Law gives way to fear in Mexican border cities

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico — The top cop in this unhinged border city has 300 openings on a 600-member police force, and his fearful greeting gave a big clue why.

"Please, please don't use my name or take a photograph," the interim chief begged.

One police chief was killed last year, a second quit in the spring and no one else appears brave enough, or foolhardy enough, to work this side of the law in Nuevo Laredo.

Mexican President Vicente Fox quietly withdrew the federal police that he had dispatched with great fanfare last year to bring peace, leaving the city virtually unprotected in a smuggling war that has claimed 170 lives since January.

This isn't the only border city where law and order are on the ropes. In Tijuana, the rate of kidnappings ranks among the world's worst, and some state police have refused postings after the killings of more than a dozen officers in paramilitary-style ambushes.

Organized crime is out of control, Tijuana Mayor Jorge Hank Rhon said after a police commander was ambushed this month. The killing of police officers, he said, "speaks to the impunity of organized crime, that they think they're above the law, or protected."

As Mexico prepares for the inauguration of Felipe Calderón on Dec. 1, the president-elect must take stock of the country's 2,000 drug-related slayings this year, residents and officials say.

"Calderón needs to apply the law or reform the law," said Nuevo Laredo resident Ana de la Cruz, mother of two teenage daughters. "We urgently need help."

Smuggler's dream

The drug problem that bridges the United States and Mexico neither starts nor ends in these two border cities. But a healthy chunk of U.S.-bound dope lumbers past each day, leaving behind the footprints of a monster.

"The number of addicts is growing," said Adan Rosa Ramos, 24, a recovering methamphetamine user who works at a rehabilitation house in Nuevo Laredo. "There's a lot more drugs on the street."

The proximity of these cities to the United States is a blessing and a curse. The Tijuana-San Diego frontier is the busiest border crossing in the world. At Nuevo Laredo, trucks and trains ferry more than 40 percent of the goods traded between the neighboring countries.

The two cities also account for the most lucrative smuggling routes in the hemisphere. The tons of cocaine, marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine seized by authorities each year make up a fraction of what barrels past — in trucks, cars, planes and underground tunnels.

Here's the arithmetic, said Daniel Covarrubias, the director of economic development in Nuevo Laredo: "The U.S. checks maybe 10 percent of the trucks that pass. Any more than that and it slows commerce. You run 10 trucks and take your chances."

Battle for control of the Nuevo Laredo corridor pits the Pacific Coast Sinaloa cartel against the Gulf cartel, whose top gunmen defected from an elite Mexican army task force. The conflict has spread to the states of Michoacán and Guerrero, where nearly 600 people were believed killed in drug-related homicides this year.

In Tijuana, the August arrest of alleged drug-cartel leader Francisco Javier Arellano Félix escalated a battle among rivals believed responsible for many of the killings in that city this year.

Law out of sight

With government all but ceding control of the border, civil society has fallen into disarray or been cowed into silence. Newspapers in Nuevo Laredo have stopped reporting drug killings under pressure from advertisers, the government and drug dealers.

Residents learned a lesson from former Police Chief Alejandro Dominguez, who was gunned down in June 2005 within hours of taking office. He had pledged to stand up to drug traffickers.

Dominguez's replacement quit, and the interim chief closed his office door during a recent interview and said he wouldn't talk about the drug business and didn't want to be identified.

His name isn't important, and apparently neither is his job. Nearly the entire police force of nearly 800 was fired last year for corruption. About 300 recruits are now working, but they mostly spend their days out of sight and out of trouble.

Even after out-of-town recruiting trips, there are no takers for 300 police jobs, including the chief's slot. Starting salaries of $600 a month apparently aren't worth it. "Last year was bad," said the La Paz funeral home's assistant director, Alvaro Ordañez Sanchez. "A lot of cops."

Tallying the 170 people shot, burned and garroted so far in the drug war, Sanchez estimated the Nuevo Laredo murder toll would approach 200 this year in a city of 380,000. The would represent nearly 10 percent of the drug-related homicides in Mexico.

Elizabeth Hernández, a state prosecutor responsible for deciding whether a homicide in Nuevo Laredo should be investigated by state or federal authorities, said she didn't know how many people had been killed.

"I've only been on the job nine months," said Hernández, who suggested a visit to the federal prosecutor's office.

Assistant federal prosecutor José Enrique Corona rolled his eyes an hour later. "Of course she knows," he said.

When asked whether his office was investigating the murder of Dominguez, 56, who served six hours as chief, Corona said the case was being handled by federal investigators in Mexico City. Prosecutors in Mexico City said it wasn't theirs. The truth is, few killings are investigated and almost none solved.

State of denial

"This is a city of lies," said one of the local reporters whose daily newspaper no longer covers drug killings. He was afraid to be identified by name. "Last year we reported on all the killings, and business and government officials blamed us for disrupting commerce. Now police say nothing happens here. What a paradise."

Residents take pains to dodge the menace of drug trafficking. Some deny it exists.

"If you behave on the streets, you won't get into trouble," Tamaulipas Gov. Eugenio Hernández Flores told potential investors during a recent business forum in Nuevo Laredo. An unofficial tally by the newspaper Milenio showed that a dozen of the 145 Mexican police officers reportedly killed this year were in his state.