All the Dead Heroes: The Border Trilogy - Part II

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment of San Diego Magazine’s The Border Trilogy. For Part I, click here.

On a sunny Rosarito morning in the first week of June 2006, little Hayndel Torres-Arellano awoke before his parents. He nudged awake his father, Ismael, and then his eight-months-pregnant mother, Negrita (Little Dark One, so nicknamed for the jet-black hair and deep brown eyes offsetting her broad, pretty face). Then he washed up for school. The smell of eggs soon filled the house, and with an hour before the start of kindergarten, the family sat down to eat.

Not yet in primary school, and sporting a gaping hole where a front tooth should be, Hayndel already knew what he was going to be when he grew up - a policeman, just like his dad. Ismael was the best officer in the history of the department, according to his chief, and Hayndel followed him around like an imprinted duckling. That morning, the boy had a strange notion in his head, as 6-year-olds are wont to do.

“Papi,” he said to Ismael, “who’s going to die first - you or Mom or me?”

Ismael paused, discomfited. “I don’t know, little man,” he replied. “I just know I love you both. Goodness only knows who goes first and who follows. It could be me or your mother, even your little brother.”

“Why?”

“Because God wants it that way,” Ismael said.

Hayndel considered the remark while chewing his eggs, his little head tilted to the side.

“I’m going to ask you a favor,” Ismael said after another pause. “If I die first, don’t cry - because I’m going to be with you. I won’t be walking next to you, but I’ll be at your side. You’ll be the man of the house, and you’ll have to care for your mother and little brother.”

Ismael had grown up in Mexico City, the oldest of four children. He became the man of the house before he was 5, when his own father died. His dream had been to go to military school, but he gave that up to provide for his family. At 17, he took a job as a cop. He met Negrita years later in central Mexico. By the time of the unsettling talk with Hayndel, the most pressing concern on his mind was his weight. Out of action and on disability, his waistline was growing.

Five months earlier, the 31-year-old had taken a spill while on patrol on one of the department’s off-road bikes. When he called Negrita that night and calmly explained he was in the hospital, she went into a panic. She didn’t relax until seeing him, surrounded by other officers, in a bed at the Red Cross. It wasn’t the shy smile on his face that eased her nerves but the chortling of his fellow cops. As it turned out, the fall he’d taken wasn’t serious. Ismael didn’t tear the ligaments in his knee until after the crash, as he attempted to extricate his pinned leg from beneath the bike - and his cop buddies weren’t going to let him live it down.

In the months that followed, he became something of a househusband. In the morning he would wake with Negrita and eat a quick breakfast with Hayndel. Then he’d take the boy to school. Though he was the kind of cop eager for action, he was also fawningly proud of his young family.

“Both of us were eating for two,” Negrita remembers. “With me pregnant and him incapacitated, we were gaining weight. It was cute, though. When he’d come back from the school, he’d say, ‘Do you want to go for tamales?’ I’d say, ‘Okay,’ and we’d go out. Then we’d come back and clean up the house. He helped me a lot, which surprised everybody; they just couldn’t believe it. Then we’d watch TV until the end of kindergarten and go for our son.”

By the time I met her, in September 2008, Negrita was two years into widowhood. Her boys, 2 and 8 years old, were thousands of miles away, with her parents, in central Mexico. Ismael had “fallen” on June 20, 2006, in a grisly three-cop killing at the hands of the Arellano Felix Organization (AFO). “I can’t bring myself to say he’s dead,” Negrita said. The brutal slaying shocked the pueblo of Rosarito into an apoplectic realization: Its small-town ethos wasn’t immune from the scourge of the latest cartel development sweeping the country. That devil-hen phenomenon, the Colombianization of Mexico, had come to roost in Baja.

A perfect storm of disparate factors has led to Mexico’s unprecedented crisis of violence, and foremost among them is 9/11. As America has become more earnest about walling off its southern neighbor (billions of dollars have been poured into the border and its protection since 2001), it’s become more difficult to cross contraband and people into the contiguous 48. Organized crime has reacted accordingly. The leaders of the cartel world may be ruthless and in some cases pathological, but they are, above all, businessmen. And the Mexican and U.S. governments have (ironically), by virtue of deeming commerce in their product illegal - thereby forcing them into black, unpoliced markets - kept them from government oversight, fair trade and antitrust demands.

