Pubdate: Sun, 31 May 2009
Source: Toronto Star (CN ON)
Copyright: 2009 The Toronto Star
Contact:  http://www.thestar.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/456
Author: Linda Diebel, Staff Reporter

LIFE AND DEATH IN NARCOLAND

Ordinary Folks in Tijuana Once Felt Exempt From the Drug Wars. That's 
No Longer the Case

The Poster City for Narcoland Is a Raw and Savage Place, Where 
Cartels Revel in Cruelty, the More Macabre the Better

TIJUANA, Mexico - The discovery of nine human heads last November in 
a seedy east-end neighbourhood - Granjas Familiares de Matamoros - 
was a barbaric nadir in Mexico's drug wars.

Three of the decapitated heads belonged to police officers: their 
credentials were stuffed in their mouths. Police also found an 
obscure note from the assassins that roughly translates: "We were in 
it with Fatso (El Gordo), but now we're doing this for Three (Tres)."

Autopsying such grisly remains will never be routine for Dr. Antonio 
Munoz Lara. Nevertheless, the Baja California state coroner 
increasingly finds himself working on the human detritus of a drug 
war that is evolving on two fronts: the fallout from President Felipe 
Calderon's decision to throw billions of dollars and the Mexican army 
at the problem; and, in Tijuana, the battle for control of the 
Arrellano Felix Brothers cartel, which grips this border city like death.

"It gets bloodier all the time," says Munoz, 49, a stocky man who 
wears a goatee and eyeglasses pushed back on his head. "In my view, 
it is proof of power ... In other words, 'I want to show you I am 
very, very bad and you'd better not (mess) with me. Nothing's going 
to stop me.'"

Munoz shouts to be heard over the wail of police sirens. "They're 
like air raid sirens in wartime," he observes during an interview in 
his office, not far from the morgue. "We're at war too. This is our 
war, you see."

Tijuana could be the poster city for life and death in Narcoland. 
It's a raw, savage city, where cartels revel in cruelty, the more 
macabre the better. Living here must be like being trapped in a 
slaughterhouse where anybody - man, woman, child - could be slung up 
on hooks at any moment.

Munoz says drug crimes today are completely different from those a 
decade or more ago, when he began forensic work back in his 
birthplace. Then, there was a degree of control, an unspoken rule 
that families were exempt from rivalry and revenge, especially women 
and children.

The town is on the border with the United States, just south of San 
Diego, a pivotal spot on north-south transit routes and a gateway for 
the drugs that feed an insatiable appetite in the U.S. and Canada.

Moreover, the recession and rapid plunge in tax-free factory 
production in this region have left growing ranks of the unemployed 
vulnerable to the allure of working in the drug trade in order to 
survive. Many end up using.

Munoz isn't alone in depicting decline. Victor Clark Alfaro, a 
Tijuana-based anthropologist, says: "It's unfortunate, but I would 
say organized crime is getting worse."

Clark fears the Republic of Mexico itself is moving inexorably 
towards full-blown narco-state status, although - and this is 
important - it is not there yet. Nobody need look further for proof 
than Tijuana's makeshift graves and dismembered bodies, or streets 
where any toddler can pick up a collection of shell casings in minutes.

But even the statistics - 844 drug-war murders in 2008, 169 in the 
first four months of 2009 - do not do justice to the awful reality of 
Tijuana life.

IT'S COMMON for corpses of drug war victims to deliver messages, just 
as last year's decapitated heads were meant to do. Gangsters crave 
fame, and the Tijuana succession wars involve convicted criminal 
Armando Villarreal ("Fatso") and aspiring narco-lord Teodoro Garcia 
Simental ("Tres" - a nickname based on another nickname, El Teo, 
taken from the first three letters of his name). He's feared for his 
special medieval ruthlessness. Like beheadings.

On a recent May Monday at the morgue, Munoz completes the autopsy of 
a male corpse, found in an east-side industrial park (another 
favourite body dump) with a scrawled message. In a culture where 
everything "narco" gets a nickname, these are narcomensajes, and this 
one reads: "This is what happens to prick rats that rob cars at gunpoint."

