A video of this lap-dancing police officer was forwarded to me in recent months from my Mexico contacts. I’m posting an abridged (and Rated G version) above, but there is another video mash-up of this called “Policia de TJ” that is is all the rage.
The “Policia de TJ” version frames the video in terms of how these days the Tijuana police officers may not be earning enough money to go to the strip clubs and so they are having to find new ways to collect some cash. Then the video of the gyrating officer begins. It’s followed by a video ending with clown music of an apparent robber escaping in front of a squad of officers.
The videos are a little grainy and you can’t actually make out the word Tijuana on the insignias, so who is to say they are even officers. Still, if true, I wonder what happened to this officer after he became a YouTube star. I dug around for videos of dancing police officers in the United States and came up with just a few – traffic cops – who were profiled on the news. Other countries’ police forces seem to have a greater propensity to swish their hips in front of a camera. Judge for yourself who is the better dancer.
Almost overnight, Mexico has jumped to the top of the U.S. diplomatic agenda – at least momentarily overshadowing Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is visiting Mexico this week, paving the way for a scheduled visit next month by President Obama.
To be sure, the violence appears to have taken a particularly savage turn over the past few years. Missing in some of these assessments, however, is that the backlash comes from the Mexican government’s own success in attacking the country’s drug cartels over the past eight years. Dismantling long-standing drug trafficking organizations, unfortunately, creates instability . Drug trafficking was a major problem during the 1990s but it may not have attracted this much attention because the drug groups operated with comparatively minimal meddling from the government. This created a false sense of order.
With so much attention on the violence in Mexico lately (I can’t seem to turn on the radio or read a news media source without hearing about it), Mexican authorities have lashed back. In recent weeks, they have pointed out that the U.S. demand for drugs is fueling the drug trade. They have accused the U.S. of not doing enough to curb the flow of firearms south of the border into the hands of drug traffickers. Mexican president Felipe Calderon also suggested that the U.S. do a better job of attacking drug corruption in its own agencies.
Things have gotten testy, and the visits by U.S. diplomats are clearly meant to soothe the bickering and focus on the cross-border collaboration efforts. Whether this actually translates to a reduction in the violence is unclear, especially when we consider the unabated demand for drugs in the United States. Instead, stability may be more dependent on the ability of Mexican drug groups to re-negotiate their roles in a way that gives us all the illusion that the underlying problem has been fixed.
Felix Gallardo, according to Mexican and U.S. reports, is an older relative of the Arellano Felix brothers (a family member says this is not true), and he was said to be a major Mexican drug trafficker in the 1980s. He has been locked up in a Mexican prison since 1989. Family members started a web site to document his health needs in prison as well as a forum for people to ask questions and send greetings to Felix Gallardo. You can check out the site here.
Here are a couple of media updates on Felix Gallardo:
McClatchy News Service wrote a story about the Felix Gallardo website and about the use of the Internet by Mexican drug traffickers in general. Reporter Marisa Taylor interviewed Felix Gallardo’s son, who started the website. You can read the story here.
In February of this year, Mexican media ran a story about Felix Gallardo writing a 32-page letter to La Jornada newspaper detailing his experiences with certain Mexican law enforcement officials, as well as other juicy details of his own arrest. You can read the La Jornada story here.
There is a certain stigma attached to border cities where members of major drug trafficking groups regularly intimidate police, kill each other, and occasionally leave trails of dumped body parts.
In light of travel advisories like this one, cities like Tijuana have tried unsuccessfully over the past year to convince tourists that they aren’t likely to be the target of a narco shooting. In Mazatlan, meanwhile, some taxi drivers are finding a niche in taking tourists to (the outside of) places believed to be owned by drug traffickers and to the crime scenes of famous drug battles, according to this story by Marc Lacey of The New York Times.
Tijuana Tunnel Tours could be a mobile event, or it could become an actual museum. There is a warehouse east of the Tijuana airport that was the origin of a massive and incomplete tunnel said to have been built for Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman in the 1990s. This tunnel museum could include photos of other tunnels, explanations of how tunnels are found, and shovels and religious icons found at tunnel sites. Guzman, who remains at large, might be appeased with a VIP pass.
