by Ioan Grillo
No one gave a moment’s thought to the far-off lands that the mind-bending substances came from, or what the drug trade gave or took away from those countries. The farthest up the food chain anyone knew about was when a local dealer got busted by the DS (drug squad) and we chatted excitedly over the details of the raid and what prison time he got.
As I came out of these teenage years, many who had experimented with drugs went on to get good jobs and start families. Some still had the odd binge, many switching to Colombian cocaine, which became fashionable in nineties England. I also knew several who suffered addiction, mostly from heroin, and went through bad bouts of stealing from their parents’ homes and drying out in rehabs. Most got over it in the end. Some are still burned-out addicts two decades later whom I find on trips home propping up bars of grimy local pubs.
Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, I also knew four young men who died of heroin overdoses. Two were brothers. One of them finished his days passed out in a public toilet. The fourth one, Paul, had stayed over at my house days before he injected the lethal dose into his bloodstream.
Paul was a brash, brawny fellow, with a mop of thick black hair and meaty hands, who would strike up conversations with strangers from bus stops to pubs. We stayed up all night as he rambled on about the girl he was seeing, his fights with his younger brother, and his philosophy on class struggle. Then he was gone. I don’t personally blame the people who trafficked the heroin that caused Paul’s death. I don’t think he would either. But I do strive to understand the forces that led to it and search for a different world in which his death could have been avoided—and he would still be chatting to strangers at bus stops today.
I traveled to Latin America with a backpack, a one-way ticket, and a goal to be a foreign correspondent in exotic climes. The Oliver Stone movie Salvador inspired me with its story of reporters dodging bullets in the Central American civil wars. But by the turn of the millennium, the days of military dictators and communist insurgents were no more. We had passed through “the End of History,” we were told, and were promised a golden age of democracy and free trade the world over.
I set foot in Mexico in 2000, the day before former Coca-Cola executive Vicente Fox was sworn into office as president, ending seventy-one years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI. This was a titanic moment in Mexican history, a seismic shift in its political plates. It was a time of optimism and celebration. The PRI clique who’d ravaged the country and lined their pockets for most of the twentieth century had fallen from power. Its massacres of protesters and dirty wars against rebels were over, people cheered. Ordinary Mexicans looked forward to enjoying the fruit of their hard work along with freedom and human rights.
A decade later, downhearted Mexicans fought off accusations they lived in a failed state. Cartel gunmen scattered corpses in plazas; kidnappers brutally stole fortunes of successful entrepreneurs; and while the government no longer censored the press, gangsters dug graves for dozens of journalists and cowed newspapers into silence. What had gone wrong? Why had the dream soured so suddenly?
In the first years of the decade, no one saw the crisis ahead. The American media heaped high expectations on the cowboy-boot wearing Fox as he entertained Kofi Annan and became the first Mexican to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress. The other big Mexican story was Subcomandante Marcos, a postmodernist rebel who led the Mayans of Chiapas into a symbolic rebellion for indigenous rights. Marcos gave TV interviews smoking a pipe and wearing a ski mask, quoting poets and inspiring leftists across the world. When El Narco was mentioned, it was in the good news of soldiers rounding up wanted capos.
However, the jangle of gunfire and chops of executioners’ axes began to sound in the background. The first wave of serious cartel warfare began in the fall of 2004 on the border with Texas and spread across the country. When President Felipe Calderón took power in 2006 and declared war on these gangs, the violence multiplied exponentially.
So why did cartels blossom during the first decade of Mexico’s democracy? Tragically, the same system that promised hope was weak in controlling the most powerful mafias on the continent. The old regime may have been corrupt and authoritarian. But it had a surefire way of managing organized crime: taking down a token few gangsters and taxing the rest. This point is now recognized by most Mexican academics and is a central theme in this book: the Mexican Drug War is inextricably linked to the democratic transition.
