MEXICO CITY — Mexican authorities announced their largest
methamphetamine seizure ever late Wednesday: 15 tons, found in pure powder form
at a ranch outside Guadalajara. It was about 13 million doses worth $4 billion —
more than double the size of all meth seizures at the Mexican border in 2011.
But while the authorities proudly showed off the seizure to local reporters, the
sheer size of the find set off alarm among experts and officials from the United
States and the United Nations. It was a sign, they said, of just how organized,
efficient at manufacturing and brazen Mexico’s traffickers had become even after
expanded efforts to dismantle their industry.
“The big thing it shows is the sheer capacity that these superlabs have in
Mexico,” said Rusty Payne, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration.
“When we see one lab with the capability to produce such a mass tonnage of meth,
it begs a question: What else is out there?”
Methamphetamine is difficult to produce in large quantities. Unlike marijuana,
which can be grown almost anywhere, meth requires international connections to
suppliers of precursor chemicals, which are tightly regulated in the United
States and Mexico, as well as manufacturers with a degree of chemistry
expertise.
The Sinaloa cartel is believed to be Mexico’s main producer, partly because it
has a reputation for being the world’s most multinational and sophisticated
cartel. And some experts say that the seizure, along with increased seizures of
meth, cocaine and marijuana at the Mexican border, suggests that Sinaloa is
producing more than ever before, despite five years of increased Mexican and
American efforts to defeat the Mexican cartels.
“Sinaloa has been hit hard in the past four to six months, but they are clearly
operating at a volume they were not able to do 5 or 10 years ago,” said David
Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego.
With methamphetamine, he added: “There is really not much competition. They are
probably the only ones with the organizational and logistical capacity to move
this kind of product.”
United Nations figures suggest that the supply of meth in the United States has
been growing, with seizures at the Mexican border increasing 87 percent in 2011.
At the same time, demand in the United States has been falling. According to the
2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the number of Americans 12 and
older who said they had used methamphetamine in the past 12 months declined 46
percent from 2002 to 2010, to 954,000 from an estimated 1.8 million.
But just as Mexican and Colombian drug traffickers are increasingly focused on
the market in Europe, experts said that the meth not sent to the United States
might be heading to other parts of the world. Sinaloa’s tentacles have been
found on nearly every continent.
Over all, experts said, meth appears to be providing an increasingly important
revenue stream for the cartel, and the seizure this week is likely to have
little long-term impact.
“It’s important to keep the seizure in perspective,” said Eric Olson, a security
expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “It’s huge.
Eye-popping. But seizures, even huge ones, don’t generally change the demand for
the drug in the long run. If a seizure of this magnitude raises the street
price, consumption may go down for a time, but it is only a matter of time until
the market adjusts and the supply comes back up.”
December 1,
2011
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE
TIJUANA,
Mexico — Squatting and sweating inside the latest drug tunnel found here in this
Pacific border city, it was easy to understand the amazement expressed by
Mexican and American officials. This one was a stunner.
The tunnel ran for almost half a mile, with wooden planks holding off the earth
on all sides. Energy-saving light bulbs illuminated the route. A motorized cart
on metal rails ensured quick passage, while a steel elevator hidden beneath the
floor tiles in a warehouse made the 40-foot descent to the tunnel’s entrance
feel like the slow drop into an unregulated mine shaft.
And yet, here is the simple fact obscured by superlatives like “the most
elaborate” and “the most sophisticated,” which officials seem to lather on each
new find.
Tunnels are Tijuana. They have become an inevitable, always-under-construction
or always-operating part of city life, as entrenched as cheap pharmacies and
strip clubs.
Residents now shrug them off. “If you have a lot of money, you can do anything,”
said Blanca Samaniego, 36, as she walked by the warehouse where Mexican
officials unveiled the tunnel on Wednesday. “It will never change. It will never
stop.”
The ground beneath her neighborhood in the hills — near the airport and the
upgraded, shimmering border fence patrolled 24/7 by American agents — has been
punched full of holes for years. Almost every kind of building has been used to
hide a logistical operation that is as much about the American taste for a high
as it is about the low-down removal of dirt.
