by Ioan Grillo
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Map: The Golden Triangle
1. Ghosts
Part I: History
2. Poppies
3. Hippies
4. Cartels
5. Tycoons
6. Democrats
7. Warlords
Part II: Anatomy
8. Traffic
9. Murder
10. Culture
11. Faith
12. Insurgency
Part III: Destiny
13. Prosecution
14. Expansion
15. Diversification
16. Peace
Books
Image Section
Notes
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Author
Imprint
The Golden Triangle
CHAPTER 1
Ghosts
It all seemed like a bad dream.
It may have been vivid and raw. But it felt somehow surreal, as if Gonzalo were watching these terrible acts from above. As if it were someone else who had firefights with ski-masked federal police in broad daylight. Someone else who stormed into homes and dragged away men from crying wives and mothers. Someone else who duct-taped victims to chairs and starved and beat them for days. Someone else who clasped a machete and began to hack off their craniums while they were still living.
But it was all real.
He was a different man when he did those things, Gonzalo tells me. He had smoked crack cocaine and drunk whiskey every day, had enjoyed power in a country where the poor are so powerless, had a latest-model truck and could pay for houses in cash, had four wives and children scattered all over … had no God.
“In those days, I had no fear. I felt nothing. I had no compassion for anybody,” he says, speaking slowly, swallowing some words.
His voice is high and nasal after police smashed his teeth out until he confessed. His face betrays little emotion. I can’t take in the gravity of what he is saying—until I play back a video of the interview later and transcribe his words. Then as I wallow over the things he told me, I pause and shudder inside.
I talk to Gonzalo in a prison cell he shares with eight others on a sunny Tuesday morning in Ciudad Juárez, the most murderous city on the planet. We are less than seven miles from the United States and the Rio Grande, which slices through North America like a line dividing a palm. Gonzalo sits on his bed in the corner clasping his hands together on his lap. He wears a simple white T-shirt that reveals a protruding belly under broad shoulders and bulging muscles that he built as a teenage American football star and are still in shape at his age thirty-eight. Standing six feet two, he cuts an imposing figure and exhibits an air of authority over his cellmates. But as he talks to me, he is modest and forthcoming. He wears a goatee, gray hairs on his chin below a curved, black mustache. His eyes are focused and intense, looking ruthless and intimidating but also revealing an inner pain.
Gonzalo spent seventeen years working as a soldier, kidnapper, and murderer for Mexican drug gangs. In that time he took the lives of many, many more people than he can count. In most countries, he would be viewed as a dangerous serial killer and locked up in a top-security prison. But Mexico today has thousands of serial murderers. Overwhelmed jails have themselves become scenes of bloody massacres: twenty slain in one riot; twenty-one murdered in another; twenty-three in yet another—all in penitentiaries close to this same cursed border.
Within these sanguine pens, we are in a kind of sanctuary—an entire wing of born-again Christians. This is the realm of Jesus, they tell me, a place where they abide by laws of their own “ecclesiastical government.” Other wings in this jail are segregated between gangs: one controlled by the Barrio Azteca, which works for the Juárez Cartel; another controlled by their sworn enemies, the Artist Assassins, who murder for the Sinaloa Cartel.
The three hundred Christians try to live outside this war. Baptized Libres en Cristo, or Free Through Christ, the sect founded in the prison borrows some of the radical and rowdy elements of Southern American evangelicalism to save these souls. I visit a jail block mass before I sit down with Gonzalo. The pastor, a convicted drug trafficker, mixes stories of ancient Jerusalem with his hard-core street experiences, using slang and addressing the flock as the “homeys from the barrio.” A live band blends rock, rap, and norteño music into their hymns. The sinners let it all out, slam-dancing wildly to the chorus, praying with eyes closed tight, teeth gritted, sweat pouring from foreheads, hands raised to the heavens—using all their spiritual power to exorcise their heinous demons.
