MEXICO CITY - On the way home from a pre-Christmas fiesta, Mauricio Rodriguez, after “two tequilas,” felt clear-headed and focused, “not dizzy or anything.”
So when the information-technology help-desk employee failed one of Mexico City’s feared holiday breath test checkpoints, he knew he would be saying goodbye for a while. No ticket. No warning. “Come get my wife,” he told his father by phone before being whisked off in a squad car. “They’re taking me away.”
Rich or poor. Legislator or bricklayer. Foreign or domestic. Anyone in Mexico’s capital city who exceeds the legal 0.08 alcohol limit must take a strange little journey to a squat brick building next to a playground on the west side of town where he can sit - and sit, and sit - and think about what he has done. Part prison, part timeout for adults, the official name is the Center for Administrative Sanctions and Social Integration. But everybody knows it as “El Torito.”
“It’s like jail-lite. Mild jail,” Jorge Emilio Gonzalez Martinez, a senator with Mexico’s Green Party, told reporters after he spent his drunken-driving penance there earlier this year. “They make you conscious of your error. I have learned.”
Winter holidays are Torito’s boom time. In Mexico, the whole month of December seems devoted to one drunken party or another. Celebrations for the Virgin of Guadalupe blend into nightly pre-Christmas celebrations and boozy company lunches that bubble over into New Year’s celebrations. Christmas bonuses, required by the government, flesh out the national wallet.
“The end of the year we see an exceeding amount of people arriving,” said Torito’s director, Rosa Maria Laguardia. “Very powerful people. Humble people. Engineers, lawyers, artists, journalists. Everyone. Everyone ends up here.”
The place is not without its charm. One recent day during the holiday rush, several inmates played a spirited game of volleyball in the courtyard. A refreshment stand served sodas and chips. There’s a library, movies and a small glass shrine to the Virgin Mary. Christmas Eve warranted a special menu: turkey in plum sauce and spaghetti soup.
A former slaughterhouse, Torito has been drying out drinkers since the late 1950s,but only in the past decade, since the introduction of the city’s breath-alcohol test program, has it taken on such cultural importance. More than 100,000 people have slept it off within its white-washed brick cells in those 10 years.
Other civil infractions can land you in Torito - drinking on the street, disturbing the peace, scalping tickets, cleaning windshields at stoplights, getting rowdy at soccer games - but the majority are drivers stopped by the breath-test police.
Rodriguez entered El Torito in the wee hours the Saturday before Christmas.
“I asked one of the guards here, ‘Hey, what do I do? What’s the dynamic? I don’t want to get stabbed.’ He’s like, ‘No, everybody just wants to leave.’”
Depending on the severity of the infraction, inmates must spend between 20 and 36 hours at Torito. They sleep on concrete bunks and the cells have metal bars, but they’re not locked and the guards don’t carry guns. By 6:30 a.m. they are roused for breakfast. There are medical checks, discussions with psychologists, classes on the dangers of drugs and alcohol.
Outside, family members wait nervously. Antonio Guerrero, a thin 22-year-old who works at a parking garage, stepped onto the sidewalk rubbing his eyes after logging his 36 hours. “Not very pleasant in there,” he said.
He got nabbed while walking on the street after “three drinks.”
He said he paid the officer 100 pesos - about $8 - and even so he was taken to Torito. “It’s because it’s Christmas.The police want to pick up as many people as possible to get their little gifts.”
Rodriguez came out in a better mood. “Freedom!” he yelled and raised both fists in the air. He hugged his wife and daughter.
“Right now I’m going to go for some cold beers,” he said. “I’m not going to drive though.”
Front Section, Pages 2 on 12/29/2013