Just a few weeks ago, below a more rudimentary warehouse nearby, the authorities
found a different tunnel with an elaborate ventilation system. A few blocks from
that, there sits an empty flophouse, where thick concrete now caps a passageway
discovered by the authorities last year. Farther east, residents note a tunnel
found in 2008, and just past the next major intersection, there are two more:
one under a small home and the other below a bodega across from a factory.
Other tunnels have been found downtown, near the main border crossing. Wherever
there is a border fence climbing high, there seems to have been an attempt to
burrow below, usually to a parking lot in California where drugs can be hauled
through a manhole cover, or to a business that almost looks legitimate.
In the latest case, the tunnel ran to Hernandez Produce Warehouse, a fruit and
vegetable company in California whose only product seemed to be green and best
when smoked.
Luis Ituarte, 69, an artist who runs a gallery here called La Casa del Túnel —
where a tunnel was found about decade ago — said that Tijuana officials would be
smart to move beyond publicizing their subterranean finds and then shutting them
down. He argued that Tijuana should capitalize on its historic identity as a
city that has been serving up vice since 1907, when President Porfirio Díaz
legalized gambling, or 1920, when the United States made alcohol illegal.
“Las Vegas, Tijuana and Havana were all built by the same kind of people,” Mr.
Ituarte said. “Only Vegas has taken on its bad reputation.”
Not that this is the direction things are heading. The mayor here recently
rejected demands from cultural groups asking to take over La Ocho, a notorious
prison that had been decommissioned.
Mexican Army officials, during a tour of this week’s elaborate tunnel, mostly
focused on the triumph of the discovery.
“These are achievements that increase public security,” said Gen. Gilberto
Landeros, standing at the tunnel entrance as local reporters took snapshots of
one another in front of the long, dim hole. “We’re pounding at the economy of
narcotrafficking.”
At the very least, he had a lot of marijuana to point to. Hefty bricks of the
stuff, wrapped tightly in orange and green plastic, surrounded him when he
announced the discovery of the tunnel inside the empty warehouse here in
Tijuana. The total haul, from both sides and a truck driven from the site in San
Diego, was 32.4 tons, with a street value of about $65 million — a new record
for a tunnel-related seizure, according to American officials.
Harder to see, unmentioned, but easy to imagine: how many tons moved across
before that load was found.
The evidence around the tunnel — worn-out soccer cleats, dusty oscillating fans,
empty water bottles — suggested that the operation had been going for months, a
supposition Mexican officials did not deny. At that rate, hundreds of tons of
marijuana worth hundreds of millions of dollars would have moved through this
one tunnel during its life span.
Most likely somewhere nearby, in another tunnel, the flow continues. The next
announcement and news tour may be only weeks away.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. and Mexican governments on
Wednesday announced multimillion dollar rewards for information leading to the
arrest and conviction of those responsible for the shooting of two U.S.
immigration agents.
The United States issued a statement saying it offered a reward of up to $5
million while the Mexican government offered 10 million pesos ($839,000). Both
countries set up telephone hotlines for individuals to call if they have
information.
In February, two unarmed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were
driving in an armored vehicle on a highway from San Luis Potosi to Mexico City
when they were ambushed in broad daylight by suspected drug gang members.
One ICE agent, Jaime Zapata, was killed and another agent, Victor Avila, was
wounded in the leg in one of the more brazen attacks by drug cartels as they
battle with authorities who are trying to crack down on drug and weapons
trafficking.
Mexican authorities have already detained more than 30 people in connection with
the shooting, including a suspected money man for the Zetas drug cartel arrested
earlier this month.
U.S. authorities have traced one of the weapons used in the shooting back to a
Texas man who bought the gun last year. He and two others have since been
charged by prosecutors for illegally buying guns for others, though they have
not been charged for anything related to the shooting in Mexico.
(Reporting by Jeremy Pelofsky, editing by Deborah Charles)
Nearly two dozen people were killed in a Mexican border area on Thursday
during a fierce gun battle between suspected members of rival drug gangs,
Mexican authorities said.
The bloodshed took place only 12 miles from the U.S. border, in Sonora, a state
that is a popular tourist destination famed for its beaches but whose interior
has increasingly been consumed by drug violence. Prosecutors said the battle was
a showdown between two rival drug and migrant-trafficking gangs, who sprayed
gunfire at one another in a sparsely populated area near a dirt road between the
hamlets of Tubutama and Saric, an area frequented by traffickers, the Associated
Press reported.
