine months.

Isis has now been out of the center for several months. She works as a stripper in a bar called Atlantico. There, at night, she dances under a mirror ball that throws the glinting colors of the rainbow on zebra wallpaper. She said dancing helps her forget her hatred, which she described as the only thing she learned during her time in the state's hands.

"They have punished no one," Isis, now 16, said of the authorities. She now supports her father and they live in a tiny home in Merida with almost no furniture. "Some of the people who beat us are still working there. They just don't care."

"I used to have dreams," she said. "But I don't anymore."

Shelters Unregulated

A sad failure of juvenile detention centers in Mexico is that some of the imprisoned children have committed no crime. They are held because they had no home and the government could find no other bed for them.

The government operates few shelters for street children, ceding most of the responsibility to churches and other private groups. Thousands of children live in private shelters without any government supervision.

The risks of this unregulated system were recently highlighted in Puerto Vallarta, according to children's advocates, who said an American, Thomas White, started building a shelter for street children in 2000. He was allowed to do so with almost no scrutiny or investigation of his background or qualifications, they said.

"It is easier to open a shelter for children than a restaurant," Angulo said.

Police said they are looking for White, who has been charged with offering money and food to street children in exchange for their posing for pornographic photos and videos. He fled after a state judge issued an arrest warrant last year, and his whereabouts are unknown.

Juan Diaz Gonzalez, a Mexico City legislator, said such abuse is common. He said some shelter operators in the capital have forced children into prostitution rings or illegal adoptions. Many of the shelters are so poorly run and funded that he called them "trash cans where kids are thrown away. The government is investing nothing in these children," he said. "They are throwing away thousands of lives."

There are new efforts to clean up the system. Since Fox came to power, top officials have been replaced, but many middle- and lower-level officials have not, particularly in the ranks of prosecutors and police. The government has little money to pay good salaries for difficult jobs, such as dealing with delinquents.

Under a new governor from Fox's National Action Party, Yucatan state officials said they plan to build a $1 million detention center. They said that only children who have committed crimes would be sent there.

They promised better record-keeping to ensure that children serve their sentences and no more. They promised that lawyers and human rights observers would be allowed access. But Yucatan, like most Mexican states, has plans and promises bigger than its pocketbook. So far, the officials have had little success in recruiting people willing to take such difficult jobs for as little as $50 a week.

Years of Life Lost

Beto had been abandoned by his parents. Living on the street was tough, he recalled, but it was nothing compared to the years of misery he suffered at the hands of the government.

"I lost a lot of my life," said Beto, who is now 16 and was recently released from the facility.

Beto wonders what his life would have been like had he not been forced into the state system. His manner is withdrawn and unsmiling. He seems like a serious man in a child's body. He lives with his ailing grandmother, earning a few pesos a day pedaling a bicycle taxi in a town 45 miles from here.

He doesn't like to talk about his years in Merida.

Interviewed at a taco stand in a colorful town square, Beto paused for a long time after each question, sipping on a soda. He said he was not angry, but the what-ifs nagged at him.

"If I hadn't taken those two buttons, the police wouldn't have picked me up," he said. "I could have found a job and a place to live. You can't do that when you're in jail."

Researcher Laurie Freeman in Mexico City contributed to this report.

© 2002, The Washington Post Company

By Mary Jordan

Washington Post Foreign Service

ISLA MARIA MADRE, Mexico -- Lorena Avila Suarez was 8 years old when she arrived by boat on this tiny Pacific island, coming ashore to be with her father, a convicted murderer.

She grew up among the other inmates and their children in one of the world's most unusual prisons, an island with a church, a bakery and a dance hall where convicts are allowed to serve sentences alongside their family members.

Then she fell in love with a convicted cocaine trafficker. So when her father was released a few years ago, and her mother and three sisters left with him, Avila Suarez stayed behind with her new husband. She still lives here in the prison where she has spent most of her life.

"Sometimes I would rather be on the outside. It is always the same here," said Avila Suarez, 25, nuzzling up to her husband, Jesus Lopez, 33, who has 18 years left to serve. "But when I leave, I would like it to be with him."

