The Policia
Patrick Oster
"The Mexicans. A personal portrait of a people"
2002
ISBN 0060011300
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Mexicans have strong feelings about their police. A newcomer doesn't even have to ask. In casual conversations, viewpoints pour out. To say that Mexicans hate their police doesn't quite capture the feeling. Abhor? Loathe? Revile? Well, yes, those are all closer, but still not quite it. Abominate! Yes, that's the feeling I encountered when talking with Mexicans about the police. Mexicans abominate their police.

Behind this unbridled antipathy is the perfectly justifiable fear that any encounter with Mexican police could involve extortion, robbery, torture, or even murder. That's what happens after the police arrive. Maybe that's why people joke that Mexico is a country where a kid can play cops and robbers by himself.

The most common fear is police extortion. That's the legal tern for it. But what's involved is bribery or, as Mexicans call It, la mordida. Mordida means "bitten." It's an apt slang word, because what the police do is put the bite on you, often fabricating offenses to do it. In Mexico City, the official motto of the city police department is Protección y Vialidad ("Protection and Highway Service"). But bribe demands are so common there that many say that the motto should be Collección y Venalidad ("Collection and Venality").

The bribes can be crushing. Some Mexicans go to extremes to evade them. While doing a story on how Mexicans drive, I met a man who had crawled away from the scene of an accident, even though badly injured, rather than undergo police questioning. He had been the victim in this accident. His car had been hit by another whose driver had ran a red light. But he had a lot of money on him, the payroll for his small company. He feared most of it would be gone by the time he got out of police hands.

Bribes to traffic cops are so established a fact of Mexican life that many people pay them as if they were highway tolls. I knew one man who paid the corner cop a weekly tribute so he could make an illegal left turn each morning to save time on the way to work. I saw others hand cops money from their car windows without even bothering to make a full stop, after they'd been waved to the curb for supposed offenses.

With all these stories in mind, I thought I had misunderstood Tonio, my office assistant, when he said, "I know a policeman who doesn't take bribes." At the time, I was working on a story on Police Day, a December 22 holiday designated to honor the police. After all the complaints I had heard about the police, I found the holiday a bizarre idea I wondered if local cops found it a little funny, too. I asked Tonio if he knew any policemen who would be willing to talk about bribery in Mexico. Tonio said he knew one. But Agustín González might not be exactly what I had in mind. Agustín not only refused bribes, he was against them.

Tonio was a good source on Mexican cops. During his off-hours, he drove his father's cab. As a veteran Mexico City driver, he had been stopped many times by the police. That's logical. Most Mexican police aren't paid enough to live on, let alone enough for the bribes they have to pay to superiors for good assignments, promotions, and maintenance of vehicles. They always seemed pressed to find extra cash. What more handy source of cash is there than cabbies, who take in fares all day long?

Until the day Tonio met Agustín, his experience had always been the same when he was curbed by the police. Whether he was at fault or had merely been stopped on a pretext, he was asked for a bribe to be let go. He always paid it. With Agustín, it was difierent. Agustin was a Mexican oxymoron, an honest cop.

Like any self-respecting Mexican driver who has run a red light and been caught, Tonio offered Agustín a propina, a tip, to forgive the offense. Much to Tonio's surprise, Agustin said no. Tonio was dumbfounded. No policeman had ever refused a bribe before. It wasn't natural. Tonio was visibly confused. He didn't even know what to do next. Would he be arrested? Would his car, God forbid, be impounded? Where did one pay a traffic ticket? In all his years of driving, Tonio had never been issued one. Everything had always been arranged at the curb. What would happen now? Agustín seemed to understand Tonio's confusion. He told Tonio not to worry. He would let him go this time. But he warned Tonio to be careful in the future. He also told him not to be so eager to offer a bribe. The ticket for running a red light carried a fine that was less than the bribe Tonio had offered.

This was the closest thing to a man-bites-dog story that I had heard in Mexico, so I asked Tonio to set up a meeting with Agustín that weekend. He did, and that Saturday we drove out to the northwestern reaches of the city for a rendezvous with a moral oddity.

Agustín's corner was the intersection of Las Armas and San Isidro streets in the Azcapotzalco neighborhood. It's right on the city line, in an industrial neighborhood of cheap apartments and smoke-belching factories. It was coffee-break time when we arrived, so we waited in my car for Agustín to return. When he did, I decided to watch him unobserved for a while to see if he acted any differently from the way he had treated Tonio.