The shooting culminated in the deaths of 21 people, with Mexican authorities
taking another nine people into custody, including six with bullet wounds.
The Sonora state Attorney General’s Office said in a statement that nine people
were captured by police at the scene of the shootings, six of whom had been
wounded in the confrontation, according to the A.P. Eight vehicles and seven
weapons were also seized. All of the victims were believed to be members of the
gangs.
For several years now, Mexico has been gripped by violence as warring drug
cartels battle over lucrative drug routes through border regions like Sonora,
Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez. The heavily armed and ruthless cartels have murdered
wantonly, killing hundreds of police, military officers, top officials and
politicians.
In the last year, the rate of killings has only surged, and this year is already
on track to become the deadliest in half a decade. More than 5,000 drug-related
killings have occurred thus far in Mexico, eclipsing the totals in 2007 and 2008
and nearing the 6,500 killed in 2009 alone.
LOS ANGELES — President Obama will send up to 1,200 National Guard troops to
the Southwest border and seek increased spending on law enforcement there to
combat drug smuggling after demands from Republican and Democratic lawmakers
that border security be tightened.
The decision was disclosed by a Democratic lawmaker and confirmed by
administration officials after Mr. Obama met on Tuesday with Republican
senators, several of whom have demanded that troops be placed at the border. The
lawmakers learned of the plan after the meeting.
But the move also reflected political pressure in the president’s own party with
midterm election campaigns under way and with what is expected to be a
tumultuous debate on overhauling immigration law coming up on Capitol Hill.
The issue has pushed Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, into
something of a corner. As governor of Arizona, she demanded that Guard troops be
put on the border. But since joining the Obama administration, she has remained
noncommittal about the idea, saying as recently as a month ago that other
efforts by Mr. Obama had made the border “as secure now as it has ever been.”
The troops will be stationed in the four border states for a year, White House
officials said. It is not certain when they will arrive, the officials said.
The troops will join a few hundred members of the Guard already assigned there
to help the police hunt for drug smugglers. The additional troops will provide
support to law enforcement officers by helping observe and monitor traffic
between official border crossings. They will also help analyze trafficking
patterns in the hope of intercepting illegal drug shipments.
Initial word of the deployment came not in a formal announcement from the White
House — indeed, it was left to administration officials speaking on the
condition of anonymity to fill in some details — but from a Democratic member of
the House from southern Arizona who is running in what is expected to be a
competitive race for re-election.
“The White House is doing the right thing,” the congresswoman, Representative
Gabrielle Giffords, said in a statement announcing the decision. “Arizonans know
that more boots on the ground means a safer and more secure border. Washington
heard our message.”
Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican whose opponent in a coming primary
has relentlessly criticized him on immigration, said Tuesday that he welcomed
Mr. Obama’s move but that it was “simply not enough.”
Mr. McCain called for the introduction of 6,000 National Guard troops to police
the Southwestern border, with 3,000 for Arizona alone. In a letter to Senator
Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, two Obama
administration officials said that the proposal infringed on his role as
commander in chief and overlooked gains in border security.
Calls for sending the Guard to the border grew after the shooting death of an
Arizona rancher in March that the police suspect was carried out by someone
involved in smuggling. Advocates of the controversial Arizona state law giving
the police a greater role in immigration enforcement played up what they
described as a failure to secure the border as a reason to pass the law.
Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, a Republican who is running for a full term, has
requested Guard troops at the border but decided not to use her authority to do
it herself, citing the state’s tattered finances. The governors of New Mexico
and Texas also pleaded for troops.
From 2006 to 2008, President George W. Bush made a larger deployment of Guard
troops under a program called Operation Jump Start. At its peak, 6,000 Guard
troops at the border helped build roads and fences in addition to backing up law
enforcement officers.
Those Guard troops contributed to the arrest of more than 162,000 illegal
immigrants, the rescue of 100 people stranded in the desert and the seizure of
$69,000 in cash and 305,000 pounds of illicit drugs.
The soldiers will not directly make arrests of border crossers and smugglers,
something they are not trained to do.
Rick Nelson, a senior fellow who studies domestic security at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that the additional
spending could improve security over the long term but that the National Guard
deployment was not sufficient for “an overwhelming change that will change the
dynamics on the border.”
