Baja Safari NOW Archives

But then I climb out of the passenger seat — that’s right, it’s me in the car — to make sure they hear me right.

“That sign across the street,” I say, pointing toward the towering words MOLINO ROJO in scarlet neon. “From what year is it?”

The guys look at each other. They have seen many things on this block, but an architectural preservation tourist, it seems, is not one of them.

“From the ’30s?” I ask hopefully.

They squint across the street and scoff.

“Fifties or ’60s,” one of them finally says.

Bummer. And welcome to the search for the Tijuana of the ’20s and ’30s — the city that was Las Vegas before Vegas was Vegas, the city that some Tijuanenses pine for and others treat like incriminating evidence. This bygone Tijuana lives on in tattered postcards and historical-society monographs, its casinos paying off in American silver dollars, its horse-track bettors forever tempted by the prospect of a nightcap at the world’s longest bar.

Looking for remnants of that place in 2007 is like diving for a Mexican Atlantis. Instead of checking out the hotels and fancy restaurants along the fast-growing Baja coast, you squint at history through a veil of border culture and discarded architecture, the scene scented with carnitas and beer.

The casinos are the key. If you persevere, you can learn why a Muslim mirage rises over the heart of Tijuana today and how two enduring trophies of 20th-century high life, the Caesar salad and the margarita, were born or adopted here.

And you can wonder: What if Baja’s old casinos had endured? Would Vegas be Phoenix? Would the strip run from Tijuana to Cabo San Lucas?

By now the world takes for granted Tijuana’s reputation as a den of forbidden thrills (or, as Krusty the Clown on “The Simpsons” puts it, “the happiest place on Earth”). Yet until I came across a new book by Los Angeles writer and preservationist Chris Nichols titled “The Leisure Architecture of Wayne McAllister,” I had not thought much about the roots of that reputation or the Tijuana-Vegas connection. In the course of telling how McAllister landed the job of designing a long-lost resort called Agua Caliente — at the advanced age of 19 — Nichols sketched a bigger picture that explained much.

From 1919 to 1933, alcohol and casinos and prostitution and horse racing were all forbidden or tightly restricted in California, and all were easily available in Tijuana. Because of that, great pleasure palaces were built, including the city’s fabled Agua Caliente casino, and countless Hollywood celebrities and their imitators crept south by car, rail, ship and small plane.

One Los Angeles Times reporter, surveying the Agua Caliente casino in 1929, concluded that “there isn’t another place on the continent, outside of a U.S. mint, where you can see so much money piled up before your eyes at one time. Its only rival in the world is Monte Carlo.”

That casino was the crown jewel of the era. It opened in 1928, tiled and stuccoed, Moorish and missionary, vast and self-assured. It lay six miles south of the border, covered 655 acres and cost about $10 million at the time, the lion’s share supplied by American investors. It was “one of the most opulent resorts ever to grace the Americas,” writes Nichols, “but more significantly, it was the inspiration for Las Vegas.”

Along with a casino offering roulette, baccarat and faro (but no windows or clocks), it featured about 400 rooms and bungalows, a horse-racing track, a golf course, a spa fed by natural spring water, an Art Deco ballroom, various cocktail bars, tennis courts, a riding academy, a landing strip for small planes, a blue-tiled minaret and an iconic bell tower, a replica of which now stands at the beginning of Boulevard Agua Caliente.

Charlie Chaplin and Gary Cooper came to the races. Douglas Fairbanks sat on the board of directors. Jean Harlow tried the golf course. Bing Crosby and Clark Gable saddled up horses, and the showroom featured a teenage dancer, Margarita Cansino, who later changed her name to Rita Hayworth.

Architectural Digest gave it 16 pages in 1929. Hollywood gave it a movie — “In Caliente,” featuring Dolores del Rio and Pat O’Brien, shot on location in 1934.

