Pubdate: Wed, 18 Mar 2009
Source: Independent  (UK)
Copyright: 2009 Independent Newspapers (UK) Ltd.
Contact:  http://www.independent.co.uk/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/209
Author: Guy Adams
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)

TIJUANA: CAUGHT IN THE COCAINE CROSSFIRE

Drug wars are ravaging northern Mexico, leaving 6,500 dead. Worst-hit 
is Tijuana, once a top spot for American tourists and now the scene 
of sickening violence. Guy Adams reports from the front line

Jose Luis Coca was cooking tacos on a corner of Insurgentes, one of 
the main roads into central Tijuana, when the shooting began. Four 
carloads of gangsters, with AR15 assault rifles, opened fire on a 
rival gang gathered in front of his stall. Within minutes, 400 rounds 
had racketed the night sky, and 16 people lay dead or dying.

Mr Coca survived by lying face down on the pavement, and crossing his 
fingers. His taco stand still bears witness to the lucky escape, 
eight bullet holes in its pockmarked frame. "One missed my head by 
maybe 10 centimetres," he says. "It went so close I could feel it. 
Every day since, I thank God for protecting me."

That was in September. Since then, Mr Coca has done an awful lot of 
thanking God. In November, two men were murdered outside a seafood 
restaurant 100 yards away, this time in daylight. Last month, he saw 
the driver of a Ford Explorer dragged from his vehicle at the local 
traffic lights, frogmarched to the nearby river, and dispatched with 
a single shot to the back of the head.

Such tales have become common in Tijuana, a ramshackle border city on 
the front line of a bloody drug war sweeping Mexico's northern 
frontier. Violence between rival groups of organised criminals has 
been bubbling there for years, but has now reached epidemic levels. 
To the consternation of the world, a staggering 6,500 people were 
murdered in Mexico last year, including hundreds of soldiers and policemen.

Many of the dead have been decapitated, or publicly tortured. 
Hundreds of innocent bystanders, like Mr Coca, have been caught in 
the crossfire. "I've been working this spot for 20 years," he says. 
"Lately, I've learned not to mess with anybody. When people come here 
drunk, and ask for free food, I just say, 'OK, you can pay next 
time'. You get into an argument with these guys, they'll just kill 
you. This is the reality of life now: say the wrong thing to the 
wrong person, and you're a dead man."

The violence has left Mexico, a nation that boasts the world's 
twelfth largest economy, in danger of being declared a "failed 
state". Tourism, one of its largest industries, has collapsed. Whole 
regions are under the control of drug cartels, and hobbled by rampant 
corruption. Two months ago, the US Joint Forces Command declared 
that, after Pakistan, it was the world's most likely nation to suffer 
a "rapid and sudden collapse".

Last week, President Barack Obama had a request from the Texas 
Governor, Rick Perry, to station National Guard troops along the 
border. On Friday, the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, said she 
was planning an urgent diplomatic visit, to discuss the soaring 
violence with the government of President Felipe Calderon.

Barry McCaffery, a former "drug tsar" for Bill Clinton, said: "The 
dangerous and worsening problems... fundamentally threaten US 
national security. We cannot afford to have a 'narco state' as a neighbour."

Tijuana's problems stem from an accident of geography. A sprawling, 
seedy, and crowded city jammed up against the US border at the top of 
Baja Mexico, it represents prime real estate for anyone wishing to 
smuggle some of the 350 metric tonnes of cocaine that find their way 
into the United States each year. Since 2006, rival gangs have been 
battling for control of these drug routes. They are well-funded - the 
cocaine industry in the US is worth $5.5bn (UKP 3.9bn) a year - 
ruthless, and care little for human life. More than 800 people were 
killed on the streets of Tijuana last year, from a population of 1.5 
million. This gave the city a worse murder rate than Baghdad.

The killings are often sickening. A few weeks back, the decapitated 
heads of three policemen were left in an icebox by the side of a 
road. Days earlier, police near Tijuana had arrested Santiago Meza, a 
local drug baron's "fixer" known as El Pozolero ["The Soupmaker"]. He 
confessed to having dissolved more than 300 murder victims in acid 
over nine years.

"In the past, the gangs had rules," says Victor Clark Alfaro, a local 
human rights lawyer. "They respected families. They didn't kill 
children. But those rules have changed. Now they don't respect 
anything. They'll kill anybody, and decapitate them, or cut the body, 
to send a message to society."

