Blood of Their Brothers: The Border Trilogy, Part I

(Photos by Sergio M. Fernandez)

EVENING WAS STRETCHING OUT against the sky when Valente Montijo-Pompa - the 60-year-old chief of police of Rosarito - sent his bodyguard for a cold six-pack, one beer for each man at headquarters. The day had been hot, and he was already tired. It was June 20, 2006, and the veteran of four decades of police work was easing into his second year as director de seguridad. None of his experience had prepared him for what was to come.

Four of the men at headquarters disappeared in the hour that followed the dispatch of that beer runner. Their tortured bodies wouldn’t be found until the following day. The men’s severed heads were dumped 20 kilometers north, near state police headquarters in Tijuana.

A former rancher with a quiet and imperious bearing, Montijo-Pompa was gently sliding down the backside of his life’s arc when he found himself, on that ill-fated afternoon, desperately feeding bullets into the magazine of an AR-15 rifle. Not knowing the fate of his men, he threw the weapon into the back of a police car, reached for another and prayed (to a God he hadn’t invoked in years) the situation wasn’t as dire as his gut said it was. Miles away, with a menacing convoy of SUVs speeding by, a tire-shop owner was forced to lower his shingle at gunpoint. In another part of town, on the side of a dirt road, an apparent federal agent approached a local policeman.

Before the cop could react, the agent produced a handgun. Squeezing a worn trigger with a Sinaloa-born finger, he sent a single round through the cop’s lower jaw. The business end of the weapon was likely nuzzling the officer’s chin, Montijo-Pompa says. The shot tore a hole in the patrol’s roof, carrying gray matter and 38 years of Catholic devotion heavenward. A ray of light sliced into the cab in the stillness that followed, giving life to dust particles kicked up by the commotion. On the other side of town, an eight-months-pregnant mother rubbed her bulging belly, watching similar particles dance through the air as she cleaned house and waited for her husband’s return.

Montijo-Pompa had assumed command of Rosarito’s police department in June 2005, as Mexico’s morass of internal strife was blossoming into a civil war. He was one of the few men to put his name into the hat when his predecessor, Chief Carlos Bowser-Miret, was assassinated with an AK-47 assault rifle (the calling card of the Tijuana Cartel, a.k.a. the Arellano-Felix Organization, AFO). Montijo-Pompa, who was voted out of office months after the June 2006 slayings, says he originally took the position as a personal favor to Mayor Antonio Macias-Garay, a young and flashy product of Baja California’s reigning Partido Acción Nacional (PAN).

Under Montijo-Pompa’s mandate, the year following Bowser-Miret’s murder was filled with peace in Rosarito, days of living velvet. The town was again in consonance with itself. Tourism was up, crime down and the chimera of security restored - until that torrid afternoon in June 2006. A pale horse appeared that day, bringing with it a wrathful night for three street cops - and a civilian - caught unawares in the firing lines of a society at war.

Related story: Killings of 4 Americans in Tijuana sow fear

“I kept Rosarito clean and peaceful,” Montijo-Pompa says, “because I wasn’t going after these mafia guys. I had a red carpet for them. I’m going to be peaceful to you, and you’re going to be peaceful to me. That was the agreement. I put it in the newspapers, on TV, on the radio, on everything.

“I didn’t want any kind of action in Rosarito - nothing. I didn’t want them throwing bodies here, or the shootings or kidnappings. Nothing like that. You have the boulevard, the Scenic Highway, anywhere you want to transport … that’s not my problem. I didn’t have people, guns or investigation sources. I didn’t even know these guys - who they were or why I was fighting them.

“I’m not going to fight with somebody whose circumstances are 1,000 to my one. I’m not going to be a hero - to kill my people. I’m not going to sacrifice others or convert Rosarito into a battleground or put innocents in the middle. My problem was to keep my guys off their back - because easily 80 percent of my cops were crooked themselves.

