Tecate's Deadliest Years, by the Numbers

From the Tecate Records, 3 of 3

This story came out of the research for The Paper Trail, which followed the Adams name from Yuma to Tecate. It's context, and it comes with one rule: violence in a place tells you nothing about any one person from there.

If you've been through Tecate, you probably think of it as the quiet one. Smaller than Tijuana, slower than Mexicali. A brewery town with a pretty plaza and an easy crossing.

From 2019 to 2021, the state's own numbers tell a different story.

Baja California's prosecutor's office, the Fiscalía General del Estado, puts out a one-page table for each city every year. Tecate's counts two things: murder cases opened, and people killed.

• 2019: 78 murder cases, 96 people killed.
• 2020: 124 murder cases, 165 people killed.
• 2021: 198 murder cases, 241 people killed.

In two years, the number of people murdered in Tecate went up about two and a half times. The worst month was January 2021: 40 people killed in 30 cases. That's close to half of all of 2019 in a single month.

Then it dropped hard. October through December 2021, the table shows 19 people killed, total.

Read the numbers right

Two things to keep straight.

Cases and victims aren't the same count. One case can have several victims. When ZETA, the Tijuana newsweekly, ran a headline in January 2021 saying Tecate's homicides were up 60 percent, the case count had gone up about that much. The victim count rose faster. Both are right.

And these are the prosecutor's counts of open case files. The tables say the numbers can change when cases are reclassified. They don't count cartel killings. They don't say who did the killing or why. A homicide table tells you how many people died. It doesn't tell you one single motive.

What was said about why

ZETA's January 2021 story described a fight between the Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa cartels as part of the picture, attributing that to its sources. That's a characterization, and it's widely repeated in coverage of the region. Nothing in the tables, or anything else we found, says how many of these killings were cartel-related. Not every murder in a bad year is a cartel murder.

On Jan. 13, 2021, the Fiscalía announced that a joint operation had brought homicides down in Tecate. The monthly table still shows January 2021 as the worst month of the three years.

The council member

Three weeks later, on Feb. 3, 2021, Alfonso Zacarías Rodríguez, a Tecate council member who chaired its public-safety commission, was shot and killed in a business parking lot downtown, a short walk from City Hall, according to ZETA.

A week later a senior Fiscalía prosecutor said one line of investigation involved personal relationships, and that a link to organized crime hadn't been ruled out. That's where the investigation stood that day, not a finding. ZETA separately reported theories about contacts he allegedly had. None of those theories has been proven in any record we found.

We searched for a later arrest, charge or court ruling in his killing and didn't find one. That doesn't mean the case is unsolved. It means the answer, if there is one, isn't anywhere public we could find.

The water defender

Óscar Eyraud Adams, a Kumiai farmer and activist from Nejí, was shot and killed in Tecate on Sept. 24, 2020, weeks after publicly accusing federal water officials of favoring big users over his community. His brother-in-law was killed less than a day later; investigators said at the time they saw no sign the two were connected. Nobody's been publicly charged in Óscar's killing that we can find. His story: 'Sin agua no podemos hacer nada'.

He's one of the 165 people in the 2020 column.

The mayor's promise

Tecate's mayor for most of those years was Olga Zulema Adams Pereyra, elected for October 2019 to September 2021. During her 2019 campaign, a local outlet reported her saying Tecate needed police who were more sensitive, better trained and better paid.

The worst years in the table fell on her watch. That's a fact. It's also a fact that murder investigations in Baja California belong to the state, not the city, and that killings were climbing statewide in 2021 too, according to ZETA. The tables can't hand credit or blame for a year's murders to any one official, and this story doesn't try to.

The day the police guarded the mayor

On Oct. 21, 2020, around 3 p.m., about 30 state agents showed up at Tecate City Hall with an arrest warrant for the mayor and two other city officials, the San Diego Reader reported. A judge had issued it for contempt. The city owed a gasoline supplier about 5.6 million pesos, roughly $266,000, and state prosecutors said she'd been ignoring orders to pay since 2019.

Adams Pereyra locked herself in her office. Almost 100 city police officers blocked the doors and guarded her for at least four hours, the Reader reported. That was nearly the whole force of a small city, including officers who'd already finished their shifts.

