Just after the men made their escape into the surrounding mountains, more guards opened more doors. This time, they let inmates belonging to the Zetas criminal gang surge from Cellblock C into Cellblock D, where their rivals in the Gulf Cartel were sleeping. Over the next hour, Nuevo León State officials say, 44 prisoners — all believed to be part of the Gulf Cartel — were bludgeoned, beaten and stabbed to death. Only two hours after the events began Sunday did jail officials at the Apodaca Prison alert state officials and the army. “By the time we had the call for help, it was already past 3 in the morning, two hours after the escape and the fight,” said Jorge Domene, the state security spokesman, describing Sunday morning’s events. “By the time help arrived in response to the call, almost all the deaths had taken place,” he said, indicating that prison security cameras showed that more than 200 inmates had participated in the killings. Officials in Nuevo León State said the jailbreak and the massacre had been carried out by the Zetas, the violent gang of drug enforcers who have turned against their former bosses in the Gulf Cartel and spread their reach over large parts of northern Mexico and the Gulf Coast. The Zetas appeared to have the authorities at the Apodaca prison under their control. Investigators continued to question security guards Tuesday, and Mr. Domene told a radio interviewer that as many as 16 guards and officials had been implicated, including the prison’s warden, Gerónimo Miguel Andrés Martínez, and its chief of security, Óscar Deveze Laureano. At least nine guards confessed to aiding the escape and the massacre directly and admitted that they had received $780 to $1,560 a month from the Zetas. Officials said Tuesday that two men and a woman were stabbed to death Monday as they were waiting to be admitted to the Topo Chico jail, which is also in the state of Nuevo León. The violence and corruption in Mexico’s overcrowded prison system have burst into public view with regularity since President Felipe Calderón started his crackdown on drug gangs more than five years ago. In May 2009, 53 prisoners, many of them Zetas, walked out of a jail in the state of Zacatecas as guards looked on. In December 2010, 151 prisoners escaped from the jail in Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Texas. In July that year, the director of a prison in the northern city of Gómez Palacio was accused of allowing gangs out of the prison to commit murder-for-hire jobs using prison guards’ weapons and vehicles. Of the 30 men who escaped early Sunday, 25 were convicted of federal crimes, said the Nuevo León governor, Rodrigo Medina. Among the escapees was Óscar Manuel Bernal Soriana, known as the Spider. Officials said he was a local Zeta leader with a reputation for bloodthirstiness who may have planned the jailbreak and ensuing massacre. In his first comments on the Apodaca incident, Mr. Calderón said Tuesday that the prison systems in some states were “in crisis” and that the federal government was building new prisons, “an effort that has not been made in 20 years in Mexico.”
Hiển thị các bài đăng có nhãn Prison. Hiển thị tất cả bài đăng
Hiển thị các bài đăng có nhãn Prison. Hiển thị tất cả bài đăng
Thứ Năm, 23 tháng 2, 2012
World Briefing | The Americas: Honduras Prison Fire Was Accidental, Officials Say
The beliefs of a Catholic media network have put it at odds with the Obama administration.
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World Briefing | The Americas: Mexico: Guards Accused in Prison Riot
The beliefs of a Catholic media network have put it at odds with the Obama administration. Room for Debate asks: What is missing from this sprawling legislation, and what should be cut?
World Briefing | The Americas: Honduras Prison Fire Was Accidental, Officials Say
The beliefs of a Catholic media network have put it at odds with the Obama administration. Room for Debate asks: What is missing from this sprawling legislation, and what should be cut?
Chủ Nhật, 19 tháng 2, 2012
In Mexico, Prison Riot Kills at Least 44 People
The authorities in Mexico’s Nuevo León State said a confrontation between inmates in two cellblocks broke out around 2 a.m. Sunday and lasted a few hours before the state and federal police could bring the prison, in Apodaca, under control. Jorge Domene, a spokesman for the state government, said it appeared that members of Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, two of Mexico’s most powerful criminal groups, started the fight as part of a power struggle, using sharp objects, stones and clubs. He said firearms were not used. The riot was the deadliest in a recent series of prison riots, including those in which 31 people died last month in Tamaulipas State and 20 were killed there in October. In Durango State, 23 people were killed in 2010. Deadly rioting is commonplace in Mexican and Central American prisons as a drug war rages among criminal groups and government forces, filling prisons and jails well beyond their capacity. Local news reports said that the prison in Apodaca held 3,000 inmates but was built for 1,500. Harsh overcrowding played a role in the fire last week that killed 359 people at a prison in central Honduras; it was one of the deadliest prison fires anywhere in decades. Officials were investigating the cause, including the possibility that an inmate had set fire to a mattress. That prison held more than 850 inmates, twice its capacity. As in Mexico, many prisoners were being held on drug charges in a country overrun by drug-trafficking gangs shipping cocaine to the United States and beyond. Supervisors at the prison in Mexico were being held as part of the investigation, which Mr. Domene said would also determine whether guards took part. In other prisons, inmates have been known to bribe guards for parties, drugs, prostitutes, cellphones, TVs, even their freedom.
