Mexico City ? Torture in Mexico’s criminal justice system is rampant despite Mexican government efforts to correct the problem, according to a report released Tuesday by the Nobel Prize-winning group Physicians for Human Rights.

The study — based on an anonymous survey last year of all federal forensic doctors who perform medical examinations of prisoners — revealed that “far more” tortures occurred than had been reported.

The report cites undertrained and ill-equipped physicians for misdiagnosing torture.

The findings will be published today in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

President Vicente Fox told reporters Tuesday that while torture remained a problem at the state and local level, among federal police it was “practically eradicated. We work every single day of the year to totally eradicate torture.”

Mexico’s constitution prohibits torture to extract information or to punish suspects.

Two-thirds of those surveyed in the physicians’ report said that at least one prisoner they had examined in the past year claimed to have been tortured by police. Half of the doctors said they had documented evidence of torture in at least one detainee in the last year.

Most doctors said, however, that torture has declined in the last five years.