Guatemalan security forces stormed a luxury jail which had been run for more than 10 years by inmates who built their own town on prison grounds complete with restaurants, churches and drug laboratories.
Seven prisoners died when 3,000 police and soldiers firing automatic weapons stormed the Pavon prison just after dawn on Monday.
The prison was run by the inmates, with corrupt guards only patrolling the prison's perimeter and running the administration section. An "order committee" of hardened inmates controlled the rest. Guards let prisoners bring in whatever they wanted and inmates set up labs to produce cocaine, crack and liquor. "The people who live here live better than all of us on the outside. They've even got pubs," said a soldier, Tomas Hernandez.
One of those killed in the raid, a convicted murderer, Luis Alfonso Zepeda, had earned around £13,000 a month from extortion, renting out prison grounds to other inmates and drug trafficking, police said. His son Samuel lived illegally inside the prison to help run the crime empire, even though he was never sent there by a court.
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