A woman collapses in a relative’s arms in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, after gunmen killed her son and injured the boy’s father. More than 5,000 people have been slain in drug violence in Mexico this year.

Mistrust bedevils war on Mexican drug cartels
The U.S. and Mexico agree that cartels have morphed into crime syndicates that pose an urgent security threat to the region. But working together has not been easy.

Competing Mexican drug cartels are destroying each other ... and that's where 'Warrior' begins ...."
http://www.warriorthemovie.com
http://www.warriorthemovie.blogspot.com
http://imdb.com/title/tt0320751

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-208917617001990565&q=warrior+mexican+OR+drug+OR+cartels+duration%3Ashort+genre%3AMOVIE_TRAILER

"the action adventure fantasy feature film "Warrior" ... about the son of a divine force ... is a story of a young man's quest to find his true identity set against the twin backdrops of Native American folklore and the treacherous Mexican drug trade and a portrayal of the classic confrontation between "good and evil" ... filmed in the exotic jungles of Costa Azul in the State of Nayarit and the urban grit of Puerto Vallarta in the State of Jalisco, Mexico .. with action, adventure, romance, comedy, a multi-ethnic cast, a major movie studio music score and spectacular cinematography ..."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-na-usmexico31-2008dec31,0,887765.story
From the Los Angeles Times
MEXICO UNDER SIEGE
Mistrust bedevils war on Mexican drug cartels
The U.S. and Mexico agree that cartels have morphed into crime syndicates that pose an urgent security threat to the region. But working together has not been easy.
By Josh Meyer

December 31, 2008

Reporting from Washington — The U.S. has begun pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into Mexico to help stanch the expansion of drug-fueled violence and corruption that has claimed more than 5,000 lives south of the border this year.

The bloodshed has spread to American cities, even to the heartland, and U.S. officials are realizing that their fight against powerful drug cartels responsible for the carnage has come down to this: Either walk away or support Mexican President Felipe Calderon's strategy, even with the risk that counter-narcotics intelligence, equipment and training could end up in the hands of cartel bosses.

Both nations agree that the cartels have morphed into transnational crime syndicates that pose an urgent threat to their security and that of the region. Law enforcement agencies from the border to Maine acknowledge that the traffickers have brought a war once dismissed as a foreign affair to the doorstep of local communities. The trail of slayings, kidnappings and other crimes stretches through at least 195 U.S. cities.

The rapidly escalating problem will probably present the Obama administration with hard choices on how to work with Mexico to combat the cartels and the gun-running, money-laundering and other illicit businesses that nourish them.

So far, the fight has largely been waged by the Calderon administration, which deployed thousands of federal troops and police to 18 states to take on the cartels, some of which have paramilitary forces protecting them and many police officers and politicians in their pockets.

"They know they have a monumental undertaking, but you have to start somewhere," Michael A. Braun, former assistant director and chief of operations at the Drug Enforcement Administration, said of the Mexican government. "If you don't, in another five years the cartels will be running Mexico."

The U.S. answer for fighting the cartels is contained in a package known as the Merida Initiative, named for the Mexican city where it was unveiled by Presidents Calderon and Bush in October 2007. When Congress passed the first installment of the three-year aid package in June, it contained at least 33 programs, giving about $400 million to Mexico for this fiscal year and $65 million for drug-fighting efforts in various Central American and Caribbean countries.

The first tranche of money was delayed until this month, and squabbling and other problems have held up delivery of most direct assistance. A senior State Department official confirmed that Mexico would have to wait more than a year for at least two U.S. transport helicopters and a reconnaissance plane that it says it desperately needs.

Starting from scratch

Some senior U.S. counter-narcotics officials and lawmakers say the U.S.-Mexico relationship has been so polluted for decades by mistrust, neglect and failure to collaborate that the countries must build much of their anti-drug strategy from scratch, even at a time when beheadings and other brutal slayings have become commonplace in Mexico.

They fear the cartels are so strong and well-funded that Mexican government forces will continue to be undertrained, under-equipped and outgunned for years, even with U.S. aid. And they say it could take decades and billions of dollars more to establish the corruption-resistant criminal justice institutions needed to eliminate the cartels and their government benefactors.

"You need a robust internal capacity to identify the cancer, cut it out and move on while checking the margins to make sure it hasn't spread," said Braun, who is now managing partner at Spectre Group International, a security consulting firm. "And they have never done that. They never institutionalized law enforcement at any level."

U.S. authorities remain deeply troubled that corruption in the top echelons of Calderon's administration could undermine the Merida effort. Some said the recent arrest of Mexico's former drug czar, Noe Ramirez Mandujano, on suspicion of taking a $450,000 bribe from the cartels showed that Calderon's effort to root out corruption was working.

Some U.S. officials say they share more information than ever with Mexico. Others are conducting damage assessments after Ramirez's arrest, and after Mexico revealed that cartel operatives had infiltrated Interpol, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and even DEA operations.

Calderon will probably discover more corruption within his government and his administration, but he deserves credit for requesting assistance and battling the cartels since his election two years ago, Braun and other current and former U.S. officials said.

Since it was first unveiled in Merida, the drug plan has been criticized as a confusing patchwork of questionable programs, including military and law enforcement training, high-tech drug-detection scanners and gang-prevention programs.

Then Congress set about making it even more complicated.

Some lawmakers got more money for U.S. counter-narcotics efforts, and others focused on more funding for Central American regional security programs. Many have complained that no one is coordinating the initiative, and that turf battles and confusion reign among the many agencies that have a piece of it.

"You've got so many different agencies involved -- who would you even put in charge of it?" said an official with the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Hard feelings

Privately, Mexican officials are furious with Bush for not doing more to investigate and stop the flood of assault weapons coming in from U.S. gun shops and gun shows. One senior Mexican official said the weapons made up about 90% of the cartels' arsenals.

And Mexico continues to accuse Washington of doing far too little to diminish the southbound flow of billions of dollars in laundered drug proceeds and drug precursor chemicals, even though both are addressed in the initiative.

Washington, particularly the DEA, is so distrustful of Mexican authorities that they share sensitive counter- narcotics intelligence and evidence with only a small group of Mexican officials.

These include a handful of recently installed top aides to Calderon and about 225 Mexican law enforcement officials who have been thoroughly investigated and trained, and who can be continually monitored by the U.S.

They say they have no choice.

"It is very troubling from the standpoint that in order for us to help the government of Mexico help themselves, we've got to have the confidence to share very sensitive information without the fear that that information is going to be leaked to the traffickers or to others in a way that could compromise operations and ultimately get people killed," said Anthony Placido, the DEA's director of intelligence.

"It would be easy to take the path of least resistance and say they're all corrupt and we can't work with them," Placido said. "But the reality is it is simply much too important not to. They have taken on these traffickers, and now they have to win. And they deserve and need our support."

The contentiousness surrounding the Merida plan is no surprise to veteran counter-narcotics officials and policymakers. They say it is emblematic of a turbulent relationship between the two countries that has often been defined by bickering, public finger-pointing and an overall atmosphere of mistrust.

For more than two decades, U.S. officials have accused Mexico of ignoring hard evidence that violent homegrown crime syndicates were gaining power and corrupting its police, army and government in a lucrative campaign to flood American streets with cocaine, heroin and other drugs.

Mexican officials said Washington had done little to diminish Americans' voracious demand for illicit drugs, and had made Mexico vulnerable by cracking down on the Colombian cartels, which then turned to Mexican organizations to move their drugs to the U.S.

And after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. turned away from the drug fight, some Mexican officials say.

As the two countries watched and often feuded, the drug groups grew into sophisticated and deadly organized-crime cartels with a global reach, a strong U.S. presence and a stranglehold over many of the Mexican governmental institutions responsible for stopping them.

DEA intelligence now estimates that the cartels are paying hundreds of millions in bribes a year and that they have expanded their operations to Africa, Europe and elsewhere.

Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico's ambassador to the U.S. and a former counter-narcotics official, cautioned that Merida was only a first step.

He said it wouldn't be easy to improve cross-border interdiction, intelligence-sharing and an integration of both countries' counter-narcotics efforts after so much neglect.

"Obviously, the longer you take to address a challenge or disease, the harder it is to root out," Sarukhan said. "And whoever thinks that the Merida Initiative or the type of cooperation that we have implemented since President Calderon arrived is a silver bullet that will eliminate a decades-old challenge in Mexico is wrong."

josh.meyer@latimes.com

LATIMES.COM /SIEGE

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Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times
TV lights glare as the body of one of several law enforcement officers is taken from the scene of a Nov. 19 attack in Culiacan, Mexico. More photos

In Sinaloa, the drug trade has infiltrated 'every corner of life'
'Narcos' have made their way into government, business and culture in this Pacific state, where kids want to grow up to be traffickers.
By Tracy Wilkinson

Competing Mexican drug cartels are destroying each other ... and that's where 'Warrior' begins ...."
http://www.warriorthemovie.com
http://www.warriorthemovie.blogspot.com
http://imdb.com/title/tt0320751

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-208917617001990565&q=warrior+mexican+OR+drug+OR+cartels+duration%3Ashort+genre%3AMOVIE_TRAILER

"the action adventure fantasy feature film "Warrior" ... about the son of a divine force ... is a story of a young man's quest to find his true identity set against the twin backdrops of Native American folklore and the treacherous Mexican drug trade and a portrayal of the classic confrontation between "good and evil" ... filmed in the exotic jungles of Costa Azul in the State of Nayarit and the urban grit of Puerto Vallarta in the State of Jalisco, Mexico .. with action, adventure, romance, comedy, a multi-ethnic cast, a major movie studio music score and spectacular cinematography ..."


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-drugwar28-2008dec28,0,6322674.story
From the Los Angeles Times
MEXICO UNDER SIEGE
In Sinaloa, the drug trade has infiltrated 'every corner of life'
'Narcos' have made their way into government, business and culture in this Pacific state, where kids want to grow up to be traffickers.
By Tracy Wilkinson

December 28, 2008

Reporting from Culiacan, Mexico — Yudit del Rincon, a 44-year-old lawmaker, went before the state legislature this year with a proposition: Let's require lawmakers to take drug tests to prove they are clean.