“This is a symbolic gesture,” he said. “At the end of the day, the face of
border security is still going to be Customs and Border Protection, the law
enforcement community. It’s not going to be the National Guard.”
Democrats and Republicans who agreed with the move rushed to take credit for it,
including Ms. Brewer, who said her signing of the new Arizona law had pushed the
administration.
“I am pleased that President Obama has now, apparently, agreed that our nation
must secure the border to address rampant border violence and illegal
immigration without other preconditions, such as passage of ‘comprehensive
immigration reform,’ ” she said.
Terry Goddard, the Arizona attorney general and a Democrat running for governor,
released a statement with the headline “Goddard Secures Administration
Commitment for $500 million for National Guard, Border Security.” In an
interview, Mr. Goddard said, “I think it is a good indication that the
administration is taking us seriously.”
But some Democrats were skeptical.
Representative Harry E. Mitchell of Arizona, a Democrat facing re-election in a
Republican-leaning district, said it was “going to take much more to secure the
border.” He proposed a minimum of 3,000 troops.
Some Republicans said the deployment of the troops should not overshadow the
need for a comprehensive approach to the illegal immigration problem.
“Arizona and other border states are grateful for the additional resources at
the border,” said Representative Jeff Flake of Arizona. “But I hope that this is
merely the first step in a process that culminates in Congress passing
comprehensive immigration reform.”
Obama administration officials had resisted sending Guard troops to the border
but had never ruled it out. They pointed to a variety of improvements at the
border, including a record seizure of drug-related cash and guns, falling or
flat rates of violent crime in border towns, and record lows in the flow of
illegal immigrants across the border. Analysts give the dismal economy much of
the credit for that.
In his meeting with lawmakers on Tuesday, Mr. Obama said improving border
security alone would not reduce illegal immigration and reiterated that a
reworking of the immigration system could not be achieved without more
Republican support.
CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — The married couple gunned down Saturday as they drove
back from a children’s birthday party with their infant daughter in the back
seat were concerned about the violence plaguing this border town, but they never
believed they could be its next targets, the husband’s brother said in an
interview on Monday.
The couple, Leslie Enriquez, 35, a pregnant American consulate worker, and her
husband, Arthur H. Redelfs, 34, an officer at the county jail in El Paso, were
within sight of the bridge leading to the United States border crossing when
gunmen said to have links to drug traffickers drove up to their car and opened
fire, killing them both.
“He was a wonderful man,” said the brother, Reuben Redelfs. “We just regret this
as a senseless act of violence.”
Gunmen also killed the husband of another consular employee and wounded his two
young children in a near-simultaneous shooting elsewhere in the city, in what
appeared to be coordinated assaults on American officials and their families.
The killings provoked outrage from Washington and raised new questions about
whether employees of the United States and their family members were
increasingly at risk of being swept into the cross-fire of Mexico’s bloody drug
wars.
The couple had been married for a couple years and lived in El Paso, where they
were raising their 7-month-old daughter, who was unharmed in the shooting. Mr.
Redelfs said he was now caring for the girl.
Despite concerns about the security in Ciudad Juárez, the couple traveled
frequently between Texas and Mexico, where they had friends and Ms. Enriquez
worked in the section of the American Consulate dealing with complaints or
concerns of Americans in Mexico.
“They weren’t worried as targets,” Mr. Redelfs said.
Asked if he believed the couple were targets because of Ms. Enriquez’s consular
job, Mr. Redelfs chose his words cautiously, saying, “I find it more than a
coincidence that two separate incidents involving consular employees who were
shot and killed occurred on the same day.”
Silvio Gonzalez, a spokesman for the United States Consulate in Ciudad Juárez,
said the agency would be closed Tuesday “as we mourn the loss in our community.”
The consular office was closed Monday for a holiday.
On Sunday night, staff at the consulate in Juárez held a meeting in which they
vented their fears and discussed ideas for improving security.
State Department officials said concerns about security were not new along
Mexico’s northern border, long the scene of some of that country’s worst
violence. But as levels of drug violence soared in recent years, the State
Department has looked at ways to tighten security at its border consulates.
