When Agents Cross Over the Borderline : Law enforcement: Charges of wrongdoing in Border Patrol have forced even loyalists to call for reforms.

From California to Texas, agents of the Border Patrol--the guardians of U.S. law and order on the frontier with Mexico--have crossed the line into lawbreaking and disorder.

The ignoble record in the 1990s includes agents prosecuted or disciplined for myriad offenses: unjustified shootings, sexual misconduct, beatings, stealing money from prisoners, drug trafficking, embezzlement, perjury and indecent exposure. Agent Luis Santiago Esteves, sent to prison last year for rape, prowled lonely desert environs using his badge to stalk women, authorities say.

The problems of the long-controversial federal border police have intensified in the past decade as illegal immigration skyrocketed, as the Border Patrol assumed a front-line role in the drug war, and as the force swelled to more than 4,000 agents.

A U.S. judge in El Paso ruled in December that the Border Patrol has committed “wholesale violations” of the rights of citizens and non-citizens alike.

Prompted by the growing litany of reported Border Patrol misdeeds, The Times examined internal documents, federal reports and court files, and conducted more than 100 interviews in the United States and Mexico--including interviews with more than 50 Border Patrol agents and officials.

The investigation found that:

* The Border Patrol hires agents with dubious pasts, including criminal records and checkered careers with police agencies and the military. Pressures to rush agents to the international line exacerbate a flawed screening process.

* Management has failed to halt unauthorized shootings, a recurring problem that has led to criminal charges against agents and generated periodic international uproar. A Justice Department audit found that immigration agents violated firearms rules in one-third of 66 incidents studied.

* Physical mistreatment of suspects--”street justice” in the words of a recently retired supervisor--is a persistent occurrence that has triggered denunciations by courts, veteran agents, Mexican officials and international human rights groups. Fear of retaliation and a deficient complaint process discourage victims and witnesses from reporting abuses.

* Internal investigations of wrongdoing and discipline of agents are slow and erratic--flaws that top Border Patrol officials and the U.S. Justice Department acknowledge. Critics say weak oversight lets agents remain on duty despite lengthy records of alleged misconduct.

From its inception in 1924 as a loose-knit band of former Texas Rangers and gunslingers who engaged in shootouts with tequila smugglers along the Rio Grande, the Border Patrol has evolved into the nation’s busiest police force, making more than 1 million arrests a year.

Charges of heavy-handed conduct have hounded the force almost since its founding. In the late 1970s, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights empaneled hearings on abuse by agents. Last year, alarm about Border Patrol activity spawned two congressional inquiries and a scathing report by Americas Watch, the international human rights monitor. The U.S. civil rights panel met again in San Diego last week to gather new testimony on abuse.

Last month, the Justice Department oversight official who monitors the patrol and its parent body, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, told a congressional subcommittee that poor management foments misconduct and corruption.

The INS “is often indifferent when it comes to screening its employees and training them, much of their work is unsupervised, and administrative discipline is sometimes haphazard,” said Inspector General Richard J. Hankinson.

Now, even Border Patrol loyalists are calling for reforms, notably some type of civilian review, a practice used by some city police forces but unprecedented for federal law enforcement.

“It will force them to clean up their act,” said Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.), a longtime patrol supporter. “You have a real problem with the Border Patrol, and they have to get a hold of it. They have some endemic problems that have never been addressed from the top.”

Michael Williams, chief of the Border Patrol since 1990, rejected the notion that the agency is in crisis.

“I’m concerned and I recognize we’ve got problems,” the chief said in an interview in Washington. “At the same time, I don’t think it’s as bad as some people would portray it to be.”

The patrol has improved the training of agents, reviewed tactics and increased cooperation with Mexican officials, administrators said. Most agents exhibit self-control and “tolerance” despite the job’s frustrations, said Gene McNary, INS commissioner during the Bush Administration.

Agents face “challenges that probably no other law enforcement agency has to go through,” McNary said in an interview. “They just get waves of people who keep coming at ‘em.”

Independently determining the extent of Border Patrol misconduct is difficult. In response to repeated requests under the Freedom of Information Act, immigration officials said they do not keep track of abuse complaints and have no comprehensive data on internal discipline of agents.

