Aztecas and Mexicles riot at a state prison in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez left at least 20 prisoners dead and seven others injured

Riot between gangs at a state prison in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez left at least 20 prisoners dead and seven others injured on Wednesday, police said.
Gunshot wounds were reported and police were investigating how a firearm entered the prison, said Victor Valencia, the Chihuahua state governor’s representative.The fight broke out shortly after 6 a.m. as visitors were leaving after an evening of conjugal visits, said Marco Antonio Moreno, state police spokesman in the city across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas.gang attack left 20 inmates dead and more than 30 others injured on Wednesday in one of the bloodiest riots in the turbulent history of prisons in Juárez.The riot was the most violent outbreak at the 4-year-old Chihuahua state Cereso prison, which was believed to be more secure than the riot-plagued municipal Cereso prison.It is not known whether any Americans were involved.Chihuahua state public safety officials said an investigation was under way to determine how members of one prison gang managed to launch the major attack on rivals housed in a maximum-security section."It was an attack presumably by the Aztecas gang on rival gangs," said Marco Antonio Moreno, a spokesman for the Chihuahua public safety department.Around 6 a.m., prisoners were leaving a conjugal visitation area of the prison when an Azteca gang member forced a guard to open the cells of fellow gang members, officials said.Initial reports were that prisoners used firearms, but Moreno said it was believed that the inmates were armed with a makeshift knives, known as a shanks.The freed Aztecas -- about 150 according to an Associated Press report, though state officials would not confirm that number -- then forced their way to an area where members of the rival Mexicles and Artistas Asesinos (Artist Assassins) gangs were located.Prisoners were stabbed with shanks, sliced with broken glass and Police prepared Wednesday to enter the Cereso state prison in Juárez during a riot. A fight between gangs after a conjugal visit at the prison left 20 prisoners dead and seven others injured, police said.beaten with variety of blunt objects. Mattresses and blankets were set on fire, and windows were broken as attackers entered the maximum-security area, officials said.No guards were killed, and order was restored about three hours later by about 200 anti-riot police and dozens of Mexican army soldiers. A list of the dead provided by prison officials showed that seven of the slain had no known gang affiliations, five were Artistas Asesinos, three were Mexicles, two were Norteños, one was a Sureño, one belonged to another gang, and one inmate had not been identified. No known Aztecas were among the dead.The Aztecas and Mexicles have been fighting for years to control drug trafficking inside prison, fueling riots and assaults that have A police officer arrives to a state prison during a riot in Cuidad Juarez, Mexico, Wednesday, March 4, 2009. A fight between gangs after a conjugal visit at a state prison in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez has left at least 20 prisoners dead and seven others injured, police said. (AP Photo/Miguel Tovar left more than 20 inmates dead at the Juárez municipal Cereso since 2006.

Aztecas are associated to the El Paso-based Barrio Azteca prison gang targeted in a U.S. anti-racketeering case last year.As a precaution, soldiers were sent to guard the outside of the Juárez municipal prison.The municipal prison is scheduled to be taken over by the military in coming days as part of the deployment of more than 5,200 soldiers and 800 federal police sent to quell violence, which has left nearly 2,000 people slain in the Juárez area since January 2008 due in part to a drug cartel war.Street violence in the city apparently has slowed since Mexican troop reinforcements arrived last weekend, but slayings continue. State police said an unidentified woman in her late teens was shot to death Tuesday night in colonia Melchor Ocampo -- one of two homicides that day.And Wednesday afternoon, the decomposing decapitated head of a man was found in a vacant lot next to the Club de Leones (Lion's Club) school.

Joaquin Guzman, known as El Chapo, and Ismael Zambada Turf war among drug Gangs claimed more than 210 lives in the first three months of this year.

Turf war among drug Gangs has claimed more than 210 lives in the first three months of this year. Many of those killed were young gunmen from out of town. The number of homicides this year is more than twice the total number of homicides for the same period last year. Several mass graves hiding 36 bodies in all have been discovered in the backyards of two houses owned by drug dealers.At the height of the violence, around Easter, bodies were turning up every morning, at a rate of almost 12 a week.
Desperate, the mayor and the governor of Chihuahua State asked the federal government to intervene."Neither the municipal government, nor the state government, is capable of taking on organized crime," Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz said in an interview.So in late March, President Felipe Calderon sent in 2,026 soldiers and 425 federal agents. They continue to patrol in convoys of Humvees and pickup trucks. But even they are intimidated. None dare show their faces, wearing ski masks instead.
"The mortuary is full of more than 50 unclaimed and unidentified bodies, proof that the soldiers in the underworld war come from other states, the mayor said.
Information about who is fighting whom is hard to come by.

