War Without Borders

MEXICO'S DRUG TRAFFICKERS CONTINUE TRADE IN PRISON

MEXICO CITY -- The surveillance cameras captured it all: guards
looking on nonchalantly as 53 inmates -- many of them associated with
one of Mexico's most notorious drug cartels -- let themselves out of
their cells and sped off in waiting vehicles.

The video shows that prison guards only pulled out their weapons
after the inmates were well on their way. The brazen escape in May in
the northern state of Zacatecas -- carried out in minutes without a
single shot fired -- is just one of many glaring examples of how
Mexico's crowded and cruel prison system represents a critical weak
link in the drug war.

Mexico's prisons, as described by inmates and insiders and viewed
during several visits, are places where drug traffickers find a new
base of operations for their criminal empires, recruit underlings,
and bribe their way out for the right price. The system is so flawed,
in fact, that the Mexican government is extraditing record numbers of
drug traffickers to the United States, where they find it much harder
to intimidate witnesses, run their drug operations or escape.

The latest jailbreak took place this weekend, when a suspected drug
trafficker vanished from a Sinaloa prison during a party for inmates
featuring a Mexican country music band. The Mexican government is
considering isolating drug offenders from regular inmates to reduce
opportunities for abuse.

The United States government, as part of its counternarcotics
assistance program, is committing $4 million this year to help fix
Mexico's broken prisons, officials said. Experts from state prisons
in the United States have begun tutorials for Mexican guards to make
sure that there are clear ethical guidelines and professional
practices that distinguish them from the men and women they guard.
"There's no point in rounding all these characters up if they are
going to get out on their own," said an American official involved in
the training, who was not authorized to speak on the record.

Although Mexican prisons call themselves Centers for Social
Rehabilitation, "Universities of crime would be a better name," said
Pedro Hector Arellano, who runs the prison outreach program in Mexico
for the Episcopal Church.

Mexico's prisons are bursting at the seams, with space for 172,151
inmates nationwide but an additional 50,000 crammed in. More arrive
by the day as part of the government's drug war, which has sent tens
of thousands to prison since President Felipe Calderon took office
nearly three years ago.

Inside the high concrete walls ringed by barbed wire, past the
heavily armed men in black uniforms with stern expressions, inmates
rule the roost. Some well-heeled prisoners pay to have keys to their
cells. When life inside, with its pizza deliveries, prostitutes and
binges on drugs and alcohol, becomes too confining, prisoners
sometimes pay off the guards for a furlough or an outright jailbreak.

"Our prisons are businesses more than anything else," said Pedro
Arellano Aguilar, an expert on prisons. He has visited scores of them
in Mexico and has come away with a dire view of what takes place
inside. "Everything is for sale and everything can be bought."

Guards Work for Inmates

For drug lords, flush with money, life on the inside is often a
continuation of the free-spirited existence they led outside. Inmates
look up to them. Guards often become their employees.

For more than a decade, Enrique, a strapping man with a faraway look
in his eyes, worked in one of the roughest prisons in Mexico,
imposing his will. He assigned prisoners to cell blocks based on the
size of the bribes they made. He punished those who stepped out of line.

"I was the boss," he declared. Not exactly. Enrique, whose story was
corroborated by a prisoner advocates' group, was actually an inmate,
serving time inside Reclusorio Preventivo Oriente prison in Mexico
City for trafficking cocaine. "It shouldn't work the way it does,"
said Enrique, now released, who asked that his full name not be
published so he can resume life after his 12-year sentence.

Miguel Caro Quintero, a major drug trafficker wanted in Arizona and
Colorado on charges of supplying multi-ton shipments of marijuana and
cocaine to the United States, was jailed for 10 years in Mexico.
Federal prosecutors accused him, like many drug lords, of continuing
illegal activities from behind bars, using smuggled cellphones to
maintain contact with his underlings on the outside and recruiting
prisoners who were nearing the end of their sentences.

When his sentence in Mexico was up, he was sent off to the United
States to face charges there, becoming one of more than 50 Mexicans,
most of them drug offenders, extradited this year.

"When we keep a criminal in a Mexican prison, we run the risk that
one way or another they are going to keep in contact with their
criminal network," Leopoldo Velarde, who heads extraditions for the
federal attorney general's office, said. "The idea is to stop
criminals, not just jail them."

Life in Reclusorio Preventivo Oriente prison's Dormitory No. 9, where
many top drug traffickers are held, shows the clout that influential
inmates enjoy. The prisoners are a privileged lot, wearing designer
clothing and enjoying special privileges ranging from frequent visits
by girlfriends to big-screen televisions in their spacious cells,
federal prosecutors told local newspapers after one of the inmates
recently bought his way out.

Traffickers continue to run their operations through their
lieutenants inside the prison as well as outside, using supposedly
banned cellphones.

The government says it is moving aggressively to ship off dangerous
criminals who are wanted in the United States and are likely to
restart their criminal enterprises from jail. Once the legal
requirements are met by both governments, the handcuffed suspects are
flown by American government agencies to face trial in the United
States. Usually the country that requests extradition pays expenses,
but American officials said that who pays depends on individual cases.

Since Mr. Calderon came to office in December 2006, his government
has surprised the United States by extraditing more than 200 criminal
suspects, more than double the rate of predecessors. Based on the
legal battles they begin to avoid extradition, it is clear that
inmates fear going to the United States. Their support network,
prison officials in both countries say, is considerably weaker there.

For years, the Justice Department lobbied Mexico to allow more
criminal suspects to face trial in the United States. But until 2005,
Mexican court rulings limited extradition to those cases in which
neither the death penalty nor life in prison was sought, and Mexican
pride about sovereignty made Mexican officials drag their feet. That
changed with Mr. Calderon's resolve to embark on a tougher drug war.

