It creates hunger for almost any kind of job growth, even that provided by mass incarceration, in predominantly white "downstate" (Illinois) or alternately "upstate" (as in New York or Michigan) prison communities. Those communities have turned, toxically, to the criminalized urban "underclass" as the raw material that provides the ticket to their little piece of the American dream or nightmare. There are many more connections that could be made re factors that feed & further both resurgent U.S. imperialism & the domestic prison craze. These are enough, however, to suggest how darkly perfect and appropriate it is that the official figurehead of that imperial expansion, GWBush, had only recently, prior to his incarceration-assisted appointment to the U.S. Presidency, come, as Governor of Texas, to oversee, in Molly Ivins' words, "the largest prison system on the planet earth." As Madison knew, there is an intimate, dialectically inseparable connection between prisons & repression at home & empire abroad. Concerned Americans owe it to themselves and their brothers & sisters around the world to make and act upon the dark connection.

Wanted: your state's inmates   In a strapped rural town, 475 Hawaiian felons coming to its private prison is hailed as good news   6.5.04   Ellen Barry & R.Sloan L.A. Times

Tutwiler MS   Once the heart of a thriving cotton economy, Tutwiler, population 1,364, had become an economic dead zone. The main street is a stretch of boarded-up windows and collapsed roofs, where signs warn against loitering and men loiter anyway. At the edge of town, fields of cotton & soybeans extend flat to the horizon. In Tutwiler's litany of disappointment, few sights were more discouraging than the brand-new prison, empty since 1,424 Alabama inmates left in March 2004. A group of Wisconsin prisoners left early too, after they complained about being housed too far from their families. Finally, last month, came a piece of good news, in the form of 475 felons from Hawaii.
Like so many rural communities across America, Tutwiler has become dependent on the prison business. 4 years ago, when Corrections Corp. of America was looking to build a $35-million private prison, it could hardly have found a more accommodating community. Roman Catholic nun Sister Maureen Delaney, who directs Tutwiler's Community Education Ctr, tried to spur debate about possible downsides, like the dangers a prison could bring. But few in town wanted to discuss it.

The same was true in mid-May, as residents awaited the arrival of the most dangerous group of criminals to be housed here. "An issue is not an issue unless people are willing to rise up and get upset about it," Delaney said. "When push comes to shove, people want the jobs."
Shortly after taking office last winter, GOP Gov. Haley Barbour changed Mississippi's law to allow the facility to accept maximum-security prisoners from other states. Tallahatchie County, where the Tutwiler correctional facility is located, is now among the nation's most flexible prison locations, warden Jack Cooke said.
Among the Hawaiian prisoners scheduled to be housed here are some who were involved in a series of riots in an Arizona prison between 1998 & 2001. "I think it's common knowledge with these prisoners that wherever they go, there seems to be an uprising," said Baptist minister Rev. William Wall, whose wife works as a nurse at the facility.

A second group of prisoners from Colorado, rejected by Texas officials because of their violent histories, began arriving a few days after the first Hawaiians. Gradually, the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility lurched back to life. Job-seekers lined up outside its bright white walls, with double rows of chain-link fence topped by triple coils of razor wire.
When all 1,400 cells are full, as the locals hope they will be, there will be more prisoners here than citizens. When the contract with Hawaii was finalized, people rejoiced. "The whole courtroom just went crazy," said Sykes Sturdivant, who serves on the Tallahatchie County Prison Authority. "All these employees were happy as a lark."
When the first busloads of Hawaiian prisoners arrived from Arizona, word spread quickly about the new inmates, a fastidiously neat group of men who remove their shoes before entering their cells. A team of consultants & prison staff delivered "cultural orientation" to local hires, many of whom were uncertain whether the Hawaiian prisoners would speak English.

The imported inmates must be treated the same way they would be in Hawaii. So they are served a rice-based diet and can have televisions in their rooms. Clothing & grooming rules are relaxed at the private facility, as they would be in a Hawaiian prison, with some prisoners allowed to wear a traditional Polynesian skirt, called a lava- lava, while inside their cells, authorities said.
If people outside the facility showed little interest in the threat posed by the new prisoners, authorities inside were keenly focused on it. With its own facilities desperately crowded and the cost of housing inmates prohibitively expensive, Hawaii began exporting its prisoners in 1995, against the protests of convicts' families and other advocates. (State officials said it cost them $102 a day to house the inmates in Hawaii, $52 a day in Arizona and $43 in Mississippi.) Suddenly mixed with inmates from other states, the felons sought to strengthen their position inside mainland prisons by forming a gang called the United Samoan Organization, or USO, Tallahatchie assistant warden Dick Smelser said.

Prison consultant Ben Griego, who helped train the Tutwiler staff, said cultural differences had worked in the inmates' favor in the past. Hawaiian inmates were so neat and seemingly well-behaved, he said, that prison officers at times lowered their guard. In a private prison in Florence AZ, a group of prisoners was found to be distributing alcohol & drugs and operating a prostitution ring using female Immigration & Naturalization Service detainees. A Hawaiian state inspection team that visited the site in 2001 reported: "The USO family runs this facility."
"The Hawaiians are very smooth in the way they operate," Griego said. "They take a very polite approach," making recommendations on how better to run the facility, "and before you know it, it was your idea."

Prison officials are training Tutwiler's workers to identify gangs at their earliest stages, for example, teaching them to identify gang-related tattoos and report new tattoos that might suggest members are actively recruiting. Outside the gates, Tutwiler's residents watched alertly for signs of the new arrivals. Agnes Martindale, 88, who lives half a mile from the prison, listened carefully one recent morning to a clamor from inside the fences. "I thought maybe somebody had escaped," she said. "They said it was just exercise."
Others were encouraged by the group's arrival. Janie Downs, 84, said she'd watched the grocery store, the doctor's clinic, the sidewalk cafes drain out of Tutwiler. As soon as she can sell her family's store, she's leaving too. "The people around here don't want to work," she said. "They stay up all night & sell dope and sleep all day." As for the prisoners, she said, "We're real proud to have them. We need them … I think we're going to be well- pleased with them."

At a community meeting last month to address questions about the imported inmates, local authorities focused on the prison's financial benefits. Corrections Corp. of America pays the county $300,000 in property taxes a year, which has allowed the school district to build 2 new buildings, said county district supervisor Jerome Little.
"The state of Mississippi is not giving you buildings," Little said.

concencamps   DHS Endgame martial law thrall trains blogspot KBR 'assembly center' contract EO11490 FEMA & Rex-84 U.S. gulags Friends of Liberty crowd control Punishment Park

Homeland Security contracts for vast new detention camps
2.8.06 & Peter Dale Scott New America Media   ¹

To date, some newspapers have worried that open-ended provisions in the contract could lead to cost overruns, such as have occurred with KBR in Iraq. A Homeland Security spokesperson has responded that this is a "contingency contract" and that conceivably no centers might be built. But almost no paper so far has discussed the possibility that detention centers could be used to detain American citizens if the Bush administration were to declare martial law.

