TIJUANA
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A month into a new mayoral administration that has vowed to fight police corruption, top officials say the deaths of a commander and another officer point to the victims' involvement with organized crime.
Jesús Alberto Rodríguez Meráz, a district commander, had been involved in “an illicit act,” said Alberto Capella, Tijuana's secretary of public safety. Now Rodríguez, 35, and another officer are dead, and two others are in the custody of federal officials conducting the investigation.
Rodríguez had been serving as interim commander in the municipal police district known as El Centenario, east of the Otay Mesa border crossing. He was abducted from his house Sunday. His body was found Thursday alongside police Officer Jorge Alberto Ovalle off a highway in an unpopulated section of Rosarito Beach.
Ovalle and the two detained officers also worked in El Centenario; one of the detainees had been the commander's bodyguard.
Julián Leyzaola, a military lieutenant colonel who is serving as Tijuana's new police chief, would only say that the day before Rodríguez was abducted, “there were a few details that perhaps triggered this series of events.”
A source with knowledge of the investigation, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak, said Rodríguez and the other officers had been linked to the theft of a marijuana shipment from a drug trafficker.
Victor Clark Alfaro, director of the Binational Center for Human Rights in Tijuana said the incident “is not surprising. . . . The corruption we see was built over many years and is deeply entrenched,” said Victor Clark Alfaro, director of the Binational Center for Human Rights in Tijuana, and a longtime analyst of organized crime trends. “There are a great deal of loyalties between police and drug traffickers.”
Capella became secretary of public safety last month after leading a statewide citizens anti-crime group that openly criticized police corruption. Days before assuming his new position, Capella survived an assault on his house, and now says he regularly receives death threats.
Capella said that perhaps 5 percent to 8 percent of Tijuana's 2,400 officers are corrupt. “Yes, it's real, it exists, but it's not all. It's groups of four or five, and not just in one district. . . . We are finding them.”
One of 11 district chiefs, Rodríguez had been with the Tijuana police department for several years, and had a clean record, Capella said. The department is conducting background checks that eventually would have uncovered any links with organized crime, Capella said.
Leyzaola said he has been meeting daily with his district chiefs. “I have the obligation to trust them,” he said. “I supervise them and make demands, but what would I do if I didn't trust them?”
Sandra Dibble: (619) 293-1716; sandra.dibble@uniontrib.com
