Tijuana saw some of its worst violence during the three-year window from 2008 to 2010. Yet the city's vibrant culture kept at it.
In this episode of the “Border City” podcast from our sister paper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, longtime U.S.-Mexico border reporter Sandra Dibble brings us to an awful time for Tijuana: the three-year window from 2008 to 2010. Cartels ramped up violence to horrifying levels, targeting cops and doctors. Police tried to purge traitors from their ranks — and went too far. But through it all, the spirit of Tijuana stayed alive. In the darkness, there were still sparkles of music and art and joy.
Read the full transcript here.
Host: Sandra Dibble
More reading:
Images from the front lines of Tijuana’s deadly drug war
Reporter’s Notebook: Behind the story: How The Times reported on Tijuana’s massive rise in homicides
Hey, what’s up. This is Gustavo Arellano.
It’s Tuesday, May 24, 2022, and you’re listening to The Times, daily news from the L.A. Times.
Today we’re bringing you Border City: Chapter 6.
Mux in (Mario)
In this episode of the podcast from our sister paper, the San Diego Union Tribune, longtime U.S.-Mexico border reporter Sandra Dibble brings us to an awful time for Tijuana: the years we know in el Norte as the Great Recession.
Cartels ramped up violence to horrifying levels, targeting cops and doctors. Police tried to purge traitors from their ranks – and went too far. I remember this time well, my family who’s been going to Tijuana forever, we actually stopped for a couple of years because things were too crazy, even for us.
But through it all, the spirit of Tijuana stayed alive. In the darkness, there were still sparkles of music and art and joy.
If you’ve been liking these border stories, then make sure to find and follow Border City on Spotify, Apple or wherever you listen…but for now, as the legendary Johnny Canales would say, Sandra, Take it away.
Mux out
Sandra Dibble: When I look back at my time reporting in Tijuana, one period stands out: the three-year window from 2008 to 2010. It was a period of violence and terror on a scale that the city had never known.
TAPE: As a helicopter kept watch from above, Mexican soldiers and police rushed to evacuate several schools down below, all signs of surging violence in Tijuana, a Mexican border city not far from San Diego.
Sandra: The Arellano cartel was growing weaker. A breakaway faction was now allied with the Sinaloa cartel. Public displays of brutality were common.
I’d never set out to be a police reporter. But almost every day, I found myself covering a shootout or a police funeral or a dramatic arrest.
Police were so scared that they wore black ski masks and traveled in caravans. Heavily armed soldiers in brown camouflage seemed to be everywhere,
But it wasn’t just the violence that was putting the city on edge.
TAPE: This is going to be one of the watershed days in financial markets history. It was a Manic Monday in financial markets, as the Dow tumbled several points over the weekend….
Sandra: In 2008, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression swept across the world. Tijuana was hit hard. The maquiladoras cut back production. Fifty thousand jobs were lost. The real estate bubble burst.
A darkness descended on Tijuana, and the dawn felt so very far away.
I’m Sandra Dibble, and this is Episode Six of Border City, a podcast from the San Diego Union-Tribune. It’s about Tijuana, a city known for violence, drugs and migration into the United States. But it’s also a city where I – like so many others – have found a place and a purpose. A city of exuberance and hope.
On a Friday morning in April 2008, I headed to the state government building in Tijuana to cover the latest anti-crime demonstration. When I walked in, I saw protestors crowded into the inner courtyard. They looked angry and scared-- but also determined.
TAPE: Doctors have become targets of violence in the Mexican border city of Tijuana.
Sandra: At least 20 doctors had been kidnapped that year, including the head of a major hospital. Now they were demanding that the government do its job: protect them.
Dr. Eric Rosenberg headed the medical society back then. He led the doctors in their 12-hour walkout. His thick cloud of graying curls made him easy to pick out in the crowd.
Eric Rosenberg: Extortions telephone extortions. People calling physicians on the phone and telling them that they should deposit fifty thousand dollars for example or they would harm them or their families that they knew where do they live and things like that. people were starting to get scared. Some of them left the city altogether.
Sandra: Not long ago, I met up with Dr. Rosenberg at his wife’s medical office in the Rio Zone. That’s the city’s bustling and upscale business district.
Dr. Rosenberg’s wife is a doctor, too. He told me about a call she got back then -- right in the small room where we were sitting.
Eric Rosenberg: There was also a young girl’s voice saying, “Mother I’ve been kidnapped. Help me.” So my wife takes her cell phone, dials her cell phone and our daughter answers. She was at school. Well, that was very typical. People started hearing this doctor left the city out of fear and or this doctor paid them the ransom money or things like that.
