His eyes searched mine, fierce and pleading. It looked to me as if something terrible had happened to him inside. A friend of his later told me that when Castellanos couldn’t sleep he did pushups and pullups, hour after hour, which explained his physique. He went on, “I just signed the paper. Whatever. This was on a Wednesday. They destroyed my mind. They destroyed my spirit. Always with tape and handcuffs. No opportunity to defend myself. But the government, the military, believed what I’m confessing. They believed things I said yes to from torture, because I don’t want to die. They are very bad persons, but they are also stupid.”

Castellanos was moved to the Real Inn, which, besides being a barracks for federales, is just what it looks like: a jail. It is used for suspects under arraigo—a forty-day preventive detention that is a key part of new federal emergency security law. Castellanos was injured physically. “Bleeding from the rectum. Something wrong in my chest, something broken.” But there was no more torture or interrogation at the hotel. His wife and brother were able to visit him there. His arraigo was renewed for another forty days. And then, on December 8th, he was released. He was never charged. He never saw a judge. He no longer had a job. Leyzaola had “lost confidence” in him. But the people whose names were on the list he signed were presumably picked up and pressed for more names.

“That’s how it works,” Raúl Ramírez Baena told me. Ramírez is a human-rights activist with long experience in Baja California. He drew a diagram, showing how each “suspect” provided a list of names, and how each of those “suspects” provided another list, quickly producing a “network.” “They call it an ‘investigation.’ But there is no investigating. Only arrests, interrogations, and torture.” Ramírez, when we spoke, had just come from a Tijuana radio station, where he had talked on the air about la depuración. Many listeners had called in. “They were people with detained police officers in their families. The police have such a bad reputation here—people were glad at first to see them being arrested. But now they are realizing it’s a trick. We don’t say that the torture victims are guiltless. We don’t know. There has never been any investigation.” His shirt pocket, he showed me, was full of scraps of paper. “These are from people who called in. They are the names of mothers and wives of detenidos. Some are receiving threats for speaking out.”

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Ricardo Castellanos, who, even on a good day, is a nervous wreck now, was particularly agitated when we spoke, because of an article that had come out that day in Zeta. A large new haul of officers—sixty-two, most of them Tijuana city police—had been arrested on suspicion of corruption, displayed to the press at a military airfield, and flown to a federal prison on Mexico’s Gulf coast. The Zeta article was about another group of officers who had so far escaped the dragnet. It mentioned Castellanos twice—once as an informer and once as an ex-policeman who had worked for the Arellano Félix gang. Castellanos was horrified. These allegations were presented as fact. The one about him being an informer could get him killed. “Zeta is a good paper, I think,” he said. “But they’re just taking information directly from the military and publishing it.” Much of the article did read as if it had been produced by the Army, though there was a sidebar about how the families of the sixty-two new detenidos were terrified that their loved ones would be tortured in captivity.

The families had reason to be afraid. Many other detainees say they were tortured. Among a group of twenty-five policemen picked up in March, 2009, taken to an Army base in Tijuana, and then transferred to a federal prison in the state of Nayarit, a majority managed, eventually, to submit depositions about their treatment in the cuartel. Their stories were very much like that of Castellanos. They, too, were bound, blindfolded, beaten, and almost suffocated with plastic bags by soldiers determined to make them sign “confessions” they had not written or read and were sometimes simply blank pieces of paper. They also suffered simulated drowning and were shocked with electrodes attached to their genitals. Some reported that Julián Leyzaola was present during their torture. Leaks to the press said the detainees had been working for El Teo.

Blanca Mesina Nevarez, the daughter of one of the twenty-five policemen, after seeing the condition of her father, wrote e-mails to the local newspapers denouncing what had been done to him. Three papers published her letter. (Zeta did not.) Mesina, a twenty-seven-year-old exercise instructor, became a spokesperson for the families of the twenty-five. They all chipped in to pay her fare to Washington, D.C., where she testified, in October, 2009, before the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, about the treatment of her father and his fellow-detainees. She and other witnesses at the hearing accused Leyzaola by name.

Back in Tijuana, Mesina and her family say that they were quickly punished for her boldness. Phone threats were succeeded by physical threats. Mesina was followed constantly by police patrol cars. In May, a black pickup truck with darkened windows and no license plates began bumping her car from behind. After the second bump, she veered into a convenience-store parking lot. “I tried to run in, but he was quick,” she told me. “He caught me outside. He had a pistol and wore a mask. He was dressed in kind of a uniform, like a special-response unit of the Tijuana police. He put the pistol to my head and said, ‘Blanquita, what’s up? Why did you submit a denunciation?’ He said he wanted to kill my family. Then he said, ‘I’m not going to kill you at this moment, because the situation has reached an international level and we don’t want to create a scandal before the election.’ Then he kissed me on the cheek and left.”

