Diego Cevallos
MEXICO CITY, Nov 19 2007 (IPS) – Miguel Fernández was a police officer in the Mexican capital who used and sold cocaine and crack for 18 years in collusion with his superiors and colleagues. Now he runs a small rehabilitation centre for addicts, where the Bible and God s healing power are the treatment of choice.
God bless you, is Fernández s standard greeting. I was more of a drug dealer than a cop, and I was on the point of committing suicide because of my addiction. But God rescued me from hell, so I decided to help others, he told IPS.
The 43-year-old former police officer and drug trafficker is a combination of rehabilitation counsellor and Christian evangelist. Since 2002 he has treated 408 addicts, and says that half of them succeeded in kicking the habit. He works mainly with low-income people who come to his centre through their families encouragement or insistence.
Of the 1,800 drug rehab centres in Mexico, at least 400 meet the required standards, according to the authorities.
The Health Ministry reports that suicides, human rights violations, and abuses such as locking people up or chaining them hand and foot, have occurred in some centres.
The government has a programme for formally licensing private centres, but has only managed to inspect 20 percent of them.
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Fernández was a Mexico City police officer from 1984 to 1996, after which he worked as a private security agent for former boxing champion Julio César Chávez in the northeast Mexican city of Culiacán.
He offers one solution to the torments of addiction: turning to God.
At his rehab centre, Fundación Pao, Nuevo Porvenir Alfa y Omega (roughly, Alpha and Omega Foundation for a New Future), which is licensed by the Health Ministry, the former police officer offers a structured schedule of activities, including Bible study and religious teaching.
Residents also pitch in with work in the centre, and occasionally go out on the streets to sell key-rings and lollipops, which they make themselves for a private company, to raise funds.
Addicts who come to the centre for rehabilitation pay a matriculation fee of 25 dollars, which entitles them to room and board for three months. Located in Nezahualcoyótl, a crime-ridden poor neighbourhood on the outskirts of Mexico City, the centre has a maximum capacity of 20 people.
According to official figures, 3.5 million of Mexico s 104 million people have tried drugs at least once in their lives, half a million have a drug habit and some 280,000 are severely addicted. The most commonly used drug is marihuana, followed by cocaine.
Casa Alianza, the Latin American branch of the New York-based Covenant House, which works with street children, recommends Fundación Pao to its donor organisations as a worthy cause. To date, there have been no complaints about any irregularities in the centre.
A spokesperson for Casa Alianza told IPS that Fundación Pao is good at what it does, particularly with low-income people who believe in God.
Fernández, who was brought up Protestant, recognises that rehabilitating drug addicts is complex and difficult. But if they discover God and commit themselves to him, they can get out of the mess they re in. I tried it, and it works, he said.
Although he does not follow any scientifically approved rehabilitation method, he acknowledges that some addicts need medical or psychiatric treatment to overcome their dependence on drugs.
When we come across cases like that, we call the Red Cross or a state health institution, he said.
Fernández, who at one point was smoking 15 grams a day of crack cocaine, is a burly, balding man who mentions God frequently, and loves talking about his past as a police officer and drug dealer.
Based on my own experience and my contact with addicts, I think a good proportion of the police continue to be linked to drug traffickers, and that many police officers use drugs, he said.
In the last three years, thousands of Mexican police officers have been screened for drug use. The number who tested positive for drugs is unknown, but it is reported that the main drugs consumed were marihuana and cocaine. Officers found to be using drugs were expelled from the force.
The government of conservative President Felipe Calderón announced in June that by year-end all 12,000 chiefs of police in the country will have been tested, through an agreement reached with state governors.
Mexico has 350,000 police officers who belong to over 1,600 different forces with no central coordination. The vast majority answer to provincial authorities, and most are underpaid and poorly trained.
I was a member of the judicial police (now the Federal Agency of Investigation) for 18 years, and for 18 years I took drugs and was also a dealer. The corruption is occurring within the force, said Fernández.
In the 1980s and 1990s, he and other police agents sold and consumed cocaine and crack, blackmailed criminals and accused innocent people of crimes in order to satisfy their superiors. He was never brought to book for any of these illegal acts, he said.
Fernández said he saw several of his colleagues murdered by organised crime, and many others go to jail. I almost ended up that way myself, because I was left unprotected when my godfather (his boss, who had links to drug traffickers) was killed, but I was lucky and God helped me, he said.
In the police force he had a family, a group in which everyone took drugs and sold them, he said. I didn t know where the drugs came from, and you couldn t ask the bosses, so we just got on with selling and consuming them.
The Calderón administration, which took office in December, expanded the role of the army in the fight against drug trafficking, sidelining the police force. According to opinion polls, the police are regarded as corrupt by 80 percent of the population.
Investigations by the Attorney General s Office found that drug mafias infiltrated the police and have taken control in several areas of the country, especially along the border with the United States.
Several years have passed since I left the Mexico City judicial police, but the corruption is still there, and many police officers take drugs, said Fernández, after inviting addicts in or out of uniform to turn to God for liberation from their affliction.
