October 03, 2013

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, a 38-year-old former drug dealer who became a yoga teacher in prison, tells the teenagers facing homicide and robbery charges in Mexico City.

All dressed in navy blue sweatpants and white sleeveless shirts, the boys move in unison to 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 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 in black uniforms.

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.

Diaz learned yoga himself 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.

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