Tijuana’s Elite Flee to San Diego County to Escape Kidnappings and Violence in Mexico
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Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times, June 7, 2008
The Plascencia family boasts the brand name for fine dining in Tijuana. Their showcase restaurant—Villa Saverios—is a foodie destination, its elegant dining room a gathering spot for the city’s political and social elite.
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Three years ago, gunmen tried to kidnap chef Javier Plascencia’s younger brother. A year later they tried again but, in a case of mistaken identity, snatched the wrong man.
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Nearly 40 years after they opened their first Tijuana restaurant, the entire extended family—18 people, including Javier Plascencia’s wife and four children—moved across the border to a suburb southeast of San Diego.
Such migrations have become increasingly common in metropolitan areas along the U.S.-Mexico border, as the ongoing violence of a brutal drug war has disrupted lives from Tijuana to Nuevo Laredo, across the Rio Grande from Texas. The Mexican government has sent more than 3,000 troops into Tijuana in the last 1 1/2 years, and on several occasions soldiers have shot it out with drug cartel gunmen on residential streets.
“San Diego is the only place you can forget the sense of insecurity and fear. There, you can breathe. Psychologically, crossing the border relieves the stress,” said Guillermo Alonso Meneses, a professor of cultural studies at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana.
In San Diego County, the Plascencias opened a new restaurant, brought in their violinist and piano player, and found that they had no shortage of customers. Romesco was soon full of others who had fled the growing violence in Tijuana, including members of the city’s most prominent families.
Real estate agents, business owners and victims groups estimate that more than 1,000 Tijuana families—including those of doctors, lawyers, law enforcement officials, Lucha Libre wrestlers and business owners—have made this move in recent years as the drug- fueled violence has worsened.
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Real estate agents tell of clients with fingers missing, sliced off by kidnappers who sent them to relatives as proof the victims were alive.
The presence of the immigrants, most in the U.S. legally, is unmistakable in the many gated, master-planned communities of eastern Chula Vista, where parking lots for upscale stores and spas are sprinkled with Baja California license plates.
So many upper-class Mexican families live in the Eastlake neighborhood and Bonita, an unincorporated community adjacent to Chula Vista, that residents say the area is becoming a gilded colony of Mexicans, where speaking English is optional and people can breathe easy cruising around in their Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs.
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Kidnappings rampant
Tijuana suffers more kidnappings than almost any other city outside Baghdad, according to a global security firm that handles ransom negotiations south of the border. And a crime wave that started three years ago has only intensified. Most abductions are not reported to authorities, but victim support groups and others estimate the number in the hundreds in the last three to four years.
Experts say the Mexican government’s crackdown on drug cartels may have inadvertently intensified the problem. With Tijuana’s major organized crime group, the Arellano Felix drug cartel, ravaged by arrests and killings, cartel lieutenants have been turning more and more to kidnappings to supplement their dwindling drug profits.
Heavily armed gunmen, often wearing federal police uniforms, snatch people from shopping centers, restaurants, country clubs. The victims are warehoused in networks of safe houses and often shackled and put in group cages until ransoms are paid.
Some families have seen loved ones abducted, released, then abducted again. Many of the kidnapped have been killed, even after large ransoms have been paid. The threat has forced many families that have stayed in Tijuana to employ large security details, bar their doors and windows and retreat behind thick gates or high walls in the Chapultepec Hills.
These days, the drug war’s spiraling violence keeps people away from Tijuana’s restaurant row on Sanchez Taboada Boulevard. Bodyguards shadow children to and from school. About half of the businesses on Avenida Revolucion, the city’s downtown tourist district, have been shuttered.
Fleeing in fear
Some people must take flight suddenly.
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In the rolling hills of Eastlake—only five miles from Mexico up California 125, the new South Bay Expressway toll road—most of the gated mansions in the $2-million-to-$3-million range have been sold to Tijuana refugees, say real estate agents. Maids cross the border daily to work for families that have recently come north—both in Eastlake’s mansions and in its lower-priced neighborhoods of large tract homes with red-tile roofs.
Though safely ensconced behind gates or in the cookie-cutter anonymity of manicured American suburbia, many people who leave Tijuana remain tethered to it by business.
Many continue to run their factories or businesses there from a distance, from nondescript office parks in Otay Mesa or Chula Vista. They monitor their employees via closed-circuit camera systems and shuttle messengers back and forth across the border with paperwork and cash.
If they must travel to Tijuana themselves, they take ample precautions—varying their routes and driving junky cars that they hope will not attract attention.
“They’re running scared. They’re having to do clever things to not be seen crossing the border. They go in different clothes. They go in different cars,” said Father John P. Dolan, pastor of St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Chula Vista. Dolan said six families in his parish have fallen victim to kidnappings in the last year.
