TIJUANA, Mexico – It was the wee hours of the morning when the heavily armed assailants, perhaps two dozen in all and dressed entirely in black, came sneaking up outside Alberto Capella Ibarra’s home. A dog’s bark woke him. Then a barrage of bullets rang out.
“It was bang, bang, bang, bang, bang,” said Capella, who leads Tijuana’s troubled police force, describing the welcome he received from a group of still-unidentified criminals days before his appointment to one of the most thankless and dangerous jobs anywhere was formally announced.
Nine months later, Capella, a squat, former corporate lawyer who had not a day of law enforcement experience when he took over, rides in a bullet-proof sport utility vehicle with a bodyguard at his side. Capella, a marked man, but now a heavily protected one, managed to survive that night, when he says 250 bullets were fired at him.
“I got down and grabbed a gun,” he said. “I shot back out at them, first from down there, and then from up there.”
A police station is just around the corner from the site of the attack, but there was no immediate response from the authorities that morning to the hail of gunfire. The police force that he is now leading did not back him up.
In the middle of the maelstrom that is Tijuana is Capella. As the president of a citizens advisory group on crime in Baja California, he was a thorn in the side of the authorities, criticizing them for their failure to crack down and for tolerating police corruption. He once marched across Baja California, camping along the way, to draw attention to the lawlessness in the state.
When a new mayor, Jorge Ramos, took office, he passed over the usual suspects for the top law enforcement job and offered the position to Capella.
Chief has been a hard job to fill these days at police departments across Mexico, since the federal government declared war on drug cartels. The cocaine barons know it sends a chilling message to the entire force when the chief is gunned down, as a past Tijuana chief was in 2000 and numerous others across Mexico have been in recent years.
Capella belongs to a club, of sorts, of lucky chiefs who have manage to escape the assassins, at least for now.