Tijuana Cartel Escalates Violence

Third of five articles

By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service

A U.S. Border Patrol agent shines his flashlight through the border fence
into Mexico. (Michael Williamson/ The Post)

SAN DIEGO — Cruising the freeway between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico,
like any suburban commuter, Emilio Valdez Mainero seemed an unlikely
assassin. The 33yearold Mexican citizen and U.S. resident rented an
apartment on Coronado Island, San Diego's most exclusive neighborhood. He
frequented the best golf courses on both sides of the border. His friends
were the sons of the wealthy of both cities.

But Valdez sometimes hit the links with a .38caliber pistol strapped to
his waist, kept an AK47 assault rifle in his Coronado apartment, and chose
one of Mexico's bestknown drug lords to be his son's godfather. According
to Mexican law enforcement documents, those were the trappings of his trade
as chief of an elite assassination squad that executed police and rival
drug dealers for the Tijuana cartel, one of Mexico's most powerful
drugtrafficking mafias.

The alleged dual lifestyle of Valdez, who was arrested last year in San
Diego in connection with killings in Mexico, illuminates a chilling new
phenomenon that is transforming the border region of the United States:
Mexican drug cartels have erased the line that once separated Mexican crime
from U.S. crime. No longer mere funnels for the flow of drugs from Mexico,
southwestern cities are now adjunct residences, recruiting grounds and
battlefields for the hemisphere's most powerful crime organizations.

Mexican drug mafias reach into the Hispanic neighborhoods of U.S. border
cities with ease, enlisting street gangs to support their criminal
enterprises. They have allegedly committed brutal murders in American
neighborhoods. Their henchmen maintain homes and businesses on both sides
of the border and drive back and forth at will, often using border crossing
cards issued by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Although violence and petty crime have flowed both ways across the border
for years, this new crime wave is far more savage and insidious, with
mafiastyle assassinations in San Diego, gangland shootouts on the streets
of Phoenix, and grisly revenge kidnappings the length of the 2,000mile
border. Some drugrelated crime also is accompanying Mexican traffickers as
they make inroads into the American heartland, but it does not compare in
viciousness or intensity to the violence on the border.

"We have to live with the violence they use to run their enterprises, and
there's no question it's affecting our citizens," said Steven McCraw of the
FBI's Tucson office.

The violence has escalated so dramatically over the last seven years that
federal agencies have sharply increased their regional manpower — double
the number of federal prosecutors, 40 percent more FBI agents and a third
more Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents. Still, these agencies
complain of being outmatched.

Law enforcement personnel increasingly are becoming targets of the
violence, as well, according to Barry R. McCaffrey, chief of the White
House Office of National Drug Control Policy. He received a death threat
from the Tijuana cartel during an August tour of the border. McCaffrey said
160 U.S. police officers and federal agents have been attacked in the
region in the past year.

Details of the Mexican drug cartels' penetration into U.S. border cities
and states emerged from scores of interviews with law enforcement officials
and civic activists on both sides of the international line, as well as
court, police and prison documents from the United States and Mexico.

Tijuana Cartel Moves North Of Mexico's largest drug mafias, none has been
more forceful in its expansion into the United States than the Tijuana
cartel run by the Arellano Felix family. From its base of operations just
17 miles south of San Diego, the Tijuana cartel not only has developed
fertile U.S. recruiting grounds among the thugs and street gang members it
needs as muscle, but also has groomed a new breed of welleducated
lieutenants — lawyers, accountants, communications technicians and business
associates — as the brains of its criminal enterprises. The violence the
Arellano Felixes spawned in Mexico has trailed them to San Diego. U.S. law
enforcement authorities said they believe the Arellano Felix organization
is responsible for at least six murders in the San Diego area in the past
year.

Last December, Fernando Jesus Gutierrez, 30, was driving home in his white
luxury sports coupe along a scenic sliver of beach known as the Silver
Strand connecting San Diego to Coronado Island when a Broncotype vehicle
edged alongside and a gunman opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle.
Gutierrez's car careened into a sand embankment and his assailant sped
away. Coronado police said they thought they were responding to a traffic
accident before they stepped up to the bulletpocked car and saw that
Gutierrez had been shot five times in the face.

