Later that day, Federales in Villahermosa arrested Roberto Rivero Arana, nephew of Los Zetas leader Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, and Daniel Pérez Galisteo, the acting police chief of Ciudad del Carmen, an oil refining town on the Gulf coast in the southern state of Campeche. Investigators determined that Pérez Galisteo had been receiving about $16,000 a month to allow Los Zetas to work in the city unmolested. “He's an agent who had been with the police force long before we took over the town government,” Ciudad del Carmen mayor Aracely Escalante Jasso said. “We had given him our trust.” Along with the men, the Federales seized 10 assault rifles, a grenade, ammunition, drugs and uniforms with police and Pemex insignia.
Another Gulf oil town, Tampico, was hit the next day. Masked gunmen attacked a police convoy as it approached El Moralillo bridge on its way out of town. Four officers—José Alfredo Ontiveros Romero, Federico Macías Hernández, Eduardo Robles Ramos and Salvador González del Ángel—were killed. That night, more gunmen forced their way into Club Mirage, a rowdy local strip joint favored by members of the Gulf Cartel. They shot the place up indiscriminately, killing five men and two women—including one dancing on stage. In the town square nearby, Jenni Rivera, a popular Mexican-American pop singer, was just about to take to the stage for an open-air concert when her entire audience of about 18,000 fled as a rumor spread that gunmen with grenades were coming to attack the show. As she was on the stairs to the stage, her crew stopped her from going on. “My security guys shouted at me not to go up and they pulled me and covered me,” she said. “Everyone on my team is okay.”
It was a spring of major discoveries for the Mexican authorities. The first came on April 23, when the Federales (supported by army soldiers) came upon a camp used by Beltrán Leyva Cartel to train assassins outside the town of San Dimas near the Pacific coast of Durango. After a brief firefight left seven sicarios and a man they had kidnapped dead, the Federales arrested 19-year-old José Natividad Ruiz Rodriguez. Several others escaped. They also seized about 1,000 pounds of marijuana, 11 AK-47s, three AR-15s, a shotgun, four handguns and 14 trucks, including two Hummers. They also discovered a .50-caliber Barrett special applications rifle. “The .50-caliber was interesting because we haven't seen that type of arm used in Mexico yet,” said Scott Stewart, a former U.S. Army intelligence officer and an analyst for STRATFOR. The Barrett is an incredibly accurate long-range sniper rifle that can kill from well over a mile away. “The [Barrett's] 5.7 x 28 armor-piercing rounds are not available for sale to the general public and are probably coming from the Mexican military,” he added. Three soldiers were wounded during the assault.
Unexpected corruption of a political hero
The second surprise came on May 26. Gregorio “Greg” Sánchez Martínez was regarded as a hero by many in southern Mexico. One of 15 children, Sánchez Martínez was born to a very poor family in Guerrero and grew up in Chiapas. At 16, he started his own lumber business and by his early twenties, he was wealthy and had made a name for himself as a popular gospel singer. He later moved to Cancún and dabbled in politics before being elected mayor of Benito Juárez Municipality, representing a coalition of four left-wing parties including the PRD. His populist, anti-corruption, anti-crime message resonated with his constituents (he had once disarmed and interrogated the entire Cancún police force), and Sánchez Martínez took a leave of absence from his job to run for governor of Quintana Roo.
Early in the campaign, Sánchez Martínez claimed on his website that he and other candidates from the “Todos por Quintana Roo” (All for Quintana Roo) coalition had received numerous threats. One he noted in particular read: “Resign from the race, or we are going to put you in jail or kill you.”
He wasn't killed. But he was put in jail for money laundering and for aiding both Los Zetas and the Beltrán Leyva Cartel. “This takes us all by surprise,” said his PRI opponent, incumbent Félix González Canto. “It is unprecedented.” Sánchez Martínez, meanwhile, maintained that he was innocent and that the evidence was manufactured by political opponents. He has yet to be tried.
