July 19, 2008, 11:58PM
Cartels have Mexican civilians trembling
Deaths of youths show bloodshed hits the innocent as well as gangs


By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

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ABOUT SINALOA

• Size: 22,429 square miles; area is roughly comparable to West Virginia
• Capital: Culiacan

• Population: 2,538,844 (2000 census)

• Agriculture: Leading crops are cotton, wheat, rice and sugarcane.

• Fishing: One of Mexico's largest seafood producers

Source: Encyclopedia of Mexican States
GUAMUCHIL, MEXICO — The narcotics trade has long been a winked-at way of life for many in this market town on the fertile coastal plains of northwestern Mexico.

It's also become a terrifying way of death.

Two dozen people have been gunned down since late June in Guamuchil, a normally somnolent community of 120,000 about 60 miles north of Culiacan, capital of the violence-racked state of Sinaloa.

Like many of the nearly 600 people slain in Sinaloa since January, most of Guamuchil's victims belonged to one drug smuggling gang or the other. Throughout the area, bodies have been left on roadsides and back streets, stuffed in the trunks of cars, dumped in fields or irrigation ditches.

Though concerned by the bloodshed, townspeople could comfort themselves in the knowledge that the slaughter passed by those not directly involved with "the business" of trafficking drugs.

Those days now seem to be over.

A 12-year-old girl, four teenagers and three work-a-day men lie among the town's casualties. They were killed shortly after 1 a.m. last Sunday while they sat in their vehicles waiting for a red light to change on the main street of Guamuchil (pronounced gwah-MU-chil).

Investigators believe the eight killed — and the two other youths and three men severely wounded in the attack — were shot because they unknowingly blocked the path of gangsters chasing an assassination target. Furious to have lost their prey, the gunmen sprayed the four cars with automatic weapons.

"These were decent people," said Luciana Arredondo, one of Guamuchil's two criminal prosecutors. "We found absolutely nothing to implicate any of them" in criminal activity.

Most of the teen victims grew up together here, some of them across the street or next door to one another. Many sang in the choir at Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Roman Catholic church that dominates Guamuchil's downtown.

"They were just neighborhood kids," said Aracely Sanchez, a sister-in-law of Alejandra Bojorquez, 18, who was killed. "They almost never went out, and when they did it was for harmless fun. They weren't trouble."


Night of cruising
After attending a quinceañera for a neighborhood girl celebrating her 15th birthday, the teenagers persuaded their parents to let them join the cruising along Guamuchil's main drag, Rosales Avenue, a popular Saturday night tradition here.

The kids were heading home and perhaps a mile from their beds when they met the gunmen.

"We're used to crimes — but between narcos, them killing each other," said Gabriel Morales, a Roman Catholic priest who knew the dead teens and praises their families. "This is is the first time they've involved innocent young people."

Still, like many towns in Sinaloa, a verdant agricultural state also famed for spawning Mexico's most notorious gangsters, Guamuchil has had a long and often fruitful relationship with narcotics.


Warring clans
Opium poppies and marijuana have been cultivated in and smuggled out of the mountains east of here for nearly a century. With U.S. government encouragement, Sinaloa's poppies were a major source of the morphine used to treat wounded soldiers in World War II.

The criminals who dominated the local drug trade began smuggling South American cocaine to American consumers three decades ago, becoming immensely wealthy in the process. Families originally from the mountains near Guamuchil now control the smuggling cartels based in Mexico.

This year, amid a federal government crackdown on the drug trade, two powerful and formerly allied Sinaloa clans have been warring with each other. The feud between gangs led by the Beltran Leyva brothers and Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman have been responsible for most of the 2,000 gangland deaths tallied across Mexico in the past six months.

Both the Beltran Leyvas and Guzman hail from the mountains near Guamuchil. The town lies on Highway 15, a prime smuggling route that cuts north from here to the Arizona border. The gang war was bound to hit here.

The killings have escalated dramatically this year, said Arredondo, the prosecutor. In May, 30 gunmen attacked the state police offices in downtown Guamuchil, shooting hundreds of rounds into the building. Assassins shot and wounded a state police commander in town shortly afterward.

"They are challenging the authorities," said Feliciano Heredia, a Guamuchil criminal defense lawyer who has represented accused drug smugglers and is now organizing a protest against Sunday's killings.

"People have to realize the situation we are in. We need a way out of this."


Fueling the economy
While relatively few Guamuchil residents may have direct links to the drug trade, underworld profits fuel the local economy, local leaders say. Garish pickups and sport utility vehicles fill the lots of car dealerships. Nightclubs and bars line the downtown streets.

"No one can deny that the economic activity is moved by narcotics," said Morales, the priest. "People have learned to live with it."

And not just in Guamuchil. A recent economic study estimates that 20 percent of Sinaloa's economy owes to the drug trade.

The statutory is more pronounced in towns like Guamuchil that are closest to the epicenter of the narcotics-producing regions.

"The narco economy and family remittances from the United States actually keep our state on its feet," wrote Guillermo Ibarra, an economist at Sinaloa's state university.

All that money has had an effect. Many here assume that local and state officials and police are in the gangsters' pockets. Businesses are widely considered fronts for narco money.

Teens increasingly dress and talk like gangsters. Hundreds flock each week to a shrine honoring a long-dead and perhaps mythical Robin Hood-style bandit who believers say provides magical protection for legal and illicit lives alike.


Ethics destroyed
"The people of Sinaloa have been very complicit in this problem," said Yudit del Rincon, a state legislator from Guamuchil and an outspoken critic of the drug trade and the social corruption that supports it. "They have created Frankenstein, and now it's turned on us.

"How many dead," she wondered, "do we need to say that this is a problem?"

The architects of President Felipe Calderon's crackdown on organized crime say that enlisting the support of local citizens is key to the effort. That's proved difficult so far, either because people fear the gangsters, distrust the authorities or consider the exercises fruitless and dangerous.

Across Mexico, police and troops pursuing gangsters have fought battles in residential streets, kicked in the doors of family homes and killed innocents at checkpoints. Dozens of complaints for robbery, unwarranted shootings and other abuses have been lodged against the estimated 3,000 army and federal police conducting the campaign in Sinaloa.

"We don't need repression," said Heredia, the lawyer. "The army comes, the bad people leave and calm returns. The army leaves and the guerrillas return. If there are clashes, innocent people are going to be killed or hurt."

But many civilians now also feel themselves targeted by the criminals, who seem to have thrown traditions that left uninvolved citizens, and even members of one another's families, in peace.

"They had certain ethics, certain rules," Del Rincon, the legislator, said of Sinaloa's gangsters of old. "But that's all been destroyed. Now they kill anyone, anytime."

dudley.althaus@chron.com



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