The local police chief, Guillermo Prieto Quintana, professed ignorance of the conflict, despite having been an officer here for 30 years. He acknowledged that the 1,600-member force was riddled with corrupt officers, a consequence, he said, of low pay and a lack of opportunity for advancement that led them to seek other sources of money. "As long as freelancing exists, this corruption is going to exist," he said.Since the late 1980s, drug smuggling in Ciudad Juarez has been controlled by a group known as the Juarez Cartel, led by Vincente Carrillo Fuentes since the death of his brother Amado in 1997.The recent violence ripping apart Ciudad Juarez stems from a gang war between former allies. On one side is the Carrillo Fuentes family and its point man here, Jose Luis Ledezma, known as J.L. On the other, are several traffickers based in Sinaloa State, chief among them Joaquin Guzman, known as El Chapo, and Ismael Zambada, known as El Mayo, said a federal prosecutor, who, like some others interviewed, spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons. Their uneasy alliance has been strained since one of the Carrillo Fuentes brothers, Rodolfo, was assassinated in September 2004, officials say. Guzman is widely believed to have been behind the killing.

One theory holds that the tension reached a breaking point in December when Zambada refused to pay the Juarez Cartel a tax for smuggling drugs through its area.Since then, Zambada and Guzman have begun an offensive against the Juarez Cartel, and Ledezma, the local crime boss, has fought back fiercely, prosecutors and city officials said. "Mayo and Chapo's people wanted to invade, and J.L. was not going to let them, and so the battles started," the prosecutor said.But a Mexican intelligence officer, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that since the assassination of Rodolfo Carrillo Fuentes, the Juarez Cartel has forged an alliance with the Gulf Cartel, led by the incarcerated kingpin Osiel Cardenas Guillen and his lieutenants in Tamaulipas State, across the border from south Texas.Over the last year, arrests and pressure from federal troops have weakened the Gulf Cartel. Sensing an opportunity, Zambada, Guzman and other Sinoloa drug traffickers who had fallen out with the Carrillo Fuentes clan have tried to take over the town, the official said."What you have is one cartel that is leaving an open space, and it's a takeover attempt by another," the intelligence official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.John Riley, the special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration office in El Paso, said the fighting in Ciudad Juarez stemmed from the same battle for territory among various Sinaloa traffickers, the old Carrillo Fuentes family and the Gulf Cartel that has shaken the entire country over the last two years, costing thousands of lives.
He added the alliances among various factions shifted constantly, creating a chaotic situation for law enforcement. "A lot of these lines have been blurred since the first of the year," he said. "It's extremely confusing."City officials said that before the recent gangland war, Ledezma had tried to establish himself as a gangster in the American tradition, controlling extortion rackets, prostitution and gambling, as well as the cocaine traffic.
Officials say he has also recruited local street gangs like Los Aztecas as gunmen and drug distributors. The Gulf Cartel has brought in a corps of hired hit men, known as the Zetas.Federal prosecutors and city officials say that Ledezma has also infiltrated the local police department to an alarming degree. Most of the officers killed in the recent violence had links to drug dealers, prosecutors said.
For residents, the federal police and military patrols have brought a brief respite from the state of terror they have been living under. But in interviews, several said they remain afraid to leave their homes at night or to let their children play outside as they did when they were young. Gunfire was a common sound after sunset, they said."Before, there was not much pressure on those who sell drugs, but with the army, things are changing," Janeth Ponce, 21, a homemaker, said as she sat in the sun last Saturday in the central square. "Now one doesn't feel so much fear, because there is more policing."But other residents said the federal intervention was only a temporary fix. The local police are outgunned, underpaid, prone to corruption and lack the authority to investigate drug dealers, they noted.
It has escaped no one's attention that the federal authorities arrested nine city police officers in late March on charges of drug dealing, and the former police commissioner, Saulo Reyes, was arrested in El Paso in January, on charges of marijuana trafficking.
"The police were doing nothing," said Janet Morales Castellanos, who was tending her father's herbal store in the market last Saturday. "One can't walk around here at night. I can't take her to the parks at night or even to the movies," she said, referring to her toddler daughter. "One stays at home."
The mayor and the police commissioner, who took office last October, agree that the only long-term solution is to clean up the police department and to give police officers the legal power to investigate drug trafficking, which only federal officers have now.To that end, they have toughened standards for recruits and are beginning to use a battery of tests to weed out drug addicts and others prone to corruption. They have bought 100 patrol cars and have permitted the officers to carry semiautomatic sidearms and machine guns, instead of service revolvers.
However, the force has changed little. Only about 30 officers have resigned or retired in the wake of federal arrests and the new tests. The first batch of 150 new recruits came out of the academy in January, but they entered a force where most officers either feared drug dealers too much to move against them or lived on their payroll.
"A municipal policeman knows everything but cannot act," said Jaime Torres, the spokesman for the department.