A battle between the feared Zetas drug cartel and rivals at a prison left 49 people dead in the northeastern Mexican city of Monterrey, authorities said on Thursday, days ahead of a planned visit by Pope Francis to another jail in Mexico’s far north.
The incident was one of the worst in a series of deadly riots in recent years to rock the country’s overpopulated prisons, some of which are largely controlled by cartels.
Fighting broke out before midnight in two areas of the Topo Chico prison between supporters of a gang leader known as “Zeta 27” and another group, with prisoners using bottles and blades, Nuevo Leon state Governor Jaime Rodriguez said.
A 2014 human rights report faulted Topo Chico for not preventing violent incidents. The prison has long housed members of the Zetas, known for extreme violence. One Zetas leader was stabbed to death there in September.
Authorities revised down their initial death toll from 52, out of a total of about 3,500 prisoners.
One victim died from gunfire, while the rest were killed from a combination of knives and other objects like bottles and chairs. Flames licked the night sky after inmates set light to food storage areas.
Milenio TV reported that inmates’ relatives who had been within the prison’s premises for conjugal visits had seen inmates with burns. Twelve people were injured, five seriously, the state government said.
40 victims had been identified so far. The names of Zeta 27 and a rival known as El Credo were not among a list of 20 names released by state government.
According to the prison authorities, the fighting had been brought under control at about 1:30am (local time) on Thursday and ruled out a prison break, adding no women or children were hurt. Worried family members at one point forced open the prison gates and threw timber and stones at riot police inside, television images showed.
Authorities are transfering inmates out of the prison to bring down the population, with 60 people set to be moved on Thursday.
Pope Francis is set to begin his first visit to Mexico as pontiff on Friday. Next week, he will visit a prison in border city Ciudad Juarez, once one of the world’s most violent cities.
Both Monterrey and Ciudad Juarez are more peaceful than at the peak of the war between rival cartels for control of routes to nearby Texas.
For much of the last decade, the Zetas spread terror across Mexico before being debilitated by arrests and deaths of their founding members. In 2012, at least 44 inmates died in another Nuevo Leon prison when members of the Zetas plotted with prison guards to stage an elaborate escape.
