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The cartel traces its inception to the death on July 29, 2010, of Ignacio Coronel Villarreal, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel in the state of Jalisco, one of El Chapo’s trusted collaborators, and uncle of Emma Coronel, El Chapo’s current wife. He was killed in a shoot-out with the Mexican army in Zapopan, in the state of Jalisco. His followers suspected he was betrayed by his own cartel, so they decided to break away and form a new one. Among the founders of Jalisco New Generation were Nemesio Oseguera Ramos, alias El Mencho; Erick Valencia; El 85; and Martín Arzola, El 53, all former members of the Millennium cartel, then a branch of Sinaloa. So began a waltz of alliances and ruptures. In early 2011 the Jalisco New Generation cartel decided to take possession of Guadalajara, the capital city of Jalisco. A free-for-all broke out. But only a few months later they allied with Sinaloa again. Since then they have been fighting against Los Zetas for control of Guadalajara and Veracruz, but they are also active in the states of Colima, Guanajuato, Nayarit, and Michoacán.
Los Zetas and Jalisco face off openly. On September 20, 2011, right in the center of Veracruz, thirty-five bodies—twenty-three men and twelve women—were found in two trucks, in plain daylight. The victims showed signs of torture, their hands tied, some with bags over their heads. All were Los Zetas members. A video was posted on the Internet after the massacre: five men with ski masks sitting at a table with a tablecloth, small bottles of water in front of them, just like at a press conference. Which is what it was, a press conference to claim responsibility for the crime: “We want the armed forces to believe us when we say that our only objective is to put an end to Los Zetas. We are anonymous, faceless warriors, but proud to be Mexican.” A few days later the lifeless bodies of thirty-six people were found in three different houses in Boca del Río, also in the state of Veracruz. On November 24, a few days before the inauguration of the International Book Fair in Guadalajara, the police discovered twenty-six bodies inside three vans, dead of asphyxiation and blows to the head. On December 22, in the early hours of the morning, three public buses were attacked by drug traffickers on Highway 105 in Veracruz: sixteen dead, including three U.S. citizens from Texas who were in Mexico for Christmas vacation. The next day, in Tampico Alto, Veracruz, ten bodies were found: tortured, handcuffed, almost all decapitated. On Christmas Day near Tampico, in Tamaulipas on the Veracruz state border, army soldiers performing a routine patrol discovered thirteen cadavers in a trailer truck. They also found drug cartel banners on the scene with messages that referred to feuds among rival groups.
• • •
July 1, 2012. Mexico has just elected a new president, Enrique Peña Nieto. The war on drug trafficking is one of his priorities. Twenty-four hours after his election a group of about forty killers stops four kids between the ages of fifteen and sixteen who are dealing drugs for the Familia Michoacana, at ten in the morning in Zacazonapan in central Mexico. Other Familia members show up. Shooting breaks out. An hour of confusion and terror. Schools suspend classes until the army and police arrive, who confirm the number of dead: at least eight.
The forty killers belong to the Knights Templar cartel, founded just over a year earlier in yet another upheaval in the murderous madness that contemporary Mexico has been condemned to by drug trafficking. The Knights Templar are exiles from La Familia Michoacana, which, they feel, has lost sight of its principles and now regularly practices theft, kidnapping, extortion. The Knights Templar, on the other hand, maintains a very rigid honor code. Its members are required to fight against materialism, injustice, and tyranny. They are waging an ideological war to defend ethical social values. They swear to protect the oppressed, widows, and orphans. It is forbidden to abuse women and minors or to use their power to deceive them. Kidnapping for money is strictly prohibited. Authorization to kill is required, since no one should take a life for money or for the fun of it: You first have to investigate, find out if there is sufficient motive, and only then can you proceed. A Knight Templar must not fall prey to sectarianism or pettiness. He must promote patriotism and show pride in his country. He must be humble and respectable. The use of drugs is forbidden. The Knight Templar must be an example of chivalry for all. And he must always seek the truth, because God is Truth. Whoever betrays or breaks the code of silence will be punished with death, his family will suffer the same fate, and his property will be confiscated.
