The presence of the immigrants, most in the U.S. legally, is unmistakable in the many gated, master-planned communities of eastern Chula Vista, where parking lots for upscale stores and spas are sprinkled with Baja California license plates.
So many upper-class Mexican families live in the Eastlake neighborhood and Bonita, an unincorporated community adjacent to Chula Vista, that residents say the area is becoming a gilded colony of Mexicans, where speaking English is optional and people can breathe easy cruising around in their Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs.
"I always say that Eastlake is the city with the highest standard of living in all of Mexico," joked Enrique Hernandez Pulido, a San Diego-based attorney with many Mexican emigre clients.
Kidnappings rampant
Tijuana suffers more kidnappings than almost any other city outside Baghdad, according to a global security firm that handles ransom negotiations south of the border. And a crime wave that started three years ago has only intensified. Most abductions are not reported to authorities, but victim support groups and others estimate the number in the hundreds in the last three to four years.
Experts say the Mexican government's crackdown on drug cartels may have inadvertently intensified the problem. With Tijuana's major organized crime group, the Arellano Felix drug cartel, ravaged by arrests and killings, cartel lieutenants have been turning more and more to kidnappings to supplement their dwindling drug profits.
Heavily armed gunmen, often wearing federal police uniforms, snatch people from shopping centers, restaurants, country clubs. The victims are warehoused in networks of safe houses and often shackled and put in group cages until ransoms are paid.
Some families have seen loved ones abducted, released, then abducted again. Many of the kidnapped have been killed, even after large ransoms have been paid. The threat has forced many families that have stayed in Tijuana to employ large security details, bar their doors and windows and retreat behind thick gates or high walls in the Chapultepec Hills.
These days, the drug war's spiraling violence keeps people away from Tijuana's restaurant row on Sanchez Taboada Boulevard. Bodyguards shadow children to and from school. About half of the businesses on Avenida Revolucion, the city's downtown tourist district, have been shuttered.
Fleeing in fear
Some people must take flight suddenly.