“We know we’re just a passing point to Tijuana - loads and loads of contraband go through here every day, every hour. So my crooked police stop the trailers, the cars, everything - and they go for money. They’re gonna take $2,000 or $10,000 or even $40,000; whatever. But these mafia guys are gonna be back. And who’s gonna pay?

“They’re gonna start with the mayor and the police chief, and then you’re gonna be in a real fight, because you’re not gonna be able to respond. When they kidnapped my three boys, there were 200 of them, all of them with the best equipment on the market. What can I do when I’ve got 15 guys available? And they have old Beretta handguns?”

IN 2003, I MOVED TO ROSARITO on a reporting tip from a convicted human smuggler. The following five years afforded me a bottom-up picture of Mexico’s organized-crime paradigm, by way of a group of wily and dentally challenged expatriate American traffickers (a strange brood that had escaped to the less-restrictive climes of Baja California). The cop beheadings happened midway through my time there, and they didn’t add up. Why did the mafia kill three municipal officers, men who were powerless to investigate its transgressions? And who was the fourth victim, the Mexican-born American citizen who had no apparent reason for being in Rosarito?

The answers to those questions have been hindered by the bad newspaper coverage of organized crime in Baja California. The San Diego Union-Tribune often repeats the official line given by police representatives on each side of the border. Reporters from Tijuana’s dailies are scared to dig much deeper than that; three editors from the muckraking journal Zeta have been assassinated since 1988. And as a law enforcement source I call “Buford Pusser” assures me, editors of Tijuana’s major dailies were on the payroll of the Tijuana Cartel in the past.

In 2007, U.S. federal sentencing statements confirmed that Javier Arellano-Felix - the then-head of the AFO (who was captured in international waters off Baja California) - ordered the decapitations. But authorities still couldn’t explain what a 31-year-old civilian named Rodolfo Masforroll was doing at the Rosarito police station or why the AFO wanted him dead. Rumors and theories were ban died about, but as is often the case in Mexico, the next high-profile crime pulled the story off the media radar and out of the public consciousness.

Baja authorities said that though they had no leads on Masforroll, the explanation for the slayings was simple: Rosarito officers interrupted a cartel party at a local ranch. Zeta (widely viewed as the only outlet in town with an honest perspective) suggested cops went to the party one too many times looking for bribe money. Another theory held that Masforroll was a DEA or even CIA operative, working against (or possibly with) the AFO. In the months following the slayings, violence flared across Mexico, and bodies piled up in Baja. But Rosarito didn’t hit the international wires again for almost two years.

Jorge Montero, a former captain in Mexico’s army (and a Mexican special forces vet), took the reins of the town’s police department at the beginning of December 2007. Weeks later, an 18-man cartel commando came gunning for him. The team stormed police headquarters in broad daylight, killing one of Montero’s bodyguards and wounding another. Only one member of the assault team has been arrested, and he was a Rosarito cop. It’s widely believed the majority of men on that commando raid were Montero’s own officers.

The event made for headline fodder on both sides of the border and was a pointed reminder that cops and corruption have become so closely tied in Mexico it’s hard to separate them. Montijo-Pompa says systematic graft dates to the arrival of the Spaniards, when the indigenous tribes who fought the Europeans were eradicated, and sycophants and the venal flourished. By the 20th century, he says, corruption had become ingrained in the cultural fabric.

Dr. David Shirk, the head of the University of San Diego’s Trans-Border Institute, demurs. The TBI studies Mexico’s judicial system and its challenges, and Shirk says corruption there is merely the reflection of a weak judicial system. According to TBI statistics (which closely match the numbers of law specialist Dr. Dante Haro of the University of Guadalajara), little more than 1 percent of crimes in Mexico are successfully prosecuted. Those figures come from an assumed mass of all crimes called the cifra negra. It’s impossible to tally the country’s universe of transgressions, Shirk says, so researchers, needing that theoretical base, construed the “black statistic.”

“Somebody is stealing a quarter out of my ashtray at home right now, and I’ll never know about it,” Shirk says. “Or somebody steals my bike and it only cost me $20 at a yard sale … I’m not going to report it to authorities. They’re part of that black universe of crimes we’ll never know about. Murder, on the other hand, has a very high incidence of reporting. All of them together compose the cifra negra.”

