Complaints About Mexican Police Echo Riverside Case

As Terry Mamalis and David Forsberg lay in the dark on the floor of the Mexican police van--bound, gagged, blindfolded, beaten, robbed, tortured and soaked with gasoline--the two New York tourists were certain they were about to die.

All they had done wrong, they say, was ask two men in uniform for directions.

It happened on Feb. 18--five weeks before the videotaped beating of illegal Mexican immigrants by Riverside County sheriff’s deputies shocked many in the United States and provoked harsh protests from Mexico.

There is no videotape of what happened to Mamalis, 28, and Forsberg, 23, when they arrived at 2 that morning at Mexico City’s international airport for a two-week vacation with Mamalis’ mother. But the details of their story are recorded in sworn statements on file with the tourist division of Mexico City’s police department, along with several other cases of alleged Mexican police brutality against U.S. citizens.

These victims--tourists, business people and, in one instance, a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball scout--all condemn the Riverside County beatings, but they say their stories are the flip side of the beatings saga.

U.S. and Mexican officials insist that such cases are exceptions.

“Most of the Americans who come to Mexico have no bad experiences,” one U.S. official said. “The overwhelming majority have a great time, go home and save their money to come back.”

Mexico City law enforcement authorities agreed.

“These are very isolated cases,” said one official in the chief prosecutor’s office.

But prosecutors here say they are treating all complaints of police brutality and corruption against U.S. citizens seriously. In a city where most foreign residents have at least one personal story about police corruption, the capital’s attorney general has been cracking down on police criminals for more than a year and has dismissed more than 900 officers. More than a tenth of them are now jailed and charged with offenses ranging from bribery to brutality.

The issue was also covered in a recent agreement signed by U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Mexican Foreign Secretary Jose Angel Gurria Trevino; that document specifically addressed police treatment of U.S. citizens in Mexico as well as of Mexicans in the United States.

Authorities from both countries say statistics of Mexican police attacks on U.S. citizens are meaningless. They concede that the overwhelming majority of victims are too terrified to file police reports; they just pack up and go home.

Nightmare Night

But the testimony of Mamalis and Forsberg--added to about half a dozen such complaints filed by U.S. citizens in the Mexican capital in the past year--underscores the anger and frustration of victims who came to Mexico solely to spend or invest money that would help the nation and its shattered economy.

“After this, I started thinking a lot about other people,” Mamalis said, explaining why he is still pursuing his legal case months after his return home. “I thought, wow, we were at an international airport when this happened. We weren’t walking down a dark alley or anything. This could happen to someone else if I don’t do something about it.

“Then I started thinking: We, the United States, have given Mexico so much money to help them. And we’re treated like this? I mean, I wasn’t asking for the world. I was just asking for directions.”

Mamalis said he and his friend were well aware of Mexico City’s crime problem before they landed here; they had read the tourist warnings before they left Westchester County, N.Y. And Mamalis’ mother had sent detailed instructions on how to catch a bus from the airport to Taxco, where she lives, so they could avoid the capital.

But no one had warned Mamalis and Forsberg to be wary of Mexican police corruption and brutality.

The U.S. State Department’s latest official advisory on Mexico warns visitors that the economic crisis and soaring unemployment here “have led to an increase in street crime, especially in urban areas.” It makes no mention, however, of Mexican police crime against U.S. citizens.

Minutes after the two young men cleared customs, they learned the hard way. They stepped out of the terminal, asked some uniformed security officers to point them toward the bus station and were told to go around the corner. The moment they did, a marked police van pulled up and several uniformed officers got out, Mamalis said.

“The next thing I know, my friend gets thrown right into the vehicle, I get hit over the head with a nightstick and they throw me in after him,” Mamalis said in a telephone interview from New York. “Now we’re in the Suburban van, we’re locked in, and I’m getting clubbed over and over and over--all over my body.”

The nightmare lasted two hours, Mamalis stated in his criminal complaint. He said that both men were blindfolded and gagged, with their hands tied behind their backs, and that they were beaten and tortured repeatedly while the officers stole everything of value from their luggage and clothes--even the money Mamalis had sewn into the lining of his shirt.

In all, Mamalis estimates he lost $3,000 in cash and jewelry--the police tried to cut his finger off to get his ring, he said--and Forsberg was out $2,000. But it wasn’t the money that hurt, Mamalis said.

“They tortured us in different ways,” he said. “And then they started pouring gasoline all over us. At that point, we pretty much assumed we were going to die. I didn’t know if I was going to get a bullet in my head or if they were going to set fire to us, but we’d given up hope.”

Finally, at 5 a.m. and without explanation, the men dumped Mamalis and Forsberg on the street--barefoot, bound, bleeding and with second-degree burns.

