MEXICO: Border city of Torreon struggles with rapid growing violence as notorious drug gang tightens grip.

Record ID: 205376

  • Title: MEXICO: Border city of Torreon struggles with rapid growing violence as notorious drug gang tightens grip.
  • Date: 29th October 2012
  • Summary: VARIOUS OF DE LA ROSA HOLDING "EL SIGLO DE TORREON" NEWSPAPER IN HANDS
  • Embargoed: 13th November 2012 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Mexico
  • Country: Mexico
  • Topics: Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVA5PBJXB4SO3SJ94UY0LW1BHLUV
  • Story Text: In a five-year struggle with Mexico's most notorious drug cartel, the city of Torreon has suffered a 16-fold increase in murders, fired its police department and lost control of its main prison to the gang.
    The Zetas cartel arrived in Torreon in mid-2007, and this centre of manufacturing, mining and farming once seen as a model for progress has become one of Mexico's most dangerous cities.
    Massacres at drug rehab clinics, bags of severed heads and gunfights at the soccer stadium have charted the decline of a city that a decade ago stood at the forefront of Mexico's industrial advances after the nation joined the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada.
    Widely seen as the most brutal Mexican drug gang, the Zetas have terrorized Torreon and the surrounding state of Coahuila. Many people in the arid metropolis about 275 miles (450 km) from the U.S. border believe if Torreon cannot defeat the Zetas soon it may need to reach some kind of agreement with their arch rivals, the Sinaloa Cartel, and let them do the job.
    In Torreon, the Zetas took control of the local police. In March 2010, the Zetas cartel invaded city hall to demand that Mayor Eduardo Olmos sack Bibiano Villa, the army general he had hired to clean up the force.
    "You can't say that the police was infiltrated by organized crime - the police was organized crime. The policemen used to work for the Zetas cartel and they generated daily actions that had an effect on kidnappings and afterwards on executions which had been organised from the municipal police," Olmos said.
    Subsequently, all but one of the 1,000-strong force were fired or deserted, and for a week Villa and his bodyguards were the only police.
    A clear example of a policeman turning rogue was Sergio Villarreal, dubbed "El Grande." Originally from Torreon, he was arrested in 2010. He worked for the local police force in Coahuila and then the federal police before he allegedly started working for a number of criminal organisations before joining the Beltran Leyva cartel where he rose to the rank of lieutenant.
    After a crisis within the police force, Olmos appointed Adelaido Flores, a former military man, as his new police chief. Flores quickly appointed a new police force, with former military troops who are constantly checked to root out any corruption.
    "Our objective is to strengthen (police corps) and have little infiltration, or nearly none and to maintain ourselves in that vivacious battle firstly against internal infiltration. How do we do this? Well, with constant internal trust exams, anti-doping exams, the inspection of mobile phones and socio-economic inspection. To constantly keep an eye on them," Flores said.
    According to local newspaper El Siglo de Torreon, there were 830 homicides in the first nine months of 2012 in the city's metropolitan area, home to just over 1 million people.
    Greater Torreon had 990 killings in 2011, up from 62 in 2006. It now has a higher homicide rate than Ciudad Juarez, long Mexico's murder capital. Only Acapulco's is worse.
    Locals say traffickers co-existed peacefully with legitimate businesses when Guzman's gang dominated here.
    Things have changed, the General Director of radio station, "Estereo Mayran," Luis De La Rosa Cordoba, said.
    "Youngsters were able to go out and now they are forced to meet at their homes and that's a clear difference between life before and life now. Before, one was able to calmly go to work and now you don't know whether you'll make it back home."
    Lying at the crossroads between Mexico's Pacific states and Ciudad Juarez and Monterrey, and linking the south to the U.S. border, Torreon has long been a strategic hub for drug runners.
    Currently, the Zetas drug cartel and the Sinaloa cartel are fighting over control of the city.
    More than 90 percent of the hundreds of suspected gang members killed or arrested in Torreon this year have been Zetas, according to estimates by city authorities.
    Despite the setbacks this year, the Zetas still control Torreon's prison, police and the mayor's office say.
    President-elect Enrique Pena Nieto, who takes office on Dec. 1, has rejected negotiating with the gangs, mindful of the PRI's past reputation for cutting deals. But he stresses his priority is reducing the violence, then taking on the drug traffickers.
    In private, some officials here say it may be impossible to avoid tacit deals with the cartels in certain areas unless the violence is curbed quickly. That means hammering the Zetas.
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