'98 Killings Revisited as Violence Grows

By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service

ENSENADA, Mexico -- Viviana woke at 4 a.m. to the sound of a struggle outside her room.

"Don't move or I'll kill you!" she remembers a man yelling that morning in 1998, and she realized that the intruders had already seized her parents and her 4-year-old brother.

"Is there anyone else in the house?" a man shouted. She heard her mother say no.

Viviana, recalling that night recently, said she hid behind a dresser. She was 15, seven months pregnant and terrified. One of the men walked into her room. She said she prayed over and over, "Please God don't let him see me." Then he left.

Minutes later she heard long sprays of gunfire. The killers, hit men out to settle a score with her father involving drugs, according to the police, had pulled 19 members of her extended family out of their beds, lined them up against a wall and executed them.

The killing on the family's ranch here, 60 miles south of the U.S. border in Baja California, set a new benchmark for brutality and remains one of the country's most notorious drug-related massacres. The dead included Viviana's father, mother and younger brother, six other children and a woman who was eight months pregnant.

"Every time I close my eyes I see it all over again," said Viviana, now 20, discussing her experience publicly for the first time.

The Sept. 17, 1998, Ensenada massacre, with its unprecedented slaughter of women and children, is back on the minds of many people here because of a new wave of brutality by drug traffickers.

The violence, which has increased sharply since the 1980s, has reached new peaks recently. Scores of people have been killed along the U.S-Mexico border and up and down this country's well-worn smuggling corridors. Pressured by a new law enforcement offensive, warring gangs have been killing at a frenzied pace.

Analysts said nearly 100 people were killed in January. More than half of them were in Sinaloa state, which faces Baja across the Gulf of California and is often called the cradle of the Mexican drug trade. The region has averaged two murders a day since Jan. 1.

"They are killing like never before. It is now a little Colombia," Jesus Blancornelas, editor of the Zeta newspaper in nearby Tijuana, wrote Tuesday after 11 corpses
were found buried in a yard in Ciudad Juarez, on the border with El Paso.

Since President Vicente Fox took office three years ago, government officials said they have made more than 24,000 drug-related arrests, including the powerful drug
lords Osiel Cardenas Guillen and Benjamin Arellano Felix. Officials say the recent surge of bloodshed is a mark of success, as decapitated cartels are fighting
desperately to reposition themselves.

But critics said the crackdown has not slowed the flow of drugs. "It has only created tremendous violence," said Mariclaire Acosta, Fox's former top adviser on human
rights.

Beyond the killing and the cascade of sensational headlines is a cost that human rights advocates say is largely forgotten. They say thousands of families -- of drug
dealers, police, soldiers, prosecutors, witnesses and innocents caught in the crossfire -- have been destroyed. Years of killing have produced many survivors such as
Viviana, whose lives have been changed forever by violence they did nothing to cause.

"They are the invisible victims of a war," said Victor Clark Alfaro, a human rights activist in Tijuana.

Earlier this month in Tijuana, Rogelio Delgado Neri, 43, a former state prosecutor, was gunned down by cartel assassins in a popular restaurant. The slaying dominated
the news for a week. Clark said there was almost no mention that Delgado, his close friend, left behind an 8-year-old daughter and a pregnant wife. He said it was
impossible to calculate the long-term damage to them: the psychological scars, the loss of their only source of income, the hard job of making a new life.

"The victims are never part of the story," Clark said.

Five years after the Ensenada massacre, the struggle continues for those who survived and for the 10,000 residents of El Sauzal, the little seaside suburb of Ensenada
where the killings occurred.

"You can never leave it behind. It is a pain that never heals," said Linda Ramirez Bela, 64, Viviana's grandmother, a sad-eyed woman who wept softly as she described
how she lost two sons and 17 other relatives in those few violent minutes.

Only Viviana and her 11-year-old cousin, Mario, survived the massacre. When the killers opened fire, Mario was shot twice but survived by pretending to be dead.

Mario, now 17, left school after the seventh grade, Viviana said. He has rarely been able to talk about what happened. She said Mario spends most of his time in a
village where there is no television, no telephone service and little contact with the world. There, amid vast expanses of cactus and scrub brush, he passes his days
tending cattle and horses.

Viviana, a young mother studying law at a university, was able to discuss the massacre at length without obvious emotion. A pretty woman with a gentle, round face, she
said she is still too shaken by the experience to have her full name published.

The ranch, known as El Rodeo, sits abandoned except for a caretaker and her family, who live in one of the three main houses. Their front door is studded with bullet
holes; the lock, blasted open by a large-caliber bullet, has been left shattered.

Weathered pieces of yellow police tape are stuck to the wall where the shooting happened, and to the garage doors in one of the houses. The concrete patio is chipped
and gouged where bullets struck. The main gate is chained and locked.

"People are still worried," said Ana Maria Tovar, another family member. "There are still so many drug dealers out there. It continues and continues."

El Rodeo ranch was owned by Viviana's father, who police said was a small-time marijuana smuggler. They said he was one of many low-level smugglers working in
territory controlled by the powerful and violent drug cartel run by brothers Benjamin and Ramon Arellano Felix.

Viviana said she does not believe her father was involved in drugs. She said she doesn't know why her family was targeted. But she said it was possible it was only a
robbery that got out of hand.

Authorities said they were sure the massacre was drug-related. A top law enforcement official involved in the case said the 15 or so killers were from a gang that
worked with the Arellano Felixes.

Ensenada police officer Jorge Argoud, one of the first to arrive at the ranch, said he has never been the same since he peered over the wall and saw the bodies.

"When you see a dead person in a car accident, it's one thing," Argoud said. "But when you see so many dead people -- a pregnant woman, a baby -- you don't know
how to handle it."

A spokeswoman for the federal attorney general's office said at least 10 men were arrested in connection with the killings but declined to provide details about the
outcome of their cases. She said the alleged leader of the killers, Lino Portillo Cabanillas, hanged himself in prison a year ago.

Viviana said she hopes the killers are punished, but she doesn't dwell on their fate. She tries to concentrate instead on her baby, born two months after the massacre,
and on her studies. She wants to practice criminal law, an interest she said was piqued by being a victim of crime.

Asked how often she still thinks about what happened, she answered immediately, with a cool, level gaze.

"Always," she said. "All the time."

                                               © 2004