Her colleagues greeted the idea with applause. Then she sprang a surprise on them: Two lab technicians waited in the audience to administer drug tests to every state lawmaker. We should set the example, she said.

They nearly trampled one another in the stampede to the door, Del Rincon recalled.

Del Rincon wasn't all that shocked. She was born and bred here in the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa, home of the drug racket's top leaders, its most talented impresarios and some of its dirtiest government and police officials.

Swaths of Sinaloa periodically become no-go zones for outsiders; the central government abdicated control long ago. By one estimate, 32 towns are run by gangsters.

In Culiacan, the capital, casinos outnumber libraries, and dealerships for yachts and Hummers cater to the inexplicably wealthy.

This is where narco folklore started, with songs and icons that pay homage to gangsters, and where children want to grow up to be traffickers. How Sinaloa confronts its own divided soul offers insight on where the drug war may be going for Mexico, where more than 5,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence this year.

"The monster has lost all proportion," said Del Rincon, who is a member of the conservative National Action Party.

A spunky woman with large eyes and hands that seem to be in constant motion, Del Rincon scans other tables at cafes where she meets people, making sure she knows who is within earshot; she lowers her voice when she names names. Her husband and closest confidant keeps tabs on her whereabouts throughout each day.

Such are the risks of speaking out.

"The narcos have networks meshed into the fabric of business, culture, politics -- every corner of life."

Drug crops

Poppies and marijuana have been cultivated in the mountains of Sinaloa since the late 19th century. For decades, Mexican farmers harvested the crops, and entire dynasties of families dedicated themselves to the trade.

Except for one brutal crackdown in the 1970s, successive governments accommodated the drug trade, even as Mexico became a staging ground for Colombian cocaine headed to its biggest market, the United States.

Back then, one party ruled Mexico. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, controlled everything from the smallest of peasant groups to the presidency.

"The state was the referee, and it imposed the rules of the game on the traffickers," Sinaloa-born historian Luis Astorga said. "The world of the politicians and the world of the traffickers contained and protected each other simultaneously."

Slowly, the monopoly started to crack. Parties other than the PRI began to win elections, here and across the nation. Different faces joined regional legislatures, while the PRI struggled to hold on. Del Rincon's PAN won the mayoralty of Culiacan and other posts across Sinaloa.

Finally, the PRI lost the presidency in 2000.

Political pluralism in Mexico may have made room for more firebrands like Del Rincon, but it also fed a free-for-all among trafficking gangs, which began to splinter and compete.

"The state was no longer the referee, and so the traffickers had to referee among themselves," Astorga said. And that was not going to be a well-mannered process.

Gradually, law-abiding people learned a new code of conduct: Keep your head down, don't ask too many questions, keep away from the restaurants and luxury boutiques where gangsters hang out. Family gatherings end early; everyone wants to get home soon after sunset.

"Mexico was a time bomb for a long time, and now it is finally out of control -- more guns, more money, more internal fights," said Marco Antonio Castrejon, a dentist whose grandparents came down from the hills and settled in Culiacan about 60 years ago. Castrejon and his seven siblings worked hard, earned degrees and established legitimate professions, even as the men with guns and menacing swaggers took the streets.

About eight years ago, Castrejon kept his oldest boy from leaving Culiacan. Generations of the family had stuck together here. It was important to stay, he advised.

But this year, when his youngest turned 17 and wanted to leave, the door was open.

"I used to be afraid to have my children away from us," said Castrejon, 48. "Now the greater fear is that they stay."

Police at risk

Pedro Rodriguez, 41, has been a police officer for half his life in one of the deadliest places on the planet for cops. He got into law enforcement straight out of the army. He thought the discipline he admired in the military would continue in the Sinaloa police force. And he liked the authority that a policeman's uniform gave him.

It all changed several years ago, he said.

"It used to be, as a uniformed police officer, I could raise my hand in the road and stop an 18-wheeler," Rodriguez said. "Today the truck would run right over me."

More than 100 police officers have been killed in Sinaloa this year, most of them gunned down. Countless others have fled, or taken bribes and changed sides. As much as 70% of the local police force has come under the sway of traffickers, by some estimates.

It is widely believed here that many legislators and other politicians are elected with the help of narcotics money. The exchange: veto power over the naming of top police commanders.

Rodriguez knows he can be betrayed by a corrupt fellow officer. So, he says a prayer every day before he leaves the modest home where he lives with his wife and four children. He works in a city that can seem normal on the surface, its streets clogged with traffic, office workers going to lunch.

Then those same streets turn into a shooting gallery. Gunmen in dark-windowed SUVs open fire on rivals or cops, day or night. Five federal and state policemen were killed in a hail of bullets on Culiacan's prominent Emiliano Zapata Boulevard one recent night. The truck with their bloodied corpses came to rest outside a busy casino under blue and purple neon lights and fake palm trees. It was the third time in recent weeks that an entire squad of agents was wiped out in an ambush. No one is ever arrested; shootings, even of cops, are hardly investigated.

"Twenty years ago we knew of the handful of big mafia dons, but they were discreet," Rodriguez said. "Today we are dealing with the apprentices, who want to get rich very fast, who commit enormous excesses, who want to be noticed."

That chaos might make some nostalgic for the old days, when a few Sinaloa dynasties dominated the drug trade, as they had for generations. Amado Carrillo Fuentes branched out from Sinaloa into Chihuahua in the 1980s and '90s and ran the Juarez drug network that made him one of the richest men on the planet, owner of a fleet of jets and vast real estate holdings the world over.

As the centralized system broke down, the Sinaloans met a new challenge: the Gulf cartel.

Based in the state of Tamaulipas, the Gulf gang was reputed to have ties with, and the protection of, Raul Salinas de Gortari, the brother of former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. After the arrest of its leader, Osiel Cardenas, the Gulf cartel became the first of the drug mafias to introduce a paramilitary army.

The narcotics ring recruited from Mexican and Guatemalan army special forces and formed the Zetas, ruthless hit men. The Zetas left one of their earliest calling cards in the town of Uruapan in Michoacan state in September 2006, when they tossed five severed heads onto the floor of a dance hall.

The Sinaloans in turn beefed up their security, and the Zetas on the other side trained additional recruits. Now several hundred, most between 17 and 35 years old, operate as mercenaries, investigators say.

"Each cartel needs its enforcement, its protection, its muscle, and that dynamic has been increasing exponentially in the last two years," a senior U.S. law enforcement official said. "And now one side has to outdo the other."

Crackdown

When Felipe Calderon took office two years ago, violence had already begun to surge. Calderon deployed the army days after his inauguration. The president, according to aides, was genuinely alarmed by the waves if killings sweeping the nation and the ability of traffickers to infiltrate politics and possibly even seek elected posts.

Even among Calderon's supporters, however, there are complaints that the president underestimated the scope of the problem, dispatched an inadequately prepared army and is not fighting on the political and economic fronts. Consequently, the backlash has been bloodier than anticipated.

With plenty of money, the traffickers continue to protect themselves and buy their way into governments, says Edgardo Buscaglia, an expert on organized crime who advises Mexico's Congress.

In the latest and potentially most explosive scandal, Sinaloan traffickers allegedly bought off senior antidrug officials in far-off Mexico City, acquiring inside information on Calderon's ground war against smugglers.

Buscaglia warns against the "Afghanistan-ization" of Mexico, in which rival kingpins gradually take over different states.

"If one criminal organization takes over one state, and another criminal organization takes another, then you have the ingredients of civil war," Buscaglia said. Mexico is not there yet, Buscaglia said, but that breakdown looms as a real danger.

Buscaglia believes traffickers already control 8% of Mexico's municipalities, or about 200 cities and towns, based on his analysis of data such as arrest warrants issued for police, army detentions of elected officials, and the presence of sanctioned criminal activity such as drug sales and prostitution.

Leading the pack was the state of Sinaloa, with 32.

Jesus Vizcarra Calderon, the mayor of Culiacan, felt compelled late last year to deny rumors that his considerable fortune came from Sinaloan traffickers. Vizcarra has been tapped by the governor of Sinaloa to be the PRI's candidate in next year's gubernatorial elections.

Sinaloa state legislator Oscar Felix Ochoa also denied criminal activity after his three brothers were arrested in June, allegedly holding nearly 40 pounds of cocaine, weapons and cash. At the same time, the army discovered a safe house harboring gunmen implicated in the slaying of federal police, with more than $5 million stashed in a strongbox. The house had belonged to Felix Ochoa, the army said.

Del Rincon, the crusading legislator, used to lead the charge against Felix Ochoa. One day, someone sent a funeral wreath to her home with her name on it.

She is more careful these days about attacking individuals, but she is more determined than ever to challenge a doped-up status quo.

"All society is contaminated," she said. "We are being held hostage. . . . If we remain silent, where will we end up?"

After a lifetime struggling to keep her family safe from traffickers, Del Rincon was dismayed when her son started dressing like the buchones -- the young wannabes who emulate traffickers.

"If we don't dress like this, the girls won't even look at us," she recalled her son saying.

"It is fashionable to be a narco," Del Rincon said, shaking her head. "It's status."

In the cemeteries of Sinaloa, many members of the new generation rest, having met premature death. Families spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to erect mausoleums that adulate the life that put their kin in their graves. The crypts are built with imported Italian marble, mosaics, crystal chandeliers, Corinthian columns and French doors.

In one, "Lupito" rests in peace with his AK-47; "Beta," "Payan" and dozens more take their journey to the afterlife amid statues of the Virgin Mary, and accompanied by bottles of tequila, cans of Tecate beer and packs of Marlboros.

