Rosarito police officers. (Photo by Sergio Fernandez)

Editor’s Note: This is the third installment of San Diego Magazine’s The Border Trilogy. For Part I, click here ^[1]. For Part II, click here ^[2]. Photos by Sergio Fernandez. ^[3]

A Rosarito cop enters the municipal palace — City Hall — and approaches the office of the secretary of security, Jorge Montero. Unholstering his sidearm, he evacuates the weapon of its magazine. He clears the chamber and hands the pistol to a dark-skinned, crew-cut guard. No words are exchanged — only stolid tension.

The guard is a former soldier in the Mexican Army, and he is one of three young men dressed in black paramilitary gear. He totes an AR-15 rifle — which is locked and loaded, with an extra magazine taped into place for easy retrieval — and stares stonily into the building’s central courtyard. He tucks the officer’s firearm into the back of his belt and dismisses the man with a tilt of his head.

It repeats interminably in this small beach town, where officers interface awkwardly with the prefect’s rigid security detail. Former servicemen compose that detail, and they know that the interim separating their boss from the last attempt on his life is measured in mere months. They also know the hit team that came for him was manned by the department’s own cops.

Montero believes the cartel wanted to make a statement more than a kill. Maybe those gunmen wouldn’t have assassinated him. Maybe the event was only to be a high-stakes kidnapping — a daring action to cast aspersion on the sovereignty of the city, the state and the Mexican Army.

He slides a DVD into a laptop, and a shot of the parking lot behind police headquarters flickers onto the screen. A procession of vehicles appears, Montero’s armored truck in the middle. The secretary’s entourage has just returned to the office. The security footage reads 12:49 p.m. It is the afternoon of Dec. 18, 2007, three weeks after Montero assumed command. At 12:52, a plainclothes bodyguard in the rear parking lot wheels around and sprints for the back door. Twenty yards away, his partner, Guillermo Castro-Corona, stands at the side of Montero’s vehicle.

A convoy of five black SUVs appears. A point car in front and a chase car behind break off and pass from sight. A commando team with evident tactical training alights, and Castro-Corona — his egress blocked by the armored truck — is shot down immediately. A hooded dragoon in a flak jacket moves to his position and ensures the kill. The picture cuts to the front of the station, where another team of commandos, moving in a three-man unit, enters the building.

“Holy shit, sir, they’re feds,” says a wide-eyed public relations officer.

His name is Fernando, and he is 23 years old. This is the first time he’s seen the footage. He’s young enough to be shocked by the violence and so green he’s ignorant of the fact the cartel always comes in federal police uniforms.

Outfitted in a farrago of camouflage and Kevlar with AFI (Agencia Federal de Investigaciones) insignia, the synchronized commandos cover each other’s backs and guard their lanes of fire. Heads pivot, and fingers tease triggers on automatic weapons. At the sole hallway leading to the secretary’s office, they turn the corner as a unit, with their target trapped and outgunned.

“It’s my own movie,” Montero says with a broad smile, swinging around in his swivel chair.

This is the third time I’ve interviewed the secretary, and his character deepens with every encounter. He is a reserved man with good manners, and he seems mildly amused — by the security footage or the attention it’s generated, or both. The feel in the air is otherwise surreal, given the Hollywood nature of the video and the fact its star is seated on the other side of a large desk. A slight man with looks that are given more to European genes than the indigenous strains in his mestizo Mexican blood, Montero is soft-spoken and bespectacled.

The smart appearance — one more befitting of a high school math teacher or an accountant — is at variance with his plucky personality. It’s not the likeness you might imagine behind the vigorous security detail he carries. Until the summer of 2008, the secretary was guarded by a Special Forces detachment from the Mexican Army.

“I think they had certain objectives,” Montero says of the cartel that came for him. “With the presidential administration of Calderon, people began talking of militarizing police departments. In Mexico, the most trusted institution is the military, maybe even more than the church. So I think the mafia had the idea that ‘If the government puts a military man in office and we manage to kill him, it will be a message — a message that whomever you appoint, we’ll kill. Or… you can cooperate with us.’

“They didn’t manage to kill me, but they said, ‘Okay, he’ll step down. And another will come, and we’ll kill him — or at least try to kill him — and he’ll go, too.’ But I’m still here. So what’s been created? A lot of frustration. And for that, I know they’ll try to kill me again. But I have to continue serving my country.”