"We considered this a driveby shooting," said Lt. Jerry Lipscomb, the
detective now working the unsolved case for the San Diego County Sheriff's
Department. "But victims usually are not of this economic caliber."

Law enforcement officials said they have no suspects in the shooting, but
DEA officials said they believe it was ordered by the Arellano Felix
family, with whom Gutierrez had business dealings. Gutierrez's family said
he ran a legitimate importexport company and said any connection to the
Arellano Felixes was through legal business.

The assassination was not an isolated incident. Earlier last year,
Alejandro Torres, 27, described by police as a drug runner, was found bound
and shot in the head in the border community of San Ysidro, Calif. His
partner, Ramon Avalos, was discovered dead in foothills about 40 miles east
of the city. And Javier Bermudez, 30, was strangled with a rope, wrapped in
a sheet and left in the trunk of a Buick parked beneath a Neighborhood
Watch sign declaring "Criminals Beware, Community Alert" in a culdesac of
a San Diego suburb; the murder was not discovered until a week later when
his attackers returned to the vehicle, doused it with gasoline and set it
ablaze.

Police said privately that they believe all three murders were
cartelrelated. Those were the first executions of their kind in San Diego,
a city of 1 million residents and a relatively low murder rate — 82
killings in 1996, about onefourth of which were drug or gangrelated,
according to city police.

"These cases are tough," said San Diego Police Department homicide chief
Lt. Glenn A. Breitenstein, who added that most drug murders go unsolved due
to the difficulty of determining even basic facts like where the killing
took place.

The Arellano Felix cartel's new henchmen are young men from the most
affluent enclaves of San Diego and Tijuana, graduates of the cities' best
private schools, aggressive young businessmen of Mexican heritage who speak
English without a trace of an accent and blend effortlessly into the
cultures of both countries. In Mexico, they have been labeled the
"narcojuniors."

"By virtue of their wealth and power and association with the Arellanos,
the juniors became untouchables murdering whomever they wished," the
Tijuana news weekly Zeta said in an editorial earlier this year after a
spate of border killings.

"These children belong to families that don't need the money — they are the
children of parents with good businesses, living in good houses," said
Martha Rocha, a Tijuana radio talk show host until last year, when she said
station officials yanked her off the air for her candid discussions of
drugrelated corruption.

Rocha often spoke bluntly from experience: One of her sonsinlaw was
recently jailed on charges related to his drug associations. "It's very
easy to get in that business," she said. "The offers are very tempting."

The man credited with creating the narcojuniors is Ramon Arellano Felix,
recently named to the FBI's mostwanted list.

Ramon, along with some of his six brothers and four sisters, moved to
Tijuana in the 1980s during the adolescence of Mexico's modernday drug
cartels. The brothers, and particularly Ramon, 33, endeared themselves to
the fledgling social elite of Tijuana, throwing lavish parties at discos
and expensive baptismal celebrations for the children of the
uppermiddleclass cliques they cultivated. In a town full of new arrivals
and brimming with new money, the Arellano Felixes' role as drug traffickers
was easily camouflaged.

In Tijuana, Ramon cultivated a flamboyant style, often appearing at parties
or the race track wearing black leather pants, a fur jacket and a bejeweled
gold cross around his neck, according to several acquaintances. But when he
went to San Diego to visit his estranged wife Angelica and their 8yearold
daughter, he favored Nike sports shirts and tennis shoes, designer
sunglasses and jaunty baseball caps — looking like the affluent young
lieutenants he was recruiting.

U.S. immigration agents who stop every car and question every driver who
crosses the border at San Ysidro have failed to detain Ramon Arellano
Felix, although criminal indictments have been pending against him in the
United States since 1983. Mexican authorities recently barged into a tony
Tijuana country club looking for him but came away emptyhanded, leaving
prominent citizens to complain later about being rousted from their golf
matches.

As the chief enforcer and head of the cartel's security detail, Ramon's
alleged penchant for violence grew to be the stuff of legend. One of his
associates alleged in court documents that Ramon stormed out of a birthday
party at a Tijuana tennis club in 1988 and murdered one of his sister's
lovers of whom he did not approve.

Most U.S. law enforcement officers had never heard of the narcojuniors
before last year, when two men were detained in San Diego for extradition
at the request of the Mexican government in connection with murder
allegations.

