TIJUANA STREETS FLOW WITH THE BLOOD OF RIVAL DRUG CARTELS

A vicious turf war has claimed 2,700 lives in Mexico this year. Its
front line runs through Tijuana, the gateway to San Diego and the vast
US drugs market, where 15 people were murdered in the space of 72
hours last week. Ed Vulliamy reports on a border town living in fear,
where honest citizens pay a cruel price for the greed of others

When the balaclava-clad paramilitary police officer pulled back a blanket
covering the corpse, a group of women wailed, shielding their babies' eyes.
The security guard, whose body had been left outside the 4/9 Minimart in
Villa Foresta on the edge of Tijuana, had been shot repeatedly at
point-blank range with what appeared to be a semi-automatic weapon, his face
and chest grated by gunfire into something more like a raw carcass on a
hook.

This was body number six last Monday night, and the sixth of what
would become a total of 15 people murdered during less than 72 hours
in this frontier city that acts as a portal from Mexico to California
and vice versa. This is the front line in the 'narco-war' - savage,
sanguine and sudden - that drug cartels are waging between each other
and with the authorities. The war has claimed some 2,700 lives this
year, and more than 6,000 since December 2006, when President Felipe
Calderon launched Mexico's first serious offensive against the cartels
who have traded for decades under a measure of government protection.

The battle has been fought mainly along the 2,100-mile border between
the United States and Mexico, the world's busiest frontier. As the
body count has increased, so has the brutality of the killing. Corpses
have been found severely tortured or decapitated, castrated, dipped in
sulphuric acid or with their tongues cut out.

Dr Hiram, chief forensic medical expert assigned to the homicide department
in Tijuana, told The Observer how 'each different mutilation leaves a clear
message. They have become a kind of folk tradition. If the tongue is cut
out, it means they talked too much. A man who sneaked on someone else has
his finger cut off and maybe put in his mouth. If you are castrated, you may
have slept with the woman of another man. Decapitation is another thing: it
is simply a statement of power, a warning to all. The difference is that in
normal times the dead were "disappeared" or dumped in the desert. Now, they
are displayed for all to see.'

Last month 13 bodies with their tongues cut out were found across the
road from the Valentin Gomez Farias secondary school. The principal,
Miguel Angel Gonzalez Tovar, said: 'It was terrifying, the children
were terrified, the staff were terrified. And now we had to suspend
some classes after this last warning. They gave me CCTV, but that does
not work. They gave me an alarm button, but that is broken. We try to
teach here, but we cannot be isolated from what is going on outside.'
The illustrated project on the wall of one classroom was about global
warming and gave guidance on what to do in a flood or hurricane.

The new army-imposed chief of police in Tijuana, Lieutenant-Colonel
Julian Leyzaola, talks of 'social terrorism' by the narcos, referring
specifically to a threat last Tuesday that, if Marines did not leave
town, the narco gangs would kidnap and kill schoolchildren.

'All I can do is to increase a police profile in the community and
schools, calm people down to avert the kind of social psychosis the
narcos want to generate, physical presence to reassure people and
intelligence to fight the criminals themselves', said Leyzaola.

The war has also struck deep into the heart of Mexico, with macabre
executions as far south as Chiapas. The magazine Proceso published a
cover photograph of the country's entire political and military
leadership under the headline 'Impotence', and concluded that 'the
narco is now a national structure'. The leading campaigner against the
drug cartels in Tijuana, Victor Clark Alfaro, talked last week about
'a war against society itself, at every level of life, school and
community, with violence on the streets and even more sinister
movements behind that violence, to create psychosis in society, and
criminalise the economy'.

The war has also spread into the US, with 135 arrests last month in a
swoop against Mexican cartel operatives.

The appalling and escalating level of violence is not only a response
to Mexico's tardy counter-offensive against the drug gangs, but a
symptom of fragmentation among the drug cartels themselves.

Last week's bloodbath in Tijuana - taking the year's death toll for
this city towards 600 - followed the arrest last Saturday of Eduardo
Arellano Felix, known better by his 'nom de narco' El Doctor - the
last remaining fugitive of five brothers who ran Mexico's oldest, but
now severely damaged, cartel. On Wednesday, the US State Department
lodged a request for Arellano's extradition for trial in the United
States, where he has been among the most wanted drug
traffickers.

That dramatic swoop on a Saturday afternoon targeted an Art Deco
mansion in the upscale Misiones del Pedregal suburb. A deafening salvo
of fire was aimed at the villa in what was presumed to be yet another
shoot-out. The next day it was shown to have been the taking of
Mexico's second most wanted drug lord into custody. He arrived -
white-bearded and apparently dazed - for his ritual handcuffed
appearance for television to join one of his surviving brothers,
Javier, in the high-security Altiplano jail.

Authorities on both sides of the border hailed the arrest as a
triumph, the US Drug Enforcement Administration calling it the 'final
demise' of the cartel founded by Mexico's first drug lord, Angel Felix
Gallardo, but run by the Arellano brothers since he was jailed in 1989.

Others were slower to celebrate. The state of Baja California's new
public prosecutor, Rommel Moreno Manjarrez said: 'We hope to be seeing
the fall of the Arellano cartel. But we have no illusions that one
cartel's misfortune is another's opportunity, and that rivals will be
watching this situation in their own way. We are trying to see how
this will play out and to battle against whatever moves are made.

'We have had a serious problem of police corruption in the past, but
are trying to purge this corruption from our forces, and are now able
to fight this battle seriously, with the DEA helping in many ways, and
with backing from our own government, which is different from the old
political situation.'

