Mayra Beltran / Chronicle Recovering drug addicts Andres Martinez, from left, Roberto Villa and Esteban Perez kneel during prayer at the temple of the Companerismo Victoria Rehabilitation Center on June 22, 2005, in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.
Posted on 07/31/2005 12:43:59 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
NUEVO LAREDO, MEXICO - When Esteban Perez sold $35 bags of heroin on the streets of this violent border city, he said he felt three things: fear, dread and terror.
He feared not having enough money to bribe the local police to look the other way. He dreaded not having enough heroin left to feed his addiction. And he was terrified of not having enough cash for the drug smugglers who had sold him the narcotics and demanded a share of his profits.
"I was scared of them, most of all," Perez, 24, said of the traffickers. "They ask you for a lot of money. If you don't pay, something bad happens to you. A lot of guys with bad debts just disappear."
Perez considers himself lucky. He says he has found God and joined an evangelical rehabilitation group, exiting the life of peddling street drugs and the violence that accompanies it.
In Mexico, which has been a pipeline for drugs into the United States for years, some trafficking gangs now are diverting narcotics for sale in Mexican cities, leaving at least 1 million Mexicans addicted to heroin, cocaine and other illegal hard drugs. Small-time gangsters are kidnapping, robbing and killing one another for the money earned from the growing market for street drugs, and users trying to overcome their dependencies are filling substance-abuse clinics.
"(Domestic drug dealing) has generated its own pool of violence," said Gilberto Higuera, one of Mexico's top drug prosecutors. "It's a threat to public safety — a cancer."
Across Mexico, 700 drug-related slayings have been recorded since Jan. 1. Although the statistics do not break down the percentage related to the so-called retail drug trade, that number is believed to be substantial. For instance, about one in seven narcotics-related killings in Nuevo Laredo since Jan. 1 was connected to street drug deals. In Sinaloa state, the scene of some of the country's most brutal drug violence, officials say disputes over street narcotics have accounted for about 100 of its 300 drug-related slayings this year.
"We are seeing a new generation of totally ruthless gangsters," said Mercedes Murillo, a Sinaloa human rights activist. "Now they will kill someone over as little as $500."
Sometimes, it is for an even smaller sum. A 14-year-old girl who allegedly sold crack in her Mexico City school hanged herself last winter. Detectives said that enforcers had threatened to kill her family over a $300 debt.
Poverty and addiction
Crime in many Mexican urban areas exploded in the 1990s.
The key factors behind the alarming increases in killings, robberies and kidnappings were a severe recession that threw millions out of work and a nearly simultaneous surge in drug use, said Victor Clark Alfaro, a specialist in international drug issues at San Diego State University.
"Crack and methamphetamines have created a cheap high for the urban poor," Clark said. "We are just seeing the beginning of its effects on working-class communities in Mexico."
In 1990, 12 percent of patients at government substance-abuse clinics were treated for crack addiction.
Now, the number of beds occupied by crack addicts tops 70 percent in many facilities. Nationally, about 10 percent of the patients are meth users, compared with none in 1990.
Heroin addiction varies widely from state to state and accounts for nearly all the patients in Nuevo Laredo's clinics.
Hard drugs cause psychotic conditions and powerful physical addictions, said Humberto San Miguel, a doctor at a drug-rehabilitation clinic in the center of Nuevo Laredo.
"Some of these addicts can act in very dangerous ways to keep getting their dose," San Miguel said. "The withdrawal symptoms can be very painful, including nausea and hallucinations."
San Miguel prescribes methadone, a legal substitute for heroin, to more than 1,500 patients so they can stop taking the illegal drug without traumatic side effects.
In another clinic in a dusty working-class barrio across the city, rehabilitation workers say the only medicine they use is the power of God.
"The strength of Christ works better than any chemical to free you from this vice," said the clinic director, Anselmo Cortez, a recently converted evangelical.
On a recent day, several newly arrived addicts could be seen lying on beds, writhing in anguish as they battled withdrawal symptoms.
Other clinic residents, including the former drug dealer Esteban Perez, sang hymns and shouted encouragement to help the addicted through their trauma.
"You can't get through this pain alone," Perez said after finishing a hymn that contained the lyric: "I was a drug addict until Jesus saved me."
Drug war in U.S.
Many experts and government officials say that drug use in Mexico is linked to the traffic into the United States.
Mexican gangs that smuggle narcotics over the northern border have paid their lieutenants off with cocaine or heroin, according to Higuera, the drug prosecutor.
