Mexico Prison Break: Three Female Escapees Found PIEDRAS NEGRAS, Mexico - Three of 132 inmates who were believed to have escaped Monday from a northern Mexico border prison were found by authorities hiding in a visiting area of the facility. All three were female. Federal police units and Mexican troops - including 70 members of an elite military special forces unit - are searching for the fugitives, who made their way out of the Piedras Negras prison, across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas. The escape, which represents almost a fifth of the prison's population, unfolded through a tunnel 21 feet long and 4 feet in diameter and let loose more than 80 inmates who were serving sentences or awaiting verdicts for federal crimes, such as drug trafficking. [The tunnel] was not made today. It had been there for months. Homero Ramos Gloria, Coahuila Attorney General The director and two other employees of the state prison have been detained for an investigation, and President Felipe Calderon called the jailbreak "deplorable" in a statement posted on his Twitter account Tuesday. Calderon appeared to re-ignite the long-running dispute between federal and state authorities, writing that "the vulnerability of state law enforcement institutions must be corrected." It had been there for months," Coahuila Attorney General Homero Ramos told the Milenio TV station. Collusion between guards and drug gangs has played a role in past escapes, and federal authorities have been pushing to have all state and municipal police and law enforcement officials submit to background and anti-drug checks, as well as vetting for possible links to organized crime. But state authorities have been dragging their feet. On Monday, federal Interior Secretary Alejandro Poire said that only 180,000 of the country's 430,000 city and state police have been vetted and checked, and that about 65,000 of those tested had failed the tests. That failure rate - about one-third of officers - has been a constant problem in the testing program, which is supposed to conclude with all officers vetted by early 2013. That goal now appears unreachable, and the question remains of what will be done with the officers who failed. All are supposed to be fired, but Mexican labor laws and a shortage of recruits to replace them makes it an arduous process. Since the current administration took office in December 2006, about 2,045 federal officers have failed periodic vetting and anti-drug tests, and 302 of them have been fired. About 600 others are involved in the lengthy internal-affairs procedure that could lead to people losing their jobs. In February, nine guards at a prison near the northern city of Monterrey confessed to helping 30 Zetas drug gangsters escape. But not only did the Zetas flee; during the jailbreak, other Zetas slaughtered 44 inmates who belonged to the rival Gulf cartel. State authorities counter that their relatively low-security prisons are forced to hold dangerous inmates being held on federal charges like drug trafficking and organized crime. They have called on federal officials to take federal inmates out of their prisons, and some of the most dangerous federal inmates had been transferred out of the Piedras Negras prison in recent months. Associated Press contributed to this report.