Riot cover for jailbreak

MEXICO CITY – It seemed a run-of-the-mill prison riot, though one that left 44 inmates beaten or knifed to death. In fact, the violence on Sunday in northern Mexico served as cover for a massive jailbreak by members of the country’s deadliest criminal gang, the Zetas.

Authorities on Monday revealed that 30 Zetas henchmen escaped from the maximum-security prison in Apodaca during the brawl – with the apparent complicity of guards and possibly other top officials.

The deadly violence underscored the abysmal condition of Mexican prisons, which are woefully overcrowded, rife with corruption and prone to high-profile escapes.

The warden, three other penitentiary officials and 18 guards have been removed or suspended and detained for questioning, said Rodrigo Medina, governor of Nuevo Leon state, where Apodaca is located.

All of those killed, he added, were from the Zetas’ bitter rival, the Gulf cartel. The two gangs, former allies, are now at war for control of part of Mexico’s drug trade and other criminal enterprises.

“We can say without a doubt that this was premeditated and planned,” Medina said in a news conference, where he offered a nearly $800,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the escapees.

“This isn’t a thing where, in the middle of a riot, it occurred to these people to escape.” Medina added. “There was a plan, which undoubtedly relied on the complicity of some officials.”

While overcrowding, violence and corruption plague penal systems throughout Latin America, the problems are especially acute in Mexico, where a military crackdown on drug cartels has helped fill cells, often to more than double capacity.

Frequently, entire criminal enterprises are run from inside jailhouse walls; in a recent wave of telephone extortions, investigators found that the vast majority of calls demanding money originated from prisons.

Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission says 467 inmates have been killed inside prisons since the beginning of 2009 – shot, bludgeoned, stabbed or burned to death.

The institution at Apodaca, just north of the major industrial city of Monterrey and about 100 miles from the U.S. border, reportedly held twice the number of men it was built to accommodate and had been flooded recently by members of both the Zetas and Gulf organizations. Authorities make some effort to separate gangs within the same prison, but divisions are easily breached.