Man tore skin off his face in Tijuana street

In the last few weeks, the border line area in Tijuana’s river canalization known as El Bordo has been in the spotlight due to crime there. One of those crimes is drug abuse; the attendant mental issues in consumers, not a new problem, has being affecting more and more people. This situation is visible around the city’s downtown, especially in El Bordo’s nearby areas.

Recently a video of a man tearing off part of his face and head skin with a knife on the streets of Zona Norte neighborhood came out. The video that was posted on social media by a taxi driver who was passing by, shows the man holding a mirror with one hand and brushing his hair and parts of his scalp off with the knife with the other, thanks to this video Marc Rivera known as “El paramedico tactico” and his team started searching for his whereabouts.

A seek-and-found operation was deployed, and when they found him they realized he was an Already Known Patient. Isaul is originally from Mexicali and suffers a cristal-meth-derived psychiatric mental condition.

“So we found him and tried to help him out and he attacked us with the knife, but because we know he has dementia we could legally force him to be treated,” Marc said. “We actually used to do it before he attacked one of our volunteers, most of which are women, but he was not mutilating himself in public till now. It started when he did what they called a “hotline” (which consists in inhaling straight the hot smoke obtained from the crystal-meth combustion) then he started to take his skin apart”.

Isaul was taken care of by the tactical paramedics and brought to Tijuana’s General Hospital, but due to their lack of plastic surgery service, he didn’t get hospitalized. Even other rehab centers rejected him because of his urgent condition.

Through a series of videos made by Marck and his team and posted on social media, Isaul’s family found him and took him back home to Baja’s capital city of Mexicali, where a specialized medic will treat him.

According to Victor Clark, director of the Binational Centre for Human Rights in Tijuana, this problem has existed since the 90s but in the last four years with the fentanyl’s introduction in El Bordo, it turned into a test lab for the cartels to spread fentanyl among drug users, and then around the whole city. He noted that at the beginning the demand for this drug came from deported people, but then it got popular among locals.

“Before the pandemic, we warned the authorities about the upcoming issue the city would face in this regard and the need of education and prevention campaign against fentanyl, but they never did it,” He highlighted, “Our intuition tells us is because the complicity high levels between the authorities and the drug cartels in this regard (…) they are highly responsible on the El Bordo’s current situation. They want to solve the problem, but fentanyl is all around the city now”.

Victor Clark explained that if El Bordo would not exist Tijuana’s downtown might look like Philadelphia’s or San Francisco’s streets where consumers have no other place to do it but there. Because the government has just one rehab center for public service of the 79 existing in Tijuana, the authorities have no idea of the magnitude of this public issue, but Victor Clark stated that according to their work with these rehab centers they estimate that there is a population of about half million addicts around the whole city, a situation that anticipates no solution.