But by then the cards had started falling another way. Nevada legalized gambling in 1931. The U.S. ended Prohibition in 1933. Santa Anita racetrack opened in Los Angeles County in 1934. In 1935, newly elected Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas banned casino gambling. (One of the leading casinos of that era, historians say, was a downtown venue called the Molino Rojo. A school replaced it, but as the sign I saw attests, another entrepreneur has revived the name at a new location.)

Tijuana kept attracting American thrill-seekers, and sports betting and several other kinds of gambling have endured. But once the high-end gamblers left, thousands of service- industry jobs were lost and the palaces crumbled, burned or were retooled.

I made two trips to Baja and enlisted three guides to help me find that lost Tijuana, all the while knowing that the star attraction of this journey probably would turn out to be a ghost.

At one point, as a guide and I waited in our car at a busy Tijuana intersection, a ball of flame erupted in front of us. Then another. Then I realized they were coming from the mouth of a roadside beggar. Between fiery bursts, he raised a jug of God-knows-what to his lips. And then the light changed and my guide hit the gas without even bothering to shrug.

“People breathe fire for money,” he said in the tone of an indulgent urbanite tutoring a bumpkin.

Maria Curry, an architectural historian who led me through downtown on another day, takes the opposite tone. “This is a magic place,” she says as we pass a workaday scene: the peppers and pinatas of the Mercado El Popo on 2nd Street. Then she explains its roots (in the market’s case, the late 1920s and 1930s).

Curry, who was born in Mexico City and moved to Tijuana in 1993 after graduate school at Cornell, splits her time between here and San Diego. For several years, she and other Tijuana and San Diego academics and architects have been trying to get more respect and protection for Old Tijuana.

But it’s no easy job. Tijuana didn’t declare itself a city until 1889 and didn’t have 1,000 residents until about 1915, when its first horse-racing track opened. Most of the 2 million or 3 million people who live here now (estimates vary) have come from elsewhere in Mexico .

As we walk and drive the city, Curry traces the outline of unspectacular Old Tijuana, such as the stately brick walls of the hilltop Alta Mira Cultural Center, which was built as a schoolhouse in 1930, or Teniente Guerrero Park.

This park was the city’s first, founded just a few blocks from Revolucion by a group of female activists in 1924. It served then as a haven for all social classes, from the wealthy merchants to the families of hotel and casino workers, and it’s not much different today: chess players, kids wrestling on the ragged grass, ancient shoeshine guys, moms pushing toddlers on the swings, and over by the west end, freelance auto repairmen.

Baja Safari NOW

The increased enforcement is in part a dress rehearsal for new rules, scheduled to take effect in January, that will require Americans to show a passport or other proof of citizenship to enter the United States. The requirements were approved by Congress as part of antiterrorism legislation in 2004. Border officials said agents along the southern border were asking more returning United States citizens to show a photo identity document. At the same time, agents are increasing the frequency of what they call queries, where they check a traveler’s information against law enforcement, immigration and antiterror databases.

The new policy is a big shift after decades when Americans arrived at land crossings, declared they were citizens and were waved through. Since the authorities began ramping up enforcement in August, wait times at border stations in Texas have often stretched to two hours or more, discouraging visitors and shoppers and upsetting business. The delays could remain a fact of life across the southern border for the next few years, border officials said, at least until new security technology and expanded entry stations are installed and until Americans get used to being checked and questioned like foreigners.

Last year 234 million travelers entered the United States through land border crossings from Mexico. W. Ralph Basham, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, the agency that manages the borders, said longer waits had resulted from added security measures at border stations that in many cases were aging, outmoded and facing surging traffic. Saying the new document checks were a “security imperative”.

