In Tijuana’s only morgue, 150 bodies fill 150 refrigerators, and on the blackboard where tomorrow’s autopsies are scheduled in tiny lettering, there is no room for another name. For a week now, Melina Moreno—the deputy director of the city's common grave for unclaimed bodies—has been anxiously waiting for authorization from the central morgue in Mexicali to bury all the unidentified bodies, which make up the majority of the corpses the Tijuana facility receives. In the lobby, a handful of family members are waiting to identity their deceased relative. Sometimes there are so many bodies that the facility’s courtyard serves as extra storage for the dead. On those days, the residents of the luxury building next door complain about the putrid smell of death.

There have already been twice as many homicides in 2018 as there were in the entirety of 2008, which saw a total death toll of 843—the bloodiest year of the drug war between the Sinaloa and Arellano Félix cartels. That murder rate evidently doesn't trouble the tourists sitting among the food trucks of the Telefónica Gastro Park , a sprawling space where they can savor regional surf-and-turf fare alongside craft beer, or the guests occupying the 12 floors of the Hong Kong Gentlemen's Club , a luxury strip joint that markets itself as “The Ultimate Exotic Getaway” (it offers direct pick-up and drop-off at the US border). In the city’s most affluent neighborhoods, a real estate boom promises the local elite and Americans the same architecture and lifestyle of San Diego, its immediate neighbor across the US border, for half the price.

The Sinaloa Cartel arrived in Tijuana approximately 12 years ago and began stripping power from the Arellano Félix Cartel, who were the city’s biggest traffickers at the time. Their war prompted a bloody period of murders, kidnappings, and shootings at tourist sites. The violence reached its peak in 2008. "Now it's a war to control the street corners as part of the local market," Fer explained, adding that Tijuana’s tourists are included in the city’s small-scale trade.

A drug dealer sat in a bar, drinking a lemonade. He asked to be referred to as “Fer” to protect his identity, and said that in order to understand what’s happening in Tijuana, one must distinguish between the "upper level"—international drug traffic—and the "bottom level"—small-scale drug trade.

In 2008, Fer was incarcerated in a US federal prison after being convicted of smuggling migrants over the border. In prison, he said, he learned how to survive in the drug trade from veteran dealers. But like many dealers in Tijuana, Fer is just trying to make a respectable living without getting killed. It's a constant worry these days: The Sinaloa Cartel’s new war with the Nueva Generacíon Jalisco and Tijuana cartels is directly responsible for the record-breaking death toll of 2018 and the two years that preceded it. As Fer explained, many of those deaths were due to local conflict—a small-scale clash that, unlike the large-scale cartel war a decade ago, many people on the wealthier side of Tijuana don't ever think about.

A few days before meeting with Fer in August, VICE met Eduardo Rodríguez, the director of the State Preventive Police, at a security command center. He had come to the same conclusion: "International trafficking continues and will continue, and our duty is to control it from both sides of the border. But now there is a war in small-scale drug trade—drug-selling points in the city’s most marginalized neighborhoods," he said. "If you don’t sell drugs, it’s very likely that you will die of old age. [July] was probably the most violent month in history, but in my opinion, there's less violence now than in 2008 because back then, it was urban terrorism. I call it terrorism due to the fact that citizens were afraid of stepping out on the streets because something could happen to them, or out of fear, tourists weren't coming to the city."

At noon on Tuesday, August 21, a man prepared his car to smuggle pounds of crystal meth across the busiest border in the world. A woman from Sinaloa desperately looked for the body of her brother who was murdered a month earlier. Dozens of people addicted to heroin lined the dried river canal to get clean needles and Naloxone capsules in the event of a possible overdose. On the outskirts of the city, the finishing touches were put on a memorial for the people whose bodies were dissolved in acid by Santiago Meza, a.k.a. El Pozolero, nine years earlier. Two men oversaw the project: Both are named Fernando and both have a missing son. Twelve hours passed without a single murder and the authorities held a press conference to announce the feat. Moments later, hitmen killed a pollero (someone who guides and smuggles migrants across the US border) in downtown Tijuana.