Mexican authorities revise death toll in prison battle to 49

The death toll from a clash between rival gangs inside a prison in the northeastern Mexican state of Nuevo Leon stands at 49, a senior official said Thursday, revising the figure of 52 fatalities cited earlier by state Gov. Jaime Rodriguez.

State government chief of staff Miguel Treviño offered the adjusted number during a news briefing late Thursday.

Forty of the 49 fatalities have been identified, he said, suggesting that the task of identifying five of the nine remaining victims would be difficult because their bodies had been burned.

The dispute at the Topo Chico penitentiary in the industrial city of Monterrey began at around 11:30 p.m. Wednesday when a group of prisoners set fire to a food storage area, a blaze that spread to an area where inmates’ cells were located, the state governor said at a press conference earlier Thursday.

He said the clash involved one gang led by Jorge Ivan Hernandez Cantu, alias “el Credo,” and another headed by Juan Pedro Salvador Saldivar Farias, alias “el Z27.”

Hernandez, whom authorities identified as a leader of the Gulf cartel, presumably controlled one section of the correctional facility.

He was arrested in November 2012 in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon’s capital, in an operation that resulted in the arrests of 24 criminal gang members, who confessed to at least 48 homicides, local media said then.

The prison riot hay have stemmed from an attempted prison break by inmates belonging like Saldivar to the Los Zetas cartel, according to prison officials consulted by EFE. Those officials said the Zetas sparked the chaos inside Topo Chico after losing control of the prison.

Saldivar, who had risen to become a regional Zetas boss, was arrested in late 2013 and identified, along with his brother, as a suspect in the September 2010 murder of U.S. citizen David Hartley.

The Zetas member also was allegedly involved in an attack on the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in the northcentral state of San Luis Potosi.

Founded by deserters from an elite Mexican special forces unit, Los Zetas began their criminal career as the armed wing of the Gulf cartel.

But in March 2010 they broke with that outfit to go into business for themselves and have engaged in brutal turf battles with the Gulf mob and carried out some of Mexico’s most notorious acts of violence in their quest for territory.

The Topo Chico prison riot, one of the deadliest in the past 30 years in Mexico, was brought under control at 1:20 a.m. Thursday thanks to the intervention of army soldiers, marines and the Federal Police.

Topo Chico is one of Nuevo Leon’s oldest penitentiaries and houses around 3,800 inmates, according to Rodriguez, who said the victims’ names would be released after they had been fully identified.