Researchers say only 25 percent of crimes are reported in Mexico. That contrasts with 65 percent in the United States. Mexicans clearly don’t trust their police. Of that 25 percent, authorities develop suspects in about one out of five cases - only 4.6 percent of total crimes. About a third of those are then brought to trial: 1.6 percent of the cifra negra.

A high-level source in Mexico’s attorney general’s office, the PGR (Procuraduría General de la República, the nation’s preeminent security agency), tells me Shirk’s numbers are right on - but his conclusion is off. Montijo-Pompa is right, the source says, corruption in Mexico is cultural.

“If you grow up in a system of corruption, one that is based in corruption, how do you know anything but corruption?” she says. “The problem is education. We need to show officials and police there is another way.”

She talks of a contemporary atmosphere of virtual impunity for killers. Beginning in the mid-20th century, she says, and escalating with cocaine in the 1970s, the Mexican government - mainly through the PGR - controlled the country’s organized-crime network. It was the government that officiated in criminal disputes and apportioned plazas - areas of influence and drug-thoroughfare, the rights to which were leased by crime syndicates. It’s not that cartels didn’t kill 30 and 40 years ago, she says; they just did it quietly - with the cooperation and pacifying oversight of the government.

Her story was echoed by claims that several law enforcement officials in Baja California made to me, and it parallels statements made by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, a jailed drug baron known as Mexico’s Godfather. Gallardo told Mexico’s La Jornada newspaper in February that in the 1980s it was the PGR that doled out plazas in Mexican territory.

A source at Los Pinos, Mexico’s White House, tells me President Felipe Calderon has dismantled the old system of government-mafia pacts and severed communication with organized crime. Ironically, the source says, that might be one of the factors driving the bloodshed. To put pressure on the government and force it back to the negotiating table, the mafiosos have begun targeting the civilian population with bloodletting and terror. Nothing demoralizes the public more quickly than killing its police chief or beheading its officers, and nothing affects the immediate policy of a government more than a terrified citizenry.

BUFORD PUSSER holds a sensitive position with Baja California’s judiciary and acts as liaison to the Mexican army. Before that, he held a high post in Tijuana’s beleaguered police department. He needs two hands to count the number of his friends who have been assassinated, and he stoically recounts two attempts on his own life. In 2007, I asked him why the AFO had killed those Rosarito cops so gruesomely - and if Montijo-Pompa had something to hide (as another police source indicated). Pusser told me he thought the former chief was clean but peripherally responsible for the death of Adrian Masforroll - who, he said, had to be one of the unluckiest men in North America.

According to Pusser, in the months leading up to the killings, Montijo-Pompa took up a private collection to clandestinely buy weapons for Rosarito’s police department. The former rancher collected between $10,000 and $20,000 and sent two officers to a Phoenix gun show to buy AR-15s (semiautomatic M-16s). As non-U.S. citizens, the Rosarito cops couldn’t buy weapons in Arizona, so they found Masforroll - who worked construction and had crossed into the States years before, eventually achieving legal status - and convinced him to help. The Mexican immigrant went to the show and bought a half-dozen rifles.

The Rosarito cops went back to Masforroll’s house, dismantled the weapons, hid the parts in a vehicle and drove home - their mission a success. Weapons in hand, and satisfied with the operation, the chief sent his men back to the United States a month later for more. They recontacted Masforroll and returned to the gun show - where they suspected they were being tailed. After procuring the weapons, the trio returned to Masforroll’s house. There, a task force of ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) agents, FBI and local cops pounced on them.

The Rosarito officers were lucky - they were merely sent home. Masforroll was charged with a class-four felony. During the booking process, Phoenix cops realized his paperwork wasn’t in order; he wasn’t a citizen at all. With the felony charge still standing, Masforroll was deported to Mexico. It had been years since he’d lived in his native country, and he didn’t know where to turn. Rosarito officers rented him an apartment, with a promise to get him back across the border.

