Swift shake-up at notorious Tijuana prison
It was no ordinary transfer, but La Mesa is no ordinary prison.
The first 1,200 inmates, those considered the most dangerous, were moved in heavily guarded buses from the overcrowded prison to the new facility 50 miles to the east, in a predawn operation involving federal police and army troops.
La Mesa prison was commonly known as El Pueblito ("The Little Town") because inmates moved openly about the prison, ran small stores, lived in improvised spaces amid its crowded alleys and passageways, and often brought their wives and children to live with them.
Businesses sold traditional Mexican food and pizzas, while others rented films, the officials said.
Wealthier inmates built more than 400 homes, some equipped with computers, phones, DVD players and tequila bars.
The transfer included moving dozens of inmates' families out of the prison.
They were taken aboard buses to a temporary shelter at a local auditorium, and officials promised to try to find housing for them — off prison grounds.
Authorities said about 900 improvised structures inside La Mesa, mostly shacks and stores, are to be torn down.
La Mesa was built in 1957 to hold just 2,500 prisoners, but until Monday it held about 6,000.
Located about a 15-minute drive from the U.S. border, the facility was basically run by inmate gangs who openly sold narcotics inside the penitentiary.
The illicit trade was so widespread that some authorities estimated that drugs cost less inside the prison than on the street.
Dozens of Americans are held at La Mesa, where they are required to pay for a cell and to buy their own food.
Crime and extortion have been reportedly so rampant in the facility — and guards so powerless — that prisoners had taken to locking themselves into cells at night with their own padlocks, to avoid being victimized.
"Today marks the end of El Pueblito," federal police commander Arellano Noblecia told local media.
But La Mesa will continue to be used as a prison.
About 2,200 inmates are to be moved to the new state-of-the-art prison near Tecate; 44 men who allegedly led the prison gangs were transferred by plane to other maximum-security prisons throughout Mexico.
Previous plans to remove families and transfer prisoners were never executed because of fear of rioting and, many believe, because prisoners paid bribes to block change.
About 40 children who have no known guardian other than the inmate they lived with in the prison were taken away by state social workers. Some left with their toys and 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 Gustavo Magallanes, a spokesman for the state of Baja California.
President Vicente Fox said the army, working with newly trained federal police, has recently scored "extraordinary results against organized crime and drug traffickers (in Tijuana), and now we are correcting the prison. It will be a complete cleansing."
Alejandro Gertz Manero, the national public-security chief who was involved in yesterday'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, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, bribed his way out of a federal prison in a laundry bin. He is still at large.