October 1, 2007
Gun Battles and Kidnappings Plague Tijuana, Mexico
Frontera NorteSur
The Mexican federal government began dispatching an additional
650 federal police to Tijuana after an upsurge in suspected narco-violence left the border city reeling last week. In the
worst incident, gunmen firing automatic weapons from various vehicles attacked a post manned by Federal Preventive Police
(PFP) and Baja California State Preventive Police late on the evening of September 24.
The ten minute firefight in
the Francisco Villa neighborhood left one civilian dead, two others wounded and two PFP agents injured. The windows of seven
government vehicles and the metal fence of a nearby school were destroyed by the storm of bullets. Walking with his girlfriend
in front of the targeted building, car washer Alfredo Luna Reyes was killed when he entered the line of fire as the attack
got underway. Luna's girlfriend was wounded in the gunfire. No suspects in the shooting were immediately detained.
Two
hours before the Francisco Villa assault, 20-year-old state police officer Ricardo Rosas Alvarado, who was assigned to a special
intelligence unit, was murdered in a parking lot situated in another section of Tijuana. Rosas' murder followed the September
23 killing of Baja California state policeman Carlos Horacio Morales Mendez.
In yet another incident bearing the signature
of organized crime, the body of Miguel Angel Ramos Pintado, a cousin of former Institutional Revolutionary Party presidential
candidate Roberto Madrazo, was discovered September 23 in the Baja California border city of Tecate. Ramos had been reported
missing since September 14. Ramos' daughter, Nadia Karina Ramos, who was a Baja California contestant in the Miss Mexico beauty
contest, quickly withdrew from the pageant competition after hearing the news of her father's death.
Tijuana's violence,
which has claimed at least 218 lives in the border city this year, erupted as Tijuana Mayor Kurt Honold was attending a hemispheric
mayors' conference in Chicago, Illinois. Honold was scheduled to talk about purported local law enforcement advances in Tijuana.
"We are on the level of London, England, not because I say it but because the International Association of City Centers affirms
it," Honold was quoted as saying before leaving for Chicago.
It is unclear who or what is behind the most recent bouts
of violence in Tijuana. A city long-dominated by the Arellano-Felix drug cartel, and plagued with high rates of methamphetamine
and other drug abuse, Tijuana has been a key battleground for control of both the domestic and export (US) drug markets in
recent years.
Jose Santiago Vasconcelos, the chief of the Federal Office of the Attorney General's anti-organized crime
unit, recently contended that the Arellano-Felix organization, whose alleged former leader, Francisco Javier Arellano, was
sentenced to life in a US prison this month, had ceased to exist. Other analysts challenge the contention that the cartel
is on its last legs.
Lame duck Baja California Governor Eugenio Elorduy blamed the latest violence on reactions by
organized crime to law enforcement crackdowns. "Let there be no doubt. We aren't going to be intimidated, we aren't going
to retreat," Governor Elorduy said. "This is a war and we accept it as being one."
Despite the enhanced police presence
in Tijuana, an armed commando kidnapped five persons, four men and a woman, in broad daylight September 26 in front of the
city's Pacific Industrial Park. The names of the victims were not immediately made public.
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Sources:
El Universal, September 26, 2007. Article by Julieta Martinez. El Sol de Tijuana, September 26, 2007. Proceso/Apro, September
25, 2007. La Jornada/PL/AFP, September 26, 2007. Frontera, September 23 and 27, 2007. Articles by Manuel Villegas and Fausto
Ovalle.
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Frontera NorteSur (FNS)
Center
for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico
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(Reprinted with authorization from Frontera NorteSur, a free,
on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news source. FNS can be found at http://frontera.nmsu.edu/)
Translation FNS