Evidence gathered from the investigation that led to his arrest later brought police to a cenote—a type of sinkhole common in Mexico and the Caribbean that are usually filled with water, but this one was dry—in Leona Vicario, just outside Cancún, that contained six bodies. The victims, four men and two women, had been asphyxiated and had cocaine in their bloodstreams. Three of the bodies had been stabbed multiple times in the chest, while the other three had the letter “Z” carved into their abdomens, a calling card of Los Zetas. Two of the bodies were identified. One was that of Isaías de Jesús Valenzuela Ruiz, head of security for the municipal government of Playas del Carmen, a small resort town just south of Cancún. The other was that of Francisco Silva Ruiz, who had recently moved to the area and made his living singing on public buses.
Body dump
The third major discovery of the spring shocked and horrified even the most cynical people in a country beset by murder and decapitations. Taxco de Alarcón is one of Mexico's most beautiful cities. Nestled in Guerrero's densely wooded mountains, Taxco has been enriched by silver mines first discovered by Hernán Cortés. The early prosperity silver brought allowed the residents to dedicate themselves to artistic pursuits like architecture and landscaping.
But the town of about 40,000 had fallen on harder times. A strike had shut down the mines for almost three years. Workers accused its operator, Industrial Minera México (part of the Grupo México conglomerate owned by billionaire Germán Larrea Mota Velasco, whom Forbes rated as the 127th richest person in the world with a $7.3 billion fortune), of not honoring its contracts or promoting employee safety conditions.
Taxco had been largely untouched by the war until late May. Near the end of the month, townspeople began to report the presence of trucks around the shuttered mines after dark. Two Beltrán Leyva-associated gunmen arrested in a different part of Mexico revealed under interrogation that they had used Taxco as a place to dump three bodies. Further investigation led authorities to a mineshaft near a grazing pasture just outside of Taxco. To keep people out of the shaft opening, it had been surrounded by gray cinder-block walls that had been covered with a light application of graffiti. There was an opening protected by wrought iron bars, but they had been bent by some of the locals to provide access to the shaft so that they could throw trash down there. When the police and firefighters approached, they reported that the smell was so strong, they would have to delay the investigation until gas masks arrived.
Luis Rivera Terrazas, only 23 but already a senior state criminologist, tried to get police or firefighters to go into the 15-foot wide, 500-foot deep shaft, but they refused. Realizing he'd have to go down himself, Rivera Terrazas put on his office's only biohazard suit and climbed down the ladder. When it ended after 30 or so feet, he rappelled his way down to the bottom, careful not to let the jagged walls tear his protective suit. He described his slow descent as cold and wet. When he reached bottom, he was surprised when his feet sank into the floor, until he realized he was not stepping on a floor, but badly decomposed human remains. “It was like a quicksand, but filled with bodies,” he said. “We were stepping on them—it was a very challenging working environment.”
For six days, workers pulled body parts up from the shaft, often by hand, recovering what they could. The first reports from the site indicated that they had recovered pieces from 25 corpses; then it rose to 77. Rumors had the total going over 100 at one point. The problem for Rivera Terrazas was that many of the bodies were badly decomposed or in pieces. At least three were mummified. “There are headless bodies,” said Rivera Terrazas said. “But some of the heads don't match the bodies.” Days of painstaking work allowed the forensics team to separate the mess into 55 individuals. Some of the victims had been bound and blindfolded. Some showed signs of torture. Many, it was determined, were alive when they were thrown into the shaft and some even survived on the bottom for at least a few moments. “The rocks i
n the shaft are sharp-edged and tore at the bodies,” said Rivera Terrazas. “There were some who arrived alive at the bottom.”
Identification was nearly impossible. Using tattoos and dental records, authorities were able to identify just eight of the dead after a month. One of them was Daniel Bravo Mota, a Guerrero state prison director, who had been missing for three weeks.
Barbie, the American enforcer
The body dump was linked to a capo of the Beltrán Leyva Cartel—Edgar “Barbie” Valdez Villarreal. Growing up in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood in Laredo, Texas, the blond-haired, green-eyed Valdez Villarreal reminded the other kids of Ken, Barbie's boyfriend. They called him Barbie, and the name stuck when a high school coach started using it. His childhood was far from the rough upbringing most cartel members and associates endured. Valdez Villarreal grew up in a nice brick house with a manicured lawn and a wooden swing set in the back. His father, Abel Valdez Villarreal, owned a retail store and stressed hard work and a college education to his boys, taking them to church every Sunday. Barbie was popular and grew very large and strong. At 6-foot-5, he became something of a star playing both ways for the United High School football team.
