Joaquín “Chapo” Guzman Loera,Six corpses in three locations in Tijuana and Tecate.

Six corpses in three locations in Tijuana and Tecate. The victims included three men whose mutilated corpses were found with a message near the U.S. border fence in Playas de Tijuana; two 16-year-old girls whose decomposed bodies were found off a road south of downtown Tecate; and a man whose body was found wrapped in a blanket on the side of a road in a central part of the Tijuana.
The sudden drop-off in violence since mid-January had led to reports of a truce between drug traffickers feuding for control of the region's domestic market and smuggling routes to the United States. But the shifting scenario raises the question of whether the renewed violence could be connected to recent arrests of suspected gang members in Tijuana by members of Mexico's Federal Police. “It would be a likely hypothesis, but we don't yet have the evidence to confirm it,” said Salvador Ortiz, head of the Baja California Attorney General's Office in Tijuana.
Drug gangs use killings as a way of punishing suspected informants and warning enemies. A message left with the three bodies found with their heads and limbs cut off was addressed to “balcon” – a word meaning blabbermouth. The violence follows the detentions by Federal Police last weekend in Tijuana of two suspected members of the Arellano Félix drug cartel: Jesús Gerardo Visaiz Castañeda and Adelaido Reyes Fuentes. On Monday, the agency detained four suspected members of a rival group led by Teodoro García Simental – most notably a former Tijuana police officer named Jesús Alfonso Trapero Ibarra. Authorities said he was responsible for recruiting, transporting drugs to the United States, and the control of neighborhood drug dealers in Tijuana and Tecate.
“The pressure is on them,” said a U.S. official knowledgeable about the drug trafficking groups in the region, but who is not authorized to make public statements. “They're aligned one day, and enemies the next.” By Tuesday afternoon only the two teenage victims had been publicly identified, Rocío Velázquez and Alejandra González. Investigators said the cause of death had not been determined, and it was unclear whether the killings were linked to organized crime. Both had been missing from their homes in Tecate since Feb. 19. A record number of homicides, 844 according to authorities' latest statistics, took place in Tijuana last year, most of them linked to organized crime. But in recent weeks, the violence notably decreased: February's 35 homicides were the lowest since violence began climbing last fall, and investigators said the homicides that did occur were not linked to organized crime.
The February total for Tijuana was lower than the February 2008 tally of 37. This month, nine homicides had been reported by Tuesday afternoon, but only the four Tuesday had signs of being linked to organized crime. Veteran observers say they are not surprised at the shifts. Since the Arellano Félix cartel rose to dominance in Baja California during the 1990s, “the violence has been cyclical, it goes up and it goes down,” said Victor Clark, director of the Binational Center for Human Rights in Tijuana. “The truces are always fragile, a period of false tranquility.”
President Felipe Calderón's war on drug-trafficking groups since 2006 has led to unprecedented violence in trafficking hot spots such as Tijuana as the cartels fight each other and fend off the military and civilian law enforcement.
The death rates have been highest in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, where the Juarez cartel has been fending off a challenge by a powerful Sinaloa-based trafficker, Joaquín “Chapo” Guzman Loera.

“Each organization is determined to finish off the other from top to bottom, from the capo to the drug dealer on the corner,” said Tony Payan, a professor at University of Texas at El Paso who has studied cartel violence.

In Tijuana, the violence has involved a separate feud authorities date to a street battle last April that left at least 14 dead. Since then, the Arellano Félix cartel has then been fighting off a challenge by García Simental, a brutal former Arellano lieutenant said to have obtained the backing of the Sinaloa cartel.