POLICE ABUSE RUINS HOMECOMING FOR MANY MEXICANS

Fox Targets Corruption, But Checkpoints Will Stay

Hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants living in California will drive
home to Mexico this month to spend Christmas with their families.

It should be a joyous occasion.

But as they reach their country, they will brace themselves to be
humiliated, harassed and extorted at police checkpoints.

These checkpoints, on the main highways in northern Mexico, are ostensibly
intended to search for drugs and guns. But immigrants, as well as residents
and legislators of these states, say federal anti-drug police from Mexico's
Department of Justice -- known as the PGR -- use their undisputed power at
the checkpoints to shake down travelers.

Officers, they say, demand bribes to let the immigrants continue on their
way. Some people have been forced to turn over televisions or stereos that
they were taking home as gifts.

"The agents at the checkpoints and roadblocks know that immigrants are
bringing back money and gifts," said Sergio Duran, a disc jockey on Los
Angeles radio station MEJOR 93.5 and spokesman for the Federation of
Zacatecan Clubs, representing about 60 groups of immigrants from the state
of Zacatecas residing in the Los Angeles area. "They know they can screw them."

This month gives Vicente Fox, who was sworn in as president Dec. 1, a
visible opportunity to change the way immigrants are received when they
come home.

For many years, immigrants have been treated as traitors to their country
for moving to the United States in search of work. Government officials
have made much of the discrimination Mexicans receive in the United States.
But immigrants say some of the most callous and brutal treatment they
receive is at the hands of police officers in Mexico, particularly at the
isolated roadblocks.

"When we enter Mexican territory, the trial begins and we pray to all the
saints for protection," said Luis Magana, a farm-worker organizer in
Stockton who is from the western Mexican state of Michoacan.

"You have more civil rights guarantees as an undocumented worker when
you're arrested by the Border Patrol than you do with those Mexican
officers," he said. "They view us as smugglers of contraband merchandise
when we enter the country and drug smugglers when we're leaving."

When a reporter recently visited one checkpoint in northern Sinaloa, PGR
agents confiscated his film, saying the area was a "federal zone" that
could not be photographed.

"Don't you have enough work in the United States with the election up
there?" asked one agent wearing sunglasses and a belt buckle emblazoned
with an assault rifle. He didn't give his name.

The reporter's taxi driver was interrogated, and the driver's patriotism
was impugned because he brought foreigners to the checkpoint.

Fox has promised to change all that. He says he'll visit border crossings
before Christmas to welcome immigrants home.

In doing so, he'll be fulfilling an important campaign promise. Moreover,
it is part of his economic policy. Fox has said he hopes to persuade
immigrants to invest in businesses and generate jobs within Mexico.

Academics and observers say the dollars immigrants send home are vital to
the country's economy. For example, Zacatecans in the United States -- more
than a million -- send home $1.3 million a day, according to state estimates.

Fox says his government won't remove the checkpoints because they are part
of Mexico's anti-drug effort. Officers at the checkpoints also search for
guns, which generally are illegal in Mexico.

"We have to combine two things: a decent and nice treatment of the people
who return to our country, but we also have to be firm in the fight against
contraband," Fox said at a recent news conference. "It's not about removing
checkpoints, it's about cleansing them of corruption."

Magana said his Organization of California Farmworkers has a program
documenting abuse by Mexican officials at border crossings and checkpoints.

With little publicity, Magana said, the program receives 40 to 60
complaints every Christmas season about abuse by Mexican checkpoint officers.

"It becomes a regular tollbooth for immigrants," said Manuel Clouthier,
owner of the newspaper Noroeste in Sinaloa, a major drug-producing state
on the Pacific coast with two PGR checkpoints. "I don't know why (the
immigrants) even want to come back. They're real martyrs."

Juan Hernandez, Fox's new director of immigrant affairs, said he will be
visiting PGR checkpoints in various states. "We have a few programs we're
going to put in place" to combat corruption at the checkpoints, Hernandez said.

A group of state legislators from the state of San Luis Potosi recently
marched to Nuevo Laredo on the Texas border, calling for an end to the
checkpoints on Highway 57, which runs from Nuevo Laredo to Monterrey. They
planned an additional rally in Nuevo Laredo with legislators from four
other states -- Zacatecas, Tamaulipas, Coahuila and Nuevo Leon -- calling
for an end to the roadblocks and increased punishment for officers who
shake down returning immigrants.

Evaristo Balderas, one of the legislators who organized the march, said
immigrants have reported paying between $20 and $400 in bribes.

Balderas said one immigrant, living in Chicago, told him he arrived at the
border with $2,000, a television, a VCR and a cassette player, and had to
give almost all of it to officers at checkpoints on his way to San Luis Potosi.

"By the time he got home, he said he had only $500 and none of the
merchandise he'd brought," Balderas said.

Stories are similar on Mexico's West Coast. In Sinaloa, residents are
outraged at the abuses they say are committed at the state's two checkpoints.

One of the checkpoints is about 40 miles from Los Mochis, and is known,
aptly in the feeling of many Sinaloans, as El Desengano -- The
Disappointment -- for a nearby village of the same name.