“It is something we have not collected routinely, and to go back and retrieve that would be a massive research project,” said Duke Austin, INS spokesman in Washington. “There has not been any consistent monitoring of disciplinary actions on a nationwide basis.”

An internal audit unit was created last year to begin gathering and analyzing information on discipline, Austin said.

Patrol officials estimate that the rate of complaints compares favorably to that of other police agencies. The number cited--one complaint per 17,000 Border Patrol arrests--is based on a 1989 study that looked only at cases that reached the Office of Inspector General, the Justice Department’s watchdog unit.

Not included were an unknown number of allegations deemed unprovable or unfounded by agents and their supervisors in field stations. Moreover, critics say, even more complete data would not be an accurate gauge of abuse because most victims are illegal immigrants--typically poor and fearful--who are unlikely to protest.

Flawed Screening

Border Patrol agents make more arrests than any other federal officers. Agents work under tremendous stress, frequently alone and far from supervision.

But recruits do not undergo the psychological testing now standard in many police agencies. And to the alarm of commanders, many new agents are not subjected to full pre-employment security checks.

“That’s something that needs to be done upfront and is not being done effectively upfront,” said Ronnie Myers, an assistant chief at the patrol training academy in Georgia.

Consequently, he said, the patrol ends up with agents “predisposed to criminal activity or not psychologically suited for the job.”

Last May, an agent--hired despite a conviction for impersonating a police officer--left the academy after his first week, muttering that “Guido” was going to kill his family. He turned up days later in a New Jersey mental hospital.

Background investigations routinely remain incomplete while agents undergo 18 weeks of academy training in Georgia and sometimes drag on after deployment along The Line, as the almost 2,000-mile boundary with Mexico is known. Ideally, experts say, hiring checks of law enforcement officers should be completed before they begin academy training--a reform instituted recently by the Los Angeles Police Department.

Border Patrol Agent Glynn D. Nance was removed from the academy, flown to Texas and arrested after court officials informed superiors in Laredo, Tex., that Nance was wanted for soliciting a bribe while a small-town police officer. He was convicted of theft.

Burned by what they call defective procedures, patrol chiefs in Laredo now improvise and run drivers license checks on their new agents. “We are trying to make sure that people who enter the Border Patrol are not wanted criminals,” said Richard Marroquin, deputy chief in Laredo.

Background investigations have been delayed by a logjam in the federal personnel system. Security checks were lagging on thousands of Justice Department employees, including Border Patrol agents, a study last year by the inspector general found.

“One should not be working for the government in such a critical position until the full background (check) is done,” Inspector General Hankinson said in an interview.

Even when a background check reveals potential problems, the study found, officials sometimes take years to act. That is a key point, the study concluded, because civil service guidelines make it more difficult to fire agents after their probationary year--an obstacle cited by many Border Patrol administrators.

Last year, background investigators belatedly got around to asking four journeymen El Centro agents--on the job as long as five years--to explain earlier military drug arrests, said agents union Vice President Tim Still, a critic of delays. “It scares the hell out of me,” he said.

Hiring waves in recent years made the Border Patrol particularly vulnerable to the screening breakdown. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act authorized a 50% staff increase, generating an unprecedented flood of recruits. Hiring pushes have been used to offset a high turnover rate--commonly 40% in the first year, among the worst in the federal government.

Mike Hance, a veteran San Diego agent and union official, said: “They went through a binge where they hired everyone that walked, and now they are paying the price.”

Agent Gary C. Porter was given a badge despite a previous indecent exposure incident in a Miami mall. In 1990, Porter received a 10-year suspended sentence and was forced to resign from the patrol for exposing himself to girls from his pickup while off duty in Laredo, Tex.

In another case, officials did not complete their check on Calexico Agent Luis Santiago Esteves until a year after his hiring.

Before joining the patrol, Esteves was arrested in the Army for allegedly beating his first wife. Charges were dropped. He later allegedly raped his second wife, threatened to rape her 10-year-old daughter, and drank and used drugs, according to testimony.

“If they had done a real background (check), I don’t think he would have made it” into the patrol, second wife Lucille Maldonado told The Times. “He was violent. . . . He hung out with some sleazy people.”

Last fall, Agent Esteves was sentenced to 24 years in prison for raping a Mexican woman whom he had stopped in Calexico for questioning.

“You have all these problems cropping up in a more severe nature than they ever did before,” said T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the agents union.

