Mexico is not a country anymore it is just one giant criminal enterprise run by crooks.. bad crooks at that .. very sad

[link to www.sfgate.com]

San Francisco Chronicle
ON THE BORDER
Tijuanans caught in crossfire of a deadly drug war zone

Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer

Sunday, January 28, 2007

Tijuana police agents search a man for illegal contraband... Tijuana police are en route to search a home for illegal ... Tijuana police search a man for illegal contraband during... A frightened women weeps during a drug sweep by Tijuana p... More...

(01-28) 04:00 PST Tijuana -- Growing drug abuse among Mexicans, the escalation of their government's war on drugs and the cutthroat battle between cartels to control trafficking routes into the United States have transformed Tijuana into a pressure cooker where corruption, kidnapping and killing chase the prosperous away and leave many living in fear.
Safe in the cheerful cocoon of Mother Antonia Day Care Center, children of Tijuana's embattled police officers lunched on spaghetti and milk and squealed in delight as they batted balloons at a party.

On the streets outside, 25 of their parents' colleagues were murdered last year.

"We haven't lost any parents, but sometimes there's this sadness because their co-workers have been killed," said Palmira Flores, director of the center within steps of the rusting U.S.-Mexico border fence. She reminds the parents: "Don't fight with your husband in the morning, because you don't know if he's coming home at night."

The police killings are the most potent symptom of a drug war escalating in Tijuana and other Mexican border cities.

Drug trafficking and violence are not new to this teeming maze of 1.5 million residents. What is new is that more cartels are vying for control of trade routes for U.S.-bound drugs, and rising drug addiction rates have created a thriving local market and boosted street crime.

Police are getting killed because of their ties to the rival cartels, said Bruce Bagley, an expert on the drug trade at the University of Miami. Many officers, he said, were killed by one cartel because they had done work for another or by a cartel member unsatisfied with the protection the officer was providing.

"I can't do my job right because if I do, they'll kill me," said one Tijuana officer, who like five other officers interviewed for this story, would not give his name because he feared for his life.

The officer said in December that corruption was worse than he had seen in 26 years on the city police force and had permeated the department's highest level.

"Half the police are on the take," he said. "I drive this old truck and they drive the latest model. I've got $5 in my pocket and they've got $5,000. We can't fix this problem alone. We need federal help."

Charging widespread corruption among local law enforcement, President Felipe Calderón sent 3,000 soldiers and federal police officers to Tijuana this month and had disarmed the city's police until Saturday.

Laurie Freeman, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, a liberal think tank with a focus on human rights, warns that federal involvement may not resolve the problem.

"There's a lot more Mexico could do to try to create institutions that are more effective and less easily corrupted, but it's difficult under all this pressure from drug traffickers to corrupt and intimidate," said Freeman, who has studied drug cartel violence in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, where a similar battle is raging.

Mexican traffickers are consolidating their dominance of U.S. distribution networks, according to the U.S. Department of Justice's 2007 National Drug Threat Assessment, despite stepped-up enforcement at the border. And U.S. demand continues unabated for the thousands of pounds of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine smuggled into the country from Mexico every day.

The battle spilled into the Tijuana preschoolers' playrooms Nov. 28 when Nancy Gómez, a secretary they knew from the police station up the block, was gunned down with two officers who were escorting her home across town.

"She was a really lovely woman," said Flores, the day care center director. She said the teachers wept privately in the center's kitchen as they watched television coverage the day after the killing.

Police are not the only victims. At least 200 Tijuana residents were kidnapped for ransom last year. Homicide is rising. Neighborhood meth kitchens are proliferating. And robberies by junkies desperate for a fix are mounting.

The pressure is taking a toll across Tijuana. "My fear," said taxi driver Juan Contreras, "is that the gunmen don't care who they hit with their bullets."

Presbyterian minister Enrique Romero has watched drug addiction unravel his impoverished parish: "There are assaults, robberies, prostitution ... all kinds of misery. They'll steal anything they can sell: phone cables, gas lines, whatever."

Longtime resident Socorro Zendejas de Garcia said her city has been transformed from the dusty frontier town she knew as a child six decades ago.

In recent years, her doctor's son was murdered when he dated the ex-girlfriend of a drug dealer -- and when the doctor's daughter began talking publicly about the crime, she paid with her life, too.

Zendejas, the wife of a doctor, also has a friend whose daughter was abducted from a supermarket parking lot and held until the family paid a ransom nine days later.

"Tijuana is turning into a maquila de raptos," Zendejas said. "A kidnapping factory."

Prosperous Tijuanans are fleeing the chaos with visas that allow them to live and work in the United States as highly skilled professionals. Some are investing their savings in businesses in the San Diego area to obtain an entrepreneur's visa. Tijuana newspapers have called the exodus a "brain drain."

