Anonymous - 1-20-2005 at 07:11 AM
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/mexico/20050120-9999-1n20...
By S. Lynne Walker
January 20, 2005
ALMOLOYA DE JUAREZ, Mexico ? The prison roster reads like a who's who of Mexican criminals.
Tijuana drug cartel leader Benjam?n Arellano F?lix. Gulf cartel leader Osiel C?rdenas. Mario Villanueva, the former governor of Quintana Roo state,
accused of trafficking for the Juarez cartel.
With these men locked up in the nation's toughest prison, Mexicans breathed a sigh of relief. In a country notorious for corruption, the
maximum-security prison known as La Palma seemed impenetrable.
But after the slayings of three prisoners in eight months ? two with guns smuggled into the penitentiary ? top prison officials were forced to admit
last week that the drug lords had taken control of La Palma.
Arellano F?lix had formed an alliance with C?rdenas, his former enemy, and launched an attack on a third cartel leader, Joaqu?n Guzm?n, said Jos? Luis
Santiago Vasconcelos, Mexico's deputy attorney general for organized crime.
On New Year's Eve, a prisoner fired seven shots from a handgun at Guzm?n's brother as he met with his attorney in La Palma's visiting area.
Vasconcelos said the gunman, who was originally arrested in Tijuana, is linked to the Arellano F?lix organization.
In Mexico's evolving drug war, La Palma had become ground zero.
La Palma was once the pride of Mexico's prison system. The first maximum-security prison built in Mexico, it was the most modern, high-tech
penitentiary in the country.
Its guards were considered an elite force, unarmed but highly trained to deal with hardened criminals. In the 14 years since it opened, there had
never been an escape, a killing or even a riot at the prison, built in cornfields an hour's drive west of Mexico City.
But things changed when Arellano F?lix and C?rdenas were locked inside La Palma's frigid, underground cells.
"They are powerful men, heavyweight mafiosos," said a guard, who declined to be named for fear of retribution. "Since those men arrived, they have
turned the prison upside down."
By the time Mexico's top prison official resigned last week and Mexican army troops and federal police stormed the prison, a prison break orchestrated
by C?rdenas and carried out by his hit squad of ex-soldiers was a frightening possibility, authorities said.
"The public was obviously in danger," said Miguel Angel Yunes, Mexico's deputy minister for public security.
Mounting problems
Prison guards said they had warned officials for more than two years that La Palma's famed security system was eroding.
They said the prison's metal detectors didn't work. The X-ray machine didn't work. There was no device to block cell-phone calls, and C?rdenas even
made a telephone call to a TV news show in October. The guards also complained that new guards got only a few weeks of training, leaving them
ill-prepared to confront Mexico's toughest criminals.
When they talked to prison officials, the answer was always the same: no money.
In an interview this week, Yunes denied that the prison's security devices were in disrepair and said guards get enough training to do their jobs.
"The problem was not the condition of the equipment," he said. "It was problem of bad performance by some public servants."
Officials suspect guards of allowing weapons to be smuggled into La Palma. Corruption, a word that had rarely been mentioned in reference to the
penitentiary, is now being blamed for the problems.
Last week, half of the prison's 150 guards were subjected to five days of drug, polygraph and psychological tests at a federal police facility after
being told they were being summoned for training courses.
"The only ones who will remain in the institution are those who the Federal Preventive Police tell us are dignified and deserve our confidence," Yunes
said.
The guards say it was lax prison officials, motivated either by greed or fear, who ceded control of La Palma to Arellano F?lix and C?rdenas.
Former warden Guillermo Montoya, now under house arrest, was put in charge of La Palma in June despite facing criminal charges for helping prisoners
escape from a maximum-security prison outside Guadalajara. During his stint as warden of that prison, Montoya eased the rules to allow cartel leader
Guzm?n and other prisoners to celebrate Valentine's Day with a dinner and dance.
Prison officials who dared to confront the drug kingpins often found their lives in danger.
In December 2003, La Palma's deputy prison director Noe Hern?ndez, known as a stern, unyielding official who had crossed C?rdenas, was gunned down in
nearby Toluca.
A dozen guards who asked that their names not be published for fear of reprisals described how Arellano F?lix and C?rdenas won concessions at La
Palma.
Arellano F?lix, who was arrested in March 2002, began by staging hunger strikes over food, family visits and prison officials' refusal to allow him to
speak to his older brother, Francisco Rafael, also at La Palma.
When C?rdenas was arrested a year later, he stepped up protests by leading hunger strikes, ordering his family to demonstrate outside the prison and
buying newspaper ads protesting prison conditions.
