ON THE BORDER

Tijuana -- Growing drug abuse among Mexicans, the escalation of their
government's war on drugs and the cutthroat battle among cartels to
control trafficking routes into the United States are leaving many
Mexican police officers dead -- as killings and hundreds of
kidnappings spread tension throughout Tijuana Safe in the cheerful
cocoon of Mother Antonia Day Care Center, children of Tijuana's
embattled police officers lunched on spaghetti and milk and squealed
in delight as they batted balloons at a party.

On the streets outside, 25 of their parents' colleagues were murdered
last year.

"We haven't lost any parents, but sometimes there's this sadness
because their co-workers have been killed," said Palmira Flores,
director of the center within steps of the rusting U.S.-Mexico border
fence. She reminds the parents: "Don't fight with your husband in the
morning, because you don't know if he's coming home at night."

The police killings are the most potent symptom of a drug war
escalating in Tijuana and other Mexican border cities.

Drug trafficking and violence are not new to this teeming maze of 1.5
million residents. What is new is that more cartels are vying for
control of trade routes for U.S.-bound drugs, and rising drug
addiction rates have created a thriving local market and boosted street crime.

Police who are getting killed often have ties to the rival cartels,
said Bruce Bagley, an expert on the drug trade at the University of
Miami. Many officers, he said, were killed by one cartel because they
had done work for another or by a cartel member unsatisfied with the
protection the officer was providing.

"I can't do my job right because if I do, they'll kill me," said one
Tijuana officer, who like five other officers interviewed for this
story, would not give his name because he feared for his life.

The officer said in December that corruption was worse than he had
seen in 26 years on the city police force and had permeated the
department's highest level.

"Half the police are on the take," he said. "I drive this old truck
and they drive the latest model. I've got $5 in my pocket and they've
got $5,000. We can't fix this problem alone. We need federal help."

Charging widespread corruption among local law enforcement, President
Felipe Calderon sent 3,000 soldiers and federal police officers to
Tijuana this month and had disarmed the city's police until Saturday.

Laurie Freeman, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America,
a liberal think tank with a focus on human rights, warns that federal
involvement may not resolve the problem.

"There's a lot more Mexico could do to try to create institutions
that are more effective and less easily corrupted, but it's difficult
under all this pressure from drug traffickers to corrupt and
intimidate," said Freeman, who has studied drug cartel violence in
the border city of Nuevo Laredo, where a similar battle is raging.

Mexican traffickers are consolidating their dominance of U.S.
distribution networks, according to the U.S. Department of Justice's
2007 National Drug Threat Assessment, despite stepped-up enforcement
at the border. And U.S. demand continues unabated for the thousands
of pounds of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine smuggled
from Mexico every day.

The battle spilled into the Tijuana preschoolers' playrooms Nov. 28
when Nancy Gomez, a secretary they knew from the police station up
the block, was gunned down with two officers who were escorting her
home across town.

"She was a really lovely woman," said Flores, the day care center
director. She said the teachers wept privately in the center's
kitchen as they watched television coverage the day after the killing.

Police are not the only victims. At least 200 Tijuana residents were
kidnapped for ransom last year. Homicide is rising. Neighborhood meth
kitchens are proliferating. And robberies by addicts desperate for a
fix are mounting.

The pressure is taking a toll across Tijuana. "My fear," said taxi
driver Juan Contreras, "is that the gunmen don't care who they hit
with their bullets."

Presbyterian minister Enrique Romero has watched drug addiction
unravel his impoverished parish: "There are assaults, robberies,
prostitution ... all kinds of misery. They'll steal anything they can
sell: phone cables, gas lines, whatever."

Longtime resident Socorro Zendejas de Garcia said her city has been
transformed from the dusty frontier town she knew as a child six decades ago.

In recent years, her doctor's son was slain when he dated the
ex-girlfriend of a drug dealer -- and when the doctor's daughter
began talking publicly about the crime, she paid with her life, too.

Zendejas, the wife of a doctor, also has a friend whose daughter was
abducted from a supermarket parking lot and held until the family
paid a ransom nine days later.

"Tijuana is turning into a maquila de raptos," Zendejas said. "A
kidnapping factory."

Prosperous Tijuanans are fleeing the chaos with visas that allow them
to live and work in the United States as highly skilled
professionals. Some are investing their savings in businesses in the
San Diego area to obtain an entrepreneur's visa. Tijuana newspapers
have called the exodus a "brain drain."

Moises, 44, a Mexican businessman who declined to give his last name
during an interview in a Starbucks cafe in Chula Vista, 6 miles north
of the border, said he moved his family there three years ago after
he was held hostage at his Tijuana office supply company.

"We don't go to Tijuana much anymore -- just to visit the doctor or
take the plane to Mexico City," said his wife, Sara. "All our friends
have moved here."

Back when Mexican political power rested in the hands of the ruling
Institutional Revolutionary Party, the impact of the illegal drug
market didn't permeate as many levels of society because state
agencies unofficially regulated it, said Monica Serrano, a professor
of international studies at the Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City. A
variety of government and law enforcement officials took bribes from
cartels to parcel out drug routes, she said.