Unlike other consulates around the world, those along Mexico’s northern border
have their own diplomatic security officers assigned to oversee the security at
the consulate and at the homes of all foreign service officers. Security at most
other consulates is managed by regional officers that oversee the safety of
consulates in various countries.
Diplomats at border consulates receive hardship pay to compensate them for the
increased risk they assume by accepting assignments at those posts. And they are
eligible for special antiterrorism training — known in State Department as
“crash-bang courses” — meant to teach them how to respond to robberies,
shootings and kidnapping attempts.
The killings came during a particularly bloody weekend when nearly 50 people
were killed nationwide in drug-gang violence, including attacks in Acapulco as
American college students began arriving for spring break.
The killings followed threats against American diplomats along the Mexican
border and complaints from consulate workers that drug-related violence was
growing untenable, American officials said. Even before the shootings, the State
Department had quietly made the decision to allow consulate workers to evacuate
their families across the border to the United States.
In Washington, President Obama denounced the “brutal murders” and vowed to “work
tirelessly” with Mexican law enforcement officials to prosecute the killers.
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the killings underscored the need
to work with the Mexican government “to cripple the influence of trafficking
organizations at work in Mexico.”
In a sign of the potential international reverberations of these killings,
President Felipe Calderón of Mexico similarly expressed his indignation and
condolences and said he would press forward with “all available resources” to
control the lawlessness in Ciudad Juárez and the rest of the country.
The F.B.I. was sending agents to Ciudad Juárez on Sunday to assist with the
investigation and American diplomats were en route to meet with their Mexican
counterparts, said Roberta S. Jacobson, the American deputy assistant secretary
of state who handles Mexico.
The coordinated nature of the attacks, the automatic weapons used and the
location in a city where drug cartels control virtually all illicit activity
point toward traffickers as the suspects, said Mexican and American officials,
declining to be identified. Officials with the state of Chihuahua issued a
statement Sunday night saying that initial evidence, corroborated by
intelligence from the United States, pointed to a gang known as Los Aztecas,
which is linked to the major drug cartel in Ciudad Juárez.
American interests in Mexico have been attacked by drug traffickers before but
never with such brutality. Attackers linked to the Gulf Cartel shot at and
hurled a grenade, which did not explode, at the American consulate in Monterrey
in 2008.
The shootings in Ciudad Juárez took place in broad daylight on Saturday as the
victims were en route home from a social gathering at another consulate worker’s
home. The first attack was reported at 2:32 p.m.
Jorge Alberto Salcido Ceniceros, 37, the husband of a consular worker, was found
dead in a white Honda Pilot, with bullet wounds to his body, the authorities
said. In the back seat were two wounded children, one aged 4 and one 7. They
were taken to the hospital.
Shell casings from a variety of caliber weapons were found at the scene.
Another call came in 10 minutes later, several miles away. This time it was a
Toyota RAV4 with Texas plates that had been shot up, with Mr. Redelfs and Ms.
Enriquez dead inside and their baby crying from a car seat in the back. Mexican
officials initially gave Ms. Enriquez’s age as 25. Ms. Enriquez, an American
citizen, was shot in the head. Her husband was shot in the neck and left arm. A
9-millimeter bullet casing was found at the scene.
Mr. Calderón is scheduled on Tuesday to make his third visit to Ciudad Juárez in
the last five weeks as he tries to contain the disastrous public relations
fallout from the killing of 16 people in January that Mr. Calderón first brushed
off as “a settling of accounts” between members of criminal gangs.
It turns out the victims of the massacre were mostly students celebrating a
birthday. By all accounts, they were just young people from a rough neighborhood
trying to steer clear of the drug gang violence that has turned Ciudad Juárez
into Mexico’s deadliest city. More than 2,000 people were killed there last
year, giving it one of the highest murder rates in the world.
CHULA VISTA, Calif. — Eduardo Tostado was a prosperous man whose businesses
and pleasures straddled the coastal border. He owned a big house and a used-car
lot in the San Diego suburbs, and a seafood restaurant in Tijuana.
He was also part of the border underworld, the authorities say — a high-ranking
member of the Mexican drug cartel driving much of the United States’ illegal
marijuana trade and the cascade of violence in a 40-year drug war. Some
evenings, Mr. Tostado drank tequila at the Baby Rock club in Tijuana or sipped
Scotch at the Airport Lounge in San Diego. He socialized mainly with men he knew
well and women he knew not at all.
