The road to Barbie
Calderón would have better news to report in the following month, however. It began on May 25 with a raid at an Acapulco strip joint called XXXoticas, which many claimed was owned by Barbie, that ended with the arrest of eight men. They seized four AK-47s, a Smith & Wesson handgun, a fragmentation grenade and, most important, four cell phones.
Some of the men refused to speak, but others cooperated. One of their cell phones showed repeated calls to a man named Aarón Arturo Ginez Becerril, who one cooperative suspect acknowledged to be one of Barbie's top confidantes. Ginez Becerril's phone was located via GPS in the parking lot of a shopping mall in southern Mexico City, but he was dead before the police arrived, shot once in the head. Using the same technology, they located the number most frequently called on Becerril's phone. It led them to the tranquil mountain village of Cañada de Alférez in the town of Lerma in the state of Mexico, just north of the capital.
Despite being aware that they might well find the notorious Barbie in the area, an elite U.S.-trained unit of Federales set up operations in the town, including a series of checkpoints, without military assistance. On their first day there, they stopped a trio of cars—a Chevy Cruze, a Ford Focus and a Chevy Malibu—they described as “exceeding the speed limit without discretion.” When they pulled them over, the first person to exit the vehicles, who they described as a “large, white man,” came to speak with them. It was only after they arrested him for traffic violations that they realized they had captured Valdez Villarreal—the second-most sought-after and certainly the most feared criminal in Mexico—virtually unarmed and unprotected. Six others in the cars drew weapons, but were arrested without gunfire. Besides Barbie, the Federales captured Maricela Reyes Lozada, Juan Antonio Lopez Reyes, Maritzel Lopez Reyes, Mauricio Lopez Reyes, Arturo Ivan Arroyo and Jorge Valentin Landa Coronado.
Barbie's arrest caused a media sensation on both sides of the border. In Mexico, the reasons were obvious. Valdez Villarreal was an incredibly violent warlord whose presence in custody made the entire country feel safer. And it showed that the Federales could mount and finish a successful operation against a difficult target without military assistance. “The capture of Valdez Villarreal is a high-impact blow against organized crime,” said Calderón spokesman Alejandro Poiré Romero. “This is an important step in the national security strategy.”
Not everyone in Mexico was convinced that putting Valdez Villarreal behind bars would actually change anything. “The arrest of these drug lords does not have any significant effects in terms of flow of drugs to the U.S. It did not happen in Colombia, where the government has dismantled the big cartels, but they are producing more cocaine,” said Jorge Chabat, an expert on the drug war at Mexico City's Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (Center for Research and Teaching of Economics). “In the long term, the dismantling of these cartels would in principle produce a reduction in levels of violence, but it is not going to happen in the short term. In the shorter term, there is no significant change.”
In the U.S., Barbie's arrest brought home how close the drug war was. When he was paraded in front of the cameras, it was clear to Americans that Barbie was one of their own. Wearing an expensive green polo shirt with the word “London” stitched on the front, the blonde, green-eyed and tall man was actually quite photogenic (at least by cartel standards), looking far less like a Mexican gangster than a Texas high-school baller who had let himself go a little. In fact, he was both. “He seems to be a pretty bright kid, (but) very brutal and ruthless,” said Scott Stewart, an analyst with the Austin, Texas-based STRATFOR security consulting firm. “In a period of cartel warfare, the enforcers will tend to rise in the organization.”
Even more compelling was his confession. Captured on video, Barbie is seen smiling and occasionally laughing. He keeps wiping perspiration from his head with a tissue and his sleeve, but he doesn't actually appear to be stressed or nervous. He admits that he became involved in the gang lifestyle because of the fast money and he decided to go hardcore because he was appalled at Los Zetas' habit of melting people's bodies and extorting local businesses, so he felt he had to fight them. Barbie quickly admitted to trafficking drugs, mainly from Panama, and that he had extensive “investments” in Colombia. When he is asked if they were drugs, he grinned and said yes. Barbie then boasts of receiving trailer loads of cash from the U.S. in return.
