by Ioan Grillo
As the death toll rose into 2005, the three big Texan newspapers—the Houston Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, and San Antonio Express—all made splashes on the story. Suddenly, we were fighting a good old-fashioned newspaper battle for coverage. “Get up there and cover it like a war!” my editor screamed. I thought he was exaggerating. But in hindsight, we were at the front end of a conflict with serious implications.
I had the luck of working with two veterans who were some of the finest reporters the Chronicle ever had: Dudley Althaus and Jim Pinkerton. But even so, on the ground in Nuevo Laredo, I struggled to make sense of the turf war. It was frustratingly hard to get real information: police, prosecutors, the mayor, all spun suspect lines. So I tried different ways to get into the story. I had known plenty of degenerate drug addicts back home; surely, I could find some on the border who had an idea what was playing out. I trawled round drug rehabs, street corners, and cantinas. Sure enough, I soon found petty dealers and smugglers who described the battle from below.
I got close to a twenty-eight-year-old called Rolando. He was the wiry youngest of ten children born of a local police commander. Rolando had smuggled marijuana into the United States and served time in a Texas penitentiary, where he learned to speak perfect English. He also had two bad drug addictions: to heroin and to crack. We would sit in a small room of his friend’s house, and he would inject heroin, then smoke a rock of crack straight after. I never understood why people got high and low at the same time. But Rolando seemed to function fine when on both and would ramble away about family, philosophy, or anything else that came up for discussion.
Rolando earned his living in Nuevo Laredo’s red-light zone, known as Boys Town, a walled-off area of four blocks with wide dirt streets and lines of brothels and strip bars. As the story goes, Boys Town was first set up by American general John Pershing to keep all his whoring soldiers in one place. A century later, American truck drivers and teenage Texans looking to lose their virginity visited this den of sin. Rolando would use his English to guide these johns to the best bars and hook them up with the prettiest ladies in exchange for tips. He spent most of his money on drugs. But he also kept a girlfriend, who worked as a stripper. One day he had just discovered his girl was pregnant; we celebrated by drinking beer and listening to a jukebox in a grimy Boys Town cantina. The next time I saw him, he told me she had lost the baby. I watched him take his usual dose of crack and heroin to commemorate.
I went with Rolando when he brought his dope, both from dealers inside Boys Town or from tienditas in barrios. Back when he was growing up, he explained, people just sold drugs and kept the money. But now all the dealers had to pay their tax to the Zetas. He carefully pointed out Zetas operatives hanging around Boys Town. These well-built men stood close to the doors of nightclubs, chatting into cell phones or eyeing the street. Boys Town, like all Nuevo Laredo, was their turf.
When Sinaloans rolled into town, Rolando explained, they had also tried to tax dealers and smugglers. Some local thugs thought this was a good thing. The Zetas were a repressive mob. Perhaps they would be better off with new bosses. They helped the outsiders set up safe houses and get their paws into the city. Others were loyal to the Zetas and pointed a finger at anyone passing information to the invaders. People caught working with the wrong team were kidnapped, tortured, and thrown dead onto the street. A turf war is a filthy business.
The Sinaloans seriously underestimated their rivals. Many of the Sinaloans’ recruits were thugs from the Mara Salvatrucha gangs of El Salvador and Honduras. The gangbangers had a fearsome reputation. But they were no match for the heavily armed and organized Zetas. Five cadavers of these Central American recruits, their arms and shoulders revealing MS tatooes, were thrown on the floor of a Nuevo Laredo safe house. A note lay next to the corpses, scrawled in the messy handwriting of narco assassins. “Chapo Guzmán and Beltrán Leyva. Send more pendejos like this for us to kill,” it said. Pendejos is a Mexican swear word that literally means “pubic hairs.” The Zetas were applying their military tactics, striking terror onto the Mexican street. Soon every gang in the country would be doing the same thing.14
President Fox ordered seven hundred soldiers and federal police into Nuevo Laredo to quell the violence. He called the offensive Operación México Seguro or Operation Secure Mexico, a campaign that Fox later incorporated into his antidrug efforts across the whole country. Nuevo Laredo was a laboratory for government strategy as well as cartel tactics.
Federal troops swiftly rounded up Zetas hit squads, lining up one group of seventeen gangster soldiers so the press could snap photos. This was meant to humiliate them, to show the government was on top. But it had the opposite effect. The thugs flashed across Mexican televisions, standing straight-backed and staring hard in front of automatic rifles, flak jackets, and radios. It let everyone know the Zetas were a gang to be feared.
