Job Discussion Forums

[amnesty]

Thanks, guys, for hijacking my thread to argue about some arcane psychology term.

Getting back to the subject - just because YOU have lived in Mexico all your life or whatever and never had a bad experience with the cops doesn't mean Mexico doesn't have an inordinate problem in this area.

Here are the things that I've heard:

1) A couple of my friends go down to Tijuana, cross the border on foot, in the middle of the day, and find an ATM on a street just off of the main shopping and tourist street "Avenida Revolucion". Next thing they know, several cops with machine guns cross the street and demand money. I forgot how much they took - maybe a few hundred dollars. Pretty bad.

2) Another friend of mine drives into Mexicali (another city on the California-Mexico border) with his girlfriend. Cops stop him for an alleged traffic violation. They ask him if he speaks Spanish, and even though he understands a little, he wisely says "no". Whereupon they tell him to follow them to the station. They walk in the station, they tell his girlfriend to sit down, and a bunch of cops surround my friend. They tell him they'll rape his girlfriend if he doesn't have $3,000 wired to their account. Pretty fucking horrible.

3) Recently the San Diego newspaper reported that Mexican cops were robbing many American tourists as they were heading back to the US border crossing. In one instance, a family is separated - some cops drive the husband to an ATM for some quick and easy cash, while the wife and child are taken to a police station, where she is raped by a cop. They reported the incident to Border Control and the San Diego police - I don't know what happened after that - probably nothing.

4) A few years ago I read in the Los Angeles Times a real horror story: a guy flies into Mexico City, and asks a cop in the airport where to find the bus into the city (or something like that). The cop says go out this door, turn right, and go around the corner. He follows these instructions, and as soon as he turns the corner, he's grabbed by a couple of cops and thrown into a van, where they beat him, tie him up, rob him, and drive around for a while torturing him (putting out cigarettes on his skin, etc.), finally throwing him out of the moving van into a ditch.

Now my friends are not druggies, not alcoholics (none of them are drinkers, beyond maybe one beer or so once in a great while, certainly not binge-drinking hooligans or anything like that), not criminals, not liars, and I have no reason whatsoever to doubt their stories. The newspapers I quoted are mainstream papers that are if anything, sympathetic to Mexico.

What's shocking to me is that these stories weren't national scandals, but rather covered once on some inside page of the paper, and never heard about again. That tells me that this kind of thing goes on all the time and that the US government has no intention of doing a damn thing about it. It's f*&king outrageous if you ask me.

[amnesty]

Ah yes, one more thing - UN-F-ING-BELIEVEABLE that some of you would bring Abu Grabass and Guantanamo into this.

One the one hand, Mexican police assault, rob and rape perfectly innocent tourists. On the other hand you have a WAR going on, and we are trying to pry information out of TERRORISTS in order to end the war sooner and save lives. Real good moral equivalency there. You guys are real geniuses, I gotta say.

[Ben Round de Bloc]

[some waygug-in]

If I may get a word in edgewise, or any other wise.
I just would like to mention, as it has been pointed out to me many times, the border area of Mexico is not typical of the rest of the country. Even from my limited personal experience in that part of the country, I would have to say that the border area is anything BUT typical of the rest of Mexico.

You have the "free zone" where tourists can come and go freely, without all the hassles of someone entering the country on a more permanent basis. A lot of people come seeking thrills, wild times, prostitutes or what have you.
Not that those things don't exist in other parts of the country, but it seems that in the border region, those things are front and center. This tends to make relations between police and tourists a lot more stressful than in the rest of the country. This is on top of the huge drug trade problem.

When I was in Nuevo Laredo, I was shocked and ashamed at the way most norteamericanos behaved.
It is no wonder the police there have problems with tourists.

If you want to see the real Mexico, you have to come further South. You have to get away from the border zone and get to know how the rest of the country is. Central Mexico is quite different from that borderland hell. I felt a lot safer in Mexico than travelling across the US, but that's just me.

Anyway, that's just my 2 centavos.

Suerte

[ls650]

[MixtecaMike]

Amnesty did have a very valid point about topic hijacking, however that's a standard risk for posts in the Mexico forum.

Re police, I had a row with a neighbor and was warned to be very careful because her "husband" is a Policia Judicial, however shortly afterwards the husband kicked her out of the house.

Mexican police are generally dispised, and with reason, as corrupt and involved in crime, for example how many kidnapping bands are run by former and current police officers? Add to that their almost complete incompetence, and you can see where amnesty is coming from.

However, the stories told in his/her post sound more than a little beyond the bounds of normality. Don't forget that many criminal organizations have fake uniforms and ID, and it is unlikely a tourist could tell the difference.

As for national scandals, there aren't any unless they affect enemies of Vicente Fox. National disgraces, basically the whole country.

Con cari�o
Bitter and twisted, going, going, ...

[seanie]

Amnesty,

Not all Mexican cops are the same. I live in a small town of about 80,000. The cops here are mostly armed with nothing more than a truncheon on the waist. I see cops every day, and I’ve never seen one so much as wield a truncheon – not even the hapless one who a woman whacked on the head with her shoe after he and his colleagues tried to remove a roadblock set up by irate market vendors. Here in this small town the most they have to deal with are drunks, juvenile delinquents, boisterous demonstrators, and - I'm guessing from Mike's post - virago wives:-). In places like Tijuana, which has a rep as narco-territory, the police are armed to the teeth; and - I imagine – constantly in danger. That’s not a justification for beating anybody up, of course. You asked “…how do the police in Mexico know who they can mess with…” I think it’s an incorrect assumption that the police in Mexico, in general, “mess with” people.

I have had one Bad Cop incident in Mexico City. A friend and I were walking near Avenida Reforma at (one of the main avenues of the city) at 4 in the morning and got picked up by cops. They drove us around in their car and told us that a judge would fine us 400 USD for not having any ID... but they would let us go for a small fraction of that, if we “cooperated” with them. My friend speaks impeccable Spanish and I do OK, and we told them to take us to the “judge” (my friend and I had our tourist card and FM3 respectively in our hotel about 5 blocks from where we were picked up; and we told them so. However, it became clear that they were less interested in our legal status than in a “shakedown”). After much arguing back and forth, they ended up taking us to our hotel and did not even come in to check our papers. Had they been truly nasty, the situation could have ended tragically, but I have to say that at no time did they threaten us with violence.

If anybody’s walked along Avenida Reforma or near the Alameda in Mexico City in the wee hours, you’ll know I’m not exaggerating when I say that police cars pass by at the rate of about 1 every two minutes. I believe they are there for my protection, and I feel reassured whenever one passes me. I’m pretty sure most – if not all - the cops in the cars see me; and I’m sure most would assume I’m a foreigner. If I felt that most of these cops were out to get me, there’s no way I’d feel comfortable in Mexico City; but the opposite is true: I love being there. Looking back, I think I managed not to be spooked by my Bad Cop experience because I have faith in the police (the way one has “faith” that a chair is not going to come crashing down if you sit on it….although every now and then it does happen ).

[leslie]

Bye

[Ben Round de Bloc]

[MixtecaMike]

This was a few years ago, but the worst example I ever saw of what Ben mentions was in Cuba. Police in uniform patrolling the beach chasing away the locals, especially the morenas. I was in a group of about four tourists with two Cubans, and it took a lot of persuading to stop the police forcing the Cubans off the beach.

They were convinced that as tourists we wanted to be protected from bothersome locals.

Maybe some police like that at Mexican bus terminals and border crossings wouldn't go astray?

[moonraven]

I think "Amnesty" is a ringer. That's why my earlier post indicated that I wasn't sure that he/she made those comments with a straight face.