MANTENTE ALEJADO DE TIJUANA!

Tijuana: How the horrifying torture and murder of 3 teenagers, 2 of them from San Diego, explains the endless killings

Borderland Beat
January 4, 2019

On a November evening, when the chill of winter is nearly fully upon the area, three teenagers huddled in an apartment in Lomas Verdes Tijuana. They had been to a barbecue and party in Ensenada the night before, while on break from school, two attended O' Farrell Charter in the Encanto neighborhood of San Diego.

Two of the boys were US citizens, Christoper Gomez, who was a senior at OFC, and Juan Suarez-Ojeda, whose sister was dating Gomez. The two met with a third friend in Tijuana, Angel Said Robles, 17 and attended the barbecue, intending to cross back on Saturday, after Thanksgiving. The two contacted their parents on Saturday to say they had lost their phones, but would be back.

Three men rushed into the apartment, beat, tortured and executed the teenagers, leaving their bodies nearby, exposed to the cold, wearing only underwear. It was believed they were taken from the nearby apartment, and dropped close by.

The kids had no links to organized crime, one played football and washed cars, his first job, they were described as good and innocent children. Earlier this week, authorities in Tijuana announced the arrest of three suspects in the killings. The men look as most, if not all of these men do, worn, weathered, the scars of meth and violence across hard lines faces, the signs of poverty and death across their bodies.

They look as common and as benign, as monstrous, as all the others. There has been to motive released, nor full names, simply, Fabricio, Esteban Manuel, and Alejandro. The solve rate for homicides in Tijuana is about 2%. The rate goes up in killings that generate a lot of attention, such as the Honduran boy, who was murdered last week, and three suspects arrested quickly after.

False arrests are common, a handful of drug addicts, killers, sicarios and narcocomeudistas, arrested, beaten, and presented as guilty of whatever heinous crimes they need to be guilty of. Or else they are guilty. We probably won't ever know. We will maybe hear a "why", which likely won't make such sense, even to me, or those who have become intimately familiar with the violence and degradation of the murdered in Tijuana.

It will make even less sense to those who, fortunately, aren't familiar with it. A case of mistaken identity. Three children were tortured and murdered, stripped to their undergarments because they looked like someone else. Or acted like someone else. Or were seen talking to someone else.

The three children were tortured, murdered, because they were friends with the wrong person. They went to the wrong taqueria, or offended the wrong person, argued with someone they shouldn't have. None of it will make much sense.

The truth is, sense is only apart of the killing on a large scale, the grim kind of realization of the kind of frenzied butchery that has taken ahold of an entire subculture of a city. I understand it, but there is no sense. What makes sense is poverty, desperation, methamphetamine have all formed an infection, which keeps growing deeper, and more powerful, year by year.

A raw flesh wound, only turning darker, and more colorful, with disease, and despair, creeping across the skin of a city, until there have been over 2500 killings in one year. That is killing on a near unimaginable scale. It is the highest rate of killing ever in Tijuana. The victims are mostly underclass, poor, confined to the colonias, like Lomas Verde, adjacent to Camino Verde, the single most violent colonias in the entire city.

Places where alliances to names like Sinaloa and CJNG really only matter from above, and the violence doesn't discriminate, killing children, mothers, fathers, innocents, those involved, those not. There seems to be no end. It has become horrifying in it's commonplaceness.

I hope there is justice for these children, the two US citizens, and their friend, for they're families, and loved ones, and girlfriends, and friends. There may be, with these arrests, the long, shaky justice system of Tijuana courts awaits. For thousands in Tijuana, there won't be. There will never be. It will stain the hearts and lives of so many, an expanding pool of pain, thick with blood, with violence.