Taking leadership of the Zetas was Heriberto Lazcano, or Z-3, known by his chilling nickname the Executioner. Hailing from the rural state of Hidalgo,15 the muscular, thick-necked Lazcano shared a peasant background with his friend and mentor Guzmán, Z-1. Lazcano also joined the army as a teenager and gained promotion to the special forces. When Guzmán defected, the loyal Lazcano was quick to follow. However, Lazcano, who took control of the Zetas at age twenty-eight, proved he was more bloodthirsty than his teacher.
Guards at a penitentiary in Matamoros refused to smuggle in luxuries to some Zetas prisoners. So Lazcano applied pressure. One night, as six prison workers finished a late shift, waiting Zetas abducted them one by one. Hours later, a horrified guard at the prison gates found the bodies of the six employees in a Ford Explorer. They had been blindfolded, handcuffed, and shot in the head. The Zetas were showing a new approach for dealing with authorities. Police had once bullied criminals into paying up. Now the worm had turned.
One man in Nuevo Laredo willing to speak out against such terror was the head of the chamber of commerce, Alejandro Dominguez. I chatted with him in his office downtown, a few streets away from souvenir vendors and tequila bars long frequented by Texans. He was tall with a shock of silver hair and an affable manner. He argued the violence was oppressing residents, who needed to reclaim the city:
“The bloodshed takes away our freedom. It makes people too scared to walk on their own streets at night. But people have to take back those streets. They have to take back their parks. We cannot just hand the city over to criminals.”
Six weeks later, the mayor named Dominguez as head of the Nuevo Laredo police force. He took the oath of office in a public ceremony, lifting his right hand above his chest and promising to protect and serve. A local journalist asked him if he was afraid of dying. He replied sternly, “I believe the corrupt officials are the ones who are scared. The only people I work for are the public.”
That evening, Dominguez went to his downtown office, where I had interviewed him. Around seven o clock, he closed up and walked to his sports utility vehicle. Two gunmen opened fire, shooting forty bullets into his body. He had lasted just six hours in the job of city police chief. The assassination made international headlines, one of the first times the emerging drug war gained attention.16
Assassins started ambushing policemen all over Nuevo Laredo. Then federal and city police started shooting at each other. The rot in the Mexican state was rising to the surface.
I got a call about a firefight on a Saturday morning while I was having breakfast in my hotel. Rushing to the scene, I found a federal agent bleeding on a stretcher. He had been driving from the airport with other agents when city police stopped them and demanded to search their vehicles. First they argued, then broke into a fistfight, then started shooting. The federal agent survived various bullet wounds.
The next day, federal agents and soldiers swept on the city police station and arrested the entire force of seven hundred officers. Federal troops then stormed a safe house and found a horrific sight—forty-four prisoners bound, gagged, and bleeding. The prisone
rs said that city police had arrested them, then handed them over as captives of the dreaded Zetas.
Evidence of police working for the insurgent Zetas was startling, but would soon become depressingly typical in Mexico. Time and time again, federal troops rolled into cities and accused local police of being deeply entwined with gangsters. Officers no longer just turned a blind eye on smuggling, but worked as kidnappers and assassins in their own right, a grave fragmentation of the state. To aggravate this problem, many federal officers were also found working for gangsters, normally different factions of the Sinaloa Cartel. So as federal troops rounded up Zetas, observers asked whom they were serving: the public or Sinaloan capos?
These revelations underline a central problem in the Mexican Drug War. The PRI years featured a delicate dance of corruption; in the democratic years, it turned to a corrupt dance of death. In the old days, police officers were rotten, but at least they worked together. In democracy, police work for competing mafias and actively fight each other. Gangsters target both good police who get in their way and bad police who work for their rivals. For policy makers it becomes a Gordian knot.
Added to this thorny issue of corruption is a more fundamental problem of drug-law enforcement. Every time you arrest one trafficker, you are helping his rival. In this way, when the federal police stormed Zetas safe houses, they were scoring victories for Sinaloans, whether they liked it or not. Arrests did not subdue violence, but only inflamed it.
The Nuevo Laredo turf war raged on through a long, hot, bloody summer in 2005. That fall, violence spread to other parts of Mexico. While they were still battling for their own turf, Zetas expanded into many areas traditionally controlled by the Sinaloan mafia. The best form of defense is attack.
