Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America

by Ioan Grillo

  “There are amazing-looking women in Michoacán, tall girls with brown skin and green eyes. And they love the federal uniform. Everyone is calling you comandante, whatever your rank is. We were like an elite and the girls recognized that. We would sneak women back into the hotels or take turns in the patrol cars.”

  It wasn’t all fun, however. The government pressured the federales to bring in Nazario. But it was hard to find the kingpin as Nazario moved in the hills, protected by spies and residents who loved and feared him. So instead they went after his lieutenants. The idea, Ramon explains, was that if they smashed the midlevel of the cartel pyramid, the top would come tumbling down.

  The feds sniffed out the gangsters’ weak spot: parties. The Hot Land villains loved a wedding, a girl’s fifteenth birthday, or any other excuse to dance to a brass band and get plastered. Most of these parties were family related, so the key was to follow the gangsters’ loved ones, especially their children and girlfriends. The technique soon scored results.

  In April 2009, four hundred federales stormed the baptism of a baby born to a La Familia member. They nabbed forty-four gangsters (not including the baby). Among them was a Familia lieutenant called Rafael Cedeño, a close confidant to Nazario. Cedeño had been posing as a state human rights commissioner as he executed people.

  Ramon describes how they squeezed Familia prisoners with the Mexican police’s tried and tested technique: torture.

  “I didn’t want to get involved at first. But everyone was doing it and I just went along. After a while, it became normal. We did what we had to do to get the information. We smacked them, starved them. We put plastic bags on their heads and watched them spit blood. And they all talked in the end. They gave us more addresses and phone numbers and we arrested more of them.”

  The federal tactics of storming family gatherings infuriated Nazario, and he counterattacked in July 2009. He struck as an immediate reaction to the arrest of one of his top men, Arnoldo Rueda, alias La Minsa. But the scale of attacks indicates that La Familia had been planning an offensive for some time, gathering intelligence on where and how to hit the feds hard.

  The federales nabbed Rueda in a safe house on the edge of Morelia in a predawn raid on a Saturday. Minutes after they pulled him from his bed and shoved him into a car, gunmen stormed out of a nearby house, shooting and hurling grenades in a wild attempt to free him. The feds repelled them.

  La Familia rapidly called its men to arms across Michoacán and in neighboring Guanajuato. They drove in convoys to police bases and sprayed them with grenades and gunfire; they ambushed police cars on patrol; and they stormed into hotels where police were staying.

  Ramon himself came under fire in one of the assaults. He was in a federal convoy heading toward a base in New Italy when their vehicles got rattled by gunshots.

  “They had high ground from a ridge above us and we were trapped in our vehicles. It was a bad fucking situation. As officers tried to get a line of fire they were hit. It is one thing when you are firing at people. I can even enjoy that. But when you come under fire it is really not very nice.”

  One officer was killed and three were injured before the federales managed to return fire and their assailants fled. They had got off lightly. In their deadliest hit, La Familia gunmen kidnapped twelve federal police off duty in the municipality of Arteaga. The gunmen tortured them and dumped their bodies along the road. “So that you’ll come back for another one of us,” read a message by the corpses.

  Within three days, La Familia had launched twenty-three attacks, killing sixteen feds and injuring many more. Mexican columnist Ciro Gómez Leyva called it La Familia’s “Tet Offensive.”

  Then right after the wave of attacks, La Familia raised an olive branch. Spokesman La Tuta delivered the message by brazenly phoning a Michoacán news show as it broadcast live. The startled anchor gave a worried frown and then cautiously asked La Tuta a question.

  “The attacks on the police. Are they by you? After the arrest of Arnold Rueda, La Mensa?” The anchor’s voice was shaky.

  La Tuta launched into his answer as the newscast aired.

  With all respect for the president of the republic. We respect the army and the navy. We have nothing against them. We know it is their work but we are asking that they watch how they behave … Show respect for our families. That is all we are asking. If you respect us, then we will respect you … The only thing we want is peace and tranquility. We know that (drugs) are a necessary evil … It is not going to finish. We want to arrive at a consensus. We want to arrive at a national pact.

  La Tuta’s underlying message is that the gangsters will back off if the government backs off. Going back to Ben Lessing’s theories on the logic of crime wars, it is a classic case of violent lobbying. La Familia murdered police to pressure them to stop arresting their operatives and busting their meth labs.

  La Familia used techniques similar to those of insurgents around the world. But the logic driving the violence, as defined by Lessing, is what differentiates them. The Taliban ambush troops to topple the Afghan government. La Familia simply wanted the Mexican government to leave them alone.

  But there is another dimension to this fighting: the role of corrupt police. Nazario had been digging his claws deeper into the Michoacán state apparatus. Some of this corruption has now been exposed. But the officials proven to be on the cartel payroll are likely the tip of iceberg. First La Familia controlled many mayors and their police forces in the Hot Land. The small-town rulers had often grown up with the gangsters, and if they didn’t cooperate then they were extremely vulnerable. Next, La Familia got state police commanders, judges and deputies on its payroll.

  Federal agents arrested a state police commander called Miguel Ortiz who worked for La Familia, and he described how the corruption functioned. As always, these confession videos need to be scrutinized carefully, but Ortiz’s testimony is convincing—if terrifying. The confession was particularly chilling as local journalists in Morelia say Ortiz had been a friendly cop who liked to chat and joke with them; until they saw him on the ten-thirty news describing how he chopped people’s heads off.

  Known as Tyson because of a thick neck and bulldog face, Ortiz began working with Michoacán gangsters as a twenty-one-year-old cop in 2001, becoming a fully fledged member of La Familia when it took to the scene in 2006. If La Familia wanted someone taken prisoner they would call Tyson and he would arrest them and hand them over. Tyson also began to execute the victims himself. While Mexican cops used to just turn a blind eye on drug traffickers, they had become full-on mob assassins.

  Tyson’s murders got him promoted within La Familia. He was given his new rank of head of the Morelia plaza at a ceremony in the countryside. He traveled on the road from Apatazingan to Aguillilla and then left the car and walked two hours into the hills. Nazario himself arrived to bless the promotion.

  Tyson then officially left the police. But he still wore his badge, drove around in cop cars, and commanded officers as well as hit men. In 2009, Tyson participated in the attacks on federal police. He describes getting a call in the morning at five A.M., very shortly after La Minsa had been arrested, and told to get as many state police cars as he could. Cartel gunmen swept in from the countryside to fire on the feds. Some of the La Familia hit men were traveling in a Mitsubishi van, which got a flat tire. So Tyson transferred them to patrol cars and drove them to a Walmart where they got into taxis and fled the scene.

  His confession that state police worked with gangsters to attack federal officers gets back to one of Calderón’s key problems: the security forces themselves had fragmented.

  Not every official in Michoacán worked for the cartel. But those who didn’t risked death. Ben Lessing also has a term for this type of violence. He calls it “violent corruption,” bloodshed to pressure officials to work for the gangsters. In Mexico, it has long been known as plata o plomo, the choice of the silver of a coin or lead of a bullet.

  Lessing believes th
is source of cartel violence against the state is more common than the “violent lobbying” terror attacks, but less visible. Whereas violent lobbying often targets random police officers as a form of pressure, violent corruption hits specific officers who refuse to fall into line.

  In 2010, gunmen assassinated the state undersecretary of public security. In his confession, Tyson said it was because the victim was interfering with police who were on the cartel payroll. Then they went after his boss, Michoacán Security Secretary Minerva Bautista.

  I talk to Bautista about the attack. She is a modest and down-to-earth woman with a history of activism that led her to the state security job. It strikes me how the Mexican drug war throws such ordinary government workers into the line of fire.

  “We had been at a state fair. I was worried so I was in a bulletproof car with bodyguards. We drove down the road when we saw this big truck trailer blocking our path. I didn’t realize what was happening at first. Then bullets hit our car.

