Police Pioneer : Amid Intimidation, Female Tijuana District Chief Perseveres

When Elvira Ruiz took charge of this seaside district’s municipal police, she faced a legion of drug punks and street criminals determined to show her who was boss. She was shot at. Run off the highway. Threatened with death.

Inside the dusty precinct, a different war was being waged. Ruiz’s subordinate officers, all male, bristled at the idea of a woman in command. They ignored her orders. They withheld information. They emptied the gas tanks of patrol cars and disconnected their starter cables. They employed time-honored gender warfare tactics, smearing her with unsavory locker room lies. They spearheaded a lobby to oust her.

In the very male world of Mexican police, Ruiz, one of a few female chiefs in the country, was regarded as an intruder. How Ruiz won her battle on both fronts is a testimony to character over circumstance, Ruiz’s image as a clean cop and sheer stubbornness.

Ruiz’s honest reputation, if merited, remains a risky distinction in a city where authorities are forced to choose between plata o plomo--bribes or bullets--by the Tijuana drug cartel, an empire backed by an array of well-connected gunmen and millions of dollars in cash. Eight ranking Baja law enforcement officers have been killed in the past year. Some victims, according to U.S. court documents, were corrupt collaborators who got bribes and bullets.

U.S. anti-drug experts say it is only a matter of time before reform-minded officers are transferred, intimidated, demoted, bought off--or worse. The most pessimistic believe that institutional corruption is so pervasive it is extremely difficult for any honest officers to rise to commands.

Against such odds, officers like Ruiz are regarded as a rare and endangered species. To her community, she is no longer an experiment, a novelty, or a sociological UFO, but a quixotic symbol of integrity in the face of daunting odds.

“Elvira does not steal. She works night and day. She cannot be intimidated because she knows she is doing the right thing,” said Baja California Superior Court Magistrate Victor Manuel Vasquez. “If there were more Elviras in the police force, we would be much better off.”

Ruiz commands an 80-officer division within the 1,200-strong city police force. She is one of five district chiefs who report to Tijuana’s police commander. Said Ricardo Arenas, spokesman for the municipal police: “If there’s an emergency call, she answers it herself. If there’s a gunfight, she’s first at the scene. Our only complaint is she should stop working when she’s sick.”

Just shy of 5 feet tall, Ruiz is a soft-spoken, articulate, divorced workaholic who looks younger than her 38 years. She clearly is not one to camouflage her femininity to blend into a fraternal milieu. When not in uniform, she prefers black designer jeans, blue eye shadow, fuchsia lipstick and maroon nail polish. Nor does she hide her disregard for machismo, the masculine expression of the Mexican gender balance of power, or shrink from the “F” word. Ruiz is an unabashed feminista.

But she appears most at home in what is still viewed, in Mexico, as a man’s world.

“Here I am, blessed among all these men,” she quipped at her desk, behind a forest of photos of her two teenage boys and a third boy she has informally adopted. She even dates a cop, maintaining a cross-border relationship with a California Highway Patrol supervisor.

“I wouldn’t trade this life for anything,” she said. “It’s very interesting. It’s exciting. You learn a lot. And that satisfaction is something no one can take away from you. If more women got the same training and opportunities, they would do a good job too.”

It was Magistrate Vasquez who appointed Ruiz in June 1994, while he was head of the Tijuana municipal police.

It had been a traumatic year. In March, Tijuana was the site of a notorious shootout between federal agents and state police officers guarding a drug lord; then there was the assassination of a presidential candidate. In April, Vasquez’s predecessor, reform-minded Cmdr. Federico Benitez Lopez, was gunned down a week after reportedly turning down a $100,000 cartel bribe. The prime suspect was a federal police commander.

Vasquez took the reins of the shattered force and wanted to make some changes. For one thing, he wanted one of Tijuana’s 60 rank-and-file female city cops to be named a district chief.

“They studied in the same academy and faced the same risks,” Vasquez said. “Were we going to promote them, or relegate them to the lifelong role of permanent subordinates?”

Vasquez answered that question when he called a meeting of 80 Playas police officers and announced that Ruiz was their new boss. A stunned silence fell upon the room.

“It hit them like an earthquake,” Vasquez said. “Men, especially the Mexican macho, do not like to be ordered by a woman. I told them leadership does not have a gender.”

Ruiz’s new command, Playas de Tijuana, was a onetime beach resort that had once been virtually crime-free. The neo-Mediterranean community still boasts pastel villas gently faded by the briny breezes and a cinematic red sun that slips into the shimmering Pacific every evening. Not to mention the famed bullring by the sea.

But by the time Ruiz arrived, the once-peaceful district was becoming a battleground for control of the local trade in methamphetamines and other drugs.

