Killers of Americans south of border rarely caught Caught in the chaos

More than 200 U.S. citizens killed in Mexico since '04

Paula Valdez of Houston lost her son Reynaldo to gunmen in Mexico. He and his friend Ashley Lynn Dininger were shot in the head during a trip to Guerrero state in 2004.﻿ Paula Valdez of Houston lost her son Reynaldo to gunmen in Mexico. He and his friend Ashley Lynn Dininger were shot in the head during a trip to Guerrero state in 2004.﻿ Photo: Mayra Beltran, Houston Chronicle Photo: Mayra Beltran, Houston Chronicle Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Killers of Americans south of border rarely caught 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

A 22-year-old man from Houston and his 16-year-old friend are hauled out of a minivan in Mexico, shot execution style by thugs in a black Lincoln Continental, and left dead in the dirt.

The body of a 65-year-old nurse from Brownsville is found floating in the Rio Grande after a visit to a Mexican beauty salon.

An American retiree, an ex-Marine, is stabbed to death as he camps on a Baja beach with his dog.

More than 200 U.S. citizens have been slain in Mexico’s escalating wave of violence since 2004 — an average of nearly one killing a week, according to a Houston Chronicle investigation into the deaths.

Rarely are the killers captured.

The U.S. State Department tracks most American homicides abroad, but the department releases minimal statistics and doesn’t include victims’ names or details about the deaths. The Chronicle examined hundreds of records to document the personal tragedies behind them.

“I’m no longer the same person,” said Paula Valdez, a Houston mother whose son was slain near her childhood home in Mexico’s Guerrero state in 2004.

More U.S. citizens suffered unnatural deaths in Mexico than in any other foreign country — excluding military killed in combat zones — from 2004 to 2007, State Department statistics show.

Most died in the recent outbreaks of violence in border cities — Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez and Nuevo Laredo.

Although, historically, even Mexico’s most violent urban centers had homicide rates below those of major U.S. cities, recent attacks and border violence driven by drug demand have escalated well beyond limited narco-executions.

Juarez last year ranked among the world’s most murderous cities.

The Chronicle analysis showed some American homicide victims were involved in organized crime. The dead include at least two dozen victims labeled hitmen, drug dealers, human smugglers or gang members, based on published investigators’ accusations. Others were drug users or wanted for crimes in the United States.

But in at least 70 other cases, U.S. citizens appear to have been killed while in Mexico for innocent reasons: visiting family, taking a vacation, or simply living or working there.

Locations and intentions

In an interview with the Chronicle, Mexican Congressman Juan Francisco Rivera Bedoya of Nuevo Leon, a former prosecutor who heads the national Public Safety Commission, said he believes most American victims get killed after crossing the border to participate in illegal activities or venturing into unsafe areas.

“Tourists visiting cathedrals, museums and other cultural centers are not at risk,” he said.

Across Mexico, more than 5,000 lives were taken last year, including police, public officials, journalists and bystanders, with seemingly little regard for age, social status or nationality, Mexican authorities report.

Mutilated bodies have been draped on highway overpasses or posed in schoolyards and public squares. Authorities have uncovered mass graves known as narcofosas and body disposal sites, where killers dissolved corpses in barrels of chemicals.

At least 40 Americans were among those killed and dumped in gruesome methods favored by cartel killers, the Chronicle found. Two Texan teens were victims of an American serial killer in Nuevo Laredo, who bragged to a friend in a recorded cell phone call that he stewed their remains in vats.

Recent border victims include at least 15 U.S.-born children and teenagers.

In 2008, Austin Kane Danielsen, an 18-year-old Kansan visiting Mexico for the first time, was attacked, beaten and kicked after leaving a disco in Matamoros. His attackers used a pickup to drag his brutalized body 30 yards and dumped it next to a railroad track.

In 2005, Eddy Vargas, an El Paso teen, was beaten to death on his way to a Juarez ice cream store. In 2004, two California-born women, Sandra Luz Castro Pelayo and Vividiana Estrella Martinez, both 18, were raped, murdered and thrown into a canal in La Rosita by gang members.