The average age of these men, all buried in the last few months, is less than 25 years.

wilkinson@latimes.com

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Remains of 12 decapitated men found in Mexico
The heads and bodies are found at separate places in Guerrero state, a hot spot in the country's drug war. Governor says eight of the victims were soldiers and one was a former state police commander.

Competing Mexican drug cartels are destroying each other ... and that's where 'Warrior' begins ...."
http://www.warriorthemovie.com
http://www.warriorthemovie.blogspot.com
http://imdb.com/title/tt0320751

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-208917617001990565&q=warrior+mexican+OR+drug+OR+cartels+duration%3Ashort+genre%3AMOVIE_TRAILER

"the action adventure fantasy feature film "Warrior" ... about the son of a divine force ... is a story of a young man's quest to find his true identity set against the twin backdrops of Native American folklore and the treacherous Mexican drug trade and a portrayal of the classic confrontation between "good and evil" ... filmed in the exotic jungles of Costa Azul in the State of Nayarit and the urban grit of Puerto Vallarta in the State of Jalisco, Mexico .. with action, adventure, romance, comedy, a multi-ethnic cast, a major movie studio music score and spectacular cinematography ..."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-behead22-2008dec22,0,6725030.story
From the Los Angeles Times
Remains of 12 decapitated men found in Mexico
The heads and bodies are found at separate places in Guerrero state, a hot spot in the country's drug war. Governor says eight of the victims were soldiers and one was a former state police commander.
By Ken Ellingwood

December 22, 2008

Reporting from Mexico City — Twelve men were decapitated and dumped at separate sites in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, authorities said Sunday.

Mexican news outlets quoted Guerrero Gov. Zeferino Torreblanca Galindo as saying that eight of the men were identified as Mexican soldiers and another as a former state police commander. Earlier, Mexican media had said that the victims' close-cropped hair indicated they were soldiers.

Nine of the heads and bodies were discovered Sunday in the city of Chilpancingo, the state capital. The heads were bundled in a plastic bag and dumped at a shopping center, and the bodies turned up in two other locations at opposite ends of the city, authorities said.

Local prosecutors said three more decapitated bodies were found in a village on the outskirts of the city, the Associated Press reported.

The find came two days after three gunmen were killed in a shootout with soldiers in Guerrero. Mexican media said the beheadings may have been intended as retribution.

The website of the daily El Universal newspaper, citing unnamed state law enforcement officials, reported that a message that accompanied the bag of heads warned: "For every one of mine you kill, I'm going to kill 10 of yours."

Beheadings have become increasingly common around Mexico amid rising drug-related violence that has killed more than 5,300 people this year.

President Felipe Calderon launched a crackdown against drug traffickers upon taking office two years ago, triggering clashes between security forces and gunmen and vicious feuding among rival drug gangs.

The coastal state of Guerrero, home to the Acapulco resort, has been one of the drug war's more violent corners. Nearly 500 people have been killed there since January 2007, a month after Calderon announced his anti-crime offensive, according to a tally by the University of San Diego's Trans-Border Institute.

As part of his crackdown, Calderon has sent 45,000 soldiers and 5,000 federal police into the streets across the country. The offensive has produced thousands of arrests and some major seizures of drugs, cash and weapons, though there is no sign that any of the main drug gangs have been dislodged.

Most of the killings have resulted from turf wars among drug-trafficking organizations, which battle for the most coveted routes for smuggling into the United States.

ken.ellingwood@latimes.com



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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-behead22-2008dec22,0,6725030.story
From the Los Angeles Times
Remains of 12 decapitated men found in Mexico
The heads and bodies are found at separate places in Guerrero state, a hot spot in the country's drug war. Governor says eight of the victims were soldiers and one was a former state police commander.
By Ken Ellingwood

December 22, 2008

Reporting from Mexico City — Twelve men were decapitated and dumped at separate sites in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, authorities said Sunday.

Mexican news outlets quoted Guerrero Gov. Zeferino Torreblanca Galindo as saying that eight of the men were identified as Mexican soldiers and another as a former state police commander. Earlier, Mexican media had said that the victims' close-cropped hair indicated they were soldiers.

Nine of the heads and bodies were discovered Sunday in the city of Chilpancingo, the state capital. The heads were bundled in a plastic bag and dumped at a shopping center, and the bodies turned up in two other locations at opposite ends of the city, authorities said.

Local prosecutors said three more decapitated bodies were found in a village on the outskirts of the city, the Associated Press reported.

The find came two days after three gunmen were killed in a shootout with soldiers in Guerrero. Mexican media said the beheadings may have been intended as retribution.

The website of the daily El Universal newspaper, citing unnamed state law enforcement officials, reported that a message that accompanied the bag of heads warned: "For every one of mine you kill, I'm going to kill 10 of yours."

Beheadings have become increasingly common around Mexico amid rising drug-related violence that has killed more than 5,300 people this year.

President Felipe Calderon launched a crackdown against drug traffickers upon taking office two years ago, triggering clashes between security forces and gunmen and vicious feuding among rival drug gangs.

The coastal state of Guerrero, home to the Acapulco resort, has been one of the drug war's more violent corners. Nearly 500 people have been killed there since January 2007, a month after Calderon announced his anti-crime offensive, according to a tally by the University of San Diego's Trans-Border Institute.

As part of his crackdown, Calderon has sent 45,000 soldiers and 5,000 federal police into the streets across the country. The offensive has produced thousands of arrests and some major seizures of drugs, cash and weapons, though there is no sign that any of the main drug gangs have been dislodged.

Most of the killings have resulted from turf wars among drug-trafficking organizations, which battle for the most coveted routes for smuggling into the United States.

ken.ellingwood@latimes.com



If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.

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:  

Drug crackdown has little effect on money laundering
In many cases, the network that turns ill-gotten gains into legal tender, crucial to operations and lavish lifestyles, continues to spin unhindered.

Competing Mexican drug cartels are destroying each other ... and that's where 'Warrior' begins ...."
http://www.warriorthemovie.com
http://www.warriorthemovie.blogspot.com
http://imdb.com/title/tt0320751

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-208917617001990565&q=warrior+mexican+OR+drug+OR+cartels+duration%3Ashort+genre%3AMOVIE_TRAILER

"the action adventure fantasy feature film "Warrior" ... about the son of a divine force ... is a story of a young man's quest to find his true identity set against the twin backdrops of Native American folklore and the treacherous Mexican drug trade and a portrayal of the classic confrontation between "good and evil" ... filmed in the exotic jungles of Costa Azul in the State of Nayarit and the urban grit of Puerto Vallarta in the State of Jalisco, Mexico .. with action, adventure, romance, comedy, a multi-ethnic cast, a major movie studio music score and spectacular cinematography ..."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-drug-money-laundering22-2008dec22,0,7541266.story
From the Los Angeles Times
MEXICO UNDER SIEGE

Drug crackdown has little effect on money laundering
In many cases, the network that turns ill-gotten gains into legal tender, crucial to operations and lavish lifestyles, continues to spin unhindered.

By Tracy Wilkinson

December 22, 2008

Reporting from Mexico City — For a B-team, Los Mapaches sure seemed to be living it up. The soccer club from the small town of Nueva Italia in western Mexico had the finest vehicles, new uniforms every game and unusually high salaries.

Little wonder, then, when the team's owner was arrested and accused of laundering millions of dollars for one of Mexico's most powerful drug gangs.

The team was one of many covers, federal prosecutors allege, that Wenceslao Alvarez, alias El Wencho, used to hide and move millions of dollars for the so-called Gulf cartel.

In the Mexican government's bloody, 2-year-old war on drug traffickers, one component of the trade remains largely untouched: money laundering. The network that helps turn ill-gotten gains into legal tender is a crucial linchpin that enables traffickers to live large, expand their operations deep into the U.S., pay off cops and politicians and buy increasingly sophisticated weaponry.

"You can arrest thousands of [traffickers] but if you don't touch the financial enterprises, the business just goes on . . . and becomes more violent," said Edgardo Buscaglia, an expert on organized crime who has advised both the United Nations and Mexican officials.

Until the government goes after traffickers' cash, Buscaglia and other critics say, the networks will continue to grow and fortify themselves, no matter how many state security forces are thrown at them.

Money-laundering is the process of concealing the origin of illicit drug profits by funneling them into businesses (legitimate or fake), real estate and financial institutions.

Estimates vary widely, but as much as $20 billion is laundered and stays in Mexico annually, with up to four times that amount continuing to other destinations, experts and Mexican officials say.

Some of the money is stuffed in suitcases and walked across the border into Mexico, or hidden in cargo containers and shipped. But investigators also suspect international courier services are moving the cash.

Banking controls are notoriously lax in Mexico, making it easier for money to be wired or deposited into accounts, then spent on goods or services. All-cash transactions are common, especially for big-ticket items such as mansions, and Hummers and armored BMWs, and to pay the legions who work for the drug mafias. The money also is increasingly being sunk into artwork, gems, gold and commodities.

Blacklisted

Every year, the U.S. Treasury Department blacklists scores of individuals and companies, most of them Mexican or Colombian, believed to be involved in money-laundering or other activities supporting drug-trafficking networks.

Rarely has the Mexican government acted on the information. Mexican authorities cannot easily confiscate traffickers' property and assets, a practice common in the U.S. and one that helped give the Colombian government an upper hand in cracking that country's cartels.

"It is a very powerful tool against narco-traffickers because it hits their interests -- their purchasing power and their ideal way of life," Colombian Vice Minister of Defense Sergio Jaramillo Caro said during a recent meeting here of Latin American public security officials. A new law that would give Mexicans that authority has been passed only in Mexico City; a national version is languishing in Congress.

The two main agencies that investigate and prosecute suspected money launderers are hamstrung and underfunded. The Finance Ministry's Financial Intelligence Unit and the attorney general's office are required to communicate with each other in writing, a clumsy process, and they are not allowed access to federal police reports, financial records or other key databases to build organized-crime cases.

