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 veggie
Registered: 07/25/04
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 Rival female drug smugglers too much for Mexico City prison, official says
#7471694 - 09/30/07 08:08 PM |
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Rival female drug smugglers too much for Mexico City prison, official says
September 30, 2007 - Associated Press
MEXICO CITY: Two notorious female drug smuggling suspects from rival Mexican cartels are now living just feet away from each other in a Mexico City prison, giving city authorities a bad case of the jitters.
The capital's prisons lack the security to hold high-profile suspected drug traffickers like Sandra Avila Beltran and Cantalicia Garza, said Juan Jose Garcia Ochoa, assistant secretary of Mexico City's government, at a news conference Sunday.
Avila Beltran, dubbed Queen of the Pacific and reputed to play a key role in shipping cocaine from Colombia to Mexico for the Sinaloa cartel, arrived at a women's prison in the capital on Saturday. Garza, who police believe worked for Mexico's ruthless Gulf cartel, has been living in a different section of the same all-female prison for a month, Garcia Ochoa said.
Their rival cartels have been at war for years, and Mexico has seen a wave of alleged drug smugglers escape from prisons in recent years.
The federal government "should send the most dangerous criminals to maximum-security prisons," Garcia Ochoa said. "They have no reason to send such dangerous inmates to Mexico City's municipal prisons: We're not prepared for them."
A spokesman for the capital's prison system, who could not be named because of departmental rules, said the two women were being kept in separate areas of the facility.
"Nothing's going to happen because security measures are preventing them from having any contact," he said, adding that guards are monitoring both women with security cameras.
But Garcia Ochoa said he plans to send a letter on Monday to federal Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora requesting the immediate removal of the women to a more secure facility.
He will also urge Medina Mora to create at least one women's section in a maximum security federal prison.
A man accused of turning Guatemala into a corridor for U.S.-bound cocaine escaped from a Mexico City jail in May 2005, allegedly with the aid of prison guards. Guatemalan Otto Herrera was recaptured in June in Bogota, Colombia, and is wanted for U.S. extradition.
Mexico's federal prisons also have been susceptible to escapes. Mexico's most-wanted drug lord, alleged Sinaloa drug cartel chief Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, escaped from federal prison in 2001 in a laundry cart by bribing guards.
A spokeswoman for the federal attorney general's office who could not be named because of departmental rules said Avila Beltran was only being held temporarily in the Mexico City facility and was well guarded.
Avila Beltran and her lover, alleged top Colombian drug trafficker Juan Diego Espinoza Ramirez, were arrested Friday. Both are wanted by the U.S.
President Felipe Calderon's administration has focused on extraditing suspected traffickers to the United States, a move which U.S. anti-drug officials have praised.
Garza was arrested in April with two of her brothers on charges of smuggling drugs, guns and people into the U.S. and money laundering.
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