Mexican jail meltdown: Will Pena Nieto now introduce penal reforms?

Submitted by gaf322 on Wed, 2012-12-26 06:05

In July, the head of the Durango state jail, plus 10 of her prison officers, were arrested after being found to be in cahoots with the notorious Sinaloa drug cartel. Now the prison has been emptied of 500 inmates after 24 people died Wednesday during an attempted jailbreak.

It appears that the Mexican penal system is in meltdown. Durango is the fiery tip of a simmering volcano of corruption and human rights issues across Mexico's jail and legal systems.

The Durango jail has been the centre of several scandals, and the Mexican government has now taken the unprecedented action of using security forces to totally empty the jail. The BBC reports an official of the security services as saying the jail "has been totally emptied as a preventive measure."

Wednesday's escape attempt led to 15 prisoners and nine guards being killed in a shootout. Questions are already being asked as to how the prisoners could have got access to arms without inside support from prison workers.

Clearing out the staff, after the corruption links with Mexico's drug cartels, seems to have not solved the issue within the Durango jail. If the cartels are still operating in Durango, where a huge operation aimed at taking visible take action to stop their influence has taken place, then it's for sure that they are operating in prisons across Mexico.

Mexico's Public Safety Secretary, Jesus Rosso, said in a statement, that guards at Durango rang the alarm bell Wednesday when a group of prisoners were seen trying to scale the prison wall. The prisoners were armed and started firing on the warden's office and guard towers before being shot on by prison guards. Rosso said that the gurads could not bring the prisoners under control and so soldiers were deployed in the prison. They finaly brought the situation under control but before the loss of 23 lives.

The whole affair feels like a thumbing of the nose from the drug cartels to Mexico's new president, Enrique Pena Nieto, who swept into power on promises of bringing Mexico's drug wars and drug related crime to an end. Many fear that his proposed method of fighting the cartels with a new 10,000 strong paramilitary force will not break the Mexican drug lords hold on the country.

There is a belief that corruption is embedded so deep within the police, the military and public office that a street-based military force has no chance of stopping those at the centre of Mexico's huge illegal drugs industry. They might stop some of the street murders and incidental killings of innocents that grew in number under the last government, but that could be at the xpense of turning a blind eye to some of the corruption that infects Mexico's public life.

This latest Durango prison incident highlights the fact that at no point has the new president mentioned changes to the running of Mexico's outdated, dangerous and corrupt prison system. Shuffling prisoners around from one hellhole jail to another while not sorting out the alleged and recently proven corruption within the penal service just reinforces the power of the cartels within the prisons. In the recent court case against the former governor of Durango, it was shown that the prison authourities loaned guns to inmates to undertake cartel-ordered excutions.

This scale of of corruption within the penal system is unlikely to be a one off, and it could be that other areas of government and the civil service are also rife with similar corruption. Some fear that Pena Nieto's new visible military corp will have no effect on such corruption and in fact is maybe a smokescreen to cut street drug killing action while letting the cartels get on with their core business of producing drugs and exporting them abroad to a waiting US market.