Death Threats Targets Top Tijuana Cop

The first attack came at 7 p.m. Monday. Gerónimo Calderón Jiménez was getting off guard duty in southern Tijuana, when heavily armed gunmen shot him repeatedly and left behind a hand-written sign: Five officers will die each week, unless police chief Julián Leyzaola resigns.

The next 15 hours saw four more assaults in Tijuana and Rosarito Beach that left two officers dead, one injured and fifth unhurt but badly shaken. In the brutal showdown between drug cartels and Mexican law enforcement, these victims were shot at random, authorities said – officers who found themselves in harm’s way as a brutal drug lord named Teodoro García Simental sent a deadly message.

A half-hour after Calderón was killed, miles away in the seaside city of Rosarito Beach, gunmen fired at a 20-year-old Rosarito Beach officer, a member of the city’s tourist police unit, as she stopped at a food stand in a neighborhood west of the toll road. She escaped injury, but blocks away and moments later, they killed fellow officer Rubén Villegas Bartolini, 42, behind the wheel of a patrol vehicle.

Another half-hour later, this time on Bulevar Insurgentes in eastern Tijuana, gunmen attacked an unarmed auxiliary police officer outside a Smart & Final store. When he was taken to the Red Cross Hospital for treatment, officers were assigned to stand guard outside. At 10 a.m. the next day, gunmen sprayed gunfire on their pickups, killing officer Eva González Cruz on her 38th birthday.

“The fight to recover Tijuana’s tranquillity will continue,” Tijuana Mayor Jorge Ramos vowed Thursday following a City Hall ceremony honoring Calderón and González. “It is not with little anonymous messages that they are going to make the Mexican state back down.”

Authorities believe the attacks were carried on the orders of García – commonly known as El Teo – who is said to control trafficking routes and the domestic drug market in much of eastern Tijuana and Rosarito Beach. In recent weeks, García’s group has suffered serious losses, as the military and civilian law enforcement forces have arrested some of his top deputies, best known by their nicknames: El Rambo, El Chuletas, La Perra, El Cande.

Garcia has wielded power in the region by building a network of corrupt police officers, but in recent months authorities say many of his allies in Tijuana’s 2,200-member have been arrested, dropped from the force or voluntarily resigned.

via Threat targets top Tijuana cop.

4 U.S. Citizens Found Strangled in Tijuana Mexico

The bodies of four U.S. citizens were found strangled, beaten and stabbed in a van in this border city, two days after they reportedly left their Southern California homes for a night at the Mexican clubs, U.S. officials said Thursday. The bodies were described as having been tortured; bludgeoned, beaten and with their skulls crushed. They were found wrapped in blankets early Saturday morning, according to a news release from the Tijuana State Attorney’s Office.

The victims were found Saturday, but their deaths were not reported earlier because they were under investigation, said Fermin Gomez, an assistant state prosecutor in Baja California.

U.S. consular officials in Tijuana said the victims  two men and two women from the San Diego and Chula Vista areas — were U.S. citizens. The state attorney general’s office in Baja, Calif., said one of the women was Mexican.

A spokesman for the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana confirmed the identities of the dead as Luis Games Chavez, 21; Oscar J. Garcia III, 23; Brianna Hernandez Aguilera, 19; and Carmen Ramos Chavez, 20. All were U.S. citizens and Southern California residents, the consulate spokesman said. He declined to give specific hometowns or say how long the four had been in Tijuana.

Their deaths are the latest in a string of violence in Tijuana that authorities blame on a bloody turf war between drug cartels.

“I just don’t think kids should be going to Tijuana right now,” Chula Vista police Lt. Scott Arsenault told the San Diego Union-Tribune. “They ran into the wrong people, obviously.”

Bernard Gonzales, a spokesman for the Chula Vista Police Department, said a friend told the women’s parents they were headed to nightclubs in Tijuana on Thursday night. They were reported missing the next day when they did not answer their cell phones.

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U.S. Citizen Beheaded In Apparent Mexico Drug Hit

A U.S. citizen was one of the three men who were found decapitated this week in Tijuana, Mexican authorities said Friday.

The body of George Harrison, a 38-year-old former Chula Vista resident, had been dismembered and mutilated and was dumped in a vacant lot near Tijuana’s beachside bullring.

Authorities said they suspected that it was an organized crime hit.

Harrison had several drug-related convictions in the United States and was suspected of drug trafficking in Mexico, Baja California Assistant Atty. General Rafael Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez said Harrison had been living in the Tijuana area since his release from a U.S. prison six months ago. He owned a pizzeria in Tijuana, from which he was abducted, Gonzalez said.

Authorities who searched Harrison’s business found four weapons, including a .38-caliber handgun.