The agency is working to speed up security checks, said patrol chief Williams, who expressed confidence that the vast majority of agents are fit for the job. But he acknowledged that questionable recruits slipped through in the frenetic hiring pushes that followed immigration reform in 1986.

“I can’t defend what decisions were made except by stating that we were given a mandate to hire,” Williams said. “It was not the ideal way to do it.”

Improper Gunplay

Most Border Patrol agents rarely fire their weapons. But disputed shootings continue to cost the taxpayers in civil claims and tarnish the agency’s image.

A television news crew videotaped supervisor Chris Wells, chief of the Salinas station, firing a shot at a fleeing car in violation of policy. He served a 10 day suspension this month for showing “poor judgment,” patrol officials said.

In a little-noticed 1991 audit, the inspector general found that Border Patrol and immigration agents broke the rules in 22 of 66 shooting incidents examined nationwide. Almost half of the agents involved failed to meet weapons qualifications requirements, the study found, and discipline of violators was inconsistent.

A federal grand jury in San Diego is investigating a high-profile 1990 case in which a Calexico agent fired a 9-millimeter bullet point-blank at Eduardo Zamores as the 15-year-old straddled a border fence, knocking the wounded teen-ager into Mexican territory.

The agent, William Cypher, stated that while chasing youths suspected of vandalizing cars, he jumped out of his sedan and pulled the trigger in self-defense because Zamores was poised to hurl a rock. Zamores denies brandishing a rock.

Calexico Police Chief Leslie Ginn, who retired last year, publicly labeled the agent’s actions unjustified. A Mexicali policeman, the only eyewitness interviewed by officers, told Calexico detectives that Zamores did not have a rock or menace the agent.

Protesters closed the border crossing between Calexico and Mexicali for a day. Cypher was transferred to Texas but never disciplined, supervisors say. Zamores sued the U.S. government, reaching a tentative settlement of about $60,000, lawyers say.

Widespread illicit shooting by agents--and subsequent cover-ups--has been a particular failing in the solitary stretches of Arizona desert, where agents have focused on interdicting drug smugglers.

During Agent Michael Andrew Elmer’s trial on murder charges in December, Elmer and his partner in Nogales testified that unauthorized gunfire has become a standard tactic. Agents use illegal warning shots to scare couriers into dropping their cargoes and running back to Mexico, allowing agents to make much-prized seizures of abandoned marijuana or cocaine.

“I think the investigation clearly revealed a pattern of firing warning shots, a pattern of not reporting them, and a pattern of supervisors looking the other way,” said former Santa Cruz County Atty. Jose Luis Machado, who prosecuted Elmer.

Elmer was acquitted of murdering an unarmed suspected drug scout, whose remains the agent admits dragging 50 yards and trying to conceal. Federal prosecutors are investigating the killing as part of a wide-ranging inquiry into possible civil rights violations by agents in Arizona.

Elmer also faces assault charges stemming from an incident at Yerba Buena Wash near Nogales, where he allegedly sprayed automatic weapons fire toward a group of 30 unarmed illegal immigrants, wounding one man.

Gary Patrick Callahan, a former Arizona agent convicted in January of cocaine trafficking, routinely fired clandestine rounds during the five years that he and a confederate spent ambushing and ripping off smugglers, according to testimony at his trial.

“It’s against Border Patrol policy, but everybody at the station . . . would fire your gun up in the air. And (smugglers) will drop their loads and run off,” testified former Agent Glenn C. Waltz, Callahan’s onetime partner, who admitted pocketing $80,000 in marijuana-skimming proceeds.

Arizona agents admit disregarding regulations that require gunfire to be reported immediately. When Elmer, using an unauthorized assault rifle, shot the suspected drug lookout in June, all five agents present ignored the reporting mandate and repaired to a parking lot to drink beer. After the Yerba Buena Wash shooting, three agents, including Elmer and eight-year veteran Frank Arellano, kept silent.

“You hear shots every night,” Arellano testified. “If you report that, you will be in the office every day for at least two hours” completing paperwork.

In a separate Arizona incident, an admitted marijuana carrier alleges in a civil suit that agents blasted him with a shotgun in a secluded canyon and then dragged him 500 yards over the border into Mexico.

