Officials link officers' death to organized crime

Two victims were found on beach

By Sandra Dibble

UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

January 5, 2008

TIJUANA – A month into a new mayoral administration that has vowed to fight police corruption, top officials say the deaths of a commander and another officer point to the victims' involvement with organized crime.

Jesús Alberto Rodríguez Meráz, a district commander, had been involved in “an illicit act,” said Alberto Capella, Tijuana's secretary of public safety. Now Rodríguez, 35, and another officer are dead, and two others are in the custody of federal officials conducting the investigation.

Rodríguez had been serving as interim commander in the municipal police district known as El Centenario, east of the Otay Mesa border crossing. He was abducted from his house Sunday. His body was found Thursday alongside police Officer Jorge Alberto Ovalle off a highway in an unpopulated section of Rosarito Beach.

Ovalle and the two detained officers also worked in El Centenario; one of the detainees had been the commander's bodyguard.

Julián Leyzaola, a military lieutenant colonel who is serving as Tijuana's new police chief, would only say that the day before Rodríguez was abducted, “there were a few details that perhaps triggered this series of events.”

A source with knowledge of the investigation, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak, said Rodríguez and the other officers had been linked to the theft of a marijuana shipment from a drug trafficker.