Montero is a Special Forces vet and the son of a Mexican general. He was in the army for 24 years and retired in 2007 because of a back injury. He was recommended for the Rosarito position by Aponte Polito, a firebrand general in charge of the army’s second sector. Polito, in just over a year in Baja California, developed a reputation for results in the fight against organized crime. He also managed to ruffle the feathers of a list of local bureaucrats. One source surmises that in taking the lead in the fight against organized crime, Polito stole the thunder of underperforming Baja California functionaries.

Rosarito police chief Jorge Montoya. (Photo by Sergio Fernandez)

A political firestorm erupted in the summer of 2008 between the nearly retired Polito and state authorities. The general was recalled to Mexico City, ending the providential security arrangement that protected Montero (whose elite guard has since been replaced by the department’s soldiers-turned-cops). Undaunted by the loss of his formidable backer, the secretary has vowed to push on in the struggle against organized crime, a fight many call suicidal and which is ultimately the result of his own refractory sense of honesty. As a municipal police chief, he doesn’t have the power to investigate or challenge the area’s reigning cartel, the AFO — Arellano-Felix Organization — but in refusing to cooperate with it, he’s initiated a war ipso facto.
The incident surrounding General Polito’s dismissal is telling, and may mark a small but salient victory in organized crime’s broad attack on Mexican society. In addition to the internecine war against the country’s police structure, cartels have managed to wend their way into politics at all levels. Though Polito is mum on the subject (Montero says talking to the media precipitated his fall), inside sources suggest the cartel utilized state-level political connections to have him removed. If that’s true, it means even when the capos can’t match the government gun-for-gun, they can flank with the aid of the legislature.

Dr. Dante Haro, a law professor and organized-crime expert at the University of Guadalajara, says that for a generation, Mexico has been the trampoline connecting the coca-producing South American countries and the purchasing states of North America. The country’s business, industry, government and social networks have been saturated with narco money, and a cottage industry of lawful enterprise designed to launder illicit profits has been established (particularly in the money-exchange, hotel and gambling industries). Political campaigns everywhere are being underwritten with drug money, Haro says, and politicos — especially at the state and municipal levels–continue to be compromised.

“I don’t want to be a hero,” Montero says, “because I’m not. But I want people to say, ‘When he was here, he made a difference.’ What’s important is that, one way or another, I’m showing my kids what it is to be a good person. People ask me, ‘Is it worth your life?’ No, it’s not. But I want to be part of those ushering in a new era. Not as Secretary Montero — just as another guy doing his little part to begin the change.”

His point touches on what might be one of the keys to ending Mexico’s civil war — a grass-roots social movement. Organized crime’s latest gambit — putting society-at-large in the middle of its war with the government — may compel a sea change. Mass demonstrations have gained momentum over the past few years as the nostalgic Robin Hood figure associated with 1980s drug bosses has morphed into an unbalanced modern-day pirate, willing to use the lives of his countrymen as leverage.

But if the tidal swing has begun, it’s nascent. The resistance of men like Montero is rare. Police throughout Mexico are walking off the job–often en masse. Entire forces in small towns have abnegated their badges after seeing their names on organized-crime threat lists — an archaic (but no less effective) tactic in a guerrilla war that’s been made more nettlesome by the enemy’s seamless ability to blend with the civilian population. And that was before 2006 when organized crime declared open war on Mexico.

Shortly after taking office, in December of that year, the regime of Mexican president Felipe Calderon followed through on its threat to extradite 15 jailed Mexican drug lords to the United States (the same extradition process that spiked violence in Colombia 15 years ago but also initiated the demise of that country’s major cartels). Mexican narcos responded with increasingly gruesome and terrifying acts against the government and populace. According to Haro, Calderon was forced into playing his last hand — military force — almost immediately after arriving at Los Pinos, Mexico’s White House.

Haro suggests that because Calderon was elected by the barest of margins (the vote ultimately went to the courts, a la Gore-Bush, and was hotly contested by his opponent, the popular leader of Mexico City), the inchoate president used the army to flex his chief-executive muscles and assert his legitimacy. But he may have underestimated the strength of the cartels, Haro says, and the level to which they’d become incorporated into the fabric of Mexican society. As a result, he put the country into a war that may not be winnable.

