The Long War of Genaro García Luna

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When Genaro García Luna, Mexico’s top police official, arrived in Tijuana in January, the city was in the middle of a storm of violence that he found, as he put it to me with clipped understatement soon after his visit, “surprising.” First, three local police officers were murdered in a single night, apparently in retaliation for a bust that a drug-cartel boss warned them not to carry out. A few days later, federal police officers tried to storm a trafficker safe house in a quiet Tijuana neighborhood and ended up in a shootout. Five gunmen held off dozens of police officers and soldiers for more than three hours. By the time the police made it inside the house, six kidnap victims from a rival cartel being held there had been executed. The traffickers had skinned off some of the victims’ faces to conceal their identities.

The attacks on the police officers were particularly worrying for García Luna, who as secretary of public security is one of the officials in charge of implementing President Felipe Calderón’s decision to aggressively wage war on drug trafficking. Just before García Luna’s visit to Tijuana, a police officer’s wife and 12-year-old daughter were murdered in their home there, in violation of a longstanding code of combat that is supposed to safeguard the families of cops and traffickers alike. In a further gesture of defiance, cartel assassins were issuing death threats over the police force’s own radio frequency, and the cartel seemed to be getting inside information about police operations. The gunmen in the Tijuana shootout had a cache of automatic weapons, including AK-47’s, the traditional weapon of choice for the cartels. During the shootout, the police, unsure of their ability to control the crossfire, evacuated hundreds of children from an adjacent preschool. “People are saying, ‘There are children fleeing here, like it’s Iraq,’ ” García Luna told me later.

What was “surprising” to him, however, was not the firepower or brutality of the traffickers; the surprising thing was that in Tijuana, the government was supposed to be winning. Over the previous few years, the city’s dominant drug cartel, known as the Arellano Félix cartel, after the family that runs it, had been, as many of García Luna’s top aides told me, practically dismantled. One of the Arellano Félix brothers was shot, another arrested by Mexican special forces and a third seized by American agents as he fished in the Pacific from a boat called the Dock Holiday. U.S. and Mexican authorities shut down several “narcotunnels,” elaborately engineered smuggling passages that run as deep as 100 feet below the fence that separates Tijuana from the United States. Stash after stash of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana was seized in town or intercepted at the border.

But by the measure that matters most to the average citizen — security — the situation was as bad or worse than ever. Even as the Mexican government was sending fleets of security officers to Tijuana, there were at least 15 drug-related killings there the week of García Luna’s visit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/magazine/13officer-t.html?th&emc=th