Borderland Beat

by Alex Marentes

  Among those detained was Jorge "El Chuleton" Gutiérrez Corral who was the operational coordinator Cipol (state police) at a time when Raul Grajeda Domínguez was the State Secretary of Public Security.

  Authorities were also investigating whether some of the individuals arrested were in fact active municipal police officers.

  El Cora also revealed an interesting fact by saying that José Luis Ledesma , El JL, the Juarez cartel boss for the whole state of Chihuahua, had been killed. El JL was only second to Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, supreme leader of the Juarez cartel. El Chapo had put a bounty on JL and hated the man with a passion. No one had been able to confirm any information of El JL, if he was captured or killed, but rumors abound, as is customary in the Mexican culture.

  It is known that this criminal group operated under the command of Noel Salgueiro Nevarez along with Antonio Torres Marrufo, El Jaguar and Gabino Salas Valenciano, El Ingeniero.

  El Cora told police that they went to the legal office of González Rodríguez that day and ordered the people who were there to lay on the floor. Then they asked the secretary behind the desk where was Mario González, as they had his name written on a piece of paper. The secretary informed them that Mario González was on the second floor of the building, where they handcuffed him and took him to a safe house.

  El Cora gave details about the torture of Mario González who was forced to implicate his sister, the former deputy prosecutor Patricia González Rodríguez, saying that she was protecting the Juárez Cartel and La Línea.

  In a video released by the Federal Public Security Secretariat (SSP), El Cora explained how and why they killed Mario González Rodríguez.

  El Cora said that during the recording of the video, a person arrived from the state of Durango who was present to coordinate the interview with El Buitre and the editing of the video. El Cora said the person was identified by the name of Charly.

  He said that they used two memory cards for recording the interrogation of the attorney that would eventually be uploaded to YouTube. On the first he answered the questions freely but on the second one he was pressured to read from some placards.

  El Cora said that the brother of the former Attorney General of Chihuahua, Patricia Gonzalez, was abducted because he was in charge of making deals with the organization "La Linea" on behalf of the former Attorney General.

  "All the questions from the first recording he answered on his own, we never put anything ... In the second recording there were other questions, put there in order to incriminate, or I do not know the reason," El Cora said.

  The video of a press conference released by the SSP showed the other seven detainees, who were wearing the same military uniforms as in the previous Youtube video of the interrogation of Mario González and who claimed to belong to the Sinaloa cartel.

  El Cora did not specify what questions Mario González answered on his own. He said that they tortured him by beating him only on the soles of the feet and legs to avoid showing any physical sign of tortured on the video. Mario González was assassinated the next day.

  The group was instructed to dig a grave in a vacant lot. "At six o'clock in the afternoon we were ordered to bury him. We killed him at that moment at the same house of the interview between all of us," El Cora said. El Cora said they used a rope and a piece of wood to apply a tourniquet to his neck in order to strangulate him. Immediately after killing him, they put him in a gray Dodge Nitro truck and moved him to the place where they had dug the grave to bury him.

  Eventually, the mayor of a municipality of Chihuahua, Marco Quezada, confirmed that the police officers who were arrested in connection with the disappearance and subsequent torture and death of Mario González Rodríguez, brother of former state prosecutor, Patricia González were set free.

  The mayor said that at the moment, there was not enough evidence to hold these officers on the charges of kidnapping and murder. Since the 60 days of arraignment were up, their rights must be respected, and they were allowed to continue working in the police department if they chose to do so.

  According to a U.S. congressional report the Firearms confiscated during the death of Mario González Rodríguez were traced to the Operation Fast and Furious.

  Mexican officials submitted information about the weapons to the ATF's e-trace system, and the ATF traced two of the AK-47s to Operation Fast and Furious. The congressional report said that an ATF email indicated that ATF officials in Phoenix who knew the two assault rifles came from the controversial operation withheld the information from Mexican officials.

  In congressional testimony, Carlos Canino, the ATF's acting U.S. attaché in Mexico, said he was the one who finally notified Mexican federal Attorney General Marisela Morales about the weapons-tracing and their link to the death of Mario González Rodríguez.

  Canino feared an international incident might break out with Mexico if the information leaked out to the news media instead of being sent through government channels. He told U.S. lawmakers that he did not want to undermine the trust that U.S. law enforcement had developed with their Mexican counterparts in the war against the drug cartels.

  Ricardo Alday, spokesman for the Mexican Embassy in Washington, D.C., said in response to the U.S. congressional report's findings that "the government of Mexico had not granted, nor will they grant, under any circumstance, tacit or explicit authorization for the deliberate walking of arms into Mexico.”

  The ATF released a report that said 68,000 weapons recovered in Mexico between 2007 and 2011 were traced back to U.S. sources. That report does not mention which of the weapons were part of the undercover Operation Fast and Furious.

  Weapons traced back to the operation have been recovered in eight Mexican states and in Mexico City, and most of them were destined for the Sinaloa drug cartel led by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán, the congressional report said. At least eight Fast and Furious-connected weapons were recovered at crime scenes in Juárez and four in Chihuahua City between 2010 and 2011.