Gonzalo has more demons than most. He was incarcerated in the prison a year before I met him and bought his way into the Christian wing hoping it would be a quiet place where he could escape the war. But when I listen carefully to his interview, he sounds as if he has really given his heart to Christ, does really pray for redemption. And when he talks to me—a nosy British journalist prying into his past—he is really confessing to Jesus.
“You meet Christ and it is a totally different thing. You feel horror and start thinking about the things you have done. Because it was bad. You think about the people. It could have been a brother of mine I was doing these things to. I did bad things to a lot of people. A lot of parents suffered.
“When you belong to organized crime, you have to change. You could be the best person in the world, but the people you live with change you completely. You become somebody else. And then the drugs and liquor change you.”
I have watched too many videos of the pain caused by killers like Gonzalo. I have seen a sobbing teenager tortured on a tape sent to his family; a bloodied old man confessing that he had talked to a rival cartel; a line of kneeling victims with bags over their heads being shot in the brain one by one. Does someone who has committed such crimes deserve redemption? Do they deserve a place in heaven?
Yet, I see a human side to Gonzalo. He is friendly and well-mannered. We chat about lighter issues. Perhaps in another time and place, he could have been a stand-up guy who worked hard and cared for his family—like his father, who, he says, was a lifelong electrician and union man.
I have known angry, violent men in my home country; hooligans who smash bottles into people’s faces or stab people at soccer games. On the surface, those men seem more hateful and intimidating than Gonzalo as he talks to me in the prison cell. Yet they have killed nobody. Gonzalo has helped turn Mexico at the dawn of the twenty-first century into a bloodbath that has shocked the world.
In his seventeen years in the service of the mafia, Gonzalo witnessed extraordinary changes in the Mexican drug industry.
He began his career in Durango, the mountainous northern-Mexican state that is the proud birthplace of Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. It is also near the heartland of smugglers who have taken drugs to America since Washington first made them illegal. After dropping out of high school and abandoning his hopes of becoming an NFL quarterback, Gonzalo did what many young tough nuts in his town did: he joined the police force. Here he learned the highly marketable skills of kidnapping and torture.
The path from policeman to villain is alarmingly common in Mexico. Major drug lords, such as the 1980s “Boss of Bosses” Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, began as officers of the law, as did notorious kidnapper Daniel Arizmendi, alias the Ear Lopper. Like them, Gonzalo left the police after a reasonably short stint, deserting when he was twenty years old to pursue a full-time criminal career.
He arrived in Ciudad Juárez and did dirty work for an empire of traffickers who smuggled drugs along a thousand miles of border from east of Juárez to the Pacific Ocean. The year was 1992, glorious days for Mexico’s drug mafias. A year earlier, the Soviet Union had collapsed and governments across the w
orld were globalizing their economies. A year later, Colombian police shot dead cocaine king Pablo Escobar, signaling the beginning of the demise of that country’s cartels. As the 1990s went on, Mexican traffickers flourished, moving tons of narcotics north and pumping back billions of dollars amid the surge in free trade created by NAFTA. They replaced Colombians as the dominant mafia in the Americas. Gonzalo provided muscle for these gangster entrepreneurs, pressuring (or kidnapping and murdering) people who didn’t pay their bills. He became a rich man, earning hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But by the time of his arrest seventeen years later, his job and his industry had drastically changed. He was leading heavily armed troops in urban warfare against rival gangs. He was carrying out mass kidnappings and controlling safe houses with dozens of victims bound and gagged. He was working with high-ranking city police officers, but fighting pitched battles against federal agents. He was carrying out brutal terror, including countless decapitations. He had become, he tells me, a man he did not recognize when he stared in the mirror.
“You learn a lot of forms of torture. To a point you enjoy carrying them out. We laughed at people’s pain—at the way we tortured them. There are many forms of torture. Cutting off arms, decapitating. This is a very strong thing. You decapitate someone and have no feeling, no fear.”