The case of the Mapaches (Raccoons) was more exception than rule. Federal agents arrested El Wencho in October while he was in Mexico City at the headquarters of a top soccer club. In addition to the Mapaches, El Wencho's holdings included car dealerships, an avocado export firm, hotels and restaurants, prosecutors say.

The alleged money-laundering operation, which authorities say extended into six U.S. states and parts of Central and South America, came to light in September as part of a U.S. federal indictment that named top leaders of the Gulf cartel and led to the arrests of more than 500 people in the U.S., Mexico and Italy.

An estimated $7.6 million of El Wencho's assets were seized by U.S. authorities in Atlanta and other U.S. cities, according to a senior Mexican official who did not want to be named because such investigations are kept secret until a formal indictment is issued. Mexican and U.S. agents spent a year tracking El Wencho's movements through tapped telephones and other surveillance, the official said.

The official said the soccer team was more of a "whim" and not particularly effective at laundering large amounts of money because it was too junior. It may have been a way for El Wencho to curry favor in Nueva Italia, a typical ploy of traffickers who do good works for their hometowns as a way to buy loyalty and protection.

Shrouded in secrecy

Mexican officials say their financial system is relatively unregulated, shrouded in secrecy laws and so complex that it is difficult to penetrate. But critics wonder if politicians blanch at changing those laws because too many of the country's elite would be implicated.

They note that the interior minister, the second most powerful person in the Mexican government, once helped defend a prominent banker who was acquitted in one of the few high-profile laundering cases to reach the courts.

There is also a general, if unspoken, tolerance of laundered money among many Mexicans, who reason that if the dollars have passed through other hands, it no longer is dirty money.

"It has been relatively useless to try to determine the amounts of money being laundered in Mexico," President Felipe Calderon told Congress last month. An official report that Calderon submitted to lawmakers said the Finance Ministry had detected 60,000 suspicious financial transactions in the 12-month period ending in June. But only 0.5% ended up in court.

A handful of money exchange houses are being prosecuted, but the gradual dollarization of the Mexican economy has diminished the role of exchange houses in suspect transactions, experts say.

Five years ago, Mexican authorities arrested accused money-launderer Rigoberto Gaxiola. Yet, from prison, he continued to wash money for traffickers from Sinaloa, the cradle of Mexican drug-running, as recently as summer, U.S. and Mexican officials say. At that point, the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control blacklisted Gaxiola along with 17 associates, including his wife and three children, and 14 of his businesses. However, the Mexican government has not made further arrests, shut down the businesses nor announced any other sanctions.

Efforts to obtain comment from officials of the Financial Intelligence Unit or from investigators with the attorney general's office were unsuccessful.

U.S. officials, meanwhile, worry that money-laundering operations could have deeper security implications.

"Once you've set up the scheme, you can launder anything," a senior U.S. law enforcement official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of security concerns. "Human slavery, arms trafficking -- even terrorists."

wilkinson@latimes.com

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Extreme drug violence grips Mexico border city
Two journalists visiting Ciudad Juarez for three days find that death is always just around the corner. Killings in 2008: 1,350, and counting.

Competing Mexican drug cartels are destroying each other ... and that's where 'Warrior' begins ...."
http://www.warriorthemovie.com
http://www.warriorthemovie.blogspot.com
http://imdb.com/title/tt0320751

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-208917617001990565&q=warrior+mexican+OR+drug+OR+cartels+duration%3Ashort+genre%3AMOVIE_TRAILER

"the action adventure fantasy feature film "Warrior" ... about the son of a divine force ... is a story of a young man's quest to find his true identity set against the twin backdrops of Native American folklore and the treacherous Mexican drug trade and a portrayal of the classic confrontation between "good and evil" ... filmed in the exotic jungles of Costa Azul in the State of Nayarit and the urban grit of Puerto Vallarta in the State of Jalisco, Mexico .. with action, adventure, romance, comedy, a multi-ethnic cast, a major movie studio music score and spectacular cinematography ..."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-juarezkillings20-2008dec20,0,6538856.story
From the Los Angeles Times
COLUMN ONE
Extreme drug violence grips Mexico border city
Two journalists visiting Ciudad Juarez for three days find that death is always just around the corner. Killings in 2008: 1,350, and counting.
By Ken Ellingwood

7:40 PM PST, December 19, 2008

Reporting from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico — The two victims rest at the same 45-degree angle, embraced by seat belts that at this moment seem an odd precaution, given the manner of death.

Gunmen had pulled alongside the forest-green Chevy Tahoe on a gritty downtown street and, in broad daylight, pumped 52 shots into where the bodies now lean.

Onlookers, at least 125 of them, press wordlessly against yellow police tape. About 50 olive-clad Mexican soldiers and blue-uniformed federal police take up positions around the perimeter, though it is unclear against what.

Ghostly quiet gives way to the beating blades of a police helicopter.

"That's 12 today?" a young man standing nearby asks, in the matter-of-fact tone of a baseball fan confirming the number of strikeouts. "Ten," I answer, meaning that 10 people have been slain in Ciudad Juarez so far on this chilly Tuesday. It is barely 3 in the afternoon. Seven more people will die later, bringing the day's total to 17 in the city of 1.3 million residents.

The young man nods. Around us, amid cut-rate dentist offices and bars with names like Club Safari, the looky-loos keep their rapt silence as workers from the coroner's office wrestle the newest victims from their car.

It is a time of extraordinary violence all over Mexico. Feuding drug-trafficking groups and the federal government's military crackdown against organized crime have left 5,376 dead this year.

Nowhere has the bloodletting been worse than in Ciudad Juarez, a sprawling border city that has registered more than 1,350 slayings in 2008, about a fourth of the country's total. The city's main drug-smuggling group, known as the Juarez cartel, is battling with rival traffickers from the northwestern state of Sinaloa for a piece of the lucrative drug trade into the U.S.

The gangland-style violence has left almost no corner of Ciudad Juarez untouched. Drug-related slayings take place in houses, restaurants and bars, at playgrounds and children's parties, and in car-to-car ambushes.

The dead, mostly little-known foot soldiers but also innocents caught in the crossfire, make up a ceaseless procession of clients for harried coroner's workers and daily fodder for the so-called red pages of local newspapers.

The killings here are carried out in a style best described as baroque, with bodies hung headless from bridges, stuffed upside down in giant stew pots, lined up next to a school's playing field. Often, they are accompanied by taunting, handwritten messages, the hit man's equivalent of an end-zone dance.

In a country that each month finds new ways to scare itself with violence, Ciudad Juarez has become emblematic of how nasty things can get.

A three-day visit by a pair of Times journalists to the rough-and-tumble factory town, across the border from El Paso, Texas, reveals a fear-struck place where most residents assume -- often correctly -- that the police are crooked and where the government's control of the streets appears tenuous at best.

In the Ciudad Juarez of 2008, you don't have to wait long for the next casualty.

Beyond a dreary, low-rise landscape of AutoZone outlets, Bip Bip convenience stores and the boxy assembly factories known as maquiladoras, lie the "laboratories." Here, in an antiseptic complex of buildings in southeastern Juarez, the results of the city's daily carnage come home. Bodies and bullets are examined, measured, tallied, matched, bagged and, occasionally, employed to solve crimes.

It is Monday. The man in charge of the state of Chihuahua's crime analysis and forensics unit here is Hector Hawley Morelos, an affable 39-year-old investigator with close-cropped, salt-and-pepper hair and a black goatee.

Hawley, a native juarense, ran a hamburger-and-burrito restaurant for 10 years before spotting a newspaper advertisement offering classes for crime investigation. His training led to a night-shift gig, then to the homicide squad and the forensics post here.

Hawley investigated some of the hundreds of slayings of women that last put Ciudad Juarez on the map as an emblem of brutal violence. More than 300 women were killed and dumped in dusty lots around the city from 1993 to 2006, murders that remain largely a mystery.

The $6-million, high-tech laboratory complex that Hawley oversees is a legacy of those killings. After an outcry over what was widely viewed as a slipshod investigation, international donors chipped in to help Chihuahua build an unusually well-equipped forensics operation. It boasts a ballistics lab, chemical and genetic testing, DNA analysis and a morgue capable of storing nearly 100 bodies.

The lab facilities opened a year and a half ago, in time for the unexpected wave of drug killings that has swamped Hawley and the 110 doctors, technicians and investigative specialists, or peritos, who cover Ciudad Juarez and northern Chihuahua state.

Doctors in the coroner's section this year had performed 2,100 autopsies by late November, including accident victims and others. That is nearly twice as many as for all of 2007.

To keep up, Hawley has hired three new physicians, two more autopsy-room technicians and a pair of stretcher-bearers, or camilleros, to pick up the dead and haul them back to the morgue. The city's tourism economy is tanking and the recession has cut deeply into border trade, but the death industry here is robust.

"It's the only place where production is going up," Hawley quips grimly.

The wearying, 24-7 workload isn't the only toll on his forensics staff. The morgue manager, a no-nonsense physician named Alma Rosa Padilla, says she no longer allows her daughters, ages 8, 9 and 13, to leave home alone. The family's only diversion these days is a Friday ice cream outing that Padilla cancels if it's dark by the time she gets home from work.

"You never know when something could happen," she says.

As she speaks, word comes of a fatal shooting on the southern edge of town. Two people are reported dead. The camilleros, dressed in black windbreakers and khaki pants, clamber into the white coroner's van and race from the compound.

The ride is a careening, 15-minute sprint past Peter Piper Pizza outlets, cinder-block taco stands and scratchy tufts of desert scrub that sprout from dusty lots. The scene gets no prettier approaching the crime site: a graffiti-stained section of weed-edged dirt streets and concrete shacks called Tierra Nueva. New Land.

Impoverished neighborhoods like Tierra Nueva form the city's expanding fringe as Ciudad Juarez marches steadily into surrounding desert to make room for transplants and migrants. Three thousand families arrive in Juarez each month, city officials say.

Some of the new arrivals seek work in the city's 284 maquiladoras, assembling televisions, car electronics and lawn mowers for less than $5 a day. Others hope to slip across the border into the United States.

