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"For the whores," the police commissioner explained.
In the morning, the floor of the cave was strewn with spent condoms.
By then, with the police more focused on looting than making arrests, the Rabbit had escaped.
In Mexico, the raid on Conejo's party and the subsequent revelations of Garay's corruption played out in the press with a mix of outrage and resignation. Sensational stories of police corruption are a near-daily occurrence here. Indeed, as drug violence has spiraled out of control in Mexico, the line between law enforcement and organized crime has virtually disappeared. Many of Mexico's police officers, who are paid less than $5,000 a year on average, supplement their meager incomes by taking money from drug traffickers. In a recent investigation of 400 federales, 90 percent were linked to the cartels. Police who refuse to cooperate are frequently executed, often in broad daylight.
More than 500 police were killed last year, some of them beheaded by members of the growing cult of Santa Muerte, or Holy Death -- a group, celebrated in shrines across the country, that includes drug traffickers and police officers alike.
In January, to cite one of many grim examples, the severed head of a police comandante was dumped in front of the police station in Ciudad Juarez, just across the border from El Paso, Texas.
The widespread corruption has all but handed control of large swaths of Mexico to the drug lords.
In the past year, at least 6,290 people were killed in drug related crimes, double the number in 2007. Nearly half of the victims remain unidentified because the families are too afraid to come forward to claim the bodies, lest they be targeted by drug violence.
Although more than 45,000 soldiers have been deployed to lawless regions throughout the country, the military response only appears to have escalated the violence.
In January, a man in Tijuana confessed to being "El Pozolero" -- the Stew Maker -- who disposed of the bodies of 300 murder victims for a drug cartel by dumping them in pits and dousing them with acid to dissolve the remains.
In February, an hours-long shootout between the army and a gang of kidnappers in Chihuahua, near the border with New Mexico, ended with 21 dead. No police officers took part: The town's entire police force had already resigned last year after drug traffickers murdered the police chief and two other cops.