Sandra: The Rosenbergs made a plan in case they became targets.
Eric Rosenberg: If one of us got kidnapped then we wouldn’t pay ransom. We agreed on that.
Sandra: Wow. Really.
Rosenberg: Yeah.
Sandra: Why?
Rosenberg: The moral aspect of the situation, and it would break us financially.
Sandra: A week after the doctors’ protest, a gun battle off a major thoroughfare took the violence to a frightening new level.
KFMB TAPE: A trail of bodies lined the streets of eastern Tijuana last night. At least 13 people killed and eight injured during a vicious gun battle between drug cartels…
Sandra: By this time, Lt. Col. Julian Ley//zaola was in charge of the Tijuana police.
Leyzaola had been an Army officer and commanded a state police unit. He’d believed for years that the Tijuana police were infiltrated by organized crime. Now that he was chief, he was determined to do something about it.
Tijuana had never seen such a hands-on police chief. Leyzaola joined his officers in chasing suspects. He even made arrests himself. He called drug traffickers filthy pigs. Cockroaches. Scum.
Leyzaola had received death threats before, but now the threats included his family. He moved them to California, where they would be safe. To protect himself, he stayed at the military base south of downtown.
Leyzaola was asleep at the base when the gun battle began just before 2 in the morning. Noise from his police radio jolted him awake.
The chief made a rash decision: to drive across town to the scene of the shooting. His bodyguards scrambled to catch up.
Years later, Leyzaola and I would sit down together at a busy Tijuana restaurant overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I asked him to describe that day for me. His memories were still fresh.
Leyzaola in translation: There were dead people everywhere, a mass of bodies, on top of cars, on the ground, on top of walls.
Sandra: More reports of gunshot victims started coming in, and Leyzaola went to investigate those, too.
Leyzaola: I think after those 25 that I saw, there were more...about 40.
Sandra: Later that morning, I rushed to a news conference at the state attorney general’s office.
It turned out that the gun battle had been triggered by a split in the Arellano cartel.
The cartel’s latest leader -- an Arellano nephew named Fernando Sanchez -- was far weaker than his uncles. So El Teo, the rogue Arellano lieutenant who had been kidnapping Tijuanenses, was growing more and more powerful, and forging a relationship with the rival Sinaloa cartel. Leyzaola said the two camps fought it out that day.
Leyzaola: After that confrontation, the Arellanos stopped existing.
Sandra: Later that day, I drove to the place where the gunfire began. It was off a major boulevard in eastern Tijuana, near a rustic juice stand where I’d sometimes buy sugar cane juice.
The crime scene was barred off with yellow tape. I could see bullet holes in the wall and windows of a nearby liquor store.
But life was already resuming its Saturday rhythms. Families had gathered in a park just blocks away. They were laying out food and decorating picnic tables with balloons and pinatas.
The news from Tijuana that day was filled with images of bloodshed. But I still hold to my personal memory -- of families celebrating, of people who refused to relinquish their hard-won moments of happiness.
BREAK 1
Sandra: The U.S. and Mexico signed an agreement in 2008. It was known as the Merida Initiative. The goal was to weaken the grip of drug traffickers and organized crime in Mexico and Central America. It was a huge commitment – $1.9 billion.
Mexico got money to reform its judicial system, to improve police training and to buy high-tech equipment. And U.S. and Mexican law enforcement agencies worked more closely than ever to capture cartel leaders.
El Teo was one of their targets.
TAPE: El Teo is one of Tijuana’s most notorious gangsters. Over the last year, more than 6,000 people have been murdered in Mexico’s drug war. Some 700 were here in Tijuana alone.
Sandra: El Teo’s brutality often played out in public. His underlings opened fire in broad daylight. On busy streets. In popular restaurants. Bodies turned up mutilated, dissolved in lye, hung from highway bridges.
Early one Monday in September, 12 corpses were discovered outside an elementary school. Some had their tongues cut out. The youngest was 15.
On a Sunday in December, nine decapitated bodies were discovered near some power lines in eastern Tijuana. I knew the spot well. I used to pass it on my way to Angela’s house.
Three of the dead were cops – members of Leyzaola’s police force.
El Teo and his followers started targeting small-business owners. At my favorite taco shop, the young owner who always greeted me with a great big smile disappeared one day. He’d been kidnapped, I was told.