It was clear Agustín took pride in his work. His blue serge uniform was immaculately pressed. His black lace-up shoes were buffed to a high gloss. His plastic police whistle hung neatly at his neck. He wore white gloves, which he used to accentuate his arm-signaling, like a batonless maestro at the podium, a Toscanini of traffic. Now and then Agustín would interrupt his "conducting" when some driver committed a traffic violation. He'd signal the person to pull over. He'd lean down to talk, resting his elbows and forearms easily on the car's windowsill. In friendly fashion, he'd lecture for a while. Sometimes he'd let the person go. Other times, he'd write out a ticket. But as far as I could tell, he never took any money.

After about half an hour of watching, we got out of the car. I had Tonio introduce me. I told Agustín that he seemed to be having fun at what he did, conducting and all. He laughed and said his job was bonito trabajo, "boautiful work." He had been doing it for twenty-six years and had no plans to quit. It was a dangerous job, though. Many Mexicans drive recklessly, he said. In the early-morning dimness, poor drivers kept their headlamps switched off to save wear and tear on the lights. Often they didn't see Agustin until the last minute. He had never been hit, but it wasn't for want of opportunities, he joked.

Corner traffic cop was hardly a cushy post. Agustin's day began early. He had to be at his station by 6:00 A.M. He had an hour-and-a-half commute by bus from his modest one-story concrete home in the Ajusco neighborbood, so he was up before dawn. Much of the year, the penetrating chill of the capital's high-altitude mornings hung in the air. Cold mornings could be followed by sun-baking afternoons. Other times, Agustín was as likely to be drenched by the daily deluge that typified the rainy season.

At fifty-two years of age and in good health, Agustín said he could remain a policeman for at least another decade. But in four years he'd be eligible for retirement at full pay. Many might jump at the chance to receive the same pay for not working as for working. But Agustín said he wouldn't retire if his superiors felt they needed him. He was a man not only of honesty and pride, but of duty. What was strange about all this, of course, was that Agustín felt it an honor to be a policeman in an era of police dishonor. He said he'd become a policeman again in a minute, notwithstanding all the embarrassing revelations that had come to light about his colleagues' criminality.

The brunt of the morning rush hour had passed. I asked Agustín if we could move into the park that abuts his intersection to talk about bribery. I asked him how extensive he thought corruption was among the police. He admitted that such things, regrettably, did exist, but he was reluctant to estimate how widely. I asked him what he thought about notorious cops in other Mexican police forces. I brought up the case of First Commander Jorge Armando Pavón Reyes, a high official of the federal judicial police. Pavón Reyes's relationship with Rafael Caro Quintero, Mexico's best-known drug dealer, was so established that he was willing to take a check for sixty million pesos (then $270,000) to let Caro flee Mexico right under the noses of pursuing U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials. It was a particularly bold act because the DEA wanted Caro in connection with the highly publicized 1985 murder of Enrique Camarena, a DEA undercover agent. Agustín chuckled at the audacity of Pavón Reyes but he declined to make any generalizations about how many other federal police were as venal.

We talked a bit about torture, which many Mexican police use as their prime investigative technique in solving a criminal case. Mexican police receive very little training on how to amass clues or handle evidence. They're more Inspector Clouseau than Lieutenant Columbo. Some speculate that this is why they feel compelled to turn to torture to solve a case quickly. But to torture someone, you first need to arrest a suspect. Mexican police often have trouble doing that. Even the most publicized, politically embarrassing crimes, such as the Christmas 1985 robbery of Aztec and Maya treasures from the National Museum of Anthropology, or the May 1984 machine-gun murder of journalist Manuel Buendia, typically went unsolved while I lived in Mexico

Sometimes police didn't try to solve a case because they didn't have enough money to do it. Norman Carlson, an American I interviewed in 1985 while he was trying to find the murderers of his son and three others, got no cooperation from the police in the state of Guadalajara until he agreed to pay for gas for squad cars to be used in the investigation.

