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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | February 2006 
Acapulco's Loss of Innocence
 S. Lynne Walker - Copley News
Acapulco, Mexico – This seaside resort was once a place of fairy tales, where the world's rich and famous vacationed in villas while their yachts bobbed on the waves of Acapulco's bay.
Even Mexico's drug traffickers played a role in the illusion. For years, they set aside their rivalries and came here with their families to take a holiday from crime, law enforcement officials say, shielding Acapulco from the drug wars that ravaged other Mexican cities.
But a broad-daylight shootout last month between drug traffickers and police shattered the last vestiges of Acapulco's idyllic image. Four traffickers died and an arsenal of guns and grenades was left behind, forcing law-enforcement officials to acknowledge the cease-fire between cartels had ended.
“We've always heard the narco-traffickers have certain places that are off-limits to violence so they can vacation. Obviously, Acapulco is no longer in that category,” said a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Today, Acapulco is a battleground for the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels, which are warring over a lucrative drug corridor stretching from Mexico's Pacific Coast north to the U.S.-Mexico border.
The drug crimes that have long rocked the Mexican border cities of Tijuana, Matamoros and Nuevo Laredo now occur with frightening regularity here and in the nearby resort of Zihuatanejo.
Only four cities in Mexico – Guadalajara, Culiacan, Tijuana and Mexicali – have more overall crime per 100,000 residents than Acapulco, according to a recent study by the Citizen Institute for Studies about Insecurity, a Mexico City-based think tank.
“It alarms us,” said Fernando Tenopala, president of Coparmex Acapulco, an organization of business leaders in this city of 900,000. “We don't want to live through what Nuevo Laredo is experiencing.”
Law enforcement officers who dare to confront the cartels fear for their lives. Acapulco's police chief resigned after his officers killed the four traffickers in last month's shootout. Last week, two grenades were tossed at the house of Zihuatanejo's police chief, seriously injuring a guard.
In Guerrero state, where Acapulco and Zihuatanejo are located, drug crimes are also increasing in the countryside. Guerrero produces more opium poppies that any other state in Mexico. It ranks ninth in the production of marijuana.
When other Mexican cities have been terrorized by drug killings, President Vicente Fox has responded by sending in soldiers and hundreds of federal police. However, stationing military patrols outside posh hotels could decimate Acapulco's already fragile tourist industry, which has lost business to newer resorts such as Cancun and Los Cabos.
“Acapulco cannot have streets full of soldiers. What are the tourists going to say?” said Víctor Manuel Bosque, the retired army general who commands the state police force in Acapulco. “If the army starts to patrol, the tourists will stop coming.”
Instead, units of federal, state and local police cruise the city's crime-ridden neighborhoods day and night, their semi-automatic rifles at the ready. Operating under an umbrella program that Fox dubbed “Safe Mexico,” they set up roadblocks, searching cars for weapons and drugs and arresting drivers whose names show up on a database of wanted criminals.
Bosque said he believes the patrols have been effective. However, in the five months since Safe Mexico began operations in Acapulco, not one major drug trafficker has been captured.
International visitors
When Acapulco threw open its doors to the world in the early 1950s, celebrities flocked to the Pacific resort. Liz Taylor married her third husband, Hollywood producer Michael Todd, here. Frank Sinatra was a regular. John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, chose Acapulco for their 1953 honeymoon.
One of the world's first international resorts, Acapulco has long since lost its luster.
Now, most of Acapulco's visitors are families from Mexico City who pile into their cars and make the four-hour drive south in search of a cheap weekend getaway. Only 15 percent of the resort's visitors come from international destinations.
Mexico City residents are accustomed to crime, but business leaders worry that increasing drug violence will make them think twice about vacationing in Acapulco.
Authorities reported 51 drug-related homicides last year, several of them on Acapulco's main tourist strip. When a deputy director of Guerrero's state ministerial police was slain outside a popular restaurant in August, the killings began to attract national attention.
Fox acknowledges that at least a dozen Mexican cities – including Acapulco – have been racked by the drug war.
Since the beginning of this year, Mexico has recorded 272 drug-related deaths. In Tijuana, one person a day was killed in drug violence last month. In Nuevo Leon state, four police officials have been slain in the past seven days.