Just as the collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in an explosion of mafia capitalism, so did the demise of the PRI. Mexican special-force soldiers became mercenaries for gangsters. Businessmen who used to pay off corrupt officials had to pay off mobsters. Police forces turned on one another—sometimes breaking out into full-on interagency shoot-outs. When Calderón replaced Fox, he threw the entire military out to restore order. But rather than falling into line, as Calderón hoped, gangsters actually took on the government.
In the first four years of Calderón’s administration, the Mexican Drug War claimed a stunning thirty-four thousand lives.4 That tragic statistic is enough for everyone to realize it is a serious conflict—more casualties than in many declared wars. But it should also be taken in perspective. In a country of 112 million,5 it is a low-intensity war. The Vietnam War claimed 3 million casualties; the American Civil War six hundred thousand; in Rwanda, militias massacred eight hundred thousand people in a hundred days.
Another hard fact in Mexico is the number of officials who have been murdered. In this four-year period, cartel gunmen slayed more than twenty-five hundred public servants, including twenty-two hundred policemen,6 two hundred soldiers, judges, mayors, a leading gubernatorial candidate, the leader of a state legislature, and dozens of federal officials. Such a murder rate compares to the most lethal insurgent forces in the world, certainly more deadly to government than Hamas, ETA, or the Irish Republican Army in its entire three decades of armed struggle. It represents a huge threat to the Mexican state.
The nature of the attacks is even more intimidating. Mexican thugs regularly shower police stations with bullets and rocket-propelled grenades; they carry out mass kidnappings of officers and leave their mutilated bodies on public display; and they even kidnapped one mayor, tied him up, and stoned him to death on a main street. Who can claim with a straight face that is no challenge to authority?
Yet in Mexico, the phrase insurgent sets off an even bigger political bang than the narco’s car bombs. Insurgents were the glorious founding fathers who rebelled against Spain. The biggest avenue in the country, which cuts across Mexico City, is called Insurgentes. To give criminals this label is to imply they could be heroes. These are psychotic criminals. How dare you compare them to honorable rebels?
Talk about insurgency, wars, and failed states also sends shivers down the spines of Mexican officials looking for tourist and investment dollars. Brand Mexico has been given a hiding in the last three years. Some officials are even convinced there is a gringo plot to divert tourists from Cancún to Florida.
Mexico is nothing like Somalia. Mexico is an advanced country with a trillion-dollar economy,7 several world-class companies, and eleven billionaires.8 It has an educated middle class with a quarter of young people going to university. It has some of the best beaches, resorts, and museums on the planet. But it is also experiencing an extraordinary criminal threat that we need to understand. As tens of thousands of bodies pile up, a strategy of silence won’t make it go away. In Spanish, they call that “using your thumb to block out the sun.”
From my early days in Mexico, I was fascinated by the riddle of El Narco. I wrote stories on busts and seizures. But I knew in my heart they were superficial, that the sources of police and “experts” were not good enough. I had to talk to narcos themselves. Where did they come from? How did their business function? What were their goals? And how was a limey going to answer this?
My search to solve this quandary took me through surreal and tragic ambiences over
the decade. I stumbled up mountains where drugs are born as pretty flowers, I dined with lawyers who represent the biggest capos on the planet, and I got drunk with American undercover agents who infiltrated the cartels. I also sped through city streets to see too many bleeding corpses—and heard the words of too many mothers who had lost their sons, and with them their hearts. And I finally got to narcos. From peasant farmers who grow coca and ganja; to young assassins in the slums; to “mules” who carry drugs to hungry Americans; to damned gangsters seeking redemption—I searched for human stories in an inhuman war.
This book comes from this decade of investigation. Part I, “History,” traces the radical transformation of El Narco, going back to its roots in the early twentieth century as mountain peasants through to the paramilitary forces today. The movement is a century in the making. This history does not intend to cover every capo and incident, but to explore the key developments that have shaped the beast and fortified it in Mexican communities. Part II, “Anatomy,” looks at the different pillars of this narco-insurgent movement today through the eyes of the people who live them: the trafficking; the machine of murder and terror; and its peculiar culture and faith. Part III, “Destiny,” looks at where the Mexican Drug War is headed and how the beast can be slain.