Even when crimes involved Americans, whose tourist patronage Mexico relies on for about two billion dollars in revenues each year, Mexican police seemed unable or unwilling to catch and prosecute those responsible. After Jewel Strain and her husband were robbed in 1985, Mexican officials at first appeared to be falling all over each other to show interest in catching the guilty parties. But when the Strains, of Granbury, Texas, were brought to a prison in the state of Querétaro, supposedly to identify some suspects, the Strains found the men had been released just before they had arrived. A sympathetic prison official pulled them aside and told them that the men had been released because they were active-duty policemen.

Bobby Stone and his wife, Freda, of Brownsville, Texas, were robbed and she was raped, also in 1985. Stone, a former U.S. Border Patrol officer, provided Mexican authorities with police-artist sketches of the assailants. But when the Stones were asked to come to identity some men who had supposedly confessed to the come, they found the men, all of whom had been roughed up, looked nothing like the sketches. Stone said the police obviously wanted to get someone, anyone, to confess to the crime to clear it from the books.

A study by the U.S. embassy in Mexico City found that few serious crimes against Americans were ever resolved. But Americans were not being singled out, U.S. officials pointed out. Few serious crimes against anyone in Mexico are truly resolved.

When police did get a suspect, they often got an amazingly quick confession out of even the hardest cases, including Caro Quintero. One technique that seems particularly effective involves mineral water and chile peppers. Peppers or fiery chile powder are put into a bottle of Tehuacán, Mexico's best-selling mineral water. The carbonated mixture is shaken. The resulting geyser of water is forced up a suspect's nostrils. The pain caused by this suffocating procedure has been described as excruciating by those who have testified to international human-rights groups about it. Americans got a close-up glimpse of this practice in August 1986. A scandal erupted after some Mexican state police used it to interrogate undercover DEA agent Victor Cortéz, whom they had arrested as a supposed drug dealer. It is so widely known a technique of police torture that Mexicans have dubbed it tehuacanazo. Cortéz said he had also been tortured with electrical shocks to his body. The eleven police officers, all from the state of Jalisco, were suspended during an investigation. Cortéz provided Mexican authorities with a deposition about the torture. But when he declined to return to Mexico to testify personally, nothing was ever done to punish the men.

Torture is forbidden by the Mexican constitution. But after a particularly well-publicized spate of police-torture revelations in the mid-1980s, Sergio Garcia Ramirez, President Miguel de la Madrid's attorney general, admitted that torture was widespread among Mexican police, though not "institutionalized." One indication of how ingrained the torture tradition runs among the p~ lice occurred in 1985, when some Mexico City area officers were charged with torturing some accused car thieves. One policeman protested the charges vigorously. He told Mexico City reporters that he and his colleagues couldn't have been the ones responsible. "We are not that stupid," he said. "When we want to torture someone, we give him shocks on the tongue and testicles. No way do we leave visible marks on the body."

Likewise, after the September 1985 earthquakes in Mexico City, bodies of several Colombian drug dealers were found covered with cigarette burns amid the rubble of the detention cells of the city attorney general's office. According to reports in the government-influenced press, the attorney general, Victoria Adato de Ibarra, admitted that the men had been arrested without due process, but she denied they had been tortured. She told an investigative committee of the federal chamber of deputies that her police sometimes used torture. But there had been no need to do so in this case, she testified, because her office already had the information it needed from the suspects. Amid protests, she later resigned and was made a judge of the Mexican supreme court.

In the spring of 1988, those same police tortured a state police commander to death. Sub-commander Pablo Estanislao Aguilar of the state of Mexico was bound, beaten, and suffocated while in police hands, because the attorney general's police suspected he was behind the murder of the son of one of their commanders. The torture-murder created such a stink that the Mexico City attorney general fired his chief of police and most of his subdirectors and commanders.

Agustín nodded knowingly as I ticked off incidents of police abuse. He knew torture existed, of course, he said. But he insisted he had no personal knowledge of it. I could see Agustin was reluctant, maybe even worried, about discussing this point, so I returned to familiar ground. I told Agustin about some of my own experiences with traffic cops. I wanted to see if my encounters had been typical.

