City Flourishes In Tijuana Prison -- Inside Guarded Walls, 2,500 People Make Living As In Any Town

TIJUANA, Mexico - Two taco stands bracket the Dragon Gate Chinese restaurant. Down one narrow street is a clothing factory.

A few doors along, bakers are making bread with California raisins. A well-dressed family strolls by, the man toying with a gleaming switchblade.

Welcome to La Mesa State Penitentiary.

Inside its guarded walls is a little city of almost 2,500 men, women and children. To outsiders, the adults are murderers, rapists and smugglers, but inside "el pueblito" they're neighbors. They're carpenters, grocers and television repairmen, all working in shops that line small, bustling streets.

Most prisons in Mexico are the more typical cell-based, locks-and-steel-bars institutions. The Tijuana prison's anything-goes reputation for corruption and ever-lurking danger is widespread.

The prison director, Jorge Duarte Castillo, said the reputation was overblown. "There's an external image and an internal image," he said.

But when a reporter said he had been inside La Mesa in the company of a regular prison visitor, Duarte Castillo refused to discuss the matter further over the telephone.

In the prison's social structure, the poor sleep on the "freeways," the small streets of the compound. Those with some money buy or rent rooms with mattresses. Above the commotion are the barred, air-conditioned houses of the "maicerones," the powerful ones.

A ladder in one hallway leads to a cubicle barely big enough to

squirm into. The man reclining on a mattress inside, who gave only the name Juan, said he had paid the equivalent of $300 - a bargain price - for the space and held a deed from the "coordinator."

Entering prisoners are generally destined for the detention block, where the most restricted sleep seven to a cell along the dark halls. But most inmates bypass detention either by agreeing to work at unpopular jobs, like garbage collecting, or by getting their families to send money so they can pay $20 to $50 for the freedom to live on the street or more for a room.

It is indeed a dangerous place. Inmates shoot each other to death about once every six weeks, human-rights organization director Clark Alfaro estimated. On Jan. 12, police responded to automatic-weapons fire in the prison but made no arrests. In 1978, prisoners gunned down the prison director, two aides and two guards in the prison yard.

A sign at the prison entrance bans metal forks, spoons and knives, but anyone inside with a little money can easily buy drugs, pistols or the sexual services of women. Clark Alfaro said about 90 percent of the inmates take drugs regularly - cocaine, heroin and marijuana.

Ah Hui, a Chinese gang member from New York who admits he kidnapped a Chinese restaurateur in Tijuana for ransom, said he thinks of the prison community as home and is glad to be there.

In the prison, he said, he has freedom. Despite the high walls and strict hierarchy, prisoners are in many ways allowed to do as they please. He met his Mexican wife inside, and they are expecting a baby any day.

"I was one person when I came in," he said in Cantonese. "When I go home I'll be three."

Ah still has eight years of a 10-year sentence to serve, but he said he doesn't mind. Of the 56 people who joined the gang at the same time as he did, only nine are still alive, he said.

"If I had been in New York for the past two years I might be dead," he said.