For those who follow covert govt operations abroad and at home, the contract evoked ominous memories of Oliver North's controversial Rex-84 "readiness exercise" in 1984. This called for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to round up and detain 400,000 imaginary "refugees," in the context of "uncontrolled population movements" over the Mexican border into U.S. North's activities raised civil liberties concerns in both Congress and the Justice Dept. The concerns persist.
"Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup after the next 9.11.01 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and possibly dissenters," says former military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who in 1971 released the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. military's account of its activities in Vietnam. "They've already done this on a smaller scale, with the 'special registration' detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and with Guantanamo."

Plans for detention facilities or camps have a long history, going back to fears in the 1970s of a national uprising by black militants. As Alonzo Chardy reported in the 7.5.87 Miami Herald, an executive order for continuity of government (COG) had been drafted in 1982 by FEMA head Louis Giuffrida. The order called for "suspension of the Constitution" and "declaration of martial law." The martial law portions of the plan were outlined in a memo by Giuffrida's deputy, John Brinkerhoff.
In 1985, President Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 188, one of a series of directives that authorized continued planning for COG by a private parallel govt.

Two books, James Mann's "Rise of the Vulcans" and James Bamford's "A Pretext for War", have revealed that in the 1980s this parallel structure, operating outside normal govt channels, included the then-head of G. D. Searle and Co. Donald Rumsfeld, and then WY cngressman Dick Cheney.
After 9.11.01, new martial law plans began to surface similar to those of FEMA in the 1980s. In January 2002 the Pentagon submitted a proposal for deploying troops on American streets. One month later John Brinkerhoff, the author of the 1982 FEMA memo, published an article arguing for the legality of using U.S. troops for purposes of domestic security.

In April 2002, Defense Dept. officials implemented a plan for domestic U.S. military operations by creating a new U.S. Northern Command (CINC-NORTHCOM) for the continental U.S. DefSec Rumsfeld called this "the most sweeping set of changes since the unified command system was set up in 1946."
The NORTHCOM commander, DefSec Rumsfeld announced, is responsible for "homeland defense and also serves as head of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). … He will command U.S. forces that operate within the U.S. in support of civil authorities. The command will provide civil support not only in response to attacks, but for natural disasters."

John Brinkerhoff later commented on PBS that, "The U.S. itself is now for the first time since the War of 1812 a theater of war. That means that we should apply, in my view, the same kind of command structure in the U.S. that we apply in other theaters of war."
In response to Hurricane Katrina in Sept. 2005, according to the Washington Post, White House senior adviser Karl Rove told the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, that she should explore legal options to impose martial law "or as close as we can get." The White House tried vigorously, but ultimately failed, to compel Gov. Blanco to yield control of the state National Guard.

Also in September, NORTHCOM conducted its highly classified Granite Shadow exercise in Washington. As William Arkin reported in the Washington Post, "Granite Shadow is yet another new Top Secret and compartmented operation related to the military's extra-legal powers regarding weapons of mass destruction. It allows for emergency military operations in the U.S. without civilian supervision or control."
It is clear that the Bush administration is thinking seriously about martial law.

Many critics have alleged that FEMA's spectacular failure to respond to Katrina followed from a deliberate White House policy: of paring back FEMA, and instead strengthening the military for responses to disasters.
A multimillion program for detention facilities will greatly increase NORTHCOM's ability to respond to any domestic disorders.

