In less than six months, Tijuana registered over 1,000 homicides for the year as of Friday.

Forty-nine homicides were recorded in the first seven days of June, according to local media and Breitbart Texas’ local law enforcement sources.

The record-breaking numbers in Tijuana are attributed to ongoing turf wars involving Cártel Tijuana Nueva Generación (CTNG), which has aligned itself with El Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación against the Sinaloa Cartel. In some areas, rival factions within the Sinaloa Cartel are fighting for control of the lucrative street-level markets and valuable routes leading into the United States. Those involved in the killings are primarily low-level street dealers, lookouts, customers, and enforcers for these individual criminal gangs. Many of the street-level dealers are targets of rip-crews looking for cash and drugs.

The number of those murdered from January to June 2018 exceeded 2017 during the same period by over 200. In 2017, there were 771 murders from January to June. The total number of killings registered in 2017 was 1,780, which places this year’s pace to be the most violent in Tijuana’s history.

With at least five murdered on June 6, the most recent occurred in the Chamizal neighborhood at 1:35 pm when an unidentified adult male was shot dead while standing outside a grocery store. It was reported that a three-year-old child was struck in the lower extremities and was transported to a local hospital. Investigators later recovered shell casings of an undetermined caliber at the scene.

Homicides for 2017 by month

January: 103

February: 108

March: 122

April: 120

May: 166

June: 152

771 Total homicides for first six months of 2017

(January to the end of June)

Homicides 2018 by month

January: 191

February: 177

March: 183

April: 208

May: 204

June: 46 *

Unofficial total for the year: 1,009

* From June 1 to 7

Breitbart Texas reported extensively on the ongoing cartel-related violence in Tijuana, recently about the arrest of five kidnappers and seizure of a cloned police vehicle. Baja California is also experiencing a spike in cartel killings.

Robert Arce is a retired Phoenix Police detective with extensive experience working Mexican organized crime and street gangs. Arce has worked in the Balkans, Iraq, Haiti, and recently completed a three-year assignment in Monterrey, Mexico, working out of the Consulate for the United States Department of State, International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Program, where he was the Regional Program Manager for Northeast Mexico (Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Durango, San Luis Potosi, Zacatecas.) You can follow him on Twitter. He can be reached at robertrarce@gmail.com