Thread: Mexico prison riot was cover for jailbreak, officials say

Authorities say 30 Zetas gang members escaped, with the apparent complicity of guards, and that all 44 slain inmates were from the rival Gulf cartel.

By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times February 21, 2012

Reporting from Mexico City—


It seemed a run-of-the-mill prison riot, though one that left 44 inmates beaten or knifed to death. In fact, the violence on Sunday in northern Mexico served as cover for a massive jailbreak by members of the country's deadliest criminal gang, the Zetas.

Authorities on Monday revealed that 30 Zetas henchmen escaped from the maximum-security prison in Apodaca during the brawl — with the apparent complicity of guards and possibly other top officials.The deadly violence underscored the abysmal condition of Mexican prisons, which are woefully overcrowded, rife with corruption and prone to high-profile escapes.

The warden, three other penitentiary officials and 18 guards have been removed or suspended and detained for questioning, said Rodrigo Medina, governor of Nuevo Leon state, where Apodaca is located.

All of those killed, he added, were from the Zetas' bitter rival, the Gulf cartel. The two gangs, former allies, are now at war for control of part of Mexico's drug trade and other criminal enterprises.

"We can say without a doubt that this was premeditated and planned," Medina said at a news conference, where he announced a nearly $800,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the escapees.

"This isn't a thing where, in the middle of a riot, it occurred to these people to escape." Medina said. "There was a plan, which undoubtedly relied on the complicity of some officials."

While overcrowding, violence and corruption plague penal systems throughout Latin America, the problems are especially acute in Mexico, where a military crackdown on drug cartels has helped fill cells, often to more than double their intended capacity.

Frequently, entire criminal enterprises are run from inside jailhouse walls; in a recent wave of telephone extortions, investigators found that the vast majority of calls demanding money originated from prisons.

Mexico's National Human Rights Commission says 467 inmates have been killed since the beginning of 2009 — shot, bludgeoned, stabbed or burned to death.

The prison at Apodaca, just north of the major industrial city of Monterrey and about 100 miles from the U.S. border, reportedly held twice the number of men it was built to accommodate and had been flooded recently by members of both the Zetas and Gulf gangs. Authorities make some effort to separate gangs within a prison, but divisions are easily breached.

Medina noted that an "unprecedented" number of arrests in the last couple of years, primarily of drug traffickers and the gunmen, kidnappers and extortionists who work with them, had resulted in an "exponential" burst in prison populations, "with all the complications and difficulties that entails."

Authorities said the fighting Sunday apparently started about 2 a.m., when Zetas using sharp instruments, stones and clubs attacked inmates belonging to the Gulf cartel. As violence spread from one cellblock to another, 30 Zetas escaped, apparently with minimal effort, leading authorities to conclude they had inside help from guards or other officials.
"It is hard for us to [acknowledge] the treason, the corruption and the complicity of a handful of officials, which trips up the work of good police, soldiers and marines who daily risk their lives," Medina said.

One of the escaped inmates was identified as Oscar Manuel Bernal, alias "El Spider," a local Zetas lieutenant arrested in 2010 inthe assassination of an army general who days earlier had taken over as police commander in the Nuevo Leon city of Garcia.

The prison systems have proved themselves notoriously porous. Scores of inmates have escaped over the years, including the fugitive multibillionaire and today most powerful cartel leader, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman. He is said to have bought his way out of a maximum-security prison in 2001, gliding out in a laundry cart.

In 2009, guards were caught on camera calmly watching as 53 inmates walked out of a prison in the central state of Zacatecas. In December 2010, 140 inmates escaped from a prison in violent Tamaulipas state, which neighbors Nuevo Leon; the warden vanished.

And in August of the same year, the warden of a prison in Gomez Palacio, in central Mexico, was jailed for allowing inmates to borrow guns from the guards, leave at night and go on killing sprees aimed at their rivals.
wilkinson@latimes.com


wilkinson@latimes.com
Mexico prison riot was cover for jailbreak, officials say - latimes.com

Official: Guards aided Zetas prison break

February 20, 2012



A state police officer wearing a face mask stands behind the fence as relatives of inmates wait for news after a prison riot at Apodaca correctional state facility in Apodaca on the outskirts of Monterrey, Mexico, Sunday Feb. 19,
2012. (AP Photo)

(AP)
MONTERREY, Mexico - Nine guards have confessed to helping Zetas drug gangsters escape from prison before other Zetas slaughtered 44 rival inmates, a state official said late Monday, underlining the enormous corruption inside Mexico's overcrowded, underfunded prisons.

The top officials and as many as 18 guards at the Apodaca prison in northern Mexico had been detained under suspicion that they may have helped 30 Zetas escape during the confusion of a riot early Sunday in which 44 members of the rival Gulf cartel were bludgeoned and knifed to death.