This clearly insane parody masks a very young, very aggressive group at war with its original cartel—now grown weak—whose territory it intends to seize, perhaps along with some neighboring areas. Its members feel omnipotent enough to declare war on Los Zetas. Like the original Knights Templar—the medieval order of chivalry founded in Jerusalem after the First Crusade to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land—these new knights claim to have been charged with a divine mission. Members are elected by a council of more experienced brothers, and once they join they can never abandon the “cause”; they take a vow that they must honor at the cost of their own lives. They must participate in ceremonies in which they dress like the Templars from whom they take their name: helmets, white tunics, and red crosses on their chests. In the countryside, the cartel distributes a manual outlining its principles, which are all linked to their fundamental aim to “protect the inhabitants of the free, sovereign, and secular state of Michoacán.” The cartel flaunts its purifying intentions while it organizes an army so as to dominate the amphetamine business. The Knights Templar are well equipped and are not afraid of openly challenging the authorities.
Blood calls for blood. It’s not just an expression. The history of Mexican cartels shows that all attempts to fight violence with violence have only led to more killings. Under President Vicente Fox, from 2000 to 2006, no decisive initiatives were taken against drug trafficking. The troops sent to the U.S. border to hinder cartel operations were insufficient and poorly equipped. The turning point came on December 11, 2006. President Felipe Calderón, who had just installed himself in Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, sent 6,500 soldiers to the state of Michoacán. It was a historic date, destined to end up in Mexican schoolbooks: a declaration of war between two opposing states, Mexico and the “narco-state.” The narco-state has an unlimited appetite, and Calderón knew it, which is why he launched the war on drugs. He couldn’t let a parasite state dictate the law. More than 45,000 soldiers have been involved in the war, in addition to the regular local and federal police forces. But blood calls for blood, and the threatened cartels have responded with worsening brutality. To judge from the numbers, Calderón’s war has not been won: The Mexican government’s official drug war bulletin of January 11, 2012, noted 47,515 people killed by violence associated with organized crime between December 11, 2006, and September 30, 2011. What’s worse is that the number of deaths increased exponentially: In 2007 there were 2,826 deaths connected to drug trafficking; in 2008 the number rose to 6,838; in 2009 it reached 9,614; in 2010, 15,273; and by the end of September 2011 it had already reached 12,903, with three months still to go before the end of the year. The new minister of the interior under Peña Nieto, Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, declared in mid-February 2013 that Mexican drug war deaths would reach around 70,000 during Felipe Calderón’s six-year term, adding that it is impossible to provide a precise official figure because “at the end of the previous legislature they stopped keeping official accounts” of drug war victims, just as there is no register of missing persons or unidentified bodies at the morgue. But some hold that the number of deaths in this dirty war is much higher. Death accounting is an imprecise science, and a few canceled lives always slip through the cracks. How many victims were dumped in narcofosas, or mass graves? How many bodies dissolved in acid? How many cadavers burned, and thus missing forever? Politicians at every level—local, regional, and national—are victims: In the first six years of the Mexican drug war, thirty-one Mexican mayors were killed, thirteen of them in 2010 alone. Honest people are now afraid to run for office; they know that sooner or later the cartels will arrive an
d try to replace them with a more welcome candidate. Amnesty International published a report in May 2014 stating that the number of victims between December 2006 and November 2012 (that is, during Calderon’s six-year term) was 136,100 (and not the 70,000 official Mexican sources say). Associations such as the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, founded by poet and activist Javier Sicilia after his son was killed by narcos, maintain that the total is much higher.
Numbers and figures. All I see is blood and money.