And he had a wild side. His first arrest was at age 19 in 1992. While speeding down the wrong side of a Laredo road in his customized pickup, Valdez Villarreal collided head on with a Toyota Corolla driven by a middle school guidance counselor, killing him. Valdez Villarreal was charged with criminally negligent homicide. His clean record and pleas from his father convinced police not to indict him. His dad then offered to pay for college, but Barbie declined. A few weeks later he was arrested with a large quantity of marijuana. After his father bailed him out of jail, Valdez Villarreal fled to Mexico City.
Contacts he had made while dealing in Texas introduced him to Arturo Beltrán Leyva. The kingpin liked him and gave him a job as an enforcer with an allied gang in Nuevo Laredo, across the river from his hometown, called Los Negros (the Blacks). Originally formed in 2002 to protect the interests of the Sinaloa Cartel in northeast Mexico against Los Zetas and law enforcement authorities, Los Negros were among the best armed and trained gangs in the country. Aligned strongly with the Beltrán Leyva Cartel, Los Negros accepted Valdez Villarreal gratefully and he quickly rose through the ranks by showing brutal efficiency and even a little showmanship in kidnapping, torturing and killing his enemies.
Along with his skills as an enforcer, Barbie also succeeded as a trafficker. Although unable to cross the border himself after arrests and narrow escapes in Louisiana and Missouri, he had contacts with the Los Angeles-based Mexican Mafia and the brutal Mara Salvatrucha—a gang of Central American, mainly Salvadoran, immigrants better known as MS-13 with cells as far away as Colorado, Toronto and Washington D.C.—who worked with him.
Valdez Villarreal was also known for working the media. The newspapers in Mexico's northeast rarely reported on drug-related stories after the assassination by grenade of Roberto Javier Mora Garcia, a crusading reporter for Nuevo Laredo's El Mañana in 2002, but Valdez Villarreal would occasionally place ads in papers to get his message across. In 2004, he took out an ad in a Monterrey paper that said he was a “legitimate businessman” who had to move to the area from Nuevo Laredo because he was being unfairly harassed by police and politicians. After Mexican authorities named him as one of the most wanted men in the country in 2008, he took out another ad, acknowledging his leadership of Los Negros and calling on the government to stop Los Zetas, who he called a “cancer” and “narco-terrorists” and who he accused of kidnapping and killing women and children.
When Arturo Beltrán Leyva was killed at the end of 2009, Valdez Villarreal and his trusted lieutenant José Gerardo “El Indio” (the Indian) Álvarez Vázquez broke with the cartel, taking Los Negros—sometimes known as the Valdez Gang—independent. Álvarez Vázquez was arrested with 15 associates on April 21, 2010 at his home in Huixquilucan de Degollado near Mexico City after a prolonged gun battle. When he was presented to the media, he was incorrectly described as a high-ranking member of the Beltrán Leyva Cartel.
Murder in the streets
Two weeks after the body dump was found, violence hit Taxco again. An anonymous complaint about noise coming from a downtown apartment drew state police at 10:10 a.m. As soon as they arrived, they were fired upon from inside the apartment. When more police and soldiers showed up, the firefight intensified. Forty minutes later, all 15 men inside the apartment were dead and three officers were injured. Police seized 16 assault rifles, six handguns and three IEDs. The authorities linked them to Los Negros.
The two weeks between the discovery of the Taxco body dump and the Taxco shootout were tumultuous ones for Mexico.
On May 31, a news crew from Channel 44 from Juárez was filming a piece at the Zaragoza bridge to Texas when shooting broke out. A white SUV had been in line to get over the bridge when the driver parked nearby and four of the six occupants got out of the vehicle. As they were headed to a white minibus that had been converted to prepare and sell burritos, all six of them were shot and killed by men in a nearby pickup truck who shot up both vehicles with AR-15s and sped away. While the news crew did not actually record any footage of the shooting or escape, they did manage to pick up a significant amount of video of Mexican army soldiers a few feet away who did nothing to interfere with or pursue the gunmen.