His wife, Ivette Rubio, was aware of this, and they were having problems in
their marriage. So when Mr. Tostado called her in June 2007 to say he had been
kidnapped and needed her to sell their house to pay a ransom, she did not
believe him.
“You got drunk,” she said, “and you went out, and you didn’t come to sleep in
the house.”
Click, the phone went dead.
Mr. Tostado was in the hands of Jorge Rojas-López, a former member of the
cartel, the Arellano Félix organization, who had turned on it. Based in the San
Diego suburbs, Mr. Rojas-López was running a renegade squad of kidnappers and
hit men, fighting for a piece of the marijuana market.
Across the border, the Mexican government, with $1.5 billion from the United
States, is battling its drug cartels, and the cartels are battling one other.
The Arellano organization has borne the brunt of these drug wars, and has
fragmented into smaller crews spinning across the border like shrapnel.
“We believe there has been a splintering of the A.F.O. and that it has lost the
power that they once wielded,” said Keith Slotter, the agent in charge of the
F.B.I.’s office in San Diego.
The illegal drug market has never been so unsettled, drug enforcement experts
say, with small elite killing squads like the one Mr. Rojas-López was running —
Mr. Slotter identified three in San Diego alone — operating on both sides of the
border. For three years, Mr. Rojas-López’s rogue squad, a mix of United States
citizens and Mexicans, used houses in tract developments as roving bases,
hunting cartel members and imprisoning their prey along bland residential
streets. They secured ransoms worth millions. Payment, however, did not
guarantee that the victims survived.
At stake were billions of dollars in profits from tons of smuggled marijuana,
and other drugs, and the precious control of Mexican border cities like Ciudad
Juárez; Nogales; and Tijuana. Those cities are thoroughfares to the world’s most
lucrative drug market: the United States.
The authorities in Kansas City, Mo., and Miami are also investigating the Mr.
Rojas-López’s squad for drug trafficking and killings in their cities.
Mr. Rojas-López and eight other members of the squad, called Los Palillos, are
now on trial in San Diego, charged with kidnapping 13 men and killing 9 from
2004 to 2007. Seven other co-defendants are fugitives. Since the investigation
began, three more fugitive squad members have been killed.
This account of Los Palillos in Tijuana and San Diego, based on more than 6,000
pages of court documents, testimony from 175 witnesses and co-defendants, and
interviews with law enforcement officials, offers a window into how Mexico’s
drug wars are playing out on American soil.
Mr. Rojas-López’s ambitions were fueled by more than just desire for a piece of
the marijuana trade. He also wanted revenge for the death of his brother,
Victor, a cartel enforcer, who was killed by the Arellanos organization in 2003
for insubordination. Mr. Rojas-López’s squad eluded the Arellanos cartel and law
enforcement officials in San Diego for three years. Investigators heard whispers
of a mutinous enforcement squad operating in the area but were unable to put the
pieces together.
Relatives of the kidnapping victims either avoided the police or withheld
crucial information about their loved ones. Instead, they quietly sold assets on
both sides of the border, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in a matter
of days.
Some victims were released unharmed. Others were smothered with masking tape,
shot in the stomach or pulverized with a police battering ram and dumped on a
suburban street. Or they were boiled down in acid and never seen again, a
technique known in Mexico as “pozole,” or Mexican stew.
Mr. Tostado, the kidnapped businessman with the big house here, and his wife
were among the pawns in this underworld, with Mr. Rojas-López demanding $2
million from Ms. Rubio for her husband’s life. The next call she received that
day was not from her husband.
She did not recognize the voice that said, “Hey, you want me to send your
husband in pieces or what?”
Call to Police Pays Off
At the time of his abduction, Mr. Tostado, a legal resident of both the United
States and Mexico, was helping the Arellanos cartel “pass tons of marijuana”
across the United States border, according to the federal agents and José
Olivera-Beritan, one of the nine suspected members of Los Palillos who is on
trial in San Diego Superior Court for murder and kidnapping. “He knew in advance
which trucks will be searched,” Mr. Olivera-Beritan said of Mr. Tostado in a
jailhouse interview. “He told us he was giving cops money under the table.”
Mr. Tostado has offered contradictory statements to agents regarding his cartel
affiliation.