These gangsters, in turn, have aggressively developed markets in cities where they operate, such as Nuevo Laredo.
"The upshot is you get these heavily financed cartels at the top of the pyramid and a range of smaller violent gangs, often with a lot of youths, unloading the drugs in Mexico's cities," said Bruce Bagley, a narcotics-trade expert at the University of Miami. "It's the worst of both worlds."
Mexico became a major smuggling route for drugs in the mid-1990s after the collapse of the major Colombian cartels, Bagley said.
"U.S. policy has played a significant role in this," Bagley said. "The so-called war on drugs has mainly succeeded in spreading the drugs around."
Use of crack and heroin in Nuevo Laredo, a crucial smuggling port because it leads to the Interstate 35 route to Dallas, has more than doubled in the past five years, according to Ana Lidia Trevino, head of an anti-drug program here.
"With this stuff pouring through our city it was bound to get to our kids," Trevino said. "Now there are tienditas (drug shops) in every barrio."
The tienditas have flourished across Mexico with the help of local police who often take bribes to turn a blind eye on the drug dealing, said Mexican analyst Jorge Chabat.
Corruption
Last month, the Mexican army took the entire 750-member Nuevo Laredo police force off the streets after presidential spokesman Ruben Aguilar said it was "heavily infiltrated by drug gangs."
At the same time, nearly 1,000 soldiers, paramilitary police and federal agents moved into the city to restore order.
As part of their operations in the past few weeks, the federal agents have arrested more than 20 people accused of selling drugs in the city, said Rafael Garcia, the top federal prosecutor in Nuevo Laredo.
"The tienditas are a cornerstone of the criminal networks," Garcia said. "We need to break them if we are going to break these cartels."
No kidding? Really? /sarcasm
Plain clothes police officers and army soldiers surround a house in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico Thursday July 28, 2005 after a group of armed men arriving in several vehicles used machine guns, grenades and even a rocket launcher to attack a home in this violent Mexican border city Thursday night, authorities said. People inside the house are believed to have returned fire with powerful weapons of their own, triggering a massive shootout. (AP Photo)
LAREDO - Two South Texas public schools have been deemed "persistently dangerous" campuses, and their students must be allowed to transfer to safer schools, state education officials said.
The Texas Education Agency must designate a school as persistently dangerous if it reported three or more mandatory expulsion incidents per 1,000 students in each of the previous three years.
Such offenses include the use or possession of a weapon on campus, arson, murder, a sex crime, an aggravated assault and a felony drug or alcohol violation.
The schools — the W.A. Todd Ninth Grade Campus in the Donna Independent School District and United South High School in Laredo's United Independent School District — must now develop corrective action plans and submit them to the state within 30 days.
"There's going to be a lot more supervision in schools," Donna Superintendent Joe D. Gonzalez said. "We want to focus on teaching and learning and not waste valuable time disciplining students."
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/3289473
Finially, an effective Mexican program.
bttt
When I read the first line of this article, the first thing that went through my head was "Somehow, they're going to blame the USA." Kreskin, eat your heart out.
No kidding!
They've been a pipeline bringing poison into our country and we're to blame when it spills over into their lives.
"Now they will kill someone over as little as $500."
Not to diminish these problems, but to me the nadir of NYC crime was the case of the fellow going to the laudromat early one Saturday morning who was shot to death for his laundry money.
It just shocks us who can't imagine such a thing.
"It just shocks us who can't imagine such a thing."
The mexican gangs that I was in high school with in Los Angeles were killing each other 50 years ago and the same gangs are killing each other today. Same animals that their parents are and their grandparents are!
We learn from example, don't we?
Yep. Unintended consequences are a real Hillary.
Good posting, but this has been going on for a while. I lived near the Mexican border during the 1980's, and crime & corruption were a huge problem back then. Major parts of the country were lawless and controlled by criminal enterprises. But it's clear from the article that the problem has become even more prevelent and more violent.
Advocates of open borders should be forced to read this article.
There was serious money in the alcohol market when that drug was illegal. How was that problem solved?
LAREDO - Two South Texas public schools have been deemed "persistently dangerous" campuses, and their students must be allowed to transfer to safer schools, state education officials said.
.....................................
IMO it is no longer a simple matter of recreactional(joke)drugs when the bad people are outfitted like military with rocket launchers and bazookas. Our leaders better PULL THEIR COLLECTIVE HEADS OUT OF THEIR A$$es.
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