Isla Maria is a Mexican government prison experiment in the Pacific Ocean 95 miles south of Mazatlan. Started at the turn of the century as a Mexican version of Alcatraz, where the worst of the worst were condemned to a life of hard labor, it has been transformed into a relative paradise for inmates who have shown a willingness to reform.

Rehabilitation is a bedrock principle of the Mexican judicial system, so much so that neither the death penalty nor life imprisonment is allowed under law. Proponents say Isla Maria is a logical extension of that idea: If prisoners are going to have to return to life in a normal community one day, why not keep them in a prison that simulates a normal community?

There are no cells or bars here. The inmates are called "colonists." They wear no uniforms and live in ordinary housing on streets that look like those in any Mexican town. While navy officers on the perimeter of the 54-square-mile island carry machine guns, the prison guards carry no guns. About 600 children of inmates live in little houses with their parents and attend public schools on pretty, palm-lined streets.

"This prison used to be almost hell. The inmates were treated savagely and humiliated," said the warden, Raul Soto Calderon. Now, he said, "If you didn't know this was a prison, you wouldn't realize it. There is nothing like this in the world."

For one thing, it would be expensive to duplicate.

With an annual budget of $4 million for 1,600 inmates, the government pays about three times as much to handle each prisoner here as it does for those at any other prison. Transportation costs for supplies and people are high. The warden, for instance, recently had to rent a small plane to airlift a prisoner with a severe kidney problem.

Public Security Minister Alejandro Gertz Manero, whose department runs the prison, questions the wisdom of a cash-strapped government running what he calls a "paradise." He would like all Mexican prisons to focus on making criminals pay restitution for their crimes.

Some also question the wisdom of allowing children to grow up in prison. In several other Mexican prisons, children also live alongside their parents, usually their mothers. Although this practice is lauded for keeping families intact, it is also criticized because it means children are raised in a community of criminals, where everything from freedom to food is limited.

"For some children it can be a little damaging," said Oliva Suarez Ilago, Avila Suarez's mother, who now lives on a peach farm in central Mexico. "They see things they shouldn't. They become aggressive and badly spoken."

Avila Suarez, who does not have children, says other parents worry about having to wait for medicine that arrives on a weekly ship. "Some children are exposed to good people on the island who say to them, 'See where I am. Learn from me,' " she said. But other children live among "people who don't want to change."

Yet for some children, living here is far safer than it is in the rough neighborhoods they left behind, and the government white-washed housing is often better, too. "I like it here because I am here with my dad," Maribel Cisneros, 13, said recently as she sat at her desk in a history class. "My dad is here because of drugs."

The inmates clearly like it here.

"When I got here I cried. What beauty!" said Guadalupe Rodriquez Quiroz, a convicted heroin-seller who spent four years in a crowded, violent Tijuana prison before arriving here. There, she said, guards made inmates pay for everything, including use of the bathroom.

A key element of the Isla Maria experiment is to take power away from guards, who have often turned Mexican prisons into sewers of bribery and illegal punishments. Here there are only 36 guards.

Most of the inmates are at Isla Maria on drug convictions; the typical sentence here is 10 years for marijuana trafficking. But there are a few who committed robbery, assault or even murder. And the sight of Luis Oscar Mendez Juarez, who killed a man during a robbery in Mexico City, swinging on a hammock by the ocean can be a bit jarring.

The new warden said he is still weeding out the prison population. He said some of the inmates who have been sent here do not meet the island's current standards. He is in the midst of a major expansion, nearly doubling the inmate population this year to 3,000. He is also planning to order off the island any children over the age of 12.

All inmates have the option of bringing their families, but many spouses and children do not want to forfeit their jobs and routines on the mainland. For some, it is prohibitively expensive to get to Mazatlan, where a navy ship shuttles families to the island. Isla Maria has also been unable to completely shed its reputation for harsh treatment, so it has not been much in demand among the main prison population in Mexico. But word is getting out.