World Briefing | The Americas: Honduras: U.N. Calls for Inquiry Into Fire at Prison
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Thứ Sáu, 17 tháng 2, 2012
WORLD: TimesCast | Honduran Prison Fire
February 16, 2012 - International inspectors arrive in Honduras a day after a prison fire that killed more than three hundred people.Produced by Emily B. Hager
High Death Toll in Honduran Prison Fire
Forensic personnel removed the body of an inmate after a fire at a prison in central Honduras killed more than 300 people, the latest disaster in a penal system known for overcrowding and violence.
Prison Fire Kills More Than 300 in Honduras
Outside the fence, hundreds of relatives rushed the gates of the burned-out prison on Wednesday, anguished and anxious for any word, clashing with soldiers and the police when they could not get in. As a prison officer stood on a balcony, reading out a roll call of the dead and survivors from a handwritten list, faces in the crowd turned away in tears. It was one of the worst prison fires in recent years in Latin America, with a death toll surpassing 300, most of the victims choking to death in their cells awaiting a rescue that never came. Guards with the keys were nowhere to be found, rescuers said. Some inmates bashed their way through the roof to escape, and kept running. They are now fugitives. Honduran prisons are rife with overcrowding, rioting and abuse on a normal day, but on Tuesday night, when officials say an inmate set fire to his mattress, things turned unimaginably worse, and this nation, already sinking into turmoil from a wave of drug trafficking, was staggered by yet another crisis. Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world, according to the United Nations. The country’s institutions are still recovering from a 2009 coup. The police are committing assassinations. Criminal groups are extorting and kidnapping almost at will. The Peace Corps has withdrawn over concerns about crime. And the nation’s prisons are so overwhelmed that in 2010 the government declared a state of emergency in the system, acknowledging that nearly half of its prisons did not meet the minimum requirements for penitentiaries. “This horrendous tragedy is the result of prison conditions that are symptomatic of the country’s larger public security crisis,” said José Miguel Vivanco, director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch. Given the violence gripping the nation, he added, “there’s huge pressure to lock up real and suspected criminals, and unfortunately almost no concern for these prisoners’ well-being.” Survivors recounted horrific scenes of companions ablaze and people trapped in their cells after the fire, the third major prison disaster in the country since 2003, broke out and burned out of control for 40 minutes before the first rescuers arrived around 11:30 p.m. “We were asleep when we suddenly heard the screams of people on fire,” said a survivor interviewed on the Televicentro television network outside the prison, where a proverb over the entrance reads, “Let justice be done even if the world perishes.” Family members, many of whom rushed to the prison in their pajamas, agonized throughout the day. The eight children of José Alejandro Morales gathered in a circle outside the prison’s gates early Wednesday waiting for an answer. Mr. Morales, who was sent to the prison two years ago on an armed robbery charge, was not on the list of survivors, nor had he been confirmed dead. Then, around 2:30 p.m., a fresh list of the dead began to circulate, and the children fell to their knees. “Our lives are ruined,” said Doris Morales, a daughter, after hearing his name. “He may have deserved to be punished, but he did not deserve this.” The bodies of many other prisoners had been incinerated, making identification nearly impossible. Inside the prison’s gates, the thud of hundreds of black body bags being dropped at the entrance by military personnel broke the afternoon air. The bags screeched as they were dragged along a gravel road, then heaved into the back of a truck, ready to be taken to the morgue. Honduran prisons, like many in Central America, are notorious for overcrowding and violence, a problem made worse as drug gangs have overrun the nation and set up staging grounds to move cocaine from South America to the United States. A United Nations report in October said that Honduras had the highest murder rate in the world, at 82.1 per 100,000 residents, far ahead of the worldwide rate of 6.9. President Porfirio Lobo last week accepted a technical adviser on security sent by the United States government to help control the violence and impunity. While Latin American prisons in general are susceptible to fires and rioting, the problem in Honduras is particularly serious, according to human rights groups and other monitors.
Karla Zabludovsky contributed reporting.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 17, 2012
A picture supplied by Reuters for an article on Thursday about a deadly fire in a Honduran prison was published in error. The news agency said on Thursday that it had removed from circulation the photograph showing two rows of prisoners’ bodies lying on the ground because it believed the picture was taken in 2004 after another prison fire in Honduras, and not after the fire on Wednesday. (Reuters also recalled four other pictures thought to be from the 2004 fire. The Times did not publish any of those.)
World Briefing | The Americas: Ecuador: Court Upholds Prison Term and Fine for Libeling President
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