Menacing, crudely written signs hung from highway bridges or left with mutilated corpses have delivered the message: Mexico's fastest-growing drug trafficking group, Cartel Jalisco Nueva GeneraciÄ‚Å‚n, is now in Tijuana ‐ and fighting to expand its influence.The group's growing presence coincides with a surge in homicides in Tijuana that started last spring, authorities said, and have continued in these first weeks of the new year, with many of the perpetrators and victims described as low-ranking members of the city's neighborhood drug trade.
Drug-related killings accounted for more than 80 percent of Tijuana's 670 homicides in 2015, the highest number in five years, according to the Baja California Attorney General's Office. A total of 71 homicides last month marked the most violent January in the city since 2010.
With the participation of Nueva GeneraciĂłn, the battle for control of Tijuana's neighborhood drug trade and lucrative smuggling routes to the United States has entered a new phase, one that has left the Sinaloa cartel increasingly on the defensive and led to the defections of some of its members, according to law-enforcement officials.
Nueva GeneraciĂłn "is the new player in town that is trying to gain control of the Tijuana plaza," said Gary Hill, assistant special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's San Diego office.