While other capos tend to mumble or stay silent in their taped interrogations, Valdez Villarreal was the opposite, talking openly, even bragging, about his career. He pointed out that he hired “some movie guys” to make a cinematic version of the story of his life, but had cut ties with them—despite a $200,000 investment—when he decided their script was too incriminatory. He said he regretted the violence in Mexico, but blamed it all on El Chapo, who he claimed broke a non-aggression pact agreed to by all the major cartels back in 2007.
One of the others arrested—a protected witness known only as “Jennifer”—revealed that Valdez Villarreal controlled the airports at Cancún and Toluca, a city of a million residents just north of the capital, by bribing the top federal agents there, José Antonio “El Buen Hombre” (the Good Man) Rosales Carvajal and Edgar Octavio “El Chuta” (the Shooter) Ramos Cervantes. To gain access to the runways in Cancún, Barbie gave Rosales Carvajal $65,000 in cash and a new BMW. Jennifer also testified that the security detail at the airport was forbidden from inspecting Valdez Villarreal, his friends or their baggage.
And Jennifer dropped another bombshell. Earlier that year a video of four men, bound and obviously beaten, was shown all over Mexican media. The men are interrogated on the video. They reveal that they are members of Los Zetas and they have killed for the gang. At one point, the obvious leader of the quartet is asked “why did you kill my brother?” in reference to a gang member who was murdered. He doesn't answer. Then a handgun comes into the frame and the man is shot in the head. Jennifer testified that the men were kidnapped in Acapulco and brought to Valdez Villarreal, and that the voice of the interrogator was Barbie's.
Soon after his confession, Valdez Villarreal recanted it all, claiming it had been delivered under extreme duress. The DEA and Mexican government agreed that leadership of his gang passed to his father-in-law, Carlos “El Charro”(the Cowboy) Montemayor González.
As their rivals were weakened, Los Zetas, now fully independent of the Gulf Cartel and working hard to push them out of their territory, increased their aggressiveness in the northeast. On September 3, soldiers were fired upon as they approached a ranch near the small town of General Treviño in Nuevo León. The resulting firefight killed five people, who the military claimed were members of Los Zetas.
Training assassins in Ciudad Mier
Later that day, informants led authorities to believe that much of Los Zetas' operation was centered around Cuidad Mier, a Tamaulipas town of 6,000 a few miles from the Rio Grande. The town had been a staging area for Santa Anna's troops in the war for Texas and played host to Fidel Castro in 1956 when he set up a weapons smuggling operation there.
Aerial reconnaissance from a military helicopter revealed what appeared to be a marijuana farm at an old ranch locally known as “El Troncón” (the Stump). There were a number of large vehicles, temporary buildings and camouflage netting. The cameras from the helicopter also showed video footage of armed, masked men in front of the ranch house.
That prompted a combined force of army and naval infantry to stage a large-scale raid on the house. A gun battle that began at about 11:00 p.m. and lasted for about 90 minutes, left 27 accused Los Zetas members dead and two soldiers wounded. Two more suspected cartel members were injured and taken prisoner and three bound men who claimed to have been kidnapped were also taken into custody. Once inside, the soldiers determined that the ranch was not a farm at all, but a training facility for sicarios. They uncovered 25 assault rifles, 4,200 rounds of ammunition, four grenades and 23 vehicles, two of which were painted to look like mili
tary vehicles.
For many residents of Ciudad Mier, this was the last straw. Things had been tough there for a while. Armed masked men would occasionally engage in gunfights in the town's streets. Sometimes they would drive down the main drag and shoot assault rifles out the windows of their armored SUVs just for the sheer enjoyment of it. One of their favorite targets were transformers, which, when shot, could send whole neighborhoods into total darkness. In May, PAN gubernatorial candidate José Julián Garza Sacramento announced that his party would not field candidates in municipal elections in three towns, including Ciudad Mier, because of cartel-related violence. Later that month—in broad daylight—masked men tied a man to a tree branch and dismembered him alive. Also that summer, a shopping center had been burned out and the local water treatment plant had been attacked and disabled. Since workers were too frightened to return to the building, the region was left without tap water. The town's police station was burned and gutted. Nobody was hurt, but the entire force had long since walked off the job.