elsewhere Convicts are condemned to a 'paradise' in Mexico Inmates, families housed together in unusual experiment 2.3.02   Mary Jordan & Laurie Freeman Wash.Post pA22 Isla Maria Madre, Mexico   Lorena Avila Suarez was 8 years old when she arrived by boat on this tiny Pacific island, coming ashore to be with her father, a convicted murderer. She grew up among the other inmates & their children in one of the world's most unusual prisons, an island with a church, a bakery and a dance hall where convicts are allowed to serve sentences alongside their family members. Then she fell in love with a convicted cocaine trafficker. So when her father was released a few years ago, and her mother & 3 sisters left with him, Avila Suarez stayed behind with her new husband. She still lives here in the prison where she has spent most of her life. "Sometimes I would rather be on the outside. It is always the same here," said Avila Suarez, 25, nuzzling up to her husband, Jesus Lopez, 33, who has 18 years left to serve. "But when I leave, I would like it to be with him." Isla Maria is a Mexican govt prison experiment in the Pacific Ocean 95 mi. south of Mazatlan. Started at the turn of the century as a Mexican version of Alcatraz, where the worst of the worst were condemned to a life of hard labor, it has been transformed into a relative paradise for inmates who have shown a willingness to reform. Rehabilitation is a bedrock principle of the Mexican judicial system, so much so that neither the death penalty nor life imprisonment is allowed under law. Proponents say Isla Maria is a logical extension of that idea: If prisoners are going to have to return to life in a normal community one day, why not keep them in a prison that simulates a normal community? There are no cells or bars here. The inmates are called "colonists." They wear no uniforms and live in ordinary housing on streets that look like those in any Mexican town. While navy officers on the perimeter of the 54 sq. mi. island carry machine guns, the prison guards carry no guns. About 600 children of inmates live in little houses with their parents and attend public schools on pretty, palm-lined streets. "This prison used to be almost hell. The inmates were treated savagely & humiliated," said the warden, Raul Soto Calderon. Now, he said, "If you didn't know this was a prison, you wouldn't realize it. There is nothing like this in the world." For one thing, it would be expensive to duplicate. With an annual budget of $4 million for 1,600 inmates, the govt pays about 3 times as much to handle each prisoner here as it does for those at any other prison. Transportation costs for supplies & people are high. The warden, for instance, recently had to rent a small plane to airlift a prisoner with a severe kidney problem. Public Security Minister Alejandro Gertz Manero, whose dept runs the prison, questions the wisdom of a cash- strapped govt running what he calls a "paradise." He would like all Mexican prisons to focus on making criminals pay restitution for their crimes. Some also question the wisdom of allowing children to grow up in prison. In several other Mexican prisons, children also live alongside their parents, usually their mothers. Although this practice is lauded for keeping families intact, it is also criticized because it means children are raised in a community of criminals, where everything from freedom to food is limited. "For some children it can be a little damaging," said Oliva Suarez Ilago, Avila Suarez's mother, who now lives on a peach farm in central Mexico. "They see things they shouldn't. They become aggressive & badly spoken." Avila Suarez, who does not have children, says other parents worry about having to wait for medicine that arrives on a weekly ship. "Some children are exposed to good people on the island who say to them, 'See where I am. Learn from me,' " she said. But other children live among "people who don't want to change." Yet for some children, living here is far safer than it is in the rough neighborhoods they left behind, and the govt white-washed housing is often better, too. "I like it here because I am here with my dad," Maribel Cisneros, 13, said recently as she sat at her desk in a history class. "My dad is here because of drugs." The inmates clearly like it here. "When I got here I cried. What beauty!" said Guadalupe Rodriquez Quiroz, a convicted heroin-seller who spent 4 years in a crowded, violent Tijuana prison before arriving here. There, she said, guards made inmates pay for everything, incl use of the bathroom. A key element of the Isla Maria experiment is to take power away from guards, who have often turned Mexican prisons into sewers of bribery & illegal punishments. Here there are only 36 guards. Most of the inmates are at Isla Maria on drug convictions; the typical sentence here is 10 years for marijuana trafficking. But there are a few who committed robbery, assault or even murder. And the sight of Luis Oscar Mendez Juarez, who killed a man during a robbery in Mexico City, swinging on a hammock by the ocean can be a bit jarring. The new warden said he is still weeding out the prison population. He said some of the inmates who have been sent here do not meet the island's current standards. He is in the midst of a major expansion, nearly doubling the inmate population this year to 3,000. He is also planning to order off the island any children over the age of 12. All inmates have the option of bringing their families, but many spouses & children do not want to forfeit their jobs and routines on the mainland. For some, it is prohibitively expensive to get to Mazatlan, where a navy ship shuttles families to the island. Isla Maria has also been unable to completely shed its reputation for harsh treatment, so it has not been much in demand among the main prison population in Mexico. But word is getting out. Avila Suarez & her husband share a one-bedroom home with a concrete floor and sparse furnishings: a double bed, a tiny television and a radio. They eat red snapper & other fresh fish caught by inmates. Their 2 lime-green parrots, Lino and Gustavo, fly freely about the house. "They have never been caged," Lopez said. Before being moved here, Lopez spent several years in a Guadalajara jail, where, he said, "you are obliged to be aggressive to stay alive." "I would be a different person if I had to stay in Guadalajara," Lopez said. There he learned that "you rob or are robbed, you defend yourself or you are beaten. Here, it is so safe you can leave your bike outside for 3 days and nobody would take it." Now the chatty Lopez is host of the island radio show, "Window by the Sea." He said people here "are afraid to make mistakes because they will be forced to leave the island." Warden Soto Calderon said that in the 9 months that he has been here, he has transferred 93 trouble-making inmates to mainland prisons. A few people have been punished for trying to ferment corn or rice to make moonshine or for smoking marijuana. Punishment is banishment to a camp on the far side of the island where there is no music, television or family life. In the old days, it used to be splitting rocks in the hot sun. Suarez Ilago, Avila Suarez's mother, said there were many good things about Isla Maria. Her husband, who killed a man in a street brawl, had no formal schooling when he arrived, but spent his years on the island finishing primary school and learning to work a farm. She said he now works hard on their little peach farm, no longer drinks and has had no more troubles with the law. Despite the rehabilitative effect Isla Maria had on her husband, Suarez Ilago said, "I never forgot for a moment that I was in jail." During the decade she spent on the island with her 4 daughters, she would look out at the endless ocean and see it as invisible bars. "I feel bad that I brought her to the island and then left her there," she said about her one daughter still in the penal colony. "It was like leaving half of my heart there." But Avila Suarez said she does not feel like someone left behind. She has a job as a telephone operator, takes occasional vacations and lives what she considers a normal life. She said she misses the little comforts that the mainland provides, like variety of food, the sight of a mountain or a highway, the latest magazines. But more important to her are the good times, and the lifetime of memories here. Nearly everyone on the island came to her wedding ceremony 7 years ago. She was just 18, stepping lightly into marriage & adulthood in a prison dining hall with an inmate band playing salsa.   In Mexico hinterland, life beyond the law   Man buried alive on elders' order 3.15.02   Kevin Sullivan & L.Freeman Wash.Post pA1 Dos Rios, Mexico   Teofilo Gonzalez Cano stabbed his cousin to death with 2 quick jabs to the heart. They had been the best of friends, growing up together in the same mud-brick house in this tiny village in southern Mexico. But one night they drank themselves nearly blind on homemade grain alcohol. An argument about nothing got out of hand, and soon Vicente Gonzalez Santiago lay dead in the dirt. Teofilo ran. They found him at dawn, sitting in a forest clutching his empty bottle. The local farmer who served as village constable, another cousin of Teofilo's, bound his hands behind his back and brought him in. The whole village was waiting, more than 300 people. They forced Teofilo to lie facedown next to Vicente's corpse. They shouted at him, called him a murderer. His mother sat in the dirt next to her son, pleading for mercy. The nearest police were more than 2 hours' drive away and there was no telephone in Dos Rios, hidden in rugged mountains 180 miles southwest of Mexico City. Justice in this backwater belongs to a half-dozen town elders, who stood over the 2 cousins in their early thirties, one dead and one accused, and debated the punishment that day in 1999. Finally they agreed. "They said the two of them should be buried together," said Catarina Cano Santiago, Teofilo's mother. According to Cano, other Dos Rios residents & human rights investigators, the elders enlisted villagers to carry out the sentence. Some of the men hacked a grave in the rocky soil of the village cemetery. Someone banged together a flimsy wooden coffin, and the villagers put Vicente's body in it. They hoisted