Thread: Tijuana Streets Flow With the Blood of Rival Drug Cartels

Tijuana Streets Flow With the Blood of Rival Drug Cartels
Ed Vulliamy reports on a border town, where honest citizens pay a cruel price for the greed of others
When the balaclava-clad paramilitary police officer pulled back a blanket covering the corpse, a group of women wailed, shielding their babies' eyes. The security guard, whose body had been left outside the 4/9 Minimart in Villa Foresta on the edge of Tijuana, had been shot repeatedly at point-blank range with what appeared to be a semi-automatic weapon, his face and chest grated by gunfire into something more like a raw carcass on a hook.
This was body number six last Monday night, and the sixth of what would become a total of 15 people murdered during less than 72 hours in this frontier city that acts as a portal from Mexico to California and vice versa. This is the front line in the 'narco-war' - savage, sanguine and sudden - that drug cartels are waging between each other and with the authorities. The war has claimed some 2,700 lives this year, and more than 6,000 since December 2006, when President Felipe Calderón launched Mexico's first serious offensive against the cartels who have traded for decades under a measure of government protection.

The battle has been fought mainly along the 2,100-mile border between the United States and Mexico, the world's busiest frontier. As the body count has increased, so has the brutality of the killing. Corpses have been found severely tortured or decapitated, castrated, dipped in sulphuric acid or with their tongues cut out.
Dr Hiram Muñoz, chief forensic medical expert assigned to the homicide department in Tijuana, told The Observer how 'each different mutilation leaves a clear message. They have become a kind of folk tradition. If the tongue is cut out, it means they talked too much. A man who sneaked on someone else has his finger cut off and maybe put in his mouth. If you are castrated, you may have slept with the woman of another man. Decapitation is another thing: it is simply a statement of power, a warning to all. The difference is that in normal times the dead were "disappeared" or dumped in the desert. Now, they are displayed for all to see.'

Last month 13 bodies with their tongues cut out were found across the road from the ValentÃ*n Gómez FarÃ*as secondary school. The principal, Miguel Angel González Tovar, said: 'It was terrifying, the children were terrified, the staff were terrified. And now we had to suspend some classes after this last warning. They gave me CCTV, but that does not work. They gave me an alarm button, but that is broken. We try to teach here, but we cannot be isolated from what is going on outside.' The illustrated project on the wall of one classroom was about global warming and gave guidance on what to do in a flood or hurricane.

The new army-imposed chief of police in Tijuana, Lieutenant-Colonel Julián Leyzaola, talks of 'social terrorism' by the narcos, referring specifically to a threat last Tuesday that, if Marines did not leave town, the narco gangs would kidnap and kill schoolchildren.

'All I can do is to increase a police profile in the community and schools, calm people down to avert the kind of social psychosis the narcos want to generate, physical presence to reassure people and intelligence to fight the criminals themselves', said Leyzaola.

The war has also struck deep into the heart of Mexico, with macabre executions as far south as Chiapas. The magazine Proceso published a cover photograph of the country's entire political and military leadership under the headline 'Impotence', and concluded that 'the narco is now a national structure'. The leading campaigner against the drug cartels in Tijuana, Victor Clark Alfaro, talked last week about 'a war against society itself, at every level of life, school and community, with violence on the streets and even more sinister movements behind that violence, to create psychosis in society, and criminalize the economy'.

The war has also spread into the US, with 135 arrests last month in a swoop against Mexican cartel operatives.

The appalling and escalating level of violence is not only a response to Mexico's tardy counter-offensive against the drug gangs, but a symptom of fragmentation among the drug cartels themselves.

Last week's bloodbath in Tijuana - taking the year's death toll for this city towards 600 - followed the arrest last Saturday of Eduardo Arellano Félix, known better by his 'nom de narco' El Doctor - the last remaining fugitive of five brothers who ran Mexico's oldest, but now severely damaged, cartel. On Wednesday, the US State Department lodged a request for Arellano's extradition for trial in the United States, where he has been among the most wanted drug traffickers.

That dramatic swoop on a Saturday afternoon targeted an Art Deco mansion in the upscale Misiones del Pedregal suburb. A deafening salvo of fire was aimed at the villa in what was presumed to be yet another shoot-out. The next day it was shown to have been the taking of Mexico's second most wanted drug lord into custody. He arrived - white-bearded and apparently dazed - for his ritual handcuffed appearance for television to join one of his surviving brothers, Javier, in the high-security Altiplano jail.

Authorities on both sides of the border hailed the arrest as a triumph, the US Drug Enforcement Administration calling it the 'final demise' of the cartel founded by Mexico's first drug lord, Angel Félix Gallardo, but run by the Arellano brothers since he was jailed in 1989.

Others were slower to celebrate. The state of Baja California's new public prosecutor, Rommel Moreno Manjarrez said: 'We hope to be seeing the fall of the Arellano cartel. But we have no illusions that one cartel's misfortune is another's opportunity, and that rivals will be watching this situation in their own way. We are trying to see how this will play out and to battle against whatever moves are made.

'We have had a serious problem of police corruption in the past, but are trying to purge this corruption from our forces, and are now able to fight this battle seriously, with the DEA helping in many ways, and with backing from our own government, which is different from the old political situation.'

Cocaine trafficking from South America into the US (and much of Europe), and trafficking in Mexican-produced heroin and methamphetamine, became a Mexican near-monopoly during the 1990s, operated by four cartels, each controlling one of four main 'plazas', or routes into the US.