But it was the discovery of the assassins' training center that began the major exodus. Within a month, all but a few hundred of the town's 6,000 residents left. Those who remained were mostly elderly or for some reason unable to leave. “It's like we're in the Wild West,” Santos Moreno Pérez, a Pentecostal minister, told reporters just as he was to join about 300 other former Ciudad Mier residents in the nearby city of Miguel Alemán, on the Rio Grande. “We have no mayor, no police, no transit system. We have been left to fend for ourselves.”
Mexico: The new Colombia?
That week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton angered many Mexicans by stating that their country was “looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago.” Her comment drew support from Oscar Naranjo Trujillo, director of Colombia's national police and a four-star general who had spent his professional career fighting the cartels in his country. “They are headed there,” he said.
The Mexicans disagreed. Alejandro Poiré Romero, chief spokesman on national security matters for the Calderón government, pointed out that Mexico's murder rate was still lower than Colombia's, and that the Mexicans were fighting a war against the cartels before they infiltrated the government to the extent they had in Colombia. He did not mention that 22 journalists had been killed in Mexico since Calderón had taken office, as compared to one in Colombia over the same period.
Obama went into damage control on Clinton's behalf the next day. He gave an interview to La Opinion, a Spanish-language newspaper in Los Angeles and stated: “Mexico is a vast and progressive democracy, with a growing economy, and as a result you cannot compare what is happening in Mexico with what happened in Colombia 20 years ago.” Unlike other interviews with the president, the White House did not publish an English transcript of the discussion with La Opinion.
The day after Obama spoke, Juárez responded. Long the most violent of Mexican cities, the murder rate had gone down from 12 per day before the military had taken control of the streets and had stabilized at about six per day. But on September 9, 25 people were killed in drug-related violence. At least four of them—two women and two men—were killed because they had witnessed another killing. At the sites of four separate attacks there were painted messages, all threatening the Sinaloa Cartel and El Chapo in particular. All of them were signed El Diego, which was the nickname for José Antonio Acosta Hernández, second in command of La Linea, the Juárez Cartel's enforcer unit. As police were investigating a murder in which the body was left in a car, they found a bomb in a nearby vehicle. It had failed to detonate.
Focus shifted farther down the Rio Grande on 11 when news broke that 85 inmates at the Centro de Ejecución de Sanciones (Sanctions Enforcement Center) in Reynosa escaped in a pre-dawn operation. Videotapes showed that a number of trucks drove down the long road—Calle Miguel Hidalgo—to the prison, which is surrounded by low scrub strewn with garbage, abandoned auto parts and piles of used tires, and stopped outside the concrete walls. Ladders being transported in the trucks were heaved over the prison walls. Inmates then climbed the ladders, got into the trucks and were transported to downtown Reynosa, where they mixed with the general public. There was no indication that anybody tried to stop them.
At 7:00 a.m., Federales arrested Warden Guadalupe Reyes Ortega, along with 43 other prison employees, including maintenance and nursing staff. The prison had been designed for 1,400 inmates, but was holding around 1,700. Tamaulipas Public Security Minister Antonio Garza García—who had assumed his position earlier that week—accused the Gulf Cartel of the breakout, pointing out that they needed reinforcements (he called them “thugs”) in their fight against Los Zetas. “The guards evidently helped in the escape,” he said. A riot in the same prison in December 2008 had left 21 inmates dead and another 34 injured.
By the time of the prison break, Reynosa had changed. It had once had a reputation as a friendly, easygoing city, but in the summer of 2010, it was rare to see anyone other than soldiers on the streets anywhere near sundown. “It's not officially declared a war, but we are in a war zone,” stated Eliacib Leija Garza, state organizer of Tamaulipas for PAN. “Most of the people stay home after six, eight at night. Just don't go out; you take your precautions, because once in a while you hear a bunch of shootings and things like that.” He also told a reporter that because of the violence, the mayor and most officials had moved to Texas. “And not only city and official people,” said Leija Garza. “Investors—people who have businesses from Tampico, Matamoros, Reynosa, Laredo—are going to the U.S. because of this insecurity.”
