Gangland

by Jerry Langton

  Two days after the Morelia grenade attack, the DEA—in conjunction with the FBI and Italian police—launched what U.S. attorney general Michael Mukasey called a “massive raid,” arresting 200 people in New York City and the southern Italian state of Calabria. The culmination of a 15-month investigation of the 'Ndrangheta, Operation Solare (also known as Operation Reckoning) also implicated some allies of the 'Ndrangheta that surprised few at the DEA. Among those were Gulf Cartel chief Ezequiel “Tony Tormenta” (Tony Storm) Cardenas Guillen, his second-in-command Jorge Eduardo “El Coss” Costilla Sánchez and Heriberto “El Verdugo” (the Executioner) Lazcano Lazcano, the leader of Los Zetas. The Mexican government issued 30-million peso bounties for each of them and the DEA added another $5 million for the head of Lazcano Lazcano.

  Although the arrests put away many of the most important members of the Aquino-Coluccio clan of the 'Ndrangheta, Calabrian deputy prosecutor Nicola Gratteri said that the drug trade between the Mexicans and the Italians (who imported cocaine and heroin throughout Europe, the U.S. and Canada) would go on because there was just too much money to be made, and because the Mexicans charged much less than the Colombians while being more reliable.

  On September 28, three men—Juan Carlos Castro Galeana, Julio Cesar Mondragon Mendoza and Alfredo Rosas Elicea—were arrested for the Morelia grenade incident. Under heavy interrogation, they admitted to the attack and revealed that they were paid to do it by Los Zetas in an effort to “provoke” the government. “I was hiding it in my hands, and it made me shudder,” Castro Galeana said of the first grenade in a videotaped confession. “I was desperate to get rid of it.”

  Mexico was not the only government the cartels wanted to provoke. Just after sundown on October 12, two masked men got out of a car in front of the U.S. consulate in Monterrey and opened fire with handguns. One of them threw a fragmentation grenade over the fence, but it failed to explode. Nobody was hurt and the overall damage was negligible, but the message was clear. The U.S. government was a target because of its support of the Calderón war on drug trafficking.

  Law enforcement scored a huge hit on October 22, coinciding with a visit to Puerta Vallarta by American secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. Acting on a tip from an informant, the army and Federales stormed a mansion in the Desierto de los Leones neighborhood of Mexico City. After a prolonged firefight, they made 16 arrests, the most important being Jesus “El Rey” (the King) Zambada García, one of the four regional bosses of the Sinaloa Cartel. He handled the Central Mexico/Capital region, answering only to Guzmán Loera. Also arrested were his son, 21-year-old Jesus Zambada Reyes, and nephew, 23-year-old Jorge Zambada Niebla, both accused of being cartel bigwigs.

  The arrested men were shown on nationwide TV and, for the first time, so were some of the incredible luxury items they owned. By showing gaudy and expensive goods like customized Bentleys and gold-plated AK-47s, the government was stressing the point that the men who ran the cartels were hardly fitting the mold of Robin Hood.

  The day after the arrest, children in the central city of Cuautitlán found a human head in a black plastic garbage bag. It was later identified to have belonged to a state police officer. Later that day, a courier dropped off a cooler at the police station of Ascensión, a small town about 20 miles south of the border with New Mexico. It sat there most of the day until a curious cop opened it to find four severed heads inside and a note from the Gulf Cartel warning them not to cross them.

  The following day, Assistant Attorney General for the State of Morelos Andres Dimitriadis Juárez was driving his Ford Focus in the Diana Delicias neighborhood of Cuernevaca when his way was blocked by two small cars, one white and one red. As he honked his horn for them to move on, gunmen emerged and pumped more that 100 shells into his car no more than 100 yards away from the Federales local headquarters. He and two assistants riding with him died. Dimitriadis Juárez was new to the job when he was killed, having taken over when his boss, Victor Enrique Payan, was found in the trunk of a car in May. Just as news of his assassination was being broadcast, another severed head with a warning note to La Familia from the Gulf Cartel was found in a cooler in the central square of the Michoacán port city of Lázaro Ramirez.

