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Mexico prison officials possibly targeted
Drug traffickers were behind the slayings of six Mexican prison employees, specifically picking them out at a roadblock, officials said Friday, detailing the latest killings in an increasingly bloody turf war that has bodies turning up almost daily along the border.
Federal prosecutor Marco Antonio Ramirez said a group of assassins, dressed in black, set up a roadblock on the dirt road leading from the prison in this town across from Brownsville, Texas. The assassins stopped only the victims' cars and let others pass.
It was unclear why the six were targeted as they got off their work shifts. The victims included a computer systems technician, two electrical technicians, a guard commander and two drivers.
Officials were still searching for two other cars belonging to the victims, as well as two white vehicles believed to have been used by the attackers.
Federal officials have described the killings as a direct challenge to President Vicente Fox's crackdown on the drug trade. Fox pledged Thursday to "wage the mother of all battles against organized crime, drug trafficking, and now within the federal prisons."
The killings mirrored another recent attack, also in Tamaulipas state. On Monday, authorities found the bodies of Teodoro Herrera, 67, and two of his adult sons along a road 170 miles southwest of Brownsville.
Witnesses said a heavily armed gang dressed in black seized more than 20 people, many of them members of the Herrera family, on Saturday. In addition to the three dead, three others remain missing. The rest were released unharmed.
For months, bodies have turned up in the trunks of cars, abandoned lots and homes along the border, evidence of a growing war between the Juarez and Gulf cartels, two of Mexico's most powerful drug gangs.
The Gulf Cartel, allegedly headed by Osiel Cardenas, is based in Tamaulipas state. Federal officials say Cardenas has continued to run his organization from a prison outside Mexico City since being arrested nearly two years ago in Matamoros. They suggested he was linked to Thursday's slayings.
Interior Secretary Santiago Creel said Friday that Cabinet members declared an "all-out battle" against drug traffickers and would continue efforts to clean up the federal prison system.
A special team of federal police last week were sent to run La Palma prison, just west of Mexico City, after reports that drug lords were planning escapes and running their cartels from jail cells.
At the Matamoros prison, a white, concrete structure surrounded by high walls and barbed wire in the middle of deserted farm fields, soldiers and federal police sealed off access roads to the facility Friday and refused to let anyone within about a mile.
"Nothing and no one will intimidate this institution," Ramirez said, adding that more federal agents were on their way to the scene.
Teresa Lopez — the wife of one of the victims, Jose Guadalupe Medrano Rodriguez, who worked as a driver at the prison — was waiting outside the morgue to recover her husband's remains.
"He never talked about problems or threats," she said.
Relatives of Adolfo Zapata, 29, said they did not believe he was in danger because he did not have direct contact with inmates. He reviewed and maintained the prison's computer network.
Zapata's father, Francisco, said he wanted officials to find his son's killers. "I hope God gives me the chance to see their faces," he said. Also, the federal Attorney General's Office said it arrested six officials accused of permitting a drug trafficker's escape from a Zacatecas state prison on Jan. 18. The suspects include the prison's director. |
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