Wealthy youths, known as “juniors,” were recruited by rival distributors and fell victim to gangland blood baths reminiscent of Al Capone. A spectacular canyon on the south end of Playas has become a favorite body dump for drug executioners.

According to U.S. court documents, Playas gunmen were recruited on both sides of the border by the Arellano Felix brothers, the reputed cartel leaders.

“The famous juniors from rich families, accustomed to doing as they please,” Ruiz said. “They drive too fast, drink too much, take drugs. At first they said, ‘You don’t know who I work for. You’ll find out. I’ll show you.’ Now they just steer clear of me. They know that if I catch them committing crimes, I’ll arrest them.”

When Ruiz arrived on the scene, street punks who had thought of themselves as untouchable were startled to find themselves being photographed for the arrest scrapbook she keeps on her desk. Even car thieves, small-time drug dealers, burglars and drunk drivers began to insinuate that if she didn’t leave them alone, she was playing with fire. During one arrest, criminals held her down and beat her up until reinforcements arrived.

“There are many people here who say they work for the great mafias, when many are just small-time narcos,” she said. “Small-time narcos can be dangerous too, because they answer to no one, so they don’t care about the consequences of their actions.”

The death threats began not long after she arrived, her subordinates say.

She was working long hours and often made the lonely drive over the mountainside to Tijuana at 3 or 4 a.m. One night in August 1994 a car sped alongside her and forced her to skid off the road. In December, it happened again--for the fourth time.

On one occasion, in December 1995, the men who ran her off the road turned around and fired off rounds, but the shots went wild.

“They could have killed me if they wanted,” she said. “It was a warning.”

Added Vasquez: “They wanted her to think about what could happen to her if she didn’t change her ways. But Elvira is not that easy to frighten.”

Part of the problem, Vasquez said, was that Ruiz did not subscribe to the tradition of supplementing police salaries, which can be as low as $200 a month, by extorting money from citizens or accepting bribes from criminals, often channeled through police chiefs.

“That means those under her are forbidden to steal,” Vasquez said. “If police are flagrantly on the take, there is always an immediate supervisor who is corrupt, and I wanted to fight corruption. You have to start somewhere, and I was starting with Elvira.”

Attempts to halt corruption ultimately step on the toes of some unseen crime organization, U.S. experts say.

“Power is based on your ability to get a segment of people to go along with you,” said Sgt. Manuel Rodriguez, head of a San Diego police cross-border liaison force that works in Tijuana. “It’s very difficult to know who these people are working for.

“Ruiz has survived a long time. She is liked and respected by her officers. And maybe, because she is a woman, they cut her a little slack. That could shield her from some of the retaliation that might have occurred.”

Like many law enforcement professionals, Ruiz preaches a fatalistic stoicism.

“We all have a destiny. We all run the risk of losing our lives one way or another,” she said. “Some of us choose to confront that threat more directly. If I were afraid, I wouldn’t do this.”

If Ruiz faced challenges on the streets when she began, she also faced hostility from within. Her superior, Vasquez, knew all about the daily hazing. So he was not particularly sympathetic when one day, several of her supervising officers showed up in Vasquez’s office to try to persuade him to remove her.

When unsavory rumors about Ruiz filtered out, Vasquez snapped. Six intransigent officers were transferred, fired or resigned.

“We got rid of them,” he said. “They tried to stain her personal dignity. That is a very ingrained manner of dishonoring a woman all over the world. I told them, I am very sorry, senores, but you are the ones who must go, not Elvira.”

Since then, U.S. and Mexican colleagues say, Ruiz has built support by firm backing for her officers’ trophy-winning sports teams. She is the first to the hospital when cops are shot, and bustles around emergency wards making sure they get proper care, colleagues say.

Ruiz never dreamed that she would be a pioneer in a male-dominated field when, after her divorce six years ago, she applied for a job as secretary for the police precinct at Rosarito Beach. At the time her only concern was supporting her two boys.

Though women soldaderas fought alongside men in the Mexican Revolution, they have occupied only limited roles in the police since then. Women began to enter police forces in large numbers in the 1980s, but only a tiny handful are in leadership positions, say spokesmen for the Interior Ministry and the attorney general’s office.

Sonia del Valle Lavin of the Women’s Communications and Information Center in Mexico City, which keeps such statistics, says Ruiz was the only Mexican female chief she had ever heard of. But there are others. Cmdr. Flerida Castilla commands a municipal district of the northern industrial stronghold Monterrey, near Texas. Lt. Col. Maria del Carmen Robles heads the 903-strong Women’s Police Group of Mexico City’s municipal police, a crime prevention unit.

“Police culture is very male-oriented, and there is always resistance to women in power here and there,” said Rodriguez of San Diego’s cross-border unit. “But Mexico’s culture is very patriarchal. For any woman to rise in the ranks the way Elvira has is very unusual.”