  “I can’t really say if I was scared or not. I didn’t have time to think. I just lay down between the seats and listened to the bullets rattling against the side of the vehicle. They went on and on. I thought for a minute, ‘This is it. I’m dead.’ But somehow, I made it through.”

  The gunmen fired an astounding twenty-seven hundred bullets at Minerva’s car. Two of her bodyguards died. But she only suffered light injuries.

  The attack shows that while some Familia gunmen were trained, others were amateurs. A soldier would have known how to create a line of fire at a fixed point, until the caps sliced through the armor. The assailants just sprayed and sprayed. But still, twenty-seven hundred bullets would make any guardian angel work overtime.

  CHAPTER 40

  In October 2009, residents of Jester Avenue, a leafy street in Oak Cliff, suburban Dallas, were awakened by the sound of a police squad smashing down the door of a wooden one-story home. The owner was a quiet thirty-six-year-old Mexican national who rarely showed up to the street of middle-class families with kiddies’ bicycles and plastic pools in the gardens. He was also the regional operative for La Familia Michoacana, distributing its crystal meth and cocaine across Texas. The home contained piles of Tupperware boxes with gleaming white crystal besides stacks of dollar bills.

  Other officers were simultaneously making raids across not only Texas, but the entire United States. They kicked down doors in California, New York, Mississippi, Massachusetts, Missouri, Georgia, Nevada, and Washington. Over forty-eight hours, a total of three thousand police nabbed 303 suspects—all alleged to be Familia operatives.

  When Attorney General Eric Holder announced what he called “Project Coronado,” he described it as the largest ever U.S. operation against a Mexican drug cartel. The officers seized $3.4 million in cash, 730 pounds of meth, and four hundred weapons, including a homemade grenade. The op, he said, shows how the U.S. stands shoulder to shoulder with the Mexican police officers being dumped on roadsides.

  The sheer level and depravity of violence that this cartel has exhibited far exceeds what we have, unfortunately, become accustomed to from other cartels. La Familia operates primarily from the state of Michoacán, Mexico. However, as we’ve shown today, their operations stretch far into the United States. Indeed, while this cartel may operate from Mexico, the toxic reach of its operations extends to nearly every state in the country.

  That’s why we are hitting them where it hurts the most—their revenue stream. By seizing their drugs and upending their supply chains, we have disrupted their ‘business as usual’ state of operations. As I have said before, this is not a one-country problem and solving it will take more than a one-country solution.

  The busts followed several years of investigations and hundreds of other arrests, Holder revealed. In 2010, the U.S. Treasury named Nazario as a designated kingpin. This meant that any American company or person doing business with him could be fined a million dollars. This was followed by more busts and intelligence packaged into so-called Project Delirium. This name, an agent tells me, was a dig at the delirium of the Maddest One.

  The first question that jumps out from Coronado is why the feds targeted La Familia for their biggest ever operation. The Sinaloa and Gulf cartels have been around longer and trafficked more drugs. Holder calls out La Familia as being more violent. But the Zetas have probably killed more people in Mexico, and some in Texas.

  However, American agents give me two explanations for going after La Familia on such a scale. The first was that their Mexican colleagues were forthcoming about passing the Americans information on the Michoacán mob. Calderón and García Luna were determined to smash La Familia and show at least one emblematic victory. But they were frustrated by grappling with a machine that was pumped with billions of dollars. They needed the Americans to cut off the oxygen of greenbacks.

  Secondly, American agents bumped into La Familia wherever they went. With so many operatives in immigrant communities, La Familia built a distribution network in a few years that rivaled older cartels, carving out cells into the heart of small-town America.

  The network grew so fast that it became exposed. Seasoned Sinaloan hoods used communication that was harder to trace, such as encrypted cells and Skype calls. But the Michoacán gangsters discussed deals on phones, which the feds tapped. Among them was Jose Gonzalez, alias the Panda, who worked out of Chicago. He made daily calls to a boss in Michoacán. Ricardo Hernandez in Dallas also chatted about meth deals on his phone. Both pleaded guilty and were given multi-decade sentences.

