Crime, Safety, and the Police

[Jackie888]

Rosarito is generally known as a quiet beach town with far less criminality than Tijuana. On the other hand, that cartel boss was in a firefight in Rosarito I think, before he was caught and caused the shutdown of Tijuana. I am guessing that murder of the public defender from the OC was a mistake in identity. Perhaps they thought he was DEA? Las Playas used to be a quiet section of Tijuana in the past. Until they found out later that members of the cartel lived over there. That was a couple of years ago. Maybe the cartel relocated to Rosarito? I don't know. Just speculating. They got to live somewhere. They got money.

[TjBrazil]

It's definitely not worth the risk. When I use to hang out with guys from some of the previous boards one guy that would occasionally hang out was suddenly not around and one of the other guys said he was caught trying to bring meth over the border. Never heard anything more or from him ever again.

People are just lazy. Get a job and you won't have to risk being in a 6 x9 cell. I was watching the Bernard Goetz documentary. These 4 dumb lazy teenagers threatened him to give them 5 whole dollars. LOL. All the work they put into his attempted robbery, they could have worked at McDonald's. Luckily they were all shot.

[Sol12]

LOL Rosario has alot murders. % based of population is probably similar to Baltimore ghettos. So better than Tijuana but Rosarito is no cabo. I read the Facebook groups theres murders and bodies showing up all the time. Its unfortunate people on the west coast don't have a Florida or Bahamas close by like the east coast. They just shoot down to mexixo and take their chances. Its one thing to fly into a resort and stay put for 4 days, another thing to start driving around, in a nice car, . I only went to Rosarito once, in winter, we took walk on beach and turned around fast it was quiet too easy to be robbed had already been robbed of passport year earlier didn't want to risk losing my passport. I did not like the look of rosarito. At least Playas had some charm with the border fence, restaurants on the cliff overlooking ocean, more people around. Felt much safer for walking anyway.

I think visiting Rosarito in the winter is much different compared to the summer. In the winter it's pretty dead but I have never felt like it was dangerous. As far as the murder goes I think it's raere fir tourists to be killed in Rosarito but like Tijuana it has Cartels violence. This is more in the eastern part of the city in the neighborhoods were the locals live.

[Sol12]

Do you guys really risk bringing your cars to Mexico? I just Uber to the border and cross. Then use Ubers in Tijuana since they are so cheap. I just wouldn't have peace of mind if I brought my car in Tijuana.

I think we all have different comfort levels in Tijuana. I've been driving in Tijuana for many years so to me it's no different than driving in the US. For those that aren't as familiar or don't trust parking in Tijuana I understand but as long as you park in a secure lot the chances of something happening are slim.

[DramaFree11]

LOL Rosario has alot murders. % based of population is probably similar to Baltimore ghettos. So better than Tijuana but Rosarito is no cabo. I read the Facebook groups theres murders and bodies showing up all the time. Its unfortunate people on the west coast don't have a Florida or Bahamas close by like the east coast. They just shoot down to mexixo and take their chances. Its one thing to fly into a resort and stay put for 4 days, another thing to start driving around, in a nice car, . I only went to Rosarito once, in winter, we took walk on beach and turned around fast it was quiet too easy to be robbed had already been robbed of passport year earlier didn't want to risk losing my passport. I did not like the look of rosarito. At least Playas had some charm with the border fence, restaurants on the cliff overlooking ocean, more people around. Felt much safer for walking anyway.

Rosario is an overpriced ghetto with a couple nice places. The weather is horrible, most of the time the city is empty. The only place in the world I dislike more is MDE. Stick with Tijuana, so much fun, great food and way cheaper.

[Dogers69]

I go there frequently, and this is the first Rosarito murder I've ever even heard of. (Although I'm sure it's not the first one ever.).