Take a rubber band and stretch it. At first there’s almost no resistance. You can make it longer, no problem. Until it reaches its full extension, beyond which the elastic will break. Today’s economy works like your elastic: All merchandise has to submit to the rules of the elastic. All but one. Cocaine. No market in the world brings in more revenue than the cocaine market. No financial investment in the world gives better returns than cocaine. Not even the record upward trends on the stock exchange are comparable to the “interest” coke offers. In 2012, the year the iPhone 5 and the iPad mini were launched, Apple became the most valuable company in terms of market capitalization ever listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Apple shares shot up by 67 percent in just one year. If you had invested €1,000 in Apple stock in the beginning of 2012, you would have €1,670 in a year. Not bad. But if you had invested €1,000 in cocaine at the beginning of 2012, after a year you would have €182,000.
Cocaine is a safe asset. Cocaine is an anticyclical asset. Cocaine is the asset that fears neither resource shortages nor market inflation. There are plenty of corners of the planet where people live without hospitals, without the web, without running water. But not without cocaine. According to the UN, in 2009, 21 tons of it were consumed in Africa, 14 in Asia, 2 in Oceania. More than a 101 in Latin America and the Caribbean. Everyone wants it, everyone does it, everyone who starts using it needs it. The costs are minimal; you can place it immediately, and the profit margin is extremely high. Cocaine is easier to sell than gold, and the revenue from it can exceed that of petroleum. Gold requires mediators and bargaining time; petroleum needs oil wells, refineries, pipelines. You could discover an oil well in your backyard, or inherit a coltan mine and supply all the cell phones in the world, but you wouldn’t go from nothing to villas on the Costa Smeralda on Sardinia as quickly as you would with cocaine. From the streets to the stars with a nuts-and-bolts factory? From poverty to prosperity selling cars? A hundred years ago maybe. Today even the big multinationals that produce primary assets, or the last remaining colossal car manufacturers, all they can do is hang in there. Lower costs. Beat the far reaches of the planet in an attempt to increase exports, which is proving to be less and less feasible.
The most reckless licit investment, the most forward-looking speculation, the fastest movements of vast sums of money—which affect living conditions on entire continents—none can compare with cocaine’s multiplication of value. Whoever bets on cocaine accumulates in just a few years the sort of wealth that it takes big holding companies decades to achieve through investments and financial speculation. If an entrepreneurial group manages to get its hands on coke, it holds a form of power impossible to achieve in any other way. Which is why, whenever coke is traded, there is always a violent, ferocious clash. With cocaine there’s no mediation. It’s all or nothing. And all doesn’t last long. When you traffic in cocaine, you can’t have unions and industrial plans, government assistance or rules subject to court appeal. If you’re the strongest, the cleverest, the most organized, the most armed, you win. The more you stretch the elastic, the more you assert yourself on the market—that’s true for any business. Only the law can break the elastic. But even when the law traces the criminal roots and tries to eradicate them, it probably won’t be able to track down all the legal activities, real estate investments, and bank accounts acquired thanks to the extraordinary tautness white powder allows.
