Tijuana Gays Fearful of Crackdown : Rights: Police raids on two bars have resulted in unprecedented public debate. Some worry AIDS education programs will be hurt.

On a Saturday night three weeks ago, dozens of police officers led by a magistrate raided two gay bars in this city’s famed downtown tourist district and arrested about 50 patrons.

The men were brought to a police station, where they claim some officers taunted them with anti-homosexual epithets and told the Americans in the group to stay out of Tijuana. Authorities fined two dozen of the men for allegedly committing “immoral acts,” then released all of them.

The incident, rare in a city known for its tolerant attitude, has angered gays on both sides of the border and sparked threats of a joint border protest and tourist boycott. Perhaps more significantly, it has mobilized Tijuana’s gay community and resulted in unprecedented public debate and private meetings between gay leaders and top city officials.

“These are not the kind of discussions that happen frequently,” said Victor Clark Alfaro, a human-rights activist who attended a meeting last week between gay leaders and city officials. “It’s interesting to see how the gay community has organized. We haven’t seen this before. . . . Perhaps it has surprised the authorities.”

According to people on both sides, the controversy illustrates complex and sometimes contradictory changes occurring in Tijuana and in Mexico. On one hand, they say the ruling National Action Party (PAN), a conservative opposition party that won local elections in 1989 with a reformist, anti-corruption message, has shown unusual openness to holding a dialogue with gays. On the other hand, City Hall’s reform campaign to remake Tijuana’s image includes a crackdown on vice, and gays fear that action is making them the targets of a moralistic crusade.

Members of the Tijuana gay community have been visible until now mainly as leaders and teachers in the fight against AIDS, a disease challenging the city’s overburdened health services. Activists have set up clinics, conducted education programs, even provided shelter for AIDS sufferers shunned by family and medical providers and left to die in the streets.

Human rights are suddenly a new rallying point. Gay leaders have demanded an investigation of the Nov. 30 raid and a promise that such incidents will stop.

“There is an atmosphere of fear now; people are tense, people aren’t going out,” said Max Mejia, editor of a local gay magazine. He said he believes that AIDS education efforts, which focused largely on nightspots, will suffer.

“The best ally that AIDS has in Tijuana is fear,” Mejia said. “The best thing that can be done to fight AIDS is that gays are not afraid to go out in public. . . . We want to know whether we are going to be treated like people or second-class citizens.”

Although city officials promise that Mayor Carlos Montejo Favela will meet with gay leaders in January, they insist that the police acted properly. They say patrons were seen kissing and fondling each other, which is illegal for heterosexual couples as well, a misdemeanor called “immoral acts in a public place.” Mejia says he saw no such acts when he witnessed the raid at one of the bars.

According to City Manager Jesus A. Sandoval Franco, police were responding to complaints about the bars, as part of a campaign under a newly toughened municipal code to control vice and street problems such as unlicensed vendors.

“This is not something against homosexuals,” Sandoval said. “We respect the liberty of opinion. But as for public conduct, every country has different customs which must be respected. . . . Perhaps the (bar patrons) from the United States thought that Tijuana, because it is a border town and is so visited by tourists, would have what they consider a more liberal attitude. But we don’t think that’s the case in the current administration.”

About 10 of the men arrested were Americans, mostly Latinos from Los Angeles and San Diego who are regulars at the bars, activists said.

Sandoval, an administrator with a low-key, direct style, said authorities are looking into complaints that police officers mocked some of those arrested with Mexican slurs against homosexuals. He said officers could be admonished as a result.

“It’s possible some of the officers could have gotten carried away,” he said. “You have to understand that in Mexico there is a very high concept of manhood. If someone had been beaten . . . that would be serious. But because someone used Mexican folkloric terms to say ‘homosexual,’ perhaps that is not a very serious offense.”

Anti-homosexual feeling in Mexican society has roots in religious and cultural values. Homosexuals in Mexico have traditionally been targets of discrimination, blackmail and verbal and physical abuse, particularly by law enforcement, according to human-rights activists.

“Gays, young people and migrants are traditionally afraid of the police,” Mejia said during an interview at Emilio’s, a dimly lit coffeehouse in a parking garage that houses the magazine and meetings of a group called FIGHT, the Spanish acronym for International Federation for the Guarantees of Human Rights. “We are a gold mine. They can rob us, assault us, insult us, blackmail us.”

But the reality is more complex than the stereotype, experts said--Mexican machismo allows for considerable tolerance of bisexuality among males, for example.

The last large-scale police operations against clubs frequented by homosexuals in Tijuana took place about 10 years ago, Mejia said.

In the 1970s and 1980s, gay-oriented organizations grew in Tijuana, benefiting from the comparatively liberal lifestyle, the proximity of gay activism in Southern California and changing Mexican attitudes. The movement gained the urgency of self-preservation with the advent of AIDS, a disease that still provokes widespread fear and discrimination.

Because of their work to change attitudes toward AIDS, gay leaders say the raids at the two popular nightspots, El Ranchero and Los Equipales, are disturbing symptoms of a hard-line policy that could prove counterproductive. The posture of the PAN government is paradoxical, they claim. During past administrations controlled by the nationally dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), there was also occasional harassment of gays, but it was more easily scotched with payoffs.

“The PAN is less corrupt,” said Alejandro Garcia, a schoolteacher and activist who volunteers at a free AIDS clinic. “They have a good side, they have tried to govern well . . . but their ideology is more conservative, repressive, moralistic. They have given the police more power to determine what is immoral.”

While City Manager Sandoval said the city supports anti-AIDS work and has no intention of harassing anyone, he made it clear there could be new police operations at nightspots if there are new complaints. Ultimately, he said, he feels the public dialogue about the issue shows that Tijuana is changing for the better.

“In previous administrations, there would have been no response to these grievances,” he said. “Perhaps we can see a positive aspect to all of this. . . . We simply want to tell the truth about what happened, about what our policy is, and leave it up to the tourists and the people in general to decide whether we have acted well or badly.”