TIJUANA — Dana Conour, a 33-year-old homemaker from Iowa, stood in a Mexican courtroom and faced the police officer accused of raping her.
When their eyes met, the events of that awful night came rushing back. She recalled how he had assaulted her on his desk, how he offered her a cigarette afterward, how he laughed about it with a fellow officer. She remembered the long wait for her husband to return from a cash machine and pay a bribe for her release.
Conour had gone back to Tijuana, nearly two months after the attack, expecting to identify her assailant in a lineup and be done with it. Instead, she found herself in a careo, or face-off, a central ritual of Mexican justice.
Conour stood an arm's length from the accused, Hector Arias, 35, a police supervisor, with only a metal screen between them. As a judge and several lawyers watched, Arias locked his gaze onto hers and proclaimed his innocence.
"I had to look him in the eyes," recalled Conour, now back home in Milo, Iowa, awaiting a verdict in the case. "He said, 'Why are you doing this to me? You're ruining my life.' And I said, 'You did this to me. I didn't ask to be here.' "
The careo -- from the Spanish word cara, meaning face -- is a Mexican legal tradition that dates to the Spanish Inquisition. Accused and accuser confront each other and offer their versions of the truth, with limited participation from lawyers.
The encounter can last minutes or hours. Judges listen for inconsistencies and study body language. Is the defendant sweating excessively? Is the accuser fidgeting? Is either hesitant?
What do the eyes show? Can the alleged perpetrator face the victim without flinching, and vice versa?
Whether a careo is an effective tool for eliciting the truth is a matter of debate, but many legal scholars, judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys say the practice has proved its worth.
Some crime victims relish the confrontation, saying it provides an emotional release. But victims of sex crimes and their advocates consider the careo primitive, a method of re-victimization in a justice system that, despite reforms, still bears vestiges of machismo.
"If she is not prepared, the rapist will eat her alive," said Maria Santos Ramirez, a psychologist who treats sex-crime victims in Tijuana, where women's groups are lobbying legislators to ban the careo in sexual-assault cases.
"The man will do anything to make her feel bad."
