by Ioan Grillo
As news of Chapo’s escape broke, an embarrassed Fox published ads in newspapers and put up posters with a special hotline number to catch the kingpin. Almost a hundred calls came in every hour. But they all gave false or useless information, and in many of them laughter could be heard in the background. A naive president asking for help seemed hilarious both to children and adults. Mexicans hadn’t quite caught on to the idea of citizen support for policing.6
So what can the escape of Guzmán really tell us about the Fox presidency? Conspiracy theorists cite it as evidence that the Fox administration allied with Guzmán and his Sinaloan gangster friends. Orders for the breakout, they say, must have come from upstairs. Fox’s secret aim was to make a renewed Sinaloa Cartel the strongest mafia, with Guzmán as a national godfather, the way the eighties capo Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo had been. After unleashing Chapo from his cage, Fox brought down his rivals, such as the Arellano Félix brothers, and allowed Chapo to expand across the country. This policy of supporting Guzmán, these theorists argue, carried on when Felipe Calderón took office.
Such a conspiracy theory, in various forms, has bugged both presidents in the democratic era. It has been written by gangsters on placards, shouted by politicians, and filled thousands of column inches.7 But is there any truth to it?
Certainly no evidence has directly linked either Fox or Calderón to Chapo Guzmán. More substantiated than the conspiracy theory is the cock-up theory. Fox may have had nothing to do with Chapo Guzmán’s escape and no power over his subsequent rise. Simply, Guzmán and his mafia partners were the most effective gangsters at building a network of corrupt officials from all wings of government. Neither Fox nor Calderón could really control the Mexican state. With the demise of the PRI, the basic system of power was gone. And this was the key to Mexico’s breaking down.
With the benefit of hindsight, the escape of Chapo Guzmán appears to be a landmark event. But back in 2001, few saw it as an earthshaker. It was just one more gangster and one more example of bad Latin American prisons. Courts had indicted Chapo in Arizona in 1993 for racketeering, and in San Diego in 1995 for conspiracy to import cocaine. But there were not yet million-dollar rewards for him. Most observers of Mexico focused on a totally different agenda—looking at a convoy of Zapatista rebels driving peacefully to Mexico City and at ongoing investigations into the PRI’s old dirty war. As Fox said in the later interview when I asked him about Chapo’s escape:
“It is an important case, but it is not the hallmark of my government. One swallow does not make a summer … Today, it is used by my opponents, by my political enemies, as an enigmatic issue.”
Over the next three years, Fox’s drug policy looked great to Americans. In 2002, municipal police shot dead Tijuana psycho Ramón Arellano Félix and the next month, soldiers seized his brainy brother Benjamin. Then in 2003, Mexican security forces nabbed kingpin Armando Valencia in Michoacán state and capo Osiel Cárdenas up in Tamaulipas. To American drug agents, who love busts and seizures, things had never looked better. I sat down with three DEA agents in the Mexico City embassy in early 2004. They said they were ecstatic with the Fox administration. An agent told me:
“Compared to the bad old days of Kiki Camarena, it is night and day. Mexico has really turned the corner in the fight against drug gangs. This country has a great future ahead.”
And then the war started.
It began small, in the midsize border city of Nuevo Laredo, in the fall of 2004. Most media reports fudge this point to say that the Mexican Drug War started when Felipe Calderón took office in December 2006. That makes easy shorthand. While such simplifications help get the broad picture across, they can also create some dangerous misconceptions—namely that this war is entirely tied to the Calderón administration, and when he leaves office, it will magically disappear. The truth is that the conflict began before Calderón and will likely rage on after him.
Few saw the significance of the Nuevo Laredo turf war. But the conflict brought in a series of unprecedented tactics: the use of paramilitary hit squads; widespread attacks on police; and mass kidnappings. These tactics would spread across Mexico on a frightening scale, defining the way the conflict was fought.
At the heart of the Nuevo Laredo battle was Mexico’s most bloodthirsty gang, the Zetas. The former special-force soldiers militarized the conflict, turning it from a “war on drugs” to a “drug war.” Suddenly, the public saw captured criminals in combat fatigues with heavy weaponry. Where had these militias sprung from? To understand how the Zetas emerged, we need to shine a light on the radical evolution of drug trafficking in the Nuevo Laredo region.