The cartels are, strangely enough, capitalism’s poster children - econo-anthropological laboratories charting the evolution of a self-regulated (black) market system. But the black market is merely a reflection of the licit, and those renegade, often bloody captains of the narcotics industry - one of the new century’s highest-grossing - are beholden to the immutable laws of supply and demand. As it’s become more difficult to cross cocaine into the United States, crime syndicates in Mexico have followed the path of least resistance, backing off drug running and branching out into complementary markets - extortion, kidnapping and murder for hire. Given Mexico’s weak and beleaguered legal system and the fact crime syndicates were perfectly out fitted for the new rackets, the permutation has been so seamless that most of Mexican society didn’t see the noose tightening until violence spiked in 2005.

Simultaneously, the cartels have established a domestic market for hard drugs. The strategy (probably more accidental than formulated) has been so successful that up to half the cocaine traveling through Mexico now stays within its borders. Small towns like Rosarito - in many ways provincial and hermetic societies with auras of Catholic simplicity and innocence-have been blindsided. Their legal, social, rehabilitation and policing structures are unable to deal with the epidemic. It’s as if the 1980s crack boom that devastated parts of Washington, D.C. and South Central Los Angeles has been unleashed on Mayberry.

Today, Mexico is dealing not only with world-class organized crime in its top-tier cartel syndicates but with a ripe and burgeoning criminal farm league. Under those cartels, at the far end of the paradigm, are street-level, loosely banded networks that supply the country’s population of recreational drug users (and increasingly, junkies). Buttressed between the two extremes are three or four levels of middlemen - business-minded outlaws who become increasingly savvy, wealthy and dangerous as they move up the ladder of those living in the shadow of the law.

At the pinnacle of that food chain, cartel capos are putting politicians into office through lavish campaign financing and blatant manipulation of ballots. On the local level, they intimidate - and corrupt - police forces so completely that in many areas of the country they are effectively the law. Mid level networks, meanwhile, are responsible for much of the current bloodshed. Newspaper vendors, dealing cocaine on the side, are taking bullets in the head for selling on the wrong turf, and entire networks of low-level thugs are being murdered for breaches of loyalty (150 people were executed in Tijuana in October 2008, and many of the cadavers showed up in groups of 10 and even 20).

An anonymous source I call Buford Pusser says the police departments of Rosarito and Tijuana are eaten up with cartel influence, and the Mexican army doesn’t trust either of them. Pusser holds a position in Baja California’s judiciary and acts as a liaison to the military. He’s worked with police forces in Tijuana, Rosarito and Ensenada, and needs two hands to count friends who have been assassinated. He’s also survived several attempts on his own life.

I first met him on a trip to the PGR (Procuraduría General de la República) office in Tijuana - the federal police - where he told me that Rosarito, contrary to popular belief, has always been an important plaza for the AFO. Its coastline is used for bringing in drug shipments by both boat and plane. He also talked about the 1994 assassination of Police Chief Jose Federico-Benitez, a crusader widely hailed as the last honest cop in Tijuana. (For more on the Benitez assassination, go to sandiegomagazine.com/exclusives.)

After that brazen shooting, the state appointed a special prosecutor - a 35-year-old gung-ho lawyer named Hodín Gutierrez-Rico. He pushed hard and was able to bring two PGR agents to trial. One of them did a short stint in jail.

“These mafia guys seem to own the courts,” Buford says. “They never lose. Never. So Hodín was lucky to send one guy to jail. The rest, nobody touched them. The guy washing cars at the PGR, he was the one who went to jail. He stayed in for like two months. That was it.

“And then, one night, Hodín - with his wife and little boy, in front of his house - the mafia came and they shot him 145 times. Then they ran over him with the car and cut him to pieces. They were playing with him. When they moved the body, there was a hole in the ground. That was his payback.

“For me, Federico-Benitez is a hero. Gutierrez-Rico is a hero, too. But they are dead. It’s as simple as that. All the heroes in Mexico are dead. And nothing changes. We are talking about 1994, Hodín in ‘95, and still the same shit. Worse and worse and worse and worse.”