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Still, any return to Tijuana is risky. About 30 people from the Chula Vista area who travel back and forth across the border have been kidnapped in the last 1 1/2 years while conducting business or visiting relatives in the Tijuana area, according to the FBI. Some have been killed.
Extraordinary security measures aren’t limited to visits to Mexico. Many families won’t tell even their closest friends their new addresses in San Diego County. Some parents with kids who carpool tell them to get dropped off a few blocks from home and walk the rest of the way.
Homeowners cast wary eyes on nosy landscapers, maids, busboys, members of their health clubs—fearful that someone will pass along valuable information about them to kidnappers.
A lifestyle adjustment
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Slowly, an emigre culture is taking root. Golfers tee up at the Eastlake Country Club instead of Tijuana’s Club Campestre. The Vega Caffe in the Eastlake Design District offers carne asada tortas with cappuccino shots. English isn’t an issue in most Eastlake stores, where signs are in Spanish and clerks are bilingual.
Power lunch spots such as Frida Restaurant and Romesco have filled the gaps left by Villa Saverios and Sanborn’s in Tijuana.
For many, Romesco has become the next best thing to an elegant night out south of the border. Its shopping center locale lacks the curb appeal of the Plascencias’ Tuscan-style restaurant on Sanchez Taboada Boulevard. But the fare is familiar: Baja-Mediterranean seafood, featuring olive oils and wines from the Guadalupe Valley.
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Email Richard Marosi at richard.marosi@latimes.com.
(Posted on June 9, 2008)
Comments
Of course, when San Diego County becomes a part of Mexico for all intents and purposes, then the kidnappings for ransom epidemic will ensue there, and the Mexican elite will have to flee somewhere else, where that place will become increasingly Mexican … the beat goes on.
Posted by Question Diversity at 6:31 PM on June 9
Do you think that they’ll be hiring White Americans as gardeners and maids? Those drug bosses will be putting the screws to any Mexican servants, and quickly find out who lives where.
Posted by Schoolteacher at 7:17 PM on June 9
Totally dishonest.
The article makes it sound like the “good” upscale mexicans are fleeing the evil, drug dealing mexicans as their country falls to them.
The truth is that ALL mexicans are the same and have contributed to the situation in mexico.
Why is that distinction important to make? Because I have been to those areas in Chula Vista they are describing. The area is very nice, with alot of money and high fa luting types. It’s also gang territory and very dangerous. The last time I was there, a group of the children of the very people they are talking about, murdered a rival behind a 7-11 when I was there getting a Slurpee. Those were not ghetto kids and that area has mostly million dollar homes.
As a country, we need to round up the mexicans of all types and classes and kick them the hell out. Because whenever, and wherever we refuse to do that, they recreate the situation going on in mexico, here in the US. It won’t be too long before it is US, not mexican military, fighting it out in the streets with “drug cartel” members in california cities, or even deeper into the US.
These are not nice people escaping a bad situation. Most of these people have close ties to those drug cartels. They are escaping the consequences of what their own behavior has done to their country…..but only as a SECONDARY objective. Their PRIMARY objective is to advance the drug cartels here. For decades, they have made money off these groups as they blighted one neighborhood after another, then moved on when it got too dangerous. Now, they are out of mexican neighborhoods to do this to and have come to the US seeking fresh territory.
We have a choice. Let them do to us what they did to mexico.
Or get rid of them….using any means the task requires.
Posted by at 8:14 PM on June 9
Actually, Baghdad and Tijuana have even more in common. All of the wealthy Iraqis that could afford it, left for the U.S. as did the rich Mexicans and they also conduct their business from the U.S. just as the Saudis conduct their terror support and directions from their summer homes in the U.S.
Posted by Skip at 7:32 AM on June 10
And that is why Mexico will remain a stinking hole. Honest people trying to make an honest living are preyed upon by the parasites who just want easy money. The place is so corrupt that they simply cannot count on local law enforcement to protect them.
Having been to Baghdad I can tell you how bad it is there. Business owners dare not advertise, because that just sends a message to the crooks that they have money to spend on advertising. Next thing you know, your daughter has been kidnapped and they are demanding your life savings.
Posted by John at 10:45 AM on June 10
Kidnapping has long been Mexico’s number one cottage industry. The level of crime and corruption that is systemic to Mexican culture is literally beyond the comprehension of the average American. It is this disbelief and denial that prevents our Hispanderering public from seeing Mexicans for what they really are and driving these criminals out of our country…
Posted by at 3:24 PM on June 11
We really need to stop playing the codependent wife of the machismo driven violent mexican husband at some point and set healthy boundaries in a very real way.
Posted by Unemployed WASP at 2:17 PM on June 14