San Diego UT: Tijuana drug rivalries turn violent

Drug Rivalries Turn Violent in Tijuana

Note: This is republished from the San Diego Union Tribune, about a week old. Tijuana is covered sparingly, but this reporter has consistently published quality stories, since the Teo/Inge days. The Tribune's coverage during that time, along with La Times, Richard Mariosi was worthy of praise. It's basically a summary of the last several weeks of violence in Tijuana, with a few points I thought were interested, and not reported elsewhere, I list those at the bottom.

TIJUANA — Severed heads inside an icebox. Banners with cryptic, threatening messages. The shooting of a state agent at a busy intersection on a weekday afternoon. Grisly, visible crimes have come back to haunt Tijuana in recent weeks, shattering the calm of this city struggling to shed its violent image.

Since April 1, Tijuana has seen more than 100 murders, with the great majority of crimes attributed by authorities to the city’s street drug trade. What has especially raised concern has been the brazen and public nature of some of the killings. Some question the timing of the violence, with Mexico’s federal midterm elections scheduled for June 7.

“There’s much lack of control in the world of small-scale drug traffickers,” said José María González, Baja California’s deputy attorney general for organized crime. “From the information that we have ... the problems are at the lowest levels, among those fighting for street corners in the colonias, not among the midlevel and high-level commanders.”

The battle for control over the lucrative Tijuana drug corridor goes back decades, but in more recent years much of the violence in the city has been attributed to the flourishing domestic market.

Who’s fighting whom? It depends on the day and the neighborhood, according to law enforcement authorities on both sides of the border. Once the uncontested territory of the Arellano Félix Organization, the market today is far more difficult to track, a world of shifting alliances with small, semi-independent cells functioning at the base of an intricate organized crime pyramid.

“The cartels sell them crystal meth so that they can sell them in the colonias,” said Victor Clark, a human-rights activist in Tijuana who has studied the drug trade. “What we have is the corporatization of the Tijuana neighborhood drug trade.”

The Sinaloa drug cartel is now acknowledged as the dominant drug organization in Baja California. “Absolutely, we believe that Sinaloa controls both the plazas in Tijuana and Mexicali,” said Gary Hill, assistant special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in San Diego.

The group’s alleged leaders in Baja California are two brothers well-known to U.S. authorities: Alfonso Arzate, known as “El Aquiles,” and René Arzate, or “La Rana.” Both are fugitives under indictment in San Diego federal court on drug trafficking charges.

In a statement this year, the U.S. Attorney’s Office described Alfonso Arzate as “the alleged Tijuana plaza boss for the Sinaloa cartel” and René Arzate as “an enforcer for the cartel in Tijuana who is believed responsible for a significant amount of violence in the Tijuana plaza.”

Just as the street-level trade is constantly shifting, so has the bigger picture. Groups from central Mexico, the Nueva Generación from Jalisco and Caballeros Templarios from Michoacan, have been quietly moving loads across the border with permission from Sinaloa, DEA’s Hill said. And remnants of the Arellano Félix Organization are still in town, seeking to reorganize.

Some of the former Arellano bosses are waiting and watching from Guadalajara after serving federal sentences, said one U.S. official who has long studied the drug trade. “They may not be calling themselves AFO anymore, but to them it’s still their plaza,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not an authorized spokesman for his agency.

Longtime observers of the drug underworld note the cyclical nature of the violence, as truces are brokered then broken. Violence in the city reached record levels from 2008 to 2010, when the Arellano Félix Organization, weakened by arrests and deaths of its top leaders, faced a major challenge from a former lieutenant who had formed an alliance with Sinaloa. Residents woke to headlines of the latest death count: bodies decapitated, dissolved in lye, hung from highway overpasses.

In recent years, the high-profile violence has largely subsided, the result of an accord between the remnants of the Arellano Félix Organization and Sinaloa, law enforcement authorities say. While the homicide count in Tijuana has remained high, with 493 killings reported in 2014 and 539 in 2013, most crimes have taken place out of the limelight in impoverished sections of the city and have been attributed largely to violence among street dealers.

“The problem in Mexico is that peace reigns under two circumstances, when there is a strong police presence or when one cartel has overwhelming dominance and nobody can challenge it,” said one U.S. official.

Now the return since April of high-profile crimes, such as beheadings and daytime shootings, has sounded the alarms.

“We feel the same as in 2007, when it was just starting,” said Gustavo Fernández de León, president of the business group Coparmex. “Here the alert is to deter the violence so that it doesn’t keep growing.”

But authorities stress that the current violence remains a far cry from peak years, when corrupt police officers collaborated with criminal gangs and shootings took place in restaurants and other places where members of the public might get caught in the crossfire, said González of the Baja California Attorney

General’s Office.

“The targets have been very clear. They’re not going after citizens,” he said.

Many of the recent victims share a similar profile, Alejandro Lares Valladares, Tijuana’s secretary of public safety, said in an interview at his office in the city’s Rio Zone.

“They’re freelancers, fighting over who’s going to take control of the narcomenudeo, the selling of drugs,” Lares said. “It’s block by block.”

Lares said he is using technology and intelligence to identify and track potential suspects: One of the problems, he said, is that judges are too quick to release suspects caught by Tijuana police. He held up a notebook filled with booking photographs of recent victims, alongside pictures taken after they were killed.

Fernández, the president of Coparmex, said t

“We think that the agencies are coordinating better, but the problem is the legal system,” he said. “We want judges, magistrates, legislators to sit down together, to see what’s going on. ... To ask, why are we releasing criminals, and fix the laws.”

Some of the most grisly discoveries of recent weeks have been five severed heads in three locations. Two that were found inside an abandoned ice chest on May 13 near the Macroplaza shopping center in eastern Tijuana that belonged to men who had been involved in the local drug trade, said González, the deputy attorney general

But the violence has also claimed some innocent lives: On April 11, a 4-year-old girl was killed by gunmen targeting her mother, a drug vendor, authorities said. On May 5, a 14-year-old girl was comatose after being shot in the head when gunmen attacked a drug dealer in her neighborhood, they said. On May 12, 4-year-old Jonathan Valdéz died and his mother was injured when gunmen shot up the house where the boy lived with his mother and her boyfriend, described as a neighborhood drug dealer.

In the latest incident, one of the accused killers was a 17-year-old boy named José Omar Macías Colmenero, known as “El Perrito.” He had previously been arrested.

Authorities link the renewed spike in violence to the April 9 killing of Luis Manuel Toscano, also known as “El Mono,” a drug trafficker who authorities said ran the drug trade in Tijuana’s Zona Norte and the adjacent Tijuana River channel, for years home to an entrenched population of homeless people and drug addicts.

Toscano was a longtime member of the Arellano Félix Organization, authorities said. He had been arrested in July 2012 by the Mexican military, but was out on bond when he was shot to death along with his bodyguard at a taco stand shortly after checking in at the state court near the city’s La Mesa Penintentiary.

sandra.dibble@utsandiego.com

(619) 293-1716

Twitter: @sandradibble

*AFO bosses waiting in Guadeljera after serving federal sentences, who would these be?

* Sinaloa controls Tijuana and Mexicali 100%, I don't know if I agree with Tijuana.