The Texan sector belonged to the 'Gulf cartel' and its military wing, Los Zetas, comprised of former crack Mexican troops. A central passage through Ciudad Juárez was terrain dominated by the Juárez cartel and the giant plaza between Tijuana and California by the Arellano brothers and their sister Eneida who, the authorities presume, will assume command of the clan.

But a fourth, unspecified, central-western plaza was run by the Alianza de Sangre (Alliance of Blood), or Sinaloa cartel, from the Pacific state of that name, way south of the border, where most of the other big traffickers also originate. This cartel was founded and is led by JoaquÃ*n 'El Chapo' Guzmán, who split from Gallardo to rival him, was jailed in 1993, but dramatically escaped in 2001 and is now a fugitive and something of a narco folk hero. Guzmán used the 2006 government offensive to lay claim to the entire border. The war that rages in Tijuana is largely between his rebels and those loyal to the Arellano family. Moreno says that an alliance forged in jail between the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels is also 'entirely finished', generating further chaos, and Sinaloa is taking on the Gulf cartel's Zetos with a trained army of its own, Los Negros (the Men in Black).

Amid the carnage, a journey with three young women from the police forensic team is a harrowing experience. On the outskirts of Tijuana, another corpse has been found, visible by the green light of a petrol station. The windscreen of the victim's Ford Explorer (with California plates) is pitted with three bullet holes, and he seems to have made a run into the street, followed by 25 further shots.

The scene of the next slaughter is the 9/4 minimart in Villa Foresta, where a blanket covers the remains of the security guard, with two more dead inside. There is wild sobbing from the women as the bullet-sprayed body outside is revealed, and those inside the store are brought out on stretchers and loaded into the white forensic department truck now carrying five dead bodies.

The shop, it seems, was a stash for drugs being loaded for export in two presumed clavos (nails - the word used here for a car carrying drugs) intended to join the 65,000 that cross from Tijuana into San Diego every day, which the police in time tow away.

Meanwhile heavy-set men arrive to look on from a slight distance, embracing each other in a way that suggests burdensome comradeship and solace, but little sadness.

Tijuana's residents are struggling, with a remarkable degree of success, to lead a normal life. A recent study among local drug addicts shows an increase from 5,000 outlets and crack houses in 2004 to 20,000 now, and an estimated 200,000 young people in a burgeoning city of three million seriously addicted to hard drugs. Friday's newspapers reported yet another vast haul by the American authorities of 90lb of cocaine, crossing Tijuana's border to San Diego in a car driven by a Mexican burro, or mule.

But the city teems with effervescent life for all the 'psychosis' the narcos wreak. The crowds of American tourists have vanished from the famous Avenida Revolución, so the souvenir business is in trouble. And with the formerly flashy narcos now lying low, Tijuana's famous brothels and strip clubs are empty of all but the worst types, the girls gyrating mainly with one another.

But like every other bar, the Sótano Suizo pub was heaving last Sunday (while Eduardo Félix Arellano was airborne, handcuffed), for the climactic football match of the season Mexicans call 'El Clásico' between Club América of Mexico City and Chivas of Guadalajara. The teams unleash attack after attack in a tremendous game-to-the-death with Chivas winning 2-1.

On Friday, slightly surreally given the week's murders, celebrations were being prepared for yesterday's Day of the Dead, an ancient rite inherited from Mexican tradition, entwining Roman Catholicism with Aztec lore of the 'Black Sun', which illuminates the underworld.

The borderland remains a strong, exciting and potent place, in which the vast majority of people live and strive honestly. This frontier is too often defined, as Professor Tony Payan of El Paso university points out in an excellent book on the borderline, not by the people who live, flock to and work here, but by whatever is polemically useful to Washington. From there, argues Payan, successive administrations have illogically and disastrously entwined their failed border 'war on drugs' with the entirely separate 'wars' on undocumented immigration and terrorism.

There is a strong sense that the region is paying the price for other people's greed. 'We are,' says Eligio Montes, police commander of Rosarito Beach, south of Tijuana, 'a cultural sandwich here on the border. And now we're squeezed between narcos from Sinaloa and Americans taking drugs.'

My companion reporter, Jorge Fregosa, ends another rollercoaster drive on Thursday (to catch the army remove hand grenades from a blue plastic bin in a side street) by saying: 'This is my city, my country and that is my flag' - and he opens the sunroof the better to see it fly, defiantly vast, with its eagle, cactus, snake and legend, in the breeze and in America's face, at the border.

'And every time they kill someone,' says Fregosa, who has seen that happen hundreds of times this year, 'it hurts me. because it hurts the place I love. The border pays the price, and now we are paying a higher price than ever.'

War on drugs

December 2006A new federal police force is created to tackle drugs cartels; thousands of troops are deployed as part of a major anti-drug trafficking drive.

2008 Drug-related killings soar. Murders linked to organized crime leap to almost 1,400 in first five months of year.

MayAttorney-General Eduardo Medina Mora says that the number of murders linked to organized crime had risen by 50 per cent, with thousands of people having been killed in the 18 months since President Felipe Calderón took office and declared war on drugs cartels - 450 of the dead were police, soldiers or lawyers.

AugustAs the murders continue, hundreds of thousands turn out for marches throughout Mexico to protest against the wave of kidnappings and killings.

© Guardian News & Media 2008
Published: 11/1/2008

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/233270.html

This always gets me when they blame their problems on Americans for using drug. What? nobody south of our border uses drugs? Who the hell makes this crap in the first place?
Hell all they can do is put more cops on the street and hope nobody kidnaps and kills school kids and here we caught 135 cartel operatives in one month.
Keep it up Mexico and we'll be sending US Marines down there!