COLUMN ONE : Peso’s Fall Fuels Rise in Crime : Mexico’s economic crisis has brought not ‘red flags’ and revolt, as many feared, but a brutal wave of robberies and murders.

Minerva Guadalupe Ramirez was getting in her car after a quick stop in a posh suburb here two weeks ago when a gunman stuck a pistol to her head. He stole the 19-year-old woman’s cash, purse and jewelry, then commandeered her 1993 Ford Topaz. He raced off, never noticing that her son, Tomas, was inside. The 8-month-old child and the car are still missing.

On that same morning, three men robbed the Naucalpan Red Cross Hospital on the city’s northwest side. They burst in and fatally shot Jeronimo Rivera, a policeman who had been assigned to guard the hospital after a June burglary. The bandits then drove off with the payroll and Christmas bonuses for the entire staff--money that came from private donations to the charity hospital.

In the heart of town, about the same time, police were proving their powerlessness against crime in a highly publicized way. More than 600 officers in combat gear swooped down on a poor neighborhood for “Operation Gaucho,” a push to capture leaders of armed robbery gangs. The result: Just three of 35 suspects arrested were wanted criminals. Residents, in the meantime, said some of the police had burglarized their homes during the sweep.

These incidents--only a handful among scores recorded on this capital’s police blotter on a single day this month--offer more than human portraits of tragedy, crime and despair. They are part of the astounding crime wave that Mexicans say has resulted from this nation’s year-old economic crisis, one analysts have called the worst in recent memory.

The peso has plummeted, bringing soaring inflation, skyrocketing unemployment and burgeoning consumer debt. Many U.S. and Mexican experts feared huge street protests nationwide, waves of labor unrest--and even the possibility of regional rebellions that might destabilize Mexico as a whole.

Instead, statistics show a phenomenon far more chilling for most ordinary people: Organized protests are down, but burglaries, auto theft and street crime are hitting records--levels so high that analysts say it threatens the nation’s stability and security.

“This is . . . the social unrest we’ve all been fearing,” said political commentator Sergio Sarmiento. “It’s already here. It’s not showing itself with red flags and angry slogans in the street. It’s showing up in crime: robbery, auto theft and murder. And that, along with police corruption, has caused another crisis--a crisis of insecurity that has touched almost everyone’s lives in this country this year.”

And it is only getting worse.

Mexico and its overpopulated capital have never been crime-free. But its crime rates consistently have ranked far below those of major U.S. cities--until now.

Statistics show that the morning of Dec. 15, when Guadalupe lost her car and baby and the Red Cross hospital lost its payroll, is now typical in the Mexican capital. The economic crisis single-handedly has generated crime rates rivaling those in urban America.

Law enforcement analysts say that several kinds of crime occur more often in much of Mexico City than they do in Los Angeles--particularly armed robbery and auto theft. The lawlessness in parts of the city rivals that in some of New York’s most dangerous neighborhoods, where the number of police per residents is much higher.

Worse, the data now indicate that the violent aspect of Mexican crime also is increasing--not merely in frequency but in desperation. Thieves are targeting once-sacred institutions: schools, hospitals, single women and even the nation’s Congress.

Corrupt Police

Compounding the insecurity this has spread throughout society is the rampant corruption among underpaid, poorly trained police. Rather than enforcing the law, many police now routinely break it, many analysts say. Officers have been arrested and charged with running gangs of kidnappers, murdering drivers who refused to pay bribes, extorting money from businesses and homeowners, and robbing pedestrians.

Those cases represent a fraction of the daily corruption that Mexican sociologists, clergy, opposition politicians and other citizens report has become a part of daily life.

Myra Perez Sandi Cuen, whose brother-in-law, Mexicana Airlines pilot Eduardo Torres Garcicrespo, was fatally shot by a Mexico City patrolman March 30--apparently because he refused to pay a bribe--described the trauma of nine months spent unsuccessfully lobbying to get a culprit put behind bars. Three officers were arrested in the case. But the gunman who has been formally accused of killing her brother-in-law remains at large.

“Nothing is going well. I’m very sad. I even cry, and I’m not one to cry,” she said. “I just feel so powerless, so useless. We don’t receive the help that we need--the help we expect.”

And if Mexicans feel unsure of their police, the statistics about skyrocketing crime offer them little solace and much cause for anxiety. Consider:

* A major crime is committed in this capital once every three minutes and 12 seconds--almost double last year’s pre-economic crisis crime rate.

* A car is stolen every 10 minutes. Mexico City’s auto theft rate skyrocketed 161% this year from 1994’s rate.

* Every day, an average of 20 homes are burglarized and 23 businesses are robbed at gunpoint. This is an increase of almost 30% in both categories over 1994.

* At least three people are killed each day in this city--a 10% increase over last year.

A monthly tally of burglaries, thefts, homicides and rapes shows that the 7,032 “major crimes” committed last January--the first full month of the crisis--almost doubled compared with the previous year.

Since then, major crimes have shot up alarmingly every month. By October, 13,910 such acts had been committed in a single month. In the first 10 months of 1995, victims reported 111,317 major crimes in Mexico City--almost double the total for all of 1994.

Tougher Crackdowns

David Garay Maldonado, Mexico City’s chief of security, said his police forces are attacking the crime wave and getting tough through raids like Operation Gaucho. But he said he lacks the resources to more effectively combat soaring crime in this sprawling city of more than 15 million.

“Without a doubt we need more officers for three reasons: population, territory and the crime rate,” he said in a recent interview. “We have 8,000 policemen per shift in a city with this population, with an area that has grown on all sides and with a crime rate that has increased.”

