MEXICO CITY -- Erica, 15, was hooked on cocaine and inhaling fumes from drain pipe cleaner to get high when she became pregnant.
"I was sleeping in the storm drains," said Erica, now 16 and the mother of a son. "There are some storm drains where the water no longer runs. Several of us slept down there."She was one of thousands of street children in Mexico, and her case "is one of the mild ones," according to Guillermina Guevara, who runs the Casa Daya for runaway girls in Mexico City, the children's shelter where Erica now lives.
"The youngest girl we have had been raped by her stepfather since she was 4," Guevara said. "She never menstruated and she became pregnant. She's a girl. She's 12 years old. And she has a baby."
Her fate is shared by thousands of Mexican children who flee abuse at home only to find unthinkable levels of exploitation in the street. Many are trapped into prostitution and drug abuse virtually from the moment they leave the homes where they had also faced physical, sexual or emotional abuse.
Conservative estimates say there are more than 13,000 street children in Mexico City, 90 percent of whom become victims of some type of sexual abuse. Making matters worse, Guevara and other specialists in the field say, is that the problem is Mexico's most troublesome secret.
Homeless and abused children are linked to street crime, drug abuse and family disintegration, but rarely if ever are those problems addressed as a whole. "To talk about prostitution is like not wanting the pope to visit," Guevara said. "Talking about drug addiction, about what's really happening -- these are things that are off-limits."
The phenomenon is not new. Spanish surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel made "Los Olvidados" -- The Forgotten Ones -- in 1950 exposing the problem of children left to their own devices. Heart-wrenching though it was, it came out before AIDS and crack made head lice and a cough seem merely quaint.
The latest government census says there were 13,370 street children in Mexico City in 1995. But nongovernmental organizations estimate the number at 20,000 to 25,000, according to a landmark UNICEF report last year.
Another 8,000 runaway children live in the streets in the northwestern border city of Tijuana, across from San Diego, and 4,000 more in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, the UNICEF report said. Still more flock to seaside tourist resorts like Cancun and Acapulco.
Worse yet, the street children are getting younger, more violent and more female, experts say.
Guevara said the typical homeless child used to be a teenage boy who might beg for food or pocket change. Now social workers are finding more kids as young as five or six running away from home, and the older ones are more apt to take up violent crime. More girls are turning up as well, most often after being sexually abused by an adult male in the household.
The population of street children boomed following the 1995 economic crisis -- Mexico's worst since the Great Depression -- when a million Mexicans were thrown out of work. For the same reason, government budgets have been tight.
Casa Daya's government allowance was cut by 25 percent this year.
In Mexico, street children are corrupted by pimps who lend them money and thus have a hold over their lives. They are put to work in crowded, bustling downtown Mexico City, where sidewalk vendors hawk all manner of cheap goods.
Here the children live amid both stunning colonial-era architecture and the worst Mexico has to offer: rogue cops, five-dollar prostitutes, fetid water overflowing sewers and mystery tacos cooked in what looks like yesterday's grease.
Nightclubs, usually around the corner from a centuries-old church, offer live sex shows where five or six men take turns with a prostitute, often a minor, before a worked-up crowd.
Others not exploited sexually live in the storm drains, like Erica, or camped out under plastic tarps strung up alongside one church.
Unwashed, skinny teenagers with bloodshot eyes and a permanent half-grin -- the result of sniffing industrial cleansers or glue or smoking a highly addictive byproduct of crack cocaine known as "El Bote" -- hover aimlessly around the church, too whacked out for any intelligible conversation.
Until October, child prostitution and pornography were not even considered serious offenses in Mexico, with a top penalty of 10 years in jail. Congress only recently elevated them to more serious offenses with prison sentences of up to 30 years.
But child advocacy groups fear a mere law will fail to make a dent in a $2 billion-a-year industry, especially since corrupt police officers are among the most consistent abusers.
"People say we have to take care of the children because they are the future," said Juan Manuel Lopez, a pediatrician running a government shelter for abused children. "But they are not the future. They are the present."
Lopez tends 61 children from toddlers to teenagers in Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl, a sprawling, grimy suburb east of Mexico City. They arrive at the shelter after authorities have found them to be abused at home. Usually they come underweight and undersize, introverted and with low self-esteem.
"Neza," as the city is called, is home to the working poor, those whose trying lifestyles create a recipe for abusing their children and then abandoning them during work hours, which gives the children an opportunity to flee home.
Unlike Casa Daya, which concentrates on teenage girls, the government shelter takes in abused or abandoned children of all ages and both sexes. Living conditions, while not squalid, are far from idyllic. Beds are crammed into dormitories that look more like classrooms while an expansion takes place.
The hard-working staff cooks, cleans and provides other services, but the children appear starved for attention. When a visiting reporter greeted a room full of children, a 4-year-old boy immediately stuck out his hand in introduction.
Lopez explained that the boy and his older sister and brother, who had a broken arm, arrived at the shelter together. Their parents attended supervised counseling for a time in a bid to reunite the family. Then the parents disappeared.
If the three are lucky they will live with a foster family. If not, they will spend their youth in a government shelter.
"At a national level there is a tremendous lack of knowledge about this problem," Lopez said. "It is a tremendous plague on society. It is a medical, psychosocial disease."
Only about half of the children are reunited with family. "Helping these children move forward is tremendously satisfying," he said. "It just breaks your heart to see them."