Brother Pursues Truth on Death in Mexican Jail : Human rights: Man’s dogged probe shows family member likely was killed. Effort could spur reforms.

It will never bring his only baby brother back. But Joe Amado wants the world to hear about his death in a squalid jail cell in this resort town, and the tales of other border hoppers who say they were tortured by the Mexican police.

For Amado, it is an emotional salve, a way to channel the anger that has welled inside him since an evening in June when police said that Mario Amado, a rail-thin North Hollywood welder, accomplished an implausible suicide by wrapping one sweater arm around his neck, the other around a crossbar and then abruptly sitting down.

“I knew from the beginning there was no way Mario would have done that,” said Amado, 50, a Van Nuys salesman. “Whoever killed him has to pay the price, and I am willing to do anything to get justice for him.”

At first, Amado just wanted to prove that his 29-year-old brother did not hang himself, so the killers could be prosecuted. The last thing on his mind was training a spotlight on what many say is the continuing problem of abuse of foreigners in Mexican jails.

But in his quest for answers, Amado has done just that.

Through a tireless campaign of networking, letter writing, phone jockeying and just plain pestering, Amado has succeeded where many others have failed. Nimbly traversing a thicket of international diplomatic and judicial obstacles, he has prodded Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari into taking a personal interest in solving the case.

U.S. and Mexican sources say arrests may be imminent.

Moreover, the publicity and new evidence Amado has generated have pushed the Mexican government--and U.S. officials--into taking a hard look at possible human rights violations against foreign visitors in Mexico.

Amado is lobbying for safeguards to better protect such visitors, and for the United States to perform independent autopsies--like the one he had done on Mario--when a U.S. citizen dies mysteriously in a foreign land.

To that end, Amado has formed a loosely based coalition of people who say they or their loved ones were tortured or neglected in Mexican jails, and that U.S. officials let them down in their time of need.

Diplomats and human rights activists say Amado’s accomplishments are nothing short of extraordinary.

“The remarkable thing about Joe is that he was stubbornly consistent in what he was doing; he just kept going and going and going,” said Diego Zavala, Amnesty International’s New Orleans-based human rights investigator for Mexico. “As he was going, he was learning the process, too. This is not easy. But he holds the truth, and the truth is going to win.”

Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City), who interceded in the case at Amado’s request, said his constituent is not the first to take on the Mexican government over the alleged torture or extortion of tourists who end up in jail.

“But without some extraordinary intervention, this would have been left as a suicide and a disgruntled brother who didn’t believe it was true,” said Berman, a ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “He has just been dogged at getting to the bottom of this.”

The products of a close-knit family, Joe and Mario were inseparable--not only as co-workers in the family recycling and wrought-iron businesses, but as adventurers who liked to travel and party. They loved to roller skate together.

Now Amado, who once enjoyed tinkering with inventions he hoped to market, spends most of his time, and conversation, on his quest for justice.

“This has been a labor of love for Joe,” said Amado’s fiancee, Deborah Larson. “Mario was like a son to him.”

Larson said that after Mario died, Joe--a man she knew to be genial and fun-loving--spent literally every waking hour on the phone. Even today his sleep is fitful, invaded by dreams of Mario that pull him out of bed early and lead him back to the telephone.

“I went from being real happy-go-lucky to serious,” Amado said in a moment of somber reflection. “My life was easy. But this has changed everything.”

One of his earliest protests against Mexican authorities was visceral and simplistic--standing at the border a month after his brother’s death, holding a sign calling for an investigation. Quickly, he became more sophisticated and started working with other families, some of whom wish they had blown the whistle as early and loudly as Amado.

“I cry my eyes out every day because I didn’t do drastic things to call attention to this,” said W. J. Whitt, a Texas oil field operator. Had he done so, he said, his daughter Jennifer, 24, might still be alive.

Instead of running to the media and human rights groups like Amado did, Whitt quietly spent 10 months trying to get Jennifer and her three friends out of a Reynosa jail, across the Texas border, after her arrest for buying prescription painkillers for a shoulder injury. He said jailers would not let him give his daughter her asthma medication during visits.

Jennifer Whitt died Sept. 29 of a bronchial attack and cardiac arrest, just hours after her release. An autopsy commissioned by her parents concluded that she never would have died had she received proper medication while in custody.

Human rights groups such as Amnesty International and even the United Nations have long accused Mexican authorities of arbitrarily detaining suspects, torturing prisoners to extract confessions and demanding bribes.

In a recent report to Congress, the State Department said police brutality in Mexico continues to be widespread.

“We are not immune to these happenings, I regret to say,” said Miguel Escobar, spokesman for the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles. “Sometimes these very lamentable violations occur, but they are not common, and we do not look the other way.”

Human rights advocates disagree and say little has improved in recent years, despite Salinas’ reform efforts. Of the thousands of complaints since June, 1990, Zavala said, only 22 police officers have been charged with a federal law outlawing torture in Mexico.

In the past year, at least three other Americans died under mysterious circumstances in Mexican jails or immediately afterward, including Raul Langarica, a South-Central Los Angeles house painter who was killed April 14 while in the custody of the state of Jalisco’s judicial police in Guadalajara.

Authorities said Thursday that they have arrested a guard and accused him of the slaying.

The U.S. State Department reports that Mexican authorities arrested 977 Americans in 1992, and that there were 67 cases of alleged mistreatment (two confirmed by Mexican authorities), mostly during interrogation or detention, and 13 protests lodged by U.S. officials.

In 1991, there were 76 cases of alleged mistreatment, two confirmed, and 16 protests.

