Ateo - 1-8-2012 at 06:45 AM
From the San Diego UT last night:
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/jan/07/tijuana-sees-drop...
TIJUANA — The new face of drug trafficking in Baja California is less violent and less centralized than in previous years. To the surprise of many
observers, groups that once waged public battles now seem to share the key Tijuana drug corridor.
Authorities said the result is that as drug-related homicides have risen in other parts of Mexico, the numbers in Tijuana have plummeted — from 820 in
2010 to 478 last year.
The falling homicide rate and the drop in high-profile crimes have come as remaining members of the once-dominant Arellano Félix Organization
apparently have found a way to co-exist in Tijuana with their longtime archrival, the Sinaloa cartel. Their hierarchical structures have given way to
smaller, semi-independent groups operating in Baja California that are lower-profile than their predecessors, authorities said.
Tijuana has been held up as a success story in Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s drug war, now entering its sixth year. While independent analysts
often say a truce between the city’s former rival cartels has been crucial to the decrease in violence, Baja California officials said the most
important factor has been government action — by the military as well as civilian law-enforcement agencies.
“In Tijuana, it was the buildup of social pressure that finally allowed authorities to do their work,” said Alberto Capella Ibarra, the city’s
secretary of public safety. A critical move, he said, has been the purging of hundreds of police officers accused of collaborating with drug lords.
Today, the traffickers “are not confronting each other because they don’t have the logistical capacity,” said Daniel de la Rosa, Baja California’s
public safety secretary. Stronger law enforcement has meant that no one trafficking group can take power, he said, and “they can’t openly conduct
criminal operations.”
The vast changes in the drug-trafficking world over the past decade were underscored last week in San Diego federal court, where the Arellanos’
onetime leader, Benjamín Arellano Félix, pleaded guilty to charges of racketeering and money laundering. He now faces up to 25 years behind bars.
Nearly a decade after his 2002 arrest, Benjamín Arellano would not recognize the group that he and his brothers built into one of Mexico’s most
formidable and profitable trafficking cartels. Today, a nephew, Fernando Sánchez Arellano, and possibly an Arellano sister, Enedina, are said to be at
the helm of an organization that authorities describe as a shadow of its former self.
A reflection of the altered landscape is the replacement of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Arellano Félix Task Force with the Major
Mexican Traffickers Group.
The California-Mexico border has long been a prime corridor for smuggling illicit drugs to the U.S. market, and trafficking has continued whether
cartels are flourishing or in retrenchment. A 2010 analysis by U.S. Customs and Border Protection found that arrests or deaths of key traffickers had
no effect on drug seizures.
“Drug trafficking remains the same. The only thing that’s changing are those at the head of criminal organizations,” Capella said.
With the decline of the Arellanos, the Sinaloa cartel has been expanding its influence across Baja California, but the extent of that control is a
subject of some dispute. In Tijuana, authorities have increasingly connected Sinaloa to arrests and drug seizures, the construction of big drug
tunnels and the discovery of $15 million in U.S. currency last November in an upscale neighborhood.
TIJUANA — Sinaloa has not launched an open bid for Tijuana, authorities said. It and the Arellanos each operate about a dozen semi-independent
trafficking groups in the city.
“It’s in everybody’s interest right now for Tijuana to be quiet,” said Nathan Jones, an adjunct professor at the University of San Diego who has
analyzed the Arellanos. With expansion of the Zeta drug-trafficking organization in other parts of Mexico, “you’ve got a lot of problems if you’re the
Sinaloa cartel. You don’t need another problem in Tijuana.”
Often described as Mexico’s most powerful drug-trafficking group, Sinaloa is a national player whose presence in Tijuana is more recent. Authorities
said the group backed 2008 efforts to unseat the Arellanos by Teodoro García Simental, a former Arellano lieutenant. The fight led to unprecedented
bloodshed in Tijuana, with a record 844 homicides that year.
But since Garcia’s arrest in 2010, high-profile violence in the area has fallen off noticeably.
Victor Clark, a human-rights activist in Tijuana who has studied drug trafficking in Baja California, talks of a new generation of traffickers who do
not carry the animosities of their predecessors and have taken a more practical approach.
“They used to be mortal enemies, but now they have a very businesslike vision,” he said.
Drug-related violence for Mexico as a whole rose last year, with various national media outlets reporting more than 12,000 deaths. The federal
government has not released its figures.
Tijuana’s homicide figures show a drop of more than 40 percent between 2010 and 2011. Authorities said the majority of recent killings have resulted
from neighborhood turf battles between small-time drug dealers, in contrast to the high-profile violence between major traffickers — gunfights in
public thoroughfares, headless bodies hung from highway bridges, corpses dissolved in lye — that engulfed the city between 2008 and 2010.
While Calderón has highlighted Tijuana as an example of progress, some said it’s too early to draw any conclusions.
“Despite the notable and very positive decrease in high-profile violence, the sustainability of the trend is unclear” in Tijuana, said Angelica Durán
Martínez, a Ph.D. candidate at Brown University who is studying Mexico’s drug-trafficking groups. “There is still a high rate of violence in the
outskirts and poor colonias that has not been properly addressed.”
At USD, Jones said the future remains uncertain. “How institutionalized is this peace? How fragile is it?”
SFandH - 1-8-2012 at 07:04 AM
Thanks for the report.
"Tijuana’s homicide figures show a drop of more than 40 percent between 2010 and 2011."
Let's hope the traffickers figure out it's more profitable to do their business in a peaceful way.
[Edited on 1-8-2012 by SFandH]
woody with a view - 1-8-2012 at 08:11 AM
so that's why bajarich is such an a-hole!