BORDER BLOODSHED LIKELY TO WORSEN, EXPERTS WARN

Unease About Potential for Spillover Rises in U.S.

After a particularly violent week in Tijuana that has left 54 dead in
a fierce cartel power struggle, experts on both sides of the border
fear the worst is yet to come.

Since early last year, Mexican President Felipe Calderon has deployed
thousands of soldiers and federal police to drug-route battlegrounds
such as Baja California, Chihuahua and Michoacan. Experts say it's
clear that the recent bloodbath along the border, felt especially
hard in Ciudad Juarez and Nuevo Laredo and now increasingly in
Tijuana, is the backlash.

In the United States, there's a growing unease about the potential
for spillover. Some sectors of the border-region economy have already
suffered severe losses as a result of the violence, and others may follow.

"The Mexican government has said that their strategy is to attack the
cartels and break them down to a more manageable size," said
political scientist David Shirk, director of the Trans-Border
Institute at the University of San Diego. "The problem with breaking
cartels up into smaller, supposedly more manageable pieces is that it
becomes disorganized crime. You start to have people who are broken
off, fractionalized, fighting among each other."

This destabilization has played out in Tijuana recently in a
terrifying string of slayings. On Monday, 12 bodies were dumped
outside an elementary school, some with their tongues cut out. A note
left with them referred to "blabbermouths" and the Arellano Felix cartel.

The carnage continued yesterday. Authorities said the bodies of 10
men had been found between midnight and noon in neighborhoods around
the city. The dead included two men who had been decapitated. Five
were found in a sport utility vehicle that had been reported stolen
last week in California.

More than 400 homicides have been recorded this year in Tijuana,
which has an estimated population of 1.5 million. The majority of
them were drug-related, Mexican authorities say. There were 337
killings citywide in 2007.

By comparison, New Orleans, one of the most violent U.S. cities,
which is less than one-fifth the size of Tijuana with about 240,000
people, had 209 homicides in 2007.

The spike in violence has revived long-standing complaints in Mexico
that the United States shares the blame through illicit weapons
exports to Mexico and the vast appetite for drugs that creates the
market in the first place.

"We demand that the United States stop the consumption of drugs,"
Baja California Gov. Jose Guadalupe Osuna said last month.
"Unfortunately, as long as there is demand, many people will continue
to be hurt and killed."

But in spite of the death toll, U.S. drug enforcement officials say
the disarray they are observing within the cartels is a positive
sign. Mexican and U.S. officials have attributed much of the violence
in Tijuana to fighting within the Arellano Felix gang, which has been
weakened by the arrests and deaths of its top leadership.

"What you have here are two factions of the AFO (Arellano Felix
Organization), and they are feeding off of each other," said Eileen
Zeidler, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration
in San Diego. "That's what we want. We want it to be disorganized. If
they're not organized, they don't function. We want it to fall apart."

But this disorganization is likely to lead to more bloodshed in the
short term, observers in both countries fear.

"This violence will diminish when there is a new equilibrium" among
drug traffickers, said Jorge Chabat, a political analyst from the
Mexico City-based research group CIDE.

Widening Consequences

The breakup of the cartels could present new challenges. The Calderon
administration's strategy assumes that local and state police will be
able to take care of the smaller, less-organized drug traffickers
left behind, Shirk said, but "that makes an enormous presumption
about the capacity of subnational governments in Mexico."

Plagued by police corruption, which is largely fueled by low pay and
a lack of professional standards, local and state authorities are
ill-equipped to handle the potentially more violent, low-level
criminal element that could emerge in the wake of the large cartels,
Shirk said.

Meanwhile, as the killings continue, the perception of lawlessness in
Tijuana exacerbated last month by two prison riots that claimed at
least 23 lives continues to have repercussions on both sides of the border.

Tijuana's tourism sector has been struggling as American visitors
stay away. The reports of violence are only one reason, Mexican
officials say, citing the struggling U.S. economy and congested
border crossings as principal factors.

Despite the turmoil, Baja California's economy has continued to grow,
state officials and business leaders said. The state's growth rate
this year is expected to reach 5 percent, just below last year's rate
of 6 percent, said Gabriel Posada Gallego, Baja's secretary of
economic development.

Support for the maquiladora sector in Tijuana has held steady with
about $250 million in new investments this year, said Saul GarcNa,
president of the city's maquiladora association. Gov. Osuna said the
state has added 32,000 jobs this year.

Baja California's business leaders, in the past sharply critical of
what they said was government complacency, spoke supportively of the
Calderon administration's self-styled war against the cartels.

"In the past, the government denied the problem," said Alfonso
Alvarez Juan, statewide president of the Business Coordinating
Council, a business umbrella group. "Today they are admitting that
there is a problem and confronting it."

But if the violence isn't brought under control, "we'll see effects
in 2009 or 2010," GarcNa said.

Economic experts say it's hard to quantify now, but companies could
be put off by the violence and the costs of additional security.