LOL Rosario has alot murders. % based of population is probably similar to Baltimore ghettos. So better than Tijuana but Rosarito is no cabo. I read the Facebook groups theres murders and bodies showing up all the time. Its unfortunate people on the west coast don't have a Florida or Bahamas close by like the east coast. They just shoot down to mexixo and take their chances. Its one thing to fly into a resort and stay put for 4 days, another thing to start driving around, in a nice car, . I only went to Rosarito once, in winter, we took walk on beach and turned around fast it was quiet too easy to be robbed had already been robbed of passport year earlier didn't want to risk losing my passport. I did not like the look of rosarito. At least Playas had some charm with the border fence, restaurants on the cliff overlooking ocean, more people around. Felt much safer for walking anyway.

[Sol12]

One of my first trips to Tijuana I was asked to transport drugs from a white guy in Caesar's strip club. I laughed at his 1 k offer. He told me it's easy. I said if it's easy why don't you do it. He was from San Diego. Never saw the guy again.

It's definitely not worth the risk. When I use to hang out with guys from some of the previous boards one guy that would occasionally hang out was suddenly not around and one of the other guys said he was caught trying to bring meth over the border. Never heard anything more or from him ever again.

[GuiGui123]

Do you guys really risk bringing your cars to Mexico? I just Uber to the border and cross. Then use Ubers in Tijuana since they are so cheap. I just wouldn't have peace of mind if I brought my car in Tijuana.

[TjBrazil]

When they put drugs on cars without the owners knowing it's not a large amount, usually just a few packages stuck to the bottom with a magnet. So they aren't dumb and can just follow you when you leave but I imagine they don't do this randomly and they already know the persons travel habits before they plant he drugs. I remember it being brought up before on here about back when the Sentri users had the sticker on the window they were being targeted so soon after they got rid of that sticker.

Either last month or two months ago they caught a young American with a few kilos of drugs in the zona norte. Not sure what his story was but definitely not worth the money if someone asks you to transport drugs across the border.

One of my first trips to Tijuana I was asked to transport drugs from a white guy in Caesar's strip club. I laughed at his 1 k offer. He told me it's easy. I said if it's easy why don't you do it. He was from San Diego. Never saw the guy again.

[Sol12]

If they hide drugs in my car, how are they going to retrieve if they don't know when and how I leave the scene? They are likely to lose their million-dollar shipment and get whacked by the boss. They can traffic drugs and humans far easier with tunnels across the border.

When they put drugs on cars without the owners knowing it's not a large amount, usually just a few packages stuck to the bottom with a magnet. So they aren't dumb and can just follow you when you leave but I imagine they don't do this randomly and they already know the persons travel habits before they plant he drugs. I remember it being brought up before on here about back when the Sentri users had the sticker on the window they were being targeted so soon after they got rid of that sticker.

Either last month or two months ago they caught a young American with a few kilos of drugs in the zona norte. Not sure what his story was but definitely not worth the money if someone asks you to transport drugs across the border.

[Dogers69]

People are desperate enough to do all sorts of stupid, crazy shit to cross the border to go North so they can be the regional distributor of Meth and Fentanyl for the cartels. Lots of money and hot girl sin that trade. These people have to be left hungry and angry enough to effect any changes to their countries, rather than just exporting their problems to other countries with their stupid, uneducated, crooked migrants.

If they hide drugs in my car, how are they going to retrieve if they don't know when and how I leave the scene? They are likely to lose their million-dollar shipment and get whacked by the boss. They can traffic drugs and humans far easier with tunnels across the border.

Mexican government take a cut of any kilo of drugs or human trafficked North to kill gringos, so they just close their eyes to all tunnels digging.

They use apple tracking devices or other tracking devices. A hidden Droid phone will work too. I doubt one could get found with drugs or people and not be spending some nights in jail. Ilits one of the reasons I don't drive into mexixo my car is not empty I can't take quick glance and know nothings around plus they can hide shitbunder bumper under hood.

[WombatEd2]

I've never been to Rosarito Beach. Is the following story indicative of typical risks one con expect on that beach?
https://www.ocregister.com/2023/01/1...official-says/

I go there frequently, and this is the first Rosarito murder I've ever even heard of. (Although I'm sure it's not the first one ever.).

[Frogg]

I've never been to Rosarito Beach. Is the following story indicative of typical risks one con expect on that beach?

Orange County deputy public defender killed in Mexico, official says.

By Nathaniel Percy. Published: January 14,2023 at 4:46 pm.

An Orange County deputy public defender was slain Saturday morning, Jan. 14, in Mexico, during a personal trip, Public Defender Martin Schwarz confirmed. Elliot Blair, in his early 30s, was in Rosarito Beach, Mexico with his wife celebrating their first wedding anniversary, Schwarz said. It appeared Blair was the victim of a crime, but further details were not known. The crime did not involve his wife.

Blair's family had not received much information from Mexican authorities as of Saturday afternoon, said Schwarz, who was working with USA Officials to gain more information.

Blair had worked for the public defender's office since 2017, the same year he passed the bar exam, Schwarz said. He handled felony cases out of the Santa Ana office. His wife also works for the Public Defender's office, Schwarz said.

Schwarz described Blair as a "devoted husband, terrific person and a fantastic lawyer who dedicated his life to serving his clients and helping the county's most vulnerable. "He impacted countless lives and his loss will be felt deeply by all who knew him," Schwarz added. "We have been in communication with the family and are doing what we can to support them in this difficult time, including working with local and federal officials to help provide them with answers."

https://www.ocregister.com/2023/01/1...official-says/

[Captain Solo]

Drone videos show thousands migrants cross the Rio Grande into Texas every night.

GATE or SWAT unit of Coahuila State Police has been organizing caravans of vans to transport migrants to US border, charging $400 to $10.000 per head, making $800,000 a night average. This unit has been committing murders, kidnaps, bombing and terrorizing acts to protect their drugs and human trafficking routes. They likely split the proceed up the chain of command all the way up to the top levels of Mexico's government.

If migrants have $400 to $10,000 to pay for passage in Mexico, they are far richer than most ISG bros. They should stay in their shit hole countries, enjoy their wealth, not exporting their beasty, stupid problems to the US and make us pay for all their expensive care. NYC is facing $2 B bill to house and feed migrants in 2023. These uneducated, skill less, shady migrants will cause very high economic and social costs to the US when most will turn to crimes to feed their greed. They break US laws the first time they step their feet in the Us, so what do you expect?

Remember the migrants from El Salvador who turned into the MS-13 gang? They spread out all over the US, traffic drugs and humans, kidnap, murder, terrorize the population, even collect street taxes from street vendors in LA and other cities. MS-13 is now the most violent gang in the US and El Salvador. Just look at the horrible results of US help to El Salvador migrants.

Latin American problems should stay in Latin America. Mexico lets them in their country, let Mexico take care of them. They will soon learn their lessons. The US should assume no moral or legal obligations to solve other countries' problems. Use all foreign aids money to Latin America to improve poverty, healthcare, business opportunities for poor Southern states. The US only encourages them to get drunk, smoke drugs, rape young girls. Murder people every day while waiting for US hand outs. Migrants should be rounded up, penalized for entering the US illegally and denied entry visas in the future.

The Mexican Backstory to Drone Images of Thousands Crossing the Rio Grande.

A tale of open government corruption, impressive criminal organization, and irresistible profit from American policy.

https://cis.org/Bensman/Mexican-Back...ing-Rio-Grande

By Todd Bensman on January 13,2023.

EL MORAL, Mexico – Just across the Rio Grande from this tiny farming village is where Fox News drones shot the video footage that provided America with perhaps the most iconic vision of the southern border's two-year-long mass migration crisis: groups of large as 2,500 calmly appeared on the Texas side near Eagle Pass to turn themselves in to the Border Patrol for quick release into the United States.

The flying cameras of Fox News shined a brilliant light on these arriving groups, stunned much of the public, spurred Republican lawmakers to voice outrage, and may well have contributed to President Joe Biden's January decision to finally visit the border.

But the Mexican side of the story here in El Moral has remained dark, though it probably stands as by far the more disturbing half of the story.

The Center for Immigration Studies recently visited the villages and roadways of the region across from where the infamous drone footage was shot, ground zero of it here in the tiny rural village of El Moral and also in nearby El Centinela, off Mexico Highway 2 along the Rio Grande and some 20-30 miles north of Piedras Negras, the Mexican city opposite Eagle Pass. These are two of the main villages, which hug the Rio Grande, where most of the huge crossings were staged.

It turns out that Coahuila state police ran all of this smuggling. To cash in on irresistibly large profits to be made, in mid-2021 they created a sophisticated criminal conveyor belt system of minivan caravan transportation, stash housing in abandoned factories, and security personnel that could only have operated in the open at such a scale because it was the government doing it all.

This and the details of the operation come via corroborating CIS interviews with an active-duty Mexican immigration officer stationed in Piedras Negras, residents of El Moral, some Mexican media reporting, and a person with direct access to an involved smuggler.

"All those big masses of people were crossing last year 2022 because everybody, all the migrants, saw and watched that Biden was doing nothing about that and was letting them all inside America," said this person, who did not want to be identified for obvious security reasons. "All levels of the government managed it," this person said of the smuggling operation on the Mexican side. "It was a very organized. It was very sophisticated. They had a lot of money off this traffic. ".

When police become crooks.

The individual said the state police felt compelled to organize this operation in mid-to-late 2021 to capture irresistible profits that American policies made possible by enticing more people than ever before to cross through the region. For perspective, Del Rio Sector Border Patrol agents "encountered" 40,342 illegal border-crossers in fiscal year 2020. In FY2022, the number reached 480,931. In just October and November, the first two months of FY 2023, Border Patrol processed 90,482.

The police operation has charged every migrant $400 for just the final crossing, the individual said, meaning that a group of 2,000 could fetch $800,000 in a night, which helps explain the large group sizes.

A federal Mexican immigration officer, in uniform, corroborated the assertion that Coahuila state police substantially ran the operation when migrant traffic began its unprecedented surge. In explaining why federal immigration officers never tried to intervene, the officer pointed out what would happen if they did. In Mexico, federal immigration officers are unarmed.

"There have been times when three or four vehicles arrived, and I have been taken out of my vehicle with guns pointed at me and asked what am I doing here. I prefer to keep my distance. We are recommended a lot of discretion because that's organized crime. ".

Federal police and soldiers, meanwhile, "will tell you, 'I'm not immigration. I didn't see any immigrants. It's not my problem. '.

The immigration officer whom CIS interviewed put all of this on the state police and its highest commanders, consistent with Mexican media reporting in recent years (more on this below).

"What has caught my attention is that there are commanders from the police that have tremendous cars, brand new trucks, and their salary is not enough. If you drive by Allende a city about 35 miles from the border, you'll see them driving their brand new Ford trucks and you're like, 'What the fuck?

Here's how it all worked:

Caravans of minivans.

In part, state police associates would sell travel packages to travelers arriving by bus in the sprawling industrial city of Monterrey, a major immigration hub in Coahuila's neighboring state of Nuevo Leon, where Texas-bound immigrants often coalesce at the station. The deals include transportation in rented minivans the four hours to Piedras Negras.

The Mexican immigration officer said those fished from Monterrey might have to pay up to $10,000. But many other migrants find their own transportation to Piedras Negras and enter the organized pipeline after hearing of it by word of mouth.

A Mexican government photo of one of the minivans provided to CIS.

In the vicinity of Piedras Negras, the police smugglers would fill abandoned factories and local houses with migrants during the day, then between the hours of 2 and 3 am, police would fill the rented minivans and form them into long snaking caravans that would drive through El Moral, a collection of several dozen homes on small acreages they can farm, where several dirt roads lead to the river a mile or so north past the edge of town.