Avila Suarez and her husband share a one-bedroom home with a concrete floor and sparse furnishings: a double bed, a tiny television and a radio. They eat red snapper and other fresh fish caught by inmates. Their two lime-green parrots, Lino and Gustavo, fly freely about the house.

"They have never been caged," Lopez said.

Before being moved here, Lopez spent several years in a Guadalajara jail, where, he said, "you are obliged to be aggressive to stay alive."

"I would be a different person if I had to stay in Guadalajara," Lopez said. There he learned that "you rob or are robbed, you defend yourself or you are beaten. Here, it is so safe you can leave your bike outside for three days and nobody would take it."

Now the chatty Lopez is host of the island radio show, "Window by the Sea." He said people here "are afraid to make mistakes because they will be forced to leave the island."

Warden Soto Calderon said that in the nine months that he has been here, he has transferred 93 trouble-making inmates to mainland prisons. A few people have been punished for trying to ferment corn or rice to make moonshine or for smoking marijuana. Punishment is banishment to a camp on the far side of the island where there is no music, television or family life. In the old days, it used to be splitting rocks in the hot sun.

Suarez Ilago, Avila Suarez's mother, said there were many good things about Isla Maria. Her husband, who killed a man in a street brawl, had no formal schooling when he arrived, but spent his years on the island finishing primary school and learning to work a farm.

She said he now works hard on their little peach farm, no longer drinks and has had no more troubles with the law.

Despite the rehabilitative effect Isla Maria had on her husband, Suarez Ilago said, "I never forgot for a moment that I was in jail." During the decade she spent on the island with her four daughters, she would look out at the endless ocean and see it as invisible bars.

"I feel bad that I brought her to the island and then left her there," she said about her one daughter still in the penal colony. "It was like leaving half of my heart there."

But Avila Suarez said she does not feel like someone left behind. She has a job as a telephone operator, takes occasional vacations and lives what she considers a normal life. She said she misses the little comforts that the mainland provides, like variety of food, the sight of a mountain or a highway, the latest magazines.

But more important to her are the good times, and the lifetime of memories here. Nearly everyone on the island came to her wedding ceremony seven years ago. She was just 18, stepping lightly into marriage and adulthood in a prison dining hall with an inmate band playing salsa.

--Researcher Laurie Freeman contributed to this report.

© 2002, The Washington Post Company

By Mary Jordan and Kevin Sullivan

Washington Post Foreign Service

MEXICO CITY -- The Little Mouse yearned to be free.

So after three months in prison, Julio Cesar Lara, a 100-pound burglar known as Little Mouse, took his chance one night. With the speed and agility that had earned him his nickname, he slipped past his guards, crawled through the shadows, scurried over a high wall on a makeshift rope and suddenly found himself a free man.

It was three weeks before the police caught up with him. But in the eyes of the Mexican legal system, he had done nothing wrong. Escaping from prison is not a crime in Mexico. "The law says that all inmates have the right to seek their freedom," said Lara, 27, who is serving three years for burglary but not a single extra day for his jailbreak. "The opportunity presented itself, and I took it."

Mexico's legal system recognizes that all people have a fundamental desire to be free. And it does not punish them for pursuing it, as some inmates recently did by disguising themselves as female visitors and tunneling to freedom using a sardine can as a shovel.

Critics of the law call it one more weakness in a judicial system that is holding back Mexico's efforts to modernize. But those who support the law describe it as a humanitarian measure that respects human dignity.

"The person who tries to escape is seeking liberty, and that is deeply respected in the law," Juventino Victor Castro y Castro, a Supreme Court justice, said in an interview. "The basic desire for freedom is implicit inside every man, so trying to escape cannot be considered a crime."

The same philosophy respects the right to run from the police to avoid capture, said Jose Elias Romero Apis, a lawyer and federal legislator. Likewise, he said, it is not considered perjury in Mexico for people to lie about their guilt on the witness stand.

"It is part of an entire philosophy; the accused is permitted to struggle however he can for his freedom," said Romero, president of the Justice and Human Rights Committee in the lower house of Congress. "Freedom is given priority over other values, including prison security."

