Mexico Inmates Organize Against Abuses in Prisons : Human rights: Committees collect accounts of bribery and torture and publicize alleged incidents.

Alejandro Hernandez knows much more about extortion today than he did when he was arrested for that crime two years ago. Unable to meet his $11,000 bail, he has been subjected to what he calls systematic extortion at the prison on the northern limits of Mexico City where he is being held awaiting trial.

Hernandez said he had to pay guards at the Reclusorio Norte prison $700 so that they would not beat him, $17 a week rent to share with four people a cell designed for three and $1 a day not to be rousted out of bed during nightly inspections.

It’s an old story in Mexican prisons. But Hernandez and half a dozen fellow inmates introduced a new twist: In January, they formed a human rights committee to protest abuses inside the prison.

Committees of political prisoners are common in Latin America. But the Committee for the Human Rights of Prisoners is unusual because its goal is to improve conditions for all who have been imprisoned and because its members include people such as Hernandez who have no previous history of political protest.

“This is part of a general burgeoning of human-rights issues in Mexico, a greater awareness that you can do something about (abuses) if you organize,” said political commentator Jorge Castaneda.

Committee members have produced studies and surveys with detailed accounts of torture and bribery. They organized a news conference inside the prison to release results to local media. They have filed 19 complaints with the National Human Rights Commission, staged two hunger strikes and met with the mayor of Mexico City when he visited the prison.

Since the committee’s inception, similar groups have been formed in three other Mexico City prisons where suspects await trial and at the state penitentiary in Tijuana, which houses both convicted prisoners and crime suspects. The groups have established contact with each other and ties to outside human-rights organizations.

Some reformers--including members of a government commission that has been highly critical of conditions in the eight Mexico City prisons--are skeptical about the groups.

“While there is no doubt that there are grave violations of human rights inside our prisons, it is difficult to know the truth about the prisoner committees,” said Manuel Castro y del Valle, chairman of the commission that has published reports critical of the prisons. “Prisoner organizations can be easily manipulated by drug traffickers or political groups, although I am not saying that they are.”

He noted that the committees are organized in the city’s most troubled prisons, four overcrowded institutions where suspects, unable to post bail, are held until they have gone through the legal process and are convicted or exonerated. (Convicted criminals are sent to a separate penitentiary.)

Although Mexico’s judicial process should take a maximum of two years, Castro y del Valle’s commission found that more than 1,000 prisoners--half at the Reclusorio Norte--have waited from three to 10 years for sentencing, contributing to a city prison system that has 10,603 prisoners and places for 5,860. Significantly, the only two suspects’ prisons without inmate committees are women’s institutions; they are not overcrowded.

“Overcrowding is at the root of many prison problems,” Castro y del Valle said. Citing a report from the National Human Rights Commission, he added that the problems confronting Mexico City prisons also are present nationwide.

And for all his reservations about inmate committees, Castro y del Valle acknowledged that outsiders are often frustrated in their efforts to monitor prison conditions. For example, he recalled being stalled for 1 1/2 hours during a surprise inspection of a maximum-security area.

In contrast, prisoners have direct access to information about daily life behind bars because they live it. And through their efforts, the general perception of an abusive, corrupt prison system is being exchanged for a clear, quantified measure of exactly how bad life is in Mexican prisons.

Their activities have put the image-conscious Mexican government in a bind. Authorities do not want to be seen as openly repressive of human-rights groups. But the prison committees’ studies provide constant reminders of abuses documented with less frequency by organizations ranging from the government’s own National Human Rights Commission to worldwide groups such as Amnesty International and Americas Watch.

Hernandez’s committee, for example, recently completed a study of overcrowding at Reclusorio Norte, elaborating on the Americas Watch report “Prison Conditions in Mexico,” released this spring. The prisoners’ study compares four cellblocks, each about 115 square feet in size. It tells of one cellblock housing five prisoners, another 65--including 15 men who sleep in a 15-by-2-foot area called “the ducts,” a space that contains the plumbing and drainage ditches.

“The stench is intolerable, and they enter through a hole,” the report states. “The ducts are a punishment area for those who have no money, the prison paupers, whom the authorities consider less than human.”

Luis Fernando Roldan, committee president, commented: “Mexican prisons do not punish delinquency. They punish poverty.”

Prison committees also have begun to record the inmates’ condition on arrival, compiling reports of torture by arresting officers. In a survey of one-third of the 180 women awaiting trial at the northern Mexico City women’s prison, 85% said they had been tortured on arrest. They had been beaten, threatened, sexually abused or tortured so severely that two women had miscarried, inmates told the Committee Against Torture.

“Nearly all of the women who were tortured were tortured in front of their children,” said Ana Maria Vera Smith, a committee member who is awaiting trial in a publicized political kidnaping. She said torture is generally used to obtain confessions, a conclusion reached in other reports, including a study published earlier this year by the Tijuana-based Binational Center for Human Rights.

The prisoners’ study, conducted in June, also indicates that changes in the law to require evidence beyond a signed confession to obtain a conviction have not stopped torture.

Committee members are convinced that by publicly identifying problems, prisoners can force authorities to clean up the prisons.

But Hernandez’s wife, Adriana, wonders how long authorities will tolerate such complaints before they take revenge on prisoners or their families.

“Normally, I stay as far as I can from the committee work,” she said. Still, she agreed to escort a reporter from the visitors’ entrance across the walkways and patios, up the stairs to the visiting area where committee members waited to talk. She smiled politely and shook her head firmly as prisoners offered their services as guides each step of the way.

“Between bribes to guards and tips to these guides, it cost me $30 to find my husband the first time I came--$30 we could not afford,” she said. After two years of twice-weekly visits to the prison--a two-hour bus ride from her home in one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods--she now walks through the prison yard with self-assurance.

But that confidence dissipated in the visiting area as committee members pulled out folders of reports and news clippings detailing abuses and corruption. She glanced nervously around the room, noting which other prisoners watched.

This is an especially difficult time for the Hernandez family because he is entering the final phase of his trial. In his 40s, with black-rimmed glasses and thinning, sandy hair, Hernandez looks like a storekeeper, which he was before his arrest.

The father of four said his only previous contact with the criminal justice system was through friends who are federal judicial police, Mexico’s equivalent of FBI agents. He and two agents are accused of threatening to report another man for tax fraud unless he paid them $4,000. If found guilty, Hernandez will be transferred because the Reclusorio Norte is only for inmates awaiting trial and sentencing.

His wife fears that, as punishment for his committee work, Hernandez will be sent, in the event he is convicted, to Santa Marta Acatitla. It is a 33-year-old penitentiary built for 1,500 inmates but housing 2,918. After a night visit, Americas Watch inspectors reported that “the darkness accentuated the prison’s dampness, cold and overall gloom and revealed how few lights functioned in the facility.”

Hernandez doubts that he would be sent to Santa Marta. First, he said, the evidence against him is weak, only the word of the person who accuses him of extortion, and his two alleged accomplices have been exonerated. More important, if authorities transfer him to Santa Marta, they run the risk that he will start another committee there, he said.

Adriana Hernandez recalled those words as she walked back across the prison yard, struggling to carry two poster-sized wood carvings her husband made for her to sell on consignment. “I hope he is right,” she said. “I just cannot stand much more.”