Additionally, a chilling message was delivered when two grenades were hurled at the car of prison security chief Luis Mendoza last week as he left La Palma maximum-security penitentiary outside Mexico City, where Tijuana drug kingpin Benjamín Arellano Félix and Gulf cartel leader Osiel Cárdenas are held. Fox has responded by vowing that cartel leaders like Arellano Félix and Cárdenas will soon be extradited to the United States for prosecution.
“The people of Mexico will not fold, nor will the federal government, nor will the security institutions of this country,” he said.
However, the once-firm resolve of many public officials to combat drug trafficking is being eroded by fear. Like top-ranking officials in other states, Guerrero Gov. Zeferino Torreblanca is beginning to talk about leaving the fight to federal authorities.
“I have children, I have a family. That is why I am afraid,” Torreblanca said in an interview this month. “What I am learning is how to control my fear so that it does not paralyze me.”
'A critical player'
The point man in Acapulco for the Sinaloa cartel allegedly is an American wanted in the United States on cocaine-trafficking charges and in Mexico on murder charges.
Edgar Váldez Villarreal, 32, a native of Laredo, Texas, is described by U.S. law enforcement as “a critical player” for the cartel in Acapulco.
His nickname, “La Barbie,” belies his ruthless behavior, authorities said.
“He is involved in the day-to-day operations – shipments, extortions, killings,” said a U.S. law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “He is dangerous, and the Mexican authorities know it.”
For nearly 20 years, Váldez's bosses have controlled the drug-trafficking route from Acapulco to the border.
Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán once owned an oceanfront mansion in Acapulco and installed a slide from his third-floor bedroom to the swimming pool. His lieutenants and their families were part of Acapulco's social scene.
When Guzmán was arrested in 1993, two lieutenants, the Beltrán brothers, remained in Acapulco and ran the business. People here describe them as professional and low-key – different from the ostentatious, gun-slinging narcos who ran cities like Tijuana.
The turf war began after Cárdenas, who heads the Gulf cartel, was arrested in March 2003. By then, Guzmán had staged a daring escape from a maximum-security prison in a laundry cart and was making an ambitious bid to take over drug corridors in border cities from Tijuana to Matamoros.
In August 2003, the Beltrán brothers sent 200 men, led by Váldez, to Nuevo Laredo to seize control of Cárdenas' territory, according to testimony given by a protected witness in a Mexican court.
The Gulf cartel responded by sending its hit squad known as the Zetas to Acapulco, and the truce that had brought stability to the resort for so many years was broken.
'Huge problem'
As the violence mounts in Acapulco, police have mostly left drug enforcement to federal forces. That is why last month's shootout was so startling. Somehow, poorly equipped municipal police managed during a 20-minute shootout to kill the four traffickers, who were armed with automatic weapons and had grenades strapped across their chests.
A man identifying himself as “El Tiburón,” or The Shark, suggested during a phone call to the Acapulco newspaper El Sur that a miscue in communications between traffickers and police resulted in the fatal shootings.
El Tiburón said Safe Mexico officials had guaranteed safe passage for a convoy transporting a high-level trafficker, the newspaper reported.
However, word apparently didn't reach Acapulco police Chief Genero García.
García “screwed up,” the caller told an El Sur reporter. Now, “he has a huge problem with the cartel.”
Gov. Torreblanca declined to comment on published reports that García received death threats before he resigned. However, Torreblanca said “a good police officer has to measure his actions.”
“Taking a kamikaze attitude in this situation doesn't do anything but cost you your life,” said Torreblanca, of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD. “You shouldn't try to be valiant. You have to be honest and intelligent. And intelligence sometimes means that you don't get involved in federal matters.”
Drug trafficking is a federal crime in Mexico.
The new interim chief has said his men will not try to halt drug-trafficking activities. And Acapulco's media-loving mayor, Félix Salgado of the PRD, is dodging interviews and refuses to hand out his daily agenda in advance. On several occasions, he has abruptly canceled public appearances.
In an interview with local reporters after the shootout, a visibly shaken Salgado seemed to be speaking directly to traffickers.
“Enough of this violence,” he said. “We want peace.”
S. Lynne Walker: slwalker@prodigy.net.mx |
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