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Drug war shutters businesses in Tijuana

TIJUANA, Mexico – A decade ago, economists hailed Tijuana as a place where cheap Mexican labor and U.S. financing could meet, attracting Asian firms eager to set up manufacturing plants to export to the United States.

Now, that vision is slipping away, a victim of drug violence that has been exploding this side of the U.S.-Mexico border for the past three years.

Once a freewheeling city that has served Americans cheap tequila since the U.S. prohibition era, Tijuana is at the center of a three-way drug war between rival gangs and Mexico’s military. Drug-related murders are a daily occurrence.

The violence is scaring away tourists who came for everything from prostitutes and dental work to medicine. A lively artistic community is also dwindling.

While most assembly-for-export businesses, or maquiladoras, continue to operate normally, drug violence is such that they risk losing new investment to competitors like China. Other businesses are seeing their livelihoods disappear.

Just a few years ago, downtown Tijuana was bustling and the main drag, Revolution Avenue, was a busy thoroughfare. But today, it is deserted, lined with “For Sale” and “For Rent” signs.

“Many big companies are pulling out and many small companies are going bankrupt. Business isn’t enough to even pay the rent for the shops and factory space,” said Manuel Cesena, 57, who owns a shoe shop on Revolution Avenue.

Cesena, who has seen his sales fall fivefold since 2005, said it is crucial for him to end his day before nightfall or face being robbed or kidnapped. After 30 years in the shoe business and exporting to the United States, Cesena is considering closing for good.

DEATH TOLL RISES

More than 1,000 people have died so far this year across Mexico in battles between drug gangs and security forces, the highest murder rate since bloodshed escalated in 2006.

Tijuana is one of the most violent cities in Mexico. A group of gangs from the Pacific state of Sinaloa have set out to destroy the Tijuana’s Arellano Felix cartel and to take over lucrative smuggling routes into California.

The feud between the Sinaloans and the Arellano Felix gang has not only scared away tourist dollars.

Business people face daily telephone threats of extortion. Kidnappings to finance narco gangs have jumped this year, creating a climate of fear and scaring away new investment.

“Those of us who remain only stay because we have properties we don’t want to leave. We are very afraid and have to be careful not to get kidnapped,” said Andres Mendez, 46, who runs an arts and crafts business in downtown Tijuana.

In Tijuana this year, drug gangs have killed more than 200 people, with cartel hitmen and soldiers spraying bullets on busy city avenues, outside shops, schools and kindergartens.

Seventeen drug hitmen were killed in a shooting in April. Even children have been murdered.

“Overcoming this insecurity is the single biggest issue for Tijuana right now,” said Jorge Cruz, a business leader in the city’s maquiladora industry.

In March, a plant in Tijuana assembling Panasonic electrical goods for export closed with the loss of 3,000 jobs. Plant managers declined to comment on the closure, but a city official said insecurity was a big factor.

Days before the Panasonic closure, soldiers in Tijuana made one of the biggest arms seizures in Mexico after raiding a house, uncovering grenade launchers, machine guns and other weapons encrusted with golden images of skulls.

LOST OPPORTUNITY

The exodus of businesses is painful for Tijuana, as many people had high hopes that it could move beyond its seedy roots and become a key trade, manufacturing and service center, given its proximity to the United States.

But a dozen local building companies closed over the past year, putting infrastructure development on hold. “Many were sick of the threats of kidnapping and extortion,” said Sebastian Lanz, who heads a group representing local construction companies.

Tijuana hoped to position itself as a car and truck manufacturing center by attracting Chinese-owned automakers and setting up a rail link from plants to the border. But the project collapsed, largely because of insecurity.

Some business owners who have chosen to keep operating in Tijuana have moved to live over the border in San Diego and only cross back into Mexico with bodyguards.

One prominent restaurant chain owner said he had swapped his flashy sports utility vehicle for a beaten-up sedan. “I call it my antikidnap vehicle. It is the way not to attract attention,” said the businessman, who asked for anonymity for the sake of his safety.

Mexico’s federal government says it is doing everything it can to restore security to Tijuana and other cities in Baja California, one of Mexico’s most violent states.

Since January last year, thousands of troops patrol Tijuana’s streets and highways, and are engaged in a daily battle to destroy the Arellano Felix and Sinaloa drug cartels and clean up the corrupt police forces that ally with them.

But winning the fight will not be easy. As the Arellano Felix cartel weakens, the gang is increasingly relying on kidnapping and extortion.

A bid to introduce closed-circuit televisions in the city has meanwhile failed, as gangs sabotaged cameras and corrupt police switched them off to allow crimes to be committed.

3 more Mexican Carriers added to Cross Border program

FMCSA granted provisional authority to 3 more Mexican based carriers to participate in the cross border program on Friday afternoon, bringing the total to 15 carrier participants, with a total of 54 power units, more than enough to provide statistical evidence of the success of the program when it winds down in September.

The carriers are:

Transportes Francisca Burgos Vizcarra from Mexicali, Baja California with 10 trucks;

M&N de Mexico from Tecate, Baja California with 1 truck;

and Distribuidora Marina El Pescador of Tijuana, Baja California, also with one truck.

To date, there are 31 more carriers approved and the FMCSA is waiting for insurance documentation and evidence of Process Agents before granting provisional authority.

