"What Happened to Our Men?"

In the nation's most savage prison riot, at least 33 inmates are butchered

Nothing like it had ever happened before in an American prison. Inmates battered gaping holes through 6-in. reinforced concrete walls. They burned open inch-thick steel doors with acetylene torches. They destroyed toilets, sinks, desks, file cabinets, beds--almost every stick of furniture that could be found. Little remained in several buildings but smoldering ashes and blood and bits and pieces of what had been human beings. Some corpses were missing arms and legs; one lacked a head. Another had an iron bar through its skull from ear to ear. Still another corpse hung from a cell block ceiling, the word RAT carved on its chest.

This was the gruesome scene that met some 200 heavily armed police and National Guardsmen last week as they charged into the New Mexico State Penitentiary near Santa Fe after the most savage prison riot in U.S. history. Said Colonel Bill Fields, commanding officer of the National Guardsmen: "I was in World War II, and I've seen mutilated bodies. I don't remember anything as bad as this." The rampage lasted 36 hours and left at least 33 of the prison's 1,136 inmates dead. Two convicts were missing and probably dead, their bodies possibly consumed by the fires that gutted several buildings. Nine prisoners and one guard were seriously injured. It was the worst prison riot since 32 inmates and eleven employees died in the 1971 revolt at New York's Attica Correctional Facility.

The spark that ignited the New Mexico riot took place at about 2 a.m. on Saturday, Feb. 2, when two guards discovered two inmates in Dormitory E-2 drinking hooch they had brewed from fermented fruit. The drunken prisoners overpowered the guards and stormed down the corridor to the control center, a cluster of rooms in the middle of the prison. The inmates shattered 1 1/2-in.-thick windows with clubs and, once inside, flicked open many of the switches that control the locks in the prison's ten dormitories and cell blocks.

Hundreds of convicts poured out of their cells and stormed through the halls, yelling, "Get the guards!" Four teen guards and one medical technician were captured; three others on duty, helped by friendly prisoners, found hiding places. The rioting inmates then ran amuck through the 37-acre prison grounds. Some rushed to the workrooms for boards, pipes, acetylene torches, anything that could be used as a weapon. Others broke open cabinets in the pharmacy for drugs--tranquilizers, barbiturates, even insulin. A few found containers of glue, which they sniffed to get high.

But a small group of inmates--perhaps Bingaman than a dozen-- went on a rampage of brutal torture and murder.

Most of their victims were in Cell Block 4, which housed suspected informers and others with reason to fear violence from fellow inmates. According to survivors, the "execution squad" doused some men with gasoline and set them on fire; others were hacked to death with homemade knives. Members of the squad killed one prisoner with a blowtorch, holding him before a window in full view of the lawen forcement officials and National Guards men who had gathered outside the 15-ft. prison fences.

Felix Rodriguez, an official of the state's department of corrections, tried to negotiate over a walkie-talkie with a group of inmates who used names like "Chopper One," "Chicano" and "Honky." They read a list of eleven complaints, including overcrowding, bad food and harassment by guards. But prison officials quickly concluded that Chopper One and the others had little influence over most of the convicts.

By 10 p.m. the riot began to burn itself out. Throughout the night, hundreds of prisoners, weary of the insurrection and fearful of being killed, made their way to the guardhouse on the edge of the compound to surrender. By morning, the remaining inmates agreed to free some of the guards in return for access to reporters and photographers. Among the first to enter the prison grounds was TIME Photographer Steve Northup, who reported: "There was smoke everywhere. You could see people giving themselves up--ghostlike figures coming out, waving white sheets. It was a nether world."

As more reporters entered the prison, more hostages were freed. When the last two guards walked out at 1:26 p.m. on Sunday, the policemen and National Guardsmen retook the prison without firing a shot. An hour later, Governor Bruce King announced that the riot was over and bent down to kiss an elderly Hispanic woman, one of the hundreds of inmates' relatives who had stood outside the fence all night. Her face turned stony. "What happened to our men?" she demanded.

It was a question that could not be answered fully, even days later. When a prison official read the list of those known to have survived ("Anselmo Duran . . . Albert Garcia . . . Adolfo Lemos"), there were cries of joy from the crowd. But others missed relatives' names and begged him to check again. "Please, mister, can you please tell me if 23355 is O.K.?" asked Lorenzo Chavez, who was reciting the identification number of his brother Gilbert. No answer came back. At week's end anthropologists from the University of New Mexico were sifting through ashes in the burned buildings, looking for teeth, bones and anything else that remained of the missing inmates Some 350 survivors huddled under blankets in the 20DEG cold of the prison compound. The rest were kept temporarily in the buildings that had escaped destruction. State officials estimated that it will take seven months and $22 million to repair the damage. Meanwhile they made arrangements to transfer some inmates to federal and state prisons in Arizona, Colorado, Indiana and Oklahoma.

Why did such savagery take place? Prison experts readily cited some causes. The penitentiary was badly overcrowded; built in 1956 for 800 inmates, it routinely held up to 1,200, and the close confinement helped make fights and homosexual rape everyday occurances. In an investigation completed last month State Attorney General Jeff Bingaman also concluded that the prison was sorely understaffed. Moreover, the report found that the guards were underpaid, poorly trained and badly supervised. The situation, the report said, amounted to "playing Russian roulette with the lives of in mates, staff and the public."

Drugs were another contributory cause. Said local TV Reporter Ernie Mills, who was in the first group of journalists swapped for guards: "Some of those in mates were so high that they could al most have flown out of that prison." Racial tensions, however, appear not to have been an important factor. About 60% of the inmates were Hispanics, 30% were white, and 10% were black. But most of the victims were also Hispanics.

Because of the unprecedented savagery, some experts concluded that a kind of madness was a cause of the carnage. Said Pedro David, a University of New Mexico sociologist who studied the prison in the early 1970s: "There were people in the prison who were very disturbed mentally and belonged in a hospital." Indeed, prison officials reported that the riot was caused by a hard-core group of about 50 inmates, who through intimidation enlisted about 150 more active participants.

Said Chief Medical Examiner James Weston: "Virtually every one of the bodies had overkill, which is to say that there was more than mob hysteria. There was rage." Added Dr. Marc Orner, the psychologist at the prison: "None of us really understands what happened in there.

The depth of the violence is incomprehensible to me as a human being and as a psychologist. It is as if all the aggression a human being can have was savagely unleashed. We just can't understand why they did this to each other."

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