Homicides in Tijuana have skyrocketed recently, returning the city to levels of hyper-violence it last saw a decade ago

This week, the Trump administration pushed ahead with its plan to return asylum seekers to Mexico while their cases are considered, moving the first group through San Diego’s San Ysidro crossing late on Friday.

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Meanwhile, far to the south, thousands of Central Americans are waiting at Mexico’s southern frontier for humanitarian visas. Several hundred have already hopped the border, and are following the route of previous migrant caravans north towards Tijuana.

What neither group may be aware of, however, is that the city they are heading for is – once again – Mexico’s murder capital.

Last year the country broke its own homicide record, with prosecutors opening 28,816 murder cases, 15% more than the previous year. And the city with most killings was Tijuana.

Three murders on New Year’s Eve took the total to 2,502 – a rate of 126 per 100,000 inhabitants, returning the city to levels of hyper-violence it last saw a decade ago.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A woman walks past two men dead in a road after a shootout in Tijuana, Mexico, on 17 November 2008. Photograph: Guillermo Arias/AP

And the numbers are still climbing: on 17 January, police announced 127 murders to date this year. Early that same evening, three more men were gunned down on streets across town in plain view; 24 hours later another three people were killed, including two women.

While external observers fear a return to cartel turf wars over smuggling routes into the US, the city’s district attorney, José Alberto Álavarez Mendoza, highlights a pandemic of petty drug dealing on the local market, as neighbourhood gangs fight block-by-block for ‘tienditas’, outlets for mainly synthetic drugs.

Tijuana’s leading expert on narco-traffic, Victor Clark Alfaro, says: “The cartel leaders – now the kind of people you’d meet at the country-club – have lost control of the low-level street dealers.”

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The violence is the worst since Tijuana witnessed all-out war between the local Arellano Félix syndicate and the Sinaloa cartel of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who is currently on trial in New York.

Broadly speaking, Guzmán won.

“Those years were also characterised by extortion and kidnapping, which affected every citizen,” says Álvarez. “But these are now down. What we have is a tragic level of homicide largely among petty dealers in the domestic market for methamphetamine.

“The drugs going north are getting through, but smuggling into the US is not violent right now – the killing is local, more intimate.”

Álvarez says “these homicides are often people that know each other. They stake out turf, then defend or expand it. These are not cartels, they are splinters, cells.”

The method of killing leaves hardly any evidence, he says. “I have a body, but no gun, no bullet or witness prepared to come forward. The revenge of the friends or family of the victim is not through the law, but another killing on the street. Sometimes I don’t even have an ID – 30% of our victims are buried anonymously in the common cemetery.”

Victor Clark Alfaro has monitored crime and narco-traffic in Tijuana since the 1980s, for his Binational Commission for Human Rights here, and as a professor at San Diego State University across the border. Yet again, he is this week preparing a file as expert witness in a drugs trial in California.

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The cartels are still forceful in Tijuana, he says. But whereas up to 10 years ago, the ‘narco-juniors’ of the Arellano Félix clan would flash their wealth around discos and restaurants, “their heirs are invisible. They are businessmen, the people you’d meet at the country club. For the first time in three decades, I cannot name their leaders to you.”

The Sinaloa cartel is still around, he says. And the defeated Arellano Félix Tijuana cartel has been revived, led by the original brothers’ sister, Enedina Arellano Félix, her children, nephews and nieces, reformed as the Tijuana Cartel Nueva Generación – and supported by the rising power in the Mexican organised crime world, the Jalisco New Generation cartel.

“But the old cartels are fragmenting inside themselves,” says Clark, “across Mexico, and here. They still smuggle cocaine and meth – though now we’re seeing more fentanyl – and big meth producers are still selling on the domestic market. Six months ago, a meth lab was raided in Tecate capable of producing $10m-worth of meth a day.”

But while the Arellano Félix clan carefully nurtured and controlled the domestic market, he says, the new generation doesn’t need to. “They do business, sell to the middleman for profit, but are separate from the killing between people who are usually on drugs themselves – where the drug dens are, in the poorest barrios where maquiladora [assembly plant] workers live, and hundreds live on the street.”

He adds: “Why should they care? They know that every time 10 people are killed on the street, 1o more will take their place. What matters to them is the money.”

Clark insists, however, that “we have always to factor in the role of the police – either dealing the drugs themselves, or allowing it to happen. We must ask: ‘Why is there never a bullet or gun?’ And ask that question all the way to the top, police and politicians: there are meth labs everywhere, and the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency] monitors what happens here carefully – why are the big seizures so rare?”

Low sun sets over the troubled Nido de los Aguilas (Eagles’ Nest) neighbourhood, and Horacio Vallez is sitting on the steps of his house near the new, reinforced steel border fence.

“We’ve seen it all here. We’ve got the fence behind our backs,” he says, “and before our eyes on the streets every week: another killing, another body here in the dust, more police, soldiers, plastic tape. But no one gets arrested.”