Instead of water-boarding it’s called the tehuacanazo — and the water forced down the victim’s nose is carbonated, and sometimes spiced with chili pepper. It’s been a well-known technique used by Mexican police for decades.

The tactic — along with electric shocks, sexual violence, near-asphyxiation and death threats — appears in the testimonies collected in a new Amnesty International report released on Thursday titled “Out of Control: Torture and Other Ill-Treatment in Mexico.”

According to the report, use of torture by Mexican police and military is widespread, with a 600 percent rise in the number of reported cases over the past decade. Yet despite the huge increase in incidents, there is little being done to combat it or, in fact, discourage it.

“Torture is so widespread in Mexico and sort of expected as an investigative technique,” said Maureen Meyer, the Washington Office of Latin America associate for Mexico and Central America.

Meyer authored a 2010 report on human rights violations committed by the military in Mexico, with a focus on Ciudad Juárez, where cartel violence combined with federal militarization made it the deadliest city in the world from 2008 to 2010. “It’s not sanctioned. It’s not necessarily a state policy to torture but in fact it’s very much permissive and the torturers are never investigated,” she said.

Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) received more than 7,000 complaints of torture and ill-treatment between 2010 and 2013, and advocates say that number is drastically lower than the actual number of incidents.

Yet not one of those complaints, as far as Amnesty International’s investigation could find, resulted in a torture conviction. In fact, very few torture complaints to human rights commissions result even in a criminal prosecution, the report stated.

In 2012, the Mexican government told the U.N. Committee Against Torture that only six verdicts had been handed down in torture trials during the seven years prior. Torture charges, if pursued at all, are typically downgraded to abuse of authority, misuse of public office, or unauthorized exercise of public authority.

According to Rupert Knox, the author of the Amnesty report, Mexican citizens are routinely detained for long periods of time — in some cases up to 80 days — during which evidence is fabricated. They are tortured into making false confessions, sometimes implicating others. The forced statements are accepted as evidence by prosecutors and judges who, despite laws against such evidence, ignore how they were obtained.