Alongside the bodies, authorities discovered a taunting narco-message similar to others left at crime scenes in the battles among rival organized crime groups

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Drug Gangs Threaten Tijuana Cops On Radio, Then Kill Them

The situation along the border continues to deteriorate.

Mexican drug gangs are breaking into Tijuana police radio frequencies to issue chilling death threats to cops which they then carry out, demoralizing security forces in a worsening drug war.

“You’re next, bastard … We’re going to get you,” an unidentified drug gang member said over the police radio in the city of Tijuana after naming a policeman.

The man also threatened a second cop by name and played foot-stomping “narcocorrido” music, popular with drug cartels, over the airwaves.

“No one can help them,” an officer named Jorge said of his threatened colleagues as he heard the threats in his patrol car.

Sure enough, two hours later the dead bodies of the two named policemen were found dumped on the edge of the city, their hands tied and bullet wounds in their heads.

Cartels killed some 530 police in Mexico last year, some of them corrupt officers who were working for rival gangs. Others were killed in shoot-outs or murdered for working against the gangs or refusing to turn a blind eye to drug shipments.

Violence has hit shocking levels in Tijuana, over the border from San Diego, since President Felipe Calderon launched an army crackdown on traffickers in late 2006, stirring up new wars between rival cartels over smuggling routes.

The drug war is scaring tourists and investors away from northern Mexico, forcing some businesses to shutter just as the country heads into recession this year.

Badly-paid Tijuana municipal police, often accused of collaborating with rival wings of the local Arellano Felix cartel, are badly demoralized, senior officers say.

“These death threats are part of the psychological warfare that organized crime is using against officers,” said Tijuana police chief Gustavo Huerta.

“Before, the gangs began infiltrating the radio after a police execution, which was bad enough, but now they are doing it beforehand and the force feels terrorized,” he said.

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Mexico Army Nabs Cartel Suspect – Claims To Have Dissolved 300 Bodies In Acid

A suspect in police custody calls himself a “stewmaker” for a Mexican drug lord, saying he disposed of about 300 bodies by dissolving them in acid.

A suspected hit man who allegedly dumped more than 300 bodies in vats of lye at the behest of a top Tijuana crime boss has been arrested near Ensenada, according to the Mexican military.

Alleged crime boss Teodoro Garcia Simental, nicknamed El Teo, narrowly escaped after soldiers on Thursday raided an upscale resort outside the Baja California port city 70 miles south of San Diego, according to one Mexican news report.

The military said Santiago Meza Lopez, a 45-year-old from the state of Sinaloa, was arrested after allegedly trying to flee from soldiers and federal agents on the Ensenada- Tijuana coastal highway. Soldiers also arrested Garcia’s cook and seized four automatic weapons and two grenades.

Military authorities said Meza admitted being Garcia’s body disposal expert, nicknamed “El Pozolero del Teo” — roughly translated: Teo’s soup maker.

Garcia, said to be in his mid-30s, is believed to be battling the Arellano Felix drug cartel for control of the Tijuana area in a turf war that has claimed more than 500 lives since late September. Many of the disintegrated remains left in barrels on busy streets have been attributed to El Teo, and have included messages addressed to reputed rivals threatening to make their henchmen into pozole, a Mexican soup.

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Vigilantes Appear To Be Fighting Back In Mexico Drug War

Shadowy vigilante groups are threatening Mexico’s drug gangs near the U.S. border in retaliation for a wave of murders and kidnappings that killed 1,600 people in this city alone last year.

One group in the border city of Ciudad Juarez pledged last week to “clean our city of these criminals” and said their mission was to “end the life of a criminal every 24 hours.”

The emergence of vigilantes would be a new twist to a vicious drug war that killed 5,700 people in Mexico last year and forced the United States to give hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the Mexican government.

Ciudad Juarez, a manufacturing center in the desert across from El Paso, Texas, was the scene of the worst violence in 2008 as drug cartels fought each other as well as staging kidnappings for ransom and extorting businessmen.

In an e-mail to news organizations, the “Juarez Citizen Command” said it was funded by local businessmen sick of abductions and extortion in the city, home to factories that export goods to the United States.

While none of the city’s 1,600 in the last year were undoubtedly the work of vigilantes, a body was found on January 7 with a message next to it that read: “This is for those who continue extorting.”

And six men in their 20s and 30s were shot dead and dumped together in Ciudad Juarez in October with a cardboard sign reading: “Message for all the rats: This will continue.”

Drug gangs often leave threatening messages with the bodies of their victims, but security officials said those two incidents might have been the work of vigilantes.