the box and began a procession down a narrow cow path to the graveyard. Others dragged Teofilo by the arms. Women & children followed, marching under a hot sun past fields of dead corn. They placed Vicente's coffin in the hole, then threw Teofilo in on top, with his arms & legs tied together. He screamed & begged for his life, calling out to his mother, "Please don't let them do this to me!" She tried to help him, but her neighbors & friends held her back. The law had spoken, and no one would stand in its way. 20y men started throwing dirt into the hole with shovels & sticks. Teofilo, screaming, tried to climb out. His 14- year-old son, Felipe, ran to him and tried to hug him & pull him up. Someone tossed a lasso around Teofilo's neck and jerked him back into the grave, ripping him from his boy's embrace. They pulled the crying youth away from his father as the dirt piled higher on top of him, until he disappeared into the ground. "When they finished," said his mother, "you could still hear him screaming under the ground." Dos Rios is a dusty wisp of a village clinging to a mountainside in Guerrero state. It takes 12 hours to drive there from the capital, down a road that turns from pavement to dirt to a harrowing path that drops thousands of feet on either side. Fewer than 400 people live in Dos Rios, in a cluster of soft-brick huts baked by a close, heavy sun. There is no electricity, not a light bulb in town. The only vehicle is an old Ford pickup truck. A priest comes once a year to say Mass in the crumbling Roman Catholic church. It has been months since a police patrol passed through. As Mexico seeks to modernize, setting up a formal justice system in places like this is one of its most difficult challenges. Mexico has more than 148,000 communities with fewer than 100 residents, many of them isolated in the vast stretches of mountains & deserts that cover much of this country. By comparison, the U.S., which has 5 times more land area, has fewer than 2,000 towns with populations under 100. More than 25 million Mexicans, a quarter of the population, live in communities of 2,500 people or fewer. Govt officials say it is simply too expensive to run roads & electric lines to many of them, let alone provide police, prosecutors and judges. As a result, millions of Mexicans live in places that remain largely beyond the law. "The rule of law is absent in these towns. The level of impunity is extremely high," said Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, Mexico's new UN ambassador, who served until recently as national security adviser. He said the administration of President Vicente Fox is working to equip rural police with satellite communication systems and create more uniform police coverage around the country. But he said many state & local govt officials have resisted that idea because they still operate under the practices that dominated during 7 decades of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party. For years, he said, the PRI encouraged powerful local bosses to handle justice in their own way. Abel Barrera, a human rights activist based in Tlapa, near Dos Rios, called justice in Mexico "unbalanced." "Things have changed in the cities, but in parts of the country like this, here in the countryside, violence is still the accepted mechanism of justice," said Barrera, who investigated the Teofilo Gonzalez Cano case. "It's still the law of the jungle." There is no formal accounting of how many people are killed in Mexico's rough rural justice every year. But human rights groups estimate that hundreds have been killed and hundreds more beaten over the years in punishments meted out beyond official scrutiny. Barrera said at least 10 people a year are killed in the region around Dos Rios in a form of local justice. "People here have not yet taken notice that Mexico is changing," Barrera said. Equal protection under the law does not exist. Sentences are given out on the judgment of a few men, who often have little education & no legal training. Their decisions are effectively beyond the oversight of federal, state and municipal govts. In some cases, their punishment is far more harsh than the formal legal system requires. For example, Mexico has no death penalty or life sentences, but the Dos Rios villagers buried Teofilo alive. In other cases, local elders are far more lenient than judges. Town elders in Dos Rios said they would punish a rapist with "a few hours" in the town's small jail cell, plus a restitution payment of perhaps $100 to the victim's family. They recalled one case in which the rapist was forced to pay for a party that the victim's family was planning. Dos Rios is a Mixtec Indian community, governed by traditional practices. Mexico has long debated how far to go in allowing its 10 million Indians to run their own judicial systems. Critics argue that all Mexicans should be governed by the same legal system. But Dos Rios remains one of many places, Indian & non-Indian, set apart from mainstream justice in Mexico. With each passing decade, roads and other public services creep closer to these self-ruled villages. 10 years ago, the road into Dos Rios was little more than a donkey path used largely by farmers hauling their opium poppies to market. Today, trucks hauling beer & Pepsi lumber down the roads, supplying villages with the syrupy smack of globalization. But the rule of law cannot be loaded onto a delivery truck, and the protection of police & courts still barely exists. "We can't get everywhere," said Isidro Basurto Mendoz, the official in charge of police in Metlatonoc, the municipal seat, which is 3 hours from Dos Rios by car and 10 on foot. "The distances are too great, and we have no communications. The problem is that when we can't get there, people take justice into their own hands." Basurto said he has 18 police officers and one pickup truck to cover 30,000 people in 156 small communities spread over an area about the size of Montgomery County. Most are reachable only by four-wheel-drive vehicles. In the rainy season they are cut off by impassable roads. As Basurto spoke, word filtered in that 2 men had been killed the night before in a village a couple of hours' drive into the mountains. A dozen of Basurto's officers grabbed their shotguns and hopped into the back of the police pickup. Despite the display of firepower, Basurto said he and his men would almost certainly not solve the crime. "I'm going to get the information, give the bodies to the families for burial, then I'll come back to do the paperwork," he said. Basurto said it was unlikely that any suspect would ever be convicted. He said his officers are not trained to gather or handle evidence. Witnesses would need to drive for hours or walk for days to give testimony before a judge. He said people have no money to make such a trip, and would fear retaliation. 2 suspects were recently arrested & charged with murder in a nearby village. Basurto turned them over to regional prosecutors, but they were free within 3 months. He suspects they paid a bribe to get the charges dropped. Now, he said, they are back in their village, threatening to kill those who identified them. Basurto said that case is unusual because the suspects were charged and turned over to prosecutors. "Usually by the time we find out about a case, it's already been resolved," he said. "Or we don't find out about it at all." Teofilo & Vicente grew up the way all children do here: poorly nourished, without shoes and with little knowledge of the outside world. They played among the chickens & mango trees, and they were lucky to survive. Elders here say that until a state govt doctor began making regular visits a few years ago, many children died for lack of medicine & basic care. The 2 boys were reared in one of the village's small red-brown cubes of mud. Together, working the fields of corn & beans, they grew into men. There are no known photos of either cousin in this village, where cameras are rare. Their families describe them as typical in every way, 2 sturdy farmhands. They both married and had the same kind of families: 3 sons & a daughter. Then things went sour for Teofilo. His wife died in childbirth. He remarried, but his second wife died of a fever about 5 years ago. He was raising his children alone. Vicente was building his own house, next to a shady grove of banana trees where he was raised. His uncle lived there, too. It was in his house that Vicente & Teofilo started drinking one afternoon in March 1999. They drank all night. Some here say that Vicente began making jokes about Teofilo's 2 dead wives. All that is known for sure is that sometime after midnight, Teofilo pulled out a small knife and stabbed Vicente twice in the chest. By 8 a.m. Teofilo had been brought in and the 2 men lay side by side on the dirt floor of Vicente's house, with the 6 elders standing over them, discussing their fate. Vicente's brother, who declined to give his name in an effort to avoid drawing more attention to the case, said the elders made the decision to bury Teofilo alive. The town elders also wish to avoid attention. Asked about the case one recent morning, Juan Gonzalez Ruiz, the comisario , or head of the local govt, switched out of Spanish and consulted with the 5 other elders, all men in their forties & fifties sitting outside the village hall. They debated for 20 minutes in their Indian language. According to a local schoolteacher who speaks both languages, Gonzalez wanted to tell the truth but the elders instructed him to lie. They said they did not want any more trouble. Following their orders, Gonzalez told a reporter that Vicente had died in an accident and that Teofilo had run away. The elders nodded in agreement. The comisario is elected by village residents, and the elders are former comisarios. They said their main goal was to find negotiated solutions to crimes & disputes. They have 10 unpaid "community police" officers, whose duties include helping to keep the peace at festivals and tracking down stolen animals. Justice varies greatly by community. In some villages, stealing an animal has led to hanging. But here, Gonzalez said, the penalty for stealing a cow is a few hours in jail. He said he or the elders go to the cell and ask the thief why he stole. They try to impress on him that stealing is bad.