“I was giving myself up--there was no reason for them to shoot at me,” said Jesus Luna Vidana, 19, who lost much of his right leg. “I was afraid I would bleed to death,” he added during an interview in Nogales, Mexico.

Federal civil rights prosecutors are also reviewing the incident. Agents exchanged fire that night in late 1991 with traffickers, patrol supervisors confirm, but no casualties were reported, although some blood was found at the scene.

Patrol chief Williams said tightened guidelines and other improvements have reduced Border Patrol shootings, particularly in the high-traffic San Diego sector. But Williams said authorities have augmented training, resources and supervision to combat a “war-zone or drug-zone mentality” in Arizona.

In the 1991 audit, federal inspectors also assailed Border Patrol management for not requiring psychological counseling or drug and alcohol testing for agents involved in shootings.

Inspectors faulted the Border Patrol for not adequately exploring the use of non-lethal devices, such as stun guns and rubber bullets, and for failing to notify authorities about shootings--heightening the potential for civil claims.

A Mexican man left quadriplegic by an agent’s shotgun blast in 1976 collected almost $1 million from the government.

More recently, a U.S. District Court judge awarded $574,000 to Humberto Carrillo Estrada, who was 12 years old when San Diego Agent Edward Cole shot him in the back in 1985 as Estrada stood in Tijuana, triggering denunciations by the Mexican government and activists. Authorities never prosecuted or disciplined Cole, although the judge labeled the agent’s self-defense justification “incredible.”

In May, 1990, Agent Michael Ostrander fired three times at a van carrying a dozen illegal immigrants near San Diego, shattering a Mexican teen-ager’s jaw and puncturing the arm of an El Salvadoran mother. U.S. authorities agreed to pay $155,000 to the victims. In a rare public admission of a bad shooting, commanders announced a 30-day suspension of Ostrander.

Physical Abuse

Most Border Patrol agents exhibit restraint and patience, but beatings and rough treatment date back decades. The abuse is deep-rooted in the Border Patrol culture, according to some veterans.

“The agent sees so many people get away with so much that he starts administering street justice,” said recently retired supervisor Randy Williamson, a 20-year veteran of the patrol’s overworked San Diego sector, who added that he refrained from abuse.

“If you are chasing a guy in a canyon, you say he fell down. . . . If (the agent) gets away with it a few times, well then OK, it becomes a way: I’m the judge.”

Robert J. Marren, a former agent and field representative in El Paso for the agents’ union, said: “There’s a degree of justice that’s handed out in the field, and it’s accepted by management.”

A numbing litany of accusations reach Mexican and U.S. authorities, public defenders, border-area physicians and migrant activists. Victims report that agents strike them with flashlights, batons, feet or fists, and complain of injurious tactics--using vehicles to herd crowds, for example.

Confronted with testimony of mistreatment, a federal judge in El Paso ruled in December that the Border Patrol used “excessive force” and “illegal and abusive conduct” against Latinos in that border city.

One victim testified that an agent had shoved his face against a fence and struck him; another said an officer had pointed a gun at his head, and a teen-age girl stated that an officer had stopped her as she walked home from school, knocked her to the ground and kicked her about 20 times. All three are U.S. citizens of Mexican descent.

“No justification existed for the force used against numerous plaintiffs and witnesses,” U.S. District Judge Lucius D. Bunton said in issuing a preliminary injunction.

Hostility among some agents toward immigrants--a mostly docile, nonviolent population--foments mistreatment, say some agents and law enforcement officials.

“In many cases, there is a tendency to identify the migrant as a criminal and treat him as such, with excessive force and little consideration,” said Javier Valenzuela Malagon, the commander of Grupo Beta, an elite Mexican border police unit that has won praise from the patrol and San Diego-area police.

Some Border Patrol supervisors tolerate, and even encourage, practices such as punitive beatings of suspects who try to elude capture, agents said. Ralph Boubel, a seven-year San Diego officer, gave the practice--which he said he disdains--a name: “Thump ‘em if they run.”

Boubel recalled his incredulity five years ago when a supervisor took him aside after a heated chase in which Boubel caught a smuggler.

“ ‘Did he pay for what he did? Did you thump him?’ ” Boubel said the supervisor asked. “I hadn’t, because (the man) hadn’t resisted. . . . If somebody ran, you were supposed to thump him. It was expected by the journeyman agents.”