After that, Mesina went into hiding, along with a human-rights lawyer, Silvia Vázquez Camacho, who was working pro bono for Ricardo Castellanos and a number of other torture victims in the Tijuana depuración. Vázquez had also received escalating threats and constant unwanted police attention. I found the two women in a city in central Mexico, where they were hiding, together with their young children. They were both homesick, they said, and worried about their families in Tijuana. But it was difficult to know when it would be safe to go home. Not as long as Leyzaola was in charge, Vázquez said, but he was hardly their only problem. The cops who had threatened and terrorized them were working for someone, who was in turn working for someone else. Leyzaola would be only one link in that chain, which led up into the political parties, various levels of officials, the military, and the cartels. “It’s more institutional than personal,” Vázquez said.

An experienced defense lawyer, Vázquez has what one might call a holistic view of Mexican law enforcement, politics, organized crime, and the justice system. If the denunciations of police harassment and threats that she and Mesina had submitted to the authorities, and the requests for protection, began to be addressed, perhaps by a new administrative faction whose interests and alliances were different from Leyzaola’s, that would be a good sign. Of course, that might not happen soon, and there were never any guarantees.

Two weeks after I met Vázquez and Mesina, Mesina’s father and twelve of his fellow-prisoners were abruptly freed from prison by a judge, who said that there was no evidence against them. Mesina’s father returned to Tijuana and publicly demanded his job back. He did not get it. As with Castellanos, the authorities had evidently “lost confidence” in him. Mesina and Vázquez remained in hiding, unconvinced it was safe to go back.

Some human-rights organizations want nothing to do with police officers who become victims. I contacted a citizens’ group for families of the disappeared. When I mentioned my interest in police officers to the group’s leader, he balked. Too many of his members felt antipathy toward the police, who were often prime suspects in the disappearance of their loved ones.

Still, I found other police-officer torture victims in Tijuana. There were four ex-cops, just released from jail, who said they had been attacked by Leyzaola himself. Their case was unusual. It started with a traffic stop and a Tae Kwon Do competition. A Korean trainer in the competition had complained to his teammates that the police stole six hundred dollars from him after he left a downtown strip club. The governor of Baja California was opening the Tae Kwon Do competition the next morning, and the Koreans started yelling at him about the cops who had ripped off their friend. Tijuana does not see many international sporting events, so the governor was mortified. He called Leyzaola and said, Find those cops. The usual door-smashing, shackling, and rough treatment brought the four patrolmen who had stopped the Korean to Leyzaola’s “bunker,” as it is known—a fortified soundproof room in the old downtown police headquarters. Luis Galván Hernández, the cop who had actually patted down the Korean, told me the story.

“We were blindfolded,” he said. “They started punching me in the stomach, hard, Leyzaola on my right side, Huerta on my left.” Gustavo Huerta Martínez is the city’s police director. “My hands were tied behind my back, my shirt pulled over my head. Leyzaola was hitting harder. I said I would admit anything just so they would stop. Leyzaola said I had stolen six hundred dollars from the Korean and he wanted me to confess to his video camera. I said no to the video. That’s when he went nuts. They started using rebar and an AR-15 rifle against my back, while still punching from the front. They started making mistakes, leaving marks, causing wounds. I wouldn’t make the video. They beat us all for hours.”

Then the four cops were thrown in jail for four months. Galván, a sharply dressed thirty-seven-year-old, showed me the medical report from his admission to jail. It listed eighteen separate injuries. “Leyzaola says that’s because I fought him,” he said. “What really happened was that I managed to get one hand out of the cuffs and tried to pull the plastic off my face. I couldn’t breathe. That sent him over the edge. He is a very sick individual.”

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The four cops say that they were first charged with armed robbery and were told by Leyzaola that they were going to prison for twenty years. The charge has since been reduced to a misdemeanor, and a lawyer, taking their case pro bono, managed to get them bail. Galván, who studied law himself, said he expected an acquittal, although he wished his Korean accuser were still in Mexico. The man’s story, he said, was fiction. If he had lost money, he had lost it in the strip club. “We’re filing a complaint for torture. Plus I want my job back. My job was my life.” His friends, he said, believed he had a death wish, talking publicly about his mistreatment by Leyzaola. Galván glowered at his papers as he gathered them into a folder. He wanted his job back. He had done nothing wrong.