While centered on Mexico, this book follows the tentacles of El Narco over the Rio Grande into the United States and south to the Colombian Andes. Gangsters don’t respect borders, and the drug trade has always been international. From its earnest beginning to today’s bloody war, the growth of Mexico’s mafias has intrinsically been linked to events in Washington, Bogotá, and beyond.
To dig deep into this story, I owe a huge debt to many Latin Americans who have spent decades laboring to understand the phenomenon. In the last four years, more than thirty Mexican journalists digging up vital information have been shot dead. I am continually impressed by the bravery and talent of Latin American investigators and their generosity in sharing their knowledge and friendship. The list is endless, but I am particularly inspired by the work of Tijuana journalist Jesús Blancornelas, Sinaloan academic Luis Astorga, and Brazilian writer Paulo Lins, author of City of God.
I recorded or filmed many of the interviews that make up this book, so their words are verbatim. In other cases, I spent days prying into people’s lives and relied on notes. Several sources asked me to avoid surnames or to change their names. With the current murder rate in Mexico, I couldn’t challenge such requests. On one occasion, two gangsters gave an interview on Mexican television and were murdered within hours, inside a prison. Five sources whose interviews helped shaped this book were subsequently murdered or disappeared, although these killings almost certainly had nothing to do with my work. Those people are:
Police Chief Alejandro Dominguez: shot dead, Nuevo Laredo, June 8, 2005
Human-rights lawyer Sergio Dante: shot dead, Ciudad Juárez, January 25, 2006
Journalist Mauricio Estrada: disappeared, Apatzingan, July 2008
Criminal lawyer Americo Delgado: shot dead, Toluca, August 29, 2009
Director of Honduran Anti-Drug Police Julian Aristides Gonzalez: shot dead, Tegucigalpa, December 8, 2009
The last on the list, Julian Aristides Gonzalez, gave me an interview in his office in the sweaty Honduran capital. The square-jawed officer chatted for several hours about the growth of Mexican drug gangs in Central America and the Colombians who provide them with narcotics. His office was crammed with 140 kilos of seized cocaine and piles of maps and photographs showing clandestine landing strips and narco mansions. I was impressed by how open and frank Gonzalez was about his investigations and the political corruption that showed up. Four days after the interview, he gave a press conference showing his latest discoveries. The following day he dropped his seven-year-old daughter off at school. Assassins drove past on a motorcycle and fired eleven bullets into his body. He had planned to retire in two months and move his family to Canada.
I don’t know how much any mere books can help stop this relentless barrage of death. But literature on El Narco can at least contribute to a more complete understanding of this complex and deadly phenomenon. People and governments have to start making better sense of the mayhem and form more effective policies, so that other families, who may be closer to the homes and loved ones of readers, do not suffer the same tragedy.
PART I
History
CHAPTER 2
Poppies
Into the bowl in which their wine was mixed, she slipped a drug that had the power of robbing grief and anger of their sting and banishing all painful memories. No one who swallowed this dissolved in their wine could shed a single tear that day, even for the death of his mother or father, or if they put his brother or his own son to the sword and he were there to see it done.
—HOMER, ODYSSEY, CIRCA 800 B.C.
Under the blasting sunlight of Mexico’s western Sierra Madre, the pink poppy takes on a slightly orange color, making the finely crumpled leaves stand out against red-brown earth and gnarly cacti. I’m staring at the opium poppies after driving up hours of dirt roads in a battered pickup truck. The path was so bumpy and vertical that I was thrown up and down as if I were on a fairground ride. I thought it was a miracle we never got a punctured tire or a rock smashing through the gas tank. Luckily, my driver—a local singer who goes by the stage name El Comandante—knew all the tricks for swerving round the sharpest debris.