Photo of warehouse that was the entrance of a massive tunnel discovered in 1993, said to have been built by suspected trafficker Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman. The last time I visited the building, it was being used by Mexican federal authorities to hold confiscated cars.
There’s something both intimidating and reassuring about being greeted at the Tijuana border by a masked soldier with a very large rifle. They started showing up here en masse last year in response to a notable uptick of drug-related violence. Now the camouflaged greeters seem to have become the city’s unofficial mascot to city visitors, along the lines of the bomb-sniffing dogs I once encountered at a Bogota, Colombia mall.
Once you get behind their ski masks, though, the ones I’ve met appear to be quite polite. I had the opportunity to watch them up close during two recent visits to Tijuana when my car was pulled over for an inspection at the border. In the most recent case, a lanky soldier leaned down to my eye level and asked me for permission to inspect the car. Then he then asked politely if I would please exit the car while he searched behind the car seats, along the door interiors and in the trunk.
Finally, finding nothing of note, he thanked me.
The San Diego Union-Tribune has a story by Sandra Dibble about the military’s increased presence in the border region.
Not everyone is pleased with the soldiers. The New York Times writes about how some Mexicans – some of whom may have questionable motives – have been protesting the military’s presence in certain drug trafficking hot spots. Read the story by Marc Lacey here.
Photo of soldiers at Tecate port of entry during an investigation in 2007.
”The Queen of the Pacific: It’s time to Talk” is the name of a book about suspected Mexican drug trafficker Sandra Avila Beltran. The title seems to suggest a confessional narrative. Instead, Avila claims to be a victim of a vengeful government that is no less corrupt than drug traffickers.
Avila’s reputation, of course, is far more intriguing. She is said to have seduced drug traffickers and police officials, to have been involved in cocaine shipments to Mexico, and to have coordinated an extensive money laundering operation for the Sinaloa cartel.
The (Spanish-language) book, which is narrated by Mexico’s prize-winning journalist Julio Scherer Garcia, allows Avila to tell her side of the story - perhaps a bit too liberally. Avila doesn’t deny that she comes from a world of drug trafficking but she asserts that associating with traffickers doesn’t make her one. Her explanation for having so many real estate properties seems somewhat simplistic: “I was good at property transactions and I dedicated a part of my time to this.”
Nonetheless, Avila (not to be confused with the Sinaloan beauty queen arrested last month) provides some interesting glimpses into the world she comes from. She talks about women in the narco world – “competitive and exhibitionists” – and shares her knowledge of some of the slang expressions used by drug traffickers – “hacer una vuelta” signifies a firmed-up business deal. She takes swipes at former Mexico first lady Marta Sahagun, says a few words about former Tijuana mayor Jorge Hank Rhon, and speaks about her love of jewels (A list of the jewelry that was confiscated from her takes up ten pages).
I couldn’t help wonder about a sister that Avila mentions who seems to have separated herself from the family. Avila’s choice to accept and embrace the drug world no doubt contributed to her ending up in prison, where she awaits a decision on her case. The tragedy for both sisters is that their separate paths both lead to pain and consequences.
Complicity is the lock and chain of the drug world, and that’s why I find this particular commentary from Avila both ominous and true: ”I have ties with the drug society, but that is not my complete world. I am part of the society in its totality.”
This YouTube video of a Tucanes de Tijuana song (from 666SiNaLoA666) details a narco party that Avila says she attended in real life and that was reconstructed with surprising accuracy:
KPBS video (via YouTube) of Car Armoring Service’s Tijuana plant
As the border region enters its second year of what I would describe as sustained drug warfare, some people have decided to simply stop going to border cities like Tijuana.
Other people – who have reasons to take extra-precautions for their safety because they own a business in Mexico or are part of a criminal group – make sure they go there as if prepared for battle. I don’t have any statistics on the numbers of armored vehicles being used in these border cities, but I recently noticed full-page newspaper advertisements for several Tijuana region services so there must be a demand for the extra protection that can cost upwards of $50,000.
