Choosing Sides in a Bloody War

There is a bloody war in Tijuana, and the battlefield extends from there through the states of Sinaloa and Jalisco and into the streets of Mexico City. About 200 homicides have occurred in Tijuana this year, the vast majority related to the “settling of accounts” among drug traffickers. Seven to 15 deaths, depending on who you count, have involved police officials. The smaller number counts the highest ranking federal anti-drug law enforcement officials and former officials assassinated across the battlefield; the larger includes their many bodyguards and state and local police officials.

Jorge Garcia Vargas and his three Mexican federal judicial police bodyguards, whose strangled and tortured bodies were found in a suburb of Mexico City last Sunday, are the most recent victims. Garcia Vargas, chief of the federal anti-narcotics agency, had been posted to Tijuana last October. He is said to have been focusing on money-laundering by the heads of the “Tijuana Cartel”--the Arellano-Felix organization. The Arellano-Felix brothers, Benjamin, Javier and Ramon, are notorious fugitives named in Mexico drug-trafficking cases. Earlier this month, as part of “Operation Cancer,” Garcia Vargas’ agents, assisted by the army, seized four Arellano-Felix houses, confiscating arms, 76 kilos of cocaine and documents.

These murders followed the machine-gun killings in Mexico City on Sept. 14 of Ernesto Ibarra Santes, two of his bodyguards and a taxi driver. Ibarra, commander of the Mexican federal police contingent in Tijuana, had occupied that post for less than one month. He was active in “Operation Alacrn” (Scorpion) in March, which raided a number of properties owned by Arellano-Felix family members and associates in Tijuana and Mexico City, as well as in the “Operation Cancer” raids two days before his death. He was also active in coordinating the arrests, in early August, of Pedro Lupercio Serratos and his brother, Oscar Gerardo, said to be top associates in the Arellano-Felix organization.

The simple and obvious interpretation of these events is that the Arellano-Felix organization, known for its ruthlessness and violence, is striking back at officials representing a government that has targeted them as the next major cartel to be eliminated. But nothing about Mexican drug politics, especially in Tijuana, is simple or straightforward.

Instead of this obvious explanation, I believe these deaths and many other recent events, perhaps even the emergence of the Popular Revolutionary Army in Oaxaca, Chiapas and Guerrero, are subplots of a major transfer of drug power in Mexico. The “federation,” the alliance system between Mexican drug trafficking organizations and their protectors, is being reorganized. The reasons for this range from changes in the structure of drug trafficking in Latin America and drug transit patterns to drug economics, to internal politics in Mexico, to the fact that the Arellano-Felix organization has become too high-profile, press-prone and violent. While they must go, the drug business and profits must continue-- $30 billion a year is major money, in Mexico or the United States.

Under this view--admittedly theory, but rooted in years of analysis and study--the Amado Carrillo Fuentes organization has been given permission by those at the highest levels who franchise drug trafficking in Mexico, (but not including President Ernesto Zedillo or his attorney general, Antonio Lozano) to expand his “plaza” (territorial franchise to operate) from the Ciudad Juarez corridor to other areas, including the Tijuana plaza of the Arellano-Felix group. In this, he is probably supported and abetted by Juan Esparragoza Morena--”El Azul” of the old Guadalajara group in Jalisco and his protectors there.

A number of events, including the above killings, hint at this and illustrate Amado Carrillo’s premier and untouchable position in Mexico:

* The early release this year by a corrupt judge of Rafael Muoz Talavera, a key figure in the old Juarez cartel, and Muoz’s return to Ciudad Juarez to work with Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

* The arrest on corruption charges of Ricardo Cordero Ontiveros, who held Vargas’ post before him, an obvious message to “keep your mouth shut about corruption”--Cordero was naive and unsuited for the post, a wealthy sign-maker by profession, but he was not corrupt.

* The transfer on Sept. 7 of the elite “incorruptible” Chihuahua group run by Army Lt. Col. Socrates Herrera, with 73 army members from Ciudad Juarez, where they had been posted as special liaisons as part of a U.S.-coordinated attack on Amado Carrillo’s organization, back to Mexico City because of the threat posed by guerrillas of the Popular Revolutionary Army.

* The recent purge of 737 police officials; the attorney general’s office said these firings could cut 70% of the narco-connection to law enforcement, but also admitted that some border state commander posts are still being sold.

Members of the Arellano-Felix group have their backs to the wall and are fighting three enemies--honest officials of the Mexican government who truly desire their capture and are pressuring them as never before, along with corrupt officials who intend to milk them to the end and other drug trafficking organizations tapped to replace them. Meanwhile, honest and corrupt anti-narcotics officials must take sides, balancing careers, ethics, “plata o plomo” (money or lead) or the likelihood of ugly deaths in the cross-fire.