Marcos Rodriguez, a 35-year-old construction worker, moved to Ciudad Juarez 15 years ago and later built one of the tiny concrete houses that today crowd Tierra Nueva.

The neighborhood has only grown bigger and more dangerous. Shootings are no longer a rarity, although Rodriguez says this one is the first on his block. His Dickies jeans and lace-up boots are Sunday clean; he hasn't worked for weeks.

Rodriguez is standing at the edge of the crowd near a sundries store when the coroner's van pulls up. The dead men lie at right angles to each other. One is on his back, blood on his face and left sleeve. The other is face down in the dirt. Leather flip-flops are still on his feet. A third man, wounded, has been taken away.

Fifty or so neighbors mingle in hushed tones behind the police tape as Hawley's peritos and several municipal police officers pace off the scene, photograph the dead, search the dusty street for shell casings.

Half a dozen soldiers, some of the 3,000 troops that President Felipe Calderon has deployed across Ciudad Juarez, watch the crime zone as teen boys on the steps of the store pass around a bottle of Coke.

A yellow pickup truck, heaped with gnarled firewood and "oyota" spray-painted on the tailgate, sits at the center of the crime scene, apparently abandoned during the shooting. Its lights were left on; the right taillight is broken. Neighbors say it belongs to one of the victims.

Witnesses recall hearing three shots, but none reports seeing the shooter. Small children crowd to the front to see better. "They didn't catch anyone," a smoky-voiced woman cackles to the assembled. "They always lose them."

A bleary-eyed man, who appears to be in his late 50s, sways drunkenly in the late-afternoon chill. Next to the bodies, a chicken pecks at the bloodied ground.

The killing bears many of the hallmarks of the drug hits that have bedeviled Ciudad Juarez this year: a quick ambush, multiple victims, no eyewitnesses. A resident tells me one of the victims lived in the house next to where the men now lie. He was involved in shady dealings, she says. "Illegal things."

Rodriguez says the episode is more evidence that his neighborhood, and the rest of Ciudad Juarez, is going over the edge.

"There are shootouts in the streets. You don't go out on the streets at night and you don't let your children out," he says.

"I can't see a future. I can't see anything," Rodriguez adds. "There is no control over any of it. None at all."

The camilleros, Raymundo Grado and Enrique Lopez, zip the bodies into white fabric bags.

At 4:40 p.m., nearly two hours after the call-out, Grado and Lopez bring the bodies into the morgue on two steel-topped gurneys. The smell of disinfecting chlorine barely masks the odor of decay wafting from three walk-in refrigerators, whose shelves are stacked with a total of 33 bodies.

The latest victims will have to wait to be autopsied. First up is a lean, mustachioed man who appears to be in his 20s. His naked body is covered with tattoos. He'd been shot five times, the day's sixth gunshot victim.

The bodies from Tierra Nueva are wheeled to the side. A perito unzips the blood-soaked bags and begins to take their fingerprints. He grasps a limp hand, presses an ink pad against each finger and rolls them one at a time on a white index card. A bouncy ballad is playing on the radio as this afternoon's autopsy doctor, Rosa Isela Castillo, and her assistant cut into the tattooed man. His right shoulder reads "Hecho en Mexico," or "Made in Mexico."

Covering the victim's chest and arms are designs of eagles and a snake, emblems of pre-Hispanic culture that suggest he belonged to the Aztecas, a street gang that reportedly works as muscle for the Juarez cartel.

Clashes between the Aztecas and another gang, the Mexicles, are said to be responsible for much of the bloodshed convulsing the city. Most victims this year have been young men like this one.

Oscar Curtidor, the autopsy technician, peels back the scalp and saws around the crown of the skull. It pops open with a crack. He scoops out the brain, looks it over and photographs inside the skull.

The chest and belly are sliced open, and heart and intestines scooped out, examined and replaced. The incision slices through a name, "Tavo," short for Gustavo, that is tattooed in oversize calligraphy across his stomach.

The procedure takes a little more than an hour. Others can take up to five. Hawley says a full autopsy of every victim is required by policy, even when it is obvious how the person died. Most are killed by bullets. The bodies some days fill all five autopsy tables and line the floors around them.

Curtidor, nearing the end of the autopsy, tucks the tattooed victim's brain into the stomach cavity and sews up the incision with forceful tugs. The scalp is pulled back into place, leaving the man looking much as he did at the start. The man's mustache is neatly trimmed, his face angular, handsome.

On Tuesday morning, we visit Juarez's mayor, Jose Reyes Ferriz. To do so, you have to pass through a battery of metal detectors at the entrance to City Hall, which sits downtown near the U.S. border. The metal detectors are new, the latest sign that no one has any idea what form the violence might take next.

Reyes, 47, is a jowly lawyer with a crisp white shirt and, on this sunny morning, a pile of troubles. The killings have terrorized his constituents and frightened off Americans who once shopped and dined in Ciudad Juarez. His police force is so riddled with crooked cops that when he fired 334 municipal officers a couple of months back, the number of bank robberies went down.

"There was a lot of infiltration of the police force," Reyes says during an interview in his airy office, which looks out across the border on to El Paso. He can remember the date war exploded between the Juarez cartel and their Sinaloa rivals.

At the end of 2007, authorities in the city began hearing rumors that hostilities were about to break out. "They even had a date, Jan. 7," Reyes says. "It actually started on Jan. 5."

Reyes says Ciudad Juarez is "paying a heavy price" for drug use in the United States and for the ready supply of U.S. weapons that are smuggled south to arm drug gangs.

The United States, he says, should steer aid to the stricken border towns.

"We need resources," Reyes says. Tops on his wish list is an encrypted radio system. A knocking sound interrupts the existing radio system every so often, followed by a narcocorrido ballad glorifying drug smugglers. It's a signal from traffickers that a cop is about to die, or just did. More than 60 have been killed in Juarez this year.

We leave the mayor and take the highway along the border to the other side of town, where the bodies of seven men were found earlier in the morning, next to a school soccer field.

Shoeless, gagged and bound at the wrists, the victims show signs of having been tortured before they were shot and strewn in the tinder-dry grass next to the street. The killers took care to lay a row of rambling, hand-lettered banners at the victims' feet that suggest the executions were the work of the Sinaloa group led by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

Hawley's crew has finished its job by the time we get to the neighborhood, an upscale section that could pass for Southern California.

A length of police tape hanging from a chain-link fence next to the sports field is all that remains of a crime scene. At the Sierra Madre school next door, the gate is locked. No one is talking to reporters.

It's a good moment to make our way to the municipal graveyard, called San Rafael, on the outskirts of town, near the trash dump. The dirt road leading there is carpeted with fallen garbage from the passing trash trucks. This is the final resting place of the drug war's unidentified dead.

The cemetery pops into view as an incongruous burst of bright colors atop a bleak desert plain. These are the normal graves, decked out with artificial flowers and ribbons. The unknown are buried separately in the fosa comun, or communal grave, without headstones or crosses.

It takes several minutes of tramping across lumpy berms, amid discarded soda bottles and plastic petals blown by the wind from neighboring sections, to find where the city recently interred 25 unclaimed bodies.

The cemetery manager appears no older than 15. He ticks off the burials this year. They are logged by hand in ink in a bound ledger in the darkened graveyard office. There were 26 in March. April had 27. June, 30. September, 49.

So far this year, more than 200 unidentified bodies have been buried in the San Rafael graveyard, a new high that the manager says is an accurate gauge of the violence taking place in town. "It all ends up here," he declares.

As we leave the cemetery, Hawley's team converges on a fatal shooting in a working-class neighborhood called Satelite. We recognize Raymundo Grado, the beefy camillero who collected the bodies from the double killing in Tierra Nueva a day earlier.

This afternoon's victim, a 32-year-old man, lies twisted on the parched lawn that serves as courtyard for a complex of low-slung apartments. He has fallen, face up and bent awkwardly into an L, near a rusted olive swing set and worn, metal seesaw.

This eastern neighborhood is notorious for drug dealing and narcomaquilas, small-scale packaging operations for selling drugs on the streets. The playground, now cordoned by the familiar yellow police tape, has been the setting of previous shootings.

A crowd at the scene includes children and maintains the same funereal quiet as the spectators in Tierra Nueva. The investigators comb the grass for clues. The victim, wearing an orange pullover, bluejeans and white sneakers, bears a crimson wound above the left eye. His father was shot too, but survived. Witnesses said two men with hoods over their faces did the shooting, then fled.

Anguished keening rises from a nearby house: "M'ijo, m'ijo." My son. My son. The crowd stares, and Grado eases the man's body into the coroner's van. The grief-stricken mother moans still. "Ay, m'ijo."

Before Grado can ferry the body back to the morgue, though, he is summoned to another pickup, this time downtown. He takes the Satelite victim along.

Two bodies are waiting, the ones seat-belted at matching angles in the forest-green Chevy Tahoe.

The bullet-riddled vehicle has come to rest beside a railroad track, down the street from the city's bullring and within view of the Camino Real hotel on the El Paso side. More police tape, more whispering. The dominant sound is the rhythmic squeaking of the SUV's windshield wipers. It has not rained all day.

Luis Nava, a 33-year-old parking attendant stands on the edge of the crowd and recites the numbers: This is the fourth shooting he's witnessed. He thinks he heard about 15 shots before a white car took off around the corner.

Nava wonders when the killing will end, but sees nothing to suggest any time soon. "This is very ugly, all this," he says. "I don't know what is going to happen here."

We edge our way around the police cordon and, with a ladder borrowed from a crew of masons, climb onto a roof above the vehicle. The silent street, which bears the name of Mexican revolutionary leader Francisco "Pancho" Villa, shimmers with shattered glass.

Hawley's investigators snap photos and tally spent bullet casings with numbered yellow tent-shaped markers. There are 52.