It hadn't taken long for me to meet the police. Just a few weeks after I had arrived in Mexico, I was stopped by two officers in a patrol car. The officer driving told me in stern tones that my car did not have the required decal in the back window to show I had paid my annual car tax, the tenencia. It was a serious violation, he added. Without that sticker, I could not drive my car farther. It would have to be impounded. Though new in the country, I had already been regaled by many Mexicans with horror stories about cars that had been stripped of everything valuable while parked in police impoundment lots. My car was brand-new. I did not want this to happen, so I appealed to the officers' reason. I pointed out that I had paid the tax. I had a receipt to prove it. The problem, I explained, was that the local delegación ("ward") office had lost thousands of paid applications for the stickers, including mine. It might be months before I got a decal, a clerk had told me. The officers were not sympathetic. The driver did say, however, that I might avoid all the bother of impoundment if I paid a fine directly to him. He would pay it for me as a "courtesy" to a foreigner in Mexico. I had just come from shopping. I had very little in cash on me. I told him I didn't have that much. In desperation, I said I couldn't afford to be without my car because I was a journalist. I needed it in my work, I told him. I pulled out my press credentials from Los Pinos (the Mexican White House) and the Interior Ministry, which controls internal security. Veteran journalists had told me to use my credentials in a pinch, with the police or anyone else. Even more than money, they said, the police understood power, the political power of a credential issued by the president or the interior minister. The officers conferred as they examined my IDs. After a while, I got a "Why didn't-you-show-us-these-in-the-first-place?" look from the two, who suddenly realized that they had wasted their time trying to get a bribe. Credentials returned, I got a snappy salute as the driver said, "Que le vaya bien," wishing me a safe journey. The driver turned to get back into his car. But, as an afterthought, he pivoted and asked me if he and his partner might have a little money for refrescos ("soft drinks"), since all our talking in the afternoon sun had caused quite a thirst. I was so relieved to be out from under the threat of impoundment that I gave them the few pesos I had. Later, as I thought about it, I became angry at myself for paying anything. After all, I had done nothing wrong. But I had a better appreciation for the fear and anger most Mexicans must feel when they are stopped by the police.

"It looks bad," admitted Agustín at the end of my story. "There's no doubt about it. It looks bad."

It doesn't have to be this way, however, he added. What was necessary, he said, was leadership. All the president or the chief of police had to do was tell citizens not to pay the bribes anymore. People should demand their tickets if they've actually committed an infraction, he argued. As in Tonio's case, the fine would probably be less than the bribe. If they hadn't done anything, then they should challenge the charges. Most policemen wouldn't want to be bothered with all the delay and red tape a challenge would involve, he said.

Agustín admitted that drivers such as Tonio, who often drove as they pleased, had become used to the "convenience" of paying fines on the spot. Others liked the ease of paying the cop on the beat a "tip" so they could double-park rather than hunt for scarce parking spaces. It would be hard to break them of this attitude, he agreed. More important, when I pressed him, he admitted that if past performance was an indication, government leadership against corruption was unlikely.

Every modem Mexican president, it seems, has launched an anticorruption program in the face of the embarrassing graft of his predecessor's administration. But not much happens after the policy is announced. Certainly that was the case with President Miguel de la Madrid. His administration (1982-88) followed that of José López Portillo (1976-82), whose reported grabs for public funds were excessive even by Mexican standards.

Unfortunately for de la Madrid, López Portillo was indiscreet about how he used the inexplicable wealth he amassed. In the final year of his term, he built a multimillion-dollar housing complex for himself and his family on a hill overlooking one of the busiest commuter routes in Mexico City. It was so visible a flaunting of his booty that people dubbed the complex "Dog Hill," a mocking reference to López Portillo's promise to defend the peso "like a dog"-a remark he made shortly before he devalued the peso drastically in 1982.

López Portillo's spokesman tried to downplay the lavishness of the ex-president's house in the Dog Hill complex. He told me it was a pinche casa ("tucking little house") that had just one bedroom, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, a bathroom-and a five-story library containing forty-thousand books and a spiral staircase. Mexican newspapers also reported that López Portillo had digs in France, Spain, and the Valle de Bravo, a weekend vacation area west of Mexico City. López Portillo also built a two-million-dollar villa in Acapulco for his mistress, Rosa Luz Alegría, whom he made his minister of tourism. However, his wife, who spent millions on shopping sprees abroad, occupied the villa before his mistress could move in. López Portillo had to build his paramour another house.

