LETTER FROM TIJUANA
IN THE NAME OF THE LAW A colonel cracks down on corruption. BY WILLIAM FINNEGAN
I
n 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. In 2007 and 2008, the city was a killing field. During the last three months of 2008, nearly five hundred people were murdered here, many in gruesome public displays: decapitations, dismemberments, corpses left hanging from bridges, piles of bodies with their tongues cut out. There were daylight shoot-outs between gangs using automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenade launchers in downtown streets and shopping malls. Kidnapping for ransom got so bad that many wealthy and middle-class families fled to the United States. The Mexican government had already sent in the Army. This has been the basic approach of President Felipe Calderón’s administration to Mexico’s organized-crime problem since taking office, in December, 2006. In Tijuana, the military began by disarming the city’s police. The twenty-six hundred members of Tijuana’s finest were widely believed to work for the narco-traffickers; the Army wanted to test their weapons for possible involvement in unsolved murders. Those test results, if they were ever produced, were not released, but the military took so long to return the guns that some cops began carrying slingshots on the job. Like most municipal police in Mexico, the Tijuana police were poorly paid, undertrained, and underequipped—when they had target practice, they had to buy their own bullets. They were also widely despised. The Army’s arrival in Tijuana, in 2007, was welcomed by a terrorized public. But the military, with no local knowledge or experience in urban warfare, had no luck at first in stopping the rising narco violence.
Then Army officers began replacing local police commanders. Lieutenant Colonel Julián Leyzaola Pérez (Retired) became Tijuana’s chief of police. In December, 2008, he was named Tijuana’s Secretary of Public Security, increasing his authority. Unlike his predecessors, Leyzaola went straight at the narcos. He called them mugrosos (slimeballs) and cockroaches, and chased their armored convoys through the streets. He replaced police commanders whom he considered passive with other retired Army officers. He told the press, “If the cartels understand only the language of violence, then we are going to have to speak in their language and annihilate them.” He told his bodyguards to concentrate on going after attackers rather than on protecting him. “I know how to shoot and I shoot well. I always shoot to the head.” His fearlessness and ire left tijuanenses in awe. Arriving at the scene of a shoot-out where one of his men had died, he punched the corpse of a cartel gunman in the face. During Leyzaola’s first year in Tijuana, thirty-two cops were killed in the line of duty— more than had died in the previous five years combined. Normally, in Mexico, narco-traffickers don’t tolerate aggressive law enforcement—least of all from city police, who lack the formal power to investigate serious crimes (state police do that), let alone combat drug trafficking (that’s for the federal police). Local police chiefs who annoy them are simply killed. It happened to the Tijuana police chief in 2000. It happened to the chief in Tecate, the next border town to the east, in 2007—he was murdered in bed, while lying next to his wife, with fifty shots to the face and chest. It happened to the deputy police chief in Tijuana in January, 2008, when a large contingent of gunmen surrounded his house and killed
him and his wife and two daughters. Leyzaola moved his family out of Mexico. He slept on an Army base. He survived a series of assassination attempts. One involved a plot to blow up police headquarters with a car bomb. He moved his office to a high-rise with a well-defended ground floor. The narcos like to commandeer police radio frequencies and fill them with taunts, threats, misinformation about crimes in progress, and narcocorridos—ballads about their exploits. Death threats against Leyzaola became a leitmotif on Tijuana police radios. In an unusually elaborate effort, one gang leader, Teodoro García Simental—an ultra-violent, obese psychopath known as El Teo—commissioned several exact replicas of the vehicles used by the Army, with a plan to ambush Leyzaola, videotape the assassination, and then post the video on the Internet with a narcocorrido soundtrack. This scheme was foiled by a last-minute raid, conducted on a tip that originated from U.S. law enforcement, on a ranch on the city’s outskirts. In July, 2009, El Teo left a note on the body of a slain police officer: “If you don’t resign, Leyzaola, I’m going to kill 5 a week.” El Teo’s men had already, in a frenzy a few months earlier, killed seven cops and wounded three in the space of forty-five minutes. Leyzaola did not resign. He called El Teo a coward. In a country where organized crime operates with fantastic impunity, this sort of ground-level defiance was unusual, if not unique. President Calderón, on a visit to Tijuana in 2009, praised the local anti-drug offensive. Carlos Pascual, the U.S. Ambassador, said Tijuana had the best municipal police force in Mexico. The mayor of San Diego praised Leyzaola, and the Los Angeles Times called his work a “model for the kind of law enforcement muscle
“The day I took office, there were five kidnappings,” Colonel Leyzaola said. The city was “totally controlled by organized crime.”