The breakdown in law and order stems from the 1980s and 1990s, when 
the US launched a crackdown on Colombian drug cartels, allowing 
Mexican syndicates to emerge in their place. Soon these groups 
controlled almost nine-tenths of America's entire supply of cocaine 
from South America. For many years, Mexico's cartels were largely 
left to get on with business, on the basis that they killed only 
their own kind. But the arrival of multi-party democracy to in 2000 - 
for 70 years, Mexico had been a one-party state - led to government 
crackdowns on their trade. These had some success. The Arellano Felix 
cartel, which for years controlled a north-west portion of the 
country, has lost most of its leaders, including, most recently, 
Eduardo Arellano Felix, one of the seven brothers who founded the 
organisation. He was captured in October, after a shootout at a house 
overlooking the city, which last week was still derelict, and riddled 
in bullet holes.

Unfortunately, when you arrest one drug baron, you do not kill off 
the trade. Instead, you create a vacancy, and a turf war. Most of the 
recent violence across Mexico, and in Tijuana in particular, has 
involved remnants of the Arellano Felix cartel battling rivals from 
the so-called Sinaloa syndicate, and Gulf Cartel, both keen to move 
in on the patch.

The impact of this war is visible throughout Tijuana, where army 
units patrol the streets day and night, and civilians think twice 
about venturing out after dark. In almost every neighbourhood, 
gangland territories are marked by shoes dangling from electricity 
wires hanging across streets.

"Three shoes stands for 'El Teo', who is from the Sinaloa family," 
says Jorge Ramos, a security guard at a bank outside the city's 
notorious red-light district. "Five means 'Felix'. Seven stands for 
'Sinoloa'. You learn to read the signs. Ending up on the wrong street 
can mean trouble."

Efforts to halt the violence are not helped by rampant police 
corruption. The cartels, with their 2,500 per cent profit margins, 
are not short of bribe cash. Forbes magazine revealed that Joaquin 
"El Chapo" Guzman, head of the Sinaloa cartel and Mexico's most 
wanted man, was worth a cool $1bn, making him 701st in its league of 
the world's richest men.

Local politicians describe Tijuana's police as institutionally 
corrupt. "I'm firing about 400 of my 1,600 police officers," the 
city's mayor, Jose Reyes, said in a recent documentary, Narco War 
Next Door. "They failed a lie-detector test in which we specifically 
asked if they were involved in corruption related to organised crime."

Violence is also fuelled by a flow of guns and ammunition over the 
border from the US, from states such as Texas, where assault weapons 
can be sold to anyone passing a rudimentary background check. In a 
desperate effort to stem the tide, one of the army bases in central 
Tijuana offers to exchange illegal firearms for money or food, no 
questions asked.

And while the US consumers created the market for the drugs that has 
caused this war, US politicians are also unwittingly providing many 
of its footsoldiers. Every day, buses arrive in Tijuana carrying 
hundreds of illegal immigrants, rounded up for deportation from 
America. Impoverished and desperate, many are immediately recruited by cartels.

"These people have nothing to lose," says Victor Clark Alfaro, who 
works with deportees. "They speak English, and many were in gangs in 
the US, so they know the business of drugs and they have contacts on 
the US side, so they become a cheap labour force for organised crime."

It is not as if Tijuana is exactly brimming with other opportunities. 
Though only 25 of the city's 800-odd murder victims last year were 
classed as innocent bystanders, the US State Department has advised 
its citizens against travelling south of the border. US Marines at 
Camp Pendleton, a base north of San Diego, are banned from crossing 
the border on leave. This has crippled the local economy, which for 
years relied on free-spending Americans visiting to stock up on cheap 
liquor and pharmaceuticals. In Rosalito Beach, a resort containing a 
seedy mixture of tattoo parlours, hotels, and chemists, the streets 
are deserted, despite the imminent "Spring Break" which normally 
brings tens of thousands of visitors. "This is my livelihood," says 
Christian Roza, owner of Dulceria Ayala, a sweet store. "It's safe in 
this town. Look at the place. Have you seen anyone killed here?"

The Mexican government insists that it is winning the war on drugs, 
and is deeply critical of what it sees as sensationalist reporting by 
Western media and governments. President Felipe Calderon condemned 
Forbes for including "El Chapo" in its rich-list. "Magazines are not 
only attacking and lying about the situation in Mexico, but also 
praising criminals," he said.

But Mr Calderon's best hope may lie in simple economics. "Wars are 
expensive," says Bruce Bagley, an expert on drug-trafficking from the 
University of Miami. "The violence has made it more costly to run 
drugs over the Mexican border, so more cocaine is coming through 
Haiti or Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico. Mexico's share of the 
market is down from 90 per cent to nearer 65 per cent." Dr Bagley 
believes the drug war has three possible outcomes. "Either one cartel 
emerges and takes over everything, with the government turning a form 
of blind eye. Or there'll be an internal agreement between cartels to 
stop fighting. Or the cocaine industry totally atomises with drugs 
entering the US from different routes."

Whatever the ending, for Mexico's tourist guides and taco-stall 
owners alike, it cannot come soon enough.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom