by Ioan Grillo
Why are the Americas awash in blood at the dawn of the twenty-first century? How, after the United States declared Cold War victories in the region, did it unravel so fast? And why are American politicians so mum about these battles that have killed more than many traditional war zones?
The fact that these crime militias have cropped up simultaneously in different countries is no coincidence but shows a regional trend, a product of historical circumstances. And while these conflicts are in separate countries, drugs, guns, and gangsters float between them. It is a chain of crime wars slicing through the continent.
This bloodshed is not in the poorest, least developed region of the world. It takes place in industrializing societies with a growing middle class. Latin American and Caribbean countries continue to modernize, building gleaming shopping malls, cinema multiplexes, and designer gyms, private schools and world-class universities. Millions of visitors sun themselves in top-notch resorts on the countries’ golden beaches. This convinces some surprised visitors that the countries are on a quick path to the First World. There is real growth taking place.
At the same time, sprawling slums are home to ultraviolent gangs with links to politicians and businessmen. The parallel universes of crime-ridden ghettos and leafy middle-class neighborhoods live side by side, sometimes meeting and clashing.
In this changing landscape, a new generation of kingpins has emerged along with their own cult followings and guerrilla hit squads. These super villains from Mexico to Jamaica to Brazil to Colombia are no longer just drug traffickers, but a weird hybrid of criminal CEO, gangster rock star, and paramilitary general. They fill the popular imagination as demonic antiheroes. Not only do they feature in underground songs in the drug world—they are re-created in telenovelas, movies, and even video games simulating their new warfare.
And what they do affects us all. Over the last two decades, these crime families and their friends in politics and business have taken over much of the world’s trade in narcotics, guns, and humans as well as delved into oil, gold, cars, and kidnapping. Their networks stretch throughout the United States into Europe, Asia, and Australia. And their chain of goods and services arrives at all our doorsteps.
In this book, I attempt to make better sense of these hybrid criminal organizations by tracking a path through the new battlefields of the Americas. Traveling across the continent, I focus on four crime families: the Red Commando in Brazil, the Shower Posse in Jamaica, the Mara Salvatrucha in Central America, and the Knights Templar in Mexico. They are puzzling postmodern networks that mix gangs, mafias, death squads, religious cults, and urban guerrillas.
When you see these groups in action, you can identify clear parallels in how they operate. Similar systems of spies watch who comes into villages in Michoacán, Mexico, and favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Gangs clear neighborhoods to create defensive buffer zones in both San Pedro Sula, Honduras, and the garrisons of Kingston, Jamaica. Gangsters hold their own trials in the suburbs of São Paulo, as they do in the Mexican mountains. These parallels paint a clearer model of what these groups are and how they operate. The invisible crime system takes some form.
Gangster militias are both products of violent societies and contributors to their increasing bloodiness. Between 2000 and 2010, murder rates rose 11 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean, while they fell in most of the world.8 Eight of the ten countries with the highest homicide rates are now in the region, as are forty-three of the world’s fifty most violent cities.9 With so few murders being solved, it’s impossible to say exactly how many died at the hands of cartels and commandos. But organized crime has a big presence in all the countries with the highest rates.
When you tally up the total body count, the numbers are staggering. Between the dawn of the new millennium and 2010, more than a million people across Latin America and the Caribbean were murdered.10 It’s a cocaine-fueled holocaust.
Politicians are confounded about how to handle this gangster power and bloodshed. Governments from Mexico City to Brasília send out troops with shoot-to-kill policies while denying they are fighting low-intensity wars. After shocking attacks on police in São Paulo, officers are alleged to have gone on a revenge killing spree and murdered almost as many people in ten days as Brazil’s military dictatorship did in two decades.11 In some cases, politicians are in league with the gangsters and are part of the problem. But politicians aren’t the sole cause of this mess. Others may not be allied with narco kingpins but genuinely struggle to find a policy that works. Some governments have experimented with new ideas, such as organizing gang truces, as in El Salvador, or offering disarmament deals, as in Colombia—with varying degrees of success.
Washington has no coherent strategy. The United States continues to spend billions on a global war on drugs, while there is little enthusiasm at home for the fight. It bankrolls armies across Latin America, from Mexico to Honduras to Colombia—and U.S. courts give asylum to refugees fleeing those same soldiers. Diplomats cozy up to their Latin American counterparts by saying they only face generic gang problems, but then Pentagon officials rock the boat by screaming that Mexico is losing control to cartels. Faced with such contradictions, politicians often take refuge in the default option: ignoring it.
But this is no longer a problem that politicians can afford to ignore. The gangster economy affects people now: from the gas in your car, to the gold in your jewelry, to your tax dollars (or euros, or pounds) financing the war on drugs. The bloodshed may be concentrated outside U.S. borders, but all the major groups move money and merchandise throughout the United States and have operatives lurking in its cities. Some have attacked U.S. agents abroad. Others have carried out murders on U.S. soil.
The web of the four crime families in this book stretches across the hemisphere, leading to all kinds of unlikely places. It spins off to lime prices in New York bars, British secret agents, World Cup soccer stars, bids to hold the Olympic Games, questions over the start of the London riots. In the summer of 2014, it was linked to sixty-seven thousand unaccompanied children arriving at the U.S. southern border, causing what President Barack Obama called a humanitarian crisis. While not all had run from bullets, some showed clear evidence they would be murdered if they went home. Less publicized was that tens of thousands of adults from the region were arriving on the southern border asking for political asylum. Some people ask why it matters if neighboring countries fall to pieces. This is one of the reasons.
CHAPTER 2
Just south of the Rio Grande, a path marks a line of death drawn by one of the most brutal bands of murderers the Americas have ever known. The criminal army known as the Zetas has butchered victims across much of Mexico as well as in Texas and Guatemala. But the sites of their five worst massacres lie along a stretch of three hundred miles roughly following the curve of the U.S.-Mexico border. One end of this line sits forty miles from Eagle Pass, Texas, a peaceful sleepy town that was the first U.S. settlement on the river. The other swaddles a series of lagoons that flow into the Gulf of Mexico. The sites are in farmhouses, fields, and on city streets.
I retrace this line of death over three days traveling with veteran border journalist Juan Alberto Cedillo in his beat-up Volkswagen. I wrote news reports on most of the massacres soon after they happened, but I want to get a better sense of the geography of this terror. I also want to document as much as I can about the sites while they can still be identified. Four of them have no plaques to remember the horrors and their victims. Many here, especially those in power, don’t want to be reminded of the carnage that has taken place in one of the most developed regions in Latin America. They want to forget.
The most western site is by a small town called Allende in arid countryside dotted with cattle ranches. The grayish land is flat and plain, the town relatively prosperous from border trade and beef. In February 2014, police and soldiers trekked through barren fields here to dig up a ranch where the Zetas had dissolved bodies in acid inside metal barrels. The Zetas called
it “a kitchen.”1 When we visit, I find there are still scattered plastic cans that contained the industrial acids used for this melting of flesh.
Police were searching for hundreds of people who had gone missing from the area. But they couldn’t work out exactly how many had died on this macabre ranch as they only found bones or stubborn chunks of tissue that had survived the toxic mix. Excavating the farmhouses and digging up other nearby ranches, they gathered about five hundred body parts, from skulls to bits of toes, and shipped them to a laboratory in Mexico City where they are still stored.
In trying to comprehend this violence, I have interviewed paid assassins, from teenagers to seasoned middle-aged murderers. Tracing their life stories, I can explain how they are pulled into the ranks of organized crime, trained to kill, and gradually take more and more lives. They have told me how they separate themselves from the act of murder by seeing it as a job, by bottling guilt deep inside. But seeing slaughter on this scale still leaves me incredulous as to how a cartel could commit such an atrocity. It is not a crime scene, but a death camp.
We follow this geography of horror into the sprawling city of Monterrey, Mexico, home to global beer and cement companies. In the heart of the town sits the charred remains of a casino that the Zetas set afire in 2011 while it was full of people playing bingo and slot machines. Fifty-two customers and employees suffocated or burned to death. The victims included wealthy locals, and this is the one site that families managed to get authorities to make a memorial for; an obelisk with Venetian blue tiles was finally inaugurated in August 2014 on the third anniversary of the tragedy. “For those who pass these waters, stop the violence in our society and wash the tears of those who suffer from it,” reads the message.
Another twenty miles to the east, we drive through Cadereyta Jiménez, home to one of Mexico’s biggest oil refineries. On a road into the town in 2012, the Zetas dumped forty-nine decapitated corpses that they had also chopped hands and feet off of. The logistics alone of holding, butchering, and transporting so many victims are hard to fathom. Two years later, only eight were identified. It’s hard to trace people who have no faces or fingerprints.
Families from across Mexico trawl these sites, and nearby morgues, to see if their loved ones are among the victims. The Mexican government revealed in 2014 that more than twenty-three thousand people had disappeared in the country in seven years, with the missing concentrated in drug trafficking hot spots. One mother in Monterrey described to me how she watched her eighteen-year-old son, a philosophy student, be marched away by a group of thugs with Kalashnikovs. After three years of searching she has still not found him, or his body. Her face was a mask of grief. This lack of closure devastates people psychologically.2
The road southeast takes us to the site of the last two massacres, near San Fernando, Tamaulipas, a farming town that has become synonymous with Zeta violence. Frustrated by being so associated with bloodshed, San Fernando’s mayor is desperate for other things to be remembered by. In April 2014, he organized local fishermen and chefs to make the world’s biggest shrimp cocktail, a titanic soup that was recorded in the Guinness Book of Records at more than a metric ton. When I visit the town hall, I am shown videos of cooks pouring shrimp from an endless line of plastic containers into a monumental cup that looks like something from Land of the Giants.
