LAND OF OUTLAWS

Once a Tourist Spot, a Border City Has Become a Battlefield for Drug Cartels

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico - The three gunmen executed Ramiro Tellez
Contreras before dawn as he got into his pickup truck to drive to his
job as an ambulance dispatcher. Blood streaming down his shoulders
and legs from four gunshot wounds, he stumbled to his front porch
before he collapsed in front of his wife and three children.

"He didn't even have time to say goodbye," said Tellez's wife, Silvia
Andrade. "How could they kill a man who lived to help others?"

The director of a 911-style emergency dispatch service, Tellez was
killed in mid-March in what was widely believed to be retaliation for
installing a new rescue and crime-monitoring system in this lawless
border city. He was among 83 people who have died this year in Nuevo
Laredo, nearly all in a brutal drug war that is spilling across the
Rio Grande and into the United States.

Once a popular destination for U.S. day-trippers seeking a taste of
Old Mexico, Nuevo Laredo is turning into a land of Al Capone meets
the Wild West as rival drug cartels battle with Kalashnikovs,
bazookas and even grenades to control billion-dollar smuggling routes
for cocaine and heroin through neighboring Laredo, Texas, the busiest
border crossing in the Americas.

"At times, Nuevo Laredo resembles a war zone," said a U.S. official
who spoke on condition of anonymity. With the drug gangs offering
local authorities "plomo o plata" (lead or silver), the official
said, "the tragic truth is that people who wouldn't otherwise do so
have no choice but to work with the cartels or be killed."

The U.S. Consulate in Nuevo Laredo closed for a week last summer
because of the lawlessness.

The dueling Sinaloa and Gulf drug syndicates have virtually
incapacitated the local government and infiltrated security forces,
according to several Mexican and U.S. authorities.

They are shooting police chiefs, government workers, other gang
members - and, in rare instances, innocent bystanders - in places as
public as hospital emergency rooms, outdoor barbecues and busy intersections.

They have muzzled the media with attacks like the one in February at
the respected daily El Manana, in which two gunmen stormed the
newsroom and opened fire with semi-automatic weapons and a grenade,
critically injuring a reporter. The paper, which lost its top editor
to a suspected gangland slaying in 2004, has since announced a policy
of "self-censorship" on drug stories and called for the legalization
of soft drugs.

And the cartels are increasingly making their presence felt on the
U.S. side of the border as they execute or kidnap U.S. citizens and
shoot at law enforcers.

That spillover is heightening opposition to immigration reforms being
considered by the U.S. Congress, though many U.S. officials and
policy analysts say there appears to be almost no overlap between
drug traffickers and undocumented Mexican workers.

Officials' Optimism

In an interview here, Nuevo Laredo Mayor Daniel Pena Trevino insisted
his government hasn't lost control of the city - though he travels in
an armored car and can't find a new city police chief. Mexican
President Vicente Fox also remains upbeat.

"Step by step, we are going to win this battle," Fox vowed recently,
even as the vast majority of murders remain unsolved in this city of
350,000, and this year's carnage is likely to exceed the 182 deaths in 2005.

Among other measures, Fox has vowed to extradite drug kingpins wanted
in the United States, and U.S. and Mexican officials recently
announced a joint task force aimed at increasing cooperation in
tracking criminals operating on both sides of the border. But some
policy analysts believe the measures will do little unless the United
States dramatically rethinks its war on drugs.

No matter the level of bilateral cooperation, drugs will continue
entering the country "unless there is a real strong change in policy
in the United States to lower demand," said John J. Bailey, an expert
on Mexican drug trafficking at Georgetown University. Even if one
cartel is squashed, he said, "another group will spring up to take
the traffic."

In Nuevo Laredo, the violence began when Sinaloa gang leader Joaquin
Guzman, also known as El Chapo, tried to take over the turf of Osiel
Cardenas, head of the rival Gulf cartel, who was arrested in 2003.
But Cardenas is fighting back from behind bars, U.S. and Mexican officials say.

By last summer, the battle had become so fierce that Fox's
administration dispatched hundreds of elite Federal Preventative
Police here to restore order. That didn't stop drug enforcers from
executing the Nuevo Laredo police chief two months later, on his
first day in office.

The next city police chief - who has since quit - fired half his
700-member force to weed out rogue elements allegedly controlled by
the Gulf cartel. But U.S. officials believe the force is still
infected by the Zetas, a group of defectors from an elite,
U.S.-trained Mexican military unit, who work with the Gulf cartel.

Allegations have mounted that the Federal Preventative Police force
here has been similarly corrupted by the Sinaloa cartel. Fox's
administration last month replaced most of the federal police. But
since the replacements arrived, 30 more people have been killed in
suspected cartel attacks, including four new federal agents.