  The forces against the cartels got a much-needed shot in the arm on October 26, when, for the second time, the daughter of a drug lord made his arrest possible. An 11-year-old girl in the upscale Chapultepec neighborhood of Tijuana known as Alicia Bracamontes let it slip that this was not her real name. Investigators soon determined that her father, Samuel Bracamontes, was none other than Eduardo “El Doctor” Arellano Félix, chief financial officer for the Tijuana Cartel.

  Their house was surrounded by 100 Federales, the special forces of the army's 28th Infantry Battalion and the Second Motorized Cavalry Regiment. When asked to surrender, Arellano Félix and his men answered with gunfire. After a three-hour firefight, Arellano Félix was arrested, along with 28-year-old Luis “El Güero Camarón” (the Blond Shrimp) Ramirez Vázquez, a known cartel operative who was badly injured in the gunfight, and 21-year-old Benitez Villa Ester, a native of Culiacán. Alicia was found unharmed. Police confiscated $1.2 million in $100 bills, two AK-47s, a submachine gun, two fragmentation grenades, three bulletproof vests, eight vehicles, 12 cell phones and 15 radios.

  The incident was hailed as a huge arrest, as the Arellano Félix brothers were being taken down one by one. Federal Undersecretary of Public Security Facundo Rosas Rosas warned that although the original generation of the Arellano Félix brothers was being neutralized, they had since passed on the day-to-day operations of the cartel to nephew Luis Fernando “El Ingeniero” (The Engineer) Sánchez Arellano, who is a known fugitive named as head of a gang by the Mexican government. Many believed he was assisted by his aunt, Enedina Arellano Félix, who is also a fugitive.

  Rosas Rosas acknowledged men loyal to Teodoro García Simental and the Sinaloa Cartel were fighting their own war on the city's streets, recalling the five bodies (four decapitated) a month earlier. One of the bodies had his head placed on his lower back with “we are the people of the weakened engineer” scrawled in blood between his shoulder blades, a reference to new Tijuana capo Sánchez Arellano.

  Corruption in the ranks

  Before law enforcement could make an effective push against the cartels, it had to win the war inside its own ranks. In the month after the capture of Eduardo Arellano Félix, there was a series of high-profile arrests as part of Operación Limpiar (Operation Clean Up) within the police that revealed how widespread corruption was at the top. It kicked off on November 2 when Victor Gerardo Garay Cadena, chief of the Federales, resigned to pursue other career options. It had long been rumored that he had been taking bribes. “I am resigning because in the bloody fight against organized crime, it is our duty to strengthen institutions, which means it is essential to eliminate any shadows of doubt regarding me,” he said. Garay Cadena was arrested a month later after testimony from a number of captured traffickers revealed that he had received cash, jewels and even gold bricks in exchange for co-operating with the Beltrán Leyva Cartel, including calling off at least two different offensives against them and allowing them to escape police manhunts on several occasions. The investigation into his behavior began when three Colombian women who attended a party testified that Garay Cadena—who was sitting in a hot tub with four prostitutes at the time—ordered his men to rob them of nearly $500,000 worth of cash and jewelry.

  Two weeks after Garay Cadena stepped down, the attorney general's office announced the arrest of Ricardo Gutiérrez Vargas, a former chief of Mexico's Federal Investigative Agency who had since become Interpol's top officer in Mexico, and his No. 2 man, Rodolfo de la Guardia García. They were accused of leaking police information to the Sinaloa Cartel.

  And two days later, Noé Ramírez Mandujano, who had stepped down as the chief of Subprocuraduría de Investigación Especializada en Delincuencia Organizada (Specialized Investigation of Organized Crime or SIEDO, an
investigative organization that answered to the attorney general) earlier in the year, was arrested after an investigation revealed that he had received $450,000 from the Sinaloa Cartel in exchange for inside information.

  The mass arrests greatly weakened the upper echelons of law enforcement in Mexico, but they also rid it of a significant amount of corruption. Calderón again asked the Mexican people to stand firm with his war against traffickers: “The Mexican government is firmly committed to the fight against organized crime and not just organized crime but corruption.” The government was desperate to replace these high-ranking officers and had to hope that the new appointees were not only competent, but above corruption.