One of them, Car Armoring Service, is a company I profiled in 2006 for The San Diego Union-Tribune when the business was using its original name of Total Shield-Blindado Seguro. You can read the story here. Amy Isackson of KPBS-San Diego radio did a more recent story in December about armored cars that you can access here. It has an interesting video of Car Armoring’s Tijuana factory that has also been posted on YouTube.
Mexico’s Secretary of Public Security has a listing of 45 car armoring services, according to this online document, but it isn’t broken down by region. One of them, Blindajes Goldman, opened up shop in Tijuana recently. Carlos Guerrero, who runs Car Armoring Service, told me that more competitors have tried to nose their way into the border region. Despite that, he said, business is brisk and his company – which already has offices in Mexicali and San Diego – will be soon opening another branch in the city of El Paso, Texas.
The Los Angeles Times’ Richard Marosi writes about one of the people believed to be responsible for a whole lot of killings in Tijuana: Teodoro Garcia Simental. You can read and learn more here about the suspected drug trafficker, who is also known as “El Teo.”
These guys don’t like being placed in the spotlight, speaking from personal experience from my days of covering this sort of thing for The San Diego Union-Tribune. But perhaps “Teo” feels a little better with the attention since he was overlooked on Detail magazine’s blog of “Most Influential” people of the year. (His nemesis – suspected trafficker Francisco Sanchez Arellano - made the list).
If you are looking for more information on the personalities behind the big guns, you can read this story by Tracy Wilkinson, also of the Los Angeles Times, about Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the suspected head of a drug group that is battling the Tijuana region’s once-dominant Arellano-Felix cartel.
I wish I could link to an indepth profile of the former head of the Arellano cartel – the now-imprisoned Benjamin Arellano-Felix – that was written by S. Lynne Walker. She wrote it when she was based out of Mexico City for Copley News Service, but it doesn’t seem to be available online. If anyone finds that story, or any other noteworthy profiles, let me know.
NPR has been airing a series this week about the border called “The U.S.-Mexican Border: A Changing Frontier.” So far, the stories have focused on deported immigrants, how Border Patrol agents track down undocumented border-crossers, and the widely-reported subject matter of “Drug Deaths, Violence Plague Border in Tijuana. While not necessarily “new” information, the series’ strength lies in pulling together stories from different parts of the border into a cohesive whole. Each morning, as I’m stuck in LA traffic, I look forward to being transported to another part of the border by NPR reporter Jason Beaubien.
Over the past six months, The Los Angeles Times has been publishing an ongoing series – “Mexico Under Siege. The drug war at our doorstep” – that includes the contributions of staff reporters north and south of the border. They recently created an attractive starting point for the series at this central location. The project includes an interactive map that shows where drug killings have taken place in Mexico, a multimedia photo gallery and a rolling ticker of the number of drug war-related deaths since January, 2007. The package also includes video interviews with border reporter Richard Marosi and Los Angeles-based reporter Sam Quinones, who covered Mexico extensively before being hired by the Times.
Tijuana is believed to have become a battleground between two drug factions that are the remnants of the original Arellano Felix cartel. To explain it simply, on one side you’ve got Francisco Sanchez Arellano (aka “El Ingeniero”) and on the other side is reportedly Teodoro Garcia Simentel (aka “El Teo”), a renegade cartel member working with other powerful Arellano rivals.
The Top-40 appear to be chosen in some cases for their provocative nature, and Provocateur/Details acknowledges the #10 team may not be around for next year’s list: “But with an estimated 90 percent of U.S. cocaine coming in across the Mexican border and up to $25 billion being sent back each year, who can blame them for wanting to be drug kings for a day?”
I’m not sure how these two clinched this title with so much competition. Aside from the still-at-large “El Teo,” also on the loose are suspected Arellano rivals Joaquin Guzman, “El Chapo” and Ismael Zambada, “El Mayo.” No word as to how they feel about not making the list.
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