Thierry Marx plunges into ultraviolence Tijuana – 20minutes.fr

Feature – In a new episode of “Passport to Crime” on Saturday at 22:30 on 13th Street …

From our special correspondent in Tijuana

At the Hotel Paradise, he found hell. Bound hand and foot, he was fatally shot in the head. An anonymous victim in the war on drugs. “A settling of accounts between cartels, it seems,” commented Thierry Marx. Welcome to Tijuana, Mexico, where the chef played the great witnesses for ten days in February for a new episode of documentary Passport to the crime , released Saturday at 22:30 on 13th Street .

Crossing the border on foot, 25 miles south of San Diego, concrete, barbed wire and automatic rifles set the scene in Tijuana is a city on. However, the number of homicides in this city of 1.3 million is down from 850 in 2010 to 530 last year. “With the weakening of the Arellano Felix cartel, there were agreements to better share the traffic,” says Victor Clark Alfaro Mexican expert. According to him, with the takeover of the Sinaloa cartel, the ultraviolence is less publicized and more pragmatic. “It’s more efficient for business. There is less beheadings and more murders by gunfire. “

Ghosts channel

Corpses, Thierry Marx saw during his first life paratrooper and peacekeeper Lebanon. In Tijuana, he was above all marked “human misery”. In an alley in the Zona Norte is 20 euros the pass. “For two positions, and 30 euros if the girl is naked,” smiles a prostitute. The latter can scroll to see 20 clients per night. If it does not have enough money back, it will be beaten and raped by the “narcos” who control drug trafficking and that of human beings.

While many migrants face every danger to pass the American side, 100,000 Mexicans are deported every year in the United States. Expelled from paradise, between 1000 and 3000 survive on the canal banks of Tijuana. Underground. Paperless, homeless and unemployed, those ghosts ravaged by crack and meth dug holes fortune and stay there, close to the border. With a pair of binoculars, they could almost see this endless wall that empties into the ocean. The American dream, so close and yet so far.

Philippe Berry