Obama grapples with Mexico’s “lightning war”
TIJUANA, Mexico — The policemen had stopped their squad car for a few seconds on a major avenue in this burgeoning border city on Saturday evening when Kalashnikov bullets flew out of a passing Plymouth Voyager.
Enrique Monge, a 31-year-old beat cop, returned fire but his effort was in vain. A cap shot through his waist and scattered into several vital organs and he died hours later in hospital.
At the wheel, his 23-year-old partner Benjamin Hernandez was hit by a bullet directly in his thorax. By a miracle, he was still fighting for his life four days later as President Barack Obama readied to fly to Mexico City and discuss such violence with Mexican President Felipe Calderon.
The attack had lasted less than a minute. The assailants switched cars to a Honda Odyssey a few blocks away and then dumped that vehicle on the outskirts of the city, leaving the scent dry.
Another day. Another murder.
Monge is just one of more than 800 Mexican police and soldiers who have been shot, stabbed to death or even decapitated since January 2008.
But the details of his particular killing go to the heart of the problem that Obama and Calderon face as they pledge to stand shoulder to shoulder against drug traffickers. Obama will arrive in Mexico Thursday — his first visit to Latin America as president — before heading to the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago on Friday.
The underlying difficulty is that the cartel hitmen — known in Mexico as sicarios — have a modus operandi that is extremely difficult to defend against, no matter how many Black Hawk helicopters Obama gives the Mexican security services.
The vast majority of Mexico’s drug-related slayings are from lightning ambushes exactly like that on the Tijuana police officers.
Dubbed “executions” by the media here, the attacks often involve assassins spraying hundreds of bullets from Kalashnikov or AR15 semi-automatic rifles in tens of seconds.
“The sicarios hit their targets so fast they don’t have a chance to respond,” said a former smuggler for the Tijuana cartel, who asked that for security reasons his name be withheld.
“They have a lot of spies who can be following the person, who most the time has no idea they are being shadowed,” he said. “Then they can get them in any place and at any time. Just when they let their guard down, the hit comes.”
Even large groups of policemen struggle to defend against such ambushes. In one attack last year, gunmen killed eight policemen who had paused at a stoplight in the city of Culiacan.
Mexican and U.S. drug enforcement officials argue that a sustained attack on the cartels and their infrastructure will eventually reduce such assassinations.
By relentlessly rounding up their soldiers and seizing their guns, money and drugs, they say, the cartels will lose the capacity to wage the violent war Mexico has suffered from in the last year.
“Working together with state and federal agencies and the army, we are making major arrests and seizures and this leads to a reduction in the violence,” said Baja California Attorney General Rommel Moreno.
Moreno pointed out Saturday’s police assassination notwithstanding, killings are actually substantially down in Tijuana.
In the last quarter of 2008, there were 421 murders in the border city, the most in its recent history. In the first quarter of 2009, there have been 108 killings.
However, on a national level, there is little sign that the cartel armies are losing their ability to carry out murder on a massive scale, with 1,960 drug-related killings across Mexico since January.
Such a level of bloodshed has prompted extreme security for Obama’s visit to Mexico City.
On the eve of his Thursday landing, Mexico City announced that more than 4,500 police will be assigned to protect the areas Obama is visiting. He will not step on the street but move by helicopter and a special black bulletproof limousine known as “The Beast,” the same car he uses at home.
Obama has promised to do more to cut off the supply of U.S.-sold guns, the tool cartel soldiers overwhelmingly use to carry out these execution-style hits.
However, many in Mexico are cynical about how effective efforts to stop southbound traffic will be.
“As long as the guns are sold in U.S. shops, the cartels will find ways of getting them into Mexico,” said Victor Clark, an investigator at San Diego State University who has done extensive research on the gangs. “If the entire border patrol service cannot stop tons of drugs and millions of migrants heading north, how will a few hundred U.S. agents stop all the guns coming south?”
Clark said the best hope is that Obama and Calderon focus on tackling the root causes that have allowed the drug cartels to flourish: Drug addiction, poverty and corruption.
“These are complex issues to combat,” he said. “But if our leaders only focus on media-oriented tactics such as moving troops around the country, the problem is just going to get worse.”
Click here for an overview of GlobalPost’s coverage of Mexico’s drug wars.
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