Tijuana suffering violent crime wave

Richard Marosi:

Waving AK-47 rifles, the black-hooded force of 10 assailants barged into the hacienda-style restaurant at lunch. The team, wearing commando uniforms, grabbed the co-owner, jumped into a convoy of three vehicles and disappeared.

A week later, 10 men — wearing similar black outfits — stormed the swank Club Campestre, snatched a 30-year-old businessman and escaped by crashing the convoy through the security gate.

The exploits of the Comando Negro, or Black Commandos, are part of a dark season of violence that has set new standards for brazenness and frequency in this crime-weary city.

Within days of the attacks on April 27 and May 4, the victims — both businessmen with links to drug trafficking, police say — were found dead. Both had been tortured, strangled and shot execution style.

Fueled in part by warring drug cartels, bodies in recent months have been turning up almost daily in empty lots, ravines and streets. Many victims were mangled by torture, their heads wrapped in tape. Some bodies have been dissolved in tubs of acid. One body, the son of a local magistrate, was missing its right hand.

Homicides in Tijuana totaled 163 in the first four months of this year, compared with 92 in the same period last year — a 77% increase.. In April, 55 homicides, a monthly record, were committed, police said. Los Angeles, by comparison, a city more than two times larger, had 36 homicides in April.

Tijuana's crime surge is part of a wave plaguing many Mexican border cities.

On Saturday, Rosarito Beach's top law enforcement official was shot to death outside his home by two masked men. Carlos Bowser, a former Tijuana police officer who became director of public safety in December, died in his bullet-riddled car. Authorities arrested six suspects and confiscated three cars in the hours following the killing. Police found guns and masks inside the vehicles.

Raul Gutierrez, a spokesman for the state attorney general's office, said ballistic tests would be performed to see if the weapons matched those used in the killing. The motive for the attack, about 20 miles south of Tijuana, wasn't known.

"Everyone will speculate … was he a hero or simply on the wrong side of one of the narco-trafficking organizations. It's always so murky," said David Shirk, the director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego.

Crime in the Tijuana metropolitan area, Shirk said, has reached unprecedented heights. "This is probably the most bloody period of Tijuana's history," he said.

Kidnappings are also a particular problem. One suspected leader of a ring of kidnappers still at large is a former chief of the state police in Tijuana. Police say abductions of people not linked to organized crime have dropped from 28 in 2001 to two so far this year. But business groups, human rights organizations and crime experts say the figure is inaccurate, because many families don't report the abductions.

Crime waves are nothing new in this sprawling border metropolis. Previous surges in violence have claimed the lives of politicians, high-ranking police officials and prosecutors. But some recent incidents have spilled into public places in upscale neighborhoods that in the past had been mostly free of violent crime.

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