Moises, 44, a Mexican businessman who declined to give his last name during an interview in a Starbucks cafe in Chula Vista, 6 miles north of the border, said he moved his family there three years ago after he was held hostage at his Tijuana office supply company.

"We don't go to Tijuana much anymore -- just to visit the doctor or take the plane to Mexico City," said his wife, Sara. "All our friends have moved here."

Back when Mexican political power rested in the hands of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, the impact of the illegal drug market didn't permeate as many levels of society because state agencies unofficially regulated it, said Mónica Serrano, a professor of international studies at the Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City. A variety of government and law enforcement officials took bribes from cartels to parcel out drug routes, she said.

The cartels became more powerful in the early 1990s, when Mexico became the principal route for U.S.-bound Colombian cocaine after U.S. enforcement sealed off Florida, experts said. At that point, the Mexican officials lost the upper hand.

The latest escalation in violence began after the high-profile arrests early this decade of several cartel bosses -- including leaders of the Arellano-Félix family, which has long controlled trafficking through Tijuana. Those arrests opened the field for the brutal Sinaloa and Gulf cartels to push their way in, according to academics here and in the United States.

"As the Sinaloa cartel has come to move in on the turf of the Tijuana cartel, that's where you've seen the violence -- the buying off of law enforcement, the assassination attempts against people on the take from the Arellano-Félix cartel," said David Shirk, director of the University of San Diego's Trans-Border Institute.

On Jan. 19, Mexican authorities extradited alleged leaders of all three cartels to the United States for prosecution -- to stop them from communicating with their gangs from inside Mexican prisons.

But those efforts don't address the problem of rising drug addiction in Tijuana, which in turn helps the international trade by making it easier for dealers to find "mules," people desperate enough for quick cash that they will smuggle drugs into the United States.

Drug addiction rates in border cities, already three times as high as the Mexican national average, climbed 24 percent from 1998 to 2002, the most recent years for which figures are available. The rates fell slightly in the rest of Mexico during the same period.

"One of the consequences of tightening up control at the border is that excess supply of drugs gets backed up and bartered in Mexico," said David Eisenberg, a Chula Vista police sergeant who holds a doctorate in social work and serves as a liaison with the Tijuana police.

"So we've got murders, extortion and kidnapping, and skyrocketing addiction rates in Mexico that are starting to match addiction rates in the United States," Eisenberg said.

Treatment center directors said 85 percent of addicts now in rehab used meth. Academics and law enforcement experts said this explosion coincides with a rise in Mexican meth production to meet demand in the United States after crackdowns across the country and at the border.

Former meth addict Agustín Bravo, 28, said his habit was what led him to join the cross-border traffic. He started in the trade as a lookout when he was a teenager. Soon, he was moving pot -- half a ton per load -- from farther south in Mexico up to Tijuana.

"At first I didn't cross it to the other side," Bravo said in an interview at the Hidden Treasures rehabilitation center, where he is now a resident counselor. "That was riskier and I didn't need to. I would find people to drive it across: guys, girls, whole families. But I was so addicted. I needed more and more cristal. I was really low and I decided to cross."

Bravo was arrested on his fifth crossing; an estimated 90 percent of mules successfully cross the border, experts said.

In Tijuana, there are several thousand tienditas, home-based meth shops, according to police. And authorities do go after these low-level dealers -- sometimes at great risk.

In a joint operation in December by local and federal police, a convoy of five pickup trucks sped up narrow, unpaved streets past shanties clinging to steep hillsides looking for such shops. The commander had selected the neighborhood based on a newspaper clipping about rampant drug dealing there.

Fingering the triggers of their submachine guns, black-clad officers riding in the truck beds scanned the people they were passing. The trucks stopped abruptly and the agents swarmed down a rocky slope and surrounded a plywood shack.

A middle-aged man they dragged out clutched a hunk of bread in one upraised hand as the officers frisked him for drugs. They found nothing, let him go and continued cruising and searching residents at random.

"If someone sees us and they take off running, they're suspect," remarked one cop.

"We're after the little guys but they're all part of a chain run by the bigger operations," said another.

The agents acknowledged that the convoy was highly visible and could get trapped in the narrow canyons where the city's poorest settlements have grown. A few months before, three trucks in a similar caravan were surrounded and strafed with bullets, they said. One officer died and five were wounded.

Perched in one truck bed, Ernesto González, who is 31 and a nine-year veteran of the Tijuana force, showed off a cell phone photo of his 3-year-old daughter. He said he worries that his life is at risk, but not so much that he'll find a new line of work.

"I like this job," he said. "It's dangerous but it's exciting. You can grab the action and get the bad guys."