In Mexico, justice at a price Inmate couldn't buy what he needed, his name 3.25.02   Mary Jordan Wash.Post pA1 Tijuana, Mexico The cop looked Jimmy Salguero in the eyes and asked the question that would change his life. "What's your name?" he said. "Jimmy Salguero," said Jimmy Salguero. The officer clicked a few keys on his computer keyboard. "No, you're Jaime Garcia," he said. "No I'm not," he insisted. But it was no use. It was a Friday night, and the police would look good ending the week with a prize arrest. So a Guatemalan painter named Jimmy Salguero became Tijuana robber Jaime Garcia. Telling the story later, Salguero, 32, said that he had been just another face in Tijuana, living in a Salvation Army shelter and trying to scheme his way across the border into the U.S. To pick up some cash, he had taken a job painting apartments. As he left work that evening in May 2000, the police stopped him & 4 Mexican painters and asked for their identification. The others produced ID cards. Salguero had none. The officers whispered among themselves, then hauled him to the station, gave him a new name and sent him to La Mesa, one of the most notorious prisons in Latin America. When Salguero protested, the cops punched him. They told him to shut up. Behind bars, month after month, everyone called him Jaime. The presumption of innocence and the right to see an attorney have long been written into Mexican law. But in practice those protections are often available only to those who can afford them. President Vicente Fox, who took office nearly 16 months ago promising to spread democratic protections to all, has sought to end govt abuse of individuals, and in particular to end a tradition of arbitrary, sloppy and corrupt police practices. But injustice has deep roots in Mexico's justice system. There are still 2 legal systems in the country: one for those with money & connections, and one for the poor. Salguero said he saw that up close on the ride to the police station, when one of the officers offered him the opportunity to buy his way out of trouble. "I hear it costs about $1,500 to $2,000 to cross the border," the officer said slyly, Salguero recalled, referring to the going rate for a smuggler to guide immigrants into the U.S. Salguero said he understood the deal being offered: Turn over your travel money and you can go home. But he had no cash. "I just asked, 'How long will I be in this place?' " Salguero said. When the police officers realized they were squeezing an empty wallet, they turned cold. "They told me, 'It will be one to three months before the judge sees you.' " As an undocumented migrant, Salguero was particularly vulnerable to police abuse. But he figured one person could surely help him: his older sister Ericka, a successful office clerk who lives in Rockville, MD. He placed a collect phone call from the station. To his relief, she answered. He was certain that his sister, an 18-year resident of the U.S. with legal status there, could convince the Tijuana police that he was Guatemalan. Salguero handed the phone to the officer on duty. "Please talk to my sister," he said. The officer grabbed the phone and hung up. "The line just cut off," his sister recalled. "They just didn't care who he was." Still, she figured the police would correct their mistake: "You take someone's fingerprints and you find out who he is, or who he is not. How hard is that?" But everything got harder. At first, Salguero didn't have a bed in prison. He needed cash for that. In La Mesa, as in many Mexican prisons, inmates pay for their accommodations. How well you sleep, eat and live depends on how much money you have. The divide between rich & poor so prevalent in Latin America is exaggerated inside that giant cage. The night Salguero arrived in the spring of 2000, he was broke. In La Mesa, penniless can mean homeless. Night after night, he joined other poor inmates searching for a patch of hard ground on the basketball court. "There was no mattress, but somehow I got a blanket," Salguero said. He soon learned that the thin blanket was one of the rare comforts provided free of charge. Even visiting rights & toilet paper would cost him. From his concrete bed, Salguero could see the prison's version of luxury. The central section of the prison was filled with more than 400 small wooden houses, many with windows, balconies and stereos. The richer inmates live there. The warden, Carlos Lugo Felix, said it was his understanding that the top price for one of the little houses was $1,500. But inmates & human rights advocates, incl Brazilian law professor Cesar Barros Leal who visited La Mesa in December, said the black market price is as high as $30,000 for the finest homes. Middle-class prisoners sleep in relatively uncrowded cells, sharing one with perhaps 6 others. And the poorest sleep on the ground, Barros said. Prison officials, trying to squeeze 5,500 inmates into a space built with a tiny budget for 2,800, allowed prisoners to build their own tiny houses years ago. Officials also allowed inmates to open kiosks, where they sell shrimp cocktails, hamburgers, tacos and burritos, and even rent videos. Inmates without cash do without. Family is a kind of wealth here, too. By long-established custom in Mexico, prisons do not provide all of an inmate's food & supplies. An inmate's family is expected to make frequent visits and provide milk, meat, shampoo, jeans, shirts and medicine or the money to buy them. 5 days a week, Salguero watched a parade of more than 2,000 visitors enter La Mesa, lugging bags of supplies. Some men around him ate as well as they would at home, with enchiladas one day and fried chicken the next. But Salguero, with no family in Mexico, survived mainly on the gruel that was wheeled around the prison in vats. All around him, families spent nights together: More than 500 wives & several hundred children spend at least a few nights a week inside the prison. But nobody visited Salguero, and no one threw anything over the wall for him at night in what is known as the "rain of objects." With the guards paid off to look the other way, family members & friends tossed packages over the prison wall, often at times & places arranged on smuggled cell phones. Even cocaine & heroin stuffed inside soccer balls were thrown over the wall. Salguero's thoughts were consumed by earning money. He needed to eat and to bribe guards. So he worked for other inmates who ran shoeshine & laundry businesses. And he carved wooden ships & picture frames and sold them to `inmates & visitors. "You pay for everything, even for water," he said. "To not have money in prison is like being out on the street without anything, with nothing to wear, no way to bathe yourself." Inmates have even divided the territory inside the prison and set up what amounts to a system of tollbooths. When Salguero wanted to use a pay phone, he paid a gatekeeper about 5¢ cents in pesos. When he wanted to go into the visitors' area to try to talk to someone else's attorney, he forked over 20¢. What really drained his finances was the roll-call bribe. Every night, when the prisoners lined up to be counted, Salguero had to slip a guard 50¢ to be marked present on the attendance sheet. The days inmates spend in prison are recorded only when they are marked present; missing roll call means spending more time in prison. Guards have turned that into a big moneymaker. With more than 5,000 inmates in La Mesa, the total take from the shakedown could reach $2,500 or more a day. Salguero paid his 50¢ nearly every night. Each time he did, Jaime Garcia got credit for another day in prison. Garcia, a convicted robber, was being sought for violating parole when Salguero was arrested. Now Salguero was serving out the remainder of Garcia's 5 year term. The injustice tore at him. "I kept saying 'I want to see a judge or a lawyer,' " he said. "But nobody paid any attention to me. Other guys in jail said to me, 'Welcome to Mexico. That's how justice is.' " Salguero was not the only inmate serving time unjustly in Mexico. Human rights advocates and Mexican law enforcement officials said there have been many cases in which the wrong person has served time. Record- keeping has been so sloppy in prisons that officials have not even known the actual identities of inmates, or how many there are. Most prisons lack computerized databases of criminals' fingerprints or mug shots. Some inmates who cannot afford a lawyer have been kept in prison beyond their sentences. And fugitives wanted for serious crimes have been discovered in prison serving time for petty offenses under assumed names. A spokesman for the state police in Tijuana said he was unaware of Salguero's case and could not comment on it. Lugo, the warden, said that since he took over 4 months ago, he has established new procedures for registering and tracking inmates. Salguero, a quiet, serious man, became withdrawn as time passed. On good days he dreamed of getting out to go back to school to learn automobile engineering. He wanted to build cars in the U.S. He had only finished primary school in Puerto Barrios, his home town in Guatemala, 2,600 miles southeast of here. He joined a Bible study group. His new friends got him off the ground and into a bunk. They paid for his new quarters and later, when he had money, they charged him a small fee each week. But they offered no hope. "Even my brothers in the Christian group told me, 'You will be here for a long time.' I asked their visitors to help me but they didn't. Maybe they were scared or maybe they thought I was lying. Even a pastor told me I was paying for some debt I probably owed." Christmas 2000 came and went. "In my solitude, I would read the Bible," he said. "It was the only thing that consoled me. I felt invisible." In Rockville, Ericka Salguero was frantic. With 3 small children, a new mortgage and a demanding job, she couldn't afford the 2,800-mile trip to