  ATF officials launched Operation Fast and Furious in 2009 in Phoenix in an attempt to identify high-level arms traffickers who were supplying the Mexican drug cartels with weapons. The operation allowed weapons purchased in the United States to cross (walk) the border into Mexico.

  ATF shut down the operation about a month after Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was found murdered in the Arizona desert in December 2010. Two AK-47s, originally purchased as semiautomatics and connected to Fast and Furious, were found near Terry's body.

  The number of weapons submitted for e-trace was 17,352 in 2007; 21,555 in 2009; 8,338 in 2010; and 20,335 in 2011.

  From the al-Qaida Playbook

  At around 7:30pm on July 15, 2010 two vehicles stopped in the middle of the streets of Bolivia and 16 de Septiembre, in downtown Ciudad Juarez. This area is always congested with commuters and people shopping. It is also close to the tourist district of the city.

  This day it was busy as usual. Several people got out of the vehicles and placed a man on his knees in the middle of the street who was wearing a Juarez police uniform. The man had his hands tied behind his back and was already injured from a gunshot.

  This caught the attention of the many people that were on foot on the sidewalk and vehicles in the heavy traffic on the street. Suddenly, while the man in policeman uniform was placed on his knees, they shot him in the head while everyone looked in horror. The men then drove away in one of the vehicles while leaving the other behind at the scene.

  They also left the dead policeman in the middle of the street after taking several gunshots at close range to his head. Some people rushed to the scene, this included a doctor who happened to be in the area.

  This resulted in a heavy response from the federal police and rescue personnel. Moments after the federal police arrived to investigate, a bomb detonated on the vehicle that had been left behind. The blast killed the doctor instantly who got the full force of the bomb, a civilian who was a musician that happened to be at the wrong place a
t the wrong time. Also killed in the blast was a federal police officer that was inspecting the car with the explosives. Several people were injured including a cameraman form Channel 2 that captured the explosion on video. The vehicle with the explosives appeared to be a Ford Taurus. Inside the vehicle there were traces of C-4 explosives and a cellular that was apparently used as a trigger.

  It turned out that the police officer that had been executed in the middle of the road was not a police officer after all. They had dressed a man in police uniform and executed the man to lure the federal police officers to the proximity to the car bomb. The Mayor of Cuidad Juarez, José Reyes Ferriz, confirmed that the execution of the man dressed in police uniform was merely a ploy to lure federal police officers to the location of the car bomb.

  "The person they placed there to attract the federal police was a man dressed in a municipal police uniform but was not a police officer. Since yesterday when we made the initial analysis, we saw that he had a normal civilian belt that is not part of the uniform, did not have any of the equipment, badge or other police insignia" said Reyes Ferriz.

  There was a rumor that the bomb attack was in retaliation for the arrest of Jesus Armando Acosta Guerrero, "El 35, who was a Lieutenant of La Linea. Armando Acosta worked right under Jose Antonio Hernandez, "El Diego," and Juan Ledesma, "El JL," who were second in command next to Vicente Carrillo Fuentes.

  This was to be the first successful car bombing that brought a new dynamic of how cartels operated in Mexico. This was reminiscence of an al-Qaida playbook. People were getting acclimated to the regular beheading, street shootout, or people hanging from bridges and this was just another method to instill fear and terror to the people of Mexico. This would start a conversation about how this could be classified as a terrorist attack. ATF assisting in the investigation and had been helping Mexican authorities in other cases were IEDs had been found on crime scenes.

  A week later there as a written message on a wall warning US authority that if they did not arrest corrupt federal police officers, another car bomb would be detonated.

  "If in 15 days, there is no response with the detention of corrupt federales, we will put a car with 100 kilos of C4," the message read.

  Composite 4, or C-4, was the plastic explosive used for the attack that killed the three people in Downtown Juárez.

  "Unfortunately, these drug cartels, they have an enormous amount of resources at their disposal. They can buy any kind of capability they want. But we are determined, working with Mexico, to do everything in our power to reduce this violence that affects not only the Mexican people, but our own," said U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley.

  The Real Test of Confidence

  On September 29, 2009 a post on Borderland Beat talked about the lie detector test administered to the Ciudad Juarez police officers and hundreds were terminated for untruthfulness results.

  The majority of the 334 Juarez police officers that were dismissed after failing "confidence exams" left the city but a few have remained. These exams consisted of some sort of polygraph examination to weed out those who were questionable as having ties to organize crime. Most of these police officers that were suspected of being dirty and subsequently terminated have been tracked by the Juarez Municipal Police and the multi task force conducting an operation known as "Operación Conjunto Chihuahua", said Ciudad Juarez Mayor José Reyes Ferriz.

  These are a lot of officers suddenly without a job and on the streets of Juarez desperate for a source of income. It's not easy finding a good paying job for anyone, yet alone for a police officer with specific skill set not common in most professions.

  "Most of the policemen who were terminated for failing the confidence exams left the city, but those who remained behind, have been monitored tracking their activities," said Mayor Ferriz.