Rosarito police officers. (Photo by Sergio Fernandez)

More than two years after his offensive was launched, Calderon’s decision to militarize police departments has raised serious political and human rights concerns, but (despite localized victories) hasn’t had a discernible effect on the violence plaguing the country. More than 5,300 people were murdered in Mexico in 2008, most of them in connection with narcotics — a doubling of the 2007 figure. The pandemonium is no surprise, meanwhile, to many of the country’s cops, who say the soldiers patrolling Mexico’s streets are fundamentally different than policemen.

“A soldier, he doesn’t know anything,” says former Rosarito police chief Valente Montijo-Pompa. “His job is not to think. His boss says, ‘Kill,’ he kills whoever is in front of him. A policeman — he’s supposed to know everything that’s happening on his beat. And that’s part of the problem. Sometimes cops know too much.”

The comment touches on the fact that police at all levels have been suborned and corrupted by organized crime. In fact, the former chief says, the Procaduria General de la Republica (Mexico’s attorney general’s office and its top policing organization) was for decades the manager of organized crime’s plaza system.

In 2007, I sat down with a high-level source at the PGR, who acknowledged the agency’s longtime ties with narcos. She said that in the 1990s, the PGR realized the narcotics industry had gone international. In the age of NAFTA and globalization, cartel capos found themselves unbound by the notion of borders.

To combat the trend, Mexican law enforcement began cooperating more closely with authorities in the United States. More recently, it’s put bigger guns on the streets to match the mafiosos’ ever more brutal tactics. But the real question is: How does a country fight against the market system itself? The source had no answer. She fecklessly pointed to the example of Colombia and suggested the worst is yet to come.

The situation is bleak, but Dr. David Shirk, of the University of San Diego’s Trans-Border Institute, says it’s not hopeless. Mexico’s policing structure, he says, looks a lot like the U.S. system did just 70 years ago, before the institution of checks and balances and internal regulation. And even the U.S. government, contrary to popular belief, was never able to conquer organized crime. In the 1930s, it quit the fight on Prohibition, opting out by changing the law. And, Shirk says, even in the 1980s, when heavy federal pressure ostensibly vanquished the Northeast’s Sicilian crime syndicates, evidence suggests the mob merely went deeper underground.

In the age of unfettered capitalism, everything comes back to money, and as one American cop suggests, maybe the difference between the developing nations and the already developed can be divined through Maslow’s hierarchy. Cops in the United States, with their basic needs comfortably managed, are able to address higher, more ethereal notions on the scale, like ethics and justice. While for a cop in Mexico, with low wages, no benefits or retirement, working in a notoriously unsteady job market, the impulse is to set aside as much as possible and to do it quickly — by whatever means necessary, Montijo-Pompa says.

Violence and rhetoric have clouded the situation at the border and given cover to illegal networks connecting drug barons and human smugglers with dirty cops and compromised politicos. But the underlying realities are as transparent as freshman biology and economics 101. Demand is the driving force behind the market system, and America’s thirst for drugs and cheap labor have fueled two of Mexico’s most profitable (illegal) lines of commerce.But even those lines are more complicated than they look. Almost everyone, for instance, loses in the immigration schemata. Mexican immigrants are financially victimized (though abusive U.S. situations are often better than the ones they faced in Mexico), while America’s middle class has become anxious about a population influx it increasingly perceives as a cultural threat. Legislators and border enforcement, meanwhile, have been roundly criticized, because at the heart of the matter is failed immigration law they’ve created and upheld, respectively.

Legal immigration is strictly limited–giving rise to the profitable phenomenon of illegals who work without benefits, insurance, disability coverage, tax garnishments or a livable wage — which should theoretically restrict supply. Yet with a poor country just south of a porous border, American hiring bosses in the poultry, agriculture, manufacturing and construction sectors (among others) have had access to a bottomless pool of undocumented immigrants. The laws of the market are at loggerheads with the laws of the state, and big companies have profited from the confusion. An irreconcilable fact is that as long as the Mexican and U.S. economies are startlingly disparate, an unending stream of people will flow from high-pressure areas of Latin American destitution to low-pressure areas of North American capital abundance (which also explains the relative lack of undocumented traffic — and security — at the United States’ northern border).

