MEXICO FIGHTS BROAD CUSTOMS CORRUPTION

Juarez Official Challenges Bribe-Taking Status Quo At The Border

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- Three months ago, Jorge E. Pasaret sold shoe
leather and taught college business classes. Now he is a government
corruption-buster.

As the new head of the notoriously corrupt Customs Administration office in
this tough border city, Pasaret spends his days ordering lie-detector
tests, firing corrupt workers, taking citizens' tips on his three cell
phones and showing up with bribe money to sting his own agents.

Pasaret has fired 43 people. He has kept only one of his eight top
assistants. He has fired two consecutive chiefs of his customs police
detachment, and others, for failing polygraph questions as simple as, "Are
you friendly with criminals?"

"I am trying to clean up this place," said Pasaret, standing near the
choked border station where 4,000 trucks and 50,000 cars a day cross over
from El Paso. "But every time you pull a curtain back you find something
else. It is really, really messy."

Although similar to the housecleaning efforts underway throughout Mexico's
federal bureaucracy, no agency has felt the corruption-smashing efforts of
President Vicente Fox's five-month-old administration more than Customs.

A blizzard of pink slips has blown into customs offices all along the
border. The agency's new national chief, a former tax auditor appointed by
Fox, has fired 18 of the 19 station directors on the border, along with
dozens of inspectors one rank down, and replaced them with such newcomers
as Pasaret. And Pasaret, on the job for only 90 days, has in turn fired
someone just about every other day.

Pasaret is dismantling a hiring system where a job applicant's chief
qualification was his or her party loyalty. He is applying hiring
techniques he learned in the private sector: advertising job openings,
recruiting college students and workers from nearby factories, and giving
applicants written and oral exams to test competency. And when
irregularities arise, lie detector tests are ordered.

Several other federal departments are doing the same, notably the National
Immigration Institute, which is planning to use psychological and written
tests as well as polygraphs to weed out corrupt officials. Mexican
immigration officers have frequently been linked to drug-trafficking and
other illegal activity.

Because corruption thrives where money flows, Customs has been particularly
riddled with it. In a single day at the border crossing between Nuevo
Laredo, Mexico, and Laredo, Tex., Mexican customs agents monitor $100
million worth of merchandise coming in from the United States.

With so much money involved, Pasaret, 44, admits worrying about the "strong
interests I am punching." He said he has already been threatened, including
by those under investigation on his own staff.

Pasaret's friends describe him as being like a preppy nerd picking a fight
in the toughest biker bar in town. So far, the nerd appears to be winning:
In his three months on the job, he has seized 140 trucks with hidden
merchandise on which more than $2 million in taxes was due -- far more than
in all of last year.

In recent days, Pasaret's agents have found 3,600 bullets stuffed inside a
double bed and $800 worth of potatoes in a false backseat of a Grand
Marquis. Potatoes are a popular item to smuggle because of a high Mexican
import duty meant to protect farmers.

As Pasaret spoke about his recent torching of 1.8 million contraband
Marlboros and other American cigarettes, an officer interrupted, telling
him a stash of Chinese-made tennis shoes had been found in a Dodge pickup.
Digging deeper into the truck, agents also found $1,800 worth of alligator
skins used to make boots.

Said Pasaret, tossing the six skins on the counter in his office: "I want
the word on the street that Juarez is closed to smuggling."

Doubters say Pasaret might as well be fighting to keep the sun from rising:
Corruption is too deeply ingrained here to be stopped by one well-meaning
official. For as long as there have been customs booths, Mexicans and
foreigners say, it was known that for a little cash paid to a uniformed
agent, they could cross into Mexico with just about anything -- agents
recently took $4,500 to allow an elephant in.

There are many ways for customs agents to cheat: waving in smugglers for a
price, low-balling the value of merchandise for a slice of the savings in
duty, selling government invoices to forgers and shaking down honest people
just to let them pass. Fox recently came to this gateway to personally warn
inspectors not to shake down Mexicans returning with gifts from the United
States.

One of the reasons agents take bribes is that they are paid so little,
averaging about $700 a month. But because they, and so many other
bureaucrats, rip off the government and assist others in evading taxes, the
government has even less money to increase wages. Breaking this cycle is a
top priority of the Fox administration. But many such efforts in the past
have failed.

The government programs a computer to randomly choose which cars and trucks
a customs agent stops, as a way of taking away the discretion of frontline
inspectors. But 95 percent of traffic is still waved through -- odds that
encourage smugglers. Customs officials have also introduced rotating
assignments for officers so that neither they, nor their smuggler friends,
know exactly where and when they will be working. But the criminals are
relentless and creative: Pasaret recently fired a secretary who was caught
selling the secret rotation schedule.

"What is going on here is a shock to the system," said Jeffrey Jones, a
Mexican senator involved in border issues.

Jones and others say it may take a while for the shock to sink in. Not long
ago, he recounted, a woman who was trying to move 11 truckloads of
unreported goods, everything from Q-tips to Chinese toys, was stopped by
Pasaret's agents. Incensed, she marched into Pasaret's office and demanded
to know how much of a bribe she needed to pay. She seemed not to understand
when Pasaret told her that no amount of graft was going to solve her problem.

"She didn't get it that there has been a paradigm shift," Jones said. "You
can't pay your way out anymore."

In another case, Pasaret recently discovered that one of his inspectors was
still shaking down truck drivers, even after all the new warnings. The
agent had accepted $1,000 from a trucker for a minor paperwork problem and
told the driver to come back with $500 more. After a telephone tip, Pasaret
went to see the agent with $500 cash in his hand and said: "This is what
you wanted, right?"

The stunned agent resigned on the spot.