San Fernando has deep horrors to run from. In 2011, soldiers unearthed 193 corpses in fields on the outskirts of town. The Zetas had pulled many of the victims out of cars and busses during a murder spree that lasted months. Most had their skulls smashed or had been stabbed rather than shot. It is reported the Zetas made some victims fight each other in gladiatorial style combats, using hammers and knives to slay each other.3
Finally, down a long dirt road lies a barn where the Zetas gunned down seventy-two people in 2010. It might have been the biggest massacre of unarmed civilians in one moment in Mexico since General Pancho Villa killed almost all the men of a mining town in 1915.4
The barn victims were undocumented immigrants heading to the United States in search of a better life. Hailing from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Brazil, they had traveled thousands of miles, crossing jungles and mountains, and finally hoped to see Texas by nightfall. One woman was heavily pregnant. The Zetas blindfolded them, bound their hands, and lay them on the ground. Then they lined up and fired hundreds of bullets into them.
To get to the barn we drive down fifteen miles of dirt road through fields of dark red sorghum, a crop used as animal feed, which stretches out like a bloodstained carpet. The barn has been left derelict, its bullet-ridden doors hanging off their hinges. As we approach, two enormous and beautiful white owls flutter out and arch into the sky. I remember how many cultures link owls with death.
The fields are abandoned, weeds growing where the corpses lay. You could drive past and never know what happened here.
* * *
My mental vision of war was first shaped by my grandfather. He was drafted into the British army when he was eighteen and spent the end of the First World War wading through trenches in France, resisting the final German advance and pushing the Wehrmacht into an armistice. Six decades later, when I was a toddler, he mimed to me how he would thrust forward with his bayonet.
This war of a century ago bears little resemblance to the violence in the Americas today; obviously it was on a far greater scale than these crime wars. But I like to compare it for one reason. It reminds us that Europeans can be just as barbaric in committing murder and atrocities. Some look for cultural reasons to explain the severity of violence by groups such as the Zetas. They ask whether there is a deep fascination with death in the Mexican psyche; or whether Jamaica has one of the world’s worst murder rates because it’s a country of former slaves who have anger in their blood. But history tells us that every culture is capable of horrific violence. We are all barbarians. I prefer to search for structural and political causes that lead people to shed blood.
My second vivid image of conflict came in the 1980s during the last freeze of the Cold War. Still a child, I was petrified there would be a nuclear attack that would turn Britain into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. I watched movies that simulated atomic war with its buildup, bombing, and aftermath and had recurring nightmares of mushroom clouds exploding over southern England.
In some ways, this side of the Cold War was the polar opposite of the violence in the ranches of northeast Mexico or the favelas of Brazil. It was a threat of monumental proportions, but it was one that was far away and never realized. In Latin America, the threat is smaller, local, and very real. However, there is a similarity. The Cold War was an endemic conflict that lasted almost half a century. Likewise, some of the crime wars in Latin America have already lasted decades and drag on with no clear end in sight.
I saw a third vision of conflict as a teenager when I visited friends in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the last years of fighting between the Irish Republican Army, Protestant paramilitaries, and British security forces. This physically resembled the new conflicts in Latin America more. Soldiers and militarized police patrolled the streets and conducted checkpoints. Catholic and Protestant armed groups were clandestine forces operating deep inside their communities. Attacks included ambushes and car bombs.
However, the level of death in the Americas is much greater. The Troubles of Northern Ireland claimed thirty-five hundred lives over three decades. Mexico’s cartel clash claimed more than sixteen thousand lives in 2011 alone; Ciudad Juárez, which has a smaller population than Northern Ireland, suffered more than three thousand murders in a single year.
So should we call these crime battles in the Americas actual wars?
Journalists writing on the bloodshed make the comparison all the time. Police and soldiers also often describe them in martial terms as they work out battle tactics to fight militias such as the Zetas. And residents of embattled communities frequently refer to war, albeit one they cannot clearly define.
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bsp; However, politicians are more cautious about using the word. Occasionally, they find it convenient to use martial language to rally troops and the public to an offensive. More often, they dismiss any implication that they are at war, because this would be disastrous for their countries’ images and tourist and investment dollars. Consequently, Latin America’s crime wars are not legally recognized as armed conflicts.
Does it even matter what we call them? A mass grave with 193 bodies is a horrific crime however you frame it. A different choice of words won’t bring victims back from the dead. It won’t turn back time so a mother won’t have to see her son dragged away while she is powerless against men with rifles.
But the choice of words has implications. If there were a declared armed conflict in Mexico, then its government would have to abide by international conflict treaties. Both Mexico’s leaders and its cartel bosses could be judged by the International Criminal Court. (Some lawyers have campaigned for this.) Declaring war zones would turn U.S. policy on its head. It could not just hide its support for Latin America’s armies in antidrug efforts but would be identified with conflicts being watched by the Hague. Judges would have to change their criteria for deciding if people fleeing them qualify as refugees.
I have grappled with such questions in reporting on Latin America’s bloodshed since 2001. Searching for the answers, I have found a growing group of thinkers trying to make sense of the violence. They come from a broad range of backgrounds and work in different milieus, and they include human rights lawyers, military strategists, and academics from anthropologists to political scientists. While their aims differ, they are united in seeking to understand this tragedy, and all their thinking can help construct a model in which we can better comprehend the wanton murder and find solutions to it.