Baja Safari NOW

US Guns Fuel Mexican Cartel Lusts

As many as 2,000 U.S. guns enter Mexico each day, feeding an expanding drug cartel arms race. Assassins blasted Ricardo Rosas Alvarado, a member of an elite state police force, with a blizzard of bullets pumped out of AK-47 assault rifles. Alvarado crumpled at the wheel of his sedan, yet another victim of the weapons known here as “goat’s horns” because of their curved ammunition clips, and which can fire at a rate of 600 rounds per minute. The killing, Mexican authorities said, was a panorama of blood, shattered glass and torn metal that brutally showcased the firepower of Mexico’s drug cartels. But that was just the warm-up. Two hours later, a small army of cartel hit men descended on a federal police office and bunkhouse in this crowded city at one of the world’s busiest border crossings. None of the officers, who had recently been sent here to crush the drug gangs terrorizing the city, were killed in the hail of more than 1,200 bullets, authorities said. But police veterans understood the message delivered to the newcomers: “Welcome to Tijuana. Our guns are bigger than your guns.”

UNION-TRIBUNE
October 16, 2007

Puerto Nuevo, Rosarito– A 67-year-old Spanish tourist abducted Saturday in Rosarito Beach was found early Tuesday by the side of a busy road blindfolded and with his hands tied, police said.

Jose Mara Sanchez Oses initially tried to flee when Tijuana patrol officers approached him, but cooperated when he could see they were uniformed police, said Arturo Zazueta Lara, a police chief in the southern district of San Antonio de los Buenos. The victim had been beaten, and “was quite upset and frightened,” Zazueta said. Sanchez made no statement, but his face showed cuts and bruisesTuesday morning as he stepped from municipal police headquarters into an a Red Cross ambulance. Sanchez had been released by his captors about 10 minutes before he was found, Zazueta said. It was unclear whether any ransom had been paid. The victim rebuffed attempts by state investigators to question him, Zazueta said: “He said he did not want to make any statements to police in civilian dress.” Sanchez, a resident of Pamplona, Spain, is one of two men abducted at gunpoint about 3 p.m. Saturday in Puerto Nuevo, an area south of downtown Rosarito known for its restaurants that specialize in lobster dishes. There was no information about the other victim, identified by Spanish officials as a Mexican-American man. According to a spokeswoman at the Spanish Embassy in Mexico City, Sanchez and his wife had come to visit his son, a Spanish citizen who lives in San Diego but works in Tijuana. The older couple, together with their son, daughter-in-law and grandchild, were having lunch with members of a Mexican-American family, the spokeswoman said. She said armed assailants broke into the restaurant as they were having lunch. Sanchez’s wife, son and daughter-in-law, a U.S. citizen, suffered injuries, according to the Spanish Embassy. The U.S. Consulate in Tijuana confirmed that three people, including a U.S. citizen, and two Spanish citizens, were taken across the border for medical treatment. They were accompanied by a child who was not injured.

Remember when the “authorities” said it was safe to travel in Mexico, as long as you are a ‘tourist’. WRONG

Baja Safari Baja 1000 FREE TOUR!

November 11-18, 2007 Starts in San Diego, fly out of Cabo.

EXCLUSIVE! For the tenth year in a row, Baja Safari Mexico Club offers its Members the FREE Baja 1000 TOUR! From Tijuana to Cabo San Lucas with two nights at the Cabo Safari Ranch. We’ll follow all the action from the Tijuana activities, Classic Caravan to Ensenada and all the Baja way to the ranch, Epic Fishing & Epic Nightlife. Members, book via safariclub@cox.net. Non-Members, sorry you’re not on the list.

Gasoline prices for the current month:

Magna………….$ 6.71 pesos per liter
Premium……….$ 8.27 pesos per liter
Diesel…………..$ 5.67 pesos per liter

These prices are in liters, since 1 gallon = 3.7854 liters.

Currency Conversion: 1 dollar = $ 10.80 pesos (+/-)

Magna………….$ 2.351 dollars per gallon
Premium……….$ 2.898 dollars per gallon
Diesel…………..$ 1.987 dollars per gallon

UPDATED!