The cartels became more powerful in the early 1990s, when Mexico
became the principal route for U.S.-bound Colombian cocaine after
U.S. enforcement sealed off Florida, experts said. At that point, the
Mexican officials lost the upper hand.

The latest escalation in violence began after the high-profile
arrests early this decade of several cartel bosses -- including
leaders of the Arellano-Felix family, which has long controlled
trafficking through Tijuana. Those arrests opened the field for the
brutal Sinaloa and Gulf cartels to push their way in, according to
academics here and in the United States.

"As the Sinaloa cartel has come to move in on the turf of the Tijuana
cartel, that's where you've seen the violence -- the buying off of
law enforcement, the assassination attempts against people on the
take from the Arellano-Felix cartel," said David Shirk, director of
the University of San Diego's Trans-Border Institute.

On Jan. 19, Mexican authorities extradited alleged leaders of all
three cartels to the United States for prosecution -- to stop them
from communicating with their gangs from inside Mexican prisons.

But those efforts don't address the problem of rising drug addiction
in Tijuana, which in turn helps the international trade by making it
easier for dealers to find "mules," people so desperate for quick
cash that they will smuggle drugs into the United States.

Drug use rates in border cities, already three times as high as the
Mexican national average, climbed 24 percent from 1998 to 2002, the
most recent years for which figures are available. The rates fell
slightly in the rest of Mexico during the same period.

"One of the consequences of tightening up control at the border is
that excess supply of drugs gets backed up and bartered in Mexico,"
said David Eisenberg, a Chula Vista police sergeant who holds a
doctorate in social work and serves as a liaison with the Tijuana police.

"So we've got murders, extortion and kidnapping, and skyrocketing
addiction rates in Mexico that are starting to match addiction rates
in the United States," Eisenberg said.

Treatment center directors said 85 percent of addicts now in rehab
used meth. Academics and law enforcement experts said this explosion
coincides with a rise in Mexican meth production to meet demand in
the United States after crackdowns across the country and at the border.

Former meth addict Agustin Bravo, 28, said his habit was what led him
to join the cross-border traffic. He started in the trade as a
lookout when he was a teenager. Soon, he was moving pot -- half a ton
per load -- from farther south in Mexico up to Tijuana.

"At first I didn't cross it to the other side," Bravo said in an
interview at the Hidden Treasures rehabilitation center, where he is
now a resident counselor. "That was riskier and I didn't need to. I
would find people to drive it across: guys, girls, whole families.
But I was so addicted. I needed more and more cristal. I was really
low, and I decided to cross."

Bravo was arrested on his fifth crossing; an estimated 90 percent of
mules successfully cross the border, experts said.

In Tijuana, there are several thousand tienditas, home-based meth
shops, according to police. And authorities do go after these
low-level dealers -- sometimes at great risk.

In a joint operation in December by local and federal police, a
convoy of five pickup trucks sped up narrow, unpaved streets past
shanties clinging to steep hillsides looking for such shops. The
commander had selected the neighborhood based on a newspaper clipping
about rampant drug dealing there.

Fingering the triggers of their submachine guns, black-clad officers
riding in the truck beds scanned the people they were passing. The
trucks stopped abruptly and the agents swarmed down a rocky slope and
surrounded a plywood shack.

A middle-aged man they dragged out clutched a hunk of bread in one
upraised hand as the officers frisked him for drugs. They found
nothing, let him go and continued cruising and searching residents at random.

"If someone sees us and they take off running, they're suspect,"
remarked one cop.

"We're after the little guys but they're all part of a chain run by
the bigger operations," said another.

The agents acknowledged that the convoy was highly visible and could
get trapped in the narrow canyons where the city's poorest
settlements have grown. A few months before, three trucks in a
similar caravan were surrounded and strafed with bullets, they said.
One officer died and five were wounded.

Perched in one truck bed, Ernesto Gonzalez, who is 31 and a nine-year
veteran of the Tijuana force, showed off a cell phone photo of his
3-year-old daughter. He said he worries that his life is at risk, but
not so much that he'll find a new line of work.

"I like this job," he said. "It's dangerous but it's exciting. You
can grab the action and get the bad guys." Drug seizures at San
Ysidro border crossing

Customs agents inspect each of the nearly 30,000 pedestrians and
50,000 vehicles that enter the United States each day at the San
Ysidro (San Diego County) border crossing. They seized about 100,000
pounds of drugs in 2006, most of it marijuana, though quantities of
cocaine and heroin are rising, and meth seizures are up almost
eightfold from a decade ago.

Amount, in pounds, of various drugs seized at the Port of Entry in
San Ysidro for fiscal years 1997 through 2006:

Marijana

Total 2006 U.S. border seizures $538.8 million

San Ysidro/Tijuana border $28.7 million

Cocaine

Total 2006 U.S. border seizures $250.4 million

San Ysidro/ Tijuana border: $13.8 million

Methamphetamines*

Total 2006 U.S. border seizures $20.5 million

San Ysidro/ Tijuana border: $10.4 million

Heroin

Total 2006 U.S. border seizures: $13.1 million

San Ysidro/ Tijuana border: $3.3 million