Source: Washington Post Contact: Pubdate: Tuesday, November 4, 1997 Page: A01 Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com Contact: letters to editor form: http://washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/edit/letters/letterform.htm Tijuana Cartel Escalates Violence Third of five articles By Molly Moore Washington Post Foreign Service A U.S. Border Patrol agent shines his flashlight through the border fence into Mexico. (Michael Williamson/ The Post) SAN DIEGO — Cruising the freeway between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, like any suburban commuter, Emilio Valdez Mainero seemed an unlikely assassin. The 33yearold Mexican citizen and U.S. resident rented an apartment on Coronado Island, San Diego's most exclusive neighborhood. He frequented the best golf courses on both sides of the border. His friends were the sons of the wealthy of both cities. But Valdez sometimes hit the links with a .38caliber pistol strapped to his waist, kept an AK47 assault rifle in his Coronado apartment, and chose one of Mexico's bestknown drug lords to be his son's godfather. According to Mexican law enforcement documents, those were the trappings of his trade as chief of an elite assassination squad that executed police and rival drug dealers for the Tijuana cartel, one of Mexico's most powerful drugtrafficking mafias. The alleged dual lifestyle of Valdez, who was arrested last year in San Diego in connection with killings in Mexico, illuminates a chilling new phenomenon that is transforming the border region of the United States: Mexican drug cartels have erased the line that once separated Mexican crime from U.S. crime. No longer mere funnels for the flow of drugs from Mexico, southwestern cities are now adjunct residences, recruiting grounds and battlefields for the hemisphere's most powerful crime organizations. Mexican drug mafias reach into the Hispanic neighborhoods of U.S. border cities with ease, enlisting street gangs to support their criminal enterprises. They have allegedly committed brutal murders in American neighborhoods. Their henchmen maintain homes and businesses on both sides of the border and drive back and forth at will, often using border crossing cards issued by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Although violence and petty crime have flowed both ways across the border for years, this new crime wave is far more savage and insidious, with mafiastyle assassinations in San Diego, gangland shootouts on the streets of Phoenix, and grisly revenge kidnappings the length of the 2,000mile border. Some drugrelated crime also is accompanying Mexican traffickers as they make inroads into the American heartland, but it does not compare in viciousness or intensity to the violence on the border. "We have to live with the violence they use to run their enterprises, and there's no question it's affecting our citizens," said Steven McCraw of the FBI's Tucson office. The violence has escalated so dramatically over the last seven years that federal agencies have sharply increased their regional manpower — double the number of federal prosecutors, 40 percent more FBI agents and a third more Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents. Still, these agencies complain of being outmatched. Law enforcement personnel increasingly are becoming targets of the violence, as well, according to Barry R. McCaffrey, chief of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. He received a death threat from the Tijuana cartel during an August tour of the border. McCaffrey said 160 U.S. police officers and federal agents have been attacked in the region in the past year. Details of the Mexican drug cartels' penetration into U.S. border cities and states emerged from scores of interviews with law enforcement officials and civic activists on both sides of the international line, as well as court, police and prison documents from the United States and Mexico. Tijuana Cartel Moves North Of Mexico's largest drug mafias, none has been more forceful in its expansion into the United States than the Tijuana cartel run by the Arellano Felix family. From its base of operations just 17 miles south of San Diego, the Tijuana cartel not only has developed fertile U.S. recruiting grounds among the thugs and street gang members it needs as muscle, but also has groomed a new breed of welleducated lieutenants — lawyers, accountants, communications technicians and business associates — as the brains of its criminal enterprises. The violence the Arellano Felixes spawned in Mexico has trailed them to San Diego. U.S. law enforcement authorities said they believe the Arellano Felix organization is responsible for at least six murders in the San Diego area in the past year. Last December, Fernando Jesus Gutierrez, 30, was driving home in his white luxury sports coupe along a scenic sliver of beach known as the Silver Strand connecting San Diego to Coronado Island when a Broncotype vehicle edged alongside and a gunman opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle. Gutierrez's car careened into a sand embankment and his assailant sped away. Coronado police said they thought they were responding to a traffic accident before they stepped up to the bulletpocked car and saw that Gutierrez had been shot five times in the face. "We considered this a driveby shooting," said Lt. Jerry Lipscomb, the detective now working the unsolved case for the San Diego County Sheriff's Department. "But victims usually are not of this economic caliber." Law enforcement officials said they have no suspects in the shooting, but DEA officials said they believe it was ordered by the Arellano Felix family, with whom Gutierrez had business dealings. Gutierrez's family said he ran a legitimate importexport company and said any connection to the Arellano Felixes was through legal business. The assassination was not an isolated incident. Earlier last year, Alejandro Torres, 27, described by police as a drug runner, was found bound and shot in the head in the border community of San Ysidro, Calif. His partner, Ramon Avalos, was discovered dead in foothills about 40 miles east of the city. And Javier Bermudez, 30, was strangled with a rope, wrapped in a sheet and left in the trunk of a Buick parked beneath a Neighborhood Watch sign declaring "Criminals Beware, Community Alert" in a culdesac of a San Diego suburb; the murder was not discovered until a week later when his attackers returned to the vehicle, doused it with gasoline and set it ablaze. Police said privately that they believe all three murders were cartelrelated. Those were the first executions of their kind in San Diego, a city of 1 million residents and a relatively low murder rate — 82 killings in 1996, about onefourth of which were drug or gangrelated, according to city police. "These cases are tough," said San Diego Police Department homicide chief Lt. Glenn A. Breitenstein, who added that most drug murders go unsolved due to the difficulty of determining even basic facts like where the killing took place. The Arellano Felix cartel's new henchmen are young men from the most affluent enclaves of San Diego and Tijuana, graduates of the cities' best private schools, aggressive young businessmen of Mexican heritage who speak English without a trace of an accent and blend effortlessly into the cultures of both countries. In Mexico, they have been labeled the "narcojuniors." "By virtue of their wealth and power and association with the Arellanos, the juniors became untouchables murdering whomever they wished," the Tijuana news weekly Zeta said in an editorial earlier this year after a spate of border killings. "These children belong to families that don't need the money — they are the children of parents with good businesses, living in good houses," said Martha Rocha, a Tijuana radio talk show host until last year, when she said station officials yanked her off the air for her candid discussions of drugrelated corruption. Rocha often spoke bluntly from experience: One of her sonsinlaw was recently jailed on charges related to his drug associations. "It's very easy to get in that business," she said. "The offers are very tempting." The man credited with creating the narcojuniors is Ramon Arellano Felix, recently named to the FBI's mostwanted list. Ramon, along with some of his six brothers and four sisters, moved to Tijuana in the 1980s during the adolescence of Mexico's modernday drug cartels. The brothers, and particularly Ramon, 33, endeared themselves to the fledgling social elite of Tijuana, throwing lavish parties at discos and expensive baptismal celebrations for the children of the uppermiddleclass cliques they cultivated. In a town full of new arrivals and brimming with new money, the Arellano Felixes' role as drug traffickers was easily camouflaged. In Tijuana, Ramon cultivated a flamboyant style, often appearing at parties or the race track wearing black leather pants, a fur jacket and a bejeweled gold cross around his neck, according to several acquaintances. But when he went to San Diego to visit his estranged wife Angelica and their 8yearold daughter, he favored Nike sports shirts and tennis shoes, designer sunglasses and jaunty baseball caps — looking like the affluent young lieutenants he was recruiting. U.S. immigration agents who stop every car and question every driver who crosses the border at San Ysidro have failed to detain Ramon Arellano Felix, although criminal indictments have been pending against him in the United States since 1983. Mexican authorities recently barged into a tony Tijuana country club looking for him but came away emptyhanded, leaving prominent citizens to complain later about being rousted from their golf matches. As the chief enforcer and head of the cartel's security detail, Ramon's alleged penchant for violence grew to be the stuff of legend. One of his associates alleged in court documents that Ramon stormed out of a birthday party at a Tijuana tennis club in 1988 and murdered one of his sister's