Infamous Prison City Torn Down

It was never an address for the faint of heart.

Yet when 1,500 well-armed federal police raided Tijuana’s notorious La Mesa State Penitentiary two weeks ago, and bulldozed the sprawling village prisoners built in its courtyard, the inmates’ children cried.

The infamous penitentiary--a carnivalesque casbah that sprouted its own homes, shops, prostitutes and drug-dealing gangs--was the only home many of the children had ever known.

“It was a little city within a city. There was no law except the law of money,” said Raul Gutierrez Anaya, a spokesman for the Baja California state attorney general’s office. “Whoever had money could have all the luxuries of anyone outside--television, wines, women and drugs.”

The National Human Rights Commission in 1992 concluded that La Mesa presented “a tableau that is unique in the world.” Baja California Gov. Eugenio Elorduy called the prison a “black legend.”

The destruction of the little universe within the penitentiary gates--a place where prisoners paid $25,000 for townhomes with cell phones, tiled bathrooms and Jacuzzis--began what Mexican President Vicente Fox said would be a “complete cleansing” of La Mesa.

Fox, who campaigned on promises to wipe out corruption, characterized the prison raid as a triumph of a joint effort between the army and newly trained federal police. He said the effort has achieved “extraordinary results against organized crime and drug traffickers” in Tijuana.

The Baja attorney general’s office suggested that there is more housecleaning to come. “They’re going to have to punish those who allowed all this,” Gutierrez said.

But reform of Mexico’s criminal justice system has been a rocky road, strewn with powerful special interests, cowed would-be reformers and stymied investigations.

In the latest twist to the bizarre saga at La Mesa, state officials announced a few days ago that the prison’s director, Carlos Lugo Felix, has vanished since the Aug. 20 raid.

Gutierrez said authorities asked Lugo Felix to appear to answer for “abandonment of duties,” but he has failed to turn up.

“We don’t know where he is,” Gutierrez said. “The state attorney general’s office is looking for him.”

In Lugo Felix’s absence, Tijuana state prosecutor Sergio Ortiz Lara has assumed the post as prison director.

Lugo Felix wasn’t the first administrator to run into trouble at the prison.

The tenure of two previous directors was cut short when they were killed, one of them during a prison riot in 1978, and a second when he was gunned down by assassins waiting at his house in 1995.

Another fled under a cloud of suspicion that he was involved in the thriving narcotics trade in the prison, where drugs were said to be so plentiful that they sold for less than street prices.

In the absence of a strong authority over the years, prisoners set many of the rules. They built as many as 400 houses, some with microwaves, computers, DVD players and air conditioning. There were maids, cooks and bodyguards. There were stores, pizza parlors, tequila bars and video emporiums.

In the mid-1990s, a prisoner, who had two French poodles and a Rottweiler, explained to a visitor the going rate for bribes to smuggle in drugs and guns. One murder in the prison was committed with an Uzi.

Such a luridly illustrious fate would have seemed unthinkable when the austere edifice was built in 1956, as a municipal jail for 600 prisoners. By the time of the raid, it housed 6,700.

More than 2,200 prisoners were given a surprise transfer the day of the raid to other prisons. After years of access to drugs, those who were shipped out had to go cold turkey.

The raid also touched off an earthquake among the prison staff.

Since the prison director vanished, 53 of the 237 guards at La Mesa were suspended, as authorities continue to investigate suspicions of corruption, Gutierrez said. Half of the 53 have since resigned, officials said.

Also displaced were prisoners’ wives and children who had lived inside the prison. The poorest lived in the open and were preyed upon by thugs. The luckiest lived in the comfortable wood siding homes.

As these families were shown the way out of “El Pueblito”--The Little Town--bulldozers toppled the houses behind them, creating mountains of rubble in the prison courtyard.

Some 40 children had no parents except for prisoners, and they were led away by social workers, tearfully clutching their toys.

Some of the homeless families took shelter at the municipal auditorium; a few accused the raiding police of stealing their possessions. The last 80 such refugees have moved out of the auditorium to the homes of relatives or friends, Gutierrez said.

Difficult Separations

“They cried to be separated from their fathers and husbands,” he said. “Entire families had been living there with the prisoners.”

The tradition of family cohabitation was perhaps the most wholesome aberration at La Mesa.

Here, the unorthodox had become such a tradition that, to some, the chorus of official outrage over corruption there had a less-than-sincere ring.

“It’s absurd,” said Victor Clark, the bearded and bespectacled director of Tijuana’s private Binational Center for Human Rights, who has visited La Mesa regularly since 1989.

Clark, a respected analyst of organized crime who has interviewed prison directors and inmates extensively, estimates that the prison’s black market concessions, from prostitution to drugs and housing, generated $2 million a month in off-the-books earnings.

“We always said the penitentiary was the under-the-table cash register of the state government,” Clark said. “People made a lot of money at La Mesa, and the corruption went to very high levels.”

“Not only did [government officials] know, but they were beneficiaries of the millions of dollars that penitentiary generated,” he said.

Clark said each new director was quickly intimidated by the organized criminals.

He said some directors confided that they were sent briefcases of cash. If they refused the money, they got telephone threats, underlined by deliveries of elaborate funeral wreaths.

Such persuasive tactics are known in Tijuana by a credo--”plata or plomo,” Spanish for “silver or lead”--whose most literal translation is: take the cash or take a bullet.

“Whether they sent them cash or funeral wreaths,” Clark said, “all of them maintained the status quo at the penitentiary.”

Clark said the captive audience of bored prisoners were a lucrative, ready-made narcotics market. Some prisoners ran up such debts that thugs threatened wives outside the prison that their children would be kidnapped if families didn’t pay up.

He said some people visited the prison not to see inmates, but to buy jewelry and other “merchandise.”

“It was one of the cheapest places in the city to buy jewels, all of them stolen,” he said. “You could find drugs on every corner.”

“It was one of the most wide open places in Tijuana.”

Clark said newcomers quickly adapted to the entrepreneurial ambience.

Prison Restaurant

When a boatload of Chinese illegal immigrants was seized in Ensenada and its crew arrested for smuggling, the incarcerated crew opened a fairly decent Chinese restaurant inside the prison, he said.

It remains to be seen whether the raid of La Mesa is truly the end of an era.

In one interview, national public security chief Alejandro Gertz Manero linked the raid at La Mesa to Mexico’s drive to recover full control over federal maximum-security prisons. He said that effort began in January 2001, after renowned Mexican drug trafficker Joaquin Guzman bought his way out of another regional prison--riding in a laundry truck.

“They say things have changed” at La Mesa, Clark said, “but today prisoners are still selling cell phone calls for 50 cents a minute, and prostitutes are still going in. The price of heroin and cocaine has supposedly doubled.”

State attorney general’s office spokesman Felipe Guicho said investigators will get to the bottom of the improprieties.

“The investigations will show who was involved in the corruption at the prison,” Guicho said, “until we find all of those responsible.”

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Times staff researcher Robin Mayper and Times wire services contributed to this story.