One El Moral resident said the caravans roared through the village on the dirt road by that resident's house in the early morning hours of almost every day, sometimes 50 minivans at once.

The officers, almost always dressed as civilians and also armed, would stage these many hundreds or thousands of migrants on the river bank and direct them to wade over to turn themselves in to the USA Border Patrol for processing into America. That's where Fox News drones caught them on camera.

But back in Mexico, that many vans in long snaking caravans in the middle of the night could not possibly have reached El Moral from Piedras Negras without state police knowledge and acquiescence. The caravans have to pass through a state police checkpoint on Highway 2, right outside a sprawling state police headquarters building. The Mexican immigration officer said that checkpoint was manned 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

And why stop and interdict them? What would the Mexicans do with so many when each and every one of them, no matter how young, were willing to pay $400 for the ride and river crossing.

Consider that each group of 2,000 migrants caught by a Fox News drone was worth $800,000 to the state police or, more conservatively, $400,000 for a thousand.

State police dogged by allegations dating back years.

Some Mexican media outlets have reported for years that an elite unit of the state police in the northern zone of Coahuila formerly known as GATE Special Weapons and Tactics Group (now Fuerza Coahuila), sent there in 2012 to oust the LOS Zetas cartel, have themselves operated as a cartel ever since.

The unit uses the usual tools of intimidation, like assassination, torture and even car bombings, mainly to control drug trafficking and, to a lesser extent, human smuggling. A fairly wide range of other Mexican media reporting dating to 2015 repeatedly implicates the elite unit's current leader Jorge Miguel Barajas Hernandez, also known as "El Hummer," and police director Hector Flores Rodriguez, alias "El Jaguar," of running the state police in northern Coahuila as a brutal cartel, ordering car bombings and always somehow evading prosecution even after arrests.

In September 2021, El Universal journalist Inigo Arredondo interviewed former and current members of GATE (a Spanish acronym for SWAT) and reviewed human rights complaints, missing persons cases attributed to GATE, and USA Court prosecution records in which the unit stands accused of gross human rights abuses for criminal purposes.

He quoted Mexican lawyer Ariana Garcia del Bosque, representing the family of a missing man believed killed by the state police, accusing them of human smuggling operations.

"The maneuvers they are carrying out are not for the sake of protection but for the sake of controlling crime," she said. "And this control has to do with the transfer and distribution of the drugs and the control of the passage of migrants to the United States. ".

Washington makes a boom goes bust.

But booms always eventually go bust.

In early January, the Biden administration announced new policies that will force many border crossers back into Mexico where they can apply for "humanitarian parole" and then cross with USA Permission through ports of entry.

The individual associated with the Piedras Negras smuggler told CIS that almost all traffic over the river immediately stopped. Gone are the caravans of minivans through El Moral.

All of which goes to show the central role of USA Policy in starting and stopping mass illegal migration.

"American policy brought them and American policy has now stopped them," the person said. "The big groups that were crossing are no more. ".

At least for now.

Florida has filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Biden administration's use of humanitarian parole to "legally" let in people who were otherwise going to cross illegally. That trial is underway in Pensacola.

The outcome may decide whether business would boom again for Coahuila State Police – and Fox News.

[Sol12]

Personally I'd be paranoid about driving into Mexico incase someone plants drugs in my car to retrieve later. Now you have to worry about people hiding in your car when you drive over LOL.

https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/loc...diego/3140882/

The good news is that if you didn't know about it they let you go. I've seen that many times when drugs are planted without the drivers knowledge. This is the first I've seen of someone actually getting across and finding people and calling the police. Last year the truck drivers crossing over in Otay were complaining about migrants hiding in their trucks. It's impossible for CBP to prove if the drivers know or not that they are hiding.

Now the other day they found about a million in cash going into Mexico. I'm sure that guy knew what he had.