Nuevo Leon state public security spokesman Jorge Domene Zambrano said nine of the guards confessed to aiding the escape. He said it appeared the breakout happened before the deadly fight.

The massacre in this northern state was one of the worst prison killings in Mexico in at least a quarter-century and exposed another weak institution that President Felipe Calderon is relying on to fight his drug war.


Mexico has only six federal prisons, and so sends many of its dangerous
cartel suspects and inmates to ill-prepared, overcrowded state penitentiaries. Drug trafficking, weapons possession and money laundering are all considered federal crimes in Mexico.


"The Mexican prison system has collapsed," said Raul Benitez, a professor at Mexico's National Autonomous University who studies security issues. "The prisons in some states are controlled by organized crime."


An increase in organized crime, extortion, drug trafficking and kidnapping has swelled Mexico's prison population almost 50 percent since 2000. But the government has built no new federal prisons since Calderon launched an offensive against drug cartels when he took office in late 2006, leaving existing jails overcrowded.


Calderon's administration has renovated three existing state prisons to use as federal lockups.


Built to hold about 185,000 inmates, the prison system nationwide now holds more than 45,000 above that capacity, according to figures from the National Public Safety System.


Of the 47,000 federal inmates in the country, about 29,000 are held in state prisons. That has drawn complaints from Nuevo Leon Gov. Rodrigo Medina and other state governors, who say their jails aren't equipped to hold members of powerful and highly organized drug cartels.


The federal government counters that none of the escapes or mass killings have occurred at federal lockups, and it cites corruption on the state level, not overcrowding, as the main cause of the deaths and escapes.


"The constant element has been corruption in the control processes" at the prisons, said Patricio Patino, assistant secretary for the penitentiary
system.


Prison employees say guards are underpaid, making them more likely to take bribes. And even honest guards are vulnerable to coercion: Many live in neighborhoods where street gangs and drug cartels are active, making it easy to target their families with threats.


The same can be said for Mexico's municipal police forces, another weak flank in Calderon's attack on organized crime. Thousands of local officers — often, entire forces at a time — have been fired, detained or placed under investigation for aiding drug gangs.


"Yesterday, Apodaca, tomorrow, any other (prison)," columnist Carlos Puig wrote in the newspaper Milenio.


Nuevo Leon's governor said earlier Monday that the breakout would have been hard or impossible to stage without the help of prison authorities. Medina said no holes had been found in the perimeter walls of the prison in Apodaca, outside the northern city of Monterrey, and no armed gang had burst in to spring
them.


"Unfortunately, a group of traitors has set back the work of a lot of good
police," Medina said at a news conference.


An increase in prison violence and escapes is fueled in part by the
increasing presence of members of highly organized drug cartels and other gangs in the prisons. In January, a fight between inmates in the Gulf Coast city of Altamira left 31 dead. A total of 171 inmates died in such violence last year, up from 45 in 2007, according to the newspaper Milenio.


Often, the riots and escapes are aided by authorities.


In the most striking case, prison corruption resulted in a massacre outside prison walls in 2010. Guards and officials at a prison in Gomez Palacio in northern Durango state let cartel inmates out, lent them guns and sent them off in official vehicles to carry out drug-related killings, including a massacre of 17 people at a rented dance hall. After carrying out the killings, the inmates returned to their cells, where they were safe from their rivals.


More typical was a prison massacre last July in the border city of Juarez
that killed 17 inmates. Surveillance video showed guards standing passively by as two inmates took their keys and opened cell doors to spray bullets into a room where members of a rival gang were reportedly holding an unauthorized party, complete with women and booze.


The Zetas, with their quasi-military discipline, probably have an edge on
their rivals from the Gulf cartel, said Benitez, the professor who studies
security.


"Once inside, they gain control rapidly," he said.


The Zetas and Gulf cartel split in 2010 and have been fighting bloody turf battles in Monterrey and throughout much of northeastern Mexico since then.


But Benitez said Mexico's prisons are part of two larger problems: rampant corruption and a dysfunctional justice system.


"The prison system is just one part of the larger penal-justice system, and in Mexico the penal reform movement is going very badly," he said.


Authorities agreed there are huge problems.


"The shortcomings that exist in Mexican prisons, insufficient food,
inadequate space to sleep, (poor) clothing for inmates, bad medical service, have made the prisons into places where corruption and inequality among inmates proliferates," according to a 2008 report on the nation's prisons, the federal Public Safety Department said


The report recommended legal changes to let more prisoners await trial while on bail, and the construction of more and better jails. Three years and hundreds of inmates deaths later, none of those changes have been carried out.

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