A wave of killings in Juarez — a stunning 1,600 victims in 2008 and more than 210 so far this year — took the lives of three Americans in three weeks, including an El Paso nurse and her physician assistant friend who were showered with bullets on Nov. 22 as they drove in a funeral procession for her sister, who was a victim of an earlier slaying.

Yet the State Department has officially issued a statement of protest in only three homicide cases in the past five years, the Chronicle found. Those include the 2006 murder of independent journalist Brad Will, which remains unsolved though the killing was videotaped, and the in-custody 2005 death of Pauline Baeza, a California community college student, who died of head injuries suffered in an Ensenada jail. Originally classified as a homicide, the State Department now lists Baeza’s death as accidental.

International human rights groups and journalism associations joined the State Department in protesting the 2004 slaying in a Nuevo Laredo prison of Texas native Mario Medina. Medina, 23, was accused of knifing to death his neighbor, El Manana newspaper editor Roberto Mora.

Human rights groups alleged Medina had been framed with falsified evidence — including a fake murder weapon. Medina was killed after he claimed Mexican police tortured a confession from him.

Low arrest rate

Few killers get caught. Nationally, only 20 percent of homicide cases in Mexico result in arrests, according to a Chronicle analysis of data from the Citizens’ Safety Institute, a Mexico City-based nonprofit that surveys Mexican prosecutors nationwide.

In Tlaxcala, a mostly rural state described in the Mexican press as a base for some of Mexico’s notorious human trafficking gangs, the clearance rate was just 8 percent.

U.S. consular officials usually withhold names and details of American victims for privacy reasons, though the State Department did issue “travel alerts” last year for several border communities, warning that “dozens of U.S. citizens” had been kidnapped and/or killed in Tijuana. The warning gave no details.

“We’re not trying to scare anybody off, but we sure as heck want people to be aware of the dangerous conditions that they might encounter in certain parts of the country,” said former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza in an interview before he left his post. Under Garza, a Bush-appointee, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico issued no public statements in response to a single slaying since the Oct. 27, 2006, homicide of journalist Will.

Records from the prosecutor in Baja California Norte, where more than 90 Americans have been killed since 2003, mostly in the Tijuana area, showed none of the cases from 2004 to 2006 had been closed.

In nearly all cases involving U.S. citizens killed in Mexico, U.S. government response has been silent — affected at every level by the complex political and economic relationship between the two countries.

Embassy-based representatives of the U.S. government’s Citizen Services program are supposed to help American victims’ families monitor developments in homicide cases and keep them “informed” of police or judicial investigations, according to State Department regulations.

75 still missing

In addition to those killed, as many as 75 Americans, mainly from Texas and California, remain missing in Mexico, based on FBI data.

U.S. authorities who monitor border crime argue they are legally limited in helping families of Americans killed or kidnapped in Mexico, where they can investigate by invitation only.

Colombian officials, with decades of experience fighting drug-induced violence, have signed international treaties to tap U.S. crime-fighting databases used to track bullets, guns, fingerprints and DNA of criminals.

Historically, local and state investigators have not accessed the data, although guns used in many killings and suspects’ DNA often can be traced back to the United States.

These tools slowly are being used in federal anti-crime efforts launched by Mexican President Felipe Calderon, including an initiative to identify U.S. victims’ DNA in mass graves uncovered in border investigations.

In 2008, at least two men accused of killing Americans in Mexico were tracked back to the United States through binational initiatives. One was arrested in Houston.

Mexican Congressman Rivera Bedoya acknowledged that the increase in border homicides in Mexico, and the flow of guns from the United States that supplies most of the murder weapons, is a binational security problem that has cost many innocent lives.

“We have to collaborate — the security of Mexico is the security of the United States,” he said.

Chronicle staff writer Dudley Althaus, researcher Joyce Lee and Mexico-based freelance journalist Jaime Delgado contributed to this report.

lise.olsen@chron.com