In the six months the program has been active, there have been no reports of accidents or serious incidents involving these trucks and carriers, contrary to what Joan Claybrook, Jimmy Hoffa and Todd Spencer would have you believing.

Mexico-Domiciled Motor Carriers

These are the Mexican domiciled carriers authorized to participate in the Cross Border Program

Mexican Bombero’s work side by side with U.S. counterparts

More than three dozen Mexican firefighters have been tackling California’s wildfires in what officials say is the first time firemen from south of the border have battled blazes on US soil.

“Firefighters are firefighters; it doesn’t matter if they’re Mexican or American,” said Marco Antonio Sanchez Navarro, Director of Tijuana Fire and Civil Protection.

“The fires are taking a lot of homes of not only Americans but Mexicans who live in the US,” added Sanchez Navarro.

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A crackdown on Baja bribes in Tijuana

Editors Note: This is old news, reported here six months ago, but TJ Police have been trying to crack down on the bribery which once ran rampant in this border town. Reports of tourists being forced to withdraw cash from ATM’s has been common. What is not being reported though is some of these “tourists” are shit faced drunk behind the wheels of their RV’s and SUV’s and and this is a convenient way to make the problem disappear. Other sites are trying to tie this to the Mexican Pilot Program and alleging this is what would happen to an American trucker in Mexico. That could not be further from the truth, unless you are caught drunk or high behind the wheel.

TIJUANA — Baja California sees a lucrative future in the luxury residential towers sprouting up along its coast, and officials are hoping developments by the likes of Donald Trump will bring Southern California prosperity south of the border.

But there’s a problem: The 5-mile highway from the border to the beaches is notorious for police who pull tourists’ cars over in search of bribes.

Now Tijuana police say they’re cleaning up the route and targeting corruption elsewhere in an effort to make the border area more inviting.

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Plans for border fence draw fire

TIJUANA, Mexico, – Hurling himself over a steel fence into the no-man’s-land between Mexico and California, an undocumented migrant sprints across a narrow strip lit by harsh arc lights and watched over by video cameras on tall posts.

Before he can shin up a second barrier of tall concrete pillars topped with seismic sensors and a layer of steel mesh more than an arm’s-length wide, U.S. Border Patrol agents close in fast and arrest him .

That scene is repeated dozens of times each day along a 14-mile stretch of state-of-the-art fencing separating San Diego, California, from Tijuana, Mexico, that has become a model for no-nonsense policing of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Inspired by the San Diego fence, the U.S. House Representatives voted in December to build a similar barrier to stop illegal immigrants across one-third of the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, seen as a weak spot in homeland security since the Sept. 11 attacks.

It is the most controversial proposal in a debate in the U.S. Congress over immigration reform that has split Republicans and sparked protests by Hispanic immigrants in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Detroit.

Although the San Diego fence is seen as a success in cutting illegal immigration, the plan for the bigger barrier is struggling to win further support in Congress.

Critics compare it to the Berlin Wall and say it goes against the American spirit of openness, sending the wrong message to the rest of the world about the United States.

Calif. Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter, who authored the fence plan and estimates it would cost about $2 billion, points to a sharp drop in the number of immigrants nabbed h it would most likely be ineffective, while the Mexican government slammed it as a disgrace.

Despite the greater chances of either dying in the desert or being caught while pushing north through the San Diego sector, immigrants at a hostel in Tijuana said they would not be put off from their quest for a better life in the United States.

“Whatever they put there they’ll just keep on going over, around or under it,” Hugo Uriel, an illegal immigrant from Mexico’s Michoacan state said.

“Finding a better life for your family is a powerful incentive,” he said at a Tijuana hostel after being caught in the United States and sent back to Mexico.

The fence plan envisages a double barrier made from former U.S. military aircraft landing mats stood on their side on the south and a high-tech steel and concrete wall to the north.

It would run for 22 miles across California, and 361 miles over the sun-blasted Arizona desert, a strip crossed by half of the 1.18 million immigrants nabbed on the border last year.

A remaining 315 miles of fence is proposed to seal three strips between Columbus, New Mexico and Brownsville, Texas, two of them along stretches of the Rio Grande River that became notorious last year as routes for Central American and Brazilian immigrants.

Border police in San Diego warn the fence has also strengthened the resolve of some die-hard immigrants and traffickers who have become wilier and more confrontational.

Attacks by frustrated traffickers on agents are soaring, with 119 gun, knife and rock assaults reported between Oct. 1 and the end of February, more than double the number noted in the same period a year ago, the Border Patrol said.

In an attempt to break through the heavily policed line, traffickers also scooped out four tunnels under the stretch of border this year alone, most of them shallow “gopher holes” used to smuggle undocumented immigrants northward.

Customs and Border Protection sources said immigrant traffickers have also crammed clients into hidden vehicle compartments, including seat backs and even gas tanks, to try and sneak them through the local ports of entry in the sector.

Immigrant welfare groups are also critical of the proposal, and point to the fact that past policing crackdowns such as ”Operation Gatekeeper” in the San Diego sector in 1994 only succeeded in rerouting the flow of immigrants to more remote and dangerous areas of the border.

“Nothing has actually succeeded in slowing down the number of migrants crossing the U.S. border,” said Rev. Robin Hoover, president of Tucson-based welfare group Humane Borders.

“The fence is just another gimmick that will just expose migrants to greater danger,” he added.