TIJUANA, Mexico _ It seemed like everyone in Christian Castillo's life was getting killed or running from death.
Two neighbors on his block were gunned down, along with the taco vendor at the end of the street. Then came a childhood friend of Castillo's mother who had started selling drugs and was shot dead with her husband. Soon their son was executed, too.
Castillo, who until a few years ago held a good job at a Tijuana insurance company, didn't attend any of the funerals. He was too busy getting high and trying not to be killed next.
"It felt like death was following me," he said.
Tijuana, a city of 1.8 million that not long ago was celebrating a major reduction in violence, is in the grip of an unprecedented homicide crisis.
A record 2,518 people were killed here in 2018 _ nearly seven times the total in 2012. With 140 killings per 100,000 people, Tijuana is now one of the deadliest cities in the world.
Across the border in San Diego, there were 34 homicides last year, or just over two killings per 100,000 people.
The root cause of the bloodshed is fundamentally different from previous iterations of violence in Tijuana.
In the past, the body count was driven by powerful drug cartels battling over lucrative trafficking routes to the United States. Now the main cause is competition in a growing local drug trade, with low-level dealers sometimes dying over the right to sell drugs on a single street corner.
Local and state officials estimate that up to 90 percent of the city's homicides are linked to local drug sales, and authorities say they are seeing a similar pattern in Juarez, Cancun and other Mexican cities at the forefront of a nationwide rise in killings, which have nearly doubled over the last three years.
"We're at war," said Jesus Escajadillo, a medical examiner at Tijuana's morgue, who one morning last summer was stooped over a tattooed body in a Lakers jersey, using forceps to dig out the bullet that had destroyed the man's face. "We are living through a civil war."
Morgue workers burn incense, run air purifiers and dispense dust masks to visitors to battle the stench of death, but at times bodies pile up on the floor and the smell seeps outside, sickening neighbors down the street.
To understand the violence and its impact on the city, the Los Angeles Times conducted more than three dozen interviews over the last nine months with law enforcement officials, criminal justice experts, gang members, victims and their families.
They blamed one drug for the growing carnage: methamphetamine, or as it is known in Spanish, cristal.
At $2 a dose _ and falling as manufacturers create cheaper production methods _ it is sold by thousands of competing dealers scattered across the city, from the dusty slums to wealthier parts of town, such as Buena Vista, where Castillo grew up.
Castillo first tried meth as a teenager in San Diego, where he spent part of his childhood in the early aughts. His friends told him it would allow him to stay up playing video games longer.
By the time he returned to Tijuana in 2010 at age 18, cristal was starting to course through the streets, wrapped in little balloons or bits of plastic whose color signaled which cartel had produced it.
"The lady on the corner sells," Castillo said. "The guy you see standing on the sidewalk with his kid, he sells."
Soon he was using and dealing, being paid in meth _ four doses for every six that he sold _ and trading his clothes and furniture for more drugs. He grew gaunt and began hallucinating that he was being chased by monsters.
He was terrified that he might slip up and deal meth in the wrong place or smoke the drugs he was supposed to sell _ both capital offenses in the drug industry here.
"I'm so used to people just dying because they don't pay, because they're selling without permission, because they owed money," Castillo said.
At 26, he had already lived longer than many _ and he wondered how long his luck would last.