The morning of June 20, 2006, was much like any other for Negrita. Ismael took Hayndel to kindergarten and returned with tamales. Later in the day, he went to see a new associate, Rodolfo Masforroll-Aguilar. Originally from Veracruz, Mosforroll-Aguilar had immigrated to Phoenix, years before. He’d been deported back to Mexico after taking a felony rap for buying guns at the behest of Rosarito cops.

Those cops - who were responsible for his undoing in the United States - rented Mosforroll-Aguilar a small apartment. Their plan was to slip him back into the States over the busy Fourth of July weekend, at the San Ysidro Port of Entry. In the meantime, he spent afternoons with Ismael. At about 5 in the afternoon, the two men drove to headquarters to talk with Montijo-Pompa.

“Ismael was the best cop I had in my whole career,” Montijo-Pompa says. “Whenever there was a call - I don’t care whether it was a robbery, an assault, whatever - Ismael was going to be the first one there, always. The first one through the door, the first to get shot at.”

Ismael was itching to return to work, ahead of doctor’s orders. But he’d already returned once, prematurely, and re-injured his knee. Convincing the chief was unlikely, but he gave it a shot.

“No way,” Montijo-Pompa told him. “Don’t even try me.”

Montijo-Pompa, Ismael and Mosforroll-Aguilar constituted half the group at headquarters on that slow and simmering afternoon. Jesus Ballesteros-Hernandez, the subcommander of the commercial police division, joined them unexpectedly. A portly and good-natured cop with a quiet and honest disposition, he was one of Montijo-Pompa’s trusted confidants (the chief figured up to 80 percent of his officers were corrupt).

A city administrator stopped by and suggested a cold drink to combat the heat. Montijo-Pompa dispatched his personal bodyguard, Benjamin Fabian-Ventura, to pick up a sixpack of Sol beer. The loyal and stone-quiet army vet ran to the corner store. Shortly after he returned, the phone rang. It was the daughter of one of Montijo-Pompa’s friends.

The friend was an old rancher and landowner, or ejidario, who’d become a millionaire in the past two decades, as land prices in coastal Rosarito had gone through the roof - making the ejidarios prime kidnapping targets. The girl, through sobs and tears, told Montijo-Pompa that a group of armed men was waiting outside her family’s ranch to grab her father. It was just after 6 p.m.

The chief sent a subcommander named Cazares to reconnoiter. At the moment, there were 15 cops on duty, and the department had almost a dozen automatic weapons. Montijo-Pompa figured he could stand up to a band of up to 12 men - anything more and he’d have to wait for a state police backup.

As he waited for Cazares, he pulled several AR-15 rifles from the department’s ordnance room. With sweat beading on his brow, he began feeding ammunition into empty magazines and gave his first pivotal command of the day. He sent his bodyguard to his house to retrieve a stash of rifles. Ismael - realizing what was happening - grabbed the hesitant Ballesteros-Hernandez and Mosforroll-Aguilar and shoved them into his car.

“I tried to stop him,” Montijo-Pompa says in recollection. “Everything happened so quickly then. And when I think about it, he was in such a hurry - in a hurry to get killed. He left like crazy and went to my house like crazy, and they hopped in the patrol and left.”

Lupita, Montijo-Pompa’s cleaning lady, remembers that Ismael’s car came to a screeching halt in front of the house, right behind Fabian-Ventura. Ismael jumped out and told Fabian-Ventura to help transfer the automatic weapons from the chief’s patrol unit. The pursy Ballesteros-Hernandez, meanwhile, shuffled about nervously. Mosforroll-Aguilar sat in the back without saying anything.

“Then they took off again, in the two cars, peeling wheels,” Lupita says. “They were in such a hurry, and I knew then that death was chasing after them.”

By that time, Cazares, on his way to the ejidario’s ranch, had run headlong into a hornet’s nest - a band of 30 heavily armed brigands. And that was only one band among many. Reports from neighbors put the total number of roving gunmen at 80 to 150. The men were federal agents, Cazares reported back, and they didn’t want the local cops interfering.

“They’re all in AFI [Agencia Federal de Investigaciones] uniforms,” he squawked over the radio, “and they told me to get the f— out of here.”

