by Ioan Grillo
The fighting by cartels and commandos, these thinkers show, is a new type of armed conflict that is not quite a civil war but is more than criminal violence. It is a gray bloody space in between whose rules are still being written. Criminal militias use light infantry weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades, belt-driven machine guns, fragmentation grenades, and automatic rifles. But they lack the guerrillas’ driving aim of conquering a country. The conflicts don’t have clear start dates, and it is a struggle to end them. Yet they claim more victims than the thousand battlefield deaths said to define a civil war.5
Political scientist Ben Lessing calls them “criminal conflicts” and observes that they are “supplanting revolutionary insurgency as the hemisphere’s dominant form of conflict.”6 Others just call them “crime wars,” summing up the merging of delinquency and war.
Robert Bunker is an external researcher for the U.S. Army War College trying to make sense of this slaughter.7 The son of a soldier, he grew up reading the Marine Corps Gazette before becoming an academic specializing in national security. Latin America’s crime wars provide him a new and baffling puzzle.
“We have this blurring of crime and war. And it doesn’t fit either nice model for us. It is crime and war mixed together. It doesn’t fit the modern paradigm. And this is why it’s driving everybody bananas. It doesn’t fit how the world is supposed to be. So our thinking has not caught up and our institutions and laws have not caught up.”
It is impractical to apply treaties such as the Geneva Conventions to these crime wars. They were written for a different age, aimed chiefly at warring nation states. But we do need to establish limits on the crime wars as we search for peace. In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, the newspaper El Diario de Juárez made this point following the murder of a twenty-one-year-old photographer on his lunch break. In a front-page editorial entitled “What do you want from us?” El Diario addressed the cartels directly:
Even war has rules. In any outbreak of violence protocols or guarantees exist for the groups in conflict, in order to safeguard the integrity of the journalists who cover it. This is why we reiterate, gentlemen of the various narco-trafficking organizations, that you explain what it is you want from us so we don’t have to pay tribute with the lives of our colleagues.
* * *
Inside this mix of crime and war, gangster gunmen are often more effective in achieving their aims than are larger government forces in achieving theirs. Like traditional warlords, gangsters control fiefs through both fear and authentic support from some residents. They are strong in villages or ghettos where governments are weak. These are no longer the shantytowns of the 1970s, where people immigrated with the hope of heading somewhere better, but slums where many youth are born and die with little aspiration but to have gangster glory.
One alarming development is the extent to which gangsters control their own justice systems. From Mexican mountains to Jamaican ghettos, crime bosses try those accused of robbing or raping and sentence them to beatings, exile, or death. It’s jungle law. But many residents find it more effective than any justice the police and courts offer.
Wielding such power, gangster warlords threaten the fundamental nature of the state, not by trying to completely take it over but by capturing parts of it and weakening it. They chip into the state’s monopoly on violence—or, more precisely, the monopoly on waging war and carrying out justice. When the state loses this it becomes less able to impose its will on many issues, including the most basic, such as collecting taxes and policing protests. People lose faith in the government, as happened in the Mexican state of Guerrero after the Iguala massacre. Some form vigilante militias to defend themselves. Others burn town halls. If governments lose more control in this way, it could have devastating consequences.
CHAPTER 3
They remind me of the Dirty Dozen. Except there are more than twelve of these guys. And they look more badass.
In the classic 1967 war movie, the Allies recruit twelve scarred convicts for a mission to parachute behind enemy lines and kill Nazis. The Allied command figures these murderers are the best men to murder murderers.
In 2014, the Mexican government made a similar calculation: It decided that gangsters were the best people to take out gangsters. In the Pacific state of Michoacán—one of the most gangster-ridden states of all—it formed an elite squadron with the job of hunting down leaders of the bizarrely named Knights Templar cartel. The unit was nominally part of a Rural State Force created that year to deputize vigilantes fighting the traffickers. But full-on mob assassins also jumped in. Many hailed from a gang known as Los Viagras in the market town of Apatzingán, a hub of drug traffickers. Others came from mountain villages amid marijuana and opium fields.
I find about fifty members of the squadron milling around a parking lot at the entrance to Apatzingán. They are comparing weapons and getting ready for a mission to storm through villages seeking out Knights Templar leader Servando Gómez, alias La Tuta. They are seriously tooled up. Supposedly, the Rural Force are only allowed to carry government-issued AR-15 rifles. But who cares? They have everything up to huge G3 machine guns, which the Mexican army uses.
They refer to their weapons by farmyard names, which is fitting because Michoacán is a fertile agricultural state. They call fifty-caliber bullets jabalitos, or “little boars.” Their beloved Kalashnikovs are goats’ horns. To turn the AK-47 into a really lethal machine, they use circular clips with a hundred bullets. When you spray a hundred caps in ten seconds you have a pretty good chance of hitting your target, and anybody close by. They call the circular clips huevos, or “eggs.” A lot of them carry grenade launchers, mostly fixed to their rifles. They call the grenades papas, or “potatoes.” They tape grenades and ammo clips round their waists and across their chests, giving them the look of authentic desperados.
The gangsters also show me their personalized sidearms. The pistols are decorated in diamonds and other stones with classic narco designs. One of them has “El Jefe”—“The Boss”—engraved into his pistol.
They are itching to get into a gunfight. As the fifty men show off their weapons and get themselves psyched up for their op, testosterone flows in bucketloads. One of them asks me how much prostitutes cost in my country, and there is a roar of laughter. One guy is almost two meters tall, bearing a G3 in his right hand. He waves to a slim teenager carrying his ammo. “This is my chica.” He smiles. “How do you say that in English? This is my ‘bitch.’”
The guy with the Jefe pistol asks if I take “ice,” the name they use for crystal meth. The Michoacán mob churns out meth by the ton, providing for tweakers from Kentucky to California. “El Jefe” remarks how pure the local ice is. DEA agents have told me that they agree. They say that Michoacán meth is the purest they have ever found.
I take photos of the guys with their weapons. They do battle poses. The two-meter-tall guy tells me not to take his picture. I say that is fine. Another man in his late forties appears from nowhere and points his finger at me. He accuses me of being a DEA agent.
“He is DEA. Why is he taking photos?”
I reaffirm that I am a journalist and I try to shake his hand. He refuses. “The DEA busted my brother in Texas,” he growls. “The agent was posing as a journalist.” The atmosphere changes in a flash. I tell him that I am not even American. I’m British. I point out a website that features my work. El Jefe finds it on his smartphone. My accuser relaxes a little and turns to me.
“If I see you again, I am going to put a bullet in your head.” He taps his forehead with his finger and points at me. To make sure the message gets across, he adds, “I’ll throw a papa [grenade] at you.”
I do my best to smile.
* * *
Back in the 1970s, hit men from Mexico to Brazil used to be assassins who killed quietly in the black of night. Now they have transformed into commandos with light infantry weapons, even shoulder-held rocket launchers. The Zetas build their own tanks, which look like somethi
ng from the fantasy road wars of Mad Max. They pour into towns in convoys of thirty pickups to massacre terrified residents. And they attack soldiers in ambushes, opening fire with fifty-caliber rifles. In many cases, they use the same battle tactics as Latin America’s old guerilla armies.
The leftist guerrilla was an emblematic symbol of Latin America in the twentieth century, personified in the iconic photos of Che Guevara. In the new millennium, guerrillas have disappeared from most of the continent. The growth of democracy has allowed former radicals to become politicians, even presidents. The idea of establishing Marxist dictatorships has been discredited. Some of the remaining guerrillas, like those in Colombia, have become major cocaine traffickers.
But where the beret-wearing freedom fighters have subsided, cartel armies have risen. Tragically, the cartel sicario with a Kalashnikov is a more dominant symbol of the new Americas. Many young people idolize Chapo Guzmán more than Che Guevara.
Like guerrillas, drug cartels are deeply rooted inside communities. As Mao Tse-tung famously said, “The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.” Gangster militias also draw their strength from villages and barrios. As in counter-insurgency campaigns, governments get frustrated confronting an enemy they can’t see and unleash soldiers to torture and murder civilians, trying to take away the sea from the fish.
But this comparison with insurgents does not mean that gangster gunmen will act in all ways like traditional guerillas or should be treated in the same way. Many Latin Americans see insurgents as the honorable fighters who liberated their land from the tyrants of the Spanish Empire while they view cartel hit men as demons. A traditional insurgent believes in their vision of a greater good, whether inspired by Marxism, Islam, or nationalism. The gangsters are chiefly motivated by just one god—mammon—the green of dollars bills. The strategic objectives of the bloodshed also differ. Guerrillas usually try to topple governments and take power. Cartel gunmen often attack security forces to pressure governments to back off.
A central objective of the gangster gunmen is to control their fiefs. If the government threatens them, they may launch insurgent-style attacks. To back these up, they often claim to be fighting for the poor. But in other cases they cut deals with governments, or directly control them. They can help the powerful fight their enemies and give them a share of their spoils, working like a paramilitary.
Conflict has transformed around the world since the Cold War. Warlords have left mounds of corpses in Africa from Liberia to Uganda. While they differ from the gangsters of the Americas in many ways, they also use ragtag armies with barbaric tactics alongside new technology. And they also base their power on the control of fiefdoms.
Militant Islamists are a very different—and much bigger—threat than the gangsters of the Americas. The Islamic State showed it can control territory the size of a country. But you can’t help but find common ground. In 2012, when the Taliban beheaded seventeen people at a wedding in Afghanistan, shocking the world, the Zetas left the bodies of forty-nine headless victims in Mexico. When the Syrian regime first wanted to demonstrate the horrors that Islamic rebels were committing, it couldn’t find any footage, so it showed video that turned out to be by Mexican cartels. (It soon had plenty of its own to show.) Islamic radicals and gangster militias both recruit poor lost teenagers and train them to be murderers; they both fight with small cells and ambushes. And in both cases, Washington is flummoxed on how to deal with them.
A Mexican cartoonist summed up the common ground following the 2015 attack on French magazine Charlie Hebdo. His cartoon showed a picture of a masked man with an AK. “Ahhhhh. It’s an Islamic terrorist,” says one voice. “Tranquila, tranquila,” says another. “It’s just a hit man from the Gulf Cartel.”
Military historians recognize the growth of asymmetric warfare and governments’ difficulties in dealing with it. The strongest theories on it come from The Transformation of War by Martin van Creveld, well ahead of its time when it was published in 1991: “Large-scale, conventional war—war as understood by today’s principal military powers—may indeed be at its last gasp; however, war itself, war as such, is alive and kicking and about to enter a new epoch.”1
Gangster warfare has ravaged the Americas, paradoxically, when many nations appeared to be getting freer and wealthier. The Cold War finished (with the U.S. declaring victory). Dictatorships collapsed, giving birth to young democracies. Borders opened up to free trade, governments liberalized their economies, and Francis Fukuyama declared “The End of History.”
But as we look back on the last two decades, we can identify clear causes of the new conflicts. The collapse of military dictatorships and guerrilla armies left stockpiles of weapons and soldiers searching for a new payroll. Emerging democracies are plagued by weakness and corruption. A key element is the failure to build working justice systems. International policy focused on markets and elections but missed this third crucial element in making functional democracies: the rule of law. The omission has cost many lives.
The deregulation of economies created some winners while leaving swathes of the world’s slums and countrysides in poverty. Meanwhile, a global black market in contraband, human trafficking, and guns has expanded exponentially.
