MEXICAN JAIL EASY TO FLEE: JUST PAY UP

MEXICO CITY, Jan. 28 -- 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.

Mr. Guzman needed plenty of help to escape on 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 Manero, 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.

Mr. Fox has inherited a system so dirty that no amount of purging seems
to cleanse it. Mr. 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, Mr. Gertz said the nation's drug
gangs had 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 last 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 of them.

When Mr. 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.

Mr. Guzman, who is 45 years old and 5 feet 6, is known as El Chapo, or
Shorty. He began his career as a kind of air traffic controller
overseeing drug flights within Mexico. Then he went into business for
himself.

He grew so successful that a rival drug gang tried to rub him out, and
one of Mexico's two Roman Catholic cardinals, Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo,
was killed in the crossfire. Cardinal Posadas died at the Guadalajara
airport in 1993 when the gang's gunmen fired on his car, apparently
thinking it was Mr. Guzman's.

That year, Mr. Guzman was arrested on drug trafficking and murder
charges. But his organization lived on. United States drug enforcement
officials said it transported tons of Colombian cocaine a month through
Mexico to the United States.

It even appears to have built a 1,500-foot, concrete-reinforced, air-
conditioned cocaine smuggling tunnel between Tijuana and Otay Mesa,
Calif., near San Diego. The organization's profits could have been used
to grease the way for Mr. Guzman's escape.

Corruption at the Puente Grande prison, which is outside Guadalajara in
the state of Jalisco, was no secret. Guards complained a year ago to the
state human rights commission that their bosses were forcing them to
comply with the system of selling privileges and protection to
prisoners. The state commission sent its report to the federal
government but received no response until two weeks ago, when Mr. Fox's
administration ordered an investigation.

The coincidence of the investigation and the escape did not go
unnoticed. Nor did the fact that the escape came the day after Mexico's
Supreme Court ruled that criminals like Mr. Guzman, who is wanted in the
United States, could face extradition and interrogation by American
authorities.