lovers of whom he did not approve. Most U.S. law enforcement officers had never heard of the narcojuniors before last year, when two men were detained in San Diego for extradition at the request of the Mexican government in connection with murder allegations. One of those young men was Emilio Valdez Mainero, who, according to an official memorandum from Mexico's attorney general's office, "hires young assassins who belong to Tijuana's upper class" for the Tijuana cartel. He also hired welltodo Americans living in San Diego as killers for the drug mafia, other Mexican documents allege. Valdez and his family have denied those allegations. Relatives and friends say that Valdez was in the construction and real estate business, but concede that he was acquainted with Ramon Arellano Felix. Documents filed in the Mexican and U.S. court systems allege that Valdez used the cover of a realestate business to provide safe houses for Arellano Felix and members of his cartel in upperclass neighborhoods of Mexico City, Guadalajara, Tijuana and San Diego. In one case, he leased an Acapulco vacation villa for cartel members after a killing spree, the court papers allege. In recent months, the list of San Diegans — U.S. citizens and Mexicans who reside here — implicated in the Tijuana cartel's cadre of narcojuniors has continued to grow. In June, San Diego police arrested Valdez's brother, Gabriel, 36, whom Mexican authorities describe as a telecommunications expert for the Tijuana cartel, whose duties included "the illicit interception of private communications which were used by the organization to avoid capture." In a deposition given two months before his arrest on behalf of his brother, Gabriel Valdez said he owned a legitimate computer business. Alfredo Hodoyan Palacios, 25, born in San Diego and educated in Catholic schools here, was arrested last year in San Diego along with his close friend, Emilio Valdez, and is wanted in Mexico in connection with the killing last year of Tijuana's chief federal prosecutor. He is allegedly known by the code name "El Lobo," or the wolf. Alejandro Hodoyan Palacios, 35, Alfredo's brother who was also born in San Diego and attended law school, was picked up by Mexican military authorities last year and confessed that he was an operative for the Arellano Felix brothers. He later sought DEA protection as an informant, but fled to Mexico where he was abducted by unknown assailants last March as he and his mother were driving through Tijuana. He has not been seen since. Fabian Martinez Gonzalez, known as "El Tiburon," or the shark, another U.S. citizen who grew up among the upper class of San Diego and Tijuana, has been identified by Mexican authorities as one of the cartel hitmen hired by his friend, Emilio Valdez, and is wanted in Mexico for murder. Frustrated Assassins In May 1993, a Tijuana cartel hit squad roamed the streets of Guadalajara in central Mexico in search of archrival Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, leader of the Sinaloa cartel. On May 24, the frustrated assassins gave up their hunt and were ready to catch a plane back to Tijuana. But at the airport they claimed they spotted their quarry and a gunbattle erupted in the parking lot. When the shooting ended seven men were dead, including Roman Catholic Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo, who had been shot at pointblank range as he was driven through the lot. The question of whether the cardinal was killed intentionally or accidentally remains one of Mexico's great mysteries. As Mexican authorities pursued the attackers, U.S. law enforcement officials were stunned to learn that at least two of the accused assassins were from San Diego, members of the city's Logan Heights "Calle 30" or 30th Street gang. U.S. police said that was the first hint they had of any connection between the Tijuana cartel and San Diego's Hispanic street gangs, the largest and most powerful of which are based in the Logan Heights neighborhood on the southern edge of the city, barely a dozen miles from the border. "In law enforcement we're always the last to know," said Lt. Howard Kendall of the San Diego Police Department's street gang unit. Today, the Tijuana cartel controls the Logan Heights gangs, using members as assassins to carry out executions and move drugs in the United States and Mexico, authorities said. Last year, for example, two Logan Heights gang members — one with the word "Logan" tattooed on his back — were killed in a shootout with Mexican military commandos at a Tijuana cartel safe house in the Sinaloa state capital of Culiacan. The pair reportedly had been guarding a cache of assault rifles, twoway radios, nightvision scopes and Mexican police and army uniforms. But, even now, with new local and federal law enforcement task forces monitoring the street gangs, U.S. intelligence on the gangs' cartel connections "is like the tip of the iceberg," said Kendall, adding, "They're tightmouthed. "You don't talk to the police because 'My homies