Cocaine trafficking from South America into the US (and much of
Europe), and trafficking in Mexican-produced heroin and
methamphetamine, became a Mexican near-monopoly during the 1990s,
operated by four cartels, each controlling one of four main 'plazas',
or routes into the US.

The Texan sector belonged to the 'Gulf cartel' and its military wing,
Los Zetas, comprised of former crack Mexican troops. A central passage
through Ciudad Juarez was terrain dominated by the Juarez cartel and
the giant plaza between Tijuana and California by the Arellano
brothers and their sister Eneida who, the authorities presume, will
assume command of the clan.

But a fourth, unspecified, central-western plaza was run by the
Alianza de Sangre (Alliance of Blood), or Sinaloa cartel, from the
Pacific state of that name, way south of the border, where most of the
other big traffickers also originate. This cartel was founded and is
led by Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman, who split from Gallardo to rival
him, was jailed in 1993, but dramatically escaped in 2001 and is now a
fugitive and something of a narco folk hero. Guzman used the 2006
government offensive to lay claim to the entire border. The war that
rages in Tijuana is largely between his rebels and those loyal to the
Arellano family. Moreno says that an alliance forged in jail between
the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels is also 'entirely finished', generating
further chaos, and Sinaloa is taking on the Gulf cartel's Zetos with a
trained army of its own, Los Negros (the Men in Black).

Amid the carnage, a journey with three young women from the police
forensic team is a harrowing experience. On the outskirts of Tijuana,
another corpse has been found, visible by the green light of a petrol
station. The windscreen of the victim's Ford Explorer (with California
plates) is pitted with three bullet holes, and he seems to have made a
run into the street, followed by 25 further shots.

The scene of the next slaughter is the 9/4 minimart in Villa Foresta,
where a blanket covers the remains of the security guard, with two
more dead inside. There is wild sobbing from the women as the
bullet-sprayed body outside is revealed, and those inside the store
are brought out on stretchers and loaded into the white forensic
department truck now carrying five dead bodies.

The shop, it seems, was a stash for drugs being loaded for export in
two presumed clavos (nails - the word used here for a car carrying
drugs) intended to join the 65,000 that cross from Tijuana into San
Diego every day, which the police in time tow away.

Meanwhile heavy-set men arrive to look on from a slight distance,
embracing each other in a way that suggests burdensome comradeship and
solace, but little sadness.

Tijuana's residents are struggling, with a remarkable degree of
success, to lead a normal life. A recent study among local drug
addicts shows an increase from 5,000 outlets and crack houses in 2004
to 20,000 now, and an estimated 200,000 young people in a burgeoning
city of three million seriously addicted to hard drugs. Friday's
newspapers reported yet another vast haul by the American authorities
of 90lb of cocaine, crossing Tijuana's border to San Diego in a car
driven by a Mexican burro, or mule

But the city teems with effervescent life for all the 'psychosis' the
narcos wreak. The crowds of American tourists have vanished from the
famous Avenida Revolucion, so the souvenir business is in trouble. And
with the formerly flashy narcos now lying low, Tijuana's famous
brothels and strip clubs are empty of all but the worst types, the
girls gyrating mainly with one another.

But like every other bar, the Sotano Suizo pub was heaving last Sunday
(while Eduardo Felix Arellano was airborne, handcuffed), for the
climactic football match of the season Mexicans call 'El Clasico'
between Club America of Mexico City and Chivas of Guadalajara. The
teams unleash attack after attack in a tremendous game-to-the-death
with Chivas winning 2-1.

On Friday, slightly surreally given the week's murders, celebrations
were being prepared for yesterday's Day of the Dead, an ancient rite
inherited from Mexican tradition, entwining Roman Catholicism with
Aztec lore of the 'Black Sun', which illuminates the underworld.

The borderland remains a strong, exciting and potent place, in which
the vast majority of people live and strive honestly. This frontier is
too often defined, as Professor Tony Payan of El Paso university
points out in an excellent book on the borderline, not by the people
who live, flock to and work here, but by whatever is polemically
useful to Washington. From there, argues Payan, successive
administrations have illogically and disastrously entwined their
failed border 'war on drugs' with the entirely separate 'wars' on
undocumented immigration and terrorism.

There is a strong sense that the region is paying the price for other
people's greed. 'We are,' says Eligio Montes, police commander of
Rosarito Beach, south of Tijuana, 'a cultural sandwich here on the
border. And now we're squeezed between narcos from Sinaloa and
Americans taking drugs.'

My companion reporter, Jorge Fregosa, ends another rollercoaster drive
on Thursday (to catch the army remove hand grenades from a blue
plastic bin in a side street) by saying: 'This is my city, my country
and that is my flag' - and he opens the sunroof the better to see it
fly, defiantly vast, with its eagle, cactus, snake and legend, in the
breeze and in America's face, at the border.

'And every time they kill someone,' says Fregosa, who has seen that
happen hundreds of times this year, 'it hurts me. because it hurts the
place I love. The border pays the price, and now we are paying a
higher price than ever.'

War on drugs December 2006 A new federal police force is created to
tackle drugs cartels; thousands of troops are deployed as part of a
major anti-drug trafficking drive.

2008 Drug-related killings soar. Murders linked to organised crime
leap to almost 1,400 in first five months of year.

May Attorney-General Eduardo Medina Mora says that the number of
murders linked to organised crime had risen by 50 per cent, with
thousands of people having been killed in the 18 months since
President Felipe Calderon took office and declared war on drugs
cartels - 450 of the dead were police, soldiers or lawyers.

August As the murders continue, hundreds of thousands turn out for
marches throughout Mexico to protest against the wave of kidnappings
and killings.