  The arrests did not stop the government from launching its own offensives. On November 7, in the midst of Operation Clean Up, the attorney general's office announced the arrest of an original member of Los Zetas, Jaime “El Hummer” González Durán. He surrendered without violence, but police uncovered a huge cache of weapons at his residence. He was charged with a laundry list of drug-related charges and revealed that he orchestrated the violent rescue of Gulf Cartel member Daniel “El Mejilla” (the Cheek) Perez Rojas from police custody four months earlier. González Durán was also widely believed to be responsible for the murder of singer Valentin Elizalde Valencia.

  But there was little for Calderón and his allies to celebrate at the end of the year, as news that the war was spilling over Mexico's northern and southern borders. A story broke in The Houston Chronicle that cartel members were fraudulently purchasing massive numbers of firearms in Texas and smuggling them south. “Our investigations show Houston is the top source for firearms going into Mexico, top source in the country,” said J. Dewey Webb, special agent in charge of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Houston division. He pointed out that many of the weapons were purchased for the cartels by American citizens or had been sold to the cartels by unscrupulous gun dealers. “They are just as responsible for the killing of that person in Mexico, that police officer or innocent bystander as if they had pulled the trigger themselves,” he said. “They have blood on their hands, just like that person who pulled the trigger in Mexico.”

  Then on December 5, a firefight broke out in La Libertad, Guatemala, just over the border from Mexico. When it was over, 18 bodies were recovered. Some of the vehicles abandoned at the scene had license plates from the northern state of Tamaulipas, the heart of Gulf Cartel territory.

  Guatemalan officials were quick to accuse rival Mexican cartels of bringing their war into their country. “The hypothesis we have is clear, and it is that several cartels here that are operating in Guatemalan territory already have certain alliances with Mexican cartels, specifically the alliances that have been made for the trafficking of drugs,” said the chief of Guatemala's National Civil Police, Marlene Blanco Lapola. “We are studying the arrival of many Mexicans, specifically members of Los Zetas, who have wanted to come to take advantage of the Guatemalan territory, a situation that we, as authorities, will not allow.”

  Nor did the cartels want to let Mexicans forget that the war was in their own front yard as well. On December 22, a woman who did not want to be named and her mother drove their beat-up blue Dodge pickup truck into the parking lot at the giant Sam's Club department store in the medium-sized Guerrero city of Chilpancingo for a little late Christmas shopping. They chanced upon a large black plastic garbage bag. Inside were nine severed heads, some still with duct tape over their mouths. Three had their military identification badges stuffed into their mouths.

  Later that day, their bodies were found at two separate locations on opposite ends of town. Each had a cardboard sign attached which read “For every one of mine that you kill, I will kill 10.” Eight of the dead were soldiers and the other was a former Chilpancingo chief of police.

  It was a sobering reminder that the government was at war with a well-armed, well-disciplined and dedicated enemy. In 2006, when the cartels were mainly fighting each other and President Fox had sent the first government troops into Nuevo Laredo, there were 62 deaths—about one every six days—associated with the War Against Drug Trafficking. In 2007, after President Calderón kicked off the New Year by deploying huge numbers of soldiers throughout the country, that number rose to 2,837. And as the cartels reorganized and went on the offensive in 2008, the death toll increased to 6,844 or about 19 per day.

  Chapter 9

  Carnage in 2009

  The Mexican government decided to wait until after New Year's Day 2009 to announce two huge arrests that had been made the previous week. The first was the latest corrupt official caught up in Operation Clean Up: SIEDO determined that army major Arturo González Rodríguez, who had once been part of President Calderón's personal security detail, had been receiving $100,000 a month for providing weapons to and coordinating military-style training for Los Zetas.

  His arrest, and the admission by Secretary of Defense Guillermo Galván Galván that at least 100,000 Mexican soldiers had switched sides and gone to work for the cartels for higher pay, led many to criticize the military and its role in the war on drug trafficking. Even the most ardent critics had to admit, however, that the war had reached a scale at which intervention by the military was inevitable. “The participation by [the military] is necessary because there is a threat and harm to national security,” said Guillermo Velasco Arzac, spokesperson for Mejor Sociedad, Mejor Gobierno (Better Society, Better Government), a citizen's rights advocacy group that had been highly critical of Calderón in the past. “It's known that many of the successes have come from the work done by military intelligence and investigation.”

