“There are children in there”, said one woman outside the prison as other relatives shouted and cursed.
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At a press conference in state capital Monterrey, Governor Jamie Rodriguez Calderon said the riot erupted between two criminal gangs in the prison complex, an global media reported.
Fr Robert Coogan, an American prison chaplain in Saltillo, 30 miles west of Monterrey, said the Topo Chico prison suffered from self-rule.
Leslie Solis, a security and justice investigator at Mexico Analua, a public policy think tank, said that the Mexican ombudsmen had stated in the past that the Topo Chico prison lacked prison guards and its management ability was too poor to maintain security.
Monterrey is Mexico’s third most populous metropolitan area and home to numerous country’s largest corporations. One Zetas leader was stabbed to death there in September.
Rodriguez said in the morning that 52 had died, but he lowered that by three in the late afternoon.
Milenio TV reported that inmates’ relatives who had been within the prison’s premises for conjugal visits had seen inmates with burns.
The riot left 52 people dead and 12 others injured, including five in critical condition.
“The government does not give prisons the priority they deserve”, Azaola said.
A human rights group said prison inmates there use violence as a way of exerting control.
Rodriguez said 40 victims had been identified so far.
“Very severe incidents happened since the last state government took over”.
The Governor confirmed federal police were deployed to bring the situation under control and no inmates escaped.
Images broadcast by Milenio TV showed police vehicles patrolling the streets near the prison after unrest broke out in the early hours of Thursday local time.
“They used sharp weapons, bats, sticks”, the governor told radio Imagen, adding that the 60-year-old penitentiary houses 3800 inmates, overseen by 100 guards.
Pope Francis is set to begin his first visit to Mexico as pontiff today.
The violence comes just days before Pope Francis is expected to be in northern Mexico. Next week, he will visit a prison in border city Ciudad Juarez, once one of the world’s most violent cities.
For much of the last decade, the Zetas spread terror across Mexico before being debilitated by arrests and deaths of their founding members.
President Enrique Pena Nieto’s administration vowed to reform the penitentiary system following Guzman’s escape a year ago.
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Los Zetas, founded by a group of former special forces soldiers, were originally the Gulf Cartel’s enforcement wing, but turned on their former masters in 2010, triggering a vicious war for territory which has wrought havoc across north-eastern Mexico.