October 1, 2007

Gun Battles and Kidnappings Plague Tijuana

Mexico Frontera Norte y Sur

The Mexican federal government began dispatching an additional 650 federal police to Tijuana after an upsurge in suspected narco-violence left the border city reeling last week. In the worst incident, gunmen firing automatic weapons from various vehicles attacked a post manned by Federal Preventive Police (PFP) and Baja California State Preventive Police late on the evening of September 24. The ten minute firefight in the Francisco Villa neighborhood left one civilian dead, two others wounded and two PFP agents injured. The windows of seven government vehicles and the metal fence of a nearby school were destroyed by the storm of bullets. Walking with his girlfriend in front of the targeted building, car washer Alfredo Luna Reyes was killed when he entered the line of fire as the attack got underway. Luna’s girlfriend was wounded in the gunfire. No suspects in the shooting were immediately detained. Two hours before the Francisco Villa assault, 20-year-old state police officer Ricardo Rosas Alvarado, who was assigned to a special intelligence unit, was murdered in a parking lot situated in another section of Tijuana. Rosas’ murder followed the September 23 killing of Baja California state policeman Carlos Horacio Morales Mendez.

In yet another incident bearing the signature of organized crime, the body of Miguel Angel Ramos Pintado, a cousin of former Institutional Revolutionary Party presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo, was discovered September 23 in the Baja California border city of Tecate. Ramos had been reported missing since September 14. Ramos’ daughter, Nadia Karina Ramos, who was a Baja California contestant in the Miss Mexico beauty contest, quickly withdrew from the pageant competition after hearing the news of her father’s death. Tijuana’s violence, which has claimed at least 218 lives in the border city this year, erupted as Tijuana Mayor Kurt Honold was attending a hemispheric mayors’ conference in Chicago, Illinois. Honold was scheduled to talk about purported local law enforcement advances in Tijuana. “We are on the level of London, England, not because I say it but because the International Association of City Centers affirms it,” Honold was quoted as saying before leaving for Chicago. It is unclear who or what is behind the most recent bouts of violence in Tijuana. A city long-dominated by the Arellano-Felix drug cartel, and plagued with high rates of methamphetamine and other drug abuse, Tijuana has been a key battleground for control of both the domestic and export (US) drug markets in recent years. Jose Santiago Vasconcelos, the chief of the Federal Office of the Attorney General’s anti-organized crime unit, recently contended that the Arellano-Felix organization, whose alleged former leader, Francisco Javier Arellano, was sentenced to life in a US prison this month, had ceased to exist. Other analysts challenge the contention that the cartel is on its last legs. Lame duck Baja California Governor Eugenio Elorduy blamed the latest violence on reactions by organized crime to law enforcement crackdowns. “Let there be no doubt. We aren’t going to be intimidated, we aren’t going to retreat,” Governor Elorduy said. “This is a war and we accept it as being one.” Despite the enhanced police presence in Tijuana, an armed commando kidnapped five persons, four men and a woman, in broad daylight September 26 in front of the city’s Pacific Industrial Park. The names of the victims were not immediately made public.

Mexico Security Memo: Oct. 1, 2007
October 01, 2007 20 23 GMT

Targeting the Feds in Baja

After several assassinations targeting police in central and northern Mexico, the Baja peninsula stood out this past week as a hot spot of violence against federal authorities. Minutes after a police officer in Tijuana, Baja California state, was killed Sept. 24, a group of armed men opened fire on a federal police headquarters in the city, wounding several agents inside. The gunmen, who were armed with assault rifles and traveling in sport utility vehicles, escaped after a 10-minute exchange of gunfire with police. Farther south, in La Paz, Baja California Sur state, a police commander was gunned down outside his house as he was leaving for work. This was the first targeted killing of a police officer in the state this year.

These incidents demonstrate how Mexico’s drug violence is reaching into every corner of the state, even typically tranquil places like Baja California Sur. They also suggest that the level of violence is getting worse. Information released by Mexico’s attorney general shows that, by mid-September of this year, 2,308 drug killings had already occurred in the country — more than the total for 2006. Cartel retaliation against increasingly aggressive government forces explains the increase. Higher casualty counts are not how President Felipe Calderon hoped to begin his first term, but they are likely to continue as long as his administration keeps up its campaign against the country’s drug traffickers.