Northeast Mexico has been a corridor for contraband since the days of Prohibition, when an enterprising criminal called Juan Nepomuceno bootlegged booze.8 As Nepomuceno’s crime syndicate transformed into the Gulf Cartel, the area known as the “little border” grew in strategic importance, aided by the rapid expansion of the American cities of Dallas and Houston. No huge metropolises were on the Mexican side of the little border, unlike upriver with Juárez. But more actual cargo flowed over. By 2004, Nuevo Laredo alone—with just 307,000 residents—saw $90 billion worth of legitimate goods heading north annually. That was more than double the $43 billion that went through sprawling Ciudad Juárez, and four times the $22 billion that went through Tijuana.
This volume of cargo meant ten thousand trucks and two thousand railcars passed through Nuevo Laredo daily. On the American side, Laredo opened straight into the I-35 highway speeding to Dallas. Drugs moved amid the vast volume of cargo and quickly shifted around Texas, then into the rest of the South and the Eastern seaboard. Laredo was a trafficking fire hose. And it was the only part of the border not controlled by Sinaloans.
By 1997, balding former car thief Osiel Cárdenas had murdered his way to the top of the Gulf Cartel. Cárdenas earned the nickname Mata amigos, or friend killer, for his Machiavellian moves to sieze power, stabbing his allies in the back. To secure himself as head honcho on the little border, Cárdenas had the notion of creating a special militia that would be more fearsome than any thugs that might come after him. He had seen the Arellano Félix brothers import Chicano gangbangers for their narco muscle. But he wanted to raise the stakes. So he turned to the Mexican army itself.
Cárdenas befriended a special forces commander called Arturo Guzmán Decena, who had been sent to Tamaulipas to clamp down on drug gangs. By all accounts, Guzmán was a talented and aggressive officer. A photo of him as a young enlistee shows him broad-shouldered, clean-shaven, and in trim shape, his right hand pinned to his chest in a Mexican national salute. His eyes stare sharply ahead with military focus, his face hinting at a certain innocence of youth. But something happened to convert this fresh recruit into a cold narco killer code-named Z-1.
Arturo Guzmán hailed from a humble village in Puebla, southern Mexico, and joined the military to escape poverty. His background is typical of the Mexican army. The corps is not controlled by adventuring upper-class officers like the British brass; nor is it an ideological right-wing brigade such as the Spanish; rather it is army of country boys from the poor south.
One of the best and brightest of recruits, Guzmán joined the elite Airmobile Special Forces Group or GAFE, the equivalent of the Green Berets. In the tradition of special forces, officers pushed recruits to their limits and instilled in them a die-hard attitude. The unit’s motto: “Not even death will stop us, and if it surprises us, then it is welcome.” Elite units from round the world provided GAFE training. Crack troops learned skills from the Israeli Defense Forces, whose experiences in Lebanon and the West Bank made them some of the best soldiers in urban combat. But the biggest influence on the GAFE came from closer to home, from American men of war.
The United States schooled Latin American soldiers throughout the late-twentieth century in warfare and anti-insurgency tactics at the infamous School of the Americas in Georgia and at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. When the manuals given to Latin American
students were declassified in 1996, they sparked outrage. Printed only in Spanish, the instruction books explained the use of psychological warfare to break insurgencies. One particularly controversial manual entitled Handling Sources instructs Latin American officers on how to use informants. In cold, clinical terms, it details pressuring informants with violence against both them and their families. As it says on page 79:
“The Counter Insurgency agent could cause the arrest of the employee’s [informant’s] parents, imprison the employee or give him a beating as part of the placement plan of the said employee in the guerrilla organization.”9
Back in Mexico, Guzmán and his comrades put their training into practice when the Zapatista uprising surprised the world in 1994. Led by the pipe-smoking revolutionary Subcomandante Marcos, some three thousand Zapatista rebels siezed town halls in the impoverished southern state of Chiapas. The insurrection was a largely symbolic protest against poverty and one-party rule; the rebels were poor, indigenous Mayans armed with old shotguns and .22-caliber rifles, and they beat a hasty retreat back into the jungle as soon as the army approached. But however hollow the military threat, the Mexican government was keen to hit back hard and flew in GAFE to hunt down Zapatistas.