Narcotics are the biggest black market earner of all. Estimated to be worth more than three hundred billion dollars a year, the global industry has pumped huge resources into criminal empires decade after decade.2 It has had a cumulative effect, heating up the region to a boiling point. The brutal logic of the underworld is that the most terrifying gangsters get the lion’s share of the profits, leading to the ultimate predators such as the Zetas.
However, the violence rages on during a historic turning point in the drug debate. Four U.S. states and Washington, D.C., have legalized marijuana along with the entire country of Uruguay. Politicians across the continent have come out of the closet to criticize the war on drugs. Actors and musicians line up to join the cause of drug policy reform.
Yet while the debate has transformed, the old policies largely stumble on. The U.S. spends billions on DEA agents in sixty countries and bankrolls armies to burn crops from the Andes to Afghanistan. Most narcotics remain illegal and keep providing massive profits to those violent enough to claim them.
The next task is to move from a change in the debate to a change in the reality on the ground.
As I look at the Red Commando, Shower Posse, Mara Salvatrucha, and Knights Templar, I profile certain gangster bosses. Their power and wealth vary; some are wanted billionaires, others chiefs of single ghettos. They differ in how violent (and in some cases evil) they are. Some have codes to protect innocents. Others carry out war crimes. But they are united in controlling fiefdoms and fighting this new type of conflict.
The characters and groups I have chosen don’t represent an A to Z of gangster warlords and cartels. There are way too many criminals across the Americas who share these traits. Some of the biggest dogs, such as Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán, are not extensively profiled, although of course he traffics his way into the text. But the characters and organizations I chose are emblematic and represent different styles. I look at the class-based ghetto warfare of the Red Commando in Brazil, the political power of the don in Jamaica, the immigrant street gang of the Mara in Central America, and the religious cult and guerrilla tactics of the Knights Templar in Michoacán. I am interested in how these gangsters wield power, how they wage war, how they operate as political and fighting forces. I am interested in what drives the insane level of violence, and what can be done to stop it.
In the case of the Knights Templar, the megalomaniac Nazario Moreno oversaw a highly pyramidal structure. In contrast, the Mara Salvatrucha is a federation of “cliques,” where power lies largely with local leaders. Thinkers have long debated whether individuals or social forces are more influential. Good contemporary historians look at both and how they interact to shape our world.
Drug traffickers and hit men
are tough to interview. Sometimes they can be aggressive. Other times they want to use publicity for their own purposes. Often they genuinely want to share their life stories and are looking for ways out or repentance. A seasoned killer in Jamaica wanted advice on his creative writing. A Brazilian gang boss showed me his poetry.
Most were trained to be killers when they were teenagers and are in a sense both victims and victimizers. Yet perhaps they don’t deserve forgiveness. They have committed horrendous crimes, from murdering and kidnapping to trafficking women.
For those of us trying to understand this mess, the villains’ stories offer vital visions into their crime world. But their cohorts often view their talking as akin to snitching and the interviewees run a genuine risk of being murdered. Dozens of gangsters in Latin America have talked to the press by name and been killed in retribution, sometimes within hours of their interview being aired. The gangsters I talk to detail crimes they have not been convicted for, including dozens of homicides, some on U.S. soil. In some cases, they agreed that I can publish their names. In others, they asked for me to leave out surnames or use aliases. I could not refuse these requests; journalism is not worth people getting killed for.
Latin America and the Caribbean are home to 588 million people divided by language, race, and social class: It is not one place, but many. A paradox of the crime wars is how extreme violence goes side by side with everyday life. While parts of Mexico and Brazil suffer crazy murder rates, others are very peaceful. The resorts of Cancún are safer than most American cities. Yucatán State has the same murder rate as Belgium, Mexico City as Boston. Even in the most violent areas, people keep on with the grind, feeding their families, getting kids to school, partying away the evenings. There needs to be more engagement with these communities, not further isolation from them.