Massive corporate representation on Capitol Hill suggests the flawed laws won’t change anytime soon, but it’s business’ suborned supporter, the American consumer, who ensures the system will stay broken. Until Americans are willing to forgo $13 Converse sneakers and 99-cent heads of lettuce, talk of change at the border will remain mere talk. On a parallel track, as long as there is demand for drugs (the case throughout recorded history), and state authority proscribes the use of them (driving up prices), there will be people willing to take risk to fulfill supply. And as the war on drugs has made increasingly clear, it’s impossible to eradicate all the coca, marijuana or poppy seed in the rest of the world.

As Ben Wallace-Wells sedulously detailed in the article “How America Lost the War on Drugs” (Rolling Stone, December 2007), U.S. authorities may finally be waking up — three decades into the fight–to the idea that demand-side policies are the key to mitigating the negative social effects of narcotics. To this point, demand has been addressed more punitively than comprehensively, and the collateral damage is evident. Prison populations have swelled twelve-fold since the inception of the war on drugs, while access to the criminalized products has been virtually unaffected. A generation of addicts, meanwhile, has been treated largely by cops instead of doctors.

As a corollary of proscription, sectors of the sprawling supply chain — especially the monopolistic cartels at the top — have reaped huge rewards. And in the midst of the turbidity they’ve generated, binational law enforcement has, for more than two decades, offered the same tired platitude in the face of increasing violence: The cartels are injured and acting desperately due to policing successes. But even the cops’ most notable triumphs, the dismantling of the upper echelons of several cartels, have engendered their own unintended consequences. The feds have often cut the head off a monster only to create multiple, less-manageable mini-monsters (the AFO is a prime example). Those small syndicates have, in turn, become part of the perfect storm in Mexico’s contemporary crisis.According to Haro, those mini-monsters have been populated by some part of the 132,000 soldiers who deserted Mexico’s army between 2000 and 2006. Similarly, he says, a sizable portion of the country’s police force is playing for both sides of the cop-smuggler divide. And as long as the present conditions persist — with great wealth circulating in the smuggling markets and relative poverty facing those in the law enforcement and military sectors — there will be no mechanism in Mexico to drive change.

Jose Luis Lugo-Baez was a corpulent Rosarito cop with an impudent grin. A fellow officer says he was a known mafia commodity within the department. In the winter of 2008, he was incarcerated for his participation in the attempted assassination of Secretary Montero. When the arrest was announced, I was sitting in front of a television in the Tijuana living room of a source I call Buford Pusser (a liaison between the state and the military who was privy to the particulars of the Lugo-Baez case). The dirty cop stared defiantly at the camera as he was presented at a press conference on the five o’clock news. Behind him were pounds of marijuana, several cell phones and a number of automatic weapons pulled out of the trunk of his patrol car.

Pusser said Lugo-Baez was a brazen asset of the cartel and that he’d been fired from Rosarito’s police force under the Montijo-Pompa regime (which the former chief confirmed). An official in the administration of former mayor Antonio Macias-Garay rescinded the dismissal, though, and gave Lugo-Baez a bodyguard position at City Hall. When Montijo-Pompa was voted out of office, Lugo-Baez was moved back into the department and promoted to subcommander. When Secretary Montero came on board, in December 2007, Lugo-Baez was one of the men who went gunning for him.

Ironically, it may have been Montijo-Pompa, without a badge for more than a year at that point, who saved the secretary’s life.

“Before I left office, I stood asking the government, the state police, ‘Give me guns, give me guns, give me guns,’” Montijo-Pompa says. “And just a week before I left, they sent me five G3 automatic rifles and 2,000 bullets. So I left them over there.

“When Montero came, he found these five guns. His bodyguards were ex-military guys — they belonged to the group I formed — and they knew how to use the guns. When the cartel came, they never expected those cops could respond. They found out it wasn’t going to be so easy, so they flew away.”

Back in Montero’s office, soundless security footage continues playing across the screen of his laptop. Commando teams have breached the former police headquarters building in two places, and the three-man unit in front turns a corner, into the hall leading to Montero’s old office. They disappear off the right of the screen, and in the void there’s nothing, only the long white reception counter near the entrance. Seconds tick off silently, with the weight of hours, and then a wraith-like cloud materializes.