are going to avenge me, my parents, my sister or my little brothers.'" U.S. police may have little intelligence on the MexicoSan Diego gang ties, but the connections are plainly visible to those who live in the workingclass community of Logan Heights. The neighborhood is saturated with a dozen gangs, many named for the streets on which they reside — 30th Street, 20th Street, 13th Street — or characteristics of the buildings where they hang out, like "The Red Steps." "Here, they [the cartels] know who they're dealing with," said Martin Escobedo, who grew up in Logan Heights and now works as youth director of the local branch of the Boys and Girls Club of San Diego, which attempts to keep its young members out of the gangs. "It's a wellrun business." "The kids start when they're 10 or 11, they steal, they work as lookouts," Escobedo said of the neighborhood gang members. Then they move up, Escobedo said, citing the example of his younger brother, Antonio. "They called him BamBam," said Escobedo. "He was the muscle." A hitman for the Arellano Felix brothers, Antonio was killed in a driveby shooting last year, just a month before his 23rd birthday and shortly after he tried to extricate himself from the gangs, said his brother. The Mexican cartels also are training the U.S. gangs to run their street operations more like businesses and less like the turfobsessed packs of the past. In one of the more worrisome trends for local police, the Arellano Felixcontrolled Hispanic gangs have begun recruiting members of African American gangs to distribute drugs on the streets of San Diego, police said. "The gangs don't fight with each other," said Lt. Robert J. Kanaski of the police department's drugs unit. "The thinking is, 'We're out here to make money, not kill each other.'" Gangs and gang violence are also proliferating in cities like Phoenix, which has become a major transit point for Mexican drug shipments into the United States. While crime rates nationwide are decreasing, violent and property crime rates continue to escalate in Arizona, according to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports. In the last two years, cartel hitmen dubbed "Sinaloa Cowboys" by U.S. police — because they are from the north Mexican state of Sinaloa — have been shooting it out in the bars and back streets of Phoenix, leaving police at a loss. "They are the enforcers," said Mike McCullough of the Phoenix Police Department. "If something isn't moved, or doesn't come back, they come up here to find out why. And that's when the shooting begins. "The victims know the suspects, but in the majority of cases there is no way to prove any connection between them," added McCullough. "All the victim's history is across the border, and so is the suspect's." Kidnappings Rise Drugrelated kidnappings have escalated dramatically in the last two years along the southwestern border, up as much as 50 percent in some stretches, according to law enforcement officials. Most cases involve drug organizations "trying to enforce discipline within their own ranks," said Steven McCraw of the FBI's Tucson office. "They're going after people they're holding accountable for lost loads, or that they suspect of cooperating with law enforcement, or for pilfering part of the drug load or not returning money." Some officials believe that the problem is far worse than figures indicate — that very few kidnappings are ever reported. Families, fearful of retaliation against other relatives, decide to keep quiet, these officials say, even though the kidnappings sometimes end with the torture and death of the victim. "This level of violence is difficult to track," said McCraw. "Often law enforcement doesn't find out about a kidnapping for six months to a year later." In many cases, cartel hitmen stage the kidnappings in the United States then dump the bodies in Mexico, recognizing that while the border is no barrier to their operations, it frequently does impede U.S. police investigations. The increase in drugrelated violence has touched innocent victims in both countries. In what authorities describe as one of the most tragic cases of the past two years, Omar Varas, 3, of the Tucson suburb of Chandler was kidnapped April 22, 1995, from the front yard of a church in the Mexican border town of Agua Prieta where he was playing with other children while his parents were attending a religious revival. Local drug traffickers mistook Omar's father for the relative of a drug trafficker who had accepted a 140pound load of marijuana in Douglas, Ariz., then disappeared without paying for it. Mexican authorities arrested seven men in connection with the kidnapping after a search in conjunction with the FBI. Last year, two teenage girls who allegedly were hired by drug traffickers to babysit for Omar for two months in 1995 led Mexican police to shreds of his underwear and a shirt buried beneath the patio of a house near Agua Prieta. Omar has never been found. © Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company