I've been trying to write about this story, but every time I come back to it, I get stuck on the same detail.
The child.
Last Thursday, during visiting hours at El Castillo prison in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, a fight broke out. By the time it was over, nine inmates and one visitor were dead. Sixteen other prisoners were taken for medical treatment.
Then I read that one of the people killed was a two-year-old boy.
And suddenly, all the numbers felt different.
The boy had come to the prison with his father. His father survived. His son didn't.
A two-year-old. At a prison. During visiting hours.
He was there to see someone. Maybe he was too young to understand where he was or what was happening around him. Maybe, to him, it was just another visit with family.
We'll probably never know what his last moments were like. And honestly, I don't know if I want to imagine them.
I just keep thinking about how a child that small ended up being one of the victims of prison violence.
He didn't belong in that story. He should never have been part of it.
And yet, he was.
The more I think about this, the more I feel that the riot itself is only part of the story.
Because prisons are supposed to be places where the state takes responsibility for the people in its custody. Whatever someone has been accused of or convicted of, the government is responsible for keeping them safe. That's the whole point of having a system of detention in the first place.
But in parts of Mexico, that responsibility seems to have broken down so badly that even a prison visit can turn deadly.
Overcrowding, too few staff, corruption and the influence of criminal groups have made prison violence a persistent problem. In some facilities, organised crime has a level of control that should never be possible inside a state-run institution.
People are locked up in the name of justice, but the system often seems unable to protect them from the very violence it's supposed to contain.
And it's not as though these problems appeared overnight.
Pretrial detention is one part of the wider problem. People can spend long periods behind bars while their cases are still being processed, adding pressure to already overcrowded facilities. When prisons are packed beyond capacity and oversight is weak, the conditions for abuse and violence become even worse.
None of this is particularly difficult to understand. What's difficult to understand is how it can continue for so long without meaningful change.
Sinaloa has its own complicated history with organised crime. It is closely associated with the Sinaloa Cartel, and rival factions have been locked in violent struggles. That conflict has affected communities, public institutions and, repeatedly, the prison system.
Just days before the incident at El Castillo, another prison disturbance in Culiacán reportedly left seven inmates dead.
Two separate incidents in a matter of days. More lives lost. More families left with questions they may never get answers to.
At some point, you have to stop looking at these incidents as isolated events and start asking what keeps allowing them to happen.
And I want to be careful about something here.
It's easy to hear about violence in Mexico and simply say, "That's how things are there." It's an easy way to distance ourselves from a tragedy, as if it belongs to another country and another kind of life.
But that explanation doesn't help anyone. It ignores the people responsible, the failures that can be addressed and the ordinary families who are left living with the consequences.
The people who died in that prison were not just names in a news report. They were human beings. They had families, people waiting for them, people who will now have to make sense of a phone call or a knock on the door that changed everything.
And somewhere among those families is a father who went to a prison with his two-year-old son and came away without him.
I keep coming back to that.
I don't know what that father saw. I don't know what he was told or what he's going through now. I won't pretend to know what it feels like to lose a child in circumstances like these.
But I know that no parent should have to face that kind of loss during what should have been an ordinary family visit.
And no child should have to pay the price for failures that adults and institutions had a responsibility to prevent.
I don't have a solution to Mexico's prison crisis. I can't fix overcrowding, corruption or the influence of organised crime with a few paragraphs on the internet.
But I do think we need to stop treating these deaths as just another grim headline.
When violence becomes so routine that nine inmates dying in a prison barely surprises anyone, something is seriously wrong. When a visitor is killed, that's another life lost to a system that was supposed to be under control. And when that visitor is a two-year-old child, it becomes impossible to pretend that the consequences are confined to the people inside the prison walls.
The boy wasn't responsible for the violence. He didn't understand the politics, the gangs or the failures of the prison system. He was two.
He depended on the adults around him to keep him safe. And they failed him.
I wish I had something more comforting to say. Something about justice, change or how this tragedy might finally force people to act.
But I don't know if it will.
I only know that a little boy went to visit someone he loved and never came home.
Ten people died that day. Every one of those deaths matters, and every family left grieving deserves answers.
But I can't stop thinking about the child.
Because a prison is already a place where people have very little control over what happens to them. A visiting room should at least be a place where their families can come and see them without fearing for their lives.
If even that isn't safe, then we need to ask some very hard questions about what that system has become.
That little boy should have had his whole life ahead of him.
Instead, he's another name in a story that people may read today and forget tomorrow.
I hope we don't.
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