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Tijuana Drug Fights


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Mexican President Felipe Calderon sent federal police and troops into several major Mexican cities to combat the drug wars gripping much of the country.

Adam Yamaguchi looks at the cartel wars in Tijuana.
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3 responses // Tijuana Drug Fights

  • In the mid-1980s, as celebrated in that old TV show, Miami Vice, cocaine made its way to the U.S. via the Caribbean. In early 1989, the coast guard flew me in a Falcon jet over remote cays in the Bahamas, a couple hundred feet above the water. Looking down, you could see people camped out on islands no more than a couple hundred yards long--waiting for loads to come in, the Coast Guard said. Off one island, we could see a huge black circle underwater, where a cocaine-laden plane from Colombia had missed the makeshift runway in the dark and exploded in the water. But the U.S. managed to shut off the Caribbean route, so the Colombians turned to Mexico. As as result the Mexican trafficking organizations were built into ever-larger cartels, first charging the Colombians a fee, then demanding half of the cocaine, and finally taking over all the distribution of cocaine in the western United States. Given that their rise was intertwined with the bribery of Mexican law enforcement and governmental officials, this had a huge social impact on Mexico. When Vicente Fox of the PAN party was elected Mexico's president in 2000, breaking the 70 year hold of the PRI party, he moved aggressively against Mexico's narco-traffickers, particularly in Tijuana, home of the largest cartel, run by the Arrellano-Felix family. Ramon Arrellano-Felix was killed. His brother, Benjamin, was taken into custody. But then, unlike in a Bruce Willis movie, all Hell broke loose. Violence increased greatly, as narco-traffickers shot it out to fill the vacuum left by the Arrellano-Felix brothers... This year, Mexico's newest president, Felipe Calderon, sent federal troops to Tijuana and other places in Mexico, and the United States government is talking about a massive military assitance program, similar to Plan Colombia, the seven-yearold, multi-billion dollar military assistance program designed to defeat Colombia's narco-guerrillas, which has yet to diminish the flow of cocaine into the United States.
    MitchKoss
  • http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30F13F...
    The latest news...
    The latest news...
    Interesting.
    LaurenCerre
  • Winners say "No" to drugs.
    Ando_SB

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