Pubdate: Sun, 5 Oct 2008
Source: San Diego Union Tribune (CA)
Copyright: 2008 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
Contact:  http://www.uniontrib.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/386
Note: Seldom prints LTEs from outside it's circulation area.
Authors: Leslie Berestein and Sandra Dibble, Union-Tribune Staff Writers
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Mexico (Mexico)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Felipe+Calderon
Bookmark http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Tijuana

BORDER BLOODSHED LIKELY TO WORSEN, EXPERTS WARN

Unease About Potential for Spillover Rises in U.S.

After a particularly violent week in Tijuana that has left 54 dead in 
a fierce cartel power struggle, experts on both sides of the border 
fear the worst is yet to come.

Since early last year, Mexican President Felipe Calderon has deployed 
thousands of soldiers and federal police to drug-route battlegrounds 
such as Baja California, Chihuahua and Michoacan. Experts say it's 
clear that the recent bloodbath along the border, felt especially 
hard in Ciudad Juarez and Nuevo Laredo and now increasingly in 
Tijuana, is the backlash.

In the United States, there's a growing unease about the potential 
for spillover. Some sectors of the border-region economy have already 
suffered severe losses as a result of the violence, and others may follow.

"The Mexican government has said that their strategy is to attack the 
cartels and break them down to a more manageable size," said 
political scientist David Shirk, director of the Trans-Border 
Institute at the University of San Diego. "The problem with breaking 
cartels up into smaller, supposedly more manageable pieces is that it 
becomes disorganized crime. You start to have people who are broken 
off, fractionalized, fighting among each other."

This destabilization has played out in Tijuana recently in a 
terrifying string of slayings. On Monday, 12 bodies were dumped 
outside an elementary school, some with their tongues cut out. A note 
left with them referred to "blabbermouths" and the Arellano Felix cartel.

The carnage continued yesterday. Authorities said the bodies of 10 
men had been found between midnight and noon in neighborhoods around 
the city. The dead included two men who had been decapitated. Five 
were found in a sport utility vehicle that had been reported stolen 
last week in California.

More than 400 homicides have been recorded this year in Tijuana, 
which has an estimated population of 1.5 million. The majority of 
them were drug-related, Mexican authorities say. There were 337 
killings citywide in 2007.

By comparison, New Orleans, one of the most violent U.S. cities, 
which is less than one-fifth the size of Tijuana with about 240,000 
people, had 209 homicides in 2007.

The spike in violence has revived long-standing complaints in Mexico 
that the United States shares the blame through illicit weapons 
exports to Mexico and the vast appetite for drugs that creates the 
market in the first place.

"We demand that the United States stop the consumption of drugs," 
Baja California Gov. Jose Guadalupe Osuna said last month. 
"Unfortunately, as long as there is demand, many people will continue 
to be hurt and killed."

But in spite of the death toll, U.S. drug enforcement officials say 
the disarray they are observing within the cartels is a positive 
sign. Mexican and U.S. officials have attributed much of the violence 
in Tijuana to fighting within the Arellano Felix gang, which has been 
weakened by the arrests and deaths of its top leadership.

"What you have here are two factions of the AFO (Arellano Felix 
Organization), and they are feeding off of each other," said Eileen 
Zeidler, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration 
in San Diego. "That's what we want. We want it to be disorganized. If 
they're not organized, they don't function. We want it to fall apart."

But this disorganization is likely to lead to more bloodshed in the 
short term, observers in both countries fear.

"This violence will diminish when there is a new equilibrium" among 
drug traffickers, said Jorge Chabat, a political analyst from the 
Mexico City-based research group CIDE.

Widening Consequences

The breakup of the cartels could present new challenges. The Calderon 
administration's strategy assumes that local and state police will be 
able to take care of the smaller, less-organized drug traffickers 
left behind, Shirk said, but "that makes an enormous presumption 
about the capacity of subnational governments in Mexico."

Plagued by police corruption, which is largely fueled by low pay and 
a lack of professional standards, local and state authorities are 
ill-equipped to handle the potentially more violent, low-level 
criminal element that could emerge in the wake of the large cartels, 
Shirk said.

Meanwhile, as the killings continue, the perception of lawlessness in 
Tijuana   exacerbated last month by two prison riots that claimed at 
least 23 lives   continues to have repercussions on both sides of the border.

Tijuana's tourism sector has been struggling as American visitors 
stay away. The reports of violence are only one reason, Mexican 
officials say, citing the struggling U.S. economy and congested 
border crossings as principal factors.

Despite the turmoil, Baja California's economy has continued to grow, 
state officials and business leaders said. The state's growth rate 
this year is expected to reach 5 percent, just below last year's rate 
of 6 percent, said Gabriel Posada Gallego, Baja's secretary of 
economic development.

Support for the maquiladora sector in Tijuana has held steady with 
about $250 million in new investments this year, said Saul GarcNa, 
president of the city's maquiladora association. Gov. Osuna said the 
state has added 32,000 jobs this year.

Baja California's business leaders, in the past sharply critical of 
what they said was government complacency, spoke supportively of the 
Calderon administration's self-styled war against the cartels.

"In the past, the government denied the problem," said Alfonso 
Alvarez Juan, statewide president of the Business Coordinating 
Council, a business umbrella group. "Today they are admitting that 
there is a problem and confronting it."

