The Dark Side of Mexico That Officials Rush to Deny : Human Rights: Although Mexico is no El Salvador, there is a pattern of selective abuse that allows torture, jailings, disappearances--even murder.

The word was that Norma Corona Sapienz “stepped on too many toes.”

She was not afraid to denounce crime, torture and atrocities committed by drug traffickers, the Mexican army and police, local and federal. Indeed, as a lawyer and president of the Commission for the Defense of Human Rights in the state of Sinaloa, Corona was investigating the murder of a client and colleague and three Venezuelan nationals. She knew they had been kidnaped and murdered by people wearing the uniform of the Federal Judiciary Police. Officially, the murderers ere drug traffickers disguised as policemen.

On May 22, Corona, 35, was shot to death by three gunmen in downtown Culiacan as she tried to escape them. They were seen fleeing in a blue Chevrolet pickup without license plates. A year earlier, she had reported to authorities that three thugs in a blue Chevrolet pickup without license plates had warned her to stop meddling in their business. As yet, no one has been charged in her slaying.

Corona’s death, according to her friends, occurred at a high point of hercareer: The local Legislature had just passed her bill criminalizing physical torture.

Now, her name must be added to the list of human-rights defenders who have been murdered in Sinaloa, in northwest Mexico. Jesus Michel Jacobo, another member of the commission, was shot to death Dec. 16, 1987. No one has been charged with his murder.

Corona’s case and others put Mexico in a politically awkward position. Unlike El Salvador, Guatemala and Chile under Augusto Pinochet, the country does not have a reputation for violating human rights. But there is no denying that there exists a pattern of selective abuse that allows torture, jailings, unexplained disappearances and murder to occur.

As during the Spanish conquest, peasants and Indians in rural Mexico are mostly the victims of human-rights abuses. “Hardly a day passes,” said one of Mexico’s foremost human-rights advocates, “without one peasant or Indian being jailed, tortured or assassinated for challenging the local c acique (boss) while defending his political, social or land rights.” These slayings go mostly unnoted. Neither the press nor the authorities make it a priority to denounce and prosecute their perpetrators.

Bad as it is in rural Mexico, the human-rights situation in the cities is also worsening. Due to the economic crisis that has plagued Mexico since 1982, street crimes have skyrocketed. Drug trafficking, with its attendant violence and corruption, has also contributed to human-rights violations.

The expansion of political activity--and its associated fraud--into the country has created a climate of social instability that feeds human-rights abuses. The deaths, jailings and torture tied to the recent elections in the Mexican states of Michoacan and Guerrero testify to this new trend.

Equal to the problem of the human-rights violations themselves is the impunity enjoyed by their perpetrators. The police and political class supposedly responsible for bringing them to justice seem indifferent. The official investigations generally are superficial, the follow-up ridiculous. The crime is soon forgotten by everyone except the grieving relatives. A country already cynical about the reach of justice grows ever more cynical.

There are, however, some favorable human-rights developments in Mexico. Foremost among them was the institution of the Academy of Human Rights in 1984. The independent organization investigates human-rights violations as well as trains people to detect them. Its legal arm, the Mexican Commission on Human Rights, defends people whose rights have been abused.

The Mexican government has also made progress. Shortly after assuming office in December, 1988, Carlos Salinas de Gortari created the first human-rights office. Luis Ortiz Monasterio, a respected human-rights activist, directs it. But the office is in the wrong place--the Ministry of Interior Government. This is the same ministry that is responsible for ferreting out abuse and fraud in the electoral process.

Until recently, the Mexican government had emphatically denied that it was failing to correct individual cases of human-rights violations. And after the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights, an arm of the Organization of American States, denounced the electoral frauds of 1985 and 1986 in Mexico and their associated human-rights abuses, it predictably tried to shrug the whole thing off as interference in its internal affairs.

Hopefully, the death of Norma Corona Sapienz will change all that, by forcing Mexico’s leaders to accept responsibility for safeguarding human rights of the country’s citizens.