MEXICO CITY, (Reuters) – In a nation wracked by drug violence, this sprawling capital city of more than 20 million has been an oasis of relative peace. But the key to that calm – an informal truce among rival gangs – may be cracking.
On a sunny afternoon this month, a group of gunmen drove into a slum in the north of Mexico City, the streets packed with shoppers and children leaving school. In plain sight, the killers lined three crack cocaine dealers against a wall and shot them in the head with AK-47 assault rifles. They then forced another two men into a black van and drove away past terrified onlookers.
The killings, allegedly carried out by the bloodthirsty La Familia cartel of the central state of Michoacan, were the latest sign that the drug violence raging across large swathes of Mexico is creeping into the capital.
The drug lords have long kept a lid on turf wars in Mexico City. But a generation of upstart gangsters has this year carried out a series of massacres and decapitations on the city edges. Cells of these newer cartels have also become more active in kidnapping and shaking down local businessmen.
In the greater Mexico City area, police have reported more than 300 gangland killings this year. The carnage includes the massacre of a family of five in the Tlalpan area, a decapitation close to the wealthy business district of Santa Fe, and two headless bodies hanged from bridge in Huixquilucan in the west of the city. The death toll is up from last year, when 260 murders in the area were blamed on rival gangs.
Mexico City includes the inner Federal District, home to almost 9 million people, and another 12 million in outer suburbs and slums governed by the State of Mexico.
“A cartel crime wave here would be catastrophic,” says Luis de la Barreda, head of ICESI, a Mexican think-tank on crime. “Mexico City is not only the home of all the country’s major institutions, it is an image that is constantly in everyone’s minds.”
The capital, to be sure, remains one of the safest parts of the nation. Ciudad Juarez on the U.S. border was last year the most murderous city on the planet. The tourist resort of Acapulco has been hollowed out by violence. Even the affluent business city of Monterrey has been ravaged. But the Federal District boasts a lower homicide rate than many U.S. cities.
Many wealthy Mexicans have retreated here from violent enclaves, setting up new businesses and helping to boost property prices. Poorer families have fled from the bloodshed around the country to shanty towns on the city edges.
But there are signs the capital could go the way of other regions. The Guadalupe Victoria neighborhood – where gangsters shot dead the three alleged crack dealers in broad daylight – is typical of the slums the new cartels are moving into. It is in the far north of the metropolitan sprawl, beneath shanty towns that spiral up dusty hills, a two-hour commute from the heart of the capital. The victims represented a problem relatively new to Mexico – a growing population of addicts and dealers who sell rocks of crack cocaine for as little as 30 pesos ($2.15).
Although the gunmen shot the alleged dealers right in front of a row of shops, store owners are too scared to talk about it. Most denied seeing anything, saying they were busy or their view was blocked.
TRUCE
Until a few years ago, when kidnappings and armed robbery were the biggest threats, Mexico City was seen as one of the most dangerous spots in the country. But it has enjoyed a relative calm while other regions were engulfed by turf wars triggered when President Felipe Calderon went after the cartels in late 2006. The capital even seemed to be a safe place for the families of gangsters. Vicente Carrillo Leyva, son of the Juarez cartel founder, was arrested in 2009 as he exercised in the park of a plush suburb wearing an Abercrombie & Fitch jogging suit.