Drug enforcers are even masquerading as security forces, so "you have
absolutely no idea who the real police are and who the fake police
are," one U.S. official said.

Despite the carnage, Nuevo Laredo is hardly Baghdad. During a recent
visit, the hot, dusty city hummed with workers and shoppers. But many
stores were shuttered and the streets were eerily empty of children.

"I don't want them to be in the wrong place at the wrong time," said
Jose Lopez, 67, as his grandchildren played inside his gated yard.
His eyes darted down the street to where a gunman boarded a transit
bus two weeks ago and shot a man dead in front of 10 passengers.

In the graceful, shady plaza across the pedestrian bridge from
Laredo, four of five restaurants and more than a third of handicraft
stores have closed as tourism from the United States has plummeted.

Cartels Widen Scope

But there is lots of movement from Nuevo Laredo to Laredo, where
Mexican cartels are expanding their presence, according to U.S. law
enforcement officials. In addition to buying homes and setting up
stash houses, drug lords are recruiting Laredo ex-cons and other
current or former south Texans.

A key Sinaloa cartel enforcer is former Laredo resident "La Barbie,"
so nicknamed for his pale skin, light hair and blue eyes. La Barbie,
whose real name is Edgar Valdez Villareal, is wanted on drug charges
in Louisiana.

"There are some significant violators here," said Tom Hinojosa, who
heads the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's Laredo office. U.S.
authorities earlier this year confiscated weapons including grenades
and homemade bombs from a stash house in Laredo, he said.

Traffickers driving vans laden with drugs also are firing at
sheriffs' deputies and U.S. Border Patrol officials during chases
along the Rio Grande.

As sheriff's deputies chased a van filled with drugs into the Rio
Grande in January, a group of men appeared on the Mexican banks of
the river, pointed their AK-47s at the deputies and shouted in
English, "You wanna play, --?"

"They are armed and they are dangerous and their orders are, 'Don't
give up your load without a fight,'" said Sheriff Rick Flores of Webb
County, which includes Laredo.

At least four people have been killed in suspected drug-related
shootings this year in and around Laredo, a city of 250,000. And 40
U.S. citizens from the Laredo area are among 400 people who have
disappeared in Nuevo Laredo in the past few years, many at the hands
of drug traffickers.

Americans in Danger

Two dozen U.S. citizens are still missing, including Yvette Martinez,
27, a mother of two, and her friend Brenda Cisneros, 23, who were
last seen leaving a stadium concert in Nuevo Laredo in September 2004.

Martinez's stepfather, railroad conductor William Slemaker, has found
eyewitnesses who say they saw city police and high-level drug
enforcers take the women away. He's also found an escaped kidnap
victim who claims he saw the women being held as cooks at a drug
cartels' safe house.

But neither the FBI nor Mexican authorities have made any arrests.

"It burns me up," Slemaker said. "If this were George W. Bush's
daughter, would they be dragging their feet like this?"

On Wednesday, U.S. ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza declared that
pressure on Mexican authorities "will not cease" until the missing
Americans are found.

But Norman Townsend, the FBI chief in Laredo, noted in a recent
interview that once a U.S. citizen crosses the border, the United
States has no jurisdiction. Townsend also said he was "frustrated" by
Mexico's response. "If Mexican authorities think the case is
drug-related, they back away," he said.

Relatives and co-workers of Tellez, the slain emergency dispatch
coordinator, expect no arrests either.

An amicable, mustachioed man, Tellez broadcast weather reports at a
local radio station and was studying law. He also had lectured on the
dangers of drug addiction at local schools.

By the time Tellez took the helm last year of Nuevo Laredo's C-4
rescue dispatching service, the city's equivalent to 911, drug
dealers had broken into radio frequencies to warn security forces and
rescue workers not to arrive too early at crime scenes. A typical
missive, said one C-4 worker, was "Hold off or you'll be dead."

Those warnings didn't stop Tellez from installing video cameras at
crime spots as part of a replacement communications system last
winter - and sharing footage with law enforcers. After an unknown man
earlier this year toppled the C-4 radio tower in broad daylight by
ramming it with a bulldozer he borrowed from a construction site,
Tellez didn't stop, either.

A black ribbon of mourning hangs on the door of Tellez's old office.
Inside, workers still dispatch ambulances and police, but they've
dispensed with the video cameras.

"Since his death we felt we should no longer use them," said Tellez's
friend Jose Luis Jacome, the new C-4 director. Asked if that was
admitting defeat, Jacome merely sighed.

[sidebar]

Homicides per 100,000 people (2005)

Mexico, national average (population of 106.4 million)

10.7

Mexico City (population of 8.8 million)

7.9

Nuevo Laredo (population of 350,000)

52

Source - Mexican National System of Public Security: City of Nuevo Laredo