HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com | Section: Front page


June 12, 2005, 3:28PM

Drug trade a way of life in Culiacan

Tolerating hundreds of gangland executions and venerating an unofficial
saint of smugglers, residents of this city in Mexico's Sinaloa state accept
the risks and welcome the wealth

By DUDLEY ALTHAUS
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

CULIACAN, MEXICO - Despite repeated crackdowns and the arrest of tens of
thousands of suspected gangsters, narcotics-fueled violence continues to
shake northern Mexico.

More than 550 people have been killed so far this year, including the newly
appointed police chief in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, who was gunned
down on his first day on the job last week.

President Vicente Fox has vowed action, throwing thousands of federal police
and army troops at the problem, so far to little effect.

Mexican presidents have launched similar anti-narcotics drives for more than
three decades. But all have failed in the face of well-financed smugglers,
corrupt officials, inept police and the ambivalent citizens of communities
compromised by the drug trade.

In few places is the challenge facing Fox more evident than in Culiacan,
capital of the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa, home turf for most of
Mexico's top criminals.

Federal officials blame Sinaloa-based gangland bosses, particularly Joaquin
"El Chapo" Guzman, for the violence racking Nuevo Laredo and other cities
along the Texas border. Guzman's outfit, the Sinaloa cartel, is battling
another crime organization for control of smuggling routes into the United
States.

In this city of 1 million people, where $85,000 Hummers share the road with
jalopies, the smuggling of illegal drugs to U.S. consumers has flowered from
a business into a way of life. Gangland executions have become as common,
and as grudgingly accepted, as the region's stupefying heat.

"This is a city very close to the United States and very far from God," says
human rights activist Mercedes Murrillo, 69, paraphrasing the famous lament
of a 19th-century Mexican dictator. "The whole city benefits from drug
trafficking.

"People here have permitted what never should have been permitted," she
says. "We, both society and the government, are permitting the killings."

Nearly 200 people have been killed in Culiacan — and 300 in Sinaloa — since
Jan. 1, most victims of turf wars between drug-smuggling gangs.

The state's Public Security Council, an advisory group to the governor,
counts nearly 7,300 murders in the past dozen years. More than 6,000 murder
investigations remain open, says Carlos Garcia, the group's civilian head.

"The talk in all the coffee shops is about how many murders there were
yesterday," says Garcia, a wealthy and politically connected labor
lawyer."We've lost our identity. Now we are all seen as drug traffickers."

Not everyone is a gangster, of course. But finding traffickers isn't
difficult in Culiacan, residents say.

Go to the city's new malls, they advise, and watch the fancy-booted,
gold-draped young men and their bejeweled wives or girlfriends shop at the
expensive stores. Notice the foreign sports cars in the parking lots.

Take a look at the large, ornate villas springing up on the edges of the
city, the good clothes and vehicles in even the poorest neighborhoods.

Or visit the shrine dedicated to Jesus Malverde, a bandit hanged 96 years
ago who has become the unofficial patron saint of northern Mexico's drug
traffickers, they say. The shrine sits across the street from the Sinaloa
governor's offices.

The names and towns inscribed on wall plaques, thanking Malverde for
"protection" and "favors" read like a who's-who list of gangsters and an
atlas of Mexico's narcotics lands.

Even if they're not covering for them, many of Culiacan's law-abiding
citizens have come to accommodations with its criminals.

The rules are fairly simple:

Don't frequent the clubs and restaurants favored by the bad guys.

Don't honk in traffic; you never know who's in the other car.

Don't complain too loudly about the violence.

Don't ask. Don't tell. Don't notice.

"You learn how to live with it," says Marco Antonio Satiate, the new state
police chief who grew up in Culiacan.

"There have been clashes between bands in which innocents have been injured
and killed," he says. "But you know also they are unlikely to mess with
people who aren't in their business."

Still, violence lurks, always threatening.

People here are shot dead on street corners or while sitting in their cars.

They are gunned down while walking out of movie theaters or eating in fine
restaurants.

They are found mutilated on roadsides or tossed into the irrigation ditches
that nurture the state's sprawling tomato and vegetable fields.

