Tijuana Scions of Privilege Alleged to Be Drug Hit Men

The young men were offered all the advantages their wealthy parents could provide: family money, connections, Catholic school educations in San Diego and the ability to pass with ease on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border.

But today, some of Tijuana’s most prominent families are bracing themselves as these privileged native sons are described by authorities as hit men for Tijuana’s alleged cocaine godfathers, the Arellano Felix brothers.

In an unusual statement filed recently in U.S. District Court in San Diego, Mexico’s anti-narcotics czar dropped the names of six young men allegedly recruited by Arellano henchmen. To the embarrassment and consternation of many here, the young men are members of the elite socioeconomic fraternity known in Mexico as los juniors.

In the murky narcotics underworld, cartel foot soldiers are usually poor men seduced by the lure of easy cash. How did these juniors--upper middle-class scions who grew up in the shadow of the U.S. Consulate with new cars and trendy clothes--catapult proud family names from the Tijuana social pages to the files of U.S. federal court?

For the juniors, the appeal may lie in the huge sums of money available--up to $15,000 for a quick run across the border--and the kicks and glamour of moving in an outlaw world where partying came second only to profits.

Now, allegations about the rogue juniors’ activities have prompted a fresh round of soul-searching in a city that has grown accustomed to mob-style violence, including the murders of seven Baja prosecutors and police commanders this year.

And as they ponder the depth of narco-corruption in Tijuana society, some are pointedly asking why more wayward juniors are not behind bars.

“The Arellano Felixes became famed for the juniors they had at their side like a protective shield,” award-winning journalist Jesus Blancornelas wrote recently in his Tijuana weekly, Zeta. “These youths, because of the position of wealth and power that brought them together with the Arellanos, became untouchable for whatever murders they wished to commit.”

The case against the implicated juniors spilled into U.S. courts after the Sept. 30 arrest of Emilio Valdez Mainero, 32, the baby-faced son of a deceased army colonel from Tijuana who, his widow says, once served in the presidential guard. Valdez “hires young assassins who belong to Tijuana’s upper class,” according to a statement by Francisco Molina Ruiz, commissioner of Mexico’s National Institute for the Combat of Drugs, now on file in U.S. federal court.

Arrested along with Valdez was Alfredo Hodoyan Palacios, 25, the son of a prominent Tijuana business family who U.S. prosecutors say is wanted in Mexico for murder. His nom de guerre is el Lobo, or the wolf, they say.

FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration agents arrested Valdez and Hodoyan on Sept. 30 near Valdez’s rented luxury apartment in Coronado Shores, a posh San Diego beach community, in a roundup of alleged Arellano henchmen after the Sept. 14 assassination of Baja California police commander Ernesto Ibarra Santes in Mexico City. In a subsequent search of the apartment, agents found an AK-47, which Hodoyan admitted possessing, court documents say.

Valdez’s arrest was based on a relatively minor charge--failure to appear to answer to a Baja California firearms violation--and Hodoyan, accused of illicit arms possession, was held for his alleged involvement in a 1992 drive-by shooting of four men in Baja, court documents say.

Subsequent Mexican allegations presented Oct. 15 by Assistant U.S. Atty. Gonzalo Curiel accuse Hodoyan of involvement in the Ibarra killing and Valdez of plotting two slayings. Both, Curiel alleged, are members of the Arellano Felix organization, a group “dedicated to drug trafficking, and the murder of competitors and law enforcement officers who were investigating and prosecuting members.”

Mexican officials have until Dec. 2 to prepare substantiating evidence and any further charges to support their request to extradite Valdez and Hodoyan, Curiel said.

Both are being held without bail in San Diego. Three other juniors named in court documents are at large. Yet another lies paralyzed in a hospital bed after being shot by a fugitive gunman at the U.S.-Mexico border crossing. Law enforcement authorities and community leaders have no firm estimates on how many of Tijuana’s privileged juniors have fallen into the drug trade; at least 20 of them, however, are believed to have died in its violence over the past decade.

For parents who once watched the boys play together in grade school at Tijuana’s private Instituto Mexico, the official story is a bitter pill to swallow.

Cristina Palacios de Hodoyan said her son Alfredo, a graduate of the St. Augustine Catholic school in San Diego, is the manager of family rental properties, not a gunman. She said that a Tijuana judge absolved him of the drive-by murder charge two years ago and that he was in San Diego when Ibarra was slain in Mexico City. The AK-47 was left by a friend, she said.

“I know Alfredo is innocent. These boys are from good families, known to all of Tijuana,” Palacios said. “Everyone who lives here has the money to give their children opportunities, cars, private schooling, clothes, an allowance. If Alfredo said, ‘Mama, I need a car,’ I got him a car. I still pay for his gas. If he is broke, I pay his credit card bill.

“Why would they be mixed up in this?”

Two blocks away, Valdez’s aging mother, a near-invalid widowed in January, lives on a shaded avenue of upscale Lomas del Hipodromo, one of the city’s most exclusive neighborhoods, just down the street from a fruit drink stand that has been shuttered since a young woman and her police guardian died there in a gangland-style hit in October. Two men guard the widow’s house.

“I am an honest, decent family woman who has spent my life completely dedicated to husband and children,” Amparo de Valdez said. “This has been a terrible blow.”

Community leaders say the alliance between rogue juniors and narcotics traffickers has been a disquieting tradition since the Arellano brothers moved into the affluent hillside neighborhoods whose bougainvillea-covered walls shelter some of Tijuana’s most impressive mansions.