In López Portillo's last year as president, public hatred for him was so palpable that candidate de la Madrid had to make criticism of corrupt government officials a key part of his platform. In the Mexican style, however, de la Madrid never mentioned López Portillo or anyone else by name in his complaints.

De la Madrid began his anticorruption campaign with a flourish. He created Mexico's first controller general's office, whose sole function was to discourage and root out corruption. He disbanded Mexico City's dreaded secret police. He fired hundreds of federal police suspected of corruption. He required all top government officials, including himself, to file income statements. His administration said it would go after big fish and quickly instituted a fraud prosecution against one of López Portillo's cabinet members, Jorge Díaz Serrano, who had headed Pemex, the state-owned oil company-and been a rival of de la Madrid's for the presidency.

On closer examination, the program proved to be a lot less than met the eye. Several officials got star treatment once arrested. Diaz Serrano, who was charged with a thirty-four-million-dollar fraud involving the sale of two tankers to Pemex, wasn't exactly doing hard time when I visited him in jail in 1987. He was in the midst of throwing a birthday party for his wife, complete with a mariachi band. He had some of the best-pressed jail uniforms of anyone I saw there. And he had a personal computer in his cell to keep track of his case and his continuing business affairs. He was later convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison and fined more than fifty million dollars. His sentence was quickly cut to five years in prison, the amount of time he had already served while awaiting conviction.

After Diaz Serrano was picked up, few other high-level arrests were made. It became clear that what de la Madrid had in mind was not wiping out official corruption but merely returning it to historic levels. The housecleaning of crooked federal cops also began to backfire. Hundreds of out-of-work cops, who had only known a life of crime while on the force, became modern-day highwaymen. Thousands of public officials failed to file their income statements on time. None of the reports on file was available to the public. In its 1987 annual report, the controller general's office stated that the most important results of de la Madrid's anticorruption campaign (known in Spanish as renovaci6n moral) "are not easily quantifiable." Officials of that office told me that the biggest achievement of the anticorruption campaign had been to deter officials from committing crimes, although it was impossible to say how many they had deterred.

No charges were ever brought against López Portillo, even though a simple net-worth analysis of his wealth compared with his known income would have given many prosecutors plenty of ammunition. I asked the controller general's office why no action had been taken against the former president. The official response was that no evidence had been found. Mention was also made of the political crisis that might ensue if a former Mexican president were prosecuted, something that had never happened. Unofficially, as one of the controller general's aides walked me back to my car after the interview, I was told that presidents often become rich because people give them things. "It's not against the law, my friend," the smiling aide said.

The de la Madrid administration would also prosecute Agustín's onetime boss, Arturo Durazo, the chief of police in Mexico City during López Portillo's administration. It was a halfhearted, comic-opera prosecution. Durazo, who had openly lived the life of a multimillionaire on a modest salary, fled Mexico at the end of López Portillo's administration. He had been accused by many, including former aides, of drug trafficking, murder, and extortion. Despite such serious allegations, the Mexican police really didn't look for him very hard. It was the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation that ultimately captured Durazo, finding him on the lam in Puerto Rico in June 1984.

Durazo's apprehension created a dilemma for the de la Madrid government. If they failed to prosecute so notorious a fugitive, de la Madrid's anticorruption program would be exposed as a sham. But bringing Durazo back had its hazards. He knew enough to put a lot of officials in the administration-his former colleagues-in jail if he talked. The government decided in favor of an extradition petition. But they just barely made the U.S. court deadline. And the crimes they listed in the petition were the least serious ones Durazo had been accused of.

The petition said nothing about Durazo's alleged drug-trafficking activities, even though Durazo had been implicated in drug trafficking in a 1976 indictment by a Dade County, Florida, grand Jury. Likewise, there was no mention of Durazo's supposed involvement in the mass murder of a group of Colombian drug dealers. According to Durazo's own colleagues, at least twelve Colombians and a Mexican were tortured and dumped into the Tula River sewer system so Durazo could get his hands on the estimated five million dollars in cash the Colombian gang had when they were arrested. Some said more had been murdered. That was the testimony of José González González, Durazo's former security chief, who wrote a best-seller about the Durazo era.

De la Madrid's government did say it wanted to prosecute Durazo for extortion, illegal possession of weapons, and possession of contraband. After a lengthy series of hearings, a U.S. judge allowed Durazo to be extradited in April 1986. But he threw out the contraband charge (involving possession of items that had not been legally imported to Mexico) because it was not a crime in the United States.