At about 5 p.m., a 40-year-old man was murdered roughly a mile away. In the days after, the Reader reported, the city took heat for having its police at City Hall instead.

At 6 p.m., a court employee arrived with a judge's order canceling the warrant. An hour later the mayor walked out. She said the debt had been paid in full the day before, and called the whole thing political violence by the governor. "They wanted to make a political circus in front of the city hall," she said, as the Reader translated it.

Gov. Jaime Bonilla said warrants have to be carried out even against mayors, and went after the police standoff: "On photos, it looked like a security house, just as in the movies where criminals protect themselves."

Five months later, a different case went further. In March 2021, a judge ordered her to stand trial for abuse of authority and collusion by public officials, AFN Tijuana reported. The complaint, filed by the city's own legal officer, alleged about 48.6 million pesos withheld from city workers' pay for social security had been diverted. She called it political persecution by the governor. That's a charge, not a verdict, and we haven't found how the case ended.

In August 2021, about half of Tecate's police officers filed their own complaint against her with the state prosecutor, El Mexicano reported. They said more than 4 million pesos had been taken from their pay with nothing to show for it, and that eight officers had been killed during her administration. That's their complaint, and we found no response from her to it.

Why this story is here

Here's why this sits next to The Paper Trail. In my tip to a state intelligence center, I described "documented cross-border connections" and "a historical federal narcotics-case overlap" in a candidate's extended family. Part 6 explains what that rested on.

Numbers like these make that kind of description feel heavier than it is. A place had a terrible few years, a lot of people were killed, and some of it was reportedly cartel violence. None of that says anything about anyone from Tecate, anyone with family there or anyone named Adams. More than 100,000 people live in Tecate's municipality. Most of them spent those years going to work and trying to keep their kids safe, same as here.

A violent year is context. It isn't evidence about a person.

The scorecard

Verified

• The Fiscalía's yearly and monthly homicide counts for Tecate, 2019 to 2021.
• The killing of council member Alfonso Zacarías Rodríguez on Feb. 3, 2021.
• The killing of Óscar Eyraud Adams on Sept. 24, 2020.
• Olga Zulema Adams Pereyra's term as mayor.
• The Oct. 21, 2020 City Hall standoff, the March 2021 order to stand trial and the August 2021 police complaint, as reported by the San Diego Reader, AFN Tijuana and El Mexicano.

Not verified

• How many of these killings were cartel-related.
• Who killed Zacarías Rodríguez or Óscar Eyraud Adams, and why.
• Why the killings dropped off at the end of 2021.
• How the 2021 criminal case against Adams Pereyra ended.
• The police officers' allegations against her.

Our read

• A violent stretch in a place is not evidence about anyone from it.

Questions still open

• Has anyone been charged in the killing of Alfonso Zacarías Rodríguez? The Fiscalía would know.
• How many of Tecate's 2019 to 2021 murders did investigators tie to organized crime? The public tables don't say. The Fiscalía might.
• What explains the drop at the end of 2021? Nobody official has said.

These questions are for the Fiscalía and Tecate officials. We haven't sent them yet.

Back to the start: The Paper Trail: Carlos Adams on the Record

Where this comes from

• Fiscalía General del Estado de Baja California, Tecate homicide tables for 2019, 2020 and 2021. Official records. Figures checked against our archived transcription of all 36 monthly rows. When we checked these links on Oct. 29, 2026, the state's site returned errors; it may have moved them. Our transcription is in our archive.
• Fiscalía bulletins, Jan. 13, 2021 and Feb. 10, 2021. Official statements.
• ZETA, Jan. 11, 2021, Feb. 3, 2021, Feb. 8, 2021 and Dec. 31, 2021. Reporting; theories in it are attributed, not proven.
• Mexico's federal electoral tribunal, ruling SUP-REC-1951-2021. Ruling. Official record of the 2019 to 2021 term.
• San Diego Reader, Oct. 26, 2020. Article. Reporting.
• AFN Tijuana, March 2021. Article. Reporting on a court order; not a verdict.
• El Mexicano, Aug. 5, 2021. Article. Reporting on a complaint; allegations.
• Tecate Informativo, May 3, 2019. Article. Reporting.
• Our search for a public outcome in the Zacarías case. Nothing found.