The News from León

Evidently, an elite police unit in León, a major city in central Mexico, is composed of avid torturers. This isn't a bunch of run-of-the-mill, Sipowicz-style body blows, either; rather, it calls to mind the behavior of the guards in that notorious prison that ryhmes with Shnabu Grabe. Officer practiced the procedures --which included beatings with locks, forcing suspects through rat- and excrement-filled gauntlets, and something called the tehuacanazo, which sounds like waterboarding without the board-- on their colleagues before applying them to detainees.