The autopsy took eight hours because Munoz had to remove 31 bullets 
from a concentrated area beginning in the lower throat, lungs and 
diaphragm and extending in fairly straight lines to the liver and 
kidneys. He grips each bullet with tweezers and lets it drop with a 
clink into a stainless steel tray. He estimates the man had been dead 
about six hours before he was delivered to the morgue.

Munoz determined there were two shooters, likely taller than the 
victim, standing more than a metre away when they opened fire. Police 
think there were three because they found 66 shell casings from an 
AK-47, 21 from a 9-millimetre pistol and eight from a weapon of 
unknown calibre.

They tortured him first, binding his feet with grey masking tape and 
spraying the ground around him with bullets. Somebody hit him over 
the head with such force his left eyeball popped out of his skull.

The coroner walks the short distance to his office to fill out 
paperwork, including the shooting victim's death certificate. 
Outside, in the waiting room, a middle-aged woman, the victim's aunt, 
sobs as she asks who will look after his three children.

"Why? WHY?" she cries loudly, a question one might think has an obvious answer.

"Everybody comes here suffering;" says Munoz. "I'm not a police 
officer and I'm not a judge. I don't judge anyone."

He has worked on headless bodies, bodiless heads, heads without lips 
or faces, corpses without genitals, legs without feet ... pretty much 
the whole shebang post mortem.

Sometimes, he even examines vats of greasy liquid with bits of bone 
in a lye-water solution or sifts through smoking acid ash. His morgue 
- - like others throughout Mexico - is filled with remains impossible 
to identify.

Munoz believes everybody deserves to carry a name, in life and death. 
Sometimes, though, that's not possible.

Organized crime is big into kidnapping - for profit and/or silence.

Cristina Palacios Hodoyan, in her 60s, is obsessed with the search 
for her missing son, Alejandro, 35, whom she counts among the "disappeared."

He was taken on a Wednesday morning in March, 1997. Men armed with 
AK-47s seized him from his car and then tossed his mother, who had 
leaped at them screaming and flailing, from their van.

Palacios, who works for the Citizens' Association against Impunity on 
behalf of the missing, knows Alejandro was mixed up with the 
Arrellano Felix cartel. It's a complicated tale, with U.S. 
authorities involved at one point, but it's believed the Arrellano 
Felix crime family abducted and likely murdered him.

"So," the mother challenges, "is my son not a human being? Did his 
rights vanish when he was taken? What about all the others?"

She maintains Tijuana authorities do little to help find the hundreds 
of people missing in the drug wars, including, among others, 
politicians, police officers, prosecutors, rights activists, 
musicians and other artists.

Palcacios says she fights tirelessly to find the disappeared. That 
cause is her raison d'etre.

TO DATE IN 2009, 15 cops have died in shootouts and assassinations, 
reason enough for the police memorial that honours this city's fallen 
martyrs. Their photographs and names are etched into the gleaming 
dark stone of a wall that forms part of the tribute.

And yet, oddly, officers on the municipal force stand around chatting 
outside their station at shift change, eat in restaurants well known 
to their enemies and ride in rundown vehicles in which sentimental 
ballads about traffickers - the infamous narcocorridos - soar over 
the crackle of the police radio. Threats are commonplace.

On Monday, April 27, Munoz and his colleagues worked on the remains 
of seven police officers - six men and a woman - gunned down in the 
space of 45 minutes, three in an ambush at a restaurant and the 
others in separate attacks. The cops are easy targets.

In his government's war against drugs, Calderon dispatched an 
estimated 25,000-40,000 soldiers to special anti-drug duty across 
Mexico, including Tijuana. (Not surprisingly, the Mexican armed 
forces are secretive about information, including troop size and 
movement, or fatalities, in the drug war.)

Killing soldiers on patrol behind bulletproof glass and armour 
plating is a lot tougher than taking down local police. Moreover, 
dead cops bring other benefits. Fewer honest officers mean fewer 
obstacles to the continual shakedown of local merchants and corporate 
tycoons for protection money.

