Drug Mafia Running Mexico's Top Security Prisons

by Diego Cevallos

(IPS) MEXICO CITY -- Most of the 1,500 inmates in Mexico's maximum security prisons live in extremely harsh conditions, according to human rights groups.

But there are also reports that certain prisoners enjoy privileges, run their drug trafficking operations from jail, and even order murders within the facilities.

Organized crime has control over the country's top security prisons, parliamentary Deputy Orlando Paredes of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) told IPS.

The legislator is calling for the removal of the administrators of the maximum security penitentiaries.

An alleged drug trafficker held in the La Palma prison, where human rights organizations say prisoners are sometimes straitjacketed and forced to take medication, was shot to death on Dec. 31 by a fellow inmate.

The killing, which followed promises by the government of President Vicente Fox to put an end to corruption in the country's top security facilities and to order exhaustive police inspections of the prisons, was the third in La Palma in 2004.

Antonio Sanchez, head of the National Citizen Institute of Security and Justice, said that he had received anonymous reports that there were two armed inmates in La Palma who had been given orders to kill several drug traffickers held there.

Sanchez said the Institute, a non-governmental body that links businesspeople and other citizens demanding more effective law enforcement and anti-crime measures, had already given that information to the attorney-general's office.

Another La Palma inmate was strangled last May, and in October a prisoner was shot and killed in the prison cafeteria.

In an earlier case, drug baron Joaquin Guzman, alias "El Chapo," escaped from Puente Grande, the country's highest security prison along with the La Palma and Matamoros facilities, in 2001.

In this Latin American country of 102 million people, there are 450 penitentiaries that house a combined total of 190,000 inmates, most of them in overcrowded conditions.

That, however, is not a problem in the country's three top security facilities, which began to operate in the early 1990s to separate the most dangerous criminals from the rest of the prison population. The three units now hold 1,500 inmates.

"It is absurd that in a high security prison, someone can sneak in a gun and shoot someone with it, or that an inmate can escape. Everywhere you look there is corruption among the prison officials," said lawmaker Paredes.

Arturo Guzman, who was murdered on the last day of 2004 in La Palma, which is located not far from Mexico City, was "Chapo" Guzman's brother.

Criminologist Cesar Zapata, an expert on drug trafficking, said the prison murders are the product of wars between drug mafias.

"The supposedly tough conditions, which even border on abuse, in these top security centers are relaxed for the benefit of some drug traffickers," Zapata told IPS.

The attorney-general's office admits that several drug kingpins continue to run their businesses from their cells in these facilities, and that there is even a risk that they could organize an armed attack on the prisons with the aim of freeing certain inmates.

A 1998 study by the governmental National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) states that in the top security prisons, which no independent observers are allowed to visit, human rights are not respected.

The inmates are not allowed to talk to anyone, with the exception of their visitors in brief, supervised visits during which everything they say, do or write down is filmed and recorded.

They are also forced to always sleep in the same position -- on their backs, with their face towards a light and a video camera.

Isolation cells and punishment meted out for no reason are common in these prisons, as are surprise searches by guards carrying high-powered guns accompanied by snarling dogs that are used to intimidate the prisoners, according to the CNDH.

The report cites documents in which prison authorities acknowledge that straitjackets are used to control some prisoners.

In the high security prisons, psychiatric manipulation is used under the pretext of discipline, says the report, which adds that some inmates have complained that they are forced to take psychoactive drugs.

Sources with the CNDH told IPS that according to their investigations, conditions do not seem to have changed in these penitentiaries in the past few years.

But the CNDH also reports that some privileged inmates are exempt from harsh treatment.

Inmates' families and lawyers, who are strip-searched when they enter the prison on visiting days, complain that they are not provided with the minimum conditions for mounting a proper defense of their loved ones or clients.