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* Zetas cartel has menaced Torreón and state of Coahuila
* City long been strategic junction for drug gangs
* Pena Nieto says no pact with gangs
By Dave Graham
TORREON, Mexico, Oct 29 (Reuters) - 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 center 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.
Once enticing U.S. firms like Caterpillar and John Deere and
Japanese auto parts maker Takata to open plants, Torreon has not
attracted any other big names since the Zetas swept in.
"It's a powder keg," said a former mayor, Guillermo Anaya, who ran
the city from 2003 to 2005 and is now a federal lawmaker.
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.
Widely seen as the most brutal Mexican drug gang, the Zetas have so
terrorized Torreon and the surrounding state of Coahuila that some
officials make a clear distinction between them and the Sinaloa
Cartel, for years the dominant outfit in the city.
"They (the Zetas) act without any kind of principles," Torreon's
police chief, Adelaido Flores, told Reuters. "The ones from Sinaloa
don't mess ... with the population."
Local politicians tacitly admit that deals with cartels, often
unspoken, helped keep the peace in the past, before a surge in
violence prompted President Felipe Calderon to mount a military-led
crackdown against organized crime six years ago.
Calderon's forces have captured or killed many top capos around
Mexico, but the campaign triggered fresh turf wars and a sharp
increase in bloodshed, spearheaded by a new generation of criminals
like the Zetas. Over 60,000 people have been killed in Mexico in
drug-related violence during Calderon's presidency.
In Torreon, the Zetas took control of the local police, and in March
2010 they 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," 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. At first, the city behaved "marvelously," said Olmos. Then
the shootings, armed robberies and kidnappings took off as the gangs
turned Torreon into a killing factory.
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.
HIGHER MURDER RATE
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.
Flores insists that better days lie ahead, saying the Zetas have
been weakened by security forces and by the Sinaloa Cartel, run by
Mexico's most wanted man, Joaquin "Shorty" Guzman.
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.
"They're nearly being finished off here," said the soft-spoken
Police Chief Flores, standing on a hill above the city and gesturing
at its impoverished western fringes.
Towering above him, a 72-foot (22-meter) statue of Jesus Christ with
outstretched arms gazes across the urban sprawl that is now the
bloodiest battleground in the Zetas-Sinaloa conflict.
Despite the setbacks this year, the Zetas still control Torreon's
prison, police and the mayor's office say.
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.
Locals say traffickers co-existed peacefully with legitimate
businesses when Guzman's gang dominated here. At the very least,
senior politicians in Coahuila have looked the other way, while some
actively colluded with gangs, local leaders say.
"They're up to their necks in it, from the top down," one local
business executive said of the politicians. "But don't put my name
down or they'll be sending flowers to my grave."
When Calderon took office in 2006, voters like 53-year-old Torreon
housewife Rosaura Gomez supported his conservative National Action
Party (PAN) for taking on drug traffickers.
But as the violence intensified and got closer to home, she lost
faith. In this year's presidential election, Gomez backed the
Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled for most of
the 20th century, in the hope that it can restore order. The party
won the election and will return to power in December.
"Before, there was a pact, and things were calm. The drugs went to
the United States and these groups didn't mess with the people. This
is what we want so we can live in peace," she said.
SUFFERING ECONOMY
Today, the economy is suffering. Garbage blows down the streets of
Torreon's old town, passing shuttered businesses. The construction
industry estimates about half the building firms are out of work in
a city that had near full employment in 2000.
Private-sector investment is on track to drop by nearly a third from
2011. New job creation is heading for a 40-percent fall to about
4,800 - in a city growing by 12,000 people a year.
Big foreign firms are tight-lipped about the violence. A Caterpillar
official said the company's security costs had risen, but that its
business had not been affected.
One top business executive, who asked to remain anonymous, says many
acquaintances have left to escape the violence.
Wearing a pained expression, he tells how a kidnapped friend had to
give the names of other suitable victims to his captors as part of
the ransom. His name was among the five given.
Despite that, the businessman argues that the crackdown on drug
trafficking has been disastrous for his city, forcing gangs to
resort to ever-more violent forms of money making.
He and many other locals look back to the days when a "Don't ask,
don't tell" attitude prevailed and business was good.
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.
DEALS WITH THE GANGS
"I think the whole country wants the Zetas exterminated," said Raul
Benitez, a security expert at the National Autonomous University of
Mexico (UNAM). "And if he's successful, Pena Nieto will have the
support to do what he wants with his drug war."
Polls show a large majority of Mexicans reject deals with the gangs,
but a 2011 survey in the hard-hit state of Chihuahua next to
Coahuila showed nearly 50 percent favored a pact.
The survey did not include Coahuila, where the Zetas' blend of
co-option and coercion has become a serious embarrassment.
Several former state officials are under investigation by federal
prosecutors on suspicion of working for the drug gang. On Oct. 7,
marines killed Zetas leader Heriberto Lazcano in the state. Then his
body was stolen from a funeral home by armed men.
When Torreon's Mayor Olmos began to root out the Zetas, the police
went on strike. Calling a meeting in his office, he soon realized
the officers who arrived were working for the enemy.
He described how a policeman slouched in a chair and wearing
sunglasses held up a phone so that the Zetas at the other end could
hear every word the mayor said. When Olmos refused to sack the
police chief, General Villa, masked Zetas surrounded his office,
lining the stairs and the streets outside.
With the help of the media, Olmos broke the strike and forced all
the police to take "loyalty tests." Only one, a woman, passed. He
then rebuilt the force with recruits from outside Coahuila and the
army, and bumped up pay by 50 percent or more. But infiltration is a
"permanent problem," he says.
Olmos, whose father was kidnapped by a gang in 1996, says the
cartels are "equally bad" and opposes making deals. But he admits
there is growing public pressure to end the violence.
Even some politicians from Calderon's PAN wonder whether a review of
the drugs policy is needed to pacify hard-hit areas.
"I think a lot of people think negotiating with certain groups may
resolve this problem," said Rodolfo Walss, a PAN city councillor in
Torreon. "Frankly, I don't know."
Back on the Cerro de las Noas hill, where the huge concrete statue
of Christ looms above the city, the attitude of salesman Jose Angel
Aguirre sums up the conundrum facing Torreon.
Saying "I would rather bury my son today than discover he was out
there killing" for a drug cartel, Aguirre conceded he would accept
the presence of one gang if it improved security.
"It would be better if one of the two sides won," the 58-year-old
said. "Then there would be peace |