One of those young men was Emilio Valdez Mainero, who, according to an
official memorandum from Mexico's attorney general's office, "hires young
assassins who belong to Tijuana's upper class" for the Tijuana cartel. He
also hired welltodo Americans living in San Diego as killers for the drug
mafia, other Mexican documents allege.

Valdez and his family have denied those allegations. Relatives and friends
say that Valdez was in the construction and real estate business, but
concede that he was acquainted with Ramon Arellano Felix.

Documents filed in the Mexican and U.S. court systems allege that Valdez
used the cover of a realestate business to provide safe houses for
Arellano Felix and members of his cartel in upperclass neighborhoods of
Mexico City, Guadalajara, Tijuana and San Diego. In one case, he leased an
Acapulco vacation villa for cartel members after a killing spree, the court
papers allege.

In recent months, the list of San Diegans — U.S. citizens and Mexicans who
reside here — implicated in the Tijuana cartel's cadre of narcojuniors has
continued to grow.

In June, San Diego police arrested Valdez's brother, Gabriel, 36, whom
Mexican authorities describe as a telecommunications expert for the Tijuana
cartel, whose duties included "the illicit interception of private
communications which were used by the organization to avoid capture." In a
deposition given two months before his arrest on behalf of his brother,
Gabriel Valdez said he owned a legitimate computer business.

Alfredo Hodoyan Palacios, 25, born in San Diego and educated in Catholic
schools here, was arrested last year in San Diego along with his close
friend, Emilio Valdez, and is wanted in Mexico in connection with the
killing last year of Tijuana's chief federal prosecutor. He is allegedly
known by the code name "El Lobo," or the wolf.

Alejandro Hodoyan Palacios, 35, Alfredo's brother who was also born in San
Diego and attended law school, was picked up by Mexican military
authorities last year and confessed that he was an operative for the
Arellano Felix brothers. He later sought DEA protection as an informant,
but fled to Mexico where he was abducted by unknown assailants last March
as he and his mother were driving through Tijuana. He has not been seen
since.

Fabian Martinez Gonzalez, known as "El Tiburon," or the shark, another U.S.
citizen who grew up among the upper class of San Diego and Tijuana, has
been identified by Mexican authorities as one of the cartel hitmen hired by
his friend, Emilio Valdez, and is wanted in Mexico for murder.

Frustrated Assassins In May 1993, a Tijuana cartel hit squad roamed the
streets of Guadalajara in central Mexico in search of archrival Joaquin
"El Chapo" Guzman, leader of the Sinaloa cartel. On May 24, the frustrated
assassins gave up their hunt and were ready to catch a plane back to
Tijuana. But at the airport they claimed they spotted their quarry and a
gunbattle erupted in the parking lot. When the shooting ended seven men
were dead, including Roman Catholic Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo, who
had been shot at pointblank range as he was driven through the lot. The
question of whether the cardinal was killed intentionally or accidentally
remains one of Mexico's great mysteries.

As Mexican authorities pursued the attackers, U.S. law enforcement
officials were stunned to learn that at least two of the accused assassins
were from San Diego, members of the city's Logan Heights "Calle 30" or 30th
Street gang. U.S. police said that was the first hint they had of any
connection between the Tijuana cartel and San Diego's Hispanic street
gangs, the largest and most powerful of which are based in the Logan
Heights neighborhood on the southern edge of the city, barely a dozen miles
from the border.

"In law enforcement we're always the last to know," said Lt. Howard Kendall
of the San Diego Police Department's street gang unit.

Today, the Tijuana cartel controls the Logan Heights gangs, using members
as assassins to carry out executions and move drugs in the United States
and Mexico, authorities said. Last year, for example, two Logan Heights
gang members — one with the word "Logan" tattooed on his back — were killed
in a shootout with Mexican military commandos at a Tijuana cartel safe
house in the Sinaloa state capital of Culiacan. The pair reportedly had
been guarding a cache of assault rifles, twoway radios, nightvision
scopes and Mexican police and army uniforms.

But, even now, with new local and federal law enforcement task forces
monitoring the street gangs, U.S. intelligence on the gangs' cartel
connections "is like the tip of the iceberg," said Kendall, adding,
"They're tightmouthed. "You don't talk to the police because 'My homies
are going to avenge me, my parents, my sister or my little brothers.'"

