By Alistair Bell ESCUINTLA, Guatemala, – In Guatemala's Escuintla prison, known by inmates as "The Hole," old metal beds with dirty, sagging mattresses sit in a dormitory with damp running down the walls.
And that's the guards' quarters

The prisoners, all members of infamous "mara" youth gangs, languish in conditions more fitting medieval dungeons than a modern nation that has just become a trade partner of the United States.

Convicted murderers and rapists sleep up to 40 at a time in a sweaty cell measuring 30 square yards, many of them on bare floors. Violence is endemic.

A gang feud has killed 50 people since August, including several who were beheaded. Eighteen of the victims died in an attack with grenades, guns and knives at The Hole, a 100-year-old former army fort brought into service because prisons are overflowing. In 2003, forensic scientists found the remains of two people believed to have been eaten in a cell at the Pavoncito prison over Christmas holidays during a gang riot there.

Social workers say new prisoners in The Hole are so scared they will be attacked by rival gang members if they go to the shared toilets at night that they defecate in their cells in plastic bags which they throw away in the morning.

Guatemala's crumbling, overcrowded prisons are the latest battle zone in a war between the two main gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha and the Mara 18, which have caused an orgy of bloodletting throughout Central America.

Prison authorities acknowledge they are struggling to contain the violence, which worsened in August when a truce between the groups behind bars in Guatemala broke down.

"It is a serious security problem. We recognize that the power of these people is in being an organized group. Controlling individual prisoners is not the same as controlling 150 gang members," said national prison boss Francisco de la Pena.


NEAR COLLAPSE Prison guards are underpaid and corrupt. Several have been arrested for smuggling weapons to gang members at The Hole.

"We inherited a penitentiary system that has almost collapsed," said Pena, who began his job earlier this year.

As many as half of the country's 8,000 prisoners are awaiting trial, said security expert Veronica Godoy. They share dormitories and cells with hardened convicts. Inmates complain they have nothing to do and say it is no wonder they fight.

"We live in inhuman conditions, without work, decent medical treatment, education or culture," said "Snoop," a leader of the Mara 18 gang in The Hole.

Fellow inmates, many bearing indigo gang tattoos on their faces, limped around an exercise yard in bandages from an armed attack in the prison by the Mara Salvatrucha.

The "maras", which grew out of Hispanic youth gangs in Los Angeles, have struck terror into Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras in recent years with a wave of murders and mutilations.

Harsh government crackdowns, including blanket arrests of young men with tattoos, have curbed gang violence on Central American streets but prisons are unable to cope.

"There is a lack of money, an excess of prisoners and the prisons are old," said Pena. "Prisoners have a total lack of respect for authority."

Shaken by the gang violence in prisons, the government is rushing through plans to build two new high security jails this year and two more in 2006.

Violent crime in Guatemala increased after the government and leftist guerrillas signed peace agreements in 1996, as out-of-work former fighters turned to crime.

A weak legal system and poverty have added to the crime wave, and there is little sign the CAFTA regional trade deal signed with the United States a year ago will raise living standards much.

Apart from the gangs, Guatemala is blighted by common murders, kidnappings, rapes and lynchings. In a country of 15 million people, 4,300 were murdered last year, an extremely high homicide rate even by Latin American standards.

Guatemala's prisons encourage, rather than prevent, crime, said Godoy from the IMASP anti-crime think tank. Extortionists and kidnappers often operate from behind bars, threatening victims via telephone.

"There is corruption among the guards which allows cell phones and everything else they need to get inside," she said.

In The Hole, prison guards, who receive $155 a month for working 12-hour shifts for eight days in a row, complain they receive bad food, shabby uniforms and have it harder than the inmates.

"We are more victims than they are, in fact worse. When their sentence is finished they go out into the street happy. We have to stay here," said a guard called Geronimo.

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