Officials: Cartels reduce police presence in Mexican border city to a minimum

November 05, 2010 9:32 AM
The Monitor

NUEVA CIUDAD GUERRERO, Tamps., Mexico — The promotional video for Nueva Ciudad Guerrero is bleak.

In the four minutes of footage posted on YouTube, the only real signs of human activity are a few moving vehicles — two of which could easily go unnoticed in the background — and a shot of a motorboat speeding across the nearby Falcon Reservoir.

The only sound in the video is an instrumental version of The Verve’s "Bittersweet Symphony."

These days, there seems to be far more bitterness than sweetness for this town of about 5,000 people on the southern end of the reservoir.

Cartel violence has surged across northeast Mexico in the past year, and traditional law enforcement agencies have ceded the town to criminal organizations. State police have pulled out. The municipal police presence has been minimized.

"We cannot go in there without the support (of the army and navy)," said Rolando Armando Flores Villegas, commander of the state police post in the nearby city of Miguel Alemán. "We can be ambushed there."

Eight days after making that statement, his severed head was delivered to a local military post.

Flores had been working at the time on the disappearance of David Michael Hartley, a McAllen man presumed dead after what his wife, Tiffany Young-Hartley, has described as an attack by cartel "pirates" on the Mexican side of Falcon Reservoir, which spans that country’s border with the United States.

She said three boats of gunmen opened fire on them, fatally shooting her husband in the head, as the couple rode separate personal watercraft during a sightseeing trip to a partially submerged church in the Mexican town of Guerrero Viejo.

An Edinburg private detective who investigated the report on his own initiative concluded that Zetitas — junior members of the Zeta drug cartel — were responsible for the shooting.

"We’ve been lucky and they haven’t ambushed us," Flores told The Monitor just days before his death. "And that is because we are going there with a lot of security."

Flores and his officers were stationed in Miguel Alemán, located about 15 miles southeast of lakeside Nueva Ciudad Guerrero. They had to travel Mexico Highway 2 and pass Ciudad Mier and Nueva Ciudad Guerrero to get to the area where Hartley disappeared.

Residents of Nueva Ciudad Guerrero live in fear of the armed outlaws who operate in the region, say people with ties to the area. The town no longer has a gas station — criminals reportedly blew up the only one.

And while the army denies there is an official curfew in effect, a high-ranking military official in Reynosa confirmed that Nueva Ciudad Guerrero residents are advised to stay indoors after dark for their own safety.

Food is in short supply here, he said, "but people can go to the neighboring communities to find what they need."

A 61-year-old Weslaco resident who traveled to Nuevo Ciudad Guerrero every two or three weeks for the last 30 years to visit a female relative stopped making those trips early this year.

"She told me not to go anymore and that if we did, she was not going to open the door for us," the man said in Spanish. "And she wasn’t paranoid. She was just afraid. That’s how bad it is."

Last month the man’s relative died of natural causes in Monterrey.

"We wanted to bury her in the family’s tomb in Nueva Ciudad Guerrero, but the bad guys didn’t let us go in," he said. "Our friend’s relative also died in Monterrey. They were transporting her back to Nueva Ciudad Guerrero, and they were forced to make a U-turn with the hearse."

Cartel members patrol the town’s streets, armed with AK-47 assault rifles, and have tapped the phones, said the Weslaco man, who is still in contact with family here.

"They even have control of the Pemex oil wells," he said of the cartel members, "so someone most know about the situation."

A high-ranking Mexican army source in Nuevo Laredo confirmed his soldiers provided an escort to law enforcement investigating the Hartley case and said they also try to protect Pemex personnel in the region.

But "we cannot escort everybody, because that is not our job," he said. "Our job is to capture the organized crime members in the act."

Local authorities didn’t want to discuss the current state of affairs in Nueva Ciudad Guerrero.

"The situation is very difficult," the city’s public safety director, Rafael Barrientos Lozano, said in a telephone interview. He added that security is just as lacking in his city as in other towns in the region.

Then he started yelling: "That’s all I can say! That’s all I can say!"

Mayor Olga Juliana Elizondo Guerrero and mayor-elect Luis Gerardo Ramos Gomez — a union leader for the federal power company, known by its Spanish acronym CFE — did not return several calls from The Monitor.

Nueva Ciudad Guerrero was founded in 1953 after Old Ciudad Guerrero was abandoned as the damming of the Rio Grande flooded the region and created Falcon Reservoir.

Nowadays, even the new city seems damned — one more town caught up in the struggle between cartels that battle not only among themselves but also with the military.

More than 31,000 people have died in drug-related violence south of the border since Mexican President Felipe Calderón launched his military crackdown on organized crime when he took office in late 2006, according to Reuters news service.

In Nuevo Ciudad Guerrero and the rest of northeast Mexico, much of the bloodletting in recent months has come at the hands of the Zetas and the rival Gulf Cartel as they fight for control over lucrative smuggling routes into the United States.

It’s a rueful state of affairs for the Weslaco resident.

"It hurts to see that the town where I grew up has been transformed into such a rotten area," he said. "It was a peaceful place with no crime. Everybody knew each other. We even knew the dogs: ‘Oh yeah, that’s so-and-so’s dog.’ Now it’s under the control of thugs from out of town."

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