As a former soldier and police chief of Tijuana and Juarez, Julian Leyzaola cultivated a reputation for exaggerated displays of toughness. At one crime scene he famously punched a corpse in the face. Now, he’s running for mayor of Tijuana.
On a clear afternoon four years ago, a gunman ran up alongside a Jeep in the Mexican border city of Juarez and started shooting.
But giving up would mean victory for his enemies, so he hatched an idea: Instead of leading a police force, he could lead a city. He chose Tijuana, where he had once been chief, and moved there with his wife and son. Dozens of local and international human rights advocates recently sent a letter to federal authorities urging an investigation into Leyzaola’s past.
Women attend a forum to listen to Julian Leyzaola, the Democratic Revolution Party candidate for mayor of Tijuana. Morena is fielding his closest rival in the mayoral race, a businessman named Arturo Gonzalez Cruz, whom Leyzaola has mocked as too weak to tackle drug gangs.Zulia Orozco, a Tijuana-based law enforcement researcher with the University of San Diego’s Justice in Mexico Project, said the lack of progress on crime favors Leyzaola.
Julian Leyzaola with daughter Iran Yuliana Leyzaola Osorio in August 1993 at his graduation from Escuela Superior de Guerra in Mexico City. The cartels responded by killing police officers, 43 in all during Leyzaola’s tenure, including seven in various spots across the city in a span of just 45 minutes.
But privately, some U.S. officials wondered whether the chief was as good as he seemed. A July 14, 2009,released by WikiLeaks from a U.S. official in Mexico warned that “it is tempting to see Leyzaola as the good guy fighting the corrupting influence of the drug cartels” but that the reality was “a bit murkier.”
Leyzaola was waiting there with several bodyguards, who informed Hernandez that he and several colleagues had been accused of stealing from tourists the night before. The criticism on human rights trailed Leyzaola to Juarez, where on his first day as head of public security in 2011 gangsters left a mangled corpse on a street with a message: “Welcome to Juarez Julian Leyzaola.”
A man who confessed to pulling the trigger said he received money from an unknown source to carry out the hit. He and an accomplice were prosecuted and sentenced to jail time, but the intellectual author of the crime was never caught. Leyzaola blames police corruption and a lack of political will by the city’s leaders. He has vowed to spend his first three months purging the force again, and says he will force officers to wear body cameras to discourage corruption.
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