But if the violence isn't brought under control, "we'll see effects 
in 2009 or 2010," GarcNa said.

Economic experts say it's hard to quantify now, but companies could 
be put off by the violence and the costs of additional security.

"The biggest costs are the opportunities lost for having a climate of 
violence and crime," said Armando Chacon, director of research for 
the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness, a nonprofit, nonpartisan 
think tank in Mexico City.

Places other than Mexico will become more attractive for offshore 
operations if the violence escalates, said Marnie Cox, the San Diego 
Association of Governments' chief economist.

"They start to worry about CEOs getting kidnapped," he said. "This 
really hurts the investment environment."

With the loss of investment in Tijuana also comes an unquantifiable 
loss of revenue to ancillary businesses in the San Diego region, said 
border business consultant Kenn Morris.

"You are talking about paper suppliers, printing companies, legal 
services," he said. "If a company doesn't expand in Tijuana, San 
Diego loses out on jobs."

As the bodies have turned up, the pace of life has continued in 
Tijuana, one of the fastest-growing cities in Mexico. But residents 
lament the psychological toll of the killings.

"Of course there's an impact, because they're human beings, no matter 
what group they belong to," Tijuana Archbishop Rafael Romo Munoz said.

With the destabilization of cartels, opportunistic crimes such as 
kidnappings   often carried out by underemployed and undersupervised 
cartel foot soldiers   have become commonplace, driving some business 
owners and professionals north.

While casual visitors to Tijuana haven't been targeted, there has 
been a series of abductions involving U.S. citizens and legal 
residents, typically individuals who live and work on both sides of 
the border. Such incidents spiked last year in Baja California, where 
the FBI reported 26 abductions of U.S. citizens and legal residents 
in Tijuana, Rosarito Beach and Ensenada. Fifteen incidents involving 
U.S. citizens and residents have occurred so far this year. A small 
number of these abductions have been carried out on U.S. soil, with 
the victims transported to Mexico, according to the FBI.

Spillover across border
If the drug-related killings on the Mexican side of the border 
continue, it shouldn't come as a surprise if more violence spills 
over to the U.S. side because the cartels employ residents of both 
countries, said Howard Campbell, a border anthropologist and 
drug-traffic expert at the University Texas in El Paso.

Already, hospital officials in El Paso have had to beef up security 
when individuals wounded in Juarez's drug war come north for 
treatment, fearing that cartel hit men will appear to finish them 
off. So far, that hasn't happened, Campbell said.

While more than 1,000 slayings have been reported this year in 
Juarez, the majority linked to organized crime, drug-related 
spillover north of the border has been minimal.

"I do think part of it is luck," Campbell said. "At some point, the 
Mexican cartel people may decide, what do they have to fear, really? 
A lot is their own perception that they can't get away with this 
stuff in the U.S. But sadly, I think they could. My sources in Juarez 
are saying the worst of the violence is yet to come."

Campbell said the Mexican effort is handicapped by law enforcement 
ties to the cartels at various levels.

"They can't win the war," Campbell said. "And they have to realize 
they are not winning it, and that they need to rethink the policy. 
I'm not saying let the 'narcos' claim victory, but let's rethink the 
policy and try not to wage war with them, because it is not working."

Others agree that Calderon is fighting with a weak hand but commend 
his efforts, with the violent backlash a necessary evil.

"I think it is a mistake to look at the bloodshed and say, 'Look at 
what Calderon is doing; it is not working,' when in fact it may just 
be the opposite   that it is working in some way, with these 
unforeseen and unpleasant results," said Jeffrey Davidow, president 
of the Institute of the Americas at the University of California San 
Diego and ambassador to Mexico from 1998 to 2002.

In the past week, Calderon has introduced two proposals aimed at 
enhancing his anti-drug efforts, including an initiative intended to 
weed out corrupt police and a controversial proposal to legalize 
small amounts of marijuana and cocaine in order to weaken the black market.

The latter is bound to be politically unpopular in both countries. 
However, with U.S. consumption driving the northbound flow of 
narcotics, if the Calderon administration's current strategy fails, 
the United States will have to find a way to either curb drug use or 
contemplate some form of legalization, some experts say.

"That is one thing that we know would ultimately kill off these 
cartels. It would rob them of their oxygen, the enormous profits they 
make," said Shirk, who cites the end of Prohibition in 1933 as a 
possible precedent. "We had a similar situation in the 1920s. That is 
how we beat the mob."

[sidebar]

BLOODY WEEK: BY THE NUMBERS

10: Number of bodies found yesterday in various neighborhoods of 
Tijuana. Two were decapitated; some were wrapped in blankets and 
tossed to the side of the road.

8: Bodies found Friday in Tijuana, including two that were decapitated.

9: Bodies found Thursday. Eight men were found together in an empty 
lot near the center of the city. They had been shot in the head. A 
ninth was wrapped in a blanket and found near the central bus station.

3: Bodies found in two locations Wednesday.

3: Bodies found Tuesday, including two near a water-utility tank. In 
addition, three barrels found outside a seafood restaurant were 
examined to see if they contained acid and human remains.

19: Bodies found in several locations Monday, including 12 near an 
elementary school. Several had their tongues cut out.

2: Bodies found wrapped in blankets Sunday.

SOURCE: Baja California Attorney General's Office
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake