Mexico’s drug cartels slay rival street dealers

TIJUANA, Mexico

Drug dealer Hector Rodriguez Estrada had a feeling he was next. His boss was beaten to death and dumped in an empty lot, his teeth and fingers missing. Then one of Mr. Rodriguez’s underlings turned up in a soccer field, his head next to his body.

Mr. Rodriguez, 30, knew his enemies could only get him if he was asleep or high. But the thought made the longtime addict, who sold methamphetamine in his eastern Tijuana neighborhood, more jittery than usual.

“He felt like something was about to happen,” said his mother, Maria de la Luz Estrada.

With good reason.

Much attention is given to Mexican drug cartels warring over lucrative transport routes to the United States. But more and more, they’re battling for an exploding number of Mexican consumers, a market that barely existed a decade ago. While the United States is expected to remain the largest and most coveted market, local consumers are a big and rapidly growing source of cash.

That makes street dealers like Mr. Rodriguez prime targets for assassins. Low-level sellers are easy prey for rivals seeking to expand turf because they work openly on street corners without bodyguards or armored cars.

Drug dealers account for many of the 10,800 people killed since Mexican President Felipe Calderon began a crackdown on cartels in 2006 - particularly in border cities, where the battles are fiercest. In Tijuana, they fill at least 90 percent of the body bags, according to top law enforcement officials.

It’s much like gang warfare over drugs in the United States, said Rafael Reyes, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s chief of enforcement for Mexico and Central America.

“You have the Bloods and the Crips battling over drug turf,” he said.

Mr. Rodriguez fit the profile for his line of work; he is the third of four children from a poor Tijuana family. His mother sold clothes on the street. His father, plagued by mental illness, worked in the United States but sent little money home.

On the streets where Mr. Rodriguez grew up - and came to control drug sales - he was known as “the Russian” for his curly red hair, or “Freckles,” a natural fighter who began smoking marijuana around age 12 and shooting heroin three years later. He was in and out of prison for petty crimes.

To Mrs. de la Luz, he was her favorite child, helping to pay her electric bills and bringing her flowers on Mother’s Day, even after she moved away from the family home. He was the child who wanted things to be different.

“I’m going to work hard so that you don’t have to struggle and your house has everything,” he told his mother. “He was the only one who helped me,” she said.

But livelihood for someone like Mr. Rodriguez means drug dealing, which is all around the aging, graffiti-strewn homes, office buildings and maquiladoras - assembly plants for manufactured goods headed to the United States.

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