The government's lawyers made fools of themselves pursuing the arms charge. Some of the weapons, it turned out, were antiques. Many weren't operational. Some blew up in investigators' faces when test-fired. Others, all automatic types, could only be possessed by army personnel under Mexican law. But Durazo pointed out that he had been given a four-star army general's rank by his boyhood friend, López Portillo.

That really left only the extortion charge, which allegedly involved payments that thousands of Mexico City police were forced to make to Durazo and his henchmen as the price for getting a job, a particular assignment, or a promotion. When the proceedings against Durazo finally began, it seemed the government was also bent on purposely blowing prosecution of this charge. Scores of witnesses had signed statements confirming the system of extorted fees. Mexican prosecutors charged that Durazo alone had taken in $2.5 million in such fees in his six years as police chief. But when witnesses against Durazo were called to affirm their statements in court, many could not be found because they had fled the country. All the rest, save two, recanted, claiming that they had been tortured into testifying against the rotund former police chief. Prosecutors explained that the witnesses had been intimidated or paid off by Durazo or his friends. While Durazo tied prosecutors in knots, he lived well in jail. He had his cell fitted with a color television, a videocassette recorder, a Jacuzzi, and wall-to-wall carpeting.

Durazo said González González, one of the two who did not recant, had made up stories about him in order to sell books. He said he knew nothing of the Tula River murders. He claimed that the money he had received from underlings had been mostly Christmas gifts. Durazo denied all financial wrongdoing. In a 1983 statement, Durazo admitted to a net worth of $640,000, which was still a lot of money for someone who never earned a salary of more than ten thousand dollars a year. U.S. prosecutors who handled Durazo's extradition proceeding estimated he was worth a minimum of $7 million. Mexican prosecutors thought his fortune might be more like $200 million.

Despite his denials, Durazo, on a police official's modest salary, managed to acquire a $2.5-million hilltop mansion in Mexico City, a Pacific beach hideaway modeled after the Greek Parthenon, a dog track, a horse track, nineteen thoroughbred horses, a bull ring, a personal disco modeled after the defunct Studio 54, a fleet of antique cars, a collection of expensive jewelry, and bank accounts with millions of dollars on deposit. When the U.S. judge considering Durazo's extradition asked how this was possible Durazo's lawyers responded: "Shrewd investments."

The other witness who stuck to his guns was Ramón Mota Sánchez, who succeeded Durazo as police chief. He resigned and disappeared shortly before he was to be caped to ratify his limited statement against Durazo. After months of awkward searching, prosecutors finally got Mota to make a brief appearance. Not having been one of Durazo's colleagues, the former army general merely confirmed he had found incriminating documents in Durazo's office when he took over as police chief.

Near the end of de la Madrid's administration, the courts still hadn't been able to convict Durazo. But even if he were to be convicted, it's unlikely the government would ever prosecute him for drug trafficking, murder, or the other serious charges people have made against him. Under the U.S.-Mexican extradition treaty that governed his return to Mexico, Mexico would need to obtain special permission from the U.S. State Department to go beyond the crimes listed in the extradition petition. Typically, this permission is not granted.

Agustin had met Durazo once. It was a ceremonial visit on one of Agustín's anniversaries on the force. Durazo had received Agustín in his lavish downtown office, dressed in his trademark powder-blue police uniform. I asked Agustín what impression he had gained of Durazo.

"He didn't ask me for a bribe," Agustin said, flashing a little smirk.

I reeled off some of the other famous bribe cases that had come to light during my stay in Mexico. In 1986, Alfredo Rios Galeana, a former cop who had become Mexico's most notorious bank robber, paid off a Mexico City jail warden to let him escape. He robbed a bank on the way out of town and was never recaptured. In 1985, after he was arrested in Costa Rica and returned to Mexico, Rafael Caro Quintero, the drug kingpin who bribed Commander Pavón Reyes with a check, availed himself of jail guards' openness to bribes. In January 1986, it came to light that Caro had in his cell gold Rolex watches, expensive cowboy boots, stereo systems, non-prison-issue clothing, and $630,000 in cash. According to his lawyer, all these items were stolen by prison guards, who apparently felt Caro wasn't giving them enough. An investigation was launched into why Caro had such luxuries in his cell. But no results were ever made public. A few months later, DEA officials who visited Caro's cell said he had been permitted to knock down the bars between his cell and those of his co-defendants to create a "suite" for his gang. It had a marble-floored sauna, Oriental carpets, a private, fenced exercise area just outside, and a live-in cook to prepare Caro's favorite meals. On days when prisoners were allowed to bring in their wives for conjugal visits, DEA officials told me, Caro was allowed to entertain a bevy of hookers in his suite.