He was released, but he was never the same. When I caught sight of him, he stayed in the background. And he didn’t smile.
For the first time since I arrived in Tijuana, I felt burned out. The news industry was in transition, and the recession had hit the Union-Tribune hard. By now, I was the only one covering Tijuana.
Writing about brutality became a numbers game. How many today? Were the bodies mutilated? Dissolved in tubs of caustic soda? Strung up from highway bridges? Dumped on a rural road?
After work I’d go home and fall on my couch, exhausted and rigid with tension. A friend from Tijuana sometimes spent the night in my extra bedroom. He was trying to avoid the long lines at the border in the morning – waits that could now stretch for two hours.
He was sweet and chatty, but I didn’t want to talk. I just watched Seinfeld reruns, night after night.
Almost everyone I knew was affected by the violence in one way or another. Including Paco, my guitar teaching friend.
Paco, in translation: During that period many people left. Those who could went to San Diego. Others returned to Mexico City. As a result, in 2008 out of 20 private students I was left with three. It was hard, very very hard, very hard. And the general atmosphere of violence that you could see in restaurants, in the streets, there was a certain thickness you could feel in the air.
Sandra: I searched for other topics to write about--stories that showed different sides of Tijuana --stories that were uplifting and hopeful.
I reported about the arrival of 1,000 teenage athletes for an international Taekwondo competition. I cycled with a group of Tijuanenses who took Wednesday night bike rides, escorted by police.
I rode a roofless red bus through the city’s tourist district--a poignant effort to bring back the visitors who had stopped coming.
I needed to tell the stories of people who kept going. Because those stories kept me going, too.
Writing about Tijuana had become so all-consuming that it was hard to imagine anyplace else existed. Every time I flew back to Washington, D.C. for family visits, I was catapulted into another reality.
My mother was 85 years old and having trouble walking. So before dawn on a chilly May morning, I drove her through Washington’s silent streets to the hospital for a knee replacement. As she was wheeled away to the operating room, we both burst into tears.
She recovered quickly and returned to her townhouse – to her tiny backyard filled with flowers.
But I was worried. She lived alone. She needed help with errands and shopping. My brother Philo would soon be moving to Rome with his family for a new diplomatic assignment. My brother Charles lived more than an hour away, in Baltimore. And there I was at the border, more than 2,500 miles away.
Over the years, I’d written about so many people in Tijuana who were far from home. But I’d rarely stopped to consider the lives they’d left behind. The family members they still carried in their hearts. The constant ache of being far away as a parent grows old.
Mux fade out
Back in Tijuana, I was more careful about venturing out around the city, especially at night. Many of my friends were more careful too.
But some young Tijuanenses refused to give in to the fear that gripped their city.
Pedro Gabriel Beas: The thing is that we refuse to stay in our homes on those days because everyone was talking about, “don’t go out by night.” They were killing some innocent bystanders in bars and not the ones that we were hanging out. But other bars, you read the news the next day and they went to a bar in whatever part of the city and they killed 10 people over there.
Those days, a lot of people had fear. We also had fear but we decided not to stay in our houses.
Sandra: Pedro Gabriel Beas played keyboard with Tijuana’s Nortec Collective back then.
The group’s favorite gathering place was an old -fashioned bar just off Avenida Revolucion. It was called Dandy del Sur, and they called it their office. They’d stay at Dandy’s until the early morning hours. Writers, poets and painters hung out there too.
The Nortec Collective won international recognition for its blend of techno and norteno music. It helped define a new Tijuana. The sound of a city that was gritty, edgy and rough but also young and joyous.
Pedro Gabriel composed a piece called Dandy del Sur. And suddenly new faces started showing up at the bar.
Pedro Gabriel Beas: A lot of people, we didn’t know. But from. From first from rock groups and other the arts. But after that, people who you look up there, it was like a upper middle class kind of or middle middle class. We were surprised at first and then we celebrated that.
Sandra: In January 2009 a new bar called La Mezcalera opened across the street from Dandy’s. La Mezcalera was a cantina, but for hipsters. It banned traditional banda music – the tunes favored by the criminal underworld.
More bars opened. And gradually, a quiet downtown street became a throbbing bar scene alive with the energy of young people tired of staying home. Nortec’s song Tijuana Makes me Happy told the story of this new Tijuana.
MUSIC from Nortec Collective
Even as the downtown crowds of young Tijuananenses grew, the battle against drug traffickers continued.
By this time, the Mexican military was openly leading the fight. A week rarely went by without a news conference at the base near downtown.
