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Last Updated: Nov 2nd, 2009 - 17:32:57 |
TIJUANA, Mexico (Reuters) - Bodies are cut up and dumped in acid. Victims are stripped naked and hung from bridges. Others have their tongues cut out before being murdered -- Mexican gangs are using horrifying methods to outdo each other in an already harrowing drugs war.
Drug cartel hitmen have massacred some 70 people in the past 10 days in Tijuana on the U.S.-Mexico border, once a freewheeling city serving Americans tequila, cheap medicines and sex that is being devastated by the war.
Mexico's government says most of the recent victims belonged to Tijuana's Arellano Felix family cartel that won notoriety in the 1990s for smuggling tons of cocaine into California and for its ruthless elimination of enemies.
But it has been weakened in recent years with former leaders killed or arrested, and other cartels are moving in to take control of the drugs trade in Tijuana and throughout the border state of Baja California.
"The Arellano Felix cartel no longer has control of drug trafficking in Tijuana, rival gangs are coming into the plaza," said Baja California's police chief, Daniel de la Rosa.
In one of the nastiest mass executions in the city, hitmen dumped 16 bodies across Tijuana, some with their tongues cut out, late last month. Days later, police found a barrel suspected of containing human remains in acid with a message from a gang threatening to make more "soup" of rivals.
Since the drug war exploded in 2006, Tijuana has become one of Mexico's most violence cities.
President Felipe Calderon has deployed thousands of troops in the city, which lies across the border from San Diego, but they have not stopped the killings and he is bogged down in a search for new strategies to halt the relentless violence across Mexico.
Now the rival Gulf cartel and its feared armed wing, the Zetas, has joined the fight in Tijuana, fanning out from its home turf near Texas.
Armed with a huge arsenal of grenades, automatic weapons, dynamite and even rocket launchers, the Zetas -- set up by former Mexican army special forces troops in the late 1990s -- are known for especially brutal killings, such as beheading their victims and amputating body parts.
"Looking at the way these new executions are being carried out, we believe the Gulf cartel is operating in Baja California in a clear escalation of the conflict," Martin Rubio, the top official at the federal attorney general's office in the state, told Reuters.
TURF WARS
Mexico's most wanted man Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman, a prison escapee who leads a cartel from the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa, also wants control of Tijuana and its smuggling corridor into California -- one of world's top drug markets.
Guzman declared war on the Gulf cartel in 2006 and the violence has steadily intensified since then with more than 3,000 people murdered in the turf wars across Mexico so far this year.
The fiercest fighting between the Sinaloa and Gulf gangs in recent months was in Ciudad Juarez on the border with El Paso, Texas, but experts say the war appears to have turned back to Tijuana.
"The Sinaloa cartel may be mounting a fresh offensive in Tijuana after concentrating on Ciudad Juarez during the summer," the U.S. security consultancy Stratfor said in a recent report.
Although it has been under intense pressure from rival groups and the army, the Arellano Felix clan has refused to disappear, and Mexican anti-drug officials say a new leadership is emerging.
Enedina Arellano Felix, one of four sisters, is now believed to manage the family business after other brothers were arrested and one was killed in a shootout with police.
"Enedina's sister Alicia has boosted the family operation with her son Fernando Sanchez Arellano, nicknamed The Engineer and around whom today's disputes in Tijuana resolve," said political analyst Miguel Angel Granados Chapa in a column in the Reforma newspaper this week.
Sanchez Arellano has yet to unite the fractured cartel and win its leadership. Although Mexican officials say he has the support of Tijuana's corrupt police force, his rivals are determined and merciless.
On a pile of corpses with their tongues cut out, dumped near a Tijuana school, a message read: "This is what happens to those who work with the big mouth Engineer."
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