Cocaine is a complicated asset. Behind cocaine’s candor hides millions of people’s work. But only those at the right point on the chain of production are getting rich. The Rockefellers of cocaine know how their product is created, every step. They know that in June you sow and in August you reap. That the sowing must be done with seeds from plants at least three years old, and that harvest is three times a year. That the harvested leaves have to be laid out to dry within twenty-four hours; otherwise they’re ruined and you can’t sell them. That the next step is to dig two holes in the ground. In the first, along with the dried leaves, you have to put in potassium carbonate and kerosene. That you have to pound this mix really well, so as to obtain a sort of greenish dishwater—cocaine carbonate—which, once filtered, is transferred to the second hole. That the next ingredient is concentrated sulfuric acid. That is how you get cocaine sulfate, the base paste, an off-white paste that then needs to be dried. That the final steps call for acetone, hydrochloric acid, and pure alcohol. That you have to filter it over and over, and then let it dry again. They know that’s how you obtain cocaine hydrochloride, commonly known as cocaine. The Rockefellers of cocaine know that to obtain more or less half a kilo of pure cocaine, you need 300 kilos of leaves and a handful of full-time workers. The cocaine entrepreneurs know all this, just as any company head would. But more than anything, they know that the majority of the peasants, dealers, and transporters who have found jobs that pay a little better than those they could hope to get somewhere else still have both feet firmly planted in poverty. It’s unskilled labor, a sea of interchangeable subjects, that perpetuates a system of exploitation of the many and enrichment of a few. Those few at the top of the heap are the ones who had the foresight to realize that, in cocaine’s long journey from the leaves of Colombia to the nostrils of the casual consumer, the real money is made through sales, resale, and price management. Because if it’s true that a kilo of cocaine in Colombia is sold for $1,500, in Mexico for $12,000 to $16,000, in the United States for $27,000, in Spain for $45,000, in Holland for $47,000, in Italy for $54,000, and in the UK for $77,000; if it’s true that the price per gram varies from $61 in Portugal to $166 in Luxembourg, going for $80 in France, $87 in Germany, $96 in Switzerland, and $97 in Ireland; if it’s true that on average 1 kilo of pure cocaine is cut to make 3 kilos that are then sold in single-gram doses; if all this is true, it’s also true that whoever controls the entire chain of production is one of the richest men in the world.
Cocaine traffic today is managed by a new middle class of mafiosi. They use distribution to gain control of the territory where it is sold. A game of Risk on a planetary scale. On one side are the areas where cocaine is produced, which become fiefdoms where nothing but poverty and violence grow, areas the mafias keep under control by generously doling out charity and alms, which they pass off as rights. No development, only profits. If someone wants to better himself, he demands riches, not rights. Riches that he needs to know how to grab. In this way only one model of success is perpetuated, of which violence is merely a vehicle and a tool. What is established is power. On the other side are countries where you plant your little flags to mark your presence: Italy, England, Russia, China. Everywhere. For the most powerful families coke works as easily as an ATM machine. You need to buy a shopping center? Import some coke, and after a month you’ll have enough money to close the deal. You need to sway an election? Import some coke, and you’ll be ready in a few weeks. Cocaine is the universal answer to the need for liquidity.
5.
FEROCITY IS LEARNED
For years I’ve been asking myself what the point is of dealing with shootings and death. Is it really worth it? Why? Are you going to be called in as a consultant? Do a six-week teaching stint in some university, the more prestigious the better? Throw yourself into the battle against evil, believing you are the good? Wear the hero’s crown for a few months? Will you profit if people read what you write? Will they hate you, the people who said these things before you did but were ignored? And what about those who didn’t say them, or said them poorly, wil
l they hate you too? Sometimes I think I’m obsessed. Other times I’m convinced these stories are a way of measuring the truth. Maybe that’s the secret. Not for others. Secret for me. Hidden from myself. Left out of my public pronouncements. Tracking the paths of drug trafficking and money laundering makes you feel you can measure the truth of things, understand the fate of an election, a government’s fall. It’s no longer enough to listen to the official statements. While the world is clearly heading in one direction, everything seems focused on something else, something banal even, superficial. Some government minister’s statement, some tiny, insignificant event, some piece of gossip. But everything is really being decided by something else. This intuition is at the base of every romantic choice. Every journalist, novelist, and director would like to tell things the way they are, the way they really are. To say to his reader or viewer: It’s not how you thought it was, this is how it is. I’m going to open the wound for you, so you can glimpse the ultimate truth. But no one ever succeeds completely. The danger is in believing that reality—that real, pulsating, decisive reality—is completely hidden. If you trip and fall into it, you start thinking everything’s a conspiracy—secret meetings, Masonic lodges, spies. Reporters are full of this sort of idiocy. To square the circle of the world in your own interpretations is the onset of shortsightedness in an eye that thinks it has perfect vision. But it’s not that simple. The complexity lies precisely in not believing that everything is hidden or decided in secret chambers. The world is more interesting than a conspiracy between sects and secret agents. Criminal power is a mixture of many elements.