Mass killing hit the north again on Thursday, June 10. It started in the afternoon when 30 masked, armed men claiming to be police forced their way into Templo Cristiano Fe y Vida (Faith and Life Christian Temple), a second-floor drug rehabilitation clinic in Chihuahua. As soon as the men entered, they started shooting indiscriminately, killing 14 people including both staff and patients. One teenaged victim had enough time to call home, screaming “Mommy, they've come to kill us!” into his family's voice mail. When five others were discovered to be alive, they were lined up against the wall and killed. Four people survived the incident by pretending to be dead. The victims were between 16 and 63 years old. Despite arriving in trucks, the sicarios fled on foot. Police discovered a threatening message left behind, but would not reveal its contents.
Still, the message was clear to the people it was meant for. Within two hours of the Templo Cristiano Fe y Vida massacre, a series of seemingly unconnected shootings in Ciudad Madero, just outside of Tampico in Tamaulipas, left 18 men and two women dead. Social media was alive with threats of retaliation for both incidents.
Calderón, who was in South Africa attending Mexico's opening game in the 2010 FIFA World Cup was told of the incidents and commented: “[These] are outrageous acts that reinforce the need to fight with the full force of the law criminal groups carrying out such barbarism.”
Major Los Zetas targets nabbed
At 5:30 in the afternoon of the next day, a heavily armored army unit set out for the quiet, residential Solidaridad neighborhood of Monterrey. They arrived at a cookie-cutter poured-concrete townhouse at 223 Avenida Fénix and surrounded the place. After tense negotiations, they emerged with two men. The fat one was Raúl Héctor “El Tory” Luna Luna and the thin one was David Eduardo “El Mantequilla” (the Butter) Fuentes Martínez. Luna Luna was said to be the leader of Los Zetas for the area and Fuentes Martinez was a major trafficker. Also seized in the townhouse were four AR-15s, another frightening Barrett .50-caliber, a handgun known in Mexico as the “cop killer,” a grenade launcher, 45 pounds of marijuana and 58 ounces of cocaine. The state attorney general said that Luna Luna was Los Zetas' top man in the area and was connected with two kidnappings and at least six assassinations. He was also allegedly one of the two men who shot at the U.S. consulate in Monterrey back in October 2008. Fuentes Martinez was accused of trafficking and assisting Luna Luna.
As news of the arrests spread, armed, masked men set up 10 roadblocks in the city. On Avenida Universidad, members of Los Zetas commandeered a city bus and a three-ton truck to block traffic in both directions, while at Avenida Lincoln, two vehicles had their ti
res shot out in order to immobilize them and traffic around them. It took a combined military and state police force two hours to chase the gunmen away. There were no injuries, but at least two people complained to police that their vehicles had been robbed.
In the same city two days later, police made another huge arrest. A few months earlier, nine men had been arrested when they were discovered stealing thousands of gallons of gasoline from a Pemex pipeline they had tapped. Their sophisticated tools and methods indicated connections to organized crime. A subsequent investigation led police to Francisco Guizar Pavón, known as “El Rey de la Gasolinas” (the King of Gasoline). He had been a Pemex drilling engineer from 1974 to 1993, but was fired for alleged involvement in a plot to steal gasoline. Since then he had allegedly been supplying stolen fuel to Los Zetas and La Familia and enjoying their protection.
On Monday June 14, the violence began when two busloads of Federales headed to Mexico City were ambushed in Zitácuaro, a small city in the mountains of Michoacán. The resulting gun battle left 10 Federales and seven sicarios (believed to be associated with La Familia) dead.
Later that day, a riot erupted at a prison in Mazatlán, leaving 29 inmates dead, 18 shot and 11 stabbed. After the fighting stopped, it was revealed that a week earlier, 20 inmates who had been associated with Los Zetas had asked to be transferred out of the prison, which was deep in Sinaloa territory, but their request had been refused.
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