TRAFFICKER'S ESCAPE REVEALS EXTENT OF MEXICAN CORRUPTION

MEXICO CITY -- The maximum security Puente Grande prison is supposed
to be one of the toughest in all Mexico: two guards for each convict,
hundreds of isolation cells, sophisticated video surveillance. There
was only one way out for Joaquin Guzman, serving 20 years as one of
the nation's biggest cocaine traffickers.

He bought his way out.

Guzman needed plenty of help to escape Jan. 19, and he got it.
Someone opened his electronically secured cell. Someone disabled the
video cameras. Someone smuggled him onto a laundry truck in a burlap
bag, and someone drove him away.

All this has driven President Vicente Fox and his new public security
chief, Alejandro Gertz, to towering rages. It offered evidence, as if
more were needed, of how the law in Mexico can be bent with a fistful
of money.

Fox has inherited a system so dirty that no amount of purging seems
to cleanse it. Fox himself said that "the pervasive influence of
dirty money" had infected "law enforcement organizations and
dishonest government bureaucrats" throughout Mexico.

"The corruption of the past can't be ended overnight," he said Friday
at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, "but now we are
truly trying to eradicate it."

As the president vowed to win that war, Gertz said the nation's drug
gangs have taunted the new government, which took office last month,
by sending threatening and impudent messages warning of political
assassinations.

"In our country," he said, "throughout its existence, and especially
in the last few years, forces have arisen that are much stronger and
more effective than the official ones. Cloaked by political
corruption for generations, they have truly become overwhelming."

In the past few years, the federal anti-drug chief, who was an army
general, and other senior military officers fighting the war on
drugs, along with the chief of the federal police and hundreds of his
subordinates, have been accused of being bought off by the cocaine
cartels.

The nation's attorney general fired more than 1,400 of 3,500 federal
police officers for corruption -- or two out of every five members of
the force -- and prosecuted 357.

When Guzman's colleague in the Sinaloa drug cartel, Hector Luis Palma
Salazar, was arrested in Guadalajara a few years back, 34 police
officers -- his bought-and-paid-for private protection force -- went
to jail with him.

Seven prominent members of the Juarez cartel now doing time were law
enforcement agents who turned to a more lucrative line of work.

The problem long ago entered Mexico's prisons, where "an entrenched
system of corruption undermined authority and led to abuses,"
according to the State Department in Washington. Almost anything can
reportedly be bought in prison -- drugs, sex, liquor -- including,
apparently, freedom.