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By Héctor de Mauleón
It happened six months ago on Libertad Street. At 8:40 pm, a man got out of a gray Jetta and shot three times at two young men, 18 and 19.
The youngest died. The other, with a shot in the abdomen and two more in the legs, was taken to a hospital in Balbuena. There he declared to agents of the Mexico City's Attorney General's Office (PGJDF) that he and his friend "were seen regularly" at 138 Libertad Street, "a drug sale point", and that a gang known as “Los Fortis”, that sell drugs on 134 Libertad street, had threatened to kill them an hour before the attack.
The PGJDF has known about Los Fortis for a long time. In April 2003, just in front of 134 Libertad street, two men traveling on a motorcycle fired at a group of young men. A 20-year-old was shot on the neck. The bullet pierced his windpipe. His name was Juan Luis Fortis Villada. He was identified as a member of Los Mayén gang, which according to the press sold drugs in the area since the times of Arturo Durazo.
Fortis was the seventh person killed in Tepito in April 2003. Then prosecutor Bernardo Batiz -when the city was ruled by Andrés Manuel López Obrador- said that the deaths were due to problems among neighbors and not among criminals. (La Crónica, April 17, 2003).
Seven years later, on October 1, 2010, two women were abducted and killed by members of Unión Tepito, that had just become the dominant gang in the area and wanted to monopolize drug distribution in the Zona Rosa, Roma, Condesa and Insurgentes corridor.
One of the women that was killed was Teresa Fortis Mayén. They left a message next to her body that read: "This will happen to everyone that works with Genaro and Adriana and the Villafáns. The next one is you Fortis X pig. Sincerely, You know who we are. You left them alone Fortis."
The three cases reveal a family controlling drug dealing in Tepito, practically without having to move from the street, since the times of López Obrador.
The Fortis mentioned by the injured drug dealer on Libertad street are just one of the 25 criminal groups operating in Mexico City that sell drugs, kidnap and exort, according to the database Lantia Consultores, especialized in in security and organized crime.
According to Lantia, these groups work for drug cartels, although sometimes they are independent.
Lantia Consultores updates its database every three months. It has detected the presence of six cartels in Mexico City through the criminal cells that work for them: Beltrán Leyva, Sinaloa, Jalisco New Generation, La Familia Michoacana, Knights Templar and Los Zetas.
The main group is the Beltrán Leyva cartel, which controls Unión Tepito among other groups.
The cells operating in Mexico City are identified in the database of Lantia Consultores as Los Fortis, Los Villafán, Los Camarillo, Los Monchis, Los 300, Los Perros, Los Carpinteros, Los Aferrados, Los Gordos, La Oficina, La Nueva Administración, Los Negros and Los Pelones, among other groups whose name comes from the nickname of its leaders: El Pelos, El Mosco, El Chino, El Conejo.
The recent discovery of the head of a young man in Tepito and his limbs at Atlampa neighborhood is the remake of something that Mexico City governments have always called "problems among neighbors,” though this time aggravated by horror.
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