Tijuana. Her pleas for help from the Guatemalan embassies in the U.S. & Mexico went nowhere. She arranged for a relative in Los Angeles to take the 3 hour bus trip across the border to give Salguero money & new clothes. She was worried because when she had last spoken to her brother he had said: "Send money so I won't get beaten." Ericka's mother-in-law arrived at La Mesa and waited nervously in the long visitors' line. The sight of police in bulletproof vests on the roof made her jittery; the smell of sewage and the picture of too many people behind chain- link fences made her sad. When she finally arrived at the visitors' window, she asked to see Salguero, using the name Jaime Garcia. She didn't know it, but she had just fallen into another moneymaking racket. The inmates who control the visitors' area charge a fee to find the inmate being summoned. And often, they charge the inmates for the "privilege" of seeing their visitors. She didn't know that she was supposed to pay. Salguero never appeared. The inmates persuaded her to leave the package of clothes & money with them; they said they would deliver it. But Salguero said he never received the package or a message that a visitor had come. "I wanted to scream. I wanted to say, 'I am not this person,' " he said. But complaints earned him a beating or, from the gentler guards, these words: "Then prove it." Salguero couldn't. So he carved boats. When he had the extra pesos, he paid to get into the visitors' area to beg a few words with other inmates' visitors and attorneys. No one took him seriously. Finally, one visitor gave him what turned out to be a golden brushoff. If you think you have a real gripe, call the human rights office in Tijuana, he said. The man passed him the phone number. Salguero was excited about the new lead, but he needed $3 for a phone card to pursue it. He worked and saved, ate less, and finally bought a shiny new phone card. It had been more than a year since his arrest. He slipped the card into a phone, dialed the number, and Luis Hernandez picked up. Hernandez, a 22-year-old lawyer, had been working in the human rights office for 4 months. He was fielding five or six calls a day from prisoners in La Mesa, all with horror stories. On 5.25.01, he visited Salguero. After they talked, Hernandez went to the court to see the file of Jaime Garcia. "I was stunned," he said. The man in the photo in Garcia's file was obviously not Salguero. He was older, taller and fatter. He had dark skin & curly hair, not the fair skin and straight hair of the man Hernandez had just visited. And he had drug needle marks running up and down his arms; Salguero did not. Hernandez wrote to the judge in Garcia's case. On June 5, as Jimmy Salguero neared the end of his 13th month in prison, he was summoned to the office of the deputy prison director. "Are you Jaime Garcia?" the man asked. "That is what they call me here. My real name is Jimmy Salguero. I am not Mexican." The official, who, along with other top management has since left the prison, was quiet. He told him to wait. An hour later he returned and said only this: "I have good news. You are free to leave." In minutes Salguero was on the street. He raced to find Hernandez. "Jimmy walked in and was in disbelief. His face was blank. No one told him why they released him," said the lawyer, reached in Spain, where he is now studying for a doctorate in human rights. He said he believed Salguero should sue the Tijuana police. Ericka Salguero said he should receive an apology, at least. "They stole a year of his life, and it is not good enough to say, 'Bye, bye,' as if nothing happened," she said. But Salguero's thoughts are already in Canada. They make cars there, too, and since 9.11.01Sept. 11, it's easier to go there than to the U.S.. He spends his days painting cars in Tijuana, saving his money. The Big House is no longer a home Mexico relocates inmates, evicts families from notorious Tijuana prison 8.21.02   Mary Jordan Wash.Post p A12 Tijuana, Mexico   Under cover of predawn darkness, 2,000 prisoners were handcuffed and moved out of La Mesa penitentiary surrounded by heavily armed police & soldiers today as the Mexican govt sought to regain control over one of North America's most notorious prisons. With helicopters flying overhead as an extra precaution, the most dangerous convicted murderers, drug traffickers and other convicts from La Mesa were herded onto buses & trucks and driven to a new prison in El Hongo, a small town 50 miles east of Tijuana just south of the border with California. For decades, wives & children of convicts have been permitted to live inside La Mesa, home to many of Mexico's drug traffickers. But today that practice ended, too, as hundreds of women & children were escorted out of the prison carrying their belongings. Bulldozers this afternoon began to raze the center of the prison, called El Pueblito or Little Town because it resembled a neighborhood. There, wealthier inmates built more than 400 homes, some equipped with computers, phones, DVD players and tequila bars. The plan is to turn La Mesa into a conventional state prison, with cellblocks, no frills and no families, for the more than 4,000 inmates who will remain. Mexican officials said La Mesa has been controlled over the years as much by inmates as state authorities. Previous plans to remove families and transfer prisoners were never executed because of fears of rioting and, many believe, because prisoners paid kickbacks to quash any proposed changes. But in a surprise operation that involved the army, federal police and state riot police, who surrounded the prison for fear of rioting, about one-third of the inmates were removed beginning at about 1 a.m. Afterward, state social workers took away about 40 children who have no known guardian except for the inmate they were living with. Some of the children carried toys and had tears in their eyes. "There was no reason for families to be in there. They were there because no one said they couldn't," said a spokesman for the state, Gustavo Magallanes. He said 43 prisoners who were considered the leaders of a drug distribution network that operated inside and outside the prison were taken to maximum security prisons. President Vicente Fox said in an interview that today's move was a victory against impunity. He said the army, working with newly trained federal police officers in Tijuana, has recently scored "extraordinary results against organized crime & drug traffickers, and now we are correcting the prison. It will be a complete cleansing." The Mexican prison system, which houses 165,000 inmates, has long been poorly funded and corrupted by cash from prisoners &and drug cartels. Since Fox took office at the end of 2000, human rights workers have been granted greater access to the prisons. They have reported that a two-tier system exists, one for those with money and one for those without. The National Human Rights Commission declared 2 years ago that La Mesa was Mexico's worst prison because of overcrowding and privileges for those with money. Inmates & guards have outlined an extensive kickback system in the prison for the right to see a visitor or not to be beaten. While wealthier prisoners could rent the houses in the center of the prison, poor ones did not even get a bed. Some slept on the pavement of the basketball court. Alejandro Gertz Manero, the national public security chief, who was involved in today's operation, said in a recent interview that it has only been since January 2001 that authorities had taken back full control of federally run maximum security prisons. That, he said, was when one of the biggest drug traffickers in Mexico, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, bribed his way out of a federal prison in a laundry bin. He is still at large. "Ten days after El Chapo escaped, we took control of those federal prisons. We weren't in charge of them before. … The drug traffickers were the owners," Gertz Manero said. He said the federal govt is setting its sights on helping clean up some of the state prisons. Some, he said, "are not in the hands of anyone." La Mesa is a concrete structure that takes up 2 huge city blocks. Today a wall of military & police trucks sealed off the prison and riot police walked the walls. "It's the end of an era. It's a good change," said Jesus Blancornelas, a Tijuana journalist who has written a bestseller on the drug trade in this city, just across the border from San Diego. He said a saying he heard in the U.S., "Even if a jail is made of gold, it is still a jail," has never applied at La Mesa. Here, he said, life inside could be as good as outside and money bought just about anything. More than 6,000 prisoners have been living in La Mesa, in a space built for fewer than 2,000. According to human rights officials' estimates, more than half the prison population is using drugs, including heroin. None of the prison guards at La Mesa will be allowed to work in El Hongo, a state-of-the-art facility where guards have been training for months and are better paid. Unlike the practice in La Mesa, family members will not be permitted to bring in cash or food. A new banking system has been set up in which families can deposit money in inmates' accounts and each prisoner can spend a maximum of $5 a day. To further try to separate inmates' cash from guards, prisoners are to be issued electronic debit cards. Veronica Vargas, 19, was one of the wives thrown out of La Mesa. As she boarded a bus with bags of clothes & other belongings, she said she had lived inside for 7 months. She said she wanted to be with her husband who, she said, was serving a 30-year sentence for migrant smuggling. She said she & her husband paid $800 rent but she did not know where the money went. "We had our little house, with a television & refrigerator and everything that we needed," she said. "But it still felt like a prison."