But for human rights groups and opposition politicians like Maria Estrella Vazquez, who heads the City Council’s civil protection commission, the security forces’ attempt at a solution has only made the problem worse. Rather than cracking down on internal corruption, they say, the police are cracking down arbitrarily on the citizens who already feel most victimized by crime.

Rafael Alvarez Diaz, spokesman for the Miguel Augustine Human Rights Center, said: “Institutions have lost legitimacy because they are no longer meeting people’s needs. In response to the justified clamor against rising crime, there has been an increase in [police] equipment and arms--greater violence--and that, in turn, has led to greater social insecurity.

“We think,” he said, that “increasing crime is, above all, the result of the economic crisis. . . . Mostly it is the youth who don’t have access to education or jobs who are committing the robberies. Perhaps if the money that is going to increase the police forces and their armaments went to create jobs for our youth, that would help solve increasing crime. On the other hand . . . what we’re seeing now is a social breakdown that is leading to indiscriminate crime.”

Specifically citing Operation Gaucho, Estrella agreed: “The official response to the crime wave has been control and repression, and they continue taking measures that marginalize the majority of the population. Nobody is opposed to a better, stronger, more efficient police force. But nothing will change without measures to improve the quality of life.”

Subway Symptom

To illustrate her point, she noted that authorities just increased the cost of riding the heavily used subway system 150%, from 40 centavos to one peso. That “isn’t much for someone with a good salary but is crippling for a lot of people,” Estrella said.

Fearing that higher fares will increase theft at the stations, city officials simultaneously announced an increase in subway security. “You have to say, ‘What’s going on here?’ They’re impacting on the finances of the people and then responding with threats of repression,” she said.

Estrella, a member of the populist opposition Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), and human rights advocates like Alvarez argue that the crime wave and the official response to it will be the most enduring impact of the economic crisis. Even if the recession eases next year, as President Ernesto Zedillo has predicted, it already has left a generation in a state of permanent despair, they said.

“The general increase in crime . . . is not only related to the crisis we are living through right now but to a complete lack of confidence in a better future,” Estrella said. “Now people see they have no options for employment, for personal development or even for marriage. There is a terrible desperation.”

Analysts said that despair is likely to worsen in 1996, fueled largely by continuing price increases and high unemployment. The recent rise in subway fares was just one of several sharp increases for basic government goods and services. The federal gasoline and electricity monopolies raised prices 6%; that means that Mexicans this year have seen their gas power bills soar 50%. And there’s talk of further increases next year in the federal sales tax, which went up 50% in April.

“Recent measures like the Metro [subway] hike and increases in taxes show the government is going to keep on forcing people to tighten their belts--and it is going to keep on reinforcing the police forces,” Estrella said. “The panorama for 1996 is difficult enough. Yes, ’96 is going to be a very hard year.”

Tearing Social Fabric

School administrators, priests and others say the crime wave has begun to tear Mexico’s social fabric and may have worse effects in 1996 as many rural peasants and unemployed urban laborers shift from participating in petty street crime and join the nation’s booming narcotics trade.

“We declare that, among the principal causes for [rising crime]--especially the increase in drug trafficking--are the misery, the hunger, the illiteracy, the ignorance, marginalization, unemployment, family disintegration, misdirected ambition and deficient system of [crime] prevention,” nine of Mexico’s archbishops concluded in a pastoral document last month.

These clergy members--almost a third of the church’s archbishops in the nation--called the multibillion-dollar cross-border drug trade a growing temptation for Mexico’s jobless. Drugs, too, can be far more lucrative than armed robbery, which fuels much of the current crime wave. Unless the government generates jobs and improves basic services, the bishopric document warned, powerful drug cartels might attract many recruits and grow even stronger.

For now, though, Mexicans are especially disturbed when they scrutinize just who--and what--has been targeted in the outbreak of lawlessness. For the first time that residents can remember, thieves have hit schools and hospitals. When it comes to armed robbery, such institutions--which had been valued as pillars of society exempt from crime--are finding that nothing is sacred.

Not even the national legislature has been spared. On the morning of Oct. 27, six heavily armed men stormed the Chamber of Deputies. Two robbers held the security guards hostage, while the other four went to the treasury. They emptied it of 1.6 million pesos in cash [about $230,000]--most of the monthly payroll for congressional administrators, secretaries and janitors. A few days later, the chamber’s messenger boy had his motorcycle hijacked at gunpoint in broad daylight.

An additional quarter-million dollars or so was stolen Dec. 14 from the Ruben Lenero Hospital, where seven armed bandits assaulted the staff, stole the payroll and sped off with cash boxes that also contained $500,000 in the Mexican equivalent of food stamps.

But it was the armed robbery at the 56-bed Naucalpan Red Cross Hospital that Director Fernando Cervantes said showed the cyclical nature--and outright viciousness--of the crime wave.

Days after he was forced at gunpoint to lie face down on the floor--near the dying officer and amid the screams of more than 50 patients--Cervantes said in an interview that the 300,000 stolen pesos was the salary and Christmas bonuses for him and his 225 employees.

“There is just no explanation,” he said. “We’re a hospital. We attend to everyone equally. To come and rob us and kill, these are professionals--not desperate people. But they left us with nothing.

“We help the neediest sectors, and now we don’t have money to help the people really affected by the crisis,” he said.

“Our salaries are paid by donations. They stole the donations. We won’t have any money for the payroll. Some workers will leave. What will happen to them? We won’t have money for equipment and supplies.

“So what’s going to happen to the hospital and to the people who come to us for help?” he asked. “It is a vicious circle of violence and crisis, and I don’t think anyone really knows where it will end.”