Bribes also kept Mexico's most wanted drug dealer at large for years, according to the DEA. One of Caro Quintero's partners, Miguel Félix Gallardo, was sighted several times in Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa, a major drug-trafficking state, after Caro was arrested. Gallardo was wanted for questioning in the murder investigation of Enrique Camarena, the DEA agent whose February 1985 murder was allegedly masterminded by Caro. When I visited Culiacán in 1986, several people told me that Gallardo had just thrown a big party for his goddaughter in the capital. He had sent out fancy invitations to state bigwigs, indicating the date and place of the fiesta and his sponsorship of it as the girl's godfather. Federal anti-drug police insisted they were unable to locate him because most of the state anti-drug police were on his payroll. Local police supposedly warned Gallardo of federal moves to capture him and refrained from passing on information about his whereabouts to federal officials.

Agustín didn't deny that corruption was rampant within police or prison ranks in Mexico. But it was obvious that he didn't really feel comfortable talking about whether this cop or that warden might be crooked. He did feel strongly, however, that it wasn't necessary to be corrupt to get by as a cop.

"We're not here to charge for infractions," he said. "My job is to keep traffic moving. We [the police] are here for the citizens. We are here for Mexico."

Agustin lamented that bribery was the first response of the majority of Mexicans when they encountered the police.

"I don't allow it," he said firmly. "I try to educate them about what to do. I tell them they can pay the fine in a bank or the delegación office."

That was a laudable goal, but hardly an easy one to achieve in a city where most drivers never take driving lessons, where thousands don't have a driver's license, and where millions don't bother to get accident insurance. Making honest drivers out of Mexicans would also be tough because of the country's easy atmosphere of corruption. From the days of the Aztecs and the Spanish conquistadors, there have been corrupt Mexican officials whose rampant greed has infected many aspects of Mexican life. Even the 1910 Revolution, which threw out the corrupt dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, did not end corruption. A fine portrait of turn-of-the-century corruption in Mexico is found in B. Traven's novel Government, the story of Don Gabriel, whose uses a low-paying civil-service job in his village to enrich himself. In the opening paragraph of the book, the author states the philosophy of Don Gabriel's fellow civil servant, Don Casimiro: "He served his country not for his country's good, but in order to profit at its expense. If a man can earn no more as a servant of the State than he can by running a snack bar, there is no reason whatever why he should aspire to devote his energies to his country's service."

I had grown up in Chicago, where, at one time, a good policeman always had change for a twenty-dollar bill. Vote early and often, was the slogan of local Democrats-and, some would argue, still is. But despite all the crooked city hall pols, gritting state legislators, and bent White House aides I encountered in the United States, nothing prepared me for the breadth of corruption I found in Mexico. Crocked union officials skimmed millions from revenues of state-owned companies. Government officials stole millions more from public treasuries. Bureaucrats wanted bribes to perform routine services. Customs officers took bribes. Immigration officers took bribes. Many police, of course, took bribes.

All these bad examples of officialdom have had an impact on the citizenry. Many adopt a larcenous approach in business, watering down or short-weighting products or turning out dangerous or shoddy goods. Their attitude seems to be that any trouble can be resolved with money to the right person. Businessmen keep double sets of books to evade income taxes. Others routinely deal in cash to hide income and attract customers by promising not to charge Mexico's oppressive 15-percent national sales tax. Thousands of Mexicans staff a thriving black market where millions of Mexicans, including government officials, shop for contraband goods that have been smuggled into Mexico to avoid customs duties. This is not to say that Mexico is the most corrupt country in the world. It is not. During my time in Mexico, Latin American countries such as Noriega's Panama and Stroessner's Paraguay overshadowed Mexico when it came to crookedness. They were veritable kleptocracies. Unlike those two, Mexico drew the line at selling citizenship or shelter to ex-Nazis, on-the-lam drug dealers, or famous assassins. But sometimes the magnitude of corruption in Mexico was breathtaking. In 1985, the governor of the state of Morelos fired the entire state police force after looking into how widespread police corruption was. When drug dealer Caro Quintero was arrested in the same year, he confessed that he had just about every state policemen in his home base of Jalisco on the take as well as many high police officials elsewhere. In the same year, it was discovered that drug dealers had thousands of acres under cultivation for marijuana in the state of Chihuahua. Hordes of peasants were used to harvest the drug. They kept the project a secret for years because they were paid two and three times their normal wages. Army troops were on the drug dealers' payroll, too. Soldiers kept curious outsiders away from the marijuana fields and bought takeout lunches each day for the workers.