I always rushed there, eager to see the day’s display. It could be tall bales of marijuana as far as the eye could see. Or tables with rows of high-powered weapons and ammunition. Sometimes soldiers paraded their latest suspects as the news cameras rolled.
Human rights groups criticized the military’s growing role. To have soldiers handling civilian law enforcement was a recipe for disaster. But political and business leaders applauded the unprecedented effort. So did many residents.
They saw Police Chief Leyzaola as a hero. A man who was courageous and honest. Tough enough to take on drug traffickers and to clean up a police department that was infested with organized crime.
But as the months passed and more cops were arrested, another picture emerged. Families of the detainees said their relatives were being held without charges, were being tortured, were being forced to confess to crimes they hadn’t committed.
Some pointed the finger directly at Leyzaola.
On March 27th, 2009, Leyzaola held a routine briefing with his police commanders. When the meeting was over, he ordered three of them to stay behind.
Miguel Angel Mesina was one of them.
Mesina, in translation: The chief’s bodyguards come and take us by force, disarm us. They take us outside, they make us board their vehicles and take us to the installations of the 28th Infantry Battalion.
Sandra: The officers were handcuffed, blindfolded and interrogated for hours, even though they hadn’t been charged with a crime. Mesina was accused of having ties to El Teo.
Mesina: They said we were working for one of the drug cartels. I said, no, I am one of Julian Leyzaola’s men. No, no, no, tell me whose people you work for and how much they pay you? That’s when I said, no, I am a policeman 100 percent, I am one of Julian’s men.
They covered our mouths with plastic bags to suffocate us. They beat us, they gave us electric shocks on our genitals. They made us think they were going to kill us and they were going to throw us on some boulevard with a sign so people would think it was organized crime.
Sandra: I was accustomed to seeing lineups of drug suspects. But when I started seeing high-ranking police officers, it all began to seem unreal. Could this be happening? Where was the line between good and bad? Were they guilty or being scapegoated?
Mesina and the others were flown to a maximum-security federal penitentiary in the state of Nayarit, a thousand miles from home. They were never tried, and their cases drew the attention of Amnesty International and the Inter-American Human Rights Commission. All of them were eventually released.
Mesina was paid compensation for his 17 months behind bars. But he didn’t get his old job back. He now earns his living selling secondhand goods.
Leyzoala has repeatedly denied the accusations of torture. I asked him whether some of the officers might have been innocent.
Leyzaola: Is it possible? It’s possible. The military conducted most of the arrests of police. The ones that I detained, it was because the federal attorney general’s office gave me the warrant.
Sandra: In 2011, Leyzaola was hired to lead the police in another violent city, Ciudad Juarez. It’s just across the border from El Paso, Texas.
Again, he campaigned against police corruption. And violent crimes fell in Juarez, too. But again he was dogged by complaints of human rights abuses.
In 2010, the growing collaboration between U.S. and Mexican authorities paid off in a big way.
DEA agents had been on El Teo’s trail for months and had shared what they’d learned with their Mexican counterparts. Finally, electronic surveillance of El Teo’s telephone led them to an upscale neighborhood in La Paz, in the state of Baja California Sur.
Before dawn on January 12th, a team of Mexican soldiers and federal police approached the house where El Teo was staying.
El Teo – one of most ruthless crime bosses Tijuana had ever known – was surprised in his own bed. He surrendered without a fight.
Almost immediately, the high-profile kidnappings in Tijuana stopped. The gruesome displays of violence disappeared. The open street battles died down.
But the killings continued.
BREAK 2
Sandra: Despite all this uncertainty, residents started to push back. It wasn’t an organized movement. Just individuals finding their strength and lighting their own way through the darkness.
One of them was Arturo Rodriguez.
Arturo Rodriguez: Everybody was upset. Everybody was tired. Everybody had the need of seeing each other again. I didn’t want to cross to the United States anymore. I wanted to keep my own city safe and start to do business in my own city. So at that point, I think that that’s what everybody felt, that they wanted to keep the city alive and safe. And the only way they were going to be able to do that is getting out of their own houses.
Sandra: Arturo makes his living fixing industrial containers. But his passion has always been promoting Tijuana artists. In 2008 he shut down a tiny storefront gallery he’d been operating near the city’s racetrack. With the violence escalating, people weren’t in the mood for art.
But now, two years later, he relaunched in an elaborately converted warehouse filled with hidden doorways and compartments. He called it La Caja -- the box. It was clearly a labor of love and an act of faith.