His wife, Ms. Rubio, took a risk that night in June 2007 by calling the police.
Investigators say that it made the difference between Mr. Tostado’s survival and
the stories of less-fortunate kidnapping victims.
The event that led to the renegade squad occurred in 2003, when Victor
Rojas-López crossed the cartel.
One evening at Zool, a nightclub in Tijuana, members of his enforcement squad
got in a fight with members of another Arellano squad over a woman. A member of
Victor Rojas-López’s team pushed a gun into the face of a man who happened to be
the brother-in-law of the cartel leader, according to grand jury testimony.
The bosses ordered Victor Rojas-López to kill the underling. He refused and was
shot to death.
His younger brother, Jorge, then took over the squad, called it Los Palillos —
“the toothpicks,” after Victor, who was skinny but tough — and fled to San
Diego.
Mark Amador, a San Diego County deputy district attorney who is the lead
prosecutor against Los Palillos, said that much of the evidence about what
happened next came from an insider, Guillermo Moreno, an American citizen and
the member of Los Palillos who had pulled the gun at Zool.
“He is the witness that pulls all the pieces together,” Mr. Amador said. Mr.
Moreno, who was arrested after Mr. Tostado’s kidnapping, ultimately led
investigators to rental houses around San Diego used by Los Palillos. In a deal
with prosecutors, he agreed to a minimum 25-year prison sentence, rather than
life. At some houses, forensic investigators found DNA from victims.
When members of Los Palillos first arrived in San Diego, they lived quietly off
earlier spoils. Then they went back to the work they knew best: killing and drug
trafficking.
The first corpses were found on Aug. 15, 2004, decomposing in a Dodge minivan.
The police said the bodies belonged to three drug smugglers who had crossed the
border to do a deal with the squad members.
The squad used safe houses with attached garages so they could move drugs or
bodies in and out without being seen, Mr. Moreno, the witness, said. In many
neighborhoods, the real estate bubble created a constant churn of new faces, so
it was easy to go undetected.
The three smugglers expected to drop off several hundred thousand dollars’ worth
of marijuana, sleep over and leave for Mexico in the morning. Instead, Mr.
Moreno said, the squad waited for the men to fall asleep, then shot one of them
in the stomach.
“Someone said, ‘Quit crying, you,’ ” Mr. Moreno told the grand jury. The man
bled to death.
The other two smugglers were suffocated. Mr. Rojas-López is accused of stealing
their marijuana and ordering Mr. Moreno to dump the bodies.
The Arellanos cartel, meanwhile, ordered a former Baja California police officer
named Ricardo Escobar Luna, 31, who was working for the cartel, to hunt down Los
Palillos in San Diego.
But members of the squad learned that Mr. Escobar was after them and abducted
him from his home in Bonita, Calif., according to testimony from Mr. Moreno. The
kidnappers disguised themselves as police officers and drove up in a BMW with
flashing lights.
Mr. Escobar’s wife called the police but never mentioned that her husband worked
for the Arellanos cartel, said Steve Duncan, an investigator for the California
Department of Justice.
Testifying before the grand jury, Mr. Moreno described how he had overheard a
discussion among squad members before the kidnapping: “Well, he’s here to kill
us; we might as well kill him.”
On Aug. 20, 2005, Mr. Rojas-López took a police battering ram into the bedroom
where Mr. Escobar, the former police officer, was tied up, according to
testimony by Mr. Moreno.
Meanwhile, Mr. Moreno went outside to water the lawn and keep an eye on the
neighbors, he said. When he went back inside, he saw blood on the walls.
Victor Escobar, the former officer’s brother, told investigators that he had
paid the squad $600,000 for his freedom, but he never had much hope. “Yeah, I
knew they’d kill my brother,” he said. “But what else could I do?”
By September 2005, the police were beginning to understand that the killings
around San Diego were related, but they still did not know how. The case began
to unfold when two squad members with automatic rifles and pistols bungled the
kidnapping of an Arellanos cartel trafficker in a cul-de-sac in Chula Vista, in
broad daylight.
A police cruiser chased the gunmen to a strip mall parking lot and was barraged
by bullets.
The gunmen were caught later that day and eventually convicted for attempted
kidnapping and the attempted murder of a police officer.