Montijo-Pompa was nervous. It was no secret the feds didn’t forewarn local authorities when coming to Baja California, but it augured ill so many would appear without notice.

“What exactly did they tell you?” he asked Cazares.

“They told me ‘Vete la verga de aqui,’ ” he said.

“Oh, shit,” Motijo-Pompa muttered.

His worst nightmare had come to pass. La verga, Spanish slang for penis, is as versatile and widely used in Mexican vernacular as the f-word in English. It’s particularly heavily used in Sinaloa, the coastal Pacific state legendary for criminals and criminal networks. Montijo-Pompa knew feds from Mexico City wouldn’t have used the expression Cazares was reporting. These were Sinaloa-born mafiosos.

And if they were from Sinaloa, it meant they were among the crème de la crème of hired guns. Whoever they were out to get (or were protecting) was a big fish. Whatever the case, the verga transmission marked the last contact with Cazares. The subcommander fell into radio silence, a hellish and frustrating development for Montijo-Pompa.

The chief cursed his absent subaltern and demanded an update, but Cazares didn’t turn up for more than an hour, miles away from the action. It was a window of time he couldn’t explain, and it cost him two years in jail (Zeta, the newspaper, later claimed an officer had been paid $10,000 to vanish, by those faux federal agents). Ismael and Fabian-Ventura, meanwhile, headed for the ejidario’s ranch - disobeying Montijo-Pompa’s directions to return to headquarters. They were unaware of the report of armed gunmen.

With 20 minutes gone by, Montijo-Pompa, at his wits’ end, sent another officer to find Cazares. On the dusty, unpaved road that led to the subcommander’s last known location, the officer made a chilling discovery. Ismael’s car sat on the side of the road, running, with its doors open.

Twenty yards behind it was Fabian-Ventura’s patrol truck. It, too, was running, and it had a bullet hole in the roof. A pool of blood was puddled on the floorboard, and fleshy debris covered the back window.

About that same time, a long convoy of black, window-tinted SUVs sped past a rural tire shop. The vehicles kicked up so much dust the sun disappeared, so the shop owner hosed down the dirt road. That caused mud puddles, which were splashed by the trucks. A mafia lieutenant in one of them saw the puddles and stopped. He knew dusty vehicles in Baja were ubiquitous, but wet ones weren’t - the mud was making his crew an obvious mark. He pulled his gun and told the shop owner to call it a day if he wanted to live to see the next.

By that time, Montijo-Pompa had contacted Rosarito mayor Antonio Macias-Garay, who put in a distraught call to state authorities: Bring in the cavalry. Montijo-Pompa wanted desperately to launch a rescue effort, but it was clear he was facing a far superior force. He personally talked to Julian Leyzaola - who is currently chief of Tijuana’s traumatized police department but was then head of Baja California’s state police - and told him to bring his men down the new highway connecting the east of Tijuana to Rosarito. That would block the probable escape route of the kidnappers.

State officers didn’t show up for almost three hours. An incensed Montijo-Pompa wonders at their inexcusable delay. Whatever their reason, he says, they didn’t follow his advice. They arrived on the main road coming into town (on the side opposite the ejidario’s ranch) and failed even to enter city limits. They didn’t make it to the ranch until the following morning.

Macario Gonzalez (currently an official with Baja California’s secretary general) was with the deputy governor’s office in 2006 and assigned to Rosarito; he talked to Montijo-Pompa the night of the kidnappings. In a 2008 interview with me, he confirmed the state police sat on the outskirts of town for several crucial hours. He says they were blocking egress from the back roads leading out of town.

Hogwash, Montijo-Pompa counters. “Anybody who knows Rosarito knows where the mafiosos would be leaving, on the other side of town, exactly where I told Leyzaola to be.” It wasn’t till after dark that Montijo-Pompa called the wives of Ismael and Ballesteros-Hernandez (Fabian-Ventura was unmarried). He told the women their husbands had been called to Tijuana for court and would have to spend the night there. Negrita thought the situation odd-it wasn’t at all like Ismael to neglect calling personally - but Montijo-Pompa was like part of the family, and she trusted him implicitly.