He began spending afternoons with Montijo-Pompa’s best cop, an officer named Ismael Torres Arellano (no connection to the cartel). Torres was on disability leave, and on the afternoon of June 20, 2006, he left his wife at home - with a baby two weeks from birth - and took Masforroll to police headquarters, where the two men found themselves in the tragically wrong place at the wrong time.

Until Police Chief Bowser-Miret’s murder, the town’s first high-level assassination, Rosarito was viewed as an insignificant satellite of the mafia-ridden Tijuana, not worth the AFO’s attention. To calm nerves, Mayor Macias-Garay turned to longtime cop Montijo-Pompa, his old friend. After being appointed, the new chief realized Rosarito’s police department had no automatic rifles - an oddity for a municipality that just 10 years before had been part of Tijuana, one of the country’s most violent plazas.

The Mexican army, which controls all firearms in the country, is fiercely guarded about automatic weapons, Montijo-Pompa says. It’s been less than 100 years, after all, since Mexico’s last bloody revolution. In 2005, the wait time for an AR-15 order was two to three years, and the former rancher knew he would likely be out of office before his weapons order arrived at headquarters.

“Do you understand that policemen in Mexico have to get down on their knees and beg for a single bullet?” he asks. “While it is nothing for the narcos to go practice with 3,000 rounds for their AK-47s.”

Current chief Montero says there’s a deeper explanation for the dearth of weapons: Mayor Macias-Garay was up to his ears in the AFO and didn’t want to arm his own officers, who might then war with the men lining his pockets. The word on Rosarito streets is that the former mayor had, and continues to have, tight ties with the Arellanos - and that he became a millionaire during his three years in office. Records show he owns several properties in Southern California, as well as a development company. His salary as mayor was $30,000 a year. (Though I interviewed him in late 2006, he’s ignored numerous attempts to contact him for this article.)

Local lore says the city attorney under Macias-Garay, a man named Juan Esquivel-Fiero (who is the head of a five-brother political dynasty in Rosarito), was also complicit with the AFO. In 2004, I went to see his brother, Alberto, who was then a subcommander in Rosarito’s police department and a friend of an American who went by the alias Big Brother (a former human smuggler who was one of my primary sources). Big Brother said the mafia ran Rosarito and that the city’s government was thoroughly mixed up with it (a claim that seemed dubious at the time, as the pueblo still carried the tenor of an idyllic beach town).

When Big Brother disappeared in 2004, I went to see Alberto - a corpulent, lightskinned man of 34, with a thick, black mustache. He said he had gone to high school in the United States, and his English was decent. After a couple of meetings, he told me Macias-Garay wanted to promote him. Then he asked me to help him find a security guard job in the United States. The incongruity - a bright career outlook in Rosarito versus his desire to flee north - became more muddled when he told me he feared for his life and his family.

“I now have a heart condition,” he said. “The stress is making my heart bad. If I don’t leave here soon, I will die.”

“How many people live in Rosarito?” I asked.

“About 85,000.”

“And how many murders were there here last year?”

“Sixteen,” he said.

That same year, I interviewed then-Police Chief Carlos Bowser-Miret. When I asked him about Alberto’s fear for his life, he shrugged it off, saying many people were scared in Rosarito. We talked about human smuggling, and I told him one of my sources had said that he, Bowser-Miret, was connected to the cartel. He laughed that off but agreed to meet again. If I was looking for organized crime, he said, I should check the background of Juan Esquivel-Fiero.

When Bowser-Miret was assassinated, months later, Alberto - one of his immediate subordinates - was named as a suspect; Bowser-Miret had recently quarreled publicly with Alberto’s brother Juan. Alberto was later cleared, but he left the police department. Juan maintained his post until PAN was voted out in 2007. All of which, by mere association, has darkened Montijo-Pompa’s reputation - a case that illuminates the great challenge of contemporary Mexican cops. With so many corrupt brothers-in-arms, and when la mordita (”the bite,” or bribe) has become a way of life for so many, who can be trusted?

