Weakened Tijuana Drug Cartel Still Deadly

TIJUANA —  Despite the arrests of key figures in the Arellano Felix drug cartel and the encroachment of rival gangs, Tijuana’s dominant narcotics traffickers are as dangerous as ever -- if not more so, U.S. law enforcement officials say.

Evidence of the mayhem wrought by the so-called Tijuana cartel is plentiful and appalling. Last month, Francisco J. Ortiz Franco, an editor at the crusading Zeta newsweekly, which had recently detailed alleged dealings by the Mexican gang, was gunned down in front of two of his children.

U.S. law enforcement officials believe that the cartel has been weakened by the arrests of a dozen top members, including leader Benjamin Arellano Felix in 2002 and lieutenants Efrain Perez and Jorge Aureliano Felix last month. But some U.S. authorities’ recent assertions that the cartel is in ruins are now viewed as having been made prematurely. Although the arrests have loosened the group’s once-ironclad grip on heroin and cocaine smuggling along the western U.S.-Mexico border, the gang has moved into other violent enterprises, including kidnapping and the production and export of methamphetamine, said Special Agent John Blake of the FBI’s San Diego office.

“The guys who were arrested were the ones doing the cocaine deals with the Colombians, the ones who made things go smoothly, key operatives in a well-oiled machine. Those connections don’t exist anymore,” Blake said.

Although the cartel is not the major trafficking organization it was, its capacity for brutality is undiminished, he added.

“The Tijuana cartel is still highly dangerous and committing atrocious acts of violence that threaten the stability of the region,” Blake added.

Drug-related violence is as common now as at any time since the mid-1980s, when the Sinaloa-born Arellano Felix clan took over the world’s busiest and most lucrative drug-smuggling corridor. In the latest case, a Tijuana police officer was found tortured and killed Monday, one of the half a dozen homicides a month in Baja California that local authorities attribute to the drug cartel. Over the years, the Arellano Felix gang has been blamed for the killing of two Tijuana police chiefs, numerous federal and state prosecutors and scores of police officers. The January slaying of Rogelio Delgado Neri, a former deputy attorney general for the region, is widely believed to have been ordered by the cartel.

In the weeks leading up to journalist Ortiz Franco’s death, Zeta published articles that detailed an assortment of crimes allegedly committed by the gang, articles that editor Jesus Blancornelas believes provoked his colleague’s killing.

Those stories included the cartel’s purchase of fake police credentials from crooked officials, the engineering of the escape of several operatives from a Tijuana prison as well as the contracting of Delgado Neri’s slaying. The week before he was killed, Ortiz Franco wrote an article that laid out the hierarchy of the cartel from top to bottom, and named names.

“As with the previous incidents, this was an act of vengeance,” Blancornelas said of Ortiz Franco’s death, alluding to his own narrow escape from an assassination attempt in 1997 and the 1988 killing of colleague Hector Felix Miranda. “Zeta publishes the information, and that bothers the narcos.”

Blake, the FBI agent, theorized that violence has risen as the Tijuana cartel desperately tries to hang on to its diminishing turf. Much of the cocaine and heroin business lost by the Arellano Felixes has been siphoned off by a rival Sinaloa mob led by Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada. He is believed to have wrested control of the Mexicali and possibly Tecate smuggling corridors east of Tijuana from the Arellano Felix gang, U.S. officials say.

The Arellano Felix syndicate has also lost control of Mazatlan -- a busy Pacific port in Sinaloa used as a transshipment point for Colombian cocaine -- to Zambada, Blake said. Ramon Arellano Felix, Benjamin’s brother and the cartel’s top enforcer, was killed by police in Mazatlan in February 2002 as he was allegedly trying to settle scores with Zambada.

Jack Hook, assistant special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s San Diego office, believes that the cartel has replaced much of the lost cash flow with methamphetamine revenue and kidnapping ransoms.

“The Arellano Felix organization has suffered losses, but it is still functioning,” Hook said. “We won’t consider it dismantled until we have all the top leaders off the street.”

The cartel is now believed to be headed by two remaining Arellano Felix brothers, Eduardo and Javier. A sister, Enedina Arellano Felix, a businesswoman who was once thought to be the cartel’s heiress apparent, is not in the leadership picture, according to the DEA.

The cartel’s tentacles still reach deep into Baja California’s political, business and social spheres and won’t be cut easily, said Victor Clark Alfaro, director of the Binational Center for Human Rights.

“I thought when they captured Benjamin and killed Ramon that the cartel was near its end. But it has a tremendous power to regenerate itself,” Clark said. He attributed much of that to payoffs to politicians, police and businessmen once estimated at $1 million a day.

Despite the steady pace of violence in this sprawling, rough-and-tumble border city of 2 million, the killing of the Zeta editor still came as a shock. After giving his bodyguards the day off, Ortiz Franco, a father of three, was shot four times in his car. Two of his children, who were sitting in the back seat, were unhurt. His widow, a lawyer, has left Tijuana with the children.

Two days later, after a raging gun battle through the streets of the Loma Dorada neighborhood, agents with Mexico’s Federal Investigation Agency arrested Arellano Felix enforcer Mario Garcia Simental, known as “El Cris,” who prosecutors believe may have ordered the killings of Ortiz Franco, Delgado Neri and many others.

That arrest, along with those of Efrain Perez and Jorge Aureliano Felix in June, were applauded by the DEA’s Hook as evidence that Mexican President Vicente Fox planned to target drug lords, an agenda that Hook said was not always apparent during past administrations.

In its July 8 issue, Zeta alleged that the triggerman in Ortiz Franco’s killing was former soldier Heriberto Lazcano. Zeta’s Blancornelas identified the driver of the getaway car as Victor Urquillo, another Arellano Felix confederate. Blancornelas declined to disclose his sources but said his newspaper was conducting its own investigation of his colleague’s killing.

In an interview, state Atty. Gen. Antonio Martinez Luna said only that the possible involvement of the two men was among the “lines of investigation” his office was following.

Speaking at his heavily guarded editorial offices, where the number of federal police assigned to him was raised from 14 to 17 after Ortiz Franco’s killing, Blancornelas vowed that his publication would continue to hammer away at the Arellano Felix cartel.

But he acknowledged that the killing of his longtime colleague has caused him to question the human cost of Zeta’s 20-year crusade. He is the only survivor among the paper’s three co-founders, who included Felix Miranda and Ortiz Franco.

“We are very saddened and at times sorry to have created this newspaper which has brought three people to their deaths in 25 years,” Blancornelas said, referring to the slayings of Ortiz Franco, Felix Miranda and one of his own bodyguards in the 1997 attempt on his life. “But at the same time, this obligates us to solve the case, investigating it as journalists.”

Despite the killing and its implicit threat to other Zeta writers, Blancornelas said his newspaper was not about to back away from its aggressive coverage of Tijuana’s underworld.

“They are drug traffickers, we are the journalists,” he said. “If they don’t want to be in the news, they should dedicate themselves to other things.”