Guatemala forces take infamous prison after 10 years
GUATEMALA: Security forces took over a Guatemalan prison
controlled for more than 10 years by inmates who produced drugs, lived
in spacious homes with luxury goods and even rented space for stores and
restaurants.
Seven prisoners died when 3,000 police and soldiers firing automatic
weapons stormed the Pavon prison just after dawn on Monday. Inmates,
some carrying grenades, fired back.
"There was initial resistance by the inmates which was controlled in
less than an hour," Interior Minister Carlos Vielmann told reporters.
Guards, often corrupt, only patrolled the prison's perimeter and ran
the administration section while inmates organized crime empires on the
outside from cell blocks and houses they built on the sprawling prison's
large grounds.
A police pick-up truck drove out of Pavon after the raid carrying at
least two bodies. A dead man's legs dangled out of the back of the
vehicle. Luis Alfonso Zepeda, a convicted murderer who headed an "order
committee" elected by prisoners that controlled the prison for more than
a decade, was killed in a shootout with security forces.
Zepeda earned around $25,000 a month from extortion and drug
trafficking run from inside the prison, police said. His son Samuel
lived illegally inside the prison to help run the crime empire, even
though he was never sent there by a court.
Prisoners had set up laboratories to produce cocaine, crack and
liquor inside Pavon, on the edge of the town of Fraijanes.
Pavon was one of the worst prisons in Guatemala's penitentiary
system, where common criminals, rival "mara" street gangsters and drug
traffickers often battle for control.
"It's a center where organized crime, drug trafficking, kidnapping,
extortion and all kinds of illicit activities were being controlled
from," Vielmann said.
Inmates also built their own homes in the prison grounds. One
belonging to a Colombian drug trafficker had a jacuzzi, national prison
director Alejandro Giammattei said.
The two-story wooden house boasted a king-sized bed and was protected
by pedigree guard dogs, a witness said.
Giammattei asked prosecutors to investigate all of the 80 or so
prison guards at Pavon for allowing drugs, weapons and hundreds of cell
phones inside.
Pavon, southeast of the capital, was originally built for 800 inmates
as a farm prison, where prisoners could grow their own food. But its
population grew over time and inmates began to construct their own homes
on the grounds. The "order committee" sold new prisoners title deeds to
homes in the grounds and rented space where inmates set up restaurants
selling home cooking like stews and tortillas.
Stores controlled by the prisoners sold soft drinks and chips brought
in from the outside.
After taking control, security forces began emptying Pavon of its
1,600 inhabitants and transferring them to another prison.
The operation came a day after Guatemala's main newspaper Prensa
Libre published a long article about the prisoners' often relaxed
lifestyle. Journalists who got into the prison said they bought
marijuana, cocaine and crack there.
Fraijanes, Tuesday, Reuters |