“I can go with you to the church and show you,” the former chief says. “See, on my hands - nothing. Not a penny. Never. The problem is, when you start biting the money, when you make the first bite, that’s when you are through - with everything. You are through with yourself, your career, your name, your family - everything. Because once you take the bite, they own you.”

At the same time, he says, there’s little wonder so many cops go bad. It’s not as if they have to kill people or even carry drugs. Often, it’s as easy as turning one’s head at a certain time or offering obscure information when needed, trivial obligations that earned serious money for Rosarito cops who were taking home $900 a month in 2006 - and who, in many cases, had gone into debt during six months of unpaid academy training. (Police in Mexico have no benefits, health insurance or pensions.)

“This guy comes out of the academy hungry and broke,” Montijo-Pompa says, “with a wife and kid depending on him; with a mortgage, furniture rental and the loan he took from his brother. And the first car he stops, a guy offers him $40 instead of taking a ticket. It doesn’t take long to realize that if he wants to make $200 a day or even $500, it’s possible - it’s only a matter of how much he wants to play the game.

“And what happens if today is my last day?” he asks. “Once I finish, I go and take back my gun and my uniform. I don’t have any kind of retirement package or medical service, no farewell, no goodbye … nothing. Go and take care of yourself. Can you fulfill that obligation? Can you live with 100 or 1,000 enemies in the streets, waiting for you? How far can you go? If I’ve got the money, I have to move from here tomorrow. What am I going to do, sell my house every day for the rest of my life?”

MOST OF MEXICO’S COPS, like Montijo-Pompa and Montero, are policia preventive - they can stop a crime in progress. But if it happens before they arrive on the scene, it’s out of their hands. At that point, it moves on to the state-level PGJE (Procuraduría General de Justicia del Estado). According to the Mexican constitution, only state- and federal-level authorities - 25 percent of the country’s police force - have powers of investigation.

It didn’t take the bad guys long to figure out that that if an investigation could be stalled on a PGJE investigator’s desk, it was as good as closed - which has left the country’s investigators facing the Mexican choice of plata o plomo (silver or lead) for decades. As a result, loyalties at the PGJE and the PGR are among the most mercurial in Mexico. And the violence has metastasized in the past 20 years - now even municipal cops live in fear.

Montijo-Pompa says he was 99 percent sure he would be killed during his tenure as chief - and I was, too. In Mexico, death has become as capricious - and as meaningless - as those dancing particles of Sonoran dust. After five years in the front row, watching the country’s civil war (a conflict fomented by and underwritten with U.S. drug demand) and the steadily climbing body count, I’ve come to see the slayings of June 20 and events like them - the multi-ton drug busts, assassinations and three-hour shootouts - as small acts in an expansive, though largely accidental, ruse. Bit parts in a giant sleight-of-hand that’s been used to distract two willfully misled republics from the real story: the steady and uninterrupted flow of banned substances (cocaine chief among them) and undocumented immigrants.

The first human flaw - one as old as the Garden and as deep as the collective unconscious - wasn’t knowledge, after all, but the greed to have that knowledge at whatever cost. And with hundreds of billions of narco- and narco-defense dollars at stake in this, the age of über-capitalism and exaltation of the greed factor - where the demoralizing effects of terror have emasculated binational journalism - hard truths have taken a back seat to self-interest and expediency. And special interests on both sides of the border - American big business and upper-level Mexican organized crime - are reaping huge profits off the chaos. The honest and valiant of Mexico, meanwhile, are being sacrificed en masse to the machinations of artifice and the inexorable demands of the market.

Part II of The Border Trilogy, “All the Dead Heroes,” examines the lives - and despair - of a pair of honest Mexican cops. The country’s mutating mafia structure and a perfect storm of conflicting factors have led to an unprecedented spike in bloodshed and prompted serious comparison with 1990s Colombia, all of which reached a crisis pitch in Rosarito on June 20, 2006.

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