Thread: Mexican prisons can't seem to keep prisoners under lock

Mexican prisons can't seem to keep drug traffickers under lock and key

Posted: Saturday, February 5, 2011 12:00 am
BERNARDO DE NIZ / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico - Just as Mexican authorities are struggling to put drug traffickers in prison, the prisons are struggling to keep them there.

Hundreds of dangerous inmates have escaped from state penitentiaries along the U.S. border in recent months, some through spectacular, action-movie breakouts, others by simply walking out the door.

The rash of escapes comes as the Mexican government and its U.S. advisers are engaged in a vast overhaul of the country's federal penal system. But those reforms have done little to improve security in Mexico's much larger state-level prison system.

On Jan. 17 in the northern state of Chihuahua, more than a dozen inmates escaped a state lockup when their criminal comrades opened fire on guards and smashed a truck through the perimeter fence. In July, guards at a facility in Durango freed a team of assassins from their cells, lending them guns and vehicles to carry out a massacre against 17 of their rivals.

But the biggest embarrassment for the Mexican government came in December in this city across the border from Laredo, Texas, when 153 inmates walked out of a state penitentiary and rode away in a cartel caravan, staging the largest prison escape in Mexican history. None of the fugitives has been caught.

"I lock them up, and they let them out," President Felipe Calderón said in frustration, blaming local officials.

That incident came just three months after 85 prisoners pulled off a similar escape from another facility in the same state, Tamaulipas.

In all, about 350 inmates escaped from prisons there in 2010, according to Mexican media tallies, and only one has been recaptured. Large sectors of the Tamaulipas state government are believed to have been infiltrated by the Gulf cartel or its rival, Los Zetas.

Prison experts say a big reason for the security breakdown is that the federal government launched its offensive against the drug mafias before it developed a penal system capable of incarcerating their members.

Instead, tens of thousands of federal prisoners - including powerful drug bosses and vicious killers - are being held in overcrowded, underfunded, poorly guarded state institutions, some of which are virtually under the control of criminal gangs.

US Consulate warning

Officials are warning U.S. citizens not to drive at night in parts of the western Mexican city of Guadalajara after suspected drug-gang members burned vehicles and blocked streets there.

The U.S. Consulate in Guadalajara, Mexico's second-largest city, posted a message on its website Thursday saying it had prohibited U.S. diplomatic personnel from traveling the highway to the airport at night, and that it "recommends that U.S. citizens consider similar precautions."

On Tuesday, assailants hurled grenades, burned vehicles and blocked several Guadalajara streets and highways in seven near-simultaneous attacks that injured a policeman and two transportation workers.

Such tactics have been used by cartels in the past to aid their escapes from police.

http://azstarnet.com/news/local/border/ ... b2ff3.html

Personally I think that Mexico is unloading their prisoners, mentally ill, and other undesirables on us. Kind of like Fidel Castro did with the Mariel Boat Lift.

Mexican prisons can't seem to keep drug traffickers under lock and key

I too believe those people are let out of prisons so they can flee to the U.S. to cease burdens. Also I think there is some type of scam allowing so many undocumented aliens cross the border into the U.S., possibly so they will have less people to support. Whatever is happening, the game playing needs to be ceased, because illegal immigrants are destroying this Country in every way possible.