Strike teams caught up with Zapatista rebels as they retreated through the ramshackle town of Ocosingo on the edge of the jungle. Within hours, thirty-four rebels lay dead. Subcomandante Marcos claimed in a communiqué that those killed had surrendered and been summarily executed, although the military insists they died fighting. The following day, soldiers captured three more rebels in the nearby community of Las Margaritas. Their corpses were dumped on a riverbank, their ears and noses sliced from their faces. The bloodshed shook the rebel movement, and Marcos was quick to sign a cease-fire twelve days after his rebellion began. From then on, Zapatistas turned to nonviolent protest, although they still maintained a small guerrilla army deep in the jungle.10
Now a highly trained and bloodied soldier, the rising star Guzmán transferred to the little border. Here, garish narco mansions stood on dirt streets hosting rowdy, all-night parties, and thousands of prostitutes danced in sprawling red-light zones. For the young officer who had spent his youth tramping around muddy jungles, it was a stunning change.
Investigators say Guzmán first worked with Cárdenas by taking bribes to turn the other cheek on Gulf Cartel drugloads. Such payoffs were typical. But while soldiers had long skimmed the profits of traffickers, it was unthinkable that they should actually defect to join them. Officers still saw themselves as protectors of the republic, who would no more easily join the narcos than a U.S. soldier would join insurgents in Iraq. Bribes were simply seen by soldiers as benefits of their job. But Guzmán shattered this model. He left the barracks for the last time and was reborn as a narco mercenary.
So what drove Guzmán to make this dramatic career move? It has been explained that he was tempted by the glitter of gold, seeing ostentatious gangsters earn more in a year than many professional soldiers in a lifetime. But he could also live well as a rising star in the army. By joining the cartel, he would become a fugitive who risked eventual death or imprisonment.
A crucial factor in his defection may have been the seismic change that was tearing the old order apart. The move to democracy made many in the army nervous about their place in the new Mexico. Badge-wearing officers were especially worried by demands to clean up abuses of the old regime. Families of the “disappeared” marched daily in the capital, and several officers were court-martialed for human rights abuses or drug corruption. As a judge sentenced General Gutiérrez Rebollo to fifty years in prison for taking narco bribes, all the army was watching. Amid this turmoil, Officer Guzmán decided he was better off outside the system.
When Osiel Cárdenas hired Guzmán, he didn’t want just another gunslinger. Cárdenas asked his recruit to set up the most ferocious hit squad possible. A schemer, Cárdenas certainly had the imagination to envision an army-trained band of enforcers. But much of the initiative toward a full-fledged paramilitary likely came from Guzmán himself. Mexican federal agents later released a conversation they say an informant relayed to them about setting up the new unit:
Cárdenas: “I want the best men. The best.”
Guzmán: “What type of people do you need?”
Cárdenas: “The best armed men that there are.”
Guzmán: “These are only in the army.”
Cárdenas: “I want them.”11
Following orders, Guzmán recruited dozens of crack soldiers. Some media reports have described the formation of the Zetas as a mass defection of a single army unit. But military records show this is inaccurate. Soldiers left their barracks to work with Guzmán over some months and were from several units, including the Seventieth Infantry Battalion and Fifteenth Regiment of Motorized Cavalry. However, members of the GAFE special forces certainly made up a good number of the founding militia, which named itself the Zetas after a radio signal the GAFE used. Members were all given a Z code, starting with Guzmán as Z-1. Within months, Z-1 commanded thirty-eight former soldiers.