  The other major arrest was that of Alberto “La Fresa” (the Strawberry) Espinoza Barrón, a high-ranking lieutenant in La Familia. Acting on an anonymous tip (many Mexicans believe it was a former La Familia member who had switched sides to Los Zetas), a special forces unit of the army surrounded his home on December 29, 2008, and he surrendered without a shot fired. Despite La Familia's vehement denials of involvement in the grenade attack in Morelia, it was among the many charges leveled at Espinoza Barrón. From his home and vehicles, police confiscated three AR-15s, an AK-47, 37 ammunition clips, six pistols, five fragmentation grenades and four plastic bags containing marijuana and crack cocaine. They also found a list of 150 “workers” he was to have paid that day.

  National journalists are targets again

  The news, literally, took a turn for the worse on January 7, 2009. The cast and crew at the Televisa's Monterrey affiliate were getting ready for their Tuesday night newscast when they heard shots and then a loud explosion. Nobody was hurt, but the gunfire and grenade thrown at the front entrance damaged the building and 16 nearby vehicles. When the smoke cleared, a note was discovered tied to the front door. It read: “Stop broadcasting only about us, broadcast about narco-political leaders too; this is a warning.”

  That the cartels were attempting to bully the national media into reporting only what they would allow was a huge blow to the collective Mexican psyche. At least 11 journalists were killed in Mexico in 2008 alone (second only to Iraq's 15), but none were noteworthy on a national scale. For years, reporters in hot areas like Juárez, Nuevo Laredo, Tijuana, Culiacán and Morelia routinely refused to cover drug-related stories or reported under assumed names.

  But Televisa—Mexico's biggest broadcaster and a trusted national institution—was another matter entirely. “We face a huge risk of becoming a blind and deaf country, because the messengers are not telling us what they are observing out of sheer fear,” said Gerardo Priego Tapia, a PAN congressman who many consider a future presidential candidate. “We think that this case, against the most important TV company in Mexico in one of the most important business capitals in Latin America, is not an accident. It's a symbol and a warning of how this year is going to be.”

  The Stewmaker

  Mexicans, now inured to news of shootings, bombings and even beheadings, were shocked again later that
month. On January 22, police and army troops stormed a beach house near Tijuana owned by Tijuana Cartel boss Teodoro García Simental. He managed yet another narrow escape, but the authorities arrested a man named Santiago Meza López as he was attempting to get into his car. Under interrogation, Meza López revealed that he was paid about $600 a week by García Simental to dissolve the bodies of the cartel's victims in drums of sodium hydroxide, also known as lye or caustic soda. After he “cooked” them for eight hours, all that remained were teeth and nails. He disposed of those final pieces by burning them with gasoline in a nearby landfill. He was known in the cartel as “El Pozolero” (the Stewmaker), because his mixtures of bodies and lye reminded them of pozole, a local delicacy. Interestingly, in the days before the conquistadores, pozole was actually made with human meat, the remains of prisoners sacrificed by the Aztecs.

  Meza López claimed to have disposed of more than 300 corpses that way. “They brought me the bodies and I just got rid of them,” he told reporters. “I didn't feel anything.” The next story on Televisa's newscast that night was about a cooler containing two severed heads and a note threatening La Familia that showed up on the doorstep of a Guanajuato police station. The contents of the note were not made public, but police acknowledged that it was signed by Los Zetas.

  New authorities in Quintana Roo

  On February 2, retired army General Mauro Enrique Tello Quiñonez was sworn in as special drug investigator for the Benito Juárez municipality in Quintana Roo, which includes the popular tourist destination of Cancún. A former leader of the nation's infantry, Tello Quiñonez left the military after reaching the mandatory retirement age of 63. Less than 24 hours after assuming his new post, his body, along with those of his aide, Lieutenant Julio Cesar Roman Zuniga, and his civilian driver, Juan Ramirez Sanchez, were found in a white four-door pickup truck in a roadside ditch just outside Cancún. All three had been tortured before they were killed. “The general was the most mistreated,” said Quintana Roo State Prosecutor Bello Melchor Rodriguez y Carrillo. “He had burns on his skin and the bones in his hands and wrists were broken.” An autopsy showed Tello Quiñonez had also had both his knees broken before he died and was shot 11 times. Only the last shot was fatal.