May 31, 2008, 11:41PM
Fighting drugs and making a stand in Culiacan
Federal troops lock down region in effort to bring gangsters to heel


By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle


CULIACAN, MEXICO — Automatic weapons at the ready, the platoons of federal police officers descend from the transport planes and high-step as neatly as majorettes into the searing heat of this violent city.

Gen. Rodolfo Cruz, short, fit and wearing the same starched blue uniform as his troops, puts the policemen through their paces as television cameras whirr.

"Here we are, showing our faces," says Cruz, 65, a career army officer, who sprinkles conversations with English phrases learned during military training in Oklahoma. "I fight crime, I put on my uniform and show my face. I don't go around hidden."

Frustrated with the rising death toll from a resilient criminal insurgency, President Felipe Calderon appears ready to make a stand in Culiacan, a sprawling northern city that's long been an incubator for Mexico's drug gangs. With the fresh units having flown in the past week, nearly 3,000 soldiers and militarized officers of the federal police now patrol Culiacan and nearby communities in Sinaloa state, struggling to bring rival gangs to heel.

"At some point, you have to cut the cancer out," a U.S. counter-narcotics official tells a reporter in Mexico City. "President Calderon realizes it must be cut out before it cuts you out."

Similar surgical efforts have been tried over the years in Sinaloa, as well as elsewhere in Mexico. All have won remission, but ultimately failed. The current attempt meets with frustrated shrugs.

"The federal forces are insufficient to stop organized crime," declares an editorial in El Debate, a leading newspaper here. "One can't live in Culiacan now. Insecurity is pervasive."

Eight federal policemen were killed last week when they attempted to raid a gangster safe house in a middle-class Culiacan neighborhood. More than 330 people have been killed gangland-style in Sinaloa this year, including 36 local, state and federal police.

"Violence is a national problem, but this is ground zero," says Jose Rafael Martinez, a 40-year lawyer browsing a United Nations photo display about the plague of illegal weapons worldwide. "It's good they're trying to do something."

Mexico's narcotics industry started in Sinaloa when mountain communities began producing heroin early in the 20th century for U.S. consumers. Poppy production led to marijuana farming. Then South American cocaine started flowing through the area in the 1980s, heading north.

The drug trade has always enjoyed the protection of local and federal officials, says Luis Astorga, a Culiacan-born sociologist who is one of Mexico's leading experts on the drug gangs.

He adds that the federal government has launched frequent campaigns since the 1950s to eradicate narcotics.

The last big push in Sinaloa was Operation Condor in the mid-1970s, when 10,000 soldiers deployed into the mountains for years to shut down drug plantations and smugglers.

Many of the gangsters simply moved to Guadalajara, Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez and elsewhere, where they or their successors control major trafficking organizations. The senior civilian official in charge of Condor became a drug smuggler himself, until he was assassinated near the South Texas border 15 years ago.

"The officially successful results of these campaigns were of merely rhetoric nature," Astorga has written in a report for the U.N. "Tougher measures in one place created trafficking problems in another."

Most people in this city of nearly 1 million are law abiding and abhor the narcotics trade. Culiacan anchors a thriving agricultural industry that produces tomatoes and other vegetables for Mexico's tables and those in the U.S. each winter.

Most everyone trudges to jobs or school each morning, returns home to their families each night.

Shopping-mall theaters show the latest films. Food courts sell Chinese takeout, American ice cream.

Many people seem scandalized by the violence and the drug trade; they want it to stop. But not all of them. Narco-culture has sunk its roots deep here.

New narco corridos — gushing ballads about the gangsters — hit the streets almost as soon as one of them dies, is jailed, or scores a victory against a rival or the government.

No one writes songs about the police or the soldiers.

Among downtown Culiacan's most cherished sites is a small chapel a few blocks from the state governor's offices. The shrine honors Jesus Malverde, a bandit hanged nearly a century ago.

Malverde is said have stolen from the rich, given to the poor and taken no grief from the government. Now he performs miracles, believers say, often on behalf of drug smugglers or other criminals.

On the south side of the city, the tombs of gang members flourish in one of Culiacan's better cemeteries, not far from the grave of the man who 20 years ago was the presidential candidate of Calderon's own conservative political party.

Photos of the deceased, often posing with pistols or automatic rifles, adorn some of the graves. "You were a good boy to your mother," reads a birthday greeting on the poster left on one grave, which includes a photo of the beloved son holding a pistol.

Elsewhere in the city , the soldiers and federal police, fingers on their rifle triggers, patrol Culiacan's streets like an occupying army.

Military and police convoys snarl traffic as they crawl along the streets. But they often run red lights. Stopping at them might present a tempting target.

Several hundred troops camp at an outdoor sports complex in one of Culiacan's rougher neighborhoods known for its organized crime.

People stare indifferently from doorways or sidewalks as the military vehicles roll through the neighborhoods in the blaring afternoon sun.

Young men in shops or sitting on stoops poke one another or gesture with raised eyebrows toward the convoy, murmuring comments through half smiles.

No one is overtly hostile. But few seem particularly friendly, either.

The homes in the neighborhoods are packed tight, their walls and rusting roofs touching one another, their children growing up together, marrying, having children of their own. Strangers don't go unnoticed in such places. The gangland gunmen hide there.

"Everyone knows who everyone is," Gen. Jose Antonio Guzman, the commander of the federal police patrolling Culiacan, says of the drug gangs in the neighborhoods.

But many police are believed to be on the criminals' payrolls. Reporting suspicious activity, unless anonymously, could be deadly. And many people might not want to make the call anyhow.

"Where do you think they buy their supplies? Who washes their clothes and performs other services for them?" Guzman asks, referring to the drug bosses and their minions.

"There is a base of support for them," Guzman said.

Gen. Cruz, who reviews the deplaning police and commands federal police operations across Mexico, has few illusions about the lasting effects of patrolling the neighborhoods.

"We would need 50,000 or 60,000 men to be permanently in the streets," Cruz says of truly locking down the drug trade in Culiacan.

"That would be materially impossible."

Cruz doesn't waste time worrying about what should be.

He says his mandate is to restore order, to demonstrate the Mexican government's determination against the drug gangs.

"I'm a professional policeman dedicated to fighting crime," he says.

"The rest doesn't interest me."

dudley.althaus@chron.com







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