TIJUANA — At first, Rafael Lopez Cruz appeared to be just another grotesquely tortured, nameless corpse, dumped in an isolated stretch of Playas de Tijuana by thugs who meticulously broke most of his bones.
Had Lopez Cruz not been a state judicial police agent who had complained of narcotics corruption in the ranks, his murder a few weeks ago might have escaped notice entirely, as simply one more name on a long list of underworld killings here.
Tijuana has made headlines as the site of gangland-style killings of top officials since the assassination of the Mexican presidential heir apparent, Luis Donaldo Colosio, here in March 1994.
Behind the high-profile crimes, however, is a bloody string of drug- and corruption-related murders that has prompted one U.S. prosecutor to compare Tijuana to Chicago in the 1930s.
The violent score-settling between drug lords--and between traffickers and police or anyone else who gets in their way--has left behind a trail of corpses, often with signs of torture, sometimes blindfolded or with their hands tied behind their backs, all bearing the signature coup de grace shots to the head.
Others have been gunned down publicly, in broad daylight, by bold thugs who don't bother to hide their faces. Many victims are anonymous young strangers from impoverished rural Mexico. Others are from socially prominent local families.
"In Tijuana, these kinds of killings have become so frequent that it's almost a normal occurrence," said Teodoro Gonzalez Luna, the spokesman for the Baja California state attorney general's office in Mexicali.
Just last week , a young woman whose family had received threats from reputed narcotics traffickers was mowed down in a public market, along with a police officer who was on the scene, police said.
State Atty. Gen. Jose Luis Anaya Bautista said drug-related violence accounts for 40% of the 35 homicides that occur each month, on average, in Baja California.
While deaths from drug violence have decreased statewide this year, they have surged in Tijuana, Gonzalez Luna said. "There are the score-settling executions at the high levels, and power struggles between neighborhood distributors."
Tijuana coroner Gustavo Salazar said he believes that there is an increase partly because of a growth in local drug sales and consumption.