Few outsiders come here. This is a place where they cut off heads and stick them on wooden poles, people warn, as they did a few days earlier in a nearby village. But I’m not seeing any severed craniums right now. I’m just staring at poppies and marveling at how beautiful they are.
What I’m looking at is not a whole opium crop, just few plants grown by a woman outside her village shop, which is across a dirt crossroads from a small army outpost. Matilde is a handsome lady in her fifties with bright, pretty eyes and skin worn like brown leather from the sun. Many people in these mountains speak with a drawl so thick I understand little of what they say. But Matilde pronounces her words carefully and looks me straight in the eyes to make sure I comprehend. “The poppies are beautiful, aren’t they?” she says as she sees me admiring her flowers. Where did she get seeds for opium? I ask. From her brother, she tells me, adding that this is a village of valientes or brave ones—the term mountain folk use for drug traffickers, the men who pulled this community out of poverty. Meanwhile, she scorns the soldiers in the outpost as guachos, an old Indian word for servants.
Matilde is particularly angry at the guachos because of a recent shooting at this crossroads.1 Four local young men were driving to a girl’s fifteenth birthday in a shiny white Hummer. (It is a village of dirt shacks, but residents love their fancy cars.) The soldiers shouted at the Hummer to stop. But it was dark and the revelers were blaring music and they carried on. So the soldiers started blasting their assault rifles—and when they thought they were receiving fire, they blasted some more. After a few rounds, the Hummer had stopped and four young men were dead, as well as two soldiers.
The army first reported that brave troops had killed four cartel hit men. But then a different version came out. The men in the Hummer had not been armed. There had been no return fire; the soldiers had been shooting from two sides and killed their own troops. It was classic stupidity, reminiscent of the stumbling conscript armies who fought the First World War in Europe. And the mistake is still being made by these troops that America—through a $1.6 billion aid program—is underwriting to fight the war on drugs at the source.
“The guachos are idiots,” Matilde tells me. “They should go home to their own stupid villages.”
This is where it all began. In these mountains, Mexico’s earliest drug traffickers grew opium more than a century ago. Over generations, these ramshackle communities churned out kingpin after kingpin. Barely literate men speaking the drawl of these highlands went out and set up sprawling international networks moving billions of dollars
.
A few hours up dirt roads from Matilde’s store is the family home of Joaquin “Chapo” Guzmán,2 the five-foot-six drug lord that Forbes valued at $1 billion. Government agents say he is still hiding up in these jagged hills somewhere, protected by villagers who love and fear him. Close by is the house of his childhood friend Arturo Beltrán Leyva, alias the Beard. Hundreds of Mexican marines recently hunted down the Beard. They stormed an apartment block where he was holed up and kept shooting for two hours while his men hurled frag grenades and unleashed automatic rifle fire. Five of the Beard’s bodyguards died before giving him up. Then the marines shot the drug lord to pieces and decorated his body with dollar bills.
In revenge, Beltrán Leyva loyalists identified the family of a marine who had died in the shoot-out. Gangsters went to the marine’s wake and murdered his mother, brother, sister, and aunt. They used to just kill rival gangsters, now they massacre entire families. What is it about these mountains? What do they have that can yield men so creative, so entrepreneurial, and yet so cold-blooded?
The Sierra Madre Occidental stretches 932 miles from the U.S. border at Arizona deep into Mexico. It is a big and wild enough terrain to hide an entire army in, as Pancho Villa proved when he fled U.S. forces after raiding Columbus, New Mexico, during the Mexican Revolution. From the sky, the mountains look like a crumpled rug covered in yellow-green hair, decorated by a splattering of lakes and ragged ravines. They twist and spiral through the Mexican states of Sonora, Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua. The latter three are known as Mexico’s Golden Triangle for all the drugs they produce.
