BajaNews - 10-18-2010 at 01:15 AM
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/18/101018fa_fact_...
William Finnegan
The New Yorker
October 18, 2010, p. 62
ABSTRACT:
LETTER FROM TIJUANA about cleaning up Tijuana’s corrupt police force. In the drug wars that rack Mexico, Tijuana is an anomaly. It’s a place where
public security has actually improved. In 2007 and 2008, the city was a killing field. There were daylight shoot-outs between gangs using automatic
weapons and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Kidnappings for ransom got so bad that many wealthy and middle-class families fled to the U.S.
In Tijuana, the military began by disarming the city’s police. The twenty-six hundred members of Tijuana’s finest were widely believed to work for the
narco-traffickers. Then Army officers began replacing local police commanders. Lieutenant Colonel Julián Leyzaola Pérez (Retired) became Tijuana’s
chief of police. In December, 2008, he was named Tijuana’s Secretary of Public Security, increasing his authority. Unlike his predecessors, Leyzaola
went straight at the narcos. He chased their armored convoys through the streets and replaced police commanders whom he considered passive with other
retired Army officers. His fearlessness and ire left tijuanenses in awe. In a country where organized crime operates with fantastic impunity,
this sort of ground-level defiance was unusual, if not unique.
Drug-related violence declined in Tijuana in 2009. Mentions the arrest of gang leader Teodoro García (El Teo) Simental, in January, 2010. With the
help of the Army, Leyzaola has been conducting a large-scale depuración, or “purification,” of the Tijuana police. He has arrested, often personally,
more than a hundred and eighty officers suspected of corruption, and has forced the resignation of hundreds more. Ricardo Castellanos Hernández, a
six-year police veteran, was taken in for interrogation in September, 2009, and tortured for three days. He maintained his innocence but eventually
broke down and signed a paper implicating other officers.
“That’s how it works,” Raúl Ramírez Baena said. Ramírez is a human-rights activist with long experience in Baja, California. He drew a diagram,
showing how each “suspect” provided a list of names, and how each of those “suspects” provided another list, quickly producing a “network.” “They call
it an ‘investigation.’ But there is no investigating. Only arrests, interrogations, and torture.” Many other detainees say they were tortured.
Mentions Blanca Mesina Nevarez, Silvia Vázquez Camacho, and Luis Galván Hernández. Leyzaola was breezy about the torture accusations. “Some have been
hit, sure,” he said. “But no torture, no.”
Leyzaola’s six-gun approach to fighting organized crime and police corruption has made space for real security improvements. But are the dirty cops
actually the ones being purged? Purges proceed by their own blinkered logic, particularly when they are conducted by torture, and are themselves
subject to corruption. Numerous people said it was all a show. The intended audience was the public and “Obama.” The latter is shorthand for the many
U.S. agencies funneling more than a billion dollars into the Mexican government’s anti-drug efforts through the Mérida Initiative.
BajaNews - 10-18-2010 at 01:18 AM
http://www.newyorker.com/online/2010/10/18/101018on_audio_fi...
This week in the magazine, William Finnegan profiles the Tijuana chief of police, Julián Leyzaola Pérez. Here Finnegan talks with Blake Eskin about
the drop in violence in Tijuana, Leyzaola’s bold tactics in confronting the drug cartels, and the allegations that Leyzaola’s purge of the police
force has relied on torture.
Listen:
http://downloads.newyorker.com/mp3/outloud/101018_outloud_fi...
The Great Tijuana Drug War Seems Finished
BajaNews - 10-18-2010 at 01:29 AM
http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/this_just_in/article_4bc29622...
by Randy Dotinga
October 17, 2010
Across Mexico, the human toll of the drug wars over the past few years is thought to be nearing 30,000. In Tijuana alone, almost 500 people were
killed in just the last three months of 2008, many of them strung up in public as a warning to others.
The killings haven't stopped. But their numbers have dropped and, as journalist William Finnegan writes in this week's New Yorker magazine, "the great
Tijuana drug war" seems to be over. Much of the credit may go to police Chief Julián Leyzaola Pérez, a retired Army officer who wields so much
machismo that he once punched the corpse of a dead drug trafficker in the face.
But, as Finnegan writes, Leyzaola's own hands may not be clean.
I interviewed Finnegan by phone about Tijuana's violence, allegations of torture in the police force and the threat looming over the city's future.
Who's affected the most by the violence in Tijuana?
The death toll was so high a couple years ago, and it's still quite high. It's largely among people involved in drug trafficking and other parts of
organized crime.
