6 Mexico Prison Workers Found Slain

Six men were found blindfolded, handcuffed and shot to death Thursday after they left their night-shift jobs at a federal penitentiary in what Mexican officials called a brazen new challenge by jailed drug lords to government control of the nation’s prisons.

The killings outside the prison in Matamoros came six days after hundreds of troops and federal police raided a prison near Mexico City, crushed a hunger strike led by one drug cartel leader and transferred five inmates to other detention centers, including the one in Matamoros.

Details of the attack Thursday in the northern border city were sketchy. Officials said the slain men -- three prison technicians, two drivers and a guard -- were found about half a mile from the prison watchtower in a white Ford Explorer that had been riddled with automatic weapons fire. The victims had ended their shift at 6 a.m.; it was unclear when or where they had been attacked. The vehicle did not belong to the prison system, officials said.

After the midday discovery, army troops sealed off the area around the prison and helicopters flew overhead. The prison, one of three maximum-security facilities in Mexico, holds about 500 inmates. The city is across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas.

Two Mexican Cabinet officials portrayed the killings as a reaction to the government crackdown at La Palma prison, where the country’s most dangerous criminals are held, and at other facilities.

“These reactions we are seeing are precisely because we are cleaning up the prisons,” Interior Minister Santiago Creel told reporters. “It is because we are making progress that these things are happening.”

Atty. Gen. Rafael Macedo de la Concha said that “criminals, many of them in prison and others on the streets,” were responsible for the killings. He said Osiel Cardenas, a La Palma inmate who leads the Gulf drug cartel, might have been involved.

President Vicente Fox’s administration has been shaken by turmoil inside La Palma since a gunman killed convicted drug trafficker Arturo Guzman Loera on New Year’s Eve as he sat in a visiting room there. Guzman Loera’s brother, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, is a leader of the so-called Sinaloa drug cartel.

Federal officials said the killer was an inmate belonging to a rival alliance between Cardenas and Benjamin Arellano Felix, who heads the Tijuana drug cartel and is also among the 530 inmates at La Palma.

The army and police raided La Palma last week after Cardenas led hundreds of other prisoners in a hunger strike to protest what they called unduly harsh security measures taken after the New Year’s Eve killing.

The clampdown eased somewhat after an unusual protest Tuesday: About 200 wives of jailed drug traffickers stepped out of luxury cars and marched to the Congress to demand more humane treatment for their husbands.

The next day, authorities reopened La Palma to visits by lawyers and family members.

Investigations into lax security have targeted other prisons. On Thursday, three penitentiary directors lost their jobs in the Pacific coastal state of Sinaloa, and Fox promised “the mother of all battles against organized crime” in the prisons.