“We tried to flag down police cars to help us, but none of them stopped,” Mamalis said.

He eventually called his mother, who came to their rescue. But he insisted on reporting the incident to the U.S. Embassy and to Mexico City’s tourist police violent-crimes unit, which launched an investigation after Mamalis pressed the case.

City prosecutors said last week that no arrests have been made but that the incident is still under investigation. Several police officers were arrested in an earlier attack on U.S. tourists at the airport in December, they added.

Baseball Scout’s Case

There are other alleged assaults by Mexican police on U.S. citizens--not just tourists but business people and residents here. One case happened in the heart of the capital just 10 days after Mamalis and Forsberg were assaulted.

Angel Figueroa, a 59-year-old scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates, came here to recruit young athletes from the Mexico City Reds into the United States’ lucrative big leagues. He too had taken warnings about soaring street crime seriously. Figueroa put all his jewelry in his pocket before he stepped out of the California Hotel to get a shoeshine at 9 a.m. on Feb. 28.

But as he stepped off the curb, four men approached, Figueroa stated in his police report. One showed a police badge, another stuck a gun in his ribs, and they shoved him into a waiting car--waving to traffic policemen on the way, he said.

“I was singled out,” he said.

The assailants thrust him onto the floor in the rear of the vehicle, robbed him of $23,000 in cash and jewelry--including a 1967 World Series ring--and forced him to walk barefoot back to his hotel, Figueroa said.

As he was reporting the crime at the tourist police office--he identified his assailants as local policemen after looking at 20,000 mug shots--the officer who was taking his report asked him for an autographed baseball.

“I said: ‘Sure. You want me to send it to you here at the police department?’ ” Figueroa recalled. “And this cop says: ‘No, not here. There are too many crooks here.’ ”

Other Testimony

Other victims who have filed similar complaints with the tourist police could not be reached for comment. But here’s a synopsis of two of their accounts:

The same month Figueroa, Mamalis and Forsberg were attacked, a young U.S. businessman was stopped in broad daylight by a Mexico City patrol car near a downtown department store, police documents say. Holding a gun to his head, the police reportedly forced him to open his briefcase, stole blank checks, cash and his automatic-teller bank card, and left with the warning: “We know who you are; we know where you work.”

Another American was literally dragged off the street by police patrolling near his hotel, according to his formal complaint. The officers reportedly forced him to his room, robbed him of everything he had and took him back to their patrol car. Then they drove off, beat him and threw him from the moving car, the complaint alleges.

Mexico City’s chief prosecutor has acknowledged corruption and brutality in the ranks of the police forces. During a recent breakfast with foreign correspondents here, the capital’s attorney general, Jose Antonio Gonzalez, said 906 Mexico City officers have been dismissed during the past 18 months.

Gonzalez said the dismissals are part of a purge meant to professionalize the police. The city plans to train thousands of new officers and replace about half of the 28,000-member force by the end of 1997, he said.

Last week, President Ernesto Zedillo fired the city’s police chief, David Garay Maldonado. Zedillo’s stated reason: police brutality in crushing a recent teacher protest on the streets of the capital. But analysts said the president clearly was aware of rising crime and police corruption in Garay’s administration.

U.S. Embassy officials declined to comment publicly on police corruption and crimes against Americans. But other U.S. law enforcement officials who have dealt extensively with the police here said privately that corruption and brutality are so widespread that they do not trust their Mexican counterparts.

“You’ve heard the expression about a bad apple spoiling the barrel,” said one U.S. federal law enforcement officer who asked not to be named. “Well, with the Mexican police it’s more like 50% to 75% of the barrel is bad.”

The treatment of U.S. citizens by Mexican police was addressed during a meeting here last month between members of President Clinton’s Cabinet and Zedillo’s top aides.

Mexico had already formally protested the Riverside County beatings, and Mexican officials at the meeting were seeking U.S. guarantees that its citizens would be better protected from U.S. police brutality.

But the document drawn up at the meeting was carefully worded to cover the flip side of the controversy as well. Mary Ryan, assistant U.S. secretary of state for consular affairs, said the agreement “addresses situations which endanger the physical safety, dignity and security of their nationals within the territory of the other.”

Still, Mamalis and Figueroa see a double standard in the controversy that erupted after the Riverside County beatings.

“My first response was, when you see someone down and getting hit, my stomach turned. I knew exactly how they felt, and the bottom line is I figured there was nothing they did to deserve that,” Mamalis said after viewing the widely broadcast videotape of the incident. “But then I thought, wait a minute--our beating was worse.

“I’m not saying, ‘Poor me.’ I’m just saying, we walk around as proud Americans, residents of the most powerful nation on Earth, and then suddenly, zap! Something like this happens to us, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”