This book is about the criminal networks that paid Gonzalo to hack off human heads. It tells the story of these groups’ radical transformation from drug smugglers into paramilitary death squads who have killed tens of thousands and terrorized communities with car bombs, massacres, and grenade attacks. It is a look inside their hidden world and at the brutal mafia capitalism they perpetrate. It is the tale of many ordinary Mexicans sucked into their war or victimized by it.
This book is also an argument about the nature of this startling transformation. It contends—despite what some politicians and pundits say—that these gangsters have become a criminal insurgency that poses the biggest armed threat to Mexico since its 1910 revolution. It looks at how failures of the American war on drugs and Mexico’s political and economic turmoil have triggered the insurgency. And it argues for a drastic rethinking of strategies to stop the conflict from spreading into a wider civil war on the United States’ doorstep. That solution, this book argues, does not come from the barrel of a gun.
Understanding the Mexican Drug War is crucial not only because of morbid curiosity at heaps of severed brain cases, but because the problems in Mexico are being played out across the world. We hear little about communist guerrillas in the Americas these days, but criminal uprisings are spreading like bushfire. In El Salvador, the Mara Salvatrucha forced bus drivers into a national strike over antigang laws; in Brazil, the First Command torched eighty-two buses, seventeen banks, and killed forty-two policemen in one coordinated offensive; in Jamaica, police clashed with supporters of Christopher “Dudus” Coke, leaving seventy dead. Are pundits going to insist this is just cops and robbers? The Mexican Drug War is a frightening warning of how bad things could get in these other countries; it is a case study in criminal insurgency.
Many Salvadoran gangbangers are the sons of communist guerrillas—and call themselves combatants just like their fathers. But they don’t care about Che Guevara and socialism, just money and power. In a globalized world, mafia capitalists and criminal insurgents have become the new dictators and the new rebels. Welcome to the twenty-first century.
Anyone on the planet with half an eye on the TV knows there is an orgy of butchery in Mexico. The country is so deep in blood, it is hard to shock anymore. Even the kidnapping and killing of nine policemen or a pile of craniums in a town plaza isn’t big news. Only the most sensational atrocities now grab media attention: a grenade attack on a crowd of revelers celebrating Independence Day; the sewing of a murder victim’s face onto a soccer ball; an old silver mine filled with fifty-six decaying corpses, some of the victims thrown in alive; the kidnapping and shooting of seventy-two migrants, including a pregnant woman. Mexico reels from massacres comparable to brutal war crimes.
And it’s all because a few American college kids are getting high.
Or is it?
Anybody taking a closer look at the Mexican Drug War works out quickly that nothing is what it seems. Every view is clouded by deceit and rumors, every fact argued over by competing interest groups and agencies, all key personalities, shrouded in mystery and contradictions. A squad of men dressed in police uniforms are filmed kidnapping a mayor. Are they really police? Or are they gangsters in disguise? Or both? An arrested thug tells all, signs of torture evident on his taped confession. Then thugs capture a policeman and videotape the officer giving a contradictory version of events. Whom do you believe? A villain commits murders in Mexico, then becomes a protected witness in the United States. Can you trust his testimony?
Another bizarre element is how the conflict can be everywhere and nowhere. Millions of tourists sun themselves happily on Cancún’s Caribbean beaches, oblivious that anything is amiss. The Mexican capital is less murderous than Chicago, Detroit, or New Orleans.1 And even in the hardest-hit areas, all can appear perfectly normal.
I have arrived at a restaurant in Sinaloa state twenty minutes after a police commander was gunned down having breakfast. Within an hour, the corpse had been carted away and waiters were preparing tables for lunch; you could eat some tacos and have no clue there had been an early-morning murder. I have watched hundreds of soldiers sweep into a residential neighborhood and kick down doors—and suddenly vanish with the same speed they arrived.
Americans visit the colonial town of San Miguel de Allende or the Mayan pyramids of Palenque and wonder what all the fuss is about. They can’t see any war or severed craniums. Why is the media hyping it? Others visit family over the Texas border in Tamaulipas state. They hear gunshots popping on the street like firecrackers at a carnival, and they wonder why these battles are not even mentioned in the next day’s newspapers.
Politicians are lost for language to even describe the conflict. Mexican president Felipe Calderón dresses up in a military uniform and calls for no quarter on enemies who threaten the fatherland—then balks angrily at any notion Mexico is fighting an insurrection. The Obama administration is even more confused. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assures people that Mexico is simply suffering from inner-city crime like the United States in the eighties. Then she later says Mexico has an insurgency akin to Colombia’s. An embarrassed Obama implies that Clinton didn’t mean what she said. Or did she? The head of the DEA cheers on Calderón for winning the war. Then a Pentagon analyst warns that Mexico is in danger of a Yugoslavia-style rapid collapse.2
Is it a “narco state”? Or a “captured state”? Or just in a right bloody state? Are there narco terrorists? Or is that phrase, as some conspiracy theorists claim, part of an American plot to invade Mexico? Or a CIA plot to steal budget from the DEA?
Perhaps such confusion should be expected from a Mexican Drug War. The fight against drugs is famously a game of smoke and mirrors;3 Mexico is a modern classic in the conspiracy-theory genre; and war always emits fog. Put all three together and what do you get? Smoky, black murkiness so dense that you can’t see your nose in front of your face. Confounded by such perplexity, many understandably throw their hands in the air and shrug that we just cannot comprehend what is going on.
But we must.
This is not a random explosion of violence. Residents of northern Mexico have not turned into psychotic killers overnight after drinking bad water. This violence exploded and escalated over a clear time frame. Identifiable factors have caused the conflict. Real people made of flesh and blood have pulled the strings of armies, made fortunes from the war, or pursued failed policies from government towers.
At the center of the whole dirty drama are the most mysterious figures of all: the drug smugglers. But who are they?
In Mexico, traffickers are described collectively by the Spanish word El Narco, using a singular proper noun. The
term, which is shouted loudly in news reports and whispered quietly in cantinas, provokes the image of an enormous ghostlike form leering over society. Its capos are shadowy billionaires from ramshackle mountain villages, known from grainy, twenty-year-old photos and the verses of popular ballads. Its warriors are armies of ragged, mustachioed men who are thrust before the press like captured soldiers from a mysterious enemy state. It attacks like a wraith under the noses of thousands of police and soldiers patrolling city streets, and the vast majority of its murders are never solved. This ghost makes an estimated $30 billion every year smuggling cocaine, marijuana, heroin, and crystal meth into the United States. But the cash disappears like cosmic mist into the global economy.
In short, El Narco is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. But most people can’t put much of a face on that gorilla.
On the streets where El Narco reigns, being in the drug underworld is referred to as being in “the movement.” That word gives a sense of the broad meaning of organized crime on the ground; it is a whole way of life for a segment of society. Gangsters have even begotten their own genre of music, narcocorridos, lead their own fashion style, buchones, and nurture their own religious sects. These songs, styles, and sermons all build up an image of the drug lords as iconic heroes, celebrated by dwellers of Mexico’s cinder-block barrios as rebels who have the guts to beat back the army and the DEA. El Narco has entrenched itself in these communities over a century. By following its development as a movement—rather than just sketching the police stories of the drug kingpins—we can get much closer to understanding the threat and figuring out how to deal with it.
My personal contact with the drug trade began more than two decades before I sat in a sweaty prison by the Rio Grande prying stories from a mass murderer—back on the green pastures of southeast England. I grew up near the seaside city of Brighton, where my dad taught anthropology. When I was a teenager in the 1980s, drugs flooded into the area like a tidal wave—despite the shouts of Nancy Reagan, La Toya Jackson, and spotty adolescents from a British show called Grange Hill to “Just Say No.” The popular drugs were Moroccan hashish, known as rocky; Turkish heroin, known as smack; and later Dutch ecstasy, known as E’s. Students or dropouts from my school could be found getting high, low, or “on one” all over the place—from public gardens to public toilets.