The smoky substance is dust, Montero explains, generated by gypsum board in the walls being pulverized by gunshots. Bullet holes erupt, and the first of the three gunmen — still masked, and scurrying on all fours like a spooked cartoon character–scrambles back onto the screen. He finds his feet again, before the reception counter, and hightails it for the door.

On his heels are two fellow gunmen, their precise movements abandoned for the havoc of unchecked flight. Several minutes go by with nothing, save for the hazy residue in the air, before Montero and his chief bodyguard appear. Their 9-millimeter handguns are leveled and at the ready. They clear the room in two-man fashion and exit the building, seeking dialogue with their attackers.

“That’s it,” Montero says demurely. “That’s the end of my movie.”When asked about Lugo-Baez, the secretary says the majority of his department is likely corrupted and that many on that 18-man hit team were probably his own officers. But he can’t change a 300-man outfit overnight — the cartel is always trying to infiltrate police forces, and turning the department on its head would only succeed in changing out crooked cops for straight mafiosos. Corruption is inherent to Mexican police forces, he says, and one of the preeminent challenges to the country. Even so, fundamentally, it’s economics — prohibition and American demand — that have fomented the crisis of violence.

But if it was the dirty collusion of the profit motive and Maslow’s hierarchy that sent Lugo-Baez and other cops in search of their boss’s life, it was economics that drove Rosarito’s decision to fight back, too. The town’s current mayor, Hugo Torres (an independently wealthy business tycoon and the owner of the historic Rosarito Beach Hotel), took the job to eliminate police corruption that was stanching tourism. He says he had no intention of fighting the cartel.

“I was the head of the business guild,” Torres explains. “I told Mayor Macias that his police had to stop taking money from tourists. And he told me, ‘There’s no problem; don’t worry about it.’ I knew if his PAN party stayed in office, it would be more of the same. So I ran against it. I’m 73 years old. I didn’t need to be mayor. I didn’t want to be mayor. But I thought I had to do it.

“When I took office, I went to meet the new governor and realized that people at the state and federal level were committed to fighting the cartel. We had cooperation at all three levels of government. So I went to the army, and they recommended Secretary Montero. That’s how the fight began.”

When I ask Torres if former mayor Macias-Garay and his city attorney, Juan Esquivel, were linked to the AFO — as I’d been told by a number of sources in Rosarito — he declines to answer on the record, though he confirms that popular perception in town is that the two men were tied to organized crime. Secretary Montero, whose office is down the hall, goes as far as suggesting the DEA and FBI should have dossiers on the former PAN (Partido Accion Nacional) politicos. The gringos are Rosarito’s only hope, he says, because state-level authorities in Baja have been compromised by the cartel, and the feds are seated thousands of miles away, in Mexico City.But Eileen Ziegler, the public information officer for the San Diego field division of the Drug Enforcement Administration (which has an office tower about 40 miles north of the ranch where three Rosarito officers were slaughtered in 2006), says San Diego agents know nothing of events south of the border — Rosarito is investigated from the DEA’s Mexico City bureau. That agency, in fact, shares a strategic vision with the Washington Post–both organizations say they cover the border region from Mexico City bureaus (akin to covering D.C. politics, or policing its streets, from Anchorage, Alaska). That fact has contributed to the ineffectual, often contrapuntal bigovernmental response to the crisis generated by Mexico’s Colombianization.

The country’s modern jeremiad of pain and bereavement, meanwhile, has grown more plaintive every year, and a generation of youth has stumbled into adolescence bereft of the voices of its dead fathers. In the place of effective government support or hard answers, the people of Mexico have fallen back on faith–and the credence imparted by an assassinated cop to his 6-year-old son: Because God wants it that way.

But God doesn’t have answers either, Montijo-Pompa says. And the killing hasn’t been this bad since the revolution — when it was firing squads that made the difference. In fact, the former chief hazards, they might be the only remedy to today’s corruption, perfidy and bloodshed.

“But then,” he says with a smile as old as the Sonora, “who controls the firing squads?”

S.D. Liddick writes for San Diego Magazine, where the border trilogy was originally published.