MEXICO CITY // Sixteen Mexican boys stretch their bodies sideways with one hand to the ground, the other pointing to the ceiling, listening to their yoga instructor in the bare room of a youth detention centre.
“Your crime doesn’t matter right now, relax,” Fredy Alan Diaz Arista, 38, a former drug dealer who became a yoga teacher in prison, tells the teenagers facing homicide and robbery charges.
All dressed in navy blue sweatpants and white sleeveless shirts, the boys move in unison to Mr Diaz’s instructions, which he peppers with inspirational phrases as they breathe heavily, switching to poses like the downward dog, table and pigeon.
“Hands to the sky,” says Mr Diaz, his voice booming as he moves between blue and green mats in a room with barred windows. “Open your chest like a bird opening its wings and heading to freedom.”
The soothing powers of yoga are among a slew of activities that the capital’s juvenile halls offer to young offenders, hoping to steer them straight in a country struggling to defeat a wave of drug-related violence that has not spared Mexico’s youth.
Within the high, barbed wire-topped walls of the Comprehensive Teenager Diagnostics Community (CDIA) in Mexico City, the 219 young detainees can learn carpentry, music or how to make tortillas in the cafeteria under the watch of unarmed guards.
Mr Diaz’s yoga class attracts teenagers like Jesus, 16, accused of rape, Pedro, 14, facing charges of killing a woman, and Eric, 19, who was sentenced to the maximum five years for a juvenile for the crimes of homicide, kidnapping and extortion.
“There are days when I wake up stressed out because I have a lot of time to serve, but when I come here all the stress goes away and I relax,” says Eric, who was 17 when he decided to make “easy money” by helping to kidnap a man who was later killed.
Mr Diaz learned yoga in prison after he was caught with a gun and 18 kilograms of cocaine in his luggage, which he was taking from the Pacific coast state of Guerrero to Mexico City in 2002.
The prison director, Cynthia Rosas Rodriguez, may add massage classes to the program, which could give the boys another career option after they walk free, but she stressed that the focus was on education.
“We offer a series of activities that, taken together, are a good way for boys who lived through lots of violence to express and metabolise their emotions,” Ms Rosas says, acknowledging that the programme will not change a “minority of boys”.
Mexico created a juvenile justice system in a 2005 reform, which says teenagers should face jail only for serious crimes. President Enrique Pena Nieto, who took office in December, has launched a nationwide crime prevention programme to keep youths away from gangs.
But Juan Martin Perez Garcia, director of the Mexico Children’s Rights Network, said some of the reforms were only finalised last year and many states still imprison youths for less serious offenses when studies show that jails act like “crime universities”.
A study by the non-profit found that drug cartels recruited 15,000 to 25,000 teenagers between 2010-2011, mostly to work as lookouts known as “hawks” but in rare cases as assassins.
At the end of Mr Diaz’s hour-long class as the boys lay on the floor with their eyes closed, their teacher urges them to “let go of your problems, your sentence”.
“From the first day I tried it I liked yoga a lot. It relaxes me when I’m stressed out,” says Pedro, who is accused of killing a woman. “If I don’t have the opportunity to study, I want to teach yoga.”
* Agence France-Presse
