Pubdate: Wed, 21 Aug 2002
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Page: A12
Copyright: 2002 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Mary Jordan, Washington Post Foreign Service
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/prison.htm (Incarceration)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/areas/Mexico (Mexico)

THE BIG HOUSE IS NO LONGER A HOME

Mexico Relocates Inmates, Evicts Families From Notorious Tijuana Prison

TIJUANA, Mexico -- Under cover of predawn darkness, 2,000 prisoners were 
handcuffed and moved out of La Mesa penitentiary surrounded by heavily 
armed police and soldiers today as the Mexican government sought to regain 
control over one of North America's most notorious prisons.

With helicopters flying overhead as an extra precaution, the most dangerous 
convicted murderers, drug traffickers and other convicts from La Mesa were 
herded onto buses and trucks and driven to a new prison in El Hongo, a 
small town 50 miles east of Tijuana just south of the border with California.

For decades, the wives and children of convicts have been permitted to live 
inside La Mesa, home to many of Mexico's drug traffickers. But today that 
practice ended, too, as hundreds of women and children were escorted out of 
the prison carrying their belongings.

Bulldozers this afternoon began to raze the center of the prison, called El 
Pueblito or Little Town because it resembled a neighborhood. There, 
wealthier inmates built more than 400 homes, some equipped with computers, 
phones, DVD players and tequila bars. The plan is to turn La Mesa into a 
conventional state prison -- with cellblocks, no frills and no families -- 
for the more than 4,000 inmates who will remain.

Mexican officials said La Mesa has been controlled over the years as much 
by inmates as state authorities. Previous plans to remove families and 
transfer prisoners were never executed because of fears of rioting and, 
many believe, because prisoners paid kickbacks to quash any proposed changes.

But in a surprise operation that involved the army, federal police and 
state riot police -- who surrounded the prison for fear of rioting -- about 
one-third of the inmates were removed beginning at about 1 a.m. Afterward, 
state social workers took away about 40 children who have no known guardian 
except for the inmate they were living with. Some of the children carried 
toys and had tears in their eyes.

"There was no reason for families to be in there. They were there because 
no one said they couldn't," said a spokesman for the state, Gustavo 
Magallanes. He said 43 prisoners who were considered the leaders of a drug 
distribution network that operated inside and outside the prison were taken 
to maximum security prisons.

President Vicente Fox said in an interview that today's move was a victory 
against impunity. He said the army, working with newly trained federal 
police officers in Tijuana, has recently scored "extraordinary results 
against organized crime and drug traffickers, and now we are correcting the 
prison. It will be a complete cleansing."

The Mexican prison system, which houses 165,000 inmates, has long been 
poorly funded and corrupted by cash from prisoners and drug cartels. Since 
Fox took office at the end of 2000, human rights workers have been granted 
greater access to the prisons. They have reported that a two-tier system 
exists, one for those with money and one for those without.

The National Human Rights Commission declared two years ago that La Mesa 
was Mexico's worst prison because of overcrowding and privileges for those 
with money.

Inmates and guards have outlined an extensive kickback system in the prison 
for the right to see a visitor or not to be beaten. While wealthier 
prisoners could rent the houses in the center of the prison, poor ones did 
not even get a bed. Some slept on the pavement of the basketball court.

Alejandro Gertz Manero, the national public security chief, who was 
involved in today's operation, said in a recent interview that it has only 
been since January 2001 that authorities had taken back full control of 
federally run maximum security prisons. That, he said, was when one of the 
biggest drug traffickers in Mexico, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, bribed his 
way out of a federal prison in a laundry bin. He is still at large.

"Ten days after El Chapo escaped, we took control of those federal prisons. 
We weren't in charge of them before. . . . The drug traffickers were the 
owners," Gertz Manero said.

He said the federal government is setting its sights on helping clean up 
some of the state prisons. Some, he said, "are not in the hands of anyone."

La Mesa is a concrete structure that takes up two huge city blocks. Today a 
wall of military and police trucks sealed off the prison and riot police 
walked the walls.

"It's the end of an era. It's a good change," said Jesus Blancornelas, a 
Tijuana journalist who has written a bestseller on the drug trade in this 
city, just across the border from San Diego.

He said a saying he heard in the United States, "Even if a jail is made of 
gold, it is still a jail," has never applied at La Mesa. Here, he said, 
life inside could be as good as outside and money bought just about anything.

More than 6,000 prisoners have been living in La Mesa, in a space built for 
fewer than 2,000. According to human rights officials' estimates, more than 
half the prison population is using drugs, including heroin.

None of the prison guards at La Mesa will be allowed to work in El Hongo, a 
state-of-the-art facility where guards have been training for months and 
are better paid. Unlike the practice in La Mesa, family members will not be 
permitted to bring in cash or food. A new banking system has been set up in 
which families can deposit money in inmates' accounts and each prisoner can 
spend a maximum of $5 a day. To further try to separate inmates' cash from 
guards, prisoners are to be issued electronic debit cards.

Veronica Vargas, 19, was one of the wives thrown out of La Mesa. As she 
boarded a bus with bags of clothes and other belongings, she said she had 
lived inside for seven months. She said she wanted to be with her husband 
who, she said, was serving a 30-year sentence for migrant smuggling. She 
said she and her husband paid $800 rent but she did not know where the 
money went.

"We had our little house, with a television and refrigerator and everything 
that we needed," she said. "But it still felt like a prison."

Researcher Laurie Freeman in Mexico City contributed to this report.
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