Backed by his new militia, Osiel Cárdenas felt more powerful than ever. This heady arrogance led him to a mistake that caused his downfall: threatening American officials. The agents—one from the DEA and one from the FBI—were driving through Matamoros in November 1999 with an informer pointing out narco real estate. Realizing they were being followed, they sped up in their car, which had consular plates, but were blocked in by a caravan of eight SUVs and trucks. About fifteen men, including several Zetas, poured out and surrounded their vehicle, training Kalashnikov rifles at them. Cárdenas himself then came out of the crowd and demanded the agents hand over their informer. The Americans refused, pleading with Cárdenas that he would never get away with killing U.S. agents. According to the agents’ testimonies, a furious Cárdenas shouted back, “You gringos. This is my territory. You can’t control it. So get the hell out of here!”12
The agents drove straight to the U.S. border and got home unscathed. In March 2000, a federal grand jury in Brownsville indicted Cárdenas for assaulting the agents and on drug-trafficking charges, and the DEA put a $2 million bounty on his head. When Vicente Fox took power, Americans had Osiel Cárdenas at the top of the list of gangsters they wanted nailed.
However, unlike the old-school capos, Cárdenas refused to negotiate surrender. Instead, he called on his Zetas militia to protect his freedom through strength of arms. Cárdenas felt he could take the government on rather than submit to arrest—and became the first narco insurgent. The modus operandi that had regulated the Mexican drug trade for decades was dead, opening the curtains for the coming war.
The Zetas recruited more soldiers as well as former police and gang members to fill their ranks. Pitched battles between soldiers and Zetas burst out on the streets of Tamaulipas. Rattled by this resistance, the army sent in reinforcements to nab Cárdenas and encouraged them to shoot first and ask questions later. These gloves-off tactics succeeded in taking out Z-1. Guzmán was eating at a seafood restaurant with some of his entourage in November 2002. Soldiers burst through the door with guns blazing, and Arturo Guzmán was shot before he had a chance to respond. In total, fifty bullets hit Z-1 across his head, torso, arms, and legs. The promising young officer and founder of the first Mexican cartel paramilitary lay full of lead on a restaurant floor.
Soldiers then tracked Osiel Cárdenas himself to a safe house in March 2003. This time his Zeta bodyguards had a chance to shoot back, unloading thousands of rounds and fragmentation grenades at the besieging troops. But the gangsters were hopelessly outnumbered and surrounded on all sides. After half an hour, soldiers stormed through the door and seized the kingpin. The Zetas still didn’t give up, with reinforcements launching attacks to try to free their commander in chief. Troops fought their way to the airport and flew Cárdenas to Mexico City. The arrest was radically different from the days when police would take capos down peacefully in restaurants. It became the
new standard.
Osiel Cárdenas in handcuffs made a gleaming trophy for President Fox. But the implications of the Zetas were little understood. Most journalists saw them as an obscure drug gang, albeit with an exotic story. Rival traffickers also failed to see the threat that the militia posed. On the contrary, with Z-1 dead and Cárdenas in jail, the Sinaloan mob thought the Gulf Cartel was finished and moved in on its territory.
The Sinaloan mafia convened a narco summit to plan the expansion. Details of this landmark meeting have come from a trafficker turned protected witness who sat in on the get-together.13 According to his account, Sinaloan mobsters, including the prison escapee Chapo Guzmán and “the Beard” Beltrán Leyva, sat down to discuss their plan of domination. Sinaloans already controlled the border from Juárez to the Pacific, they said. Now the mafia could take over the lucrative routes into East Texas. Who were the hicks of northeast Mexico to withstand them? Sinaloan gangbangers rolled into the northeast claiming the territory. The first phase of the Mexican Drug War pitted the might of the Sinaloa Cartel against the insurgent Zetas.
In 2004, just before the turf war broke out, I got a job covering Mexico for the Houston Chronicle. The Texan editor generously didn’t mind working with a reporter with a daft British accent. I could always e-mail him if he didn’t understand my slur. All I had to do was learn what Bubba, the typical Texan, liked and didn’t like. “Bubba doesn’t like the word bourgeois. Use a shorter one,” he would say. I started writing on Mexico’s transfer to democracy. Then corpses piled up on the Mexican side of the Texas border—soon there were twenty, then fifty, then a hundred murders. I was flown up to Nuevo Laredo. Bubba wanted to know what the hell was going on.
