MEXICO CITY — Lawyers who visit their clients in the Altiplano, Mexico’s highest-security prison, say they must leave behind their wallets, pens, tie clips, shoelaces. They complain that guards check inside the men’s underwear and women must take off their bras.
Those in solitary confinement, such as the prison’s most famous inmate, drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, are under constant surveillance and receive just one hour of daily caged-in recreational time, according to those familiar with the prison.
So the news in July in the Mexican magazine Proceso that Guzman had organized nearly 1,000 prisoners to hold a five-day hunger strike to protest the prison’s poor hygiene, medical care and food seemed curious. Not just that the world’s most fearsome drug lord was now apparently a human rights crusader but that he had the freedom of movement and communication inside the prison to pull it off.