To beef up their army, they swelled their ranks with new recruits. Their bloody reputation helped them. Thousands of young thugs realized the name Zetas meant power and were keen to join the baddest team. But to encourage them, the Executioner audaciously put out job ads, which his men wrote on blankets and hung on bridges.
“The Zetas operations group wants you, soldier or ex-soldier,” one banner said. “We offer you a good salary, food, and attention for your family. Don’t suffer hunger and abuse anymore.” Another said, “Join the ranks of the Gulf Cartel. We offer benefits, life insurance, a house for your family and children. Stop living in the slums and riding the bus. A new car or truck, your choice.”
The Zetas also went abroad for talented killers. They found the most eager mercenaries in Guatemala, former members of the crack Kaibil commandos that tore through rebel villages in the nation’s civil war. The hardened Kaibiles made the Mexican special forces look like Boy Scouts. With their motto, “If I retreat, kill me,” they were trained to cut bullets out of their own bodies in combat. While the Mexican army killed hundreds of leftist insurgents, the Kaibiles massacred tens of thousands of rebels and their entire families.
The Gulf Cartel spent millions of drug dollars to finance the rapid growth of the Zetas. But to make the expansion more profitable, Zetas units generated their own income. Thugs with large arsenals of guns had a quick way of getting cash: extortion. At first, they taxed anyone in the drug business, including marijuana growers and street dealers. Later, they branched out to shake down anything in sight.
Efrain Bautsista, who grew marijuana for many years in the southern Sierra Madre, saw the changes in his old community. Although Efrain left the mountains for Mexico City in the early 1980s, he would go back to visit his family and had cousins and nephews still growing marijuana in the fields near Teloloapan in Guerrero state. He describes the entrance of the Zetas:
“There had never been fighting over marijuana in Teloloapan. If you wanted to grow mota, you just grew it and sold it in the town to smugglers. That is the way it had always been since back in the 1960s when we first started growing.
“Then these Zetas appeared and said that anyone who grew marijuana had to pay them. People in my part of the mountains are rough, and a lot of them told these men to fuck themselves. And then bodies started appearing on the streets. And people started paying up.”
When police arrested regional Zetas soliders, they found many were local men who had enlisted with the northeastern mob. Mexican intelligence agents explain that Zetas cells are akin to franchises. As with McDonald’s, local recruits get training and the best brand name in the business. Then a local leader, whom the Zetas called a second commander, can run his own outlet as long as he kicks back the payments to HQ. Paramilitary squads that sprung up in Colombia in the 1990s operated with a similar degree of local autonomy.
The new Zetas cells clashed with Sinaloans and their affiliates across Mexico. Suddenly violence hit the seaside resort of Acapulco; then bodies piled up in neighboring Michoacán state; then a convoy of Zetas drove hundreds of miles and carried out a massacre in Sonora state. As the war intensified, so did tactics. Decapitation was almost unheard of in modern Mexico. But in April 2006, the craniums of two Acapulco policemen were dumped by the town hall. The police officers had shot dead four thugs in a prolonged firefight, and the gangsters wanted to teach them a special lesson.
It is still unclear exactly what inspired such brutality. Many point to the influence of the Guatemalan Kaibiles working in the Zetas. In the Guatemalan civil war, troops cut off heads of captured rebels in front of villagers to terrify them from joining a leftist insurgency. Turning into mercenaries in Mexico, the Kaibiles might have reprised their trusted tactic to terrify enemies of the cartel. Others point to the influence of Al Qaeda decapitation videos from the Middle East, which were shown in full on some Mexican TV channels. Some anthropologists even point to the pre-Colombian use of beheadings and the way Mayans used them to show complete domination of their enemies.
The Zetas were not thinking like gangsters, but like a paramilitary group controlling territory. Their new way of fighting rapidly spread through the Mexican Drug War. In September the same year, La Familia gang—working with the Zetas in Michoacán state—rolled five human heads onto a disco dance floor. By the end of 2006, there had been dozens of decapitations. Over the next years, there were hundreds.
Gangsters throughout Mexico also copied the Zetas’ paramilitary way of organizing. Sinaloans created their own cells of combatants with heavy weaponry and combat fatigues. They had to fight fire with fire. “The Beard” Beltrán Leyva led particularly well-armed death squads. One was later busted in a residential house in Mexico City. They had twenty automatic rifles, ten pistols, twelve M4 grenade launchers, and flak jackets that even had their own logo—FEDA—an acronym for Fuerzas Especiales de Arturo, or