Montserrat Caballero Ramirez, who leads a city notorious for being the most violent in Mexico and one of the most perilous globally, has demonstrated fearlessness in her role. Despite facing numerous challenges such as her security guards being targeted and discovering a threatening note on a deceased woman addressed to her, she boldly reduced the count of her mayoral bodyguards from 28 to six. This decision was made despite the fact that she holds a prominent position in a country where a woman is tragically killed every two and a half hours.

Very recently she agreed to move into an army barracks with her nine-year-old son following death threats but until then Caballero, 41, had often infuriated her personal protection team by walking her dog alone and going to a public gym.

Cuartel militar en donde vive Montserrat Caballero

The mayor is trying to make Tijuana safer for women. She has introduced an emergency smartphone app that can send an alarm and GPS location to a police control room. More ambitiously, since taking office nearly two years ago, Caballero has been uncompromising in taking on Tijuana’s organised crime gangs, showing that, if they do not conform to the law, she is prepared to shut multimillion-dollar businesses that exploit women. “Others just turned the other way,” she says when I ask why action has not been taken before, “or they’re paid off.”

The crackdown has put her firmly in the crosshairs of the drug lords.

“Oh, it’s very dangerous,” she says, “but I have a responsibility to prevent this and to talk about these people.”

Her husband, who lives in the United States, pleads in vain for her to join him there. But she will not go: a straight-talker who says she “doesn’t take any BS”, she is on a mission to protect all women.

Working on a documentary that screens on Monday, we hurtle around the border city with the mayor in her official bulletproof car as she strives to convince Tijuana’s inhabitants that “someone in a skirt can do the job”.

Looking at the scale of the challenges facing her, it is easy to feel they are insurmountable. Mexico is embroiled in a decades-old turf war between cartels slugging it out for territory and control over the blockbuster businesses of drugs, sex and human trafficking — and women are invariably at the sharp end of this brutal battle.

Last year about 30,000 people were murdered in Mexico. Most were male casualties of the drug wars but nearly 4,000 were women. About a quarter of these (947) were investigated as “femicides” — women killed because of their gender. These are typically brutal crimes: according to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, “Women are more likely than men to be killed by strangulation, drowning, suffocation, and stabbing” and, partly as a result, “ 77 per cent of Mexican women report not feeling safe”.

“I absolutely feel like there’s a war on women in Mexico,” says Nicole Ramos, a lawyer living in Tijuana, a city of two million people just over the border from San Diego in the Mexican state of Baja California.

“I don’t feel comfortable driving at certain hours, driving in certain places by myself, wearing clothing on the street that might be more revealing or attract more attention. Because I understand that my life does not have the same value as a man’s life here.”

For Caballero, the root of femicide is the same as all the serious challenges in her city and across Mexico: drugs and the cartels that push them. They have infiltrated almost every section of society.

The cartels often kill in deliberately gruesome ways and their social media videos — put out as a warning to others — are as bad as those distributed by Isis. Images are posted of women with breasts cut off; limbs severed; their heads put on car bonnets. Men are being murdered too but the number of women killed is increasing sharply and believed to be massively underreported.

Tijuana is a cocktail of contradictions.

It has a hedonistic, escapist image and relies heavily on tourism, yet armed troops from the National Guard are constantly patrolling, clad in ballistic helmets, kneepads, black masks and resting their guns on their laps as they sit in the back of pick-up trucks. They look like they are going into battle in Ukraine or Syria but few in Tijuana bat an eyelid.

Alongside the stalls displaying ponchos and sombreros, and the smiling mariachi bands and stores full of handmade cowboy boots down Avenida Revolucion, the city has a seedy underbelly.

Thousands of men travel from the US over the world’s busiest land border every year to live out their wildest fantasies. Drugs are as easy to order as tacos — and women can cost less than the cocktails they are plying their customers with. Child pornography appears to be thriving and the cartels own or stake a claim on many of the businesses hustling for money. Women run to Tijuana to escape or hide. Many of them disappear and are never seen again.

Caballero, a former lawyer, is one of six children. She grew up in a poor household blighted by domestic violence (her indigenous mother was abused) and suffered racism because of her dark skin. This is a background that she takes pride in — and it is plain that many residents of Tijuana residents love her for it.

Constituents are greeted with a warm hug and kiss. I watch as she tucks a note, handed to her by an elderly woman, into the top of her leather boots. She wants the mayor to mend broken street lights which now made her road vulnerable to muggings.

“I will follow it up,” the mayor promises. She gets her hair and make-up done by transgender artists and sex workers in the city’s red-light district. “It keeps me in touch with my people,” she says. “I want them to know I am one of them and I’m listening.”

The mayor’s unconventional approach has endeared her to some and annoyed many others. She is variously described as “uninformed” and “ignorant” — but also “warm”, “approachable” and “different from other politicians”.

“I want to do the best I can for the people while I am mayor,” she says. And if that means upsetting some of the cartels, big business or her fellow politicians then so be it. Already she seems to have done all three.

Caballero has waded in where few of her male counterparts have gone before — working with the federal government to close one of the biggest sex clubs in Tijuana, the Adelita, which failed to show documentation proving that all its female staff were above 18.

The rows of women leaning on the walls of the many “gentlemen clubs” and bars in the huge red-light district are an indication of how women are typically viewed in this macho society. “We’re commodities,” one woman told me, “bought and sold like cars.” The crime figures indicate they are probably discarded and disposed of more easily than a vehicle. We spot exceedingly young-looking girls among the sex workers. One, dressed in a short skirt and high heels with red lipstick, looks like she has not yet reached puberty. At least one is heavily pregnant.

Our team films with a unit from the National Guard watching over us, guns drawn and ready. As we leave the area, one ofthem warns us he had spotted a “suspicious” police car circling the area while we were filming. “If you’re followed, call me and my unit will be out straight away to help,” he says, giving us his personal mobile number — such is the level of distrust towards the force in Tijuana.

Police intransigence or apparent compliance with the narco lords is a constant complaint.

Caballero refuses to back off.

“I’m double proud because I have to be brave to go and close those places,” she says. “A lot of people feel scared because some say they [the businesses] are related to narco-trafficking but I don’t care. If they have children working there, I will close them.”

The news originally published in The Times.

VIDEO RELACIONADO: Reconoce AMLO trabajo de la alcadesa de Tijuana Montserrat Caballero