Within a few years, Los Palillos had become a minicartel with a drug trafficking
network that snaked through the Mexican cities of Ensenada and Tijuana, San
Diego and on to Missouri and Florida, according to federal agents.
Two Cuban nationals ran Los Palillos operations in Kansas City, Mo., Mr. Moreno,
the witness, told federal officials.
In September 2006, a woman in the small farming community of Jameson, about 50
miles north of Kansas City, heard gun shots and then found two bodies near a
barn. Deputies discovered a 47,000-square-foot marijuana garden behind rows of
corn stalks. Members of Los Palillos were arrested on suspicion of killing local
rivals, the authorities said.
By 2007, the authorities said, the renegade squad had made millions of dollars.
Mr. Rojas-López wore Rolex watches. Photographs on MySpace showed his squad
members hoisting drinks at trendy San Diego bars.
In May 2007, two more drug smugglers, both 33, were kidnapped, and they were
never seen again. Mr. Moreno told federal agents that their bodies had been
dissolved in a vat of acid.
Beer, Soccer and Arrests
Before he was kidnapped, Mr. Tostado was worried. A man had left an extortion
note at the front door of his home, recorded by his security camera. Armed with
a picture of the man, Mr. Tostado drove down to Tijuana to find some answers.
Mr. Tostado, an avid off-road racer, who admitted in court that he had
socialized with members of the Mexican underworld and had accepted a $200,000
race car from the Arellano family, learned that the man in the photo was a
member of Los Palillos.
A few weeks later, an acquaintance introduced Mr. Tostado to a Tijuana woman
named Nancy. On June 8, Nancy invited Mr. Tostado to her home in Chula Vista.
Mr. Tostado walked in carrying bottles of Cognac and whiskey. Hands grabbed him
from behind in the darkened room. Someone fired a Taser, immobilizing him.
Mr. Tostado was held for eight days while Los Palillos negotiated by phone with
his wife. He said that he drank beers with his abductors, who watched soccer on
television and smoked marijuana.
Occasionally, Mr. Rojas-López would vent angrily about the Arellanos cartel.
“They have killed my family and my brother,” he told him. “I had to do
something, and I have the nerve to do it over here.”
By June 16, Mr. Rojas-López had agreed to accept $193,000 in cash. Wiretapped
calls recorded the kidnappers directing the dropping off of the ransom money.
On June 16, 2007, federal agents arrested the squad leaders, Mr. Rojas-López and
Juan Estrada-Gonzalez, the second-in-charge, after they dropped the money off at
a motel. Another team of agents stormed the house where Mr. Tostado was being
held and freed him.
Later that day, as Mr. Tostado recounted his experience to federal agents, he
pledged to leave the underworld behind.
“I think I need to start over again,” he said. “I’m reborn right now.”
Mr. Tostado is keeping a low profile these days. He sold his house in Chula
Vista and no longer races the off-road circuits in Mexico.
He sold his restaurant in Tijuana, too, after someone left three barrels in
front of it in 2008. They were full of bones and acid.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Attorney General Eric Holder calls it the largest single
strike at a Mexican drug cartel operating in the U.S. -- the arrest of more than
300 people in a series of drug raids across the country.
Holder said at a news conference that the arrests over the past two days were
aimed at the U.S. operations of the La Familia cartel. Holder said La Familia is
the newest and most violent of Mexico's five drug cartels.
More than 3,000 federal agents and police officers made the arrests in more than
a dozen states. The raids are part of a long-running anti-drug operation that
has led to nearly 1,200 arrests over almost four years.
A New York grand jury has indicted alleged cartel leader Servando
Gomez-Martinez.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's
earlier story is below.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Attorney General Eric Holder calls it largest single strike
at a Mexican drug cartel operating in the U.S. -- the arrest of more than 300
people in a series of drug raids across the country.
Holder said at a news conference that the arrests over the past two days were
aimed at the U.S. operations of the La Familia cartel. Holder said La Familia is
the newest and most violent of Mexico's five drug cartels.
More than 3,000 federal agents and police officers made the arrests in more than
a dozen states. The raids are part of a long-running anti-drug operation that
has led to nearly 1,200 arrests over almost four years.
A New York grand jury has indicted alleged cartel leader Servando
Gomez-Martinez.
