(Updates with inspector quote, details)

By Mica Rosenberg and Miguel Angel Gutierrez

MEXICO CITY, July 8 (Reuters) - Mexico's human rights commission said on Tuesday it was investigating police training methods after videos showed a cadet being made to roll through vomit and another having his head shoved into a pit of excrement.

The grainy images of a police training course, apparently partly filmed with a mobile phone camera, caused a scandal after a newspaper in the central state of Guanajuato posted them on its Web site last week.

The paper said the video showed courses given by a private security firm to officers in the city of Leon, apparently to harden them to torture that might be inflicted by criminal gangs that have killed hundreds of police while engaging in a turf war over drug smuggling and fighting a government crackdown.

"We opened the investigation to find out where these courses are being given and to which security forces so we can put an end to all kinds of torture," senior rights commission inspector Raul Plascencia told Mexican radio.

Plascencia told Reuters the commission was expanding its probe to see if the methods were being used across Mexico.

Outside of training courses, nine people have been tortured by police in Guanajuato state over the past two years, he said. Torture "is not part of a course, these are real deeds," he said.

HUNG UPSIDE DOWN

The videos, which can be viewed on the YouTube Web site, show police being subjected to harsh treatment by superiors and what appears to be a foreign trainer in jeans and T-shirt giving orders in English.

In one image, men in combat gear pour carbonated water up the nose of a groaning officer as they hang him upside down and blindfolded in a hole they say is filled with rats and human waste. In another, a cadet is made to roll back and forth across a pile of vomit and is then dragged through it.

Mexican authorities say the officers were being trained to cope with high-stress situations they could encounter as the federal police and the army wage war on violent drug cartels.

"If these were acts done with the consent of all involved there is no crime there," Guanajuato's state Attorney General Daniel Chowell told local reporters last week.

But the videos sparked concern that cadets are learning torture techniques in a nation where analysts say up to half of the police could be in the pay of drug gangs and where rights groups say abuse is common in police detention cells.

The scandal erupted as the U.S. Congress agreed to send $400 million in surveillance equipment to help President Felipe Calderon's 18-month-old crackdown on drug gangs, softening conditions that some lawmakers wanted to attach to prevent human rights abuses by Mexican security forces.

Drug gangs fighting over smuggling turf and protection networks have murdered more than 500 police since the crackdown began in December 2006. Many of the victims were tortured.

"This video suggests that public security institutions are continuing to fail to take seriously the responsibility to eradicate torture and other ill-treatment in the performance of their duties," Amnesty International said last week. (Editing by Alan Elsner

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