Mexico Unveils Anti-Corruption Plan : Extortion: Officials vow to crack down on holiday abuses at the border, and Tijuana says it will pay its police more to discourage bribe-taking.

Mexican authorities have unveiled a series of anti-corruption measures designed to make it easier--and potentially less threatening--for Mexican citizens and other travelers entering Mexico during the holiday season.

In a broad effort announced this week in Tijuana and other border cities, officials vowed to crack down on extortion and abuse of some of the hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens residing in the United States who are expected to return south for the holidays.

Among other things, federal authorities are distributing a kind of “know your rights” pamphlet and have set up a new, toll-free 800 number for reporting shakedowns.

In its announcement, the Mexican Interior Ministry stated that “no judicial agent may act against migrant workers who return to Mexico.”

The pamphlet notes, for instance, that Mexican citizens can bring personal goods worth up to $300 into the nation without paying taxes. Mexican immigration officials have long solicited bribes from unsuspecting migrants arriving with everything from foodstuffs to clothing to electronic goods.

The program also involves streamlined entry procedures, with the creation of information booths along the border for returning migrants.

And, in Tijuana, the most populous Mexican border city and a key migratory corridor, a new, opposition administration has promised that police officers’ salaries will be doubled permanently, starting this week, in an effort to reduce the illicit payments that have long been endemic among underpaid Mexican police and officials.

Last week, city officials also said the government will now pick up the costs of police uniforms and other equipment.

“The idea is to lift morale and reduce the possibility of acts of corruption,” said Gabriel Huerta, a spokesman for Tijuana Mayor Carlos Montejo Favela, who took office Dec. 1, vowing to increase police salaries.

Traditionally, Mexican customs and immigration officials fatten their wallets during December.

The numbers of migrants heading home for the holidays, always large, has increased considerably since the 1986 amnesty law in the United States provided temporary legal residence for more than 3 million foreigners, more than two-thirds of whom are Mexican citizens and more than half of whom are residents of California.

However, Victor Clark Alfaro, a human-rights activist in Tijuana who has documented cases of harassment directed at migrants, noted that the effort is limited by the fact that it does not appear to extend beyond the border region, even though most migrants are bound for their former homes in the Mexican interior.

“Corruption doesn’t stop at the border,” he said.

Montejo, a 57-year-old former banker who ran under the banner of the National Action Party, is the first-ever opposition mayor of Tijuana.

The ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI, has long dominated Mexican government, but its reputation as corrupt, inefficient and anti-democratic has cost the party considerable prestige and a number of races, notably last July’s mayoral contest in Tijuana and the governor’s race in Baja California, which was also won by National Action. The PRI standard-bearer, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, is anxious to reverse the party’s sullied image; he has embraced good-government themes.

The two anti-corruption actions in Baja--raising police salaries in Tijuana and increasing safeguards for returning migrants--were taken separately, but together the measures illustrate the reformist spirit prevalent in Mexican government today, both on the national and regional levels. Thus, PRI authorities based in Mexico City spearheaded the initiative to protect returning migrants, while local officials in Tijuana, affiliated with the opposition National Action Party, were behind the raises in police salaries.

Despite the considerable hoopla surrounding the anti-corruption initiatives, however, there is still much skepticism south of the border about the efficacy of reducing long-rooted practice of bribery, especially since official salaries remain ridiculously low by U.S. standards. Even with a doubling of their salaries, Tijuana’s 1,600 police officers will still only earn slightly less than $100 a week. (Beginning police officers in San Diego earn almost $500 weekly.)

Moreover, skeptics in Mexico accustomed to the periodic launching of anti-corruption campaigns say reality seldom lives up to the rhetoric.

Indeed, when ex-Tijuana Mayor Federico Valdes declared three years ago that Mexicans returning from the United States would be welcomed with “open arms,” some migrants replied that they would more likely be received with “open palms”--the hands of police officials soliciting cash.

“These (latest) actions are just first steps to reduce official extortion and other abuse,” said Clark, the rights activist. “The structure of corruption remains in place.”