Tijuana cartel charged in San Diego case

LA Times:

Federal authorities announced a wide-ranging criminal case Friday against top leaders of a Tijuana-based drug cartel that ran much of its operations from the San Diego area, allegedly ordering murders, kidnappings and torture of rival traffickers in Mexico.

The racketeering conspiracy case charges 43 cartel lieutenants, enforcers and drug traffickers, among them half a dozen current or former Mexican law enforcement officers, including a top official in the Baja California attorney general's office who allegedly passed along information obtained from U.S. law enforcement to cartel leaders.

The organized crime group, an offshoot of the Arellano Felix drug cartel, moved some operations to San Diego in recent years, seeking a safe haven from gang wars and law enforcement crackdowns south of the border, said Laura Duffy, the U.S. attorney in San Diego.

The case marks the latest example of organized crime groups in Tijuana trying to take advantage of the cross-border environment to hamper investigations and hide from rivals and police. The allegations also are a stark illustration of how deeply the cartels have infiltrated Mexican law enforcement in Baja California.

U.S. prosecutors allege that cartel members in Mexico kidnapped and killed several people, then tried to shift responsibility in some of the cases to rival gangs through corrupt Mexican law enforcement. In California, U.S. authorities employing undercover agents and heavy surveillance were able to prevent most violent attacks, including six attempted murders and an attempted kidnapping, Duffy said.

Thirty-one of the 43 defendants are in custody, authorities said. Four were arrested in Mexico by authorities there, and 27 in cities around San Diego County, from Imperial Beach to upscale Poway.

The 20-month investigation was run by the multiagency San Diego Cross Border Violence Task Force, which took advantage of tools often unavailable to those investigating Mexican drug cartels, such as telephone wiretaps, cameras and informants.

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Setting up operations in San Diego was a significant strategic mistake by the cartel. They gave the US authorities an easy hook for prosecution. The Mexican criminal insurgency in Tijuana was attempting to control distribution on the I-5 corridor up the West Coast. It was a valuable route and that was reason for a lot of the killing. The cartels have taken several recent hits lately.