Somewhere between this nightmare and our own, different one, lies the answer:

If hell had a special section reserved for recording industry executives, it would probably look a lot like Tepito.

The Mexico City neighborhood is a mile and a half of exuberant, unabashed intellectual-property piracy: thousands of people eddying through a labyrinth of street stalls, buying CDs, movies and software at a tiny fraction of the legal price.

It's also the center of a nationwide piracy business that the Recording Industry Association of America and other groups say probably took almost a billion dollars from the music, film and software industries last year — a business that is almost single-handedly killing Mexico's music industry, crushing legitimate record sales, and sending potential stars fleeing from the country.

Stumble long enough through Tepito's maze of poorly erected street stalls and taco stands, and you might come upon Discos Medellin, a modest little shop where Guillermo Lopez quixotically sells original, nonpirated music for about nine dollars a CD. Lopez, a connoisseur of salsa, has been running the shop for 13 years and has seen sales fall from an average of maybe 60 discs a day a few years ago to about 15 a day now.

....Mexico is the third-biggest market in the world for pirated music. Almost 70 percent of the music sold in Mexico is copied (most of it in Tepito), and that figure has been climbing pretty steadily for five years. In May the office of the U.S. Trade Representative added Mexico to its list of flagrant intellectual-property violators.

Recent music sales figures in Mexico would make an American record executive cringe. According to Amprofon, the organization that represents the big international record companies in Mexico — like a local RIAA — CD sales fell about 16 percent in 2001, and almost 18 percent in 2002. Internal estimates for this year paint an even uglier picture — the market is expected to shrink by almost a third in the first half of 2003.

Those are apocalyptic numbers. And they've got people in the record industry here speaking in apocalyptic tones.

...."About three years ago, the piracy started to really explode — personally, my sales went down 70 percent in the space of one year," he says. The business folded with predictable speed after a plunge like that, and Honerlague opened a joint venture with Sony, selling some of his own Mexican artists like Tatiana and a lot of foreign-catalog discs like Santana.

Honerlague blames the cheap consumer CD burner for killing his last business and wreaking havoc on the recording industry. But relatively weak copyright laws and inadequate enforcement have also contributed to what he believes will be a long-lasting change in how the music industry does business in Mexico.

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