“It is nothing new. Unfortunately, for the past eight years drug traffickers have tightened their tentacles around boys from prominent families who are accustomed to lives of opulence,” said Father Salvador Cisneros, rector of the Sagrado Corazon seminary in Tijuana. “Many of the young have become involved in narcotics traffic. This is a grave problem in Tijuana society.”

Cisneros said traffickers view the juniors as vital strategic allies, because most can drive freely across the border and know which times inspectors are most likely to wave them through instead of stopping and searching them.

Some, like Hodoyan, were born in U.S. hospitals and become U.S. citizens, he said. U.S. officials say it is not uncommon for upscale Tijuana families to have relatives--or residences--on both sides of the border. Some Tijuana parents were themselves born in U.S. hospitals and still have U.S. doctors, and in some cases, U.S. health insurance, a U.S. consular official said.

“The juniors can enter the United States and blend into its society with tremendous facility. It makes them very useful,” Cisneros said. “Anyone who can drive easily into the United States can earn $15,000 in just a few hours. That is a tremendous temptation for someone of their age. They are easily converted into tools of the narcotics trade.”

For years now, the rat-a-tat-tat of shootouts has peppered the elegant winding streets of Tijuana’s hillside districts, where tiled Moorish fountains decorate public plazas and security officers guard gated communities with sweeping views of the ocean and mountains.

A number of empty mansions in those neighborhoods, confiscated in anti-drug operations, offer mute testimony to a shady presence.

One of the seized homes belongs to Valdez, one of the two juniors jailed in San Diego. The impregnable compound, its white stucco wall crisscrossed with police tape, has been chained shut since 1994, its gloomy grandeur a stark contrast to the sunny Mediterranean-style courtyards of its neighbors.

Valdez was deeply involved with Ramon Arellano, drug commissioner Molina said in his statement. The reputed kingpin even became godfather to Valdez’s young son, Emilio, in August 1991, according to Molina’s statement.

“It’s true,” Cristina Palacios said. “Ramon became the godfather of a number of children in Tijuana. Let’s face it, it was often for the money. He would pay for a big baptism party.”

Until the Arellanos were sought for the 1993 slaying of Mexican Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo, Ramon and his brothers were well-integrated in top-drawer Tijuana social life, Palacios said.

She said she first saw Ramon Arellano 10 years ago at a party when she arrived to pick up her teenage daughter. “There wasn’t a kid who went to parties in Tijuana who didn’t know him,” she said.

Another of Palacios’ sons, Agustin Hodoyan, met Arellano at a party thrown by Valdez in 1987. Hodoyan even translated for Arellano and an attractive young American woman who spoke no Spanish. “How could you not know him?” Hodoyan said. “Every Friday and Saturday night, he would be at the disco or a party. He always paid for everyone’s drinks. He was a partyer. He used to drive around with his music turned up real loud.”

One of the young men who shot hoops at the Hodoyans’ basketball court, Gustavo Miranda Santa Cruz, is also named in the court documents. Miranda was gunned down as he waited to drive across the U.S. border with his wife Oct. 3 and told authorities he believed Valdez and Alfredo Hodoyan ordered his killing, though he had participated in “criminal actions” along with them, Molina’s statement said. Miranda is now under guard at an undisclosed facility and, according to Molina, has provided information to authorities.

No motive for his shooting was given, but friends of Miranda say his mother, a financial advisor and insurance agent, had been encouraging her son to distance himself from the other juniors. Gustavo had even begun selling policies at her modern Tijuana office suite, employees said. His mother, absent from her office since the shooting, could not be reached for comment.

“Since the American godfathers emerged in the 1920s, we have known that when someone joins, they can never quit. They know too much,” said Dr. Manuel Molina Bellini, head of a Tijuana methadone treatment program for heroin addicts and an expert in Tijuana’s youth narcotics culture. “The kids that get involved in this think only of adventure and easy money. They never imagine they could get themselves killed.”

Also named in the court documents is another childhood friend of Valdez and Hodoyan, Fabian Martinez. Friends recall Martinez as such a painfully shy child that his father once organized a baseball team to encourage him to play with other kids.

Mexican authorities say he is a fugitive pistolero whose alias is Tiburon, or shark. According to an Oct. 3 statement by the Mexico attorney general’s office, he has racked up a bloody official resume in shootings in which at least a dozen have died. Victims include a Tijuana newspaper photographer, a rival trafficker killed with his wife and child, and a federal police agent shot 30 times, the statement said.

Hector Villareal, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office, said Martinez is wanted in Mexico in connection with the slaying of Ibarra and others.

Martinez, Hodoyan and unspecified other gunmen “planned and arranged the murder” of Ibarra, according to U.S. prosecutor Curiel’s Oct. 15 declaration, filed in San Diego federal court.

Martinez allegedly was one of the triggermen who sprayed Ibarra’s taxi with gunfire, killing two bodyguards and the cabdriver along with him, an Oct. 3 Mexico attorney general’s statement said.

Two other juniors--Eduardo Leon and Fabian Partida--also were named in the U.S. files as recruits to the Arellano organization, but no additional details were provided.

The disclosures have fed a frenzied season of gossip and dismay in Tijuana.

“No one really cared about these guys as long as they were just killing each other,” editor Blancornelas said. “It was only when active-duty police commanders began to die that people began to pay attention.”