Drug cartel conflict cited for escalating Tijuana murder rate

After reaching a new high last year, the bloodshed in Tijuana has continued at an unrelenting pace in the first days of the new year as two powerful drug trafficking organizations battle for control of the city’s lucrative street drug sales.

As homicides soared to unprecedented levels across Mexico in 2017, Tijuana registered one of the steepest increases in the country. The tally for the year was a record 1,744 homicides — almost double the record of 910 homicides set in 2016, according to figures from the Baja California Attorney General’s Office.

The long-established Sinaloa cartel and a newer, aggressive group known as the cartel Nueva Generacion Jalisco, often abbreviated as CJNG, are fighting for supremacy in Tijuana.

“The main issue right now with the power struggle is Sinaloa and the CJNG battling for street dealers, narcomenudeo,” said an official of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “You have got to understand, the money that they make in Tijuana, that’s as much as crossing the border” with smuggled drugs.

Though bullets have struck bystanders, the killings have been largely targeted and carried out in the city’s impoverished and working class neighborhoods, authorities say. Close to 90 percent of the victims are low-level operatives in the local drug trade, they say.

In many cases, the victims’ bodies are unclaimed, either because they are from other parts of Mexico or because they are estranged from relatives.

“There are a lot of people from outside” the region, said Gerardo Sosa Olachea, Baja California’s newly named public safety secretary. “They’re sent up here to get rid of people, and to take possession of the plaza.”

Tijuana’s public safety secretary, Marco Antonio Sotomayor, said a key step to reducing the violence is cutting the demand for illicit drugs by fighting addiction. Methamphetamine is the biggest problem, followed by heroin, he said in an interview.