The SUV's passenger window has been blown out by the explosion of bullets. There are holes in the windshield. The victims, a bulky, 40-year-old driver and a passenger later identified as his 12-year-old daughter, show no signs of having fired back. Both have multiple gunshot wounds.

The police helicopter makes its passes as Grado reaches into the vehicle to enclose the girl in a body bag. Bullets have shredded the shoulder of her light-blue sweat shirt. A plastic Coke bottle falls from the cab as he pulls her onto a gurney.

Grado shifts to the driver's side and methodically removes the heavyset man, grasping his belt and shoulder. Above him, in the dimming afternoon light, a woman grins broadly from a banner promoting the virtues of teeth whitening.

There are places in the world where society falls apart in ways that are swift and unmistakable: Rebels storm the government radio station; a warlord claims dominion; refugees swarm the border. Mexico is not one of these.

Even in Ciudad Juarez, even these days, residents drop off their kids at school and go to work, streetlights come on at dusk and the trash gets picked up. They're selling Christmas trees at the Home Depot.

But all around are signs of social fraying. Menacing notes appear outside schools warning of harm unless teachers hand over their year-end bonuses. The city's most respected crime reporter, Armando Rodriguez, of the El Diario newspaper, is dead, sprayed by gunfire two weeks earlier as he sat in his car in front of his home. His 8-year-old daughter, sitting next to him, somehow survives.

No corner is off limits. The Mexican army has turned a water park called Las Anitas into a camp for its drug war troops. We try to visit on our last day in Juarez. Atop the colorful water slides, helmeted soldiers now stand guard. You can't go in.

All over town, people ask who really rules Juarez. Reyes, the mayor, says the government "has to retake control of the streets." The unspoken admission is that they are already lost.

ken.ellingwood@latimes.com

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Mystery man blamed for gruesome Tijuana deaths

Competing Mexican drug cartels are destroying each other ... and that's where 'Warrior' begins ...."
http://www.warriorthemovie.com
http://www.warriorthemovie.blogspot.com
http://imdb.com/title/tt0320751

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-208917617001990565&q=warrior+mexican+OR+drug+OR+cartels+duration%3Ashort+genre%3AMOVIE_TRAILER

"the action adventure fantasy feature film "Warrior" ... about the son of a divine force ... is a story of a young man's quest to find his true identity set against the twin backdrops of Native American folklore and the treacherous Mexican drug trade and a portrayal of the classic confrontation between "good and evil" ... filmed in the exotic jungles of Costa Azul in the State of Nayarit and the urban grit of Puerto Vallarta in the State of Jalisco, Mexico .. with action, adventure, romance, comedy, a multi-ethnic cast, a major movie studio music score and spectacular cinematography ..."

MEXICO UNDER SIEGE
Mystery man blamed for gruesome Tijuana deaths
By Richard Marosi
Teodoro Garcia Simental is believed to run a network of hide-outs where kidnap victims are caged. And he is said to be behind most of Tijuana's gang war bloodshed.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-tijuanadruglord18-2008dec18,0,246171.story
From the Los Angeles Times
MEXICO UNDER SIEGE
Mystery man blamed for gruesome Tijuana deaths
Teodoro Garcia Simental is believed to run a network of hide-outs where kidnap victims are caged. And he is said to be behind most of Tijuana's gang war bloodshed.
By Richard Marosi

December 18, 2008

Reporting from Tijuana — He is said to love the ladies, fast horses and dissolving enemies in lye.

Teodoro Garcia Simental is among the best known but least identifiable villains in Mexico's drug war, blamed for a trail of terror across Baja California.

His heavily armed hit men, authorities say, have been leaving the gruesome displays of charred and decapitated bodies across the city, signed with the moniker "Tres Letras," for the three letters in "Teo." And authorities believe he runs a network of hide-outs where kidnap victims are held in cages.

Yet thousands of police officers, soldiers, state and federal agents can't seem to find him.

Billboards showing Tijuana's most wanted kidnappers don't include Garcia's image, even though he is believed to be behind most of the gang war that has claimed more than 400 lives here since late September.

"That tells you that you don't want to be the one responsible for putting Teo's picture in public," said one U.S. law enforcement source who spoke on condition of anonymity. "There's no future in it."

The alleged crime boss appears chubby-cheeked and sporting an ill-fitting tie and coat in his only published photograph, labeled as No. 27 on the FBI's narctip.com website. His photo bears no name, and he is listed as one of several dozen people sought for allegedly using false Mexican police identification in connection with slayings, kidnappings and other crimes.

Many police officers, prosecutors and ordinary citizens go silent when Teo's name is mentioned. What is known about him comes from the secret testimony of captured gunmen, narco-messages left with victims and anonymously written narcocorrido ballads sold at swap meets. "Pay attention, President [Felipe Calderon]. . . . In Tijuana, I rule," one song boasts. "We'll show you what a real war is like."

Mexican court documents and interviews with U.S. and Mexican authorities paint a portrait of Garcia as a vengeful crime boss who vows not to go down without a fight.

Garcia is said to be in his mid-30s -- even his date of birth is not known. He reportedly bets big on clandestine horse races at isolated ranches outside Ensenada. He hires people at $400 per week to guard kidnapping victims and to weld together the barrels of caustic chemicals used to dispose of some of his victims, according to documents and interviews. One Mexican law enforcement official said Garcia has killed people at parties, laughing at their stunned reactions.

"Criminals earn respect and credibility with creative killing methods," said the official, who requested anonymity for reasons of security. "Your status is based on your capacity to commit the most sadistic acts. Burning corpses, using acid, beheading victims. . . . This generation is setting a new standard for savagery."

Garcia's alleged criminal empire is built largely on kidnappings and extortion, a model for a post-drug-war crime boss who, starved of narcotics profits, resorts to bloodier, homegrown pursuits.

Garcia's bid for power began shortly after Calderon launched his offensive against organized crime groups in December 2006, aiming to destroy the country's drug cartels by shattering their leadership ranks.

"The government's strategy was to break the cartels into smaller, more manageable pieces," said David Shirk, director of the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego. "But smaller doesn't mean more manageable. . . . It's begetting more violence . . . and more dangerous organizations, and people like this guy."

Garcia, whose family is said to be from Sinaloa state, grew up in Tijuana and started out in the Arellano Felix organization as a trusted enforcer, probably in the 1990s, and grew powerful as a lieutenant who helped transform kidnapping into a multimillion-dollar industry.

This year, the head of the cartel, Fernando Sanchez Arellano, a nephew of the founding brothers, tried unsuccessfully to halt the abductions of doctors, businessmen and politically influential figures. Sanchez Arellano apparently was worried that the crime wave, attributed to Garcia, was hampering the cartel's drug-trafficking business, according to U.S. and Mexican authorities.

In April, the renegade lieutenant and the cartel leader split in spectacular fashion; their gangs shot it out on an expressway in eastern Tijuana, leaving 14 dead. Garcia fled to Sinaloa but returned in September to launch all-out war. He is believed to be allied with the Sinaloa cartel, which is led by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

Since then, Tijuana has seen an average of five killings per day, many of them carrying messages boasting that they were the work of Garcia. One victim was found with his face sliced off. Three headless bodies were dumped near a baseball diamond. Two corpses were hung from an overpass. Others have been doused with gasoline and set aflame.

Mexican authorities say Garcia's gunmen shot up a billiard hall, nightclubs, a motorcycle shop and seafood restaurants.

After Sanchez Arellano apparently tried to kill one of Garcia's top gunmen outside a Rosarito Beach taco stand, Garcia's squad retaliated by killing five of Sanchez Arellano's associates and leaving their dismembered bodies in cars outside the same taco stand, law enforcement officials said.

The government, meanwhile, seems helpless to stop the killings. Police officers who have not been lured away to work for Garcia as drivers, lookouts and hit men are paralyzed with fear. Garcia is said to possess a list with every cop's address and phone number. More than one police officer has answered his phone to threats from a man identifying himself as Garcia.

Other times, there is no warning -- as in January, when gunmen surrounded the home of Deputy Police Chief Margarito Saldaa Rivera and opened fire, killing him, his wife and two daughters. Authorities blame Garcia for the slaying.

Officers stationed in Garcia's stronghold in eastern Tijuana put tape over the numbers on their cars and patrol in groups of two or three cruisers. If they see a convoy of Ford F-250s and Cadillac Escalades -- the drug gangs' vehicles of choice, often stolen from California -- they go the other way.

"We're scared," said one police officer. "There's no way U.S. cops would work under these conditions."

The ineffectual response has exposed the disarray of law enforcement's anti-drug efforts in Baja California, where relations between federal and local forces are marked by distrust and there is little sharing of intelligence.

Garcia, who is said to move constantly, and always with armed guards, seems to mock police efforts. One of his lieutenants, Raydel Lopez Uriarte, nicknamed Muletas, or crutches, gives his squad uniforms inscribed with the letters FEM: the Spanish initials for Special Forces of Muletas. The uniform patches feature a skull and crossed crutches, for the death and crippling injuries they leave in their path.

Garcia's alleged tactics have earned him at least one potent enemy.

In October, after a Mexican soldier was killed in a clash in which four gunmen also died, Tijuana's top military commander, Gen. Alfonso Duarte Mugica, mentioned Garcia's name at a news conference, signaling that the alleged crime boss was in his cross hairs.

About three weeks later, hundreds of soldiers and federal agents fanned out across neighborhoods believed to be Garcia's stronghold. For 24 hours, the killings stopped. Then, more than 40 people were slain over three days.

Three were police officers. They had been decapitated along with six other people, whose corpses left no doubt who was responsible: Their bodies, placed head to toe, had been arranged to spell out "3 L." Tres Letras.

richard.marosi@latimes.com

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-

Less cocaine on U.S. streets, report says
The National Drug Threat Assessment cites increased drug seizures on smuggling routes and Mexico's war on organized crime.

