In Mexico, no one is spared the carnage

Drug violence plagues rich towns, poor villages alike
By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Nov. 13, 2010, 11:18PM

TAMPICO, Mexico — Tethered as they are to the scalding and hurricane-harried coastal marshes of the Gulf, people in this port and petroleum city long have taken pride in shrugging off whatever the world has thrown at them.

But for the past year, the 1 million residents of this metropolis, 300 miles south of the Rio Grande at Brownsville, have been slammed time and again by Mexico's criminal tempest.

Scores of people from the city's small and tightly-knit business community - including two former mayors - have been kidnapped. Extortion has reached even the most threadbare shops. Gun battles have erupted on the city's main drag, raged in crowded neighborhoods and nearby ranchlands alike.

Many families who can afford to do so have moved to Texas for safety. Some 30 percent of small businesses have closed, business leaders say. And streets, restaurants and stores empty quickly just past nightfall.

There are bloodier choke points in Mexico's gang wars: headline-grabbing killing fields like Ciudad Juarez and the cities bordering south Texas, or parts of the Pacific coast states of Sinaloa, Michoacan and Guerrero.

But only a little off the radar, in an untold number of villages, towns and cities across Mexico, there are communities like Tampico where the threat is just as tangible, the terror as real. They present this fatal reminder: No matter how prosperous or poor, no one can expect to be spared.

"Everyone is so scared," said one prominent rancher, who like other private citizens agreed to talk on the condition his name not be used. "Every day there is shooting and every day there is killing. I've never been a coward, but these guys are vicious."

"The guys" in Tampico are thugs from the Gulf Cartel, the narcotics smuggling organization based along the south Texas border. Or they are the Zetas, that cartel's former assassins and enforcers, who are now its worst enemies.

Since the one-time allies fell into bloody feuding early this year, the killing has swept Tamaulipas state and the rest of northeastern Mexico. Hardly a community - and certainly not Tampico - has been spared.

"It's very lamentable to have organized crime in the state," Gov. Eugenio Hernandez of Tamaulipas, which borders Texas from Laredo to the Gulf of Mexico and includes Tampico, said in an interview. "But it's more lamentable to have organized crime groups fighting here."

Gunmen in late October attacked police headquarters in Ciudad Madero, one of three cities that comprise the greater Tampico area. Eight police officers were reported wounded in the assault, which sent scores of high school students waiting for a bus nearby fleeing.

Weeks ago, a running gun battle between army troops and suspected gangsters wound through the streets near the rancher's home, in one of Tampico's best neighborhoods. The gunmen holed up in a small house and made their stand. Soldiers killed a dozen of them.

In late September, three men and a 14-year-old girl, were found hanging from an overpass on Tampico's main street about a mile from the city's airport and between its flagship hotel and a new shopping center.

Gangsters kidnapped the family of a leading industrial executive on August 11, a day after he and other businessman met with the governor to complain about insecurity. The executive's family was roughed up and released, but his chauffeur was tortured and murdered.

That night, a two-hour battle flared when army troops moved in on a gangster boss dining at the city's T.G.I. Friday's restaurant, next door to a BMW dealership.

And at the end of August, gunmen and troops fought for more than 12 hours in Panuco, a ranch and oilfield town southeast of Tampico. The army reported seven people killed in the battle. But local residents reported seeing dead civilian gunmen piled in trucks like cordwood.

Reporters from the local television stations and newspapers never dared to confirm the real toll in Panuco. As elsewhere, the gangsters forbid Tampico's journalists from reporting of much of the violence.

Information from the government comes partially, slowly or not at all. The news flies instead on twitter, facebook, by text message, most often jumbled with rumor and bald faced lies.

"There's this vacuum that we find ourselves in," said a journalist at one of the city's newspapers. "Society expects information from the media and we can't report it. We haven't wanted to look too closely at the details.

"It seems like a movie," he said. "But this is our life."

Tampico's port has been key for drug traffickers. Army troops captured 12 tons of cocaine here three years ago. And the city remains controlled by the Gulf Cartel, journalists and residents say. But Zeta gunmen make frequent raids into the city and are behind many of the kidnappings and extortions.

Local police are on the gangsters' payroll, residents say. And many people suspect taxi drivers, waiters, hotel desk clerks and bank employees of spying for the gangs.

"The problem isn't drug trafficking, the problem is corruption," said a leading businessman. "In the state of Tamaulipas corruption is brutal, complete, overwhelming."

"We should have done something," the businessman said. "It was growing and growing worse until it got to this point."

Tampico's incoming mayor, who will take office on New Year's Day, has vowed to clean up the police and bring order to the streets. But she acknowledges that it prove difficult.

"It's a topic that has to be handled with a lot of tact, with a lot of caution," Magdalena Peraza said last week. "Tampico continues to be alive and working in spite of everything. I want to motivate the citizenry."

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