Then there's revenge in a city where army Col. Julian Leyzaola - the 
police chief - and new Tijuana Mayor Jorge Ramos fired 248 officers 
(out of a 2,160-member municipal force) when the city government 
changed hands last year. Other officers remain under investigation, 
with rumours flying about impending purges.

There have been no public breaks in the case of the seven murdered 
officers, although Baja California Attorney-General Salvador Ortiz 
Morales insists the war against the cartels is a priority, both for 
his team and the national government in Mexico City. Organized crime 
activities - drug trafficking and kidnapping - fall under federal 
jurisdiction, leading to action by the military, as well as the 
Federal Police and several special national and state investigative units.

While authorities are beginning to see modest results with some 
high-profile arrests (see box), Ortiz concludes: "We are not 
satisfied. All of Tijuana is united against our common enemy."

THIS SCENE IS surreal. No other word can begin to conjure up the 
bizarre, dreamy quality of the show put on by Mexican military HQ, 
Region II, for the media today at its base in downtown Tijuana.

Two heavily armed soldiers in combat helmets and black masks guard 
handcuffed Enrique Solis Mejia, 52, on a makeshift stage on the 
base's basketball court.

Mejia, from the Guadalupe Victoria farming co-operative near the 
border city of Mexicali, is spindly, scruffy and glazed-looking. He 
had the great misfortune to have been stopped by an army patrol as he 
was driving a bright red Kenwood 18-wheeler with 563,800 kilos of 
marijuana stashed under lightly strewn straw. None too bright, really.

Journalists crowd in. Cameras whir and the ear-shattering calls of 
peacocks fill the air. The base is home to about two dozen of the big 
birds, which fan their tail feathers in full mating strut and gawk at 
the Mejia espectaculo.

"Perhaps you'd like to come over and see his vehicle?" a military 
press officer asks helpfully, and everybody marches along to do so.

That's it. Show's over. The army got its man and his stash.

Nevertheless, hardly a week goes by without the army heralding some 
drug bust or another, suggesting great headway is being made in the 
war on drugs. For the most part, it's small stuff. Mejia's just a 
mule - low-level and totally expendable.

OUR INTERVIEW over, the light fades fast and Munoz wants to get home. 
He should rest when he can; he understands better than most the 
strain and peril of living and working in Tijuana.

"I have respect (for what can happen)," he says. "I can't say I don't 
live with fear, but I'm not involved. So I have learned if I carry 
myself with respect, they are going to treat me with respect."

Or so he hopes. That's how everybody gets by in Tijuana, with hope of 
personally escaping the violence that is both random and, for too 
many unlucky innocents, horribly targeted.

"What's it like in Toronto? Any jobs for coroners in your city?" he 
asks, half in jest, as I pack my gear. "How many murders do you have a year?

I reply we've had close to 100 some years. I'm thinking of 80 murders 
in 2005 - "Year of the Gun" - and 84 in 2007.

He's silent, and then chuckles. There's no humour in the sound. He 
sighs loudly.

"Bueno ... you know we have three or four a day here in Tijuana?"

[sidebar]

THE STEW MAKER

They call him El Pozolero, the Stew Maker. Sometimes he is El 
Pozolero de Teo (Teo's Stew Maker). One hundred soldiers arrested 
this narcotrafficker - real name, Santiago Meza Lopez, 45 - last 
January in Tijuana. And whatever his name, his was a very big bust. 
Meza is one sick dude. He gets his nickname from his practice of 
dissolving corpses in corrosives. During the Tijuana military news 
conference (to mark a rare significant capture), Meza admitted he 
soaked 300 corpses in his water/lye recipe for 24 hours and then 
buried what was left. For this, plus kidnapping and other chores, he 
earned $650 weekly. Authorities believe he works for Teodoro Garcia 
Simental (El Teo), who's locked in a battle for control of Tijuana's 
Arellano Felix Brothers cartel with a gang family member, nicknamed 
El Ingeniero (The Engineer). Meza apparently has ties to the Sinaloa 
cartel, one of the country's six most powerful criminal operations, 
during what is arguably the bloodiest jockeying for control in the 
modern history of Mexico's drug-trafficking industry. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake