The Cartel: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  Maybe Monterrey.

  Once the jewel of the PAN economic revival, the symbol of modern corporate Mexico with shiny skyscrapers, boulevards of exclusive stores, and trendy restaurants patronized by regios—the young up-and-coming—Monterrey has become a nightmare.

  With police basically paralyzed, crime has gotten out of control.

  Downtown stores and restaurants are regularly robbed. There’s open fighting in the streets—a man was chased down, shot, and then hanged from a bridge in front of a horrified crowd.

  At a trendy restaurant that made the mistake of serving Sinaloan cuisine, about a hundred regios were enjoying beers and aguachile about midnight when seven Zeta gunmen came in, made everyone lie on the floor, collected wallets and cell phones, then separated the men from the women and systematically took the women into the restrooms and raped them.

  The women were afraid to press charges because their assailants kept their identification cards for purposes of retaliation.

  It got worse.

  A Zeta cell in the city tried to extort a casino known for laundering narco money through its accounts. The casino owners refused to pay. Keller has seen the videotapes of two pickup trucks pulling up to a Pemex station and filling plastic barrels full of gasoline. Other security cameras caught the trucks pulling up to the Casino Royale on a Saturday afternoon at about two o’clock in the afternoon. Seven gunmen get out of the trucks. They walk into the casino lobby and start to shoot. They come out, and the other Zetas roll the barrels into the casino and set them on fire.

  The emergency exits were padlocked and chained.

  Fifty-three people died of flame, smoke, and toxins.

  Five of the attackers arrested later in the week said that they didn’t mean to kill anyone, that they were just trying to scare the owners into paying the 130,000 pesos a week.

  More critical than Monterrey, the Zetas are taking ground—literally taking ground—in Guatemala, especially in the north, in the Petén district bordering Mexico. Last year, the Zetas slaughtered twenty-seven campesinos in the province, terrifying countless others off their smallholdings, and now Ochoa is consolidating power there. If he controls Guatemala, he takes Barrera’s main cocaine route into Mexico.

  And the weakened CDG is (barely) hanging on against the Zetas in Matamoros, Reynosa is once again under contention between the Zetas and the CDG, and the border towns are a howling wilderness.

  Despite the FES and Sinaloa pressure, the Zetas control—rule, really—large swaths of Mexico. They dominate numerous state and municipal police forces, have effectively silenced the mainstream media, and have established a virtual reign of terror.

  And now Barrera has taken the war right into the Zeta stronghold of Nuevo Laredo.

  Again.

  This poor city, Keller thinks as he walks away from the garbage truck display—that’s all you can call it, truly, a “display.”

  First Sinaloa fights the Gulf and the Zetas for it.

  Then the Gulf and the Zetas fight each other.

  Now Sinaloa fights the Zetas.

  Well, Sinaloa and us.

  Me.

  Me and my new best friend Adán Barrera.

  Barrera has shifted his focus to Nuevo Laredo, so Keller has, too, taking up residence in a nondescript “long-stay” hotel across the bridge in Laredo. He moves between Laredo and Mexico City, with only occasional stops in Valverde to see Marisol.

  There’s “light” as in the opposite of “dark,” Keller thinks as he gets back in his car for the trip back across the bridge, and “light” as in the opposite of “heavy,” and his relationship with Marisol now has aspects of dark weight.

  The weight of guilt, for one—Marisol’s guilt for having let Erika take the dangerous job. Keller’s guilty for not having been there to protect her, for failing to have rescued her.

  Add to that a sense of immutable loss.

  “Let’s be honest,” Marisol said one night during one of her starkly darker moods. “We had this little faux family going here, didn’t we? Faux marriage, faux child? Then reality hit, didn’t it?”

  “Let’s get married for real, then,” Keller suggested.

  She stared at him incredulously. “Do you seriously think that’s going to help?”

  “It could.”

  “How?’

  He didn’t have an answer for that.

  The rest of their mutual ennui, he supposes, is simply cumulative. He had read that the Puritans used to execute heretics by placing stones on their chests until their rib cages were crushed or they suffocated. And that’s a little what he feels like—and he supposes that Marisol does as well—the sheer cumulative weight of death after death, sorrow after sorrow, crushing them, taking the air out of their lives.

  But they don’t split up. They’re both too stubborn and honorable, he thinks, to go back on the unspoken vow, the silent understanding that they would see this through together, wherever it led.

  So they stay together.

  Well, sort of.

  He spends more and more time in the Mexico City bunker, in Laredo, on raids with FES, or on whatever front of the Mexican drug war is especially hot at the moment. Marisol is kind enough to feign sadness when he leaves, but they’re both (guiltily) relieved for the breaks from the weight that they enforce on each other.

  The painful truth is that they can’t look at each other without seeing Erika.

  Despite his urgings, his imprecations, his angry arguments, Marisol has stayed in Valverde, and stayed in office. She forced herself to make a brilliant, defiant speech at Erika’s funeral, made herself go through a press conference in which she again openly defied both the government and the cartels while managing to imply that there was small, if any, difference between the two. She once again made herself a target, almost as if she could not tolerate living after so many have died.

  “Survivor guilt,” Keller said to her one night.

  “Just as you did not appreciate my amateur psychoanalysis,” Marisol answered, “I don’t appreciate yours.”

  “I don’t care if you appreciate it—”

  “Thank you.”

  “—I care only that you don’t carry out this death wish.”

  “I don’t have a death wish,” Marisol said.

  “Prove it. Move to the States with me.”

  “I’m a Mexican.”

  “Then come to Mexico City.”

  “No.”

  He’d already sold his soul to the devil, so a bonus payment that bought security for Marisol didn’t matter. Keller put out word to Adán, who sent word back to the army in the valley that La Médica Hermosa was now a friend, the lady of an important ally, to be protected at all costs.

  “Do you think I’m stupid?” Marisol asked a few days later. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice soldiers patrolling outside the house? The office? The clinic? They’ve never been there before. Nor have they ever followed my car except to harass me.”

  “Are they harassing you now?” asked Keller, concerned that his demand hadn’t been met.

  “In fact they’re elaborately polite,” Marisol said. “What did you do?”

  “What I should have done sooner,” Keller said. Except I didn’t have the power then, the goddamn alliance with Adán.

  “Such a powerful man,” Marisol said. “I don’t want them.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “You don’t care what I want?” Marisol asked, arching an eyebrow.

  “Not in this case.” He hated arguing, but it was better than the long silences, the averted eyes, the sidelong glances, the lying in bed side by side wanting to touch or at least speak but not being able. “I’m trying to protect you.”

  “You’re patronizing me.”

  That’s exactly what I’m doing, Keller thinks now.

  Being a patrón.

  It’s what I do now.

  Fourteen Zetas skinned alive.

  And I provided the intelligence that located them.

 
; He buys “dinner” at 7-Eleven before going back to his room.

  —

  The Zetas strike back less than two weeks later, killing twenty-three of Barrera’s people. Fourteen of them are decapitated and nine hang from a bridge next to a banner reading FUCKING BARRERA WHORES, THIS IS HOW I’M GOING TO FINISH OFF EVERY FUCKER YOU SEND TO HEAT UP THE PLAZA. THESE GUYS CRIED AND BEGGED FOR MERCY. THE REST GOT AWAY BUT I’LL GET THEM SOONER OR LATER. SEE YOU AROUND, FUCKERS.—THE Z COMPANY.

  The Nuevo Laredo police quickly come out and deny that the Sinaloa cartel is in the city, prompting Barrera’s people to leave six severed heads in ice chests outside the Nuevo Laredo police station with the message YOU WANT CREDIBILITY THAT I’M IN NL? WHAT WILL IT TAKE, THE HEADS OF THE ZETA LEADERS? KEEP IT UP AND I ASSURE YOU THAT HEADS WILL KEEP ROLLING. I DON’T KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE LIKE YOU DO, FORTY, ALL THE DEAD ARE PURE SCUM—IN OTHER WORDS—PURE ZETAS. SINCERELY, YOUR FATHER, ADÁN.

  Once again, the grisly images appear on Esta Vida.

  Once again, the Zetas vow that they will find Wild Child.

  —

  The problem, Keller thinks, is that we can’t get to Forty or Ochoa, and until we decapitate that two-headed snake, we won’t crush the Zetas. We can take down as many underbosses as we want, but until we get Forty and Ochoa, the Zetas just keep marching on.

  Forty is apparently again in charge of defending Nuevo Laredo from Barrera, but he’s never spotted in the city. Barrera’s people are looking for him, the FES is looking for him, American intelligence is looking for him, but so far, he’s invisible. They just find his handiwork, hanging from bridges or dumped on the sides of roads.

  And Ochoa is easily the most elusive cartel leader since, well, Adán Barrera. He moves from safe house to safe house, in Valle Hermoso, in Saltillo out in Coahuila. He’s said to meet with Forty once a month at ranches in Río Bravo, Sabinas, or Hidalgo. Or they go hunting zebras, gazelles, and other “exotics” at private game ranches in Coahuila or San Luis Potosí. Or they watch their horses race as they sit in armored cars near the track, surrounded by bodyguards.

  In all the Zeta territories, they hire ventanas—lookouts. Ambulantes, store clerks, neighborhood kids, who watch for the police or the marines, and use whistles or cell phones to give warnings. Los Tapados—“the Hidden Ones”—are poor children hired to put up pro-Zeta banners, chant slogans, and protest the presence of the military and the federales.

  The government can’t find Ochoa, and he shoves the fact in their faces. Just three hundred yards from an army base in the 18th Military Zone, he endowed a church, where a plaque reads CENTER OF EVANGELIZATION AND CATECHISM. DONATED BY HERIBERTO OCHOA. He uses a Nextel phone once, and then throws it away. Like Barrera, Z-1 eschews the showy persona of other narcos. He doesn’t frequent clubs and restaurants, doesn’t show off his wealth.

  He just kills.

  It’s the hunt for Barrera redux, except this time the Mexican government is putting massive resources into the effort. MexSat, the national security system, operates two Boeing 702 HP satellite systems, costing over a billion dollars, from ground control stations in Mexico City and Hermosillo. It scans the country for signs of Forty and Ochoa and finds nothing.

  American drones fly over the border area like hawks hunting for mice.

  And find nothing.

  “What if we’re looking on the wrong border?” Keller asks Orduña one day in Mexico City. “What if they’re not in Mexico at all? What if they’re in Guatemala?”

  Ochoa has a grasp of military history. What if he’s adopted the classic guerrilla strategy of basing himself in an extraterritorial sanctuary across a border in a neutral country?

  Where Barrera is relatively weak, and where the FES can’t get to him. Even Orduña won’t cross an international border. It makes sense—the Zetas have been increasingly active in Guatemala, and maybe Ochoa has decided to run his war from there.

  “We’re still talking about eight hundred miles of border,” Orduña says. “Rain forest, jungle, hills.”

  “Wasn’t there a mass killing in Guatemala recently?” Keller asks. “Twenty-seven people in a village? Where was that?”

  The sort of thing that used to make headlines and is now considered just another day of business as usual. But Orduña goes back through the intelligence files and locates the site.

  Dos Erres is a small village in the Petén district, in a heavily forested area not far from the border.

  Orduña orders a satellite run.

  Two days later, he and Keller look at the photographs.

  The village itself looks pretty standard—a dirt road runs through a hamlet of small houses and huts, with a small church and what looks to be a school. But to the east of the village there’s a freshly cut rectangle with the outlines of what seem to be neatly ordered rows of tents.

  “It’s a military camp,” Orduña says. “A bivouac.”

  “Like special forces might build?” Keller asks.

  They do another satellite run for closer images and get them. Perusing the new photos, Keller can clearly see men dressed in military-style uniforms around the tent sites, jeeps with mounted machine guns, “bush kitchens,” and latrines.

  The village itself seems oddly deserted.

  No kids in the schoolyard.

  Few people around the church.

  There are some civilians, most of them seem to be women, but not as many as you would expect from the number of houses.