American officials say they are thrilled with the Mexicans' more
aggressive extradition policy. "The best way to disrupt and dismantle
a criminal organization is to lock up its leaders and seize their
money -- so we will work with our Mexican counterparts to locate and
extradite, when appropriate, cartel leadership to the United States
for prosecution," Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in July.

A Wave of Escapes

The jailbreak in May at the Cieneguillas prison in Zacatecas was just
one of several escapes that showed how porous Mexican jails are. The
Zetas, a paramilitary group known for its ruthlessness in protecting
its drug turf, planned the escape, and have organized jailbreaks in
at least four states, Mexican law enforcement officials said.
Zacatecas prison has had at least three escapes in recent years.

The situation there is so bad, according to a local lawyer, Uriel
Marquez Valerio, that inmates managed to invite a musical group into
the prison in 2005 to celebrate the birthday of a drug trafficker,
who several weeks later found a way to escape.

In recent weeks, the authorities have managed to catch three of the
53 escapees from May and have thrown 51 prison officials, including
the director, into jail while the investigation into collusion in the
escape continues. The prime piece of evidence against the prison
employees was the surveillance system they were supposed to use to
monitor inmates. The video, leaked by law enforcement officials and
now available on YouTube, recorded the jailbreak in detail.

It was clearly an inside job, one that prompted Interpol to issue an
international alert for 11 of the escapees, who were deemed "a risk
to the safety and security of citizens around the world."

One of the escapees, Osvaldo Garcia Delgado, a 27-year-old trafficker
with the nickname Vampire, said after he had been re-arrested that
the Zetas planned the breakout. Carefully plotted for weeks, the
operation was designed to release some top Zeta commanders. Scores of
lower-level Zetas were taken along as well.

The Vampire told police interrogators that the prisoners were
awakened early one morning and told to dress in their best clothes.
He expressed surprise that the guards were doing no guarding that day
but instead had become instrumental players in the escape plan.

The men carrying out the escape were dressed in federal police
uniforms and drove what appeared to be police vehicles, with lights,
sirens and official-looking decals affixed to the sides. There was a
helicopter flying overhead as well, giving the operation the air of
legitimacy. Since drug cartels frequently recruit law enforcement
officials as allies, it is never clear in Mexico whether they will in
fact enforce the law -- or whether they are impostors.

In this case, the authorities later disclosed that the uniforms worn
by the gunmen who carried out the escape were either outright fakes
or outdated outfits. The vehicles, which screeched away from the
scene with sirens blaring, were not actual police-issue either, the
authorities said. All that said, investigators have not ruled out the
possibility that corrupt law enforcement officials helped carry out
the operation.

After the latest escape, federal authorities have begun interviewing
prison workers to determine how Orso Ivan Gastelum Cruz, who was
arrested by the army in 2005, disappeared Sunday from jail in
Sinaloa, where one of Mexico's major drug cartels is based.

Last July, Luis Gonzaga Castro Flores, a trafficker working for the
powerful Sinaloa Cartel, bought his way out of Reclusorio Preventivo
Oriente prison, where he was described by the local media as the
godfather of Dormitory No. 9, the area where many drug prisoners are kept.

Other detainees escape before ever getting to prison or while being
transferred to court, often with the aid of their cartel colleagues
as well as complicit guards. In March, an armed group opened fire on
a police convoy outside Mexico City, freeing five drug traffickers
who were being taken to prison.

The government acknowledges it does not have full control of its
prisons, but it attributes part of the problem to its aggressive
roundup of drug traffickers. Escapes are on the rise, a top federal
law enforcement official, Luis Cardenas Palomino, told reporters
recently, because the government was locking up so many leading
operatives that it was getting harder for the cartels to function.

A Space Crunch

Mexico's prison system is a mishmash of federal, state and local
facilities of varying quality. The most dangerous prisoners are
supposed to be housed in maximum security federal facilities, but
there is nowhere near enough space. So the federal government pays
the states to take in drug traffickers and other federal prisoners in
their far less secure lockups.

From August through December 2008, in the most recent statistics
available, state prisons across Mexico reported 36 violent episodes
with 80 deaths, 162 injuries and 27 escapes, the government said.
There was no breakdown in those statistics of how much of the
violence was linked to traffickers, but experts said prisoners
involved in the drug trade tend to be the most fierce and trouble-prone of all.

"These are clear signals that the penal system, as it is currently
organized, is not meeting its primary obligation of guarding inmates
efficiently and safely while they serve their sentences," the federal
government's recently released strategic plan on prisons said of the
string of assaults and escapes.

To relieve the congestion and better control the inmates, the
government is planning a prison-building spree that will add tens of
thousands of new beds in the coming years. One goal, officials say,
is to keep drug lords separate from petty criminals as well as the
many people who have been imprisoned but never convicted, thus
reducing their ability to recruit new employees.

The government is also focusing on personnel, boosting guards' pay,
putting them through a newly created training academy and screening
them for corruption. Mexico recently sent several dozen of its guards
to beef up their skills at the training academy used by the New
Mexico Department of Corrections.

All of the trainees, even guards with 15 years' experience, had to
start with the basics, shining their boots, cleaning out dormitory
toilets and listening to lectures on how conniving inmates can be in
trying to win over weak-willed guards.

Some of those Mexican guards who are now active participants in
Mexico's deeply flawed penal system say they welcome the moves toward
professionalism.

One prison guard acknowledged, "We have guns, but we know it is them,
not us, who really control things."