Another group, “Businessmen United, The Death Squad” put a video on Internet site YouTube last June threatening to go after kidnappers and criminals in Ciudad Juarez, the biggest city in Mexico’s Chihuahua state. The video is no longer on YouTube.

via Shadow of vigilantes appears in Mexico drug war – Yahoo! News.

Border Terror – Violence and Brutality Spreads In Mexico

Violence in Mexico continues to grow in both brutality and the  number of dead.  Here’s just a few of the many stories to come from the border cities over the past week.

Mystery Man Blamed As Body Count Grows

He is said to love the ladies, fast horses and dissolving enemies in lye.

Teodoro Garcia Simental is among the best known but least identifiable villains in Mexico’s drug war, blamed for a trail of terror across Baja California.

His heavily armed hit men, authorities say, have been leaving the gruesome displays of charred and decapitated bodies across the city, signed with the moniker “Tres Letras,” for the three letters in “Teo.” And authorities believe he runs a network of hide-outs where kidnap victims are held in cages.

Yet thousands of police officers, soldiers, state and federal agents can’t seem to find him.

Billboards showing Tijuana’s most wanted kidnappers don’t include Garcia’s image, even though he is believed to be behind most of the gang war that has claimed more than 400 lives here since late September.

“That tells you that you don’t want to be the one responsible for putting Teo’s picture in public,” said one U.S. law enforcement source who spoke on condition of anonymity. “There’s no future in it.”

[...]

Garcia is said to be in his mid-30s — even his date of birth is not known. He reportedly bets big on clandestine horse races at isolated ranches outside Ensenada. He hires people at $400 per week to guard kidnapping victims and to weld together the barrels of caustic chemicals used to dispose of some of his victims, according to documents and interviews. One Mexican law enforcement official said Garcia has killed people at parties, laughing at their stunned reactions.

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A Week In Tijuana

The teenage nephew of the army general leading the local fight against drug traffickers was killed this weekend in Baja California’s continuing violence.

A municipal police department spokesman said gunmen shot the boy, Carlos Alfonso Ortiz Davila, 16, about 8:30 p.m. Friday while he was in front of a high school known as CECYTE on the southside of Tijuana, the spokesman said.

He said the teen was the nephew of Gen. Alfonso Duarte Mujica, commander of the Second Military Zone and a leading figure in the fight against drug cartels in northwest Mexico.

A state police officer also was killed during the weekend. Around 6 p.m. Sunday, a battle broke out on city streets between gunmen and state police officers. The officer was wounded and died soon after the fight, said the Baja California State Attorney General’s Office.

The boy and the officer were among seven people killed this weekend in the state.

In Tijuana, police around 2 a.m. Saturday found the body of man who had been burned to death on the the east side of the city, the Attorney General’s Ofice said.

About 3:30 that afternoon, two men were shot, also in eastern Tijuana. One of them died three hours later, the Attorney General’s Office said.

About 8 p.m., municipal police found two decapitated bodies in an empty lot in in far eastern Tijuana near the Tecate city limits. The bodies had a message signed by “La Maña,” a nickname used by a drug trafficking leader, the state agency said.

The violence extended to Rosarito Beach, when a man was shot to death around 11 a.m. Sunday as he drove his car, the state agency reported.

About 800 have been killed in Tijuana this year. Most of the deaths have been blamed on rival drug gangs battling for supremacy.

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Four Police Officers Killed in Ciudad Juarez

Gunmen staged four attacks on police within a half-hour period, killing four officers in a Mexican border city overrun by drug violence, an official said Monday.

Authorities are investigating whether the attacks Sunday night were coordinated, municipal police spokesman Jaime Torres said.

Dozens of Ciudad Juarez police have been killed this year in attacks blamed on drug gangs trying to consolidate territory. Many officers have quit out of fear for their lives, often after their names have appeared on hit lists left in public.

Another such list naming 26 officers was found early Monday at a dog racing track above the bodies of four civilian men gunned down at the track, Torres said. One of the four had been decapitated, and a Santa Claus hat had been placed on his head. A fifth man who survived was left bound and gagged next to the bodies.

At Least 9 Soldiers Found Decapitated

Mexican police on Sunday found nine decapitated bodies and the army identified eight soldiers who had died fighting powerful drug gangs and whose murders were seen as a brazen challenge to the government.

The bodies showed signs of torture. They were left on the side of a highway about an hour north of the tourist resort of Acapulco in the southern state of Guerrero, state police said.

Their heads were stuffed in a plastic bag and left outside a shopping center.

Mexico’s President Feline Calderon has deployed tens of thousands of troops and police since 2006 to take on drug cartels. The defense ministry vowed not to back down despite its latest losses.

“They are trying to scare the military. Regardless, the ministry promises to continue fighting,” it said in a statement.

The ministry released the names of eight decapitated soldiers but said one of them was recovered on December 9.