  “The Zetas have taken over,” Orduña says, “moved most of the people out and kept only enough to service their basic needs.”

  Cooking, Keller thinks.

  Cleaning.

  Sleeping with the men.

  “Look at this,” Keller says, pointing to images of the church and the school. Both buildings have men in the front and rear.

  “Sentries?” Orduña asks. “Guards? Are Forty and Ochoa living in the church and the school?”

  The old military saying, Keller thinks—“Rank hath its privileges.” The two top-ranking officers don’t live under canvas but in the two biggest buildings in the village. It’s SOP.

  The next satellite run yields gold.

  Keller stares at the photo.

  Then he flies to El Paso.

  —

  Fort Bliss is the living definition of a misnomer, Keller thinks as he drives onto the base on the semidesert flats east of El Paso.

  He’s seen little of Crazy Eddie since he lifted him out of Acapulco. Literally. One of those black-helicopter jobs that the right-wing crazies are always muttering about. Two minutes after getting Eddie’s call, Keller was on a secure SAT line, exchanging coded messages with Washington that even his Mexican colleagues couldn’t access. There was no telling how even Orduña would react to the U.S. snatching one of the most wanted men in Mexico.

  An hour later, Keller was on a helicopter owned by a CIA shell corporation, which landed him on the roof of the Hotel Continental. He met a very nervous consular agent who took him into a small conference room where Eddie Ruiz sat.

  Narco Polo, Keller thought. Eddie had on a sky-blue polo shirt with white chinos and a pair of sandals.

  He looked tired but calm.

  “We’re going to get on a helicopter that will fly us to Ciudad Juárez,” Keller said. “From there another helicopter will take us to Fort Bliss army base in Texas. If at any time during that process you try to run, I will put a bullet in the back of your head. Do you understand?”

  “This is running,” Eddie answered.

  The flights went smoothly.

  During the entire time, Eddie didn’t say a word.

  The suits were waiting when they got to Fort Bliss. A State Department attorney read him his rights, so to speak. “You are here as an American citizen, under protective custody based on prior, present, and future cooperation in ongoing investigations. Do you understand?”

  “Sure.”

  It was a tag-team match. A federal deputy AG took over. “You have been
indicted under the so-called Kingpin statutes for drug trafficking. But we are not arresting you at this moment. If you try to leave, or cease cooperating, you will be arrested and placed in the custody of the federal corrections system and be taken to trial. That being said, you do have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney—”

  Eddie chuckled. He had attorneys who owed him money.

  “—one will be afforded to you. Do you wish an attorney?”

  “No.”

  “In all probability,” the prosecutor continued, “you will face trial on the trafficking charges. However, your past and future cooperation will be noted in your file for those prosecutors with a view toward charges and to the presiding judge with a view toward sentencing. Do you have any questions?”

  “Can I get a Coke?”

  “I think that could be worked out.”

  “One other thing,” Eddie said. “I want to see my family.”

  “Which one?” Keller asked.

  “Both of them. Asshole.”

  It was complicated, bringing first one and then the other of Eddie’s family in to see him.

  The Mexican narco-world was buzzing about the disappearance of Crazy Eddie Ruiz. Phone and Internet traffic exploded, and both the narcos and law enforcement were busy trying to chase it down.

  Some said that he’d been killed in retaliation for kidnapping Martín Tapia’s wife; others said that was bullshit because he’d released her. Still others responded that he was killed exactly because he did release her, by his own people, because they were afraid that he was weak.

  They all agreed on one thing—Eddie was spotted in Acapulco the day of his disappearance, on the boardwalk eating an ice-cream cone.

  But they were all out looking for him, or his body. They might also be watching his families.

  His second wife, an American citizen, had crossed the border and was said to be with family in the area, but then again, she was nine months’ pregnant and would have come into the States to have the baby anyway.

  Keller made both contacts personally.

  It was tricky.

  Ex-wives—or in this case not exactly an ex-wife—are renowned snitches, but Eddie faithfully sent Teresa more than enough money to live well, and her parents were, until they got busted, involved in laundering his coke money, so Keller doubted that she’d be a problem.