Failed Breath Tests Behind Holiday Rush at Mexico City's Hangover Prison Joshua Partlow - The Washington Post
go to original December 27, 2013

Mexico has one of the world's worst road safety records, with more than 80,000 people killed in traffic accidents in the past four years. But authorities say the message is slowly getting through that the country's laws are there to be obeyed. Encouragingly, despite population growth, the number of road deaths is stable, and there is evidence, particularly in Mexico City, that attitudes towards drunk-driving are changing for the better. (The Guardian UK)

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 IT help desk employee failed one of Mexico City’s feared alcoholímetros — those pervasive breath tests at holiday 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 they can sit — and sit, and sit — and think about what they’ve 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 González Martínez, 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.”

Read the rest at The Washington Post

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!