The next morning, after a sleepless night, Montijo-Pompa received a call: Four bodies had been discovered, encobijido (wrapped in blankets), near a grade school. Officials had to wait for forensics experts from Tijuana before unwrapping them. At that point they made a gruesome discovery: The bodies had no heads. A call an hour later told authorities where to find them - near state police headquarters in Tijuana.

Montijo-Pompa was crushed, but there was still work to do. He needed to alert two wives and Fabian-Ventura’s family - and Negrita was eight months pregnant. He arrived at her house with several other officers and an ambulance and told her Ismael had died in an auto accident. Hayndel was listening in another room. When Negrita approached him, he wouldn’t look her in the face, and he couldn’t talk. He was mute for months.

The slain officers, whom Montijo-Pompa refers to as “my right hand, my left hand and my eyes,” had been beaten and tortured. An autopsy showed that Ballesteros-Hernandez had a heart attack - it’s not clear whether the thrombosis was caused directly by torture or by the sight of the horrors unfolding in front of him. It turns out those putative federal cops were actually a mafioso security force protecting a large cartel party on a ranch close to the home of the ejidario. After Cazares mysteriously left the mafioso security detail in peace, other officers showed up, and an incensed Javier Arellano-Felix, the head of the AFO at the time, ordered their killings. Court records later attributed the kill order - heads are gonna roll - to the AFO capo.

Word on the street in Rosarito is that highranking police officials were in attendance at the party - which might help explain Leyzaola’s baffling negligence. By the time state cops arrived at the ranch, they found six straggling underlings, reportedly inebriated, who had been left to fix a flat on a cartel pickup. The men said a Rosarito cop had been paid off (they later recanted). Cazares was arrested a month later by Mexico City authorities, following a week-long federal investigation. Nothing more came of the inquiry.

The outstanding question still flutters around motive - why such savagery? One theory holds the mafia was sick of being shaken down by local cops. But more likely than that, Javier Arellano-Felix, increasingly desperate - since 2002, Mexican and U.S. authorities have systematically dismantled the AFO hierarchy - was reacting with the new cartel tactic of terror toward the government and civilian population; part of the mafia zeitgeist of the new century: attrition through brutality.

IN 2008, I SAT DOWN with Negrita. She told me she’d recently talked with Hayndel, by phone. The 8-year-old had called her in tears.

“Don’t be mad at me, Mommy,” he said. “But I’m beginning to lose Dad’s voice - I can’t remember what he sounded like. I try so hard, but I can’t remember.”

For Hayndel, the ashes are returning to ashes and the dust is settling, but his legacy - the fulfillment of his father’s last wish - has been stolen. He is ready to be the man of the house, but in Mexico, cops don’t have benefits, a retirement or a widows-and-orphans fund. Ismael’s family is on its own. And Negrita, as a single mother on a secretary’s salary, can’t afford to raise her children (her youngest was born two weeks after Ismael fell). The boys live thousands of miles away in central Mexico, with her parents. It’s as if, she says, her life has ended. When the AFO killed her husband, it killed her as well.

As a walking casualty, Negrita joins a burgeoning population of survivors of the 10,000- plus fatalities - those just since the turn of the century - in Mexico’s internecine civil war, with more than 5,000 killings in 2008 alone. It’s a place where honest cops have short life expectancies, and the rest are involved (to some extent) with organized crime.

When I moved back to Rosarito, early in 2007, I stumbled onto a longtime cop who insisted all the chiefs there are corrupt. “Even Montijo-Pompa?” I asked. We talked about the beheadings, and the cop nervously drove me to the ranch where the deed had occurred. He told me Montijo-Pompa was with holding information.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Do you know whose ranch this is?” he said. “It belongs to Macias-Garay, the mayor.”

Other sources have told me the claim is true. Montijo-Pompa says he’s tried to track down property records, but they’re inconclusive. Macias-Garay, meanwhile, has rebuffed attempts to contact him for comment. And so the owner of the ranch is a mystery.

“What good would it do to know, anyway?” Montijo-Pompa says. “Nothing changes here … nothing.”

S.D. Liddick writes for San Diego Magazine, where this article was originally published.

Tags: SDNN

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 10:40 am and is filed under Local News, Mexico, Politics & Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.