Americans Held In Mexican Jails Worry U.S. State Department

UP TO 600 SUBJECT TO CORRUPT GUARDS, SQUALID CONDITIONS

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico -- Tillie Blount apologizes frequently these days
about the way her thoughts wander.

``When your heart breaks,'' she explains, ``pieces of your mind go
everywhere.''

Blount's memories roam at random across decades, from her son's
second-place finish in a soapbox derby as a boy to his love for a
vintage motorcycle as an adult, and onward to a bitter frustration
over where he lies today: in an unmarked pauper's grave in the Nuevo
Laredo municipal cemetery.

While visiting this dusty, bustling border town in September, Blount's
son, James Willis Abell, was jailed on drug charges and later beaten
to death in a Mexican prison.

The authorities have charged five men, including a prison guard, with
his murder.

Abell, 43, was one of more than 600 Americans known to be in Mexican
prisons as of Sept. 30, many of them in squalid conditions.

More than 250 are held just over the U.S. border, 48 in Nuevo Laredo
and 117 in Matamoros, across from Brownsville. An additional 61 are in
Monterrey, 150 miles south of here, and 59 in Ciudad Juarez, near El
Paso, American officials say.

``These people have been incarcerated for a range of offenses
including narcotics violations and weapons offenses,'' said Steve
Morisseau, an official of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. ``There are
also cases where people are in jail for assault, for fraud or for theft.''

Mexican prisons, officially known as Centers for Social Readaptation,
are commonly overcrowded, filthy and dangerous, according to a State
Department report issued last February, and they are frequently
staffed by undertrained and corrupt guards.

The state penitentiary in Tijuana, for example, where 157 Americans
are held, was built to hold 1,800 inmates but currently has 4,300. La
Loma prison, where Abell died, was built to accommodate 200 prisoners
but now holds nearly 1,200.

A solid block of forbidding whitewashed concrete walls topped with
razor wire, La Loma's upper stories have only barred, open slits for
ventilation, and prisoners stuff blankets and newspapers into them to
try to defeat the winter cold.

Prisoners complain that they must buy food, medicine and other
necessities from guards, or bribe guards to allow the goods to be brought in.

``You could get whiskey, drugs, women, whatever you wanted, as long as
you had the money,'' said Ricardo Mata, a Laredo cabby who spent three
weeks in La Loma several years ago after a dispute with local police.
``Without money, you could starve to death in there.''

Drug and alcohol abuse is rampant, according to the State Department
report. In 1998, Carlos Tornero D(acu)az, the director of the federal
district prison in Mexico City, admitted that guards there supplied 40
percent of the illegal drugs smuggled into the prisons and that
inmates lacked enough drinking water.

The corruption and poor conditions have led to riots that endanger
inmates, officials say.

In March 1999, and again last May, the authorities stormed La Loma
with federal troops after riots broke out. One prisoner was killed in
May and dozens were injured. Riots have been reported recently in
Ciudad Juarez and the states of Chiapas and Tabasco, resulting in at
least 10 deaths.

Many of the jailed Americans may be guilty of the crimes with which
they are charged and are legitimate objects of Mexican efforts to curb
gun smuggling and drug trafficking. But widespread corruption among
the police, as documented in the State Department's report, raises
questions about others, officials say.

``Sometimes here, the police themselves can be the problem,''
Morisseau conceded.

Blount's son, a painter, was charged with possession of
chlorpromazine, a tranquilizer used to treat mental illness, though
his family maintains he had no record of drug or significant alcohol
use.

U.S. consular officials visited Abell twice after his arrest on Sept.
13. He appeared to be under the influence of drugs on the first visit,
they said, and was uncooperative on the second.