Mexico's Deadliest Prison Riot in Apodaca as GDG and Zetas Clash

MEXICO CITY--Fighting between two warring drug cartels appears to have killed 44 inmates in what may be Mexico's deadliest prison riot, officials said Sunday.

Jorge Domene, security spokesman for Nuevo Leon state, said that the prisoners died when inmates from one cell block invaded another cell block in a prison in Apodaca, a few miles from the city of Monterrey, Mexico's industrial capital. Mr. Domene said it was likely that the killing involved "a feud" between members of the Zetas drug cartel and the rival Gulf Cartel.

"It appears that inmates in one cell block attacked the other," said Mr. Domene, speaking in a telephone interview from Monterrey.

The entire prison staff on duty at the time has been detained to determine if guards were involved in the fighting, which started at 2 am, Mr. Domene said. The prison, built to house some 1,700 inmates is jammed full with some 2,700 prisoners, he said..

The dead prisoners were stabbed, beaten and hit with stones in the fighting, Mr. Domene said. Television footage showed hundreds of worried and weeping relatives of inmates gathered around the prison fence.

Since President Felipe Calderon declared war against Mexico's drug traffickers in 2006, Mexican prisons have often become deadly battlefields for members of rival drug gangs captured by security forces. Last month, thirty one inmates died in a similar riot in the next door step of Tamaulipas. In October, 20 inmates were killed in fighting in a prison in Matamoros, also in Tamaulipas, across the border from Brownsville, Texas.

In many cases, prisons are run by one or another criminal cartel, which use the prisons as sanctuaries. In 2010, the government arrested the prison director and guards at one facility in the state of Durango where officials allegedly provided arms and transport for a death squad of Sinaloa cartel members who were allowed out every night to kill rivals. The inmates, who were involved in a number of drug related killings, including the massacre of 17 people at a restaurant, would then return to sleep safely at the prison..

 "Prison reform is a pending agenda item in Mexico," says Eric Olson, at the Mexico Institute at Washington's Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "The strategy has been to arrest a lot of people, but when you warehouse prisoners in prisons that are overcrowded and poorly managed, you are likely to have this kind of warfare breakout inside prisons.'

For the last two years, the Zetas, once enforcers for the Gulf Cartel, have been fighting their former colleagues for control of drug routes and local drug markets in both Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon, which border the U.S. The Zetas have also orchestrated massive prison breaks to free gang members and to recruit inmates as soldiers for their organization.

Police hold back the relatives of inmates outside the Apodaca correctional state facility as they try to get past the gates in Apodaca on the outskirts of Monterrey, Mexico.

Prison conditions in all of Latin America have deteriorated as governments through the region incarcerate more people as they try to deal with a wave of violence linked in part to drug cartels. The region's creaky judicial system means that many times prisoners awaiting trial for minor crimes are kept in the same population as the worst criminals. Last week, a fire swept through a jammed prison in Honduras, killing 357 people. Last year, in Venezuela, 30 people died in a 27 day riot and siege of a notoriously overcrowded prison.

Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director of Washington-based Human Rights Watch, says governments throughout Latin America have abandoned their responsibility for running prisons. "Inmates in many prisons run the prisons as they wish," said Mr. Vivanco. "In the last two decades in Latin America, most of the violence, the worst abuses, committed with total impunity, have been done by prisoners against other prisoners."

WSJ Text as published all photos and Map added by Chivis

Reuters Video HERE

Source:  Wall Street Journal

View Havana's Post of Borderland Beat Forum of the same subject HERE