THE BIG HOUSE IS NO LONGER A HOME

Mexico Relocates Inmates, Evicts Families From Notorious Tijuana Prison

TIJUANA, Mexico -- Under cover of predawn darkness, 2,000 prisoners were
handcuffed and moved out of La Mesa penitentiary surrounded by heavily
armed police and soldiers today as the Mexican government sought to regain
control over one of North America's most notorious prisons.

With helicopters flying overhead as an extra precaution, the most dangerous
convicted murderers, drug traffickers and other convicts from La Mesa were
herded onto buses and trucks and driven to a new prison in El Hongo, a
small town 50 miles east of Tijuana just south of the border with California.

For decades, the wives and children of convicts have been permitted to live
inside La Mesa, home to many of Mexico's drug traffickers. But today that
practice ended, too, as hundreds of women and children were escorted out of
the prison carrying their belongings.

Bulldozers this afternoon began to raze the center of the prison, called El
Pueblito or Little Town because it resembled a neighborhood. There,
wealthier inmates built more than 400 homes, some equipped with computers,
phones, DVD players and tequila bars. The plan is to turn La Mesa into a
conventional state prison -- with cellblocks, no frills and no families --
for the more than 4,000 inmates who will remain.

Mexican officials said La Mesa has been controlled over the years as much
by inmates as state authorities. Previous plans to remove families and
transfer prisoners were never executed because of fears of rioting and,
many believe, because prisoners paid kickbacks to quash any proposed changes.

But in a surprise operation that involved the army, federal police and
state riot police -- who surrounded the prison for fear of rioting -- about
one-third of the inmates were removed beginning at about 1 a.m. Afterward,
state social workers took away about 40 children who have no known guardian
except for the inmate they were living with. Some of the children carried
toys and had tears in their eyes.

"There was no reason for families to be in there. They were there because
no one said they couldn't," said a spokesman for the state, Gustavo
Magallanes. He said 43 prisoners who were considered the leaders of a drug
distribution network that operated inside and outside the prison were taken
to maximum security prisons.

President Vicente Fox said in an interview that today's move was a victory
against impunity. He said the army, working with newly trained federal
police officers in Tijuana, has recently scored "extraordinary results
against organized crime and drug traffickers, and now we are correcting the
prison. It will be a complete cleansing."

The Mexican prison system, which houses 165,000 inmates, has long been
poorly funded and corrupted by cash from prisoners and drug cartels. Since
Fox took office at the end of 2000, human rights workers have been granted
greater access to the prisons. They have reported that a two-tier system
exists, one for those with money and one for those without.

The National Human Rights Commission declared two years ago that La Mesa
was Mexico's worst prison because of overcrowding and privileges for those
with money.

Inmates and guards have outlined an extensive kickback system in the prison
for the right to see a visitor or not to be beaten. While wealthier
prisoners could rent the houses in the center of the prison, poor ones did
not even get a bed. Some slept on the pavement of the basketball court.

Alejandro Gertz Manero, the national public security chief, who was
involved in today's operation, said in a recent interview that it has only
been since January 2001 that authorities had taken back full control of
federally run maximum security prisons. That, he said, was when one of the
biggest drug traffickers in Mexico, Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, bribed his
way out of a federal prison in a laundry bin. He is still at large.

"Ten days after El Chapo escaped, we took control of those federal prisons.
We weren't in charge of them before. . . . The drug traffickers were the
owners," Gertz Manero said.

He said the federal government is setting its sights on helping clean up
some of the state prisons. Some, he said, "are not in the hands of anyone."

La Mesa is a concrete structure that takes up two huge city blocks. Today a
wall of military and police trucks sealed off the prison and riot police
walked the walls.

"It's the end of an era. It's a good change," said Jesus Blancornelas, a
Tijuana journalist who has written a bestseller on the drug trade in this
city, just across the border from San Diego.

He said a saying he heard in the United States, "Even if a jail is made of
gold, it is still a jail," has never applied at La Mesa. Here, he said,
life inside could be as good as outside and money bought just about anything.

More than 6,000 prisoners have been living in La Mesa, in a space built for
fewer than 2,000. According to human rights officials' estimates, more than
half the prison population is using drugs, including heroin.

None of the prison guards at La Mesa will be allowed to work in El Hongo, a
state-of-the-art facility where guards have been training for months and
are better paid. Unlike the practice in La Mesa, family members will not be
permitted to bring in cash or food. A new banking system has been set up in
which families can deposit money in inmates' accounts and each prisoner can
spend a maximum of $5 a day. To further try to separate inmates' cash from
guards, prisoners are to be issued electronic debit cards.

Veronica Vargas, 19, was one of the wives thrown out of La Mesa. As she
boarded a bus with bags of clothes and other belongings, she said she had
lived inside for seven months. She said she wanted to be with her husband
who, she said, was serving a 30-year sentence for migrant smuggling. She
said she and her husband paid $800 rent but she did not know where the
money went.

"We had our little house, with a television and refrigerator and everything
that we needed," she said. "But it still felt like a prison."

Researcher Laurie Freeman in Mexico City contributed to this report.