IN MEXICO, WAR ON DRUG CARTELS TAKES WIDER TOLL

Military Campaign Draws Accusations of Rights Abuses

NOCUPETARO, Mexico -- Plastic sacks give Norberto Ramirez chills.

On the May night last year when his nightmare began, Ramirez said,
Mexican soldiers pulled a plastic sack over his head and cinched it
around his neck while he lay inside a dark bar in this desolate
village. He gagged. They pulled off the sack, he said, then put it
back and cinched again.

It went on like that for hours.

"I thought I was going to die, and I wanted to die," said Ramirez,
44, whose recollections match details in a human rights commission
report authorized by the government and in interviews with more than
a dozen villagers.

Ramirez's ordeal occurred during one of the most volatile moments in
Mexico's military campaign against drug cartels, a war that has
ranged from the U.S.-Mexican border to Gulf ports to insular rural
outposts such as this, and that pits the country's demand for
security against its stated commitment to human rights.

A village of 3,000 mostly small-plot farmers, Nocupetaro is among a
constellation of communities where the military has been dispatched
to take on the cartels in one of the largest domestic deployments in
Mexican history. President Felipe Calderon has sent more than 25,000
soldiers and federal police across the country over the past 16
months in response to drug-related violence that has killed more than
5,300 people since 2006.

According to government figures, major army operations in nine states
have led to more than 22,000 arrests and the seizure of 50 tons of
cocaine and 40,000 weapons. The operations, government officials say,
have shaved $9 billion a year from the cartel's roughly $23 billion drug trade.

But in nearly every state where the army has deployed, residents have
accused soldiers of grave human rights violations that now number in
the hundreds. Here in the western state of Michoacan, Calderon's home
state, more than 100 such violations have been alleged, including the
fatal shooting Jan. 12 of a 17-year-old boy at a checkpoint.

In an anti-narcotics plan now before Congress, President Bush has
proposed sending the Mexican military $205.5 million in equipment in
2008, more than 40 percent of the proposed outlay for the year. The
Merida Initiative, as the program is known, designates a portion of
Mexico's proposed $950 million package for 2008 and 2009 for human
rights training for police, prosecutors and prison officials, though
none for the army.

"The military is committing excesses, and that is a reminder of the
Dirty War," said Sergio Aguayo, founder of the nonprofit Mexican
Human Rights Academy, referring to the period in the 1960s and '70s
in which government troops are accused of having killed hundreds of
student protesters and civil rights activists. A few government
officials were briefly jailed, but there have been no major convictions.

A report issued in September by Mexico's government-sponsored
National Human Rights Commission gave details of three cases that
occurred during Calderon's military campaign, including in
Nocupetaro. The commission concluded that 59 people here were
subjected to "cruel and degrading" treatment at the hands of
soldiers, including "arbitrary and illegal detentions," torture and looting.

The commission's head, Jose Luis Soberanes, urged Calderon to "get
the armed forces back to the barracks and stop sending them on
missions they are not trained for."

Mexico's army opened its first department-level human rights office
this year. But the office is authorized only to pass on complaints,
not initiate investigations on its own. Gen. Jose Antonio Lopez
Portillo, who heads the office, said the military's human rights
record during the deployment has been "satisfactory."

Of the 421 human rights complaints his office received between
December 2006 and February 2007, he said, more than 100 have been
dismissed for insufficient evidence. No soldiers have been convicted,
he said, and only the case of a shooting in June at a checkpoint in
Sinaloa state that killed two women and three children has reached
the military courts. He declined to discuss the Nocupetaro case specifically.

"The message is clear," Lopez Portillo said. "There are very few complaints."

A Deadly Ambush

On May 1, the day before Norberto Ramirez said he was beaten,
suspected drug cartel assassins ambushed an army convoy patrolling
trafficking routes near his remote village. Five soldiers, including
a colonel, were killed in the attack, which local residents contend
was intended as a show of force by the cartels.

Most homes in this village, sprawled between craggy ranges in
Michoacan's Tierra Caliente, have no telephones. Cellphone signals do
not reach here, and the only Internet connection is in the mayor's office.

Because of its isolation, the village became an easy-to-protect
headquarters of the small Nocupetaro cartel in the 1980s and '90s.
Local officials estimate that half the town was once involved in the
drug trade, mostly peasants tending plots of marijuana. But the
village also hosted cartel leaders and other big drug traffickers,
whose organization has outlived some of them.

In the late 1990s, the government moved against drug-trafficking in
Michoacan, and the economic effects on the small-time growers and
businesses they sustained were swift and devastating. The town
emptied, with as many as a third of its residents heading to the
United States during harvest seasons.

"It was like a huge factory closed," said the then-mayor, Marco
Antonio Garcia Galindo, now 36. "It was better before the drug trade
left because there was money, but it was also worse because this
place was much more violent."

The trade soon returned to the region, taking a more violent turn
that would peak in May.

A Swift Response

The army responded swiftly to the deadly ambush, pouring hundreds of
troops into Nocupetaro and the surrounding region.

Over two days, soldiers ransacked houses, strapped villagers to
wooden posts and robbed homes, according to human rights reports and
interviews with more than a dozen villagers. Mexico's human rights
commission cited physical evidence that four girls, all under 18, were raped.

The night the soldiers were killed, Ramirez, a wiry father of five
with sad, sunken eyes, had gone to bed in his three-story concrete
house in Caracuaro, a small town outside Nocupetaro. He had built the
house himself with money earned during 27 years of migrant labor --
building highways in Texas, driving forklifts in Indiana, packing
perfume in New Jersey.

In November 2006, tired of the months away from home, he said, he
began buying cars in the United States for resale in Mexico. Just two
days before the hooded soldiers roused him from sleep last May, he
had cleared $500 on a 1990 Chevrolet Cheyenne pickup.

"You're coming with us," he recalled the soldiers telling him.

After taking his money, Ramirez said, the soldiers drove him to La
Estrellita bar on the edge of Nocupetaro. They pounded his stomach
and back with their rifles, placed his head inside the plastic sacks
and jabbed him with electric cattle prods, he said. All along, he
said, he told them he knew nothing about the ambush.

At the same time that Ramirez says he was being tortured, Garcia
Galindo, the mayor, said he counted at least 300 soldiers in the
village. The national human rights commission report said villagers
described seeing men tied to posts and "asphyxiated by being
submerged in basins of water," accounts corroborated in interviews
conducted here recently.

Garcia Galindo, an articulate entrepreneur who owns a water
purification plant, was overwhelmed. His police chief had only an
elementary school education, no law enforcement experience and had
been a migrant laborer until just before he took office. The village
judge was the dentist.

With no sense of his legal options and the army in the village
streets, Garcia Galindo said, he started calling government agencies.

No one returned his calls.

A Life Demolished

Ramirez said he was taken to a military prison where he was held for
several days, then released without charge.

He returned home doubled over in pain, he said. Medical exams, the
results of which he provided during an interview, showed severe
damage to his liver and intestines. He underwent surgery but was
hospitalized again later because of complications.

Each day, it seemed, a new bill arrived. The receipts are stuffed in
two backpacks: $300 for medicine on Sept. 4; $450 on Sept. 5; $1,500
on Sept. 8. There are months' worth of them. Unable to keep up,
Ramirez sold his little rental house in December. It was to have been
the future home of his 12-year-old son, Heriberto Ramirez.

Soon, he said, he plans to leave because he cannot find work. But the
green card that allowed him to work in the United States was taken by
soldiers, he said, and he doubts he will be able to secure a new one.

If he cannot, Ramirez said, he has another plan. He'll jump into the
Rio Grande and swim.