Competing Mexican drug cartels are destroying each other ... and that's where 'Warrior' begins ...."
http://www.warriorthemovie.com
http://www.warriorthemovie.blogspot.com
http://imdb.com/title/tt0320751

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-208917617001990565&q=warrior+mexican+OR+drug+OR+cartels+duration%3Ashort+genre%3AMOVIE_TRAILER

"the action adventure fantasy feature film "Warrior" ... about the son of a divine force ... is a story of a young man's quest to find his true identity set against the twin backdrops of Native American folklore and the treacherous Mexican drug trade and a portrayal of the classic confrontation between "good and evil" ... filmed in the exotic jungles of Costa Azul in the State of Nayarit and the urban grit of Puerto Vallarta in the State of Jalisco, Mexico .. with action, adventure, romance, comedy, a multi-ethnic cast, a major movie studio music score and spectacular cinematography ..."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-drugwar16-2008dec16,0,1819062.story
From the Los Angeles Times

Less cocaine on U.S. streets, report says
The National Drug Threat Assessment cites increased drug seizures on smuggling routes and Mexico's war on organized crime.

By Richard Marosi

December 16, 2008

Reporting from San Diego — Mexican drug trafficking organizations are expanding their control of U.S. markets but appear to be struggling to keep cocaine and other illegal drugs on American streets, according to a government report released Monday.

Cocaine remains the leading drug threat, though marijuana is the most commonly abused illegal substance, according to the National Drug Threat Assessment report. Profits from those drugs, along with methamphetamine, heroin and others, range from $18 billion to $39 billion for Mexican and Colombian trafficking groups.

Cocaine availability continued to decline in many cities, a trend the report attributed to Mexico's ongoing battles with traffickers and to increased seizures by U.S. authorities. The shortages have pushed the price of cocaine up 41% since 2006, from $87 to $123 per gram, the report said.

Meanwhile, some methamphetamine production appears to be shifting back to the U.S. after successful efforts by Mexico to crack down on the precursor drugs needed to produce the drug there, according to the report.

The study, along with a recent survey by the University of Michigan showing drug use as reported by high school students had declined 25% since 2001, was cited by the Bush administration as evidence of progress in curbing drug availability and use.

"There will be more work done after I'm out of here," President Bush said last week after a meeting on drug use reduction, "but we have laid the foundation for a successful effort against drug use, drug supply and helping those who have been addicted."

Critics say the administration's strategy has failed to curb America's enormous appetite for drugs, through prevention and treatment. In 2008, the federal government spent $13.6 billion on drug control, with 64% going toward law enforcement. About 36%, or $4.9 billion, was aimed at treatment and prevention.

"At the very best it's containing the problem, not solving it," said Mauricio Cardenas, director of the Latin America Initiative at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. "Focusing entirely on supply and eradication is not taking us too far. We have to bring demand and consumption into the picture."

From 2003 to 2007, cocaine production in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru increased from 790 to 865 metric tons, the report said. Less cocaine reached America's streets in 2007 in part because of several exceptionally large seizures of cocaine in the Eastern Pacific route, the report said.

The Mexican government's offensive on organized crime appears to be disrupting traditional trafficking routes, with cartels increasingly moving drugs through California rather than Texas, according to the report. Cocaine seizures in 2007 at California ports of entry exceeded the totals in Texas for the first time since 2004, according to the report.

Marijuana continues to be America's illegal drug of choice; levels of marijuana use are higher than any other drug. Meanwhile the average potency of marijuana increased in 2006 to the highest levels ever recorded, in part because of improvements in cultivation techniques, the report said.

Marosi is a Times staff writer.

richard.marosi@latimes.com

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Mexico: 10 suspected traffickers killed

Competing Mexican drug cartels are destroying each other ... and that's where 'Warrior' begins ...."
http://www.warriorthemovie.com
http://www.warriorthemovie.blogspot.com
http://imdb.com/title/tt0320751

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-208917617001990565&q=warrior+mexican+OR+drug+OR+cartels+duration%3Ashort+genre%3AMOVIE_TRAILER

"the action adventure fantasy feature film "Warrior" ... about the son of a divine force ... is a story of a young man's quest to find his true identity set against the twin backdrops of Native American folklore and the treacherous Mexican drug trade and a portrayal of the classic confrontation between "good and evil" ... filmed in the exotic jungles of Costa Azul in the State of Nayarit and the urban grit of Puerto Vallarta in the State of Jalisco, Mexico .. with action, adventure, romance, comedy, a multi-ethnic cast, a major movie studio music score and spectacular cinematography ..."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-briefs8-2008dec08,0,4724481.story
From the Los Angeles Times

WORLD BRIEFING

Mexico: 10 suspected traffickers killed

December 8, 2008

MEXICO
10 suspected traffickers killed in southern town

Ten suspected drug traffickers and a soldier were killed in gun battles in the southern Mexican town of Arcelia.

The violence began with a shootout between two rival gangs that left one dead, according to a statement from Guerrero state's Public Safety Department. Nine more, and the soldier, were killed in a subsequent confrontation between troops and police and heavily armed men traveling in 10 cars.

In Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, six people were killed when assailants opened fire inside a pool hall, officials said.

And in Michoacan state, soldiers found at least eight bodies Saturday in a shallow grave. The corpses had been cut into pieces and burned, Mexico's Defense Department said in a statement.

-- times wire reports

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When four people in a Monterrey jewelry store were killed by gunmen who took nothing, few doubted that it was a message.

Competing Mexican drug cartels are destroying each other ... and that's where 'Warrior' begins ...."
http://www.warriorthemovie.com
http://www.warriorthemovie.blogspot.com
http://imdb.com/title/tt0320751

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-208917617001990565&q=warrior+mexican+OR+drug+OR+cartels+duration%3Ashort+genre%3AMOVIE_TRAILER

"the action adventure fantasy feature film "Warrior" ... about the son of a divine force ... is a story of a young man's quest to find his true identity set against the twin backdrops of Native American folklore and the treacherous Mexican drug trade and a portrayal of the classic confrontation between "good and evil" ... filmed in the exotic jungles of Costa Azul in the State of Nayarit and the urban grit of Puerto Vallarta in the State of Jalisco, Mexico .. with action, adventure, romance, comedy, a multi-ethnic cast, a major movie studio music score and spectacular cinematography ..."


http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-monterrey7-2008dec07,0,5447755.story
From the Los Angeles Times

MEXICO UNDER SIEGE

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-monterrey7-2008dec07,0,5447755.story
23 seconds of the Mexican drug war

When four people in a Monterrey jewelry store were killed by gunmen who took nothing, few doubted that it was a message.
By Sam Quinones

December 7, 2008

Reporting from Monterrey, Mexico -- In the seconds before the gunmen burst into the tiny Lozano Garza jewelry store in this city's downtown, three shoppers browsed the display cases.

An unarmed security guard sat by the door.

Then three men with assault rifles ran in, one after the other, the muzzles of their weapons ablaze.

By the time anyone reacted to the gunfire, it was too late. The four people collapsed in the barrage of bullets. One of the gunmen helped another, apparently wounded by a comrade, out of the store. Before the last killer fled, he fired final shots into a customer and the guard.

Twenty-three seconds after they came, the gunmen disappeared into the traffic of busy Francisco Madero Avenue, lined with hardware and lighting shops, taco vendors and newsstands. The page of a catalog on one case fluttered in the breeze.

The killers left the jewelry. Nor did they touch the cash register. They paid no heed to the three video cameras that recorded the entire scene.

Lying dead that afternoon of March 14, 2007, were an off-duty police commander and his wife, Benjamin Espinosa and Griselda Melendez, who apparently were shopping for a religious medallion in gratitude for a successful intestinal operation on their hospitalized infant daughter. Beyond them lay Ignacia Perez, a homemaker who lived on a former garbage dump and sold jewelry to neighbors, who paid her in weekly installments.

Sprawled near the entrance was Fernando Rodriguez, an unarmed security guard who took the $90-a-month job to save for his oldest daughter's 15th birthday celebration. He lived in terror that someone with a gun would come through that door.

A shattered peace

The victims' stories intersected in that jewelry store, but the slaughter recorded on the videotape that day looks to have been rooted in a nearby town that believed itself immune from Mexico's drug war. San Pedro Garza Garcia, southwest of Monterrey, backs up against the Sierra Madre Oriental, 15 miles and a world away from that jewelry store.

It is Latin America's wealthiest town and had long been considered one of its safest. For years, it has been the suburban escape for the industrial dynasties -- the Sada, Garza, Zambrano, Elizondo, Rivero and other families -- that manufactured steel, glass, beer and cement, and turned Monterrey into a global economic player.

Hundreds of sampetrinos, as residents are known, hold Dallas Cowboys season tickets. They shop at Maserati dealerships, and send their children to top-flight private schools. Many can navigate Houston and Aspen better than the barrios where Ignacia Perez, Fernando Rodriguez and police commander Benjamin Espinosa and his wife lived.

When Espinosa was hired as a San Pedro Garza Garcia patrol officer in 1995, it was one of the few good police jobs in Mexico. Officers there were paid about $1,000 a month.

Being a San Pedro police officer "was an honor," said Mauricio Fernandez Garza, San Pedro's mayor from 1989 to 1991. "There was a lot of recognition. They had better uniforms, of higher-quality fabric. There was a lot of training."

Fresh from two years of military service, Espinosa was aggressive and disciplined. Both his jaw and his crew cut were sharp. "He was a police officer 24 hours a day. He was very active," said Camilo Cantu, a former San Pedro chief of police.

Espinosa went to McAllen, Texas, every few months for training and target practice sponsored by U.S. law enforcement.

San Pedro police had a maximum response time of two minutes. That was possible because San Pedro never had much crime. Fernandez Garza remembers no homicides during his tenure, and in a town full of banks, only one bank robbery. No one could remember a San Pedro police officer being killed in the line of duty in those days.

The town elites kept a firm hand.

"When a daughter was marrying someone from outside," said Gilberto Marcos, a businessman and San Pedro community activist, "they'd check his bank accounts . . . to see if his money was made right. We used to look into who these people were, what family they came from. If they didn't check out, you wouldn't speak to them."