Few of the killings are seriously investigated, Murrillo and other critics say.

Fewer still are ever solved.

"When there is a killing today in Sinaloa, they immediately investigate the
victim," says Murrillo. "They don't look for the killer. There is no judge
that judges. There is no trial. And then everyone forgets about it."

Fox administration officials say the recent wave of violence nationwide
springs from a crackdown that has seen major traffickers jailed, killed or
sent running. More than 44,000 trafficking suspects have been jailed in the
past four years, officials say, including senior gang leaders.

In the vacuum, the officials say, midlevel traffickers war with each other
for control and escalate the bloodshed in hopes of forcing the government to
back off.

"It's nothing more than the intention of the organized crime groups to
intimidate all of us," says Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, the federal
government's top organized crime prosecutor.

Narcotics have been a business here for nearly a century. Sinaloa is the
birthplace of the Mexican drug-smuggling trade, and Culiacan is its heart.

Poppies grown in the isolated mountains that divide the state from the
Mexican interior were refined into opium and heroin and shipped north to the
United States in the 1920s.

In the 1960s, marijuana became a major crop in the mountain villages. By the
early 1980s, Colombian cocaine was pouring through here on its way north

Through the decades, Sinaloa's smugglers grew from bumpkins rooted in
mountain villages to billionaire barons commanding high-level protection,
phalanxes of gunmen and international empires.

In recent years, street-corner traffickers, selling all sorts of drugs,
including marijuana and crystal meth, gained increased influence and a
growing share of the violence.

Labs sprang up in poor urban neighborhoods and farm villages. Traffickers
killed one another in disputes over territory and customers, police and
residents say.

A longtime cocaine trafficker, Guzman escaped from federal prison four years
ago with what many think was help from corrupt jailers.

Officials blame Guzman, commonly called "El Chapo," or "Shorty," for much of
the violence in Nuevo Laredo, as he attempts to seize control of smuggling
routes into South Texas dominated by the Gulf Cartel, based in Matamoros.

Guzman has been difficult to capture, officials insist, because he has been
protected by the Sinaloa communities in which he's based.

"He's an intelligent guy. Very, very intelligent," says prosecutor Santiago.
''He unfortunately has this organization in communities he has penetrated
and where he's seen as a hero.

"Some residents see themselves benefiting from the illegal activities of
this guy."

As he has done on the border this year, an alarmed Fox launched an
anti-crime campaign here in late May, urging greater cooperation with the
Sinaloa state government and sending hundreds of troops and paramilitary
federal police to patrol Culiacan's streets.

But Garcia and other activists say any benefits are likely to be
short-lived. They point to a spotty federal anti-narcotics effort and a
revolving-door leadership in local law enforcement. The last six years have
seen three state attorneys general and three state police heads.

"It's out of the authorities' hands now," says Murrillo, the human rights
activist. ''Fifteen years ago there were maybe 10 people who you could
probably say were traffickers. Now there are maybe 500. How are you going to
combat them?"

The federal police patrol Culiacan's streets. They throw up roadblocks to
search for weapons and raid houses suspected of drug activity.

Violent crimes have dropped since the federales arrived. But Murrillo and
other experts say the crime wave will return as soon as everyone figures out
the patterns of the police patrols.

"It's the same as Disneyland," Murrillo says. "It's a shame (the federales)
don't dress like Mickey Mouse, at least to give the children a treat.

"But they don't frighten anyone because everyone knows where they are."

With expectations for law enforcement low, Murrillo and other activists say
the long-term answer lies in weaning society from its drug addiction.

End the political corruption and the public tolerance that shields the
gangsters, they argue, and the violence will dissipate.

"If we don't return to the basics, we are lost," says Garcia, who is
spearheading a Public Security Council initiative emphasizing education and
public activism. "The protection should be in your values, in your beliefs."

"Our principal problem is ordinary corruption," Garcia says. "People don't
trust in the institutions or in the prosecutors. No one believes in anything.

"If there is political will, this will start to end," he says of the
violence. "The trafficking won't disappear completely. But this will end."

dqalthaus@...

HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com | Section: Front page
This article is: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/3220962

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