But obviously, there are passersby who can get hurt in some of these shootouts and when the crimes extend to kidnapping for ransom, for instance, or
extortion of businesses. That's how it reaches straight into the general population: through families and businesses who have nothing to do with
organized crime.
On this side of the border, we think of organized crime through the prism of Chicago in the 1920s and The Sopranos. Is it different in
Tijuana?
In essence, I don't think it is different.
The drug trafficking organizations, the big cartels, have branched out into a lot of areas of criminal activity that don't involve drugs: human
smuggling, money laundering, prostitution, murder for hire, kidnapping for ransom, extortion of businesses. They've diversified, and some don't even
make the majority of their profits from the drug business. In the end, they look a lot like the organized crime here.
But they have tremendous reach into government, probably more than we probably ever experienced in the U.S.
Public corruption is essential to success in organized crime. They've managed to corrupt many branches of government with their tremendous wealth.
What's different now than a couple years ago?
What's changed in Tijuana and makes it unusual in Mexican cities, particularly among border cities, is that public security has improved over the past
couple of years.
The city was caught in a full-fledged gang war in 2007 and 2008, a level of danger that was really off the charts with whole restaurants being taken
hostage. That's no longer true. It's considered the rare success story in the general context of rising drug violence.
You focus on the police chief. Has he made a big difference in people's lives?
Some people give him a lot of credit — the big businessmen in Tijuana who were moving their families to the United States. They really tend to credit
Leyzaola with the improvement of public security.
In general, my man-on-the-street survey didn't turn up the kind of support I expected to find. People were more cynical. They agreed the streets had
gotten safer, but people didn't tend to credit him as much as I thought they might.
In a Hollywood version of the drug wars, he'd be a hero. But people tended to tell me that the cartels were fighting among themselves, there were
different gangs sorting out their differences, and that the greater peace is a sign that some of the more violent characters had been removed from the
scene.
You write that the police chief has become a very public face of law enforcement. But at the same time, his actions within his own department
have raised questions.
He personally put himself on the line by publicly challenging the narcos. He had a lot of success: he managed to stay alive and make it uncomfortable
for the narcos to parade around in their armored SUV convoys waving their AK-47s.
He said his most important achievement by far was an anti-corruption campaign within the police. The depuración, or purification, of the police has
been a big project: He told me he'd smoked out 600 bad cops, arrested them or forced them to resign, out of a police force of 2,000.
But there was very little if any serious investigation of police corruption, and the whole process seemed to proceed by torture. In the end, I did
believe the testimony of the torture victims I talked to.
Despite all the violence in Mexico, border cities like San Diego and El Paso have low crime rates. Why hasn't violence crossed over to the
U.S.?
It's pretty striking, especially because of all the noise you hear in politics about the violent crime associated with illegal immigration and so on.
But that isn't to say that Mexican mafias with extensive drug trafficking operations in the United States aren't in a very rough business, and there's
not plenty of violence associated with that business.
It's sometimes said that cartels based in border cities, like the Arellano-Felix organization in Tijuana, are careful not to perpetrate violent crime
in the neighboring U.S. cities because they tend to have their families living there. I can't prove that's the pattern, but that's a theory I've often
heard.
Has your work given you any insight into what would happen if marijuana was legalized in California?
It would depend a lot on the form of legalization and the scope.
If the United States as a whole was to legalize marijuana to some extent and regulate production and distribution in a serious way, the way that is
done with alcohol and tobacco, that could really hurt the Mexican cartel's business. Their product would remain illegal, and they would certainly be
competing with an affordable and legal product.
With the kind of piecemeal legalization you see going in the U.S., half-legal here and semi-legal there, you could still end up with a situation where
the Mexican drug trafficking organizations are supplying marijuana to American users who are in a situation where there's been some legalization, and
they may be getting high quite legally. That doesn't mean that pot hasn't gotten some blood on it from the long trail from its production to its
ultimate sale.
This has been a brutally violent week in Tijuana. What's the future of violence in the city?
There have been predictions that the Sinaloa Cartel, the most powerful trafficking cartel in Mexico, sees the Arellano-Felix cartel as having been
weakened — which it has — and is now planning to make a major move on Tijuana the way they did on Ciudad Juarez, leading to incredible violence. God
forbid that should happen.
tjBill - 10-19-2010 at 11:11 AM
The New Yorker article requires a subscription to read. But I think they make it available to everyone after a month.
krafty - 10-19-2010 at 12:49 PM
This will make my 83 yr. old Dad happy-he thinks we are nuts for living here, and reads the New Yorker religiously
tjBill - 11-7-2010 at 05:29 PM
The New Yorker article is now available without a subscription,
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/18/101018fa_fact_...
It's an interesting read. At 8 pages they really go in depth.