MEXICO BATTLES PLAGUE OF CORRUPTION

Mexico is a country where crooked cops are the norm rather than the
exception and the worst of them prey on the capital.

Authorities in Mexico City admit a daily average of 700 crimes involving
weapons and resulting in the deaths of at least six people. That's the
official figure. The Mexican press says it's much higher.

A metropolis of 8.5 million, Mexico City has 28,000 policemen. They are
blamed for muggings, bank robberies, kidnaps, murders, rapes, auto thefts,
holdups of passenger buses hijackings of freight trucks.

About 70 policemen are fired every month for failing drug tests. But police
involvement in the drug trade and other crimes is so routine that only the
most horrific raise public ire.

One such case occurred in July when three teenage girls were kidnapped by
four uniformed officers they had asked for directions. The patrolmen took
the girls to the stables of a mounted police detachment where they were
held captive for four days and repeatedly raped. The 18-year-old escaped by
hiding in a horse stall; the younger girls were later found wandering
incoherent and half-naked on a city street.

Fifteen officers were arrested, the mounted police unit was disbanded and
80 other policemen were placed under house arrest pending investigation.
But the powerful Mexican Employers' Federation said that was not enough to
stem what it called "a growing and uncontrolled phenomenon of insecurity"
posed by the security forces.

It called for the establishment of a nationwide database on criminal cops -
something Mexico has never had - so those fired by one police force cannot
simply get jobs on another or, worse yet, join the legion of criminal gangs
run by former cops.

Ideally, says Mexico City's mayor, the only way to reform the force is to
fire all the cops and begin again. But, he points out, "past
administrations have fired thousands and then we just end up with thousands
of armed, unemployed cops on the street, many of whom become criminals."

So he has started a new incentive program to help underpaid officers stay
straight and supplement their $300 monthly wages. They will get $30 for
each felony arrest, or booted off the force if they're caught accepting
bribes for letting criminals go.

Skeptics doubt this will turn bad cops around. More likely, they say, it
will turn into another extortion racket with officers arresting innocent
citizens just to get the bonus.

Corruption begins even before cadets enter the police academy. A study by
two Mexican sociologists, recently published in Nexos magazine, revealed
that applicants who take the test to join the police force can get the test
result they want "based on the amount of money placed between the pages of
the test."

Once they reach the academy, said Nexos, they are "trained to rob with
professionalism." And on the street, they have to extort money from
drivers, shopkeepers and criminals because they have to pay their superiors
a "daily quota." From small crimes, aspiring officers quickly graduate to
bigger ones.

Police in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas were found to be driving
200 stolen cars from the United States. And virtually all the top law
enforcement officials in Morelos state were arrested or investigated for
criminal activity, mostly kidnapping. One ring operating in Morelos under
police protection was notorious for cutting off a victim's ear to get quick
ransom payments.

When the police go bad, Mexico traditionally turns to its army. The
military, for example, has been entrusted with a bigger role in the war on
drugs on the assumption that better-trained, better-paid soldiers are less
susceptible to bribery and other forms of corruption than the police.

But that illusion was shattered by the arrest and imprisonment last year of
Mexico's top drug-fighting general, who was found to be in the pay of a
cocaine cartel.

In the words of DEA agent quoted by the New York Times earlier this year -
before President Clinton certified Mexico as "cooperating" in the war on
drugs - "much of our work in Mexico is an exercise in futility."

Holger Jensen is international editor of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver.

Checked-by: Joel W. Johnson