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Drug Trade Tyranny on The Border
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"They were corrupt, but not stupid," he said.
To the children of Rosarito Beach, narco gunmen had already became local heroes because they drove the fanciest cars, wore the latest styles and acted like they owned the town. "Black commandos," the drug cartel hit men, began openly flashing their weapons, snorting cocaine and strutting through the beach town.
"It became impossible to avoid drug dealers -- your kids go to school with their kids," Aurelio Casta¿eda, a Rosarito Beach bar owner and merchants association official, said in an interview. "You'd go to a bathroom in a bar, and they'd be selling cocaine. They don't even try to hide it, and there was nothing you could do about it, nobody you could turn to."
Casta¿eda's once-busy bar, El Torito, is often empty. He says his business is down 80 percent since 2001, when Rosarito Beach's drug violence spiked, scaring off most surfers and other tourists.
Beyond the flash of the bars and hotels, Rosarito Beach is a warren of impoverished neighborhoods where developers, after paying off city officials, did not bother to install water lines or electrical connections. The dismal living conditions created fertile recruiting grounds for drug traffickers, who have found many willing to "mule" their product across the border for $500 a trip.
But great quantities of drugs stay in Rosarito and are sold at hundreds of convenience stores or private homes that thrive under police protection. Not long ago, a Baja California journalist began digging into the problem. The cartels found out and, in a series of phone calls, threatened to kill him.
It wasn't the first time. He'd had enough. Terrified, the journalist left the business.
"I was saying to myself, 'This is an important subject,' " the journalist said on condition of anonymity, fearing for his safety. "But I wasn't willing to lose my life over it."
