Tijuana, the busiest exit door from Mexico to the United States in the world, has not experienced a wave of violence in recent days. Live attention on the spillover of violence with which in that border city they have had to survive for many months. Tijuana is the last microcosm of the national decomposition, crossed by the dark relations between rulers and drug traffickerswhich forced extreme situations, such as the one that the mayoress Montserrat Caballero, have to govern from a military barracksas they still do, keeping proportions, in Iraq, which is in a civil war.
But Tijuana is not going through a civil war. There is no power struggle. What you face in everyday life is a war between the cartels of the Pacific and Jalisco Nueva Generaciónfor staying with the square defended by its historical owners, the Tijuana Cartel and the remnants of their leaders, the Arellano Felix brothers. The incentive is strong in that square that has been the racking of everything for almost a century, when prohibited liquor entered the United States, the fentanylthe very addictive drug that has killed more than 100,000 Americansand methamphetamines.
More than a year ago, the conflict intensified in the streets of Tijuana, where the cartels, in addition to moving drugs to the United States, they started selling them on the streetschanging the demographics of consumers and including among its fentanyl and methamphetamine buyers children as young as 10. It is not a phenomenon that should be missed. Tijuana is the border with the largest number of addicts with the most money in the country, and the most buoyant society for drug use.
The violence that lives in Tijuana, is not unique in lower california. It is part of an axis of conflict between cartels that includes Ensenada and Mexicali, which had as its genesis the arrival of Jaime Bonilla to the state government, who dismantled the institutional protection network that protected the heirs of the Arellano Félix family, who headed the Tijuana cartel, sometime a quarter century ago, the most powerful and violent in the country.
Bonilla’s predecessor was PAN Francisco Kiko de la Vega, the last governor of that party, which had a strong structure in Baja California. One of the main blue operators was Carlos Torres Torres, who when he got married for the first time had the then president as best man Felipe Calderon and his wife Daisy Zavala. Shortly after, he was nominated to fight for the mayoralty of Tijuana, which he lost in 2010 to the PRI.
Torres Torres married for the second time in 2019 with the then mayoress of Mexicali, Pilar Avila Marinaand they moved towards Brunette. The husband of the current governor supported Bonilla in his electoral campaign -for which the PAN expelled him-, who once in office in November 2019, reorganized the security areas, and got rid of the PAN structure that had been established. embedded for years in that field.
That was the genesis of what is lived in Tijuana today because, according to intelligence information from the federal government, it altered the prevailing status quo that dates back to the negotiation of a sector of the family of the children of the Arellano brothers. Felix and the remnants of the Tijuana Cartel, with Rafael Caro Quintero, which by then was in the process of definitively separating from the Sinaloa/Pacific Cartel. At the end of Bonilla’s short term, Governor Ávila began to return to part of the structure from which her predecessor shook offincluding the one who appointed prosecutor, Iván Carpio, whom she met when she was mayor as a police officer and public prosecutor.
Ávila’s arrival in power also brought with it a deterioration in security and an increase in crime rates. Likewise, according to intelligence information, there was a rearrangement in the criminal organizations and the war between them expanded. In Tijuana and Ensenada the heirs of the Arellano Félix were reduced and they became disputed plazas of the Jalisco Nueva Generación and Sinaloa/Pacífico cartels. In Mexicali, given the weakness in Caro Quintero’s organization, the Arellano Félix children’s franchise allied with the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel, to confront the Sinaloa/Pacific cartel.
The rest is counted by statistics. The only surprising thing about violence in Tijuana is that we are turned to see it until now. Since January, the Citizen Council for Public Safety and Criminal Justice has released its ranking of the most dangerous cities in the world, based on the number of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. Tijuana, with 100.8 intentional homicides per 100,000 inhabitantswas in fifth place, where the top 10 included four other Mexican cities.
Tijuana has fewer intentional homicides than the number one in that category, Los Cabos, at the other end of the peninsula, with 111.3 murders per 100,000, or Acapulco, which has 107 per 100,000, but in the ranking of cities most violent in the world, ranks first. This can only be explained because in those cities there is a dominant criminal organization that is not in an open war, but rather that the wave of preventive assassinations seeks to prevent its rivals from settling down, taking over and starting to seriously dispute their place.
In Tijuana there is no Pax Narca -which does not mean peace, but there is an organization that decides who dies and when they are killed-, because the fire capacity between the three criminal organizations is similar and they cannot finish annihilating each other. The people of Tijuana are not calm, nor would they have reason to be. They are alone. The government does not fight criminals, and when Morena is in power, there is no pressure or demands, just political justifications for why it does nothing.
#Horror #Tijuana