Commanders contend that abuse is not as pervasive as detractors say, and that violators are dealt with decisively. “It’s illegal, it’s a violation of a person’s civil rights, it’s not what we train these people for,” Chief Williams said.

Mexican diplomats in El Paso disagree, citing the case of Margarita Rodriguez, a grandmother who has accused Agent Mario Bellamy of beating her during an arrest June 30 at a housing complex. The woman admits to making a mistake: She ran away.

Bellamy became enraged when Rodriguez chased after her 2-year-old, the woman said in an interview at her home in Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso. Still haunting her memories are the boy’s plaintive cries as she tried to shield him from a barrage of blows administered by the plainclothes agent, she said.

“I fell on the grass, and he kept beating me and beating me, yelling at me,” recalled Rodriguez, who said she crossed the border illegally that day on a social call to her daughter. Rodriguez’s daughter was fined $100 for attacking Bellamy with tear gas spray during the incident.

An FBI spokesman in El Paso said last week that civil rights prosecutors were reviewing the investigation into the accusations. Bellamy said Wednesday he has been cleared.

The Mexican Consulate in El Paso took the unusual step of singling out Bellamy, a five-year patrol veteran, charging that he “has shown . . . a minimum of respect for the moral and physical integrity of people.”

Statements filed with the consulate in the previous two years accused Bellamy of pummeling a Mexican fruit vendor, allegedly breaking the man’s nose against the side of a vehicle and threatening him at gunpoint, and of injuring a woman prisoner by driving a transport van recklessly. Internal investigations cleared Bellamy of wrongdoing.

The only known disciplinary action against him was a 60-day suspension in 1988 for drawing his gun on a fellow agent during an on-duty fight. “The Mexican consulate hates my guts for some odd reason,” Bellamy said Wednesday.

A thousand miles to the west, border crossers returning to Tijuana have filed about 170 abuse allegations against Border Patrol agents with Grupo Betathe Mexican police unit, in the past two years.

A common report: U.S. agents did not formally arrest injured victims, but instead released them in the field. Migrants also allege that agents warned them not to tell anyone that they had been roughed up.

San Diego attorneys for Federal Defenders--a U.S. government service that represents indigent defendants--maintain an “abuse book” containing photos and statements by about 400 alleged victims of serious Border Patrol beatings, mostly during the past five years.

“They come in here looking like chopped meat,” said chief attorney Mario Conte.

The file, the lawyers note, represents only the worst injuries suffered by the small minority of border crossers prosecuted in federal court. About 75% of his defendants allege rough treatment, said attorney Peter Vance. “Even if I assume half my clients are lying,” said Vance, who has since left the office, “that’s still an astounding amount of information coming in concerning abuses.”

Lawyers and other advocates allege that agents seek to head off brutality complaints by singling out accusers for criminal charges of assault or illegal entry--even though the vast majority of those arrested are sent back to Mexico within hours. Williamson, the retired Border Patrol supervisor in San Diego, acknowledged that bullying and retaliatory tactics are used against would-be complainers.

“The agents either . . . frighten the person into not making a complaint against them or they come up with some kind of a countercharge: ‘Yeah, I thumped up on the person, but he jumped me and we were fighting,’ ” said Williamson, who added that some detainees also exaggerate or lie.

Judge Bunton in El Paso also cited the specter of retribution. “Victims fear retaliation by the INS and by the El Paso Border Patrol in the form of deportation, criminal charges, or loss of legal immigration status for themselves or family members,” he ruled.

The federal judge denounced the Border Patrol complaint process as complex and “ineffective,” adding: “Often the victim of abuse is discouraged from filing a complaint by the governmental offices, personnel and complaint structure.”

Noting a pervasive “sense of futility” in filing grievances that go nowhere, the judge concluded: “Victims begrudgingly accept this type of abusive law enforcement action as a way of life.”

Allegations of abuse are inherently difficult to prove, often pitting agents’ versions against the accounts of illegal immigrants.

And those seeking to report mistreatment face basic obstacles: The patrol provides no standardized, agency-wide complaint form or other systematic information on pursuing allegations, as Basilio Gonzalez learned in 1991.