U.S. police may have little intelligence on the MexicoSan Diego gang ties,
but the connections are plainly visible to those who live in the
workingclass community of Logan Heights. The neighborhood is saturated
with a dozen gangs, many named for the streets on which they reside — 30th
Street, 20th Street, 13th Street — or characteristics of the buildings
where they hang out, like "The Red Steps."

"Here, they [the cartels] know who they're dealing with," said Martin
Escobedo, who grew up in Logan Heights and now works as youth director of
the local branch of the Boys and Girls Club of San Diego, which attempts to
keep its young members out of the gangs. "It's a wellrun business."

"The kids start when they're 10 or 11, they steal, they work as lookouts,"
Escobedo said of the neighborhood gang members. Then they move up, Escobedo
said, citing the example of his younger brother, Antonio.

"They called him BamBam," said Escobedo. "He was the muscle." A hitman for
the Arellano Felix brothers, Antonio was killed in a driveby shooting last
year, just a month before his 23rd birthday and shortly after he tried to
extricate himself from the gangs, said his brother.

The Mexican cartels also are training the U.S. gangs to run their street
operations more like businesses and less like the turfobsessed packs of
the past. In one of the more worrisome trends for local police, the
Arellano Felixcontrolled Hispanic gangs have begun recruiting members of
African American gangs to distribute drugs on the streets of San Diego,
police said.

"The gangs don't fight with each other," said Lt. Robert J. Kanaski of the
police department's drugs unit. "The thinking is, 'We're out here to make
money, not kill each other.'"

Gangs and gang violence are also proliferating in cities like Phoenix,
which has become a major transit point for Mexican drug shipments into the
United States. While crime rates nationwide are decreasing, violent and
property crime rates continue to escalate in Arizona, according to the FBI
Uniform Crime Reports.

In the last two years, cartel hitmen dubbed "Sinaloa Cowboys" by U.S.
police — because they are from the north Mexican state of Sinaloa — have
been shooting it out in the bars and back streets of Phoenix, leaving
police at a loss.

"They are the enforcers," said Mike McCullough of the Phoenix Police
Department. "If something isn't moved, or doesn't come back, they come up
here to find out why. And that's when the shooting begins.

"The victims know the suspects, but in the majority of cases there is no
way to prove any connection between them," added McCullough. "All the
victim's history is across the border, and so is the suspect's."

Kidnappings Rise Drugrelated kidnappings have escalated dramatically in
the last two years along the southwestern border, up as much as 50 percent
in some stretches, according to law enforcement officials.

Most cases involve drug organizations "trying to enforce discipline within
their own ranks," said Steven McCraw of the FBI's Tucson office. "They're
going after people they're holding accountable for lost loads, or that they
suspect of cooperating with law enforcement, or for pilfering part of the
drug load or not returning money."

Some officials believe that the problem is far worse than figures indicate
— that very few kidnappings are ever reported. Families, fearful of
retaliation against other relatives, decide to keep quiet, these officials
say, even though the kidnappings sometimes end with the torture and death
of the victim.

"This level of violence is difficult to track," said McCraw. "Often law
enforcement doesn't find out about a kidnapping for six months to a year
later."

In many cases, cartel hitmen stage the kidnappings in the United States
then dump the bodies in Mexico, recognizing that while the border is no
barrier to their operations, it frequently does impede U.S. police
investigations.

The increase in drugrelated violence has touched innocent victims in both
countries. In what authorities describe as one of the most tragic cases of
the past two years, Omar Varas, 3, of the Tucson suburb of Chandler was
kidnapped April 22, 1995, from the front yard of a church in the Mexican
border town of Agua Prieta where he was playing with other children while
his parents were attending a religious revival.

Local drug traffickers mistook Omar's father for the relative of a drug
trafficker who had accepted a 140pound load of marijuana in Douglas,
Ariz., then disappeared without paying for it.

Mexican authorities arrested seven men in connection with the kidnapping
after a search in conjunction with the FBI. Last year, two teenage girls
who allegedly were hired by drug traffickers to babysit for Omar for two
months in 1995 led Mexican police to shreds of his underwear and a shirt
buried beneath the patio of a house near Agua Prieta. Omar has never been
found.

© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company