Mexico troops enter Tijuana in drug gang crackdown
03 Jan 2007 23:18:50 GMT Source: Reuters
By Lizbeth Diaz TIJUANA, Mexico, Jan 3 (Reuters) - Hundreds of soldiers and federal police descended on the border city of Tijuana on Wednesday to probe corruption by local police and open a new front in President Felipe Calderon's war on drug violence. As two helicopters circled overhead, dozens of troops with assault rifles and riot shields converged on a police headquarters to inspect weapons, a first step in probing alleged drug gang links and corruption inside the local force. Calderon ordered a 3,300-strong special force to Tijuana and the first 500 arrived on Wednesday. The offensive came three weeks after Calderon sent 7,000 troops to his crime-ridden home state of Michoacan to kick off a new war on drug-related violence that killed some 2,000 people in 2006. "We are determined to regain security, not just in Michoacan or Baja California, but in every part of Mexico that is threatened by organized crime," Calderon said on Wednesday, visiting troops in Michoacan, in western Mexico. Calderon took office on Dec. 1. Tijuana, just south of San Diego and one of the busiest border crossings into the United States, sees a murder almost every day and two kidnappings a week, most blamed on brutal rivalries between drug cartels. The city's drug trade is dominated by the Arellano Felix cartel, which battles rival gangs from the northwestern state of Sinaloa. Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora said there was evidence criminal gangs had infiltrated the local police. "This is about getting Tijuana out of the hands of criminal organizations," he told Reuters. Huge quantities of South American cocaine pass through Mexico on its way to the United States, and Mexico also produces marijuana, methamphetamines and heroin. Mexico's municipal police are so poorly paid and badly equipped that even officers not in the pay of crime gangs are widely considered inept. Calderon's predecessor Vicente Fox declared war on drug gangs in early 2005, but the crackdown only intensified turf wars between cartels. Gang-related murders and drive-by shootings spread down Mexico's Pacific coast. In one grisly incident last year, five severed heads were tossed onto the dance floor of a Michoacan nightclub. Calderon said the war on drug gangs -- whom local media blame for half of all federal crimes -- had to be accompanied by improvements to the justice system, which is also criticized as ineffective and corrupt. "We need laws that help us chase and imprison criminals, not ones that save them from the punishment they deserve," he said.