There are, however, a few escape clauses. While escaping is legal, prisoners can be charged if they break laws in the process. If they injure someone on the way out, conspire with other prisoners to escape, bribe someone or damage property, they can be charged. But if, like Lara, they simply figure out a way to hop a wall or sneak out a door, they have committed no crime.

"It's an extraordinary law, a charitable and spiritual law," said Sister Antonia, an American Catholic nun who has lived and worked in a Tijuana prison for 25 years. "Every person in their heart yearns to be free."

Some said the get-out-of-jail-free law gives prisoners a chance to get even with an unfair justice system. Mexican prisons are clogged with petty criminals, while bankers and politicians accused of stealing millions stay free. Many said the escape law gives the common man one last shot at beating the system.

"There are a lot of people in jail who shouldn't be," said Javier Reyes, 38, a city public works employee. He said the justice system is especially harsh on the poor and he didn't object to them escaping. "This is a result of the unfairness of the system."

But others said the law, which dates to the 1930s, sends the wrong message, especially at a time when opinion polls show crime is the Mexican public's No. 1 concern. "It's absurd," said Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico City's police chief. "The prisoner is a danger to society if he leaves prison. You cannot value the right of one person over the rights of all the others."

Alejandro Gertz Manero, top public security official in President Vicente Fox's government, called the escape law "nonsense," and said he would like to see it changed. He said officials are working on several proposed changes to the federal criminal code. But Congress would have to approve them, and Fox has had limited success persuading the opposition-controlled legislature to pass his initiatives.

Since his election in 2000, Fox has spent time and money trying to bring Mexico's chaotic prisons under control. When he took office, it was not uncommon for wealthy inmates to buy "weekend passes" to go home for parties. Some built Jacuzzis and tequila bars in their cells. But recently many of those cells have been dismantled, hundreds of corrupt guards have been fired and new surveillance equipment has been installed.

But that has not stopped prisoners from digging and climbing out of prisons -- or just walking out the front door. There are no reliable statistics on escapes, but dozens are reported in the press every year.

Last month, a prisoner walked out of a prison in the state of Jalisco by showing the guards a fake ID brought by a visitor. Also last month here in Mexico City, a convicted murderer in Reclusorio Sur, the prison from which Lara escaped, sneaked out of a prison hospital where he was being treated for a toothache. Still handcuffed, he flagged down a taxi and rode away.

One of the most famous escape artists here, known as "El Tarzan," made big headlines last December by sashaying out of Mexico City's Reclusorio Oriente dressed as a woman in a wig and a dress.

One of the most audacious was a convicted murderer whose wife carried him out of Mexico City's Reclusorio Norte in 1998 in a suitcase she used to lug home his dirty laundry. Prison officials said he dieted until he weighed 110 pounds so he would fit. His nickname before the escape was "The Bullet Eater," but he is now referred to in the local press as "El Samsonite."

He was found nine months later working in a store in Guadalajara and brought back to prison. He escaped again not long afterward and is still free.

The most infamous recent escape was that of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, one of Mexico's most notorious drug lords, who escaped from the maximum-security Puente Grande prison in Jalisco state in January 2001. Guzman bribed guards and prison officials, about 60 of whom are currently on trial. He rode out of prison hidden in a laundry truck and has not been seen since.

If he is found, he will have to finish his 20-year sentence and face bribery charges. But the escape itself will earn him only the admiration of his peers, which is what Lara said he has had since he hopped the wall.

"I'm a hero to the guys who wear beige" prison uniforms, Lara said during an interview in the office of the prison warden, who jokingly calls him "our Spiderman."

Lara said he feels lucky to be alive. Escaping may not be a crime, but prison guards are allowed to shoot and kill anyone trying to escape. Lara dodged a shower of bullets fired by guards who chased him into cornfields.

He has less than two years left on his sentence and said he's looking forward to getting back to running the hamburger stand he operated before. When asked whether he would ever try to escape again, a broad grin crossed his face.

"It depends," he said.

© 2002, The Washington Post Company