But by the late 1990s, San Pedro was being infiltrated by the world its residents had moved there to escape.

Families from Monterrey's middle and upper-middle classes had swelled San Pedro to 120,000 people, triple its size in the 1960s.

The elite's social control ebbed. Among the new residents were out-of-state drug-cartel families who had moved to the one town where their BMWs and bodyguards wouldn't stand out.

In 2001, San Pedro was shocked when resident Felipe de Jesus Mendivil and his wife were arrested after a shootout with police. The federal attorney general's office said police found $7 million and jewelry in 15 suitcases, all believed to have come from drug sales the couple were allegedly laundering for the Juarez drug cartel.

That year, newspapers reported that Benjamin Arellano Felix, head of the Arellano-Felix cartel that controls the flow of drugs from Tijuana, had kept his wife and children in San Pedro for several years.

"We started seeing signs of violence that aren't the usual minor robberies, but rather were kidnappings or executions," said Jose Roberto Mendirichaga, a history professor, civic activist and San Pedro resident.

Members of San Pedro's elite were busy diversifying their once-regional businesses into global companies and navigating Mexico's bumpy democratic transition, said Oscar Flores, a historian.

"They didn't think [drug violence] could come here," Flores said. "By the time they thought all this [drug violence] was important, it had grown a lot."

By 2005, Monterrey, one of Mexico's safest big cities, had become a disputed pathway for drugs headed to the United States.

The Gulf drug cartel controlled the areas of Nuevo Leon state around San Pedro; the city became an island controlled by the Sinaloa cartel, some of whose members had moved there, said a former city official who requested anonymity out of concern for safety.

'These two cartels'

"Many of the problems we're seeing are really between these two cartels," the official said.

Family members of prominent San Pedro businessmen and politicians were kidnapped, among them the brother-in-law of the state director of public safety. Since 2006, five police officers have been killed.

In February 2006, San Pedro Police Chief Hector Ayala was gunned down. That September, Marcelo Garza y Garza, a well-known San Pedro resident and chief of state police investigations, was shot to death outside the town's largest Roman Catholic church.

San Pedro may have paid cops better than the rest of Mexico, but it still paid too little. Several San Pedro SWAT officers left the department and are believed to be working for the cartels.

But Benjamin Espinosa hung in. He rose from street cop to operations commander targeting the city's local drug dealers. His new rank, with a salary of $1,500 a month, afforded his family a telephone but not a car. He often used a city vehicle.

He joined a unit aimed at rooting out corrupt cops. This year he was involved in capturing two supposed cartel gunmen. He was scheduled to take them to a prison near Mexico City on Friday, March 16 of last year. But on the Wednesday before, the 30-year-old went shopping with his wife, also 30, on Francisco Madero Avenue, in the Lozano Garza jewelry store, owned by the family of San Pedro's director of public safety.

Ignacia Perez spent the morning of the day she died sweeping her concrete-block house 15 miles from San Pedro Garza Garcia.

"Nati," as everyone knew her, was a dark, handsome woman, the mother of four boys, and recently a grandmother, at 37.

She lived atop what had been known as Garbage Dump No. 4, at the foot of Cerro del Topo Chico (Small Mole Hill), a mountain that cleaves the northern sections of Monterrey. The city closed the dump and began covering it in the early 1980s, and waves of rural migrants rushed in to grab the land.

At 15, Perez married Jose Luis Rodriguez, a Monterrey garbage man, and the couple squatted on a thoroughfare then taking shape, Avenida Esperanza -- Hope Avenue. They built a shack of pallets, cardboard and plastic tarp, and strung copper cable to a nearby transformer for electricity.

In that shack, Perez grew into a woman and bore their sons. Over several years, her husband built two rooms, eventually adding three others and painting it all light blue.

Years later, the city paved the streets, installed electrical lines and meters, and issued land titles. The spider web of copper cables came down. The once-squatted shantytown entered the new century a working-class neighborhood with most of the essentials.

City services, it's true, remained a rare sight. Yet crime was relatively low. Killings, shootings, kidnappings were things that happened elsewhere.

Through these years, Perez raised her sons. Her husband drank heavily, and she made do with the little money he gave her each week.

Perez's two older sons became garbage men, got married and moved.

"She was a nice mother, though she would scold us at times," said her third son, Victor Rodriguez, 19. "She'd listen to music while she swept and mopped the floors."

Five years ago, Perez began selling jewelry door to door for the Lozano Garza store. She offered rings, earrings, necklaces and bracelets -- all gold-plated, and nothing for more than $40.

She would go down to the store and pick up a few pieces at a time. It was the farthest she traveled from her neighborhood.

After cleaning the house that day, that's where Perez headed. She left money for the telephone, water and electricity bills on the kitchen table. Her sons found it when they returned that afternoon; she'd never done that before.

About noon, she boarded a bus that took her past lines of concrete-block houses like her own and into downtown Monterrey, where she got off at a stop across the street from the jewelry store.

By that time, Fernando Rodriguez had been at his post inside the store for more than four hours.

It was a dull job. Rodriguez would go outside occasionally to talk with Fernando Lizcano, who owned the cellphone shop next door.

"We'd talk about work, the family, sports," Lizcano said. "He'd come from time to time and ask to use the phone."

Rodriguez, from a large rural family, had little education and few skills. At 44, his options were considerably reduced. Most companies didn't hire men his age, except as security guards.

Thus he had struggled to provide his family with a rented house on an unpaved street a mile north of where Perez lived, just west of Esperanza Avenue.

But he remained a cheerful person, untempted by drink or violence. He was a teddy bear of a man who drew joy from his wife, Oralia, and daughters, Esmeralda, Areli and Fernanda, then ages 14, 10 and 3.

Sunday, his only day off, he would take them to parks around Monterrey. The family frequently took photographs.

"Their whole life is in their photos," said Oralia's mother, Angelica Aleman.

He sang often and loved dancing with Oralia. His mother-in-law thought of him as her son.

As a younger man, Rodriguez sold kitchenware door to door. He was a messenger for several years, until he broke his leg in an accident. Then he was hired to clean and guard a beauty school downtown for $80 a week. He learned to clean the school's clippers and machinery. His only fear was that he would have to eject some rowdy customer.

Rodriguez spoke constantly of his wife and daughters and worried how they would manage without him. "They were his world," said Myrna de Luna, owner of the beauty school. "He'd register them for school. He'd shop for his daughters and wife -- buy their dresses, even their underwear."

His main worry was saving for his oldest daughter's quinceañera that July. He wanted a dance hall with a big sound system and many guests.

A few months before the deadly attack, he'd quit the beauty school to work at the jewelry store because it paid $10 a week more, but he never liked the new job. Unarmed and alone, he worried about having to protect the store.

On Saturdays he cleaned the machines at the beauty school for extra cash. "He was looking for money anywhere he could find it," De Luna said. Most other days, he dropped by there to ask for his job back.

To work at the jewelry store, Rodriguez had to leave home early and come back late. The morning before he left for the last time, Oralia asked her husband whether she could look for work. Rodriguez had always said no. But that morning, he said maybe she should, after all, interview for a job.

She went to a factory that day. She was being interviewed in the afternoon when her family sent word that she was needed at home.

The war moves on

On the evening of March 14, Nati Perez's family gathered on Esperanza Avenue, hoping. The shootings had been reported on television and radio. A cousin who worked at the hospital where the city morgue is located called, saying that one of the bodies looked like Nati.

Perez's son Victor and his aunt went to the hospital to see for themselves. "Her face was destroyed, but she had a mole above her lip and that's how my aunt recognized her," Victor recalled.

Monterrey officials pledged to help with the funeral. "It was just promises," Victor said. The family buried her in the city cemetery near the state prison.

Abraham, her youngest son, seldom ate; her husband spent his nights crying in the upstairs bedroom he had built for the couple. He has stopped drinking. Perez's sister drops by to cook and clean the house on Esperanza Avenue.

"It doesn't feel the same," said nephew Joel Lopez. "Here my aunt was everything. She was the one who gave the house spirit."

Merchants along Francisco Madero Avenue say they miss Fernando Rodriguez.

"It took a long time to get used to the idea that he was dead," said Lizcano, who ran from his cellphone shop after the shooting and was the first to find the bodies.

For his daughter's 15th birthday last year, the Rodriguez family held a modest dinner at their house.

The jewelry store moved two days after the attack. The storefront that housed it is the only unrented space for blocks.

The four killings remain unexplained. The families have heard nothing from officials. The video shows no clerks or manager in the store at the time of the shooting -- a source said the staff was upstairs eating lunch.

One theory is that the killers ambushed Espinosa to send a message to San Pedro's director of public safety, Rogelio Lozano, whose family owns a chain of jewelry stores that included the shop attacked.

"The citizens have to guess," said Marcos, the businessman and San Pedro community activist. "One guess is that [Espinosa] was involved with one gang and the other killed him. Or there's the one that you'd like to believe, which is that, for having done his job, they killed him."

Kidnappings of important sampetrinos continue. In August, 17 months after the slayings, thousands of residents marched through the streets of downtown Monterrey as part of a national mobilization against drug violence. The cartels' warring, meanwhile, has drifted elsewhere; it has left more than 6,000 fatalities nationwide in less than two years.

But in San Pedro, the killing of Espinosa created little sustained outrage. There were no fundraisers, no trusts set up for his daughters.

The girls live with their mother's family. Their grandfather, Lucio Melendez, 57, supports them. He earns $100 a week as a security guard, and wonders why anyone in Mexico would want to be a cop.

Quinones is a Times staff writer.

sam.quinones@latimes.com

LATIMES.COM /SIEGE
About this series
A team of Los Angeles Times reporters and photographers has been chronicling drug-related violence that has claimed more than 6,000 lives in Mexico in less than two years. Earlier stories and additional material, including the security-camera footage of the slayings described in this story, are available online.

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