Gonzalez, a Stockton child-care worker, said he glanced out a restaurant window and saw an agent punching a handcuffed prisoner. Gonzalez made an oral complaint at a Border Patrol station, but an officer produced a written version that “bore little resemblance to what I had reported,” Gonzalez said in a sworn statement to his attorneys.

An agent then asked him: “Look, man, can’t you forget this?” Gonzalez recalled.

Lax Oversight

The Border Patrol does not have its own internal affairs unit. Instead, several outside agencies investigate serious allegations against agents. After receiving the results, patrol superiors can impose disciplinary sanctions--reprimands, suspensions or terminations.

High-ranking immigration and Justice Department officials express frustrations with the result: a slow-moving, uneven internal oversight process that often fails to deter wrongdoing by agents.

“I felt it was a bad situation,” former immigration commissioner McNary said. “If I knew something was wrong, I didn’t have anybody here to send out to investigate.”

Investigations of misconduct drag on, allowing wrongdoers to remain on duty for months and prolonging uncertainty for those wrongly accused.

“We don’t get a fast enough turnaround on our case investigations,” said Ronald J. Dowdy, chief patrol agent in Tucson. “That’s one of the frustrations about our disciplinary system that bothers me as a manager a lot.”

Field supervisors refer complaints they find credible to the inspector general’s office, which received 463 allegations against agents in fiscal 1992. Inspectors opened formal investigations in 30 cases, covering possible infractions ranging from beating suspects to bribery. Nine of the 30 cases remain under investigation; inspectors found most of the rest to be unsubstantiated.

Local authorities, the FBI and Justice Department civil rights officials also pursue criminal complaints. But jurisdictional squabbles sometimes interfere. The FBI complained in writing last fall that Border Patrol agents in Tucson were being “dissuaded” from reporting suspected crimes by co-workers.

Patrol officials say the primary outside watchdog--the inspector general’s office--is spread too thin. The office, created in 1989, also has responsibility for the rest of the immigration service and several other agencies.

Agents and critics also contend that the inspector general’s office includes former agents hesitant to pursue allegations against onetime colleagues. Four of the 11 investigators assigned to the San Diego inspector general’s office, for example, are ex-Border Patrol agents.

Inspector Gen. Hankinson acknowledged problems caused by lack of staff, but he blamed the Border Patrol for applying discipline slowly and unevenly after receiving inspectors’ reports.

Although some agents are disciplined for such offenses as sloppy attire or minor traffic accidents, officers complain, others evade penalties for serious wrongdoing. A case in point: Rodolfo Greene, a Tucson agent who improperly tapped into a law enforcement databank to glean information on women whose acquaintance he sought. Supervisors initially declined to discipline him, records show, opting instead to counsel Greene about the violation.

But the agent soon ran a license plate check on another woman after she spurned unsolicited overtures in a note the agent left on her windshield. Irate Arizona state police protested to Border Patrol commanders, who suspended Greene for 60 days in 1989. Greene declined comment.

Detractors say the patrol is slow to root out abusive agents. Machado, the former county attorney in Nogales, said he encountered a dismissive attitude by patrol officials toward abuse complaints last year while prosecuting Agent Elmer for murder.

“They go in with an attitude: ‘This did not occur. You prove to me that it did,’ ” Machado said. “They don’t go in with an open mind that something did or didn’t occur. . . . There’s really a lack of accountability, or a procedure to ensure that agents are responsible for their actions.”

Americas Watch, the human rights organization, asserted in a 1992 report that the 16-year career of Michael Alan Lewis shows the “impunity” of border agents.

The federal government agreed last year to send $650 per month for 20 years to the impoverished parents of the late Ismael Ramirez, 17, a migrant worker who died of injuries suffered when Lewis arrested him during a raid in the Central California town of Madera.

Witnesses said Lewis chased the youth, picked him up and threw him head first to the pavement. Lewis denied any wrongdoing, and authorities found insufficient evidence for prosecution or discipline. Americas Watch called the Lewis case an “outright refusal to punish agents.”

Lewis has been named in at least two other federal abuse complaints--arising from raids on a Central Valley onion field and a plum orchard--settled for a combined $18,000. During a one-month period in 1983, he was at the wheel of Border Patrol vehicles that injured one migrant and killed another. A California Highway Patrol investigator cleared Lewis of vehicular manslaughter even though his van struck and killed a man while speeding at 81 m.p.h. on a Calexico road.

