Tijuana.- An alleged dealer was decapitated by members of his gang because he had not paid the drug he peddled on the streets, an official with the state Attorney General's Office said Thursday afternoon.
The head of the victim, identified as 30-year-old Ramsés Jesús Mendoza Velázquez, was found hanging on Morelos bridge, in the city's south side, on Monday morning.
The state's deputy prosecutor against organized crime, Fermín Gómez, said Mendoza's killers intended to terrorize other dealers who owed them money.
In a press conference at the agency's Tijuana, the official presented two men who are accused of killing and decapitating Mendoza Velázquez. They were arrested in a house on Los Olivos Street in the Lázaro Cárdenas neighborhood, in eastern Tijuana, along with an arsenal that included seven rifles, ammunition clips and radios, he said.
He identified the men as Joel Antonio Barriga Ortiz, 25, and Alfredo Ávila Mendoza, 26. The latter had tattooed horns on his partially shaved head.
As he was being photographed at the press conference, a reporter asked Ávila Mendoza how many people he had killed. He nonchalantly responded, "two."
The deputy said that the men who were arrested, also street dealers, confessed to the killing and said that they had left the victim's body on a lot in the Plan Libertador neighborhood, in Rosarito Beach.
According to the deputy, 70 percent of the 818 violent deaths that occurred in the city last year, and of the seven murders in the first six days of January, were cases such as Mendoza Velázquez's, connected street-level drug dealing.
"Groups that want to control the drug sales are unleashing this wave of violence, " he said.
The criminal landscape has changed in the last year. The two leaders of a ruthless gang backed by the Sinaloa cartel were arrested early last year. Meanwhile, the Tijuana-based Arellano Félix cartel continues to weaken. As a result, dozens of criminal cells that served both groups began to work on their own without respecting areas that were previously controlled by rival groups.
A war began among the small groups that left at least 572 people dead in the last year, most of them under the age of 27, their bodies dumped on the street or hung.
Nor are decapitations new. A half-dozen headless bodies have been found on bridges on the city's south and east side, some of them bearing messages threatening other criminal groups.
Omar.millan@sandiegored.com
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