San Diego Union-Trib:Tijuana police force ordered to turn in guns

[Joanie Baloney]

TIJUANA – The city's entire 2,300-member municipal police force has been ordered to turn in its weapons, leaving doubt Thursday about who would be patrolling this city of more than 1.5 million residents.
The surprise directive from Mexico's Defense Secretariat comes a day after President Felipe Calderon ordered Operation Tijuana, a major offensive against organized crime in the city. More than 3,000 soldiers and federal agents are being sent to the city with the aim of tackling the city's crime problems.

Holy Guacamole, Batman! Martial law 15 minutes away from San Diego? What the heck is going on here??

:scared:



http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/mexico/tijuana/20070104-1921-bn04tjcrime.html

[LiberalFighter]

1. What is dimwad going to do? Or will he leave it to the Terminator?

[KurtNYC]

2. They announced part of this on Wednesday

sounds like they think the TJ police are corrupt.

[Kagemusha]

3. In another situation, this would seem a good, sane decision.

Because that police force is pretty corrupt.

But there are two obvious problems.

- The martial law part, and
- What the hell is the guarantee that the soldiers and federal agents won't be corrupted by the mere fact they are being deployed to druglord turf, where they will have every temptation known to Mexican paraded before them?

[BrightKnight]

4. I would like to see TJ cleaned up.

I don't believe that it is possible but I would like to see it. TJ would be worth a lot more to Mexico without all of the corruption.

I lived in San Diego for a while. Southern California has some of the most expensive and beautiful real estate in the Country all the way up to the border. The ocean views and beautiful beaches do not end at the border.

TJ could be a lot more than a corrupt border town specializing in cheap trinkets and petty vice. It has museums, hotels, restaurants and decent shopping too. It will never be a Mexican Las Vegas but might attract some investment capital

[leesa]

6. Yeah, great. Let's develop the shit out of Mexico too. Southern California

has great views and coastline...too bad they are all privately owned.

[lvasconcellos]

8. "The Donald" has just built a huge condo complex

on the beach just south of T.J. He forgot to tell the investors there's no sewage treatment facility there, so they may be swimming in it!:rofl:

[nosmokes]

5. oh yeah. this plan has success written all over it- in

invisible ink.

[MindPilot]

7. Man that's some scary shit. K&R

Especially coming on the heels of the attack on the National Guard outpost near Nogales. Holy crap!

[LanternWaste]

9. I don't know if this is as much a rarity as we may think...

I don't know if this is as much a rarity as we may think. I lived in Cancun for 18 months and during that time, the local police force were ordered not to come in to work for two days in a row while the federales came in and pretty much took over everything. This happened on three separate occasions while I lived there.

Word on the street was that it was part anti-corruption and part anti-cartel. All the residents I personally knew were either happy that it happened or completely apathetic to the situation.

Although I'm the first to admit that Cancun and TJ are worlds apart in content, trade and inhabitants.


(From my point of view, the only thing that changed during the time was that we actually had to pay traffic tickets in the El Centro police stations rather than paying the "fine" to the local beat cop w/ no questions asked.)

[cascadiance]

10. Hmm... I wonder if there timing this with the new passport restrictions to get into U.S...

Perhaps they're trying to avoid any fo the drug folks running up over the border here with fake driver's licenses, etc. Just got my passport before the end of the year. I'm hoping I beat the deadline of the RFID chip being in it, but who knows. I guess even with my passport now, I'll put off going to TJ any time soon! Thanks for the note!

[slackmaster]

11. Not just their guns

Their rifles as well.

Holy Guacamole, Batman! Martial law 15 minutes away from San Diego? What the heck is going on here??

Martial law is correct.

[High Plains]

12. This is what drug prohibition brings us.

This is all about cracking down on the Mexican trafficking organizations, the misnamed "cartels," who are making billions supplying our insatiable appetite for illegal drugs. There were more than 300 drug prohibition-related murders in Tijuana last year, including a bunch of cops, and about 2000 in all of Mexico.

The killings are part of an "ajuste de cuentas" (settling of accounts) among the competing drug trafficking organizations. Ironically, this latest wave of prohibition-related violence is the result of former President Fox's war on the traffickers, which disrupted the status quo ante. Now, the trafficking organizations are fighting for position. If Calderon thinks he will get a different result, he is a fool.

Drug prohibition-related corruption in Mexican police forces in legendary and endemic, and to the extent the military is brought into this fight, it will be corrupted, too.

This is the Mexican front in our war on drugs. We need to end drug prohibition, end the black market profits going to bad people, end the prohibition-related violence. It's time to tax, regulate, and control currently illegal drugs the same way we do with alcohol. It would be better for us and better for Mexico.

[SlowDownFast]

13. Feds order Tijuana cops to disarm; patrols halt

Feds order Tijuana cops to disarm; patrols halt




By Sandra Dibble
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
January 5, 2007



JOHN GIBBINS / Union-Tribune
Police officers waited to turn in their weapons yesterday under Operation Tijuana, in which 3,000 Mexican soldiers and federal agents are being sent to the city to ferret out corruption and curb organized crime.

TIJUANA – Under federal orders to disarm, members of the city's 2,300-officer police force turned in their weapons and stopped patrolling yesterday, creating doubt about who was responsible for maintaining order in the city of 1.5 million residents.

The surprise directive from Mexico City came a day after President Felipe Calderón ordered Operation Tijuana, a major offensive against organized crime in the city. More than 3,000 soldiers and federal agents are being sent there with the aim of tackling the city's crime problems, but only a fraction have arrived. Federal officials were expected to conduct ballistics tests on the weapons,apparently to see if any of the weapons could be linked to the many killings attributed to drug cartels.




http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/mexico/tijuana/20070105-9999-1n5tjcrime.html

edited for the 4 para rule