"The biggest costs are the opportunities lost for having a climate of
violence and crime," said Armando Chacon, director of research for
the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness, a nonprofit, nonpartisan
think tank in Mexico City.

Places other than Mexico will become more attractive for offshore
operations if the violence escalates, said Marnie Cox, the San Diego
Association of Governments' chief economist.

"They start to worry about CEOs getting kidnapped," he said. "This
really hurts the investment environment."

With the loss of investment in Tijuana also comes an unquantifiable
loss of revenue to ancillary businesses in the San Diego region, said
border business consultant Kenn Morris.

"You are talking about paper suppliers, printing companies, legal
services," he said. "If a company doesn't expand in Tijuana, San
Diego loses out on jobs."

As the bodies have turned up, the pace of life has continued in
Tijuana, one of the fastest-growing cities in Mexico. But residents
lament the psychological toll of the killings.

"Of course there's an impact, because they're human beings, no matter
what group they belong to," Tijuana Archbishop Rafael Romo Munoz said.

With the destabilization of cartels, opportunistic crimes such as
kidnappings often carried out by underemployed and undersupervised
cartel foot soldiers have become commonplace, driving some business
owners and professionals north.

While casual visitors to Tijuana haven't been targeted, there has
been a series of abductions involving U.S. citizens and legal
residents, typically individuals who live and work on both sides of
the border. Such incidents spiked last year in Baja California, where
the FBI reported 26 abductions of U.S. citizens and legal residents
in Tijuana, Rosarito Beach and Ensenada. Fifteen incidents involving
U.S. citizens and residents have occurred so far this year. A small
number of these abductions have been carried out on U.S. soil, with
the victims transported to Mexico, according to the FBI.

Spillover across border
If the drug-related killings on the Mexican side of the border
continue, it shouldn't come as a surprise if more violence spills
over to the U.S. side because the cartels employ residents of both
countries, said Howard Campbell, a border anthropologist and
drug-traffic expert at the University Texas in El Paso.

Already, hospital officials in El Paso have had to beef up security
when individuals wounded in Juarez's drug war come north for
treatment, fearing that cartel hit men will appear to finish them
off. So far, that hasn't happened, Campbell said.

While more than 1,000 slayings have been reported this year in
Juarez, the majority linked to organized crime, drug-related
spillover north of the border has been minimal.

"I do think part of it is luck," Campbell said. "At some point, the
Mexican cartel people may decide, what do they have to fear, really?
A lot is their own perception that they can't get away with this
stuff in the U.S. But sadly, I think they could. My sources in Juarez
are saying the worst of the violence is yet to come."

Campbell said the Mexican effort is handicapped by law enforcement
ties to the cartels at various levels.

"They can't win the war," Campbell said. "And they have to realize
they are not winning it, and that they need to rethink the policy.
I'm not saying let the 'narcos' claim victory, but let's rethink the
policy and try not to wage war with them, because it is not working."

Others agree that Calderon is fighting with a weak hand but commend
his efforts, with the violent backlash a necessary evil.

"I think it is a mistake to look at the bloodshed and say, 'Look at
what Calderon is doing; it is not working,' when in fact it may just
be the opposite that it is working in some way, with these
unforeseen and unpleasant results," said Jeffrey Davidow, president
of the Institute of the Americas at the University of California San
Diego and ambassador to Mexico from 1998 to 2002.

In the past week, Calderon has introduced two proposals aimed at
enhancing his anti-drug efforts, including an initiative intended to
weed out corrupt police and a controversial proposal to legalize
small amounts of marijuana and cocaine in order to weaken the black market.

The latter is bound to be politically unpopular in both countries.
However, with U.S. consumption driving the northbound flow of
narcotics, if the Calderon administration's current strategy fails,
the United States will have to find a way to either curb drug use or
contemplate some form of legalization, some experts say.

"That is one thing that we know would ultimately kill off these
cartels. It would rob them of their oxygen, the enormous profits they
make," said Shirk, who cites the end of Prohibition in 1933 as a
possible precedent. "We had a similar situation in the 1920s. That is
how we beat the mob."

[sidebar]

BLOODY WEEK: BY THE NUMBERS

10: Number of bodies found yesterday in various neighborhoods of
Tijuana. Two were decapitated; some were wrapped in blankets and
tossed to the side of the road.

8: Bodies found Friday in Tijuana, including two that were decapitated.

9: Bodies found Thursday. Eight men were found together in an empty
lot near the center of the city. They had been shot in the head. A
ninth was wrapped in a blanket and found near the central bus station.

3: Bodies found in two locations Wednesday.

3: Bodies found Tuesday, including two near a water-utility tank. In
addition, three barrels found outside a seafood restaurant were
examined to see if they contained acid and human remains.

19: Bodies found in several locations Monday, including 12 near an
elementary school. Several had their tongues cut out.

2: Bodies found wrapped in blankets Sunday.

SOURCE: Baja California Attorney General's Office