Education is sorely lacking. 67 children study in the village school, which goes to the sixth grade. Only a few children finish all 6 years. If they wanted to continue their schooling, they would have to drive three hours to Metlatonoc. No one can remember anyone ever doing that. The people are accustomed to accepting the punishments meted out by the elders. But Teofilo's case shocked many residents. Guadalupe Martinez Castillo, who said she is about 40, said she still cannot believe what her town did. "It frightens me because I think the same could happen to me, my children, my family," she said. "Everyone lives in fear because they didn't do that to an animal, they killed a person."
Cano, Teofilo's mother, said she lives with fear & regret. From her home, she can just about see the village's hilltop cemetery, where the 2 cousins are buried in a grave marked by a single anonymous slab of wood jammed into the rocky ground. Sitting in the red dirt at her house, Cano said she wished she had filed some kind of complaint about her son's death. But she is afraid to challenge the men who run Dos Rios. "I don't have the courage to confront them," she said. "If I were a man, it might be different. But people here don't know who to go to for justice."

Francisco Estrada Rojas, who teaches at the elementary school, said the elders ordered Teofilo to be buried alive to "teach a big lesson." He said there had been several murders in Dos Rios in the years leading up to Teofilo's execution. He said that, in the absence of police, disputes over land, family matters, a few cattle or other minor issues often ended in bloodshed. He said few of those killers were caught, and when they were, they almost always seemed to be able to bribe police or prosecutors to let them off. "That's why people take justice into their own hands," Estrada said. "This happened because the community had been beaten down by so many crimes without punishment."
Estrada said that when the police arrived a day after the murders, they wanted to dig up the men to see for themselves what had happened, and to put the 2 men in separate graves. But local officials told the police that no one in town would help them. Estrada said they told the police: "You'll have to pay for the food & drink of the laborers, and no one wants to do that kind of work." Several people in the community said the police stayed only a few minutes longer. There is a widespread belief here that the officers were paid a bribe to forget about the whole thing. "They didn't arrest anybody," Estrada said. "Because they would have had to arrest the whole community."

