Families grieve after rival Mexican drug gangs hack each other to death in horror prison riot
Corrections officials accused of being complicit after 28 inmates were killed in rampage
Shell-shocked relatives of Mexican inmates who had been decapitated and mutilated by their rivals behind bars have condemned what they called a reign of terror inflicted by gangs that extort and torture prisoners.
Brenda Lopez, a 23-year-old student, waited with her 80-year-old grandmother outside the hulking concrete structure for news of her uncle: “They won’t tell us anything. We don’t know how he is, where he is.”
Overnight, dozens of grieving relatives gathered outside the Pacific coast resort town’s morgue, waiting to be called in to identify their loved ones’ bodies.
As they stood in agony, with police lights flashing across their faces, they spoke in hushed tones about what they described as the abysmal conditions inside the jail, which holds nearly 2,200 inmates – 65 per cent over capacity, according to official figures.
“He didn’t have to tell me how badly they treated him inside. You could see it a mile away,” one 25-year-old woman said of her dead relative, fearful of giving her name. “The mafia ruled in there. The others lived in fear.”