bajaguy
Elite Nomad
Posts: 9247
Registered: 9-16-2003
Location: Carson City, NV/Ensenada - Baja Country Club
Member Is Offline
Mood: must be 5 O'clock somewhere in Baja
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Prison escape
Here we go again.........
Tucson Sector of DHS received the following information pertaining to more then 85 prisoners escaping from a jail near the U.S. Border, on Friday.
The prisoners, mainly cartel members, climbed over a prison fence in the border city of Reynosa, across from McAllen, Texas, in the early hours of
Friday morning, local radio and newspapers reported, saying 85 men escaped. A later report confirmed that the number of escaped prisoners was higher
then 85.
A spokesman for Mexico's attorney general's office in Reynosa confirmed the jailbreak but declined to give details.
Police arrested more than 40 prison guards and staff who were on duty when the men escaped, and two prison guards are missing, local radio and
newspaper El Norte said.
The jailbreak follows a scandal in July, when authorities discovered that prison officials had allowed convicts out of a prison in northwestern
Durango State to carry out revenge attacks before returning to cells for the night.
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Gypsy Jan
Ultra Nomad
Posts: 4275
Registered: 1-27-2004
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Mood: Depends on which way the wind is blowing
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From the Houston Chronicle
85 escape prison in border city
Mexican police, soldiers are sent to Reynosa to hunt down criminals
By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Sept. 11, 2010, 7:18AM
MEXICO CITY — Mexican prisoners in the border city of Reynosa used ladders to slip over an 18-foot-high wall in a pre-dawn escape Friday that put 85
inmates back on the streets just south of the Rio Grande, state officials said.
Federal police are questioning scores of guards at the state prison, which sits near the highway leading from Reynosa to Monterrey, Jose Antonio
Garza, head of the Tamaulipas state public security ministry, said at a news conference. Two guards also have gone missing.
Mexican troops and state police were rushed to the prison and sent searching for the escapees so that Reynosa's residents can "be certain that these
escapees are not going to continue causing problems," Garza told reporters in Ciudad Victoria, the Tamaulipas state capital.
All but 19 of the escapees were being held on federal charges, said Garza, who was named head of public security just this week.
Many of those jailed on federal charges are suspected gunmen for the Zetas or the rival Gulf Cartel gangsters operating in Reynosa across the Rio
Grande near McAllen.
Those gangs have been warring with one another as well as federal troops this year, killing hundreds along the border and in the Monterrey area.
Tamaulipas state's eight state prisons hold nearly 8,000 inmates, about a quarter of them facing federal charges. Friday's incident was not the first
prison breakout in the region.
Twelve prisoners escaped from a Reynosa jail in April. Another 41 prisoners escaped from the state prison in Matamoros, across the border from
Brownsville, in late March.
In all, more than 200 prisoners have escaped this year from jails in Tamaulipas - mostly in cities along the Texas border, Garza said.
A riot in the Reynosa prison in October 2008 killed 21 inmates and injured 34 others. The prison's warden was replaced following that incident.
Tamaulipas state has become one of Mexico's most violent this year. The all-but-certain candidate to win the governorship was assassinated six days
before the July 4 elections.
Mexican Marines discovered the massacred bodies of 72 Central and South American migrants Aug. 24. Officials are blaming both crimes on the Zetas.
Neither Reynosa's newspapers nor those in the state capital of Ciudad Victoria carried news of the jailbreak on their websites Friday. Local
journalists often don't report such news under threat of death from gangsters.
Escapes and deadly riots are common in Mexico's prison system, which has become severely overcrowded by about 110,000 suspects arrested on organized
crime charges in the past four years.
The Reynosa jail is holding 300 more prisoners than its 1,400 capacity, Garza said Friday.
Police in July arrested a prison warden and many of her guards in the northern city of Gomez Palacio, accusing them of freeing a gang boss and several
other prisoners nightly to commit crimes.
The freed inmates, with the help of guards, were responsible for the massacre of 17 people attending a party in the adjoining city of Torreon in July,
federal officials said.
The officials learned of the warden's involvement in the crime through the videotaped confession of a municipal policeman who was part of the
conspiracy.
The policeman was then executed on the video by his interrogators, presumably members of the Zetas.
dudley.althaus@chron.com
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow mindedness.”
—Mark Twain
\"La vida es dura, el corazon es puro, y cantamos hasta la madrugada.” (Life is hard, the heart is pure and we sing until dawn.)
—Kirsty MacColl, Mambo de la Luna
\"Alea iacta est.\"
—Julius Caesar
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