Drug-cartel bloodshed puts residents of Sonoran towns on edge
by Chris Hawley and Sean Holstege - Sept. 7, 2008 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

Every day before her husband went to work, Maria Jesús Jiménez kissed him and told him the same thing.

"God bless you and bring you back," she would say, as he stood at the doorway in his Cananea police officer's uniform. And every time he did, until the night a convoy of black SUVs roared into town and he was killed by suspected drug smugglers.

Jiménez built a small shrine in front of her house, a little concrete hut painted sky blue. There, next to figurines of Jesus and the Virgin of Guadalupe, she plans to put her husband's photo and his nightstick. The photo she wants to use shows her husband looking resplendent in his white dress uniform, but it needs a new frame, she said.
Luz Estrella, their 19-month-old toddler, had kissed the old frame so often that it broke.

In Mexico, drug violence has been rising to new levels of brutality as powerful drug cartels take on each other and federal troops dispatched by Mexico's President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa.

The Arizona-Mexico border has been spared most of the violence so far, but a cloud of quiet fear and intimidation wielded by the drug traffickers still hangs heavy over the Mexican towns that dot the desert.

Two Republic reporters and a photographer recently spent a week touring borderlands from Agua Prieta to Caborca to see how the people of northern Sonora cope.

In Nogales, military patrols now police the streets. In Agua Prieta and Naco, the police have quit in droves.

In Altar, poor immigrants from southern Mexico huddle in the square and talk of going home rather than risk the border again.

Travelers avoid the mountain highway from Altar to Nogales after dusk because of all the smugglers.


A smuggler's funeral

The old farming town of Caborca lies halfway between the Arizona border and the Gulf of California.

Once a stopover on the Spanish missionary trail before the searing Altar Desert, Caborca is now a town of 52,000 and a staging point for smugglers going north. Shops are busy, and new two-story mansions are going up on the edge of town.

On the central palm-lined plaza is the old Candelaria Roman Catholic Church. The Rev. Edgar Valle Paz is the 33-year-old priest who leads the church, a youthful man with a friendly, round face who speaks slowly and softly.

Valle conducts about five funerals a month. The priest knows when he's burying a narcotrafficante, or drug smuggler. Nobody shows.

"Life means nothing to these people," Valle says. "Every day it seems like there's another body."

Despite his position, he feels powerless. Valle said he can tell his congregation not to get involved with drugs or smuggling.

"But to directly come out against certain people would be like putting a pistol to your head," Valle said. "That would be a very stupid kind of bravery."


Violence reigns

Since Calderón took office in December 2006, more than 5,000 people have been killed in Mexico's drug wars. Cartels intimidate, torture or execute anyone capable of disrupting multibillion-dollar profits, including other smugglers, police, federal troops, journalists and government officials.

By mid-August 2008, there were 2,680 murders attributed to the drug cartels, surpassing the previous year's record number.

Along the Texas and California borders, violence the past two years has grown more gruesome, brazen and indiscriminate. Beheadings are a weekly occurrence, mutilations routine. Cartels post executions on the Internet.

In Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, 800 people have been killed this year, tripling the 2007 rate.

In Juarez and Culiacan, capital of the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa, crude car bombs have become a weapon of choice.

Three of Mexico's top drug-enforcement officers were assassinated in May and June.

Mexico is now the dominant supplier of Colombian cocaine, black-tar heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine to the United States. Smuggling illegal immigrants has grown into a lucrative side business for drug cartels.

Money drives the violence. Cartels bought powerful weapons and hired military commandos to wipe out rivals, informants and law enforcement. What emerged are private armies that shoot their way out of trouble, often with grenades and rocket launchers. Money also buys police, judges, politicians, journalists and professionals.

Violence and corruption continue to destabilize Mexican society and the borderlands.


Policing the police

Naco is a windy speck of a Sonoran ranching town east of the Huachuca Mountains.

In the cramped concrete police station, the assistant police chief says the town of 6,000 has no smuggling problem.

Next door, Mayor Lorenzo Villegas knows better. He has seen the darkened SUVs that cruise the dirt streets and has read the reports of beating victims turning up in clinics.

Villegas motions his assistant to bring out a large cardboard box. It's filled with drug-testing kits. The mayor has replaced two-thirds of the Police Department since he took office in December 2006, including one officer whose urine showed cocaine.

Naco has gone through 17 police chiefs in seven years. Villegas has fired three in this term of office alone.

"I'll replace as many as it takes," Villegas says. "I'll change them every month if I have to."

In February 2007, Villegas fired Police Chief Roberto Tacho amid complaints he was on the smugglers' payroll.

Soon after, Tacho's brother, Agua Prieta's police chief, was gunned down.

Tacho was later arrested trying to cross the border at Douglas with 57 pounds of marijuana concealed in his gas tank.


The smuggling franchise

Violence in Sonora is never far away, but it's more a tool of enforcement than turf war.

Sonora is still controlled by the Sinaloa cartel. Every aspect of smuggling is franchised work, available to anyone - even rivals - who pay the Sinaloa cartel the going tax.

The desert is big enough and demand in the United States large enough for a number of players to co-exist without fighting over turf. Violence along the Texas and California borders occurs in the dense urban areas around major crossing points. In contrast, the Sonora-Arizona border is wide-open desert landscape and smuggling routes are dispersed, making violent ambushes much harder to carry out.

There's the occasional killing in Sonora to make an example of somebody who got greedy or got too unreliable, but the wholesale wars between the cartels for supremacy have not happened yet. Border authorities watch and worry.

"Whenever something happens in Juarez, we see a ripple effect all the way to the eastern part of Sonora, around Agua Prieta and Naco," said Tony Coulson, the Drug Enforcement Agency's assistant special agent in charge in Tucson. "That's why we watch that corridor."

In July, an Agua Prieta police officer was killed. The next day, 10 members of the department quit.

A decapitated police officer was found in July near the Sonoran state capital, Hermosillo. A message had been carved into his hog-tied body with a knife. His index finger had been stuffed into his mouth, a fate reserved for snitches. It was the first time a decapitated body was found in Sonora, U.S. authorities said.


Bad signs

In a pleasant Nogales neighborhood less than a mile from the border, a man is showing off a fleet of cars in his repair lot.

All were seized in drug raids. Business is good. He points to a red sports car gathering dust and says the driver was killed during a narco shootout.

Earlier that week, there was another shootout in Nogales, a chase, and more gunplay in Hermosillo, 156 miles away.

The man watches a half dozen tan armored personnel carriers drive up the street. Army soldiers grip their semiautomatic rifles. Federal agents in dark-blue uniforms stare out behind mirrored sunglasses.

Like seized cars, military convoys are also more common now in Nogales.
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