CRIME FIGHT TAKEN TO MEXICO'S CLASSROOMS

Schools Implement Anti-Corruption Plan

TIJUANA, Mexico -- Ismael Iglesias seems an unlikely foot soldier in
President Vicente Fox's war against this country's cancerous culture of
corruption.

A junior high student in the raucous border city of Tijuana, Iglesias is
tall and handsome and giggles a little when he speaks to strangers. From
his scuffed shoes to his gel-slicked hair, the boy with a toothy smile is
every inch an awkward 14-year-old.

But for the past five months, Iglesias and his classmates have read books,
watched videos and talked about corruption that plagues this city and much
of Mexico.

They are participating in a new, school-based campaign to fight corruption
and organized crime from the grass roots up. The program is modeled after
one that experts say has helped weanSicily's society from decades of Mafia
control.

Along the way, Iglesias has learned a lesson that many Mexicans have not.

"When a policeman asks for a bribe, don't give it to him," says Iglesias.
"We are the ones who make corruption possible. They ask for bribes, but
we're the ones who give (the money) to them."

Those are revolutionary words in a country where corruption seems to grease
just about every cog of public life.

Fox wants to hear more.

While his anti-corruption drive, expected to be unveiled this month, will
shine with bold new proposals, some experts believe that a national school
campaign based on the pilot program in Tijuana will determine the fight's
long-term success.

The experts say that corruption has become so imbedded in Mexico, and so
intertwined with the organized-crime gangs that run everything from
stolen-car rings to drug cartels, that the only way out is to change what
Mexicans expect of themselves and their government.

"To change a culture which is poor, which has been riddled with crime and
corruption for decades, you have to try to change social institutions,"
says Roy Godson, a Georgetown University professor who helped design the
Tijuana pilot project.

"Where do you go to do that?" Godson says. "You start in the schools."

In Tijuana, a major crossing point for cocaine into the United States and
the home turf of one of Mexico's most violent drug gangs, those schools
have bars on the windows and tall iron fences around the grounds.

The narco-dollars that end up in the pockets of judges, police commanders
and politicians buy the traffickers enough freedom not just to operate, but
also to eat in city's best restaurants and drive flashy cars and trucks.

"It's easy to spot them. The traffickers don't care if everybody knows who
they are," says Luis Miguel Gomez, a skinny 14-year-old and a classmate of
Iglesias.

In a city where gangsters are more famous than movie stars, drug lords end
up as role models. Students in Tijuana don't want to grow up to be
engineers or doctors, say their teachers and parents; they want to grow up
to be gangsters.

The drug traffickers "wear big gold chains and big belt buckles of silver
and gold. They drive big cars and go around with two or three women. Kids
see it. They want to be like them," says Diaialsy Aguilar, a junior high
school civics teacher who coordinates anti-corruption classes in the state
of Baja California.

It's a tough place to be a teacher, and an even tougher one to teach
students about the rule of law or the evils of taking a bribe.

But conversations with teachers, parents and administrators -- as well as a
formal evaluation by officials of the 2-year-old pilot program -- suggest
that, against all odds, the classes are working.

After educators judged the pilot effort a success in four Tijuana schools,
they adopted the curriculum statewide this year. Now, about a third of 14-
and 15-year-olds in Baja California take the class.

Students read a Spanish translation of The Lord of the Flies to understand
why a society needs rules. They watch GoodFellas, the Robert De Niro movie,
to understand a Mafia soldier's slow descent from the good life to hard time.

Many of the youths say their favorite part of the class is an explanation
of how organized crime works -- the nitty-gritty of how cartels recruit,
organize themselves and use violence against their own, as well as outsiders.

The campaign works, say teachers, because it doesn't hide from the real
world where the children live once they leave the schoolyard. Instead, it's
an effort to take them past the star-power of mobsters. Classes are visited
by former cartel members, including one whose speech has been permanently
slurred by a head wound he received in a shootout.

The classes try to connect the youths' actions -- like offering a traffic
cop a bribe or stealing a wallet -- to the violence they see around them.

"This is not math or physics or something abstract. Kids find this
fascinating because it's about the real world," said Jose Antonio Bustos, a
vice principal at Tijuana's Technical Junior High No. 1. "It's powerful
stuff, and it clicks."

The anti-corruption course is spreading quickly.

Chihuahua and Sinaloa, states in northern Mexico battered by gangland
violence, have agreed to implement the program next year. The country's
sprawling capital, Mexico City, is expected to do the same.

Federal education officials say they hope eventually to implement the
campaign in every school in the country. Local educators can adjust the
course's design, in some places emphasizing corruption in government
offices more than organized crime, officials say.

The new curriculum comes amid a broad anti-corruption crusade that Fox is
expected to announce March 30. Already, a flurry of "no-more-bribes" radio
commercials have been aired.

Fox's aides say the president's plan aims to establish citizen oversight
committees for government construction projects, send operatives into
public offices to test the honesty of officials and raise salaries for
police officers and government workers.

In keeping with a campaign pledge by Fox, the drive will not target corrupt
officials of past presidential administrations. Aides say Fox will instead
propose what they call a zero-tolerance policy against corruption in the
current government.

Godson, the Georgetown professor, says the proof that this kind of campaign
can work lies an ocean and two decades away, in the Sicily of the 1970s.

Then, the island's powerful Mafia syndicates controlled nearly every aspect
of public and private life. Sicilians not directly on the mob's payroll
observed a pact of silence. Legal reforms and stepped-up training for the
police were not enough.

Ultimately, Godson says, Sicily's children made the difference. A school
campaign, on which the Tijuana pilot is based, changed their attitudes.
They grew up to hate the Mafia.

Last year, Europe's finance ministers held their annual meeting in Palermo,
Sicily's capital. Moody's Investors Service gave the city's bonds favorable
ratings, comparable to those of such U.S. cities as San Francisco and
Boston. "Twenty years ago, you would never have believed it," Godson says.

In Tijuana, that seems like a long way off.

First, Goodson says, it means a new generation of Mexicans must find a way
to succeed against corruption.

It's a responsibility at least that some children here seem willing to
shoulder.

"Maybe sometime in the future we're going to govern," says Jose Garcia, 15,
wearing a starched white shirt and sporting the razor-cut hair style that
has made Ricky Martin an icon.

"If we try," Garcia says, "maybe we can leave a different society for our
own kids."