Report Tells of ‘Institutionalized’ Torture by Police

A Tijuana rights group, charging that the torture of crime suspects is “institutionalized” in Mexico, unveiled a report Wednesday alleging 158 cases of beatings and other physical abuse by federal police officers.

The report states that the 158 victims, including 14 women, had suffered a wide range of tortures that included beatings with fists, bats and guns; the imposition of electric shocks to their bodies and near-suffocation by the placing of plastic bags over suspects’ heads. The alleged abuses occurred in Baja California between 1985 and 1991, the report said.

“Torture has become more sophisticated, refined, diversified and modernized in recent years,” said Victor Clark Alfaro, who heads the Binational Committee of Human Rights, a private advocacy group that documents abuses on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

The rights group has previously investigated the use of torture by state and city police officers, but the new inquiry is its most detailed look at alleged abuses by the Federal Judicial Police, a plainclothes force that operates throughout the nation but is under the authority of the attorney general’s office in Mexico City. Federal police have jurisdiction for drug cases and other sensitive investigations.

Critics have long charged that federal police officers use torture and other means to coerce suspects into confessing.

Federal police officials in Tijuana could not be reached for comment Wednesday. But federal authorities and the Mexican attorney general’s office have denied such allegations in the past.

All 158 torture victims were serving prison terms in the Baja California State Penitentiary in Tijuana when interviewed by investigators, the rights group said.