Drug killings throughout Mexico have more than doubled to over 5,300 this year, scaring off investment and tourists. The United States has sent hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to help its southern neighbor fight the cartels.

The Mexican army has made some prominent captures, but the cartels seem able to quickly replace their losses. Meanwhile, a growing number of police have been gruesomely murdered.

A note left with the severed heads warned of more decapitations, the state police said.

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Terror At The Border – Mexico Drug Cartels Send Message of Torture and Death

The death squads of the drug cartels are killing in spectacularly gruesome ways, using the violence as a language to deliver a message to society.

Increasingly, bodies show unmistakable signs of torture. Videos of executions are posted on the Internet, as taunts, as warnings. Corpses are dumped on playgrounds, with neatly printed notes beside them. And very often, the heads have been removed.

When someone rolled five heads onto the dance floor in a cantina in Michoacan state two years ago, even the most hardened Mexicans were shocked. Now ritual mutilations are routine. In the border city of Tijuana, 37 people were slain over the weekend, including four children. Nine of the adults were decapitated, including three police officers whose badges were stuffed in their mouths.

“There is a new and different violence in this war,” said Victor Clark Alfaro, the founder of the Binational Center for Human Rights, who moves around Tijuana accompanied by bodyguards. “Each method is now more brutal, more extreme than the last. To cut off the heads? That is now what they like. They are going to the edge of what is possible for a human being to do.”

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Over 38 Murders In Tijuana Over The Weekend

At least 38 people have been killed in Tijuana since Saturday, nine of them decapitated, in escalating drug-related violence that appears to have left in tatters a Mexican military offensive launched two weeks ago.

The killing spree marked the end of the tenure of the city’s top law enforcement official. Secretary of Public Security Alberto Capella Ibarra was removed from his post Monday evening after a year marked by upheaval in the police ranks and increasing violence.

Dozens of soldiers and federal agents patrolling the eastern part of the city have failed to stop the killings between rival drug cartels, which continue brazen and brutal attacks across Tijuana.

Three of the nine decapitated bodies discovered in an empty lot Sunday were those of police officers, according to the Baja California attorney general’s office. On Saturday night, two brothers, 4 and 13 years old, were gunned down along with their father outside a grocery store, authorities said.

The nephew of Baja California’s tourism secretary, Angel Escobedo, was found fatally shot inside his car Saturday morning. In nearby Rosarito Beach, police over the weekend discovered a dismembered body in a car outside a taco stand, and another outside a small church.

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Eduardo Arellano Felix – Mexico Drug Cartel Leader Captured In Tijuana

The head of a major family drug-dealing cartel in Tijuana, a city bordering the United States which is plagued by rampant gang violence, has been arrested, police said Sunday.

Eduardo Arellano Felix, nicknamed “the Doctor”, was arrested in an operation Saturday night, said spokesmen of the National Defense Ministry (Sedena) and Federal Public Security (SSPF).

The police exchanged fire with the gangsters before getting into the house where he had been hiding, they said.

With Eduardo’s detention, “the generation of the (Arellano) brothers who formed that criminal structure has been dismantled,” SSPF Vice Minister Facundo Rosas told a press conference.

Eduardo Arellano was fully identified for his burnt scars in both arms and chest, Rosas said.

“The detention of Eduardo Arellano Felix means a strong blow to that criminal group,” and he will face charges of drug trafficking, use of arms exclusive to the Mexican army and kidnapping, said the official.

analysts warn that the arrest will not necessarily dismantle the trafficking organisation.

“Those people watching the drugs trade say that at any moment another member of the family, or another cartel, could swoop in and recover control,” he said.

Arellano Felix was located in a house in the border area of Tijuana, and fired on federal agents after being encircled, police said.

A three-hour gun battle with more than 100 police and soldiers ensued before his arrest.

He was found with a girl, aged 11, believed to be his daughter, police said.

His drug cartel, also known as the Tijuana cartel, is allegedly one of the four large drug mafias operating in Mexico and is blamed by the US justice department for importing and distributing hundreds of tonnes of cocaine and marijuana in the US.

It has also been blamed for the murder and torture of police officers, informants and rivals

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Terror and Torture In Mexico

Eight dead bodies were found Tuesday alongside messages from drug gangs in the northern Mexican city of Tijuana, where 16 dead bodies were found a day earlier. Six of the bodies found Tuesday in the city along the US border were inside barrels with sulfuric acid in the city center, while the two others were found in the suburbs.

The public prosecutor’s office in the state of Baja California said the barrels included a message.

“This is what happens to the engineer, and we will make stew with all those who are with him,” the message said.

The two other bodies were wrapped in blankets which had the message, “here are your people, Duarte.” Read more