When Genaro García Luna, Mexico’s top police official, arrived in Tijuana in January, the city was in the middle of a storm of violence that he found, as he put it to me with clipped understatement soon after his visit, “surprising.” First, three local police officers were murdered in a single night, apparently in retaliation for a bust that a drug-cartel boss warned them not to carry out. A few days later, federal police officers tried to storm a trafficker safe house in a quiet Tijuana neighborhood and ended up in a shootout. Five gunmen held off dozens of police officers and soldiers for more than three hours. By the time the police made it inside the house, six kidnap victims from a rival cartel being held there had been executed. The traffickers had skinned off some of the victims’ faces to conceal their identities.
The attacks on the police officers were particularly worrying for García Luna, who as secretary of public security is one of the officials in charge of implementing President Felipe Calderón’s decision to aggressively wage war on drug trafficking. Just before García Luna’s visit to Tijuana, a police officer’s wife and 12-year-old daughter were murdered in their home there, in violation of a longstanding code of combat that is supposed to safeguard the families of cops and traffickers alike.