Disparate justice imprisons Mexico's poor
As police focus on petty crime, major offenders often go unpunished
7.6.02   K.Sullivan, M.Jordan & L.Freeman Wash.Post pA1

According to recent testimony to the Mexican Congress by top law enforcement officials, well over 90#37; of serious crime goes unpunished. In a nation with one of the world's highest kidnapping rates, much drug-related bloodshed and a chilling level of violence on the streets of the capital, the prisons are choked with people who stole to eat. Tellez said a man who stole a Gansito, similar to a Twinkie, was released in November after spending 3 years in jail. He said another man who stole bread worth about $4 was sentenced to 6 years.
Public opinion polls show that Mexicans are fed up with their justice system. One of the key complaints is that it thunders down so hard on petty criminals. At every turn, the system is consumed with the smallest crimes: Poorly trained police focus on the easiest crimes to solve; corrupt officers, often paid to look the other way when there is more serious crime, have no such incentive to let small-time offenders go. Legislators under political pressure to combat rising crime rates have set tough minimum sentences for the smallest of robberies.

The result is that in many cases, as with Hurtado, the subway cheater, judges are forced by the law to hand down sentences they believe are unfair. Judges in Mexico have almost no discretionary authority. The Mexican legal system, based in 19th century Napoleonic Code, deliberately limits the role of judges. The theory is that legislators should craft penalties and judges should simply impose them. The judge in Hurtado's case wanted to be lenient but said the law would not let him. He convicted Hurtado of "using a false document", showing a subway worker's pass that Hurtado said he had found on the floor. That is the equivalent of a felony, a crime considered too grave to warrant bail, punishable by a minimum of 4 years in prison. Behind bars, Hurtado vomited from nervousness. He fell far behind on his class work and lost wages from an after-school job.
"What my son did wasn't a crime; it was a mistake," said his mother, Laura Aviles Rodriguez. "Who would call this justice?"

Behind the high brick walls of a Mexico City development called Poinsettia, amid gardens of purple bougainvillea and expensive SUVs parked in a row on the cobblestones, Oscar Espinosa Villareal lives the life of an accused embezzler with means. Espinosa, Mexico City's mayor from 1994 to 1997, is accused of illegally diverting $45 million that was never accounted for during his term. When a judge issued a warrant for his arrest in Aug. 2000, he did what many wealthy Mexicans do in the same situation: He bought a plane ticket and fled the country. His top aide is still a fugitive.
Espinosa flew to Canada then Nicaragua, where he was caught. He maintains he has done nothing illegal and that he is the victim of a revenge campaign by his political enemies. He fought extradition on grounds that the case against him amounted to political persecution, but the Nicaraguans sent him home. Espinosa is part of the well- connected old guard of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ran Mexico from 1929 to 2000. He served as campaign finance manager for his old friend, Ernesto Zedillo, who became president and rewarded Espinosa with the mayor's job, a presidentially appointed position until 1997. When Espinosa's term expired, Zedillo appointed him to serve as national tourism minister from 1997 to 2000.

When Espinosa arrived back in Mexico on a federal police jet from Nicaragua, his wealth & connections kicked in. He hired one of Mexico's leading lawyers, who persuaded a federal judge to issue an order forbidding his arrest & detention, allowing him to remain free pending trial. Espinosa was ordered to post bail of about $400,000. He paid about $12,000 in cash, put up his house to cover the balance, and then went home.
Based on Mexico's long history of elites beating criminal charges, few here believe Espinosa will ever be convicted. It is a story Mexicans know well: Accused of stealing $45 million, Espinosa sleeps in his own bed at night, while Hurtado, who sneaked a 20¢ subway ride, was forced to sleep on a jailhouse cot for months awaiting trial. Francisco Garduno, former head of prisons for Mexico City, has given speeches to inmates citing Espinosa as an example of how those accused of major crimes get better treatment than minor offenders, who are invariably poor. "The road to justice opens up wide for them," Garduno said. "But for the poor it is very narrow."

Far from Espinosa's hillside retreat, in a rough neighborhood in the southeast side of the city, Tellez, the Catholic priest, runs a church program to get minor offenders out of jail. Frustrated with the govt's approach to petty criminals, the church has quietly begun its own effort to help. The church pays fines & bail for thousands of nonviolent petty criminals, most of them first offenders. People convicted of a crime are often allowed to choose jail time or a fine. Tellez said he has handled cases of many who could have avoided jail or served less time by paying a fine of as little as $25. "It absolutely is unfair that money determines freedom," Tellez said.
Church lawyers last year reviewed the files of 11,000 prisoners in Mexico City jails, half the city's inmates. They concluded that at least 4,000 were minor offenders stuck behind bars because they could not afford to pay fines or bail. In all, the church has arranged for the release of 4,100 people. A private foundation, supported by Telefonos de Mexico, or Telmex, the country's largest telephone co., has paid for the release of 20,000 minor offenders in the last five years. The foundation spokesman, Mario Cobo Trujillo, said cases have included a man, charged with injuring another man in a fight, who spent 8 months in jail awaiting trial until the foundation paid his $25 bail. Cobo said another man spent more than 18 months awaiting trial for want of $100 for bail.

Mexico's culture of official secrecy has kept the extent of the problem hidden. Until recently all prison records in Mexico were considered confidential, and they are still difficult to obtain. That has made it hard to document how the system has been primarily focused on the least significant crimes. But now that church lawyers & human rights workers are being given access, members of the public are getting their first glimpses at the make-up of the prison population. What they are finding has sparked a drive to substitute restitution & community service for prison time for minor offenders.
Hurtado's case was handled by Judge Eduardo Mata, a chain-smoking former prosecutor. "Ever since I got this case, I thought it was a shame," Mata said in an interview in his glass-walled courthouse office. "He just did something stupid. But there was nothing I could do." Mata, who has been a judge for 9 years, said the case was a frustrating reminder of the strict limits on his authority and how minor offenders end up behind bars. "I think we need reforms that give judges more freedom," he said. "We don't have the flexibility we need."

A Mexican judge's main task is to read files and issue a sentence that falls between the minimum & maximum penalty established in the criminal codes. In Mexico there are no jury trials. And in many cases, the judge never even sees the defendant, issuing his decision based on the written record. Limiting the judge's authority is meant to limit bribery and other corruption on the bench. "Our hands are tied by the law," Mata said. "We can't do anything if we think the minimum sentence is unfair."
Mata recalled a case in which a young man stole a bag of bread from a woman in a Mexico City market. Police grabbed him immediately, and they and the thief discovered that the woman had also stuffed 40,000 pesos, about $4,500, into the bag after a trip to the bank. Mata said he wanted to sentence the man based on his intention, which he said was to steal a loaf of bread. But because the man had committed a major robbery, even unwittingly, Mata said, the law required him to sentence him to several years in prison. In Hurtado's case, Mata said the best he could do was issue the minimum sentence for his crime: 4 years in prison and a fine of about $950. Mata said he then used the only wiggle room the law allowed him, letting Hurtado substitute an additional fine of about $560 for his prison time. "He didn't damage society in any way," Mata said. "I didn't like the sentence I had to give him. Our laws aren't that fair."

Gaunt & defeated, Hurtado walked out of jail on March 13 after 63 days behind bars. A former employer lent him more than $1,500 to pay his fines, allowing him to avoid a prison sentence that would have kept him locked up until 2006. That makes him luckier than most. But it will take every peso of his earnings and his mother's for more than a year to pay back his debt. Former prison chief Garduno, who now runs the city's transportation dept, is outraged at how the system treated Hurtado and how it punishes the wrong people. So he gave him a city job to help him pay off his debts. "I am trying to repair the damage done to our society," Garduno said. "I am trying to rectify something that has happened to thousands of people in Mexico."

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