CHAOS ON THE BORDER

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - It's practically a daily ritual: Accused drug
traffickers and assassins, shackled and bruised from beatings, are
paraded before the news media to show that Mexico is winning its drug
war. Once the television lights dim, however, about three-quarters of
them are let go.

Even as President Felipe Calderon's government touts its arrest
record, cases built by prosecutors and police under huge pressure to
make swift captures unravel from lack of evidence. Innocent people
are tortured into confessing. The guilty are set free, only to be
hauled in again for other crimes. Sometimes, the drug cartels decide
who gets arrested.

Records obtained by The Associated Press showed that the government
arrested 226,667 drug suspects between December 2006 and September
2009, the most recent numbers available. Less than a quarter of that
number were charged. Only 15 percent saw a verdict, and the Mexican
attorney general's office won't say how many of those were guilty.

The judicial void is a key reason why Mexican cartels continue to
deliver tons of marijuana, methamphetamines, heroin and cocaine onto
U.S. streets.

"It in effect gives them impunity," U.S. Ambassador Carlos Pascual
told the AP, "and allows them to be able to function in ways that can
extend themselves into the United States."

Mexico's justice system is carried out largely in secret and has long
been viciously corrupt. Add a drug war that Calderon intensified, and
the system has been overrun. Nearly 25,000 people have died in the
war to date, and the vast majority of their cases remain unsolved.

The AP obtained court documents and prison records restricted from
the public and conducted dozens of interviews with suspects'
relatives, lawyers, human rights groups and government officials to
find out what happened after suspects were publicly paraded in key
cartel murder cases.

In Ciudad Juarez, where a war between two cartels over trafficking
routes killed a record 2,600 people in 2009, prosecutors filed 93
homicide cases that year and got 19 convictions, the AP found. Only
five were for first-degree murder, court records show, and none came
under federal statutes with higher penalties designed to prosecute
the drug war.

"They never charge anyone with homicide because they don't have the
evidence, they don't have proof," said Jorge Gonzalez, president of
the public defenders association. "They just show them to the media
to give the impression that they're solving cases."

Soldiers in Juarez routinely announce to the public that suspects
have confessed to a shocking number of murders.

Hector Armando Alcibar Wong, known as "El Koreano," killed 15, they
said. But a year after his August 2009 arrest, authorities don't even
know where he is. Chihuahua state officials say they handed him over
to federal authorities; the attorney general's office says it never had him.

Soldiers told the media in 2008 that Juan Pablo Castillo Lopez was
tied to 23 killings. He was never charged with homicide and was freed
from state prison less than a year later. The army quickly arrested
him again, saying he killed two more people within three days. Nine
months after that, he still doesn't face a homicide charge.

Oswaldo Munoz Gonzalez, known as "El Gonzo," admitted to killing 40
people, according to the joint police-army operation in Ciudad
Juarez. His family says he was tortured into that confession. Eight
months later, he hasn't been charged with a single homicide either.

Munoz was first detained in 2008 and accused of aggravated robbery
but he was released after prosecutors failed to present enough evidence.

Two months after he was released, authorities say they nabbed Munoz
during a traffic stop, and found drugs and guns in his truck.

His sister, Petra Munoz Gonzalez, says they're lying - he was dragged
from his home while his wife and two young daughters watched. She
says her brother, a taxi driver and occasional bus driver with a
third-grade education, does not drink or use drugs.

Munoz's family didn't know where he was until they saw him paraded on
television days later, with guns and drugs in front of him.

"He told me, 'I never killed anyone,"' Petra Munoz said. "He said he
confessed because he had been tortured. He told me they put a bag
over his head so he couldn't breathe and gave him electric shocks
down there (on his genitals) and beat him until he fell over in pain.
Who would endure that?"

"I just ask that the truth be told," she added. "Why haven't they
presented proof, or witnesses, or anything that incriminates him?
It's been almost a year."

Chihuahua authorities say they can't discuss open cases. Mexico
Attorney General Arturo Chavez declined several AP requests for comment.

The attorney general's records show the same pattern of catch and
release in all states where Calderon's government sent federal police
and soldiers to crush the cartels.

In Baja California, home to the border city of Tijuana, nearly 33,000
people were arrested but 24,000 were freed. In the northern state of
Sinaloa - the cradle of the powerful cartel by the same name - more
than 9,700 were detained, but 5,606 freed. In Tamaulipas, birthplace
of the Gulf cartel, nearly 3,600 were detained while 2,083 were freed.

Calderon first launched his military assault in December 2006 in his
home state of Michoacan, deploying thousands of troops shortly after
a new cartel called La Familia rolled five severed heads onto a
nightclub's dance floor.

Since then, federal forces have arrested more than 3,300 drug
suspects. Nearly half have been released.

In 2008, drug traffickers in Michoacan lobbed hand grenades into a
crowd celebrating Mexico's independence. Eight revelers died,
including a 13-year-old boy, making it one of Mexico's
highest-profile murder cases. Police and federal authorities arrested
three suspects within 10 days. None of the men had criminal records.
All three confessed.

But at least 16 people say the three men weren't even there.

The witnesses - next-door neighbors, relatives, bar owners,
waitresses, a corner store owner and a doctor - told authorities they
saw all three that night in Lazaro Cardenas, more than 300 miles from
the colonial square in Morelia where the attacks occurred, according
to interviews and statements obtained by the AP.

