Tijuana BC: 2,039 Executions and Counting

Translated by Yaqui for Borderland Beat from: Zeta

By: Patricia Tamayo
Thanks to Neal !

The PGJE aims to stop the drug trade by implementing legal tactics, while the Municipal Police uses an "emerging strategy" in four areas of the city to reduce crime, while murder rates soar in Tijuana.

An unidentified man was found cut in half; his brutal assassins cut him at the height of the pelvis, stuffed his mutilated body into  two plastic bags; in one bag was the top half of the body (seen from the abdomen to the head)  and in the other bag, the lower half of the victim's body , ie  from the hips to the feet. The remains were placed in a trash can on Mulegé street in Colonia Herrera, Delegación Playas de Tijuana.

Municipal and detective agents arrived on the scene and confirmed the macabre discovery. The victim had a tattoo on his right arm with the legend Ezekiel. He wore a gray short-sleeved shirt, a black vest, blue shorts, and black-and-white sports shoes. The man, still unidentified, became number 2,000 murder victim so far this year.

Around 9:55 am on Saturday, October 20,  neighbors reported that a human head was observed in a plastic container.

Up until  the morning of Thursday, October 25, Tijuana reached 2,039 homicides in 2018, a historic figure in Baja California, when there are still 67 days until the end of the year and malicious crimes have already increased by 14.5 percent compared to 2017.

NOTE: This is before Chivis' Post on TJ Murders on Oct 28th, when she reported 8 murders in 24 hours, not to mention the decapitated head in the cooler near the TJ/San Ysidro Border Crossing.

The speech of the Attorney General's Office of the State (PGJE) for several months, is the same: 90% of the murders are struggles between narcomenudistas for the control of places of sale.

According to the PGJE, the profile of the victims has not changed. They are people with a criminal record, low social strata and addicts; most of the corpses end up in a common grave because they are not identified.

The zones, in which the members of the Sinaloa, Arellano Félix and Jalisco Nueva Generación cartels are fighting for control, are:  La Presa, La Presa Este, Los Pinos, Sanchez Taboada and El Centro; demarcations where there were constant armed attacks.

In October, up to the end of this edition, the statistics totaled 173 victims: 86 executed by firearm and the rest, among dismembered, bagged, burned and/or killed with a sharp weapon or bludgeoned to death.

"To diminish the crimes in Tijuana, legal and operational strategies must be implemented, we must put and keep everyone and anyone we have to in jail ," said Jorge Alberto Álvarez Mendoza, deputy attorney general.

For thirty days, the Deputy Attorney General has implemented a new strategy to stop drug dealing. 

Álvarez detailed it:

"We are doing something similar as in the issue of vehicle theft, where we had the recycling of criminals, they went in and out of prison, until they started working on the recidivism. In the case of narcomenudeo continue with the issue of judicial proceedings without arrested in homicide, which is to get more arrest warrants in homicide, and in turn start to beat them with another strategy, which is to seek prison time. "During this month the strategy worked because we had a talk with the Judicial Branch and there was an acceptance, an agreement, that although we are going to judicialize more, the processes are shorter and faster."

According to the official, a case for narcomenudeo can be resolved in months, but with the new initiative, the same day that the person is arrested, the hearing is held, an accusation is made, it is linked to the process and right then and there is the conditional judgement of the process.

He added that from January to September, 35 cases were investigated with detainees and 500 without detainees in drug trafficking; whereas with the newly implemented strategy, 70 cases have been prosecuted with detainees and between 10 and 15 without detainees.

"What Happened?

An issue was reported with a detainee with an appointment and he did not show up, another appointment and he did not show up, so by then it was already an obligatory appearance, then an arrest warrant, which he complied with when he was detained, and when he was arrested, in many occasions the individual  goes back to the street with a fortnightly signature  (ie signs papers affirming he will return for his court appearance) and does not show up again, then a new arrest warrant is issued; that is to say that a single crime issue generated seven or eight appearances, "
Alvarez explained.

To continue:

"What was proposed to the Judicial Power is that we are going to prosecute  a detainee, and if in that same impute hearing, I can  link and I have a suspension and it is done right there, instead of seven hearings, in  a  single appearance it can be done.  I want  to do that to  reduce the  recidivism in the background, like when  someone who commits a crime of theft and who is a recidivist ; he must stay in jail, be processed and sentenced. 

This has been possible with the support of the arrests of the Municipal Police, the operative actions of prevention and the combination of the issues of Procuraduría, of which the one that commits a crime and is a recidivist will be left in jail. To that he attributed the decrease in the incidence of crime in robberies, and that is expected to be the same case in drug dealing. "

The deputy district attorney projected that with more orders to apprehend drug dealers, the crime of homicides will go down.

"From the legal point of view, combined with the operational actions must have a positive theme, the only thing that can give me a result in a short time is the operational action," he said.

Twenty-six ministerial agents are part of the joint operation of the Coordination Group, in which the incidence of crime, with the exception of drug dealing, goes down.

EMERGING STRATEGY OF THE SSPM:

After Tijuana exceeded 2,000 deaths, the Municipal Public Security Secretariat (SSPM) implemented an emerging strategy to reduce homicides.

"I tell the Tijuana residents that the Municipal Police will not lower  their guard. They are not alone, we remain firm in the fight against crime, our police will continue to detain criminals as many times as necessary , those who break the law, " warned the head of the corporation, Marco Antonio Sotomayor Amezcua.

"In that sense the director -Mario Martínez  and a server established an emerging strategy to reduce homicides, the first of which is that we have assigned an additional number of elements to four police districts, where these situations are mainly generated: La Presa , Presa Este, Los Pinos and Sánchez Taboada ".

And he affirmed, the SSPM is assigning resources, weapons, vehicles, "we will be working directly with the director and a server in this area".

The strategy also includes the fight against drug trafficking:  "because we know that the main source of these homicides has to do with drug dealing and we are going to increase the number of detainees and drug seizures. 

"We ask for the collaboration of the community so that through the numbers of Anonymous Denunciation, such as the 089, or the emergency 911, inform us of criminal incidents that may be present in their communities, knowing that their calls are going to remain anonymous, so that they can be  responded to  immediately and decisively to those calls, " the municipal official concluded.