Bribery, to be frank, is what many Mexicans (and resident foreigners) think of first when they wanted to get something done. It's an insidious attitude of epidemic proportions. It is probably the most serious obstacle to Mexico's becoming a modern, developed nation. General Mota Sánchez, while he was Mexico City's Police chief, once captured the scope of this unstated assumption about Mexicans' venality. In response to complaints about police corruption, Mota said it would be unrealistic to hope that he or the de la Madrid government could eliminate it entirely. "The police cannot be an island of purity in a society like ours," he said, "but we will try to reduce corruption to the level of the rest of the country."

More than a few Mexicans were astounded when I told them that I was going through all the time-consuming legal steps required to adopt my son, Alex, in Mexico. The normal method of adoption is to pay a woman for her baby and then register the child as one's own, never telling the authorities or the child what really happened. If a clerk at the birth-certificate registry office raises an eyebrow, one can always offer a "tip" to move things along.

Even the Mexican courts are up to their gavels in bribery. Leaders of local bar associations openly complain that many judges are on the take, handing out justice to the highest bidder. Trial lawyers regularly bitch that they have to pay "tips" to court clerks and judges just to get routine papers filled. Defense attorney Hector Montoya Fernández got so riled up about the need to pay people off in the Mexico City court system that he held a press conference in 1985 to charge-that the courts were "teeming with rats, filth and corruption, with only a few honorable exceptions." He said court officials "were nothing but booty hunters who keep lawyers on both sides of a case running around uselessly until they [the lawyers] decide to accept the corrupt system and pay. This is the only way to see action on a case."

In this sea of corruption, Agustín was as improbable as a salmon swimming upriver. When I met him, he was making about eight thousand pesos a day ($4.75). That was about a third more than the typical Mexican. But he clearly wasn't getting rich on it. He rented his house from his in-laws. He'd probably never be able to save enough to buy his own home, he said. But Agustin had become rich in other ways. His parents had only finished grammar school. He hadn't gotten beyond high school. But his oldest son was in a national university, studying architecture. Two others of his six children were in college preparatory schools. The other three, with prodding from their parents, were likely to follow suit, he said.

It wasn't easy getting his kids that far, he admitted. Tuition was nominal in the public schools. But sacrifices had to be made to pay for books, supplies, and clothes. To economize, his kids used books from libraries when they could. They were encouraged to study hard and discouraged from too much time in front of the television or in the street. Agustin and his wife often went without so his kids would have what they needed.

"You can get by," he said. "Obviously you can because here I am. The salary is sufficient."

In early 1988, I drove back to Azcapotzalco. I guess I just wanted to deal with that doubt that had been at the back of my mind ever since I had met Agustín. "Was this guy for real?" I had asked myself more than once. I had told some of my Mexican friends about Agustín. Without exception, I was informed that I had been taken in. Cynicism about the police ran deep. I decided I would watch Agustín one more time, again unobserved, to see if this was the man Diogenes had so long searched for.

I chose the morning rush hour again, because it was easy to park nearby and remain unnoticed. I brought some binoculars. I wanted a close-up look at Agustín's conversations with drivers he stopped. I felt a little funny using binoculars. But I wanted to see if money was passing, however so slyly. I watched Agustín for a better part of two hours. He did not disappoint. He did nothing untoward.

I thought about talking with Agustín again. But what would I say? I couldn't very well congratulate him for passing the honesty test after my two hours of spying. I left Agustín as I had found him, a happy man in a job he loved, a rara avis for my life list.