California civic leader slain in Mexico

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LOS ANGELES — The execution-style murder of a young El Monte, Calif., civic leader in Mexico was viewed Friday as a stark sign of just how widely the country’s savage drug violence has spread.

Bobby Salcedo, an assistant principal and school board
member, had no ties to narcotics trafficking, said his family and
friends. He is believed to be the first U.S. elected official killed in
the 4-year-old spasm of carnage.

Gomez Palacio,
the Mexican city where he died, once had a reputation for industry. But
the deaths of Salcedo and five men with him were among 11 killings with
signs of execution in the city that night, according to local media
reports.

Salcedo’s ties to the central Mexican city where he was killed highlight the dramatic shift in the city’s fortunes. El Monte and Gomez Palacio became sister cities in the 1960s largely because they were middle-class industrial towns. Salcedo, who was born in California, had raised money for scholarships, and to build playgrounds and clinics.

He met his wife, Betzy, in 1999 when she came from Gomez Palacio to Southern California on a sister-city exchange student scholarship. They were visiting her family when he was hauled off and shot to death.

“I don’t know if we lived in a bubble, but we never
thought we would be targeted,” said Salcedo’s brother Carlos. “We were
never looking over our shoulder.”

But criminality and lawlessness have descended on Durango state, where Gomez Palacio
is located, like a pestilence, attacking the city of 240,000 people
with special ferocity. Last year, more than 600 people were killed in
Durango, the fourth deadliest state total in the country.

For immigrants from Durango in Southern California, the return home for Christmas was once a hallowed tradition. This year, however, the Federation of Durangan Clubs estimated travel home was off by as much as 60 percent.

“There’s a lot of fear,” Carlos Martinez, the federation secretary, said. “People don’t want to risk it.”

Martinez said the federation was promoting a round-trip flight from Tijuana to Durango for $220, cheaper than the cost of a bus, but the airline canceled the flight due to lack of sales.

Agustin Roberto “Bobby” Salcedo, 33, apparently wasn’t all that worried.

Joseph Vu, 34, a former coworker and classmate of
Salcedo, said they exchanged text messages hours before Salcedo was
kidnapped. “He said he was going to have a few beers. That was it,”
said Vu, who is also an assistant principal at El Monte High School.

The couple was dining with Betzy’s former classmates
at a bar called Iguanas Ranas, next to the Buchacas pool hall Wednesday
evening. Shortly after midnight a group of armed and masked men burst
into the bar and asked who owned a truck parked out front,
investigators told The Times. No one claimed it so the gunmen went from
man to man, slapping them around until zeroing in on Salcedo and five
others. They were hauled away.

The bodies were discovered several hours later,
dumped in a field near a canal. Salcedo was killed by a single gunshot
to the head and had apparently not been tortured, said an official in
the state attorney general’s office in Gomez Palacio, who did not want to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Most of the other men had also been killed with a
single gunshot, but two bore numerous gunshot wounds, suggesting they
were the targets, the official said. None of the men killed with
Salcedo had criminal records, but investigators suspect one or two
might have been drug dealers.

No evidence indicates Salcedo had been specifically targeted, authorities said.

Residents of Gomez Palacio expressed surprise that Salcedo would have ventured to the strip on Miguel Aleman Boulevard,
which has a well-established seedy reputation. Its bars, pool halls and
nightclubs have been the scene of kidnappings and shootouts, and the
area is an easy place to buy drugs.

“I think he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and with the wrong people,” one resident said.

At Mountain View High School in El Monte,
where Salcedo was once student-body president, then later served as
football coach and assistant principal, he was remembered as an
involved administrator, attending sporting events, dressing up on Halloween and exercising often on the school’s track.

“He’s helped every aspect of the school,” said junior Justin Spence. “Everyone knew him.”

El Monte Police Chief Ken Weldon described
Salcedo as conscientious and hard working, a “giver” and a leader.
“This is a dagger in the hearts of a lot of people,” he said.

Salcedo’s brother Carlos said that on Thursday his
sister-in-law called to tell him his brother’s body had been found in a
ravine. He was the first in the family to hear the news. He said his
mother broke down. “She kept saying, ‘They took my Bobby,'” he said.

Durango has been gripped by a spasm of drug violence in the last few years fueled by a dispute over the territory.

The Sinaloa cartel and its leader, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, long controlled the area. But moving in from neighboring Coahuila are the Zetas, a ruthless gang that has splintered off the Gulf cartel in Mexico’s northeastern border region.

One Southern California
immigrant leader, who did not want to be identified for fear of
retaliation, said people are routinely stopped at roadblocks run by
well-armed men outside Santiago Papasquiaro, the town that serves as a gateway to the Durango sierra.

“They ask you, ‘Which group are you from: Los Zetas
or Los Chapos?'” said the immigrant leader. “This happened to me twice.
It’s terrifying. The traditional Christmas trip home is over. We go now
only when it’s an emergency.”

This violence has infected lowland, normally peaceful Gomez Palacio, which is both the state’s wealthiest industrial town and a distribution center for goods heading to the United States — a strategic point for the battling cartels.

In the last year, a generalized criminality has set
in across the town, encouraged by authorities’ ineffectiveness,
immigrants and residents say.

“It could be that a neighbor who doesn’t have work calls up and extorts a neighbor,” said Salvador Franco, president of the Gomez Palacio club in Southern California, who recently returned from the city. “They pretend to be traffickers or Zetas.”

In the last year, many Gomez-Palacio
businesses have closed as their owners fled. Franco said he knew a
family who received extortion and kidnapping threats and sold its
two-bus transportation line and left for the United States.

“Things are serious,” he said. “You have to be inside by 6 p.m. You can’t be in a restaurant. You can’t have a good car because you never know who’s going to take it from you.”

Martinez, the federation secretary, said extortion
and kidnapping have become scourges of the city’s middle-class business
owners. He said a brother-in-law who is an architect moved his firm
from an office to his house to avoid seeming wealthy and attracting
attention. His brother ran a purified-water store for five years until
receiving demands for weekly payment of protection money.

“Car lots, factories and restaurants have closed,”
Martinez said. “These are things you’ve never before seen in the state
of Durango.”

(c) 2010, Los Angeles Times.

Visit the Los Angeles Times on the Internet at http://www.latimes.com/

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

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