In the Amado case, the Mexican and U.S. governments insist that they are doing all they can to find out what happened. Mexican authorities say they thoroughly investigate all deaths and allegations of foul play. Baja California officials have maintained for most of the past year that Mario Amado committed suicide.

But for Joe Amado, murder--and then a cover-up--is the only way to explain what happened.

Joe Amado’s nightmare in Rosarito began on a Saturday last June after he and Larson, along with Mario and a friend, Patricia Mae Griffin, had spent the day at the beach. Amado and his fiancee then went for a drive, leaving Mario and Griffin at her family’s condominium.

Amado and Larson returned to an empty condo and were already worried when Mexican police officers knocked on the door asking to speak with Griffin. Told she was not there, they refused to say what they wanted and left.

A few hours later, three detectives showed up. They said Mario had been arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct and had killed himself in Cell No. 2 of the municipal lockup. Would Amado come identify him?

“I was hoping they had made a mistake,” Amado said.

He rushed to the jail, only to find that the body had been moved to the morgue. After identifying a photo of the corpse, a distraught Amado left the country--and has never returned.

It turned out that Griffin had told police that Mario was drunk and had hit her. Even though Griffin asked that no charges be filed, police tossed Mario into jail to sleep it off, said arresting Officer Marco Antonio Castillo. Within an hour, he was dead.

Police said four borrachos, or common drunks, had been in the dank, windowless cell. But they were asleep, police said, and did not see a thing. Amado said that is impossible given the cell’s small size and contends that it was the first of many lies.

Amado’s sister and another brother claim that police purposely misidentified the body as “Vicente Amador” on Mario’s toe tag--hoping the body would be unclaimed, cremated and the evidence destroyed. Mexican authorities also did not notify the U.S. Consulate of Amado’s death, as required.

The investigation was closed before Mario was even buried, said Baja California’s chief investigator in the case, Martin Esquivel Gutierrez.

Amado also said his initial calls to U.S. and Mexican government officials were not returned. Then, authorities here and in Mexico told him the same thing: Without proof of murder, there was nothing they could do.

So Amado set about proving it.

He consulted forensic experts, police and human rights activists--and every journalist he could find.

“I had to learn, and to learn very fast,” he said. “There’s no books written on these damned things.”

After Mario’s death, Amado was afraid to go back to Mexico. His brother and sister worked to get the body sent to a family plot in Corcoran, near Bakersfield, where Mario was buried in his favorite blue suit.

While claiming the body, his sister Dolores persuaded Mexican police to give her what she thought would be a key bit of evidence--the gray pullover sweater Mario allegedly used to hang himself.

Amado, who has spent $20,000 of his own money so far, hired a private pathologist to review the official Mexican autopsy. Dr. Richard Siegler countered the conclusion of suicide, saying it was probably murder. He said Mario had been beaten so hard near his liver that he had passed out from internal bleeding before his death.

Last October, at Amado’s request, the top medical examiner for Los Angeles County reviewed the evidence and agreed that Mario probably had been killed. Amado was soon working the phones again, making sure the press and human rights groups knew about the new evidence.

By January, Salinas was promising to speed up the investigation and commission a “tie-breaker” autopsy. But to do so, Amado had to identify his brother’s body, which had been buried seven months.

“This is the tough part,” Amado told a group of reporters he had summoned to the exhumation. “This is where I’m angry. . . . But Mario would have wanted it that way.”

The autopsy, completed in March by a Kings County pathologist, concluded that Mario was strangled by someone else.

The gray sweater provided damning evidence. The FBI said fibers embedded in Mario’s neck came not from the sweater, but from a piece of rope or cord.

Amado finally had his proof.

Amado says he is not sure who killed his brother, but he suspects that the police beat him and faked the suicide as a cover-up.

The Rosarito municipal police and Baja California’s judicial police maintain that their investigation was thorough.

Lead investigator Esquivel dismisses abrasions found on the body’s back and head and internal injuries, saying they do not prove foul play. Esquivel said he interrogated the four borrachos over a 72-hour period and concluded that they did not see anything and had no motive for killing Amado.

Esquivel also said Joe Amado and Griffin told him that Mario had talked of suicide, a charge Amado denies.

Because of Amado’s protestations, Esquivel said, he has been “interrogated” by superiors about his handling of the case. He said he has been absolved of any wrongdoing and describes Amado as a “grandstander” whose incessant accusations have some hidden motive.

Mexican authorities point to Salinas’ intervention--and Esquivel’s interrogation--as proof the case is being taken seriously. In addition, the police chief of Rosarito at the time of Mario’s death has been transferred as part of an anti-corruption housecleaning by Tijuana’s newly appointed police chief, Jose Federico Benitez Lopez.

Benitez said the murder investigation is being monitored by the highest levels of government, thanks to Amado’s perseverance. “It is very unusual,” he said in an interview in his Tijuana office, “no question about it.”

Meanwhile, Amado waits. He still spends at least three hours on the phone every day, going down his 20-page list of reporters and other contacts so he can tell them the latest about his brother’s case--and the growing flock of victims he is helping.

He frequently acts as a clearinghouse for other victims and last week helped the Langarica family press U.S. and Mexican officials--and hold a news conference--to get to the bottom of Raul Langarica’s slaying.

“It’s hard to stop when there’s so many people out there hurting,” he said. “They keep calling me because they are running into walls.”

And with him always, driving him on, is the memory of his brother. “It’s tough,” he said, his voice cracking. “I think about him every day. I just won’t let them get away with this.”