  Many of the media community were concerned that these unemployed police officers would find themselves working for the drug cartels that are more than happy to snatch corrupt officers to use in their battle against each other. This is a legitimate concern as it is widely known that the drug cartels are constantly recruiting police or military personnel because of their training, knowledge and expertise in the use of firearms.

  In the northern part of the state of Michoacan the Mexican police arrested a former police officer Marcos Arturo Juárez Cruz, aka "El Chamuco" or otherwise "The Demon," who formed part of the drug cartel known as, "La Familia." "El Chamuco" was a state police officer between 2001 and 2007, a time in which the Secretary of federal Public Security (SSP) said that he provided support to the well-armed Gulf cartel, and a group of assassins (sicarios) known as Los Zetas.

  At that time the Gulf cartel was allied with "La Familia" in operations in Michoacan, but later they broke off their relationship and are now rivals.

  According to the SSP, "El Chamuco" was recruited to "La Familia" and quickly rose through the ranks within the drug cartel for his "discipline, relationship with ranking officers and his negotiating skills. His salary was estimated to be 50,000 pesos per month (nearly $3,700 US dollars) plus expenses, a lot more of the basic salary of a Mexican police officer.

  The SSP emphasizes that despite his youth, "El Chamuco" was well respected within the organization for his violent temper and coolness when killing his rivals.

  "La Familia" is one of the most powerful cartels in Mexico, an organization that has forced the Mexican Government to deploy a total offensive in recent months. That is the primary reason why these cartels seek members who have tactical police/military experience and also members that have relationships with police and military organizations.

  Mayor Ferriz said that the "Operación Conjunto Chihuahua" does a good job keeping track of police officers that have been given their termination papers after failing the reliability tests.

  "We will continue to purge the bad elements from within the police department, and obviously, we will provide all pertinent data of these people to the "Operación Conjunto Chihuahua" to enable them to follow up on these people, as has been done since October 17 when we terminated 334 members from the police department," said the mayor.

  Yes, it is agreed that it's essential to remove the corrupt elements from within the police ranks as soon as possible, otherwise any significant result in controlling this wave of violence and mayhem in the streets of Juarez will be a total failure. Results from these initiatives are slow coming and in the mean time we continue to see the slaughtered of human bodies dumped on the city streets at a record number.

  The only key element overlooked by Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz, who are supposedly attempting to wage a war against the organized crime, is the corrupt political machine that protects the criminal structure from top to bottom. That is truly what is needed for any meaningful eradication of the carnage that has been engrained way too long in the very fabric of the social norm in Mexico.

  Ciudad Juárez is in the grip of the most violent drug war the nation has ever seen. President Felipe Calderón has sent in the army to take on the Juarez cartel and a few too many corrupt police elements. The army is fighting the cartels, the cartels are fighting each other and honest cops are in short supply. Nowhere else has anyone suffered more than the people in Juárez.

  The results have been nothing short of chaos.

  On a daily basis, bodies are spotted on roadsides, down alleys, in public dumps and perched in public plazas. Bodies have been found handcuffed together, bearing the marks of vicious beatings. Severed heads have been dumped in cooler boxes and there are reports of torture videos posted on YouTube to include Borderland Beat. A local paper claimed one cartel hired a musician to play victims their favorite ballads during their executions.

  The cartels act like they’re untouchable. They pass lists of names to local police, telling them who they’ll be killing in the weeks to come. One note was left at a monument to fallen officers. It listed 22 police officers who had resisted the corrupting efforts of
the cartels.

  So, Juarez was attempting to revamp its police forces with better training and a force possessing a degree of integrity. This required the cleansing of the Juarez police forces in order to eradicate the corruption from the drug cartels. Juarez was attempting to fill the void of hundreds of officers who have been fired for failing "confidentiality tests " or police officers who have quit for fear of being executed by the ruthless cartels.

  Despite all this, life goes on in Juarez and people try to retain some trust in their government. It is obvious more police are needed and more training is necessary. Juárez was still looking to recruit 1,400 more officers as the city deals with a crime wave that began in 2008. This task will not be easy, especially when you are a cop in one of the most dangerous cities in Mexico.

  The Mexican Drug War's Collateral Damage

  President Felipe Calderon had to initially rely solely on the military to take on the cartels in the streets of Mexico while he revamped his federal police from the ground up. He had in mind to create a federal police force adequately equipped to take on the cartels in a tactical perspective. When you deploy military forces upon your community of civilians it poses some problems. The military function under different rules of engagements as oppose to police forces. The problems soon became obvious and caused negative controversy in the deployment of military among the civilian populace.

  The Mexico conflict has three fronts:

  1.Intra-cartel: Internal struggles and the elimination of “traitors” within an organization.

  2.Inter-cartel: Fighting between different organizations.

  3.Government vs. cartels: The military and law enforcement’s fight against drug organizations.

  The drug war waged in the streets of Mexico between cartel against cartel or cartel against military can be intense. Very often we saw that high caliber assault weapons in full auto (point and spray) method of operation are used. We saw many instances where innocent people that were caught in the crossfire were killed, too often - too many.