Crime wave forces Mexican upper-class residents to flee - People's Daily Online

Horrific details of the kidnapping wave. Focus on TJ buy Nuevo Laredo has has the same problem for years now, and it is seeping across the border.

A crime wave has led to an exodus of upper-class residents at Mexican border towns to flee to the United States to escape kidnappings and violence in Mexico, the Los Angeles Times reported on Saturday.

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 in Mexican border towns like Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo, the paper said.

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.

Real estate agents tell of clients with fingers missing, sliced off by kidnappers who sent them to relatives as proof the victims were alive.

Tijuana, which borders San Diego, about 80 miles (128 kilometers) south of Los Angeles, suffers more kidnappings than almost any other city outside Baghdad, the report said.

As the crime wave was mounting, 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, according to the report.

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, the report said.

Crime wave forces Mexican upper-class residents to flee - People's Daily Online