THE BORDER REPORT

TIJUANA – The beefy white police truck careened around the street corner, its siren screaming, taking the curb and landing hard, a piece of the back fender snapping off, not bothering to slow down as it raced up Revolucíon Boulevard. The rest of the cops ran to their own trucks, pulling away from the curb in a frenzy of shrieking sirens and tires.

Tourists and Tijuanenses stood at the intersection, warily watching the brewing fiasco.

I was with a media crew, giving them a tour of the narco side of Tijuana. Police chief Julian Leyzaola was gracious enough to let us ride along with a police unit for a few hours while they cruised the streets. It started innocently enough, a slow moving patrol along the tourist strip. Boring really; clearly the orders had come down: “don’t let anything happen to them.” Fair enough but disappointing.

Then a call came in, three guys in a new truck trying to jack a gas station on the east side. Teo’s turf. Maybe simple street thugs, but the truck description gave everyone pause. Nobody was taking any chances. Every cop in the city, local, federale, soldier, tore up the Via Rapida, across the canal and into the hills where the three men had disappeared. Tijuana’s always made headlines, so many killings it’s almost become a cliché now. Last year was the worst. Things are calm when there’s a crime boss, not so much when there’re two. Even less when they fracture.

But that’s Tijuana; a morning jogger finds a pile of decapitated bodies on his favorite running path. A man steps forward and admits to dissolving some 300 people in vats of lye. Street merchants complain about the business these days, the armored car business is booming. The fighting’s mostly over these days; El Teo, Teodoro Garcia Simental, the Arellano Felix renegade, seems to have won the battle for Tijuana. And he’ll keep the city under control. Maybe. If the Arellanos don’t come back, deliver a nasty surprise. If the Sinaloans he contracted to help him wrest Tijuana from Fernando Sanchez Arellano, El Ingeniero, don’t decide to take Tijuana for themselves. If. If. If.

Slowly, the city’s coming back to normal, what passes for normal in Tijuana.

“The numbers are back where they were,” says an FBI agent I stopped to have coffee with Sunday morning in San Diego. “Coke, meth, heroin, all the big sells, are up 40 percent,” he says. The numbers in narcotics moving through Tijuana had dropped for months, nearly a year. Now they’re back. La plaza tiene dueño. Otra vez.

But the new owners aren’t the cocaine dynasty that drew headlines for their ruthlessness, their audacity, their penchant for killing. It’s a little sad in a way. The Arellanos, a cocaine dynasty for twenty years, have been reduced to robbing banks, extorting small shop owners and acting like low-life, unimaginative thugs, terrorizing Tijuana, not through power but through fear and petty crime. It leads to some curious conflicts.

The police trucks blanketed three, four blocks of houses in the hills northeast of Zona Rio when we arrived. Big men with machine guns, balaclavas pulled over their faces, crackling radios, military, federal police, cops everywhere.

It was nothing, three thugs had robbed a Pemex, left without paying then pulled a gun on an attendant and drove off.

But everyone’s scared, tense, no idea who’s around the corner these days, or who the thugs are, or what they’re carrying.

The three guys look a little crestfallen,  slouching in the back of the police trucks, using their manacled hands to pull baseball caps over their faces, away from the cameras.

“Tío,” one says as his truck starts to pull away from the curb to take him in.

“Disculpe,” he says.

The uncle stands in front of his own home, nodding his head. The Dodge 3500 his nephew and the other were driving sits at an angle halfway up the drive, the doors hanging open like someone had tried to jump out before it even stopped. The cops will send a tow truck for it later.

Whose were they? I ask a man I talk to sometimes.

“We don’t know yet,” he says, his voice muffled in the balaclava he donned.

“But man, I almost don’t want to find out.”