Gays Mobilize in Reaction to Tijuana Vice Crackdown

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

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

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 significant, it has mobilized Tijuana’s gay community and created 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 Tijuana-based 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.”

People on both sides say the controversy illustrates complex and sometimes contradictory changes under way in Tijuana. On one hand, they say the local conservative opposition National Action Party, called PAN, which won election here in 1989 with a reformist, anti-corruption message, has shown unusual openness in talking with gay leaders. On the other hand, a City Hall reform campaign to remake Tijuana’s image includes a crackdown on vice, and gays fear that is making them the targets of a moralistic crusade.

“This is not something against homosexuals,” City Manager Jesus A. Sandoval Franco 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.”

Until now, the Tijuana gay community has been visible mainly as leaders and teachers in the fight against AIDS, which is challenging the city’s overburdened health services. Activists have set up a clinic, conducted education programs and 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 incident, and a promise that there will be no more such raids.

“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 believes education efforts by gay groups, which were conducted in 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 next month, they also insist that police acted properly. They say patrons were kissing and fondling each other--conduct that is illegal for heterosexual couples as well. Mejia says he saw no such acts when he witnessed the raid at one bar.

Police were responding to complaints under a new municipal code designed to control vice and such street problems as unlicensed vendors, Sandoval said. About 10 of the men arrested were Americans, mostly Southern California Latinos who are regulars at the bars, activists said.

Sandoval said authorities are looking into complaints that police officers mocked some men with Mexican slang that insult homosexuals. If they did, they could be reprimanded, he said.

“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. But beyond stereotypes of intolerance, experts say, Mexican “machismo” paradoxically allows for male bisexuality. Yet effeminate-seeming Mexican men have traditionally been targets of discrimination, blackmail and verbal and physical abuse, particularly by law enforcement, according to human rights activists.

In the 1970s and 1980s, gay-oriented organizations grew in Tijuana, benefiting from the fairly liberal lifestyle, Southern California’s gay activism, 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.

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 to their AIDS education work. The posture of the PAN government is paradoxical, they claim: past administrations controlled by the nationally dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party, called PRI, occasionally harassed gays, but the harassment 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.”