Lewis was not punished by the Border Patrol and in fact was later assigned to teach driving at the agency’s academy. He is known to have been disciplined once: a 30-day suspension for throwing a migrant’s bicycle into a river. Lewis, now based in Florida, did not return telephone messages.

Law enforcement authorities also question the patrol’s handling of Luis Esteves, who was convicted last fall of rape. Esteves, a smooth-talking former Army recruiter with a history of alleged abuse against women, relished patrolling the barren expanses of the Imperial Valley in southeastern California.

“In the desert,” Esteves told one of his alleged victims during an on-duty telephone call taped by detectives, Border Patrol radio transmissions crackling in the background, “you do what you please.”

Supervisors first had indications in October, 1989, that Esteves was menacing women. A motorist complained that Esteves detained and interrogated her twice in one night, then phoned her and made sexual propositions. The patrol took no action against him.

In December, 1989, El Centro police arrested the agent for allegedly raping a Mexican woman, who ran screaming from his apartment and broke her ankle escaping over a fence. Esteves had stopped and questioned her on the street, then later lured her to his home. Esteves was suspended by the Border Patrol. But charges were dropped when the woman missed a court hearing. Superiors then reinstated Esteves--almost six months before the FBI completed its investigation.

Police arrested Esteves again in July, 1991, for allegedly raping another woman whom he had also stopped while on patrol. He was acquitted in that case, but was convicted of the first rape charge, which was reinstated when the victim agreed to testify.

Branding Esteves “a blight on law enforcement,” a probation officer concluded: “One can only wonder how many other women have been abused by this defendant and have failed to come forward.”

NEXT: The Border Patrol culture and abuse.

The Troubled Border Patrol

The Border Patrol, the nation’s busiest police force, is the symbol of U.S. law enforcement along nearly 2,000 miles of border with Mexico. Agents make more than 1 million arrests a year.

But the patrol’s record includes persistent reports of abusive behavior by agents, improper shootings and crimes including drug smuggling, sexual assault and theft. The litany of patrol problems has enraged Latino communities, strained relations with Mexico and spurred calls for reform in Congress and elsewhere.

Along the Mexican border the patrol is organized into nine sectors, totaling about 3,500 agents. Below is a look at the patrol network, highlighting troubles in selected sectors.

San Diego

Agents: 1,002*

Arrests: 564,635* Nation’s busiest, most violent border zone. Many abuse complaints originate in busy crossing areas such as the Tijuana River levees. A female agent who testified against a fellow officer was recently transferred after receiving threats from co-workers.

El Centro

Agents: 216

Arrests: 29,778 Important entry point for migrants seeking farm work in California. An agent was sentenced to a 24-year prison term last year for raping a Mexican woman. Others were recently sent to jail for embezzlement and assault.

Tucson

Agents: 290

Arrests: 71,099 Canyons near Nogales and other rugged border terrain have become prime drug corridors. An agent was acquitted last year of murder in the shooting of an unarmed drug suspect, but remains under federal investigation. Others have been convicted of drug trafficking, perjury and stealing from prisoners.

El Paso

Agents: 624

Arrests: 251,661 Action is centered in urban strip across Rio Grande from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. There have been complaints about recent Border Patrol activities, including shootings, an alleged beating of a grandmother and abuse of students. A federal judge ruled agents have violated rights by stopping people solely because they look Latino.

Laredo

Agents: 365

Arrests: 72,604 A patrol supervisor, accused in off-duty murder, killed himself. Another was demoted for not reporting misconduct by agents. An agent received a 10-year suspended sentence for exposing himself to little girls. Commanders run their own driver’s license checks on new agents, fearful that some may be wanted criminals who slipped through the screening process.

Yuma

Agents: 193

Arrests: 24,822 Sparsely populated desert area with relatively few illegal border crossings.

Marfa

Agents: 109

Arrests: 10,512 Remote area, including Texas’ Big Band country.

Del Rio

Agents: 311

Arrests: 33,339 Rural agricultural region along the Rio Grande.

McAllen

Agents: 420

Arrests: 88,464 Favored route for Central American immigrants because of proximity to interior of Mexico; a prominent drug-smuggling zone.

* Number of agents through October, 1992; arrests for year ended Sept. 30, 1992