Schools Try to Nip Criminality in the Bud

In neckties and knee socks, pupils at Technical Secondary School No. 26 seem no match for the steely drug lords and crooked cops of this crime-splashed city.

But 14- to 16-year-olds at the humble Tijuana school--and some 170 other middle schools across the state of Baja California--are at the forefront of an unusual bid by reformers to combat rampant violence and corruption.

An experimental class, which is also being taught at a handful of schools in San Diego County, blends civics and ethics with a crash course on organized crime--from its notorious local figures to its bloody and corrosive toll. The goal: to create a culture of lawfulness.

The 3-year-old curriculum was inspired by the successes of anti-corruption campaigns in the Sicilian city of Palermo and in Hong Kong, where officials mobilized schools, churches and average citizens to aid law enforcement offensives against entrenched mobs.

The border course borrows from popular culture, news reports and students’ own experiences to get them to view criminality as a shared burden and to see how simple personal acts--such as bribing one’s way out of a traffic ticket--add to broader lawlessness familiar to many residents of Tijuana.

“Other countries have changed. Why can’t we?” asked Celia Gonzalez, a teacher at the Tijuana school. “The thing is to have faith.”

The goal may sound abstract, but the program is taking hold at an auspicious moment. Mexico’s new president, Vicente Fox, has made crime reduction an early priority, declaring war on drug cartels and imploring frustrated Mexicans to get off the sidelines.

The corruption course, an elective, has taken off in Baja California, spreading from four test schools in Tijuana in 1998 to a statewide program this year. Two other drug-plagued Mexican states--Sinaloa and Chihuahua--are adopting the curriculum, and there is talk that the course, consisting of 60 lessons, might go nationwide.

The Mexican students express enthusiasm for the assignments, which include reading a Spanish translation of “Lord of the Flies” and watching the mobster film “Goodfellas.” They have asked to organize citywide marches in Tijuana and Mexicali in support of the rule of law.

“There is a lot of corruption all through the justice system,” said 15-year-old Mariana Zaragoza. “We want to know more so that . . . when we become the leaders of Tijuana, we don’t do the same as those people.”

The idea of combating border corruption through teenagers came from Roy Godson, a Georgetown University government professor and president of the National Strategy Information Center, a research group in Washington, D.C., that has studied approaches to fighting crime around the world.

Officials in the Sweetwater Union High School District in Chula Vista, a San Diego suburb, liked the idea. Soon teachers from the U.S. side of the border were sitting down with Mexican counterparts, designing a single course to be taught in both countries. Teachers and school officials went to Palermo in 1999 to see how Mafia influence had been blunted by stirring community reprobation as a crucial complement to the police crackdowns.

The corruption curriculum features segments on values, culture, crime and graft and a final section that uses role-playing to teach students how to avoid being pressured by friends or others into criminal acts. In one exercise, students are asked if they would accept $1,000 or $2,000 to carry a package with unknown contents into the United States.

Teachers and administrators say the course helps illustrate crime’s fluidity. Marijuana smuggled north through Mexico, the students learn, ends up rolled into joints in the United States. Gang members from San Diego, armed with U.S. weapons, have been hit men for the ruthless Arellano Felix drug cartel based in Tijuana.

Godson said a goal of the course is to convey the social cost of ignoring graft.

“Most people . . . think crime and corruption [are] something for the police and the government, not the average citizen. Once you have a lot of crime and corruption in the area, people get more concerned,” he said. “People on the border reached that stage.”

Worry is especially high in Baja, where the homicide rate is quadruple that of San Diego. In fact, some Baja teachers won’t discuss their role in the program publicly for fear of retribution from crime bosses. But by enlisting educators, reformers are banking on Mexicans’ traditionally high regard for schools and teachers.

For all the high hopes, everyone involved acknowledges that it will take years for the lessons to produce measurable benefits.

“[Students] know that maybe society can be changed over the long term. They see that Palermo put in place certain measures along with other sectors of society--families, the church, the media--and were able to reduce crime and make changes,” observed Luz Antonia Carrillo, a Tijuana teacher who said she was unafraid to be publicly identified with the program. “We each have to put in our grain of sand. We each have to make a contribution.”

In Mexico, that means overcoming considerable cynicism toward the police, courts and government among otherwise respectful youngsters. Tijuana students said they think authorities ignore reported crimes and collude with drug lords. Many young people see the legal process as a matter of putting money in the right hands.

Asked whether she trusted police, 15-year-old Perla Navarro answered bluntly: “Not much.” She said they are more likely to go after the innocent than punish wrongdoers. A classmate, who said he lost a watch and $10 to armed muggers not far from the school, complained that lax patrolling makes pupils easy targets for thieves in the impoverished colonia, or shantytown.

Teachers know better than to feed students sugary fictions. “They know. It’s reality,” said Gonzalez, the teacher.

In her classroom, a call for empowerment rests behind every tale of crime. Gang violence, car thefts, drug cartels--responsibility for all rests ultimately with the students, their families and neighbors, the teacher insists.

A newspaper article about vandals offers her a chance to point out what happens when crimes go unreported. And the 1998 massacre in Ensenada of 19 men, women and children is a sign of new extremes in drug-trade brutality. Today’s gang members, Gonzalez warns, can end up tomorrow’s assassins.

Boosters say the curriculum is designed to equip students to weigh their own decisions and is not another “Just Say No” campaign. They think the corruption course may fare better than programs such as Drug Abuse Resistance Education--which sends police officers into elementary schools to discourage drug use--because it is led by teachers and woven into the regular curriculum.

Preliminary testing of students indicates that the border class has improved their understanding of crime and corruption but not altered many of their attitudes. The results showed, for example, that the course did little overall to keep students out of trouble.

At Castle Park High School in Chula Vista, teacher Carmen Hernandez wants her students to feel outrage about crime’s toll on its victims. Although the ninth-graders have taken hungrily to the class topics, Hernandez said, she has seen little sign that they have become more compassionate. The curriculum is the same as in Mexico but is compressed into 40 lessons.

Sessions at Castle Park are more freewheeling than in Tijuana, where teaching tends to favor memorization. Hernandez sprinkles a presentation about the community’s role in fighting crime, for example, with a story about her own watchful neighbor. She maintains a file of news clippings and assigns students to write journal entries about their brushes with crime.

“I wish I could say I gave them a conscience,” Hernandez said. “But at least I can say I made them think.”

On the Mexican side, however, teachers have reported some dramatic outcomes: students swapping gang life for school government, car thievery for better grades. Some young people have discovered moral dilemmas, such as whether to turn in a parent who packages crack cocaine.

Baja officials say their main worry is that the rapid expansion statewide will hurt the quality of the course. And there are funding concerns. The U.S. government bought books for 15,000 Mexican students, although Baja’s education department contributes the bulk of the funding, about $400,000.

Education leaders vow to continue the anti-corruption effort. They caution, however, that schools alone cannot craft a new cultural outlook on graft.

“The best tool we have is education. But that is not enough,” said Carlos Franco Pedroza, a ranking Baja school official. “We also need the help of the media, the community and the family. They can make this a permanent process.”