Mexican Border Town Tries to Clean Up Its Image

MATAMOROS, Mexico —  When the killings of six guards at the nearby maximum-security prison horrified even this bloodied border city, civic leaders came up with an interesting solution to their image problem: change the name of the prison.

Matamoros, where mass kidnappings and assassinations have become common, was rocked by the incident in which six guards were kidnapped after they left work Jan. 20, and found two hours later, hands bound, shot dead and jammed into a van. Authorities say the killings are “message murders” from narco-traffickers that the government should back off on its effort to clean up the prison system.

As the home of the so-called Gulf cartel, one of Mexico’s most vicious drug trafficking gangs, Matamoros has witnessed ebbs and flows of violence. But the executions of the guards set a new standard for ruthlessness, and may have been the last straw for the U.S. State Department, which days later issued a travel advisory warning of the dangers in Mexican border towns.

Although U.S. officials later softened their warning, saying it was not meant to discourage visitors to the border region, its effect was swift. Tourism declined sharply, and truck crossings from neighboring Brownsville, Texas, fell 15%. Late last month, a meeting between Texas and Tamaulipas state lawmakers to discuss border issues was moved from Matamoros to Brownsville after the Texas delegation refused to cross into Mexico because of safety concerns.

Alarmed, the City Council and business community are calling for drastic measures. They’ve asked that the 400 federal police and army troops sent here after the killings remain permanently. And they want the prison, known as the Matamoros Federal Center for Social Re-Adaptation, to be renamed the Saltpeter prison. Or the Mesquite prison. Anything but Matamoros.

Although some observers say the city and region are suffering from much bigger problems than a name change can fix, Mayor Baltazar Hinojosa Ochoa says the town of Matamoros is being unfairly tarred by the grim goings-on at the prison, about 12 miles west of the border crossing.

“It’s as if Alcatraz were San Francisco, but Alcatraz is one thing and San Francisco is another, yes or no? Well, it’s the same here in that [the prison] is one thing and Matamoros is something else,” he said. “The city is calm and not what has been portrayed internationally.”

But human rights advocate Luz Armenta of Matamoros says the city is dangerous and that people on both sides of the border have reason to be afraid here.

“You don’t honk your horn here at anyone,” she said, “because you never know if they are going to jump out of the car and shoot you with AK-47s in the middle of the street.”

Talk of more police and image improvement is of no interest to Alma Lilia Gonzalez, the 23-year-old widow of Jose Isidro del Valle, one of the six slain guards. Gonzalez said her husband, who started work at the prison just four months ago, hadn’t been threatened before he was killed.

“He was so happy to get the job because he started earning much more than before,” she said of the $700-a-month salary, twice what factory workers in the city’s maquiladoras make. “We were going to have another baby and buy a house.”

Tears slipping down her cheeks, Gonzalez said she still had not told their 4-year-old son, Kevin, that his father was dead

Public Security Ministry officials said that since the shootings, 40 prison guards have requested transfers, out of a staff estimated in the local media at 150. The prison is one of three maximum-security facilities in Mexico.

As is common when law enforcement officials here are killed, some in the Mexican press speculated that Del Valle and the other guards were targeted because they somehow had been involved in drug trafficking.

But official information so far indicates the killings were random. Del Valle’s neighbors described him as honest and hard-working.

“God takes the good ones and leaves the bad ones here,” said Dora Elena Cabrera, owner of a small store near Del Valle’s house in the El Popular barrio. “I’ve known him since grade school and only saw him being a good father, trying to improve himself and help others. He was so happy because he had found work after looking a long time,” she said.

Since the killings, Mexican army soldiers have patrolled the streets of Matamoros and are camped at the downtown public swimming pool complex.

But some say the deployment is too little, too late. The State Department advisory followed an unusual public letter from U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza criticizing Mexico for not doing enough to stem the narco-based violence and kidnappings along the border. The letter was a departure for the Bush administration, which had lauded President Vicente Fox’s anti-drug efforts.

The strength of the country’s drug cartels inside prisons was evident in the New Year’s Eve killing of Arturo Guzman Loera, brother of Sinaloa drug trafficker Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, inside the maximum-security La Palma penitentiary near Mexico City.

Their reach was underscored further this month when the Mexican attorney general revealed that a member of Fox’s staff had been arrested after allegedly feeding information about the president’s travel plans and whereabouts to an unnamed drug smuggling gang.

Revelations that followed the Mexican army’s occupation of La Palma prison reinforced the impression that the inmates were more in charge than the government. Evidence found in the La Palma raid indicated that rival drug lords Benjamin Arellano Felix of the Tijuana cartel and Osiel Cardenas of the Gulf cartel had formed an alliance and were running their operations from their cells.

The government’s subsequent efforts to regain control of the prison system, including searches of Matamoros and other federal prisons and transfers of some traffickers to different jails, unleashed a new round of violence, prompting the State Department warning.

Among the recent incidents in Tamaulipas state:

* On Jan. 17, the former mayor of Soto la Marina and his two sons were found dead, their bodies dumped alongside a highway.

* On Jan. 15, 20 fishermen from the coast a few miles east of Matamoros were kidnapped and beaten by an armed band of suspected traffickers who accused them of stealing a shipment of cocaine. They were freed after a day.

* On Jan. 8, Reynosa policeman Alan Gerardo Mata and his uncle were found dead on the highway to Monterrey. A note was pinned on Mata’s pants saying the killing was a message to “El Chapo and those who wanted to help him.”

* On Jan. 7, an armed group entered a downtown hotel two blocks from Matamoros city hall and briefly held 40 guests hostage while they searched for a rival. Some of the guests were beaten.

* Also on Jan. 7, the former mayor of the town of Diaz Ordaz disappeared; he hasn’t been seen since.

* On Jan. 3, the security advisor to the mayor of Reynosa was found dead alongside the highway to Monterrey.

In addition, about 25 U.S. citizens have been kidnapped in Tamaulipas state in recent months, although mostly from the city of Nuevo Laredo and none in Matamoros.

News of the prison killings, as with all the outrages perpetrated by Mexican drug traffickers, travels fast across the border, said Sergio Lopez, owner of a trucking firm in Brownsville. He said many of his friends and business associates were reluctant to cross the border.

Julio Cesar Almanza, president of Matamoros’ chamber of commerce and tourism, said that fact was driven home when he recently got a call from a Brownsville judge and others who were planning to attend a wedding in Matamoros.

“They said they want a police escort after they cross. That really made me realize how this [wave of violence] is affecting us,” Almanza said. “But bad things only happen to bad people here. Nothing happens to those who do the right thing.” Almanza got them an escort.

Maybe the judge had read the Matamoros newspapers too often. A front page of the daily El Bravo last week splashed a photo of the latest victim of the violence, a man found shot to death execution-style along with his wife in their rental home here.

Next to the photo was a story headlined “Defamatory Campaign Fails,” quoting a local federal official as saying that the U.S. travel advisory was “exaggerated.”