Trouble at Falcon Lake
The anarchic state of northeast Mexico started leaking over the border a few miles up the Rio Grande from Reynosa. In 1953, the two countries built Falcon Dam on the Rio Grande, which provided a reliable source of water for drinking, irrigation and hydroelectricity for the area. The resulting pool—known officially as Falcon International Reservoir, but commonly as Falcon Lake—was a very popular recreation spot and is regularly stocked with sport fish by the Texas government. It is also world-renowned for its birdwatching, with sizable colonies of rare species like the red-bellied woodpecker and black-chinned hummingbird.
Fierce territory wars between the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas (as well as incursions by other groups, including the Sinaloa Cartel) had forced some of Los Zetas and their associates to seek refuge in and around Antigua Guerrero, the old part of Nueva Guerrero, a city on the shores of Falcon Lake. There were frequent reports—although more through social media and rumor than mainstream media—that members of Los Zetas were operating small boats and robbing people on the Mexican side of the lake. The mayor of Nueva Guerrero, Olga Juliana Elizondo Guerra, told The Washington Post that people on her side had frequently been harassed on their land, boats and vehicles had been stolen and tourists had stopped coming. “We hope this ends soon,” she added.
On April 30, five Americans in two bass boats were fishing just outside the partially submerged Old Guerrero Church. It's known as a great spot for bass and is on the Mexican side of the border. They were approached by four “heavily tattooed” men with guns who boarded their boats, demanding money and drugs. The Americans rounded up about $200 in cash and gave it to the Mexicans. The armed men then returned to their boats and followed the retreating fishermen, breaking off their pursuit when it was obvious they were in U.S. waters.
After that, stories of Falcon Lake pirates—often claiming to be Federales, but identified as members of Los Zetas by the “Z” tattoos on their necks and arms—began to surface more frequently. On May 6, three Americans fishing just north of a small island on the Mexican side of the lake were approached by two men with AR-15s who claimed they were Federales and that they had to search the boat for drugs and weapons; finding none, one of the men threatened to shoot them if they did not pay. They made off with about $400. Two days later, San Antonio dentist Richard Drake was approached by men he believes were pirates. “I turned and looked over my shoulder,
” he said. “Three guys in a bass boat with machine guns waving and yelling at me: ‘Pull over! Pull over!’ ” He didn't. Instead, he outran them to the U.S. side.
By the Memorial Day Holiday at the end of May, four more armed robberies had been reported from the lake. One fisherman noted that the pirates had taken the memory disk from his digital camera in case it contained any incriminating evidence. The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) issued an alert telling Americans to look out for any boats with large prows, small outboard motors with the cover removed and hulls with no identification numbers. A Border Patrol boat had encountered one such boat filled with masked men and gave chase, but it proved too fast and made it safely back into Mexican waters.
Normally, Memorial Day draws 200 or more bass boats and tens of thousands of visitors to the lake. But in 2010, there were only about two dozen boats. Dwayne Deets, a Houston-based fisherman whose electronics-laden bass boat is worth about $50,000, spoke with reporters about how he was avoiding the Mexican side of the lake even though everyone knew that's where the bigger fish were. “We've all heard about the pirates, and we're all sticking to the American side of the lake, because those are some bad boys out there,” he said, pointing out that firearms are legal for fishermen to carry on the U.S. side, but not on the Mexican side. “I just pray no one gets killed out there.”
Tom Bendele, owner of Falcon Lake Tackle, took American reporters on a tour of the lake, include Salado Cove, near the island where the May 6 incident took place. “Until this started, we fished everywhere, and we never cared about the border, Texas to Mexico. But now? No. Hardly anybody is fishing the Mexico side of the lake,” he said. He pointed out how parts of Mexico are just swimming distance from Texas and that Mexicans often use nets (which are illegal on the lake) to catch large quantities of fish to sell. “You could see how it would be easy to get jumped in here,” he added. “Notice you don't see any Americans?”
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