Success in Tijuana?
On October 7th, Mexico's President Felipe Calderón called Tijuana a "clear example" that his four-year-long security strategy against drug cartels in Mexico has a solution. "Tijuana went from being a city seized by terror and focused only on questions of crime to a city motivated by hope and focused on being competitive," Calderón said. President Calderón made his assertion despite evidence that the number of homicides in 2010 was well on track to surpass last year's 695 murders, with 639 already in 2010. An October 16th article in the New York Times by Federico Campbell, agreed with President Calderón: "... now Tijuana is recovering. The violence has begun to subside, thanks to the local police and the Mexican military, as well as the capture last January of Teodoro García Simental, an infamous drug lord known as El Teo." And on October 18th, William Finnegan highlighted the tactics used by Tijuana's Secretary of Public Security Colonel Julian Leyzaola Perez to crack down on corruption in The New Yorker. The tactics described in the article are harsh, with torture, coercion, fear and impunity at their root. The article, though, contended that the harsh tactics appear to be working. People praise Leyzaola's tactics, and the Los Angeles Times called his work a "model for the kind of law enforcement muscle the Mexican government needs to battle organized crime." Finnegan writes, "In the drug wars that rack Mexico--the death toll over the past four years is approaching thirty thousand--Tijuana is an anomaly. It is a place where public security has actually improved." This recent increase in coverage touting the successes of Tijuana's fight against the drug cartels was put into serious question over the weekend, after 13 people were killed execution-style at a drug rehabilitation clinic. The Sunday evening murders came one week after authorities seized and burned 134 tons of marijuana, seen as a major victory for local, state and federal police. After the killings in Tijuana, an unknown voice was heard over police radios saying "This is a taste of Juárez" and warning that one person will be killed for every ton of marijuana seized. According to the Finnegan's article in the New Yorker, Leyzaola's tactics to fight the cartels included replacing passive police commanders with army officers, telling the press that "if the cartels understand only the language of violence, then we are going to have to speak in their language and annihilate them." In addition to "annihilating" the cartels, Leyzaola worked to "purify" the Tijuana police force by arresting officers suspected of corruption and forcing the resignations of others, sometimes by torturing police officers until they confessed or provided names of corrupt officers. In a letter to the editor of the New York Times, Nik Steinberg of Human Rights Watch wrote about the danger of promoting the tactics used in Tijuana as a solution to Mexico's security situation. "What's more, the Mexican military and police, whom Mr. Campbell praises for making Tijuana safer, have committed widespread human rights abuses, including more than 100 credible accusations of torture documented by Human Rights Watch, undermining the very security they were sent to restore." Steinberg notes that "Sadly, if anyone can lay claim to Tijuana it is the cartels, who have never lost control over their illicit trade." Sunday's executions in Tijuana adds to the evidence that, while harsh tactics may bring immediate, short-term results, they are just that: short-term. And until Mexico, and the United States, address the underlying factors driving violence, insecurity and the drug trade, the drug cartels will still be in control of the situation.