Neighbor Gloria Ortiz and her daughter, Selene, told the AP they had
dinner with one of the men in his cramped living room. Juan Carlos
Castro, a mechanic who loves to cook, invited them over for a
favorite dish - stewed pig's feet in chili sauce - and discussed a
menu for Selene's 15th birthday party, which Castro had offered to cater.

Edith Franco, a Lazaro Cardenas doctor, testified under oath that she
had dinner with Julio Cesar Mondragon at her mother's taco restaurant
that night.

Three days later, Castro's wife, Esperanza Fajardo, was told that
gunmen had taken him away in a car. She reported a kidnapping to police.

Three days after that, Mondragon was kidnapped as he washed his car
outside his house. His wife said she heard her husband scream for
help, but by the time she rushed to the window he was gone.

Alfredo Rosas' girlfriend said he was abducted in a similar way two days later.

The next time the three women saw them, the men were being paraded in
front of television cameras in Mexico City by federal police, who
identified them as terrorists and members of the Zeta drug cartel.

Castro was cut and bruised. Mondragon's face was black-and-blue.
Rosas, who was wearing a hospital robe, had five broken ribs and a black eye.

"At that moment, you cry, you scream. You feel impotent," Fajardo
said. "I said, 'How is it possible that they are accusing him of
something he didn't do?"'

Castro says he was beaten until he not only confessed, but gave them
Mondragon's name as an accomplice.

"They showed me videos in which they were cutting someone's head off,
and they told me they would cut me up finger by finger, arm by arm,
and my family, too," Castro said in handwritten court testimony
obtained by the AP. "I would repeat what they told me to say, and if
I made a mistake, they would hit me."

Mondragon said in his court statement that his captors took him
blindfolded to a spot where he heard what he thought were the screams
of a man being burned alive. "Set him on fire!" Mondragon's captors
shouted. He prayed he "would die quickly."

Instead, he said, his captors took him to a house and repeatedly
dunked his head into a bucket of water, beat him with a rifle butt
and hung him from a tree, singeing his ears with a lighter. Mondragon
said he gave them Rosas' name.

Federal police say an anonymous phone tip then led them to a house in
the Michoacan town of Apatzingan, a known stronghold for La Familia,
where they found the three men tied up, blindfolded and whimpering.
The tip came days after the government accused La Familia of staging
the grenade attack, and the cartel responded by hanging a banner
claiming its innocence and vowing to find the killers.

Police say the battered men confessed and claimed allegiance to La
Familia's biggest rival. They were flown blindfolded to Mexico City,
still unaware who their captors were.

"I started to think, 'Could this be the government?"' Mondragon said
in his statement. "'What if I tell them the truth, that I didn't do
any of the things I've been talking aboutUKP' But I didn't say
anything. I was afraid."

The attorney general's office had two secret witnesses who claimed
Castro and Mondragon smuggled drugs and attacked police, but said
nothing about the grenade attack. One witness was killed last year,
said Rosas' attorney, Raul Espinoza de Los Monteras Santillan. The
other, he said, admitted he never met the defendants.
In February, the prosecution's own expert dismissed as unreliable a
blurry surveillance video that supposedly placed two of the suspects
at the celebration.

A year after the arrests, an appeals judge dismissed charges of
organized crime, terrorism and grenade possession against all three
men. The confessions have been retracted, but homicide charges still stand.
The proceedings have been delayed because at least eight hearings
have been missing at least one of the three arresting officers, the
lawyers said. The government says it cannot comment on an ongoing trial.

All three men remain in jail.

"I'm really disappointed in the government," witness Franco told the
AP. "They didn't look for the culprits. They looked for someone to blame."

Even Mexico's president admitted the court system is inept recently
as he touted a new judicial system that Mexico has begun to adopt.

"It fosters injustice, impunity and corruption," Calderon wrote on
the presidential website. "We need a profound change and that's why
we have begun an unprecedented effort to modernize and redesign our
legal system."
That effort, with aid from the United States, started under a
constitutional amendment passed by the legislature, approved by all
32 states and signed by Calderon in 2008.

Under the old system, defendants are presumed guilty until proven
innocent, proceedings are carried out almost entirely in writing, and
judges usually rubber-stamp whatever government prosecutors and
investigators hand them. Without public scrutiny, mistaken arrests,
bungled investigations and false confessions are commonplace.

With the reform, defendants are presumed innocent until proven
guilty; police must investigate crimes and collect evidence before
making arrests; a panel of judges decides whether there is enough
evidence for the case to proceed, and trials are argued orally in
courts open to the public.

The law calls for the changeover to be completed by 2016. The U.S.
Agency for International Development has provided training in
forensics, interviewing and courtroom arguments to 550 Mexican
prosecutors. Some 5,000 federal police officers have taken basic
investigation courses, also with U.S. funding. The Obama
administration is requesting $207 million in its 2011 budget for
judicial and government reforms in Mexico.

The new system was piloted in Chihuahua state, home to Ciudad Juarez,
in 2007 - just before the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels began their
bloody war to control drug routes into the United States. All
Chihuahua prosecutors and judges were trained in the new techniques.

But even state prosecutors say the drug war has stymied the new system.

Soldiers, who under Mexican law can't do police work, routinely bring
in evidence such as illegally obtained confessions that judges are
forced to throw out.

"The numbers of arrests increased tremendously but the numbers of
prosecutions virtually didn't change," noted Pascual, the U.S. ambassador.

Since the reform was implemented, 98 officials who had received
training - police investigators, forensic experts, prosecutors - have
been assassinated by gangs, said Carlos Gonzalez, spokesman for the
Chihuahua attorney general's office.

Nobody has been arrested in any of those killings.