Visiting hours were extended by four hours after a hunger strike. The list of people who were allowed to visit the prisoners was expanded. In
addition, searches of family members ? particularly wives ? were eased. That meant guards could not examine as closely what they were carrying under
their clothing.
"There were a series of errors," Yunes acknowledged.
It was impossible to keep prisoners from contacting the outside world because fewer than 200 of the 531 inmates at La Palma have been convicted.
Mexican law gives accused inmates the right to meet with lawyers as they fight the charges against them. They also have the right to weekly conjugal
visits.
"That is one of the problems at the prison ? it was built for people who had been sentenced," Yunes said. "The majority have only been charged, so we
have to take them to court and to visits with their attorneys."
Arellano F?lix and C?rdenas were allowed out of their cells for nearly 12 hours a day. Also, groups of up to 50 inmates ? many from the drug kingpins'
own cartels ? gathered in the prison's exercise yard. Worst of all, Yunes said, the drug kingpins were housed in adjoining cells, allowing them to
have lengthy, uninterrupted conversations.
Partners in prison
In the fiercely competitive drug world, an Arellano F?lix-C?rdenas alliance might have been unlikely. But behind the prison walls, two of Latin
America's most dangerous men became business partners.
Before they were arrested, Arellano F?lix and C?rdenas controlled lucrative drug routes on opposite ends of the border.
Arellano F?lix's turf was the Tijuana-San Diego corridor, which supplies 40 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States. He was the cartel's
CEO, handling the logistics of getting cocaine from Colombia. Although he wasn't known for picking up a gun and killing people, authorities say he
sometimes ordered executions.
C?rdenas controlled a lucrative route on the east end of the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, the Gulf cartel's shipping point for tons of cocaine and
marijuana. A former mechanic's assistant, C?rdenas got his start training drug-sniffing dogs for Mexican agents.
"The two groups united because they were at tremendous risk" from other drug traffickers operating from the middle of the border in the Ciudad
Juarez-El Paso corridor, Vasconcelos said.
At some point, Arellano F?lix became C?rdenas' subordinate in the venture, Vasconcelos said.
Working together, they crafted a strategy to press the two ends against the middle, putting a vise grip on the Juarez cartel. Vasconcelos said that
cartel is run by five men, including Arellano F?lix's archenemy, Ismael Zambada. Another of the Juarez cartel leaders is Guzm?n, who escaped from the
maximum-security prison in Guadalajara two years after the Valentine's Day dinner.
C?rdenas and Arellano F?lix's actions helped trigger a wave of violence that has claimed lives in Tijuana and Mexicali, as well as at La Palma.
Mexican and U.S. authorities believe the Arellano F?lix cartel has lost control of the eastern part of Baja California, including Mexicali, to
Zambada.
Two Arellano F?lix brothers, Eduardo and Javier, are believed to be running the cartel in Tijuana. But Mexican authorities arrested several important
cartel figures after Ram?n Arellano F?lix, the cartel's executioner, was shot by police in February 2002. With Arellano F?lix and his chief financial
advisers, trigger men and logistics people in prison, "that organization is in crisis," Vasconcelos said.
"They are trying to maintain their leadership, their strength, so they are using everything," he said. "Corruption. Violence. Murders. Everything."
Taking action
Shortly after dawn Friday, the government launched an operation to bring the two men under control.
Armored personnel carriers rumbled into place around the prison's perimeter. A convoy carrying hundreds of army troops and federal police rolled up to
the main entrance. Helicopters buzzed overhead.
Outside the prison, family members began to gather.
By Saturday afternoon, they were arriving by the busload from C?rdenas' home state of Tamaulipas. The wives of notorious traffickers Oscar Malherbe
and Arturo Mart?nez, dressed in designer boots and rhinestone-studded sunglasses, worried in the blistering sun that their husbands weren't eating
well, that they might be sick or that they had been hurt during the military operation.
They were still there Sunday, when the government loaded five prisoners believed to have been allied with C?rdenas and Arellano F?lix onto a Hercules
military helicopter and flew them to maximum-security prisons in other parts of the country.
Although Arellano F?lix and C?rdenas were not among those evacuated from the prison, they no longer have adjoining cells.
On Tuesday, the drug kingpins and other inmates were marched with their hands cuffed behind their backs into the exercise yard and told that La Palma
is once again in the hands of the government.
No more civilian clothes instead of uniforms. No more communicating by handwritten notes. No more daylong visits with lawyers.
Televisions must be earned with good behavior, as must conjugal visits. Searches of cells, which turned up scores of homemade knives, several cell
phones and a flat-screen TV over the past few days, will continue.
"We will not allow any more challenges," said an official wearing a mask, apparently to prevent reprisals. "This is a maximum-security facility, and
it will operate that way."