Tijuana’s mood was shifting. Arturo could feel it.
Arturo Rodriguez: There was like anger and to do the things that we wanted to do. We wanted to take the city again by ourselves.
Sandra: Antonio Escalante and two dozen other artists were also reclaiming a piece of their city. They focused on Pasaje Rodriguez, an old passageway off of Avenida Revolucion, the street where American tourists used to shop.
Antonio Escalante, in translation: When we arrived, it was very dirty, abandoned….We found syringes left by people who had come to inject themselves...We were working for about six months, quietly, building, repairing the spaces...then we created galleries, studios, spaces, some of them very special.
Sandra: I asked Antonio what he was thinking at the time. Was he trying to revitalize downtown?
Antonio Escalante: I wasn’t thinking anything. I knew something would happen. It’s like when I step into my studio to paint. When I go to the studio, I don’t know what’s going to happen because I work in abstract…..We knew something was going to happen, but we did not know just how
Sandra: The renewed Pasaje Rodriguez opened on an April evening in 2010.
Antonio Escalante: It was raining. I said, “this is ruined.” Nobody will come. And when I crossed the street to get to the Pasaje, I was struck at the sight of it being filled with people. It was full in spite of the rain. People were enjoying what we were offering.
Sandra: One of the best parts of my job was still driving the toll road that leads from Tijuana to the cities of Rosarito Beach and Ensenada. The stretch that Trump and others once promised would be the world’s next glamourous destination.
I’d lower my window and watch the Pacific Ocean meet the sky. Shades of blue stretched all the way to the horizon. I could smell the air and feel the wind whipping through my hair.
But for all its natural beauty, the recession and the violence had caused a downturn here too. Restaurants, shops and hotels that were once filled with U.S. visitors sat desolate and empty. The highway was lined with the frames of unfinished condo towers. And the Trump Ocean Baja Resort? It was just a hole in the ground.
TAPE: Investors poured $32 million into it and are now told they won’t get a penny back.
Sandra: The developers had declared bankruptcy. Trump had cut all ties to the project and removed his name. And the buyers were now suing to get back their deposits.
All across the region, so many lives had been upended – some by violence, others by the recession. Tijuana seemed caught in a daily struggle between hope and despair.
As I drove around and reported stories, I could see no clear winner.
Mux in
In the next episode: A splashy event brings a parade of world celebrities to Tijuana.
But in the midst of the excitement, a gruesome display of bodies becomes a sobering reminder that the violence continues.
Mux In (Mario)
CREDITS
Border City was reported, written and created by me, Sandra Dibble.
Susan White was my editor and co-creator.
Our associate producers were Elize Anoush Manoukian and Hafsa Fathima.
Kurt Kohnen and AMFM Music provided original music and sound design.
And Joanne Faryon and Garage Media offered production support.
Our theme song, Tierra Mestiza, was composed by Gerardo Tames. It’s performed by Mexico City-based Los Folkloristas.
Thanks to Hernan del Riego, who read the voice of Julian Leyzaola
Manuel Sanchez, who read the voice of Francisco Guerrero
Gustavo Solis, who read the voice of Miguel Mesina
And Miguel Cuevas, who read the voice of Antonio Escalante
Many thanks, too, to KFMB-TV, for the use of its news clips.
Mux Out
BREAK 3
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Gustavo: And that’s it for this episode of THE TIMES, daily news from the LA Times.
Thanks again to Sandra Dibble and the San Diego Union-Tribune for letting us bring Border City to our listeners…and thanks to ustedes for the feedback! A lot of y’all have told me you’ve enjoyed us running Border City, so we keep playing them. Keep that feedback coming!
if you can’t wait to hear the next episode…you can find chapter 7 in the Border City feed today. Just find and follow Border City wherever you listen to podcasts, or you can listen online at san diego union tribune dot com slash border city.
Our show is produced by Shannon Lin, Denise Guerra, Kasia Brousalian, David Toledo, Ashlea Brown, and Angel Carreras. Our editorial assistants are Madalyn Amato and Carlos De Loera. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto and Mike Heflin. Our editor is Kinsee Morlan. Our executive producers are Jazmin Aguilera and Shani Hilton. Our theme music is by Andrew Eapen. And thanks to Lauren Raab.
Like what you’re listening to? Then make sure to follow the Times on whatever platform you use. Don’t make us the Poochie of podcasts!
I'm Gustavo Arellano. We'll be back tomorrow with all the news and desmadre. Gracias.
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