On the border in northwestern Mexico, Tijuana sits between the haves and the have-nots those in Mexico who have cocaine, marijuana, heroin and speed, and those in the United States who do not but will pay lots for it.

Small-time dealers cook speed, or methamphetamine, in backroom labs hidden in poor neighborhoods. Big-time traffickers tally their profits behind guarded fortresses. Others in this border city of 2 million people just do their best to keep out of the line of fire.Every 30 hours, on average, violence claims another life in this gritty metropolis or in the barren deserts nearby--the overwhelming majority of them connected to the smuggling of drugs, arms or undocumented workers.

Some fear Tijuana is on the edge of becoming the new Medellin, the Colombian city that fell into chaotic drug violence in the 1980s and early '90s.

The city, home to the busiest border crossing on Earth, is one of the main ports of entry for drugs heading into the United States--the world's largest drug market. U.S. officials seized more than 188 tons of drugs worth an estimated $308 million at the five Mexico-California border crossings in the 1998 fiscal year--up 44 percent from the previous year.

Along the 2,000-mile border, homicides this year have hit record levels near drug passage points: 156 in Tamaulipas state, 49 in Chihuahua, and 216 in Sinaloa, not a border state but a prime trafficking center, according to the Binational Center of Human Rights, an independent Tijuana group.

The fragile balance that had checked drug violence in the past was upset by the July 1987 death of Amado Carillo Fuentes, who led a powerful cocaine smuggling cartel based in Cindad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas.

In Tijuana, big-time trading still is firmly controlled by the Arellano Felix brothers, whose group brings multi-ton drug shipments into the western United States and beyond to Chicao, Kentucky, Ohio and New York.

Yet struggles between mid-level and emerging dealers have made 1998 the bloodiest on record for the city, according to Victor Clark, director of the human rights center.

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"It has provoked a feeling of uncertainty, of insecurity along the border," he said.

In September, a hit squad pulled an alleged marijuana trafficker and 18 of his relatives from their beds and killed them in El Sauzal, 45 miles south of Tijuana. In October, young men with a Kalashnikov assault rifle killed six strangers and wounded a seventh in what police say was a drugged, thrill-seeking spree.

Witnesses have said the brothers pay up to $1 million a week in bribes to federal, state and local officials.

But one DEA official said Tijuana's violence is not as bad as Medellin once was--simply because the Arellano Felix organization is so dominant.

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