  Their court files reveal telling details about the mob’s modus operandi. Unlike the eleven million undocumented migrants in the U.S., the ranking Familia operators came in with papers. They lived in middle-class neighborhoods, often with their families, and bought houses in cash.

  In Dallas, Hernandez would oversee meth shipments coming from the border to safe houses across the metropolitan area. Dallas acts as a hub for the cartel, a wholesale warehouse where dealers from other cities and states can collect their supply. Hernandez took in mountains of cash, which his hoods hid in trap cars, and drove south to Michoacán, the court documents say.

  Hernandez and Gonzalez admitted to being midlevel La Familia operatives. But many others swept up in Coronado were on the bottom rung. They were often young, some only teenagers, and undocumented; the cartel paid them peanuts to sit in stash houses, eat pizza, and keep their eyes on the towers of crystal. If they got nabbed, they often got multi-decade sentences. But most knew nothing about the cartel; some didn’t even know who they were working for.

  While Coronado sounds impressive, the seizures also had a limited impact on La Familia. Three million dollars is a fortune to most of us. But the meth industry makes billions. The 790 pounds of meth seized was also a piss in the ocean of the forty metric tons that Americans could have smoked or snorted that year. La Familia was hurt, but it could gradually replace its people and reestablish operations.

  Furthermore, the U.S. agents struggled to flip their detainees and get intel that could nail Nazario and his court in Mexico. The men were too scared that their loved ones back home would be cut up or boiled in acid. Mexican police were left with their own sources to nail Nazario.

  In December 2010, the federales finally got their break. They got intelligence that Nazario would be going to an early Christmas party in a village called El Alcalde. It’s a ramshackle settlement right next to the ranch where the Maddest One grew up, full of his friends and family. In his seasonal generosity, Nazario would be handing out Christmas presents, including fridges and cars, to his loyal supporters.

  The feds claim they got the information from an anonymous tip-off. But I find that hard to believe. To mobilize thousands of troops, they would need secure intelligence, either from a phone tap or an informant who the feds were sure was good. The Mexican government was offering a thirty-million-peso reward for Nazario, so there was incentive for someone to snitch.

  Alvarez, the commissioner who led the
operation, described to me how they assembled two thousand officers to sweep on El Alcalde. But straight away, he saw problems with the logistics. They wanted to move forces quietly without tipping off the target, but that was hard with such numbers. It was also challenging to surround El Alcalde and cut off escape routes as it was in hilly country. Forces were spread out in difficult terrain.

  On December 8, the federales got word that Nazario had arrived. Vast convoys of federal police rolled down the roads. Black Hawk helicopters (provided by Washington) buzzed over the hills. Cornered, Nazario ordered a counterattack. The feds had expected this. But they had not expected its ferocity.

  “They had a wall of more than forty trucks at the entrance to El Alcalde,” Alvarez says. “There was about five hundred sicarios [hit men]. They opened fire and it was a long and hard battle.”

  The battle turned out to be one of the most ferocious in the Mexican drug war, and indeed in the nation’s recent history. Police fired from helicopters, but came under attack from Browning machine guns that almost brought a chopper down.

  The firefights erupted throughout the entire night and into the next day. Like in the “Tet Offensive,” La Familia hit other police positions and shoot-outs erupted in twelve municipalities in Michoacán, including the state capital, Morelia, New Italy, and Uruapan. This time the federales had prepared not to leave easy targets.

  The cartel thugs also hijacked dozens of trucks and buses and torched them on the main highways, blocking the movement of police. This tactic is borrowed from radical protesters, and has been used by cartels across Mexico, winning its own term: narcobloqueos.

  During this fighting, Nazario fled El Alcalde with a contingent of gunmen to a nearby village called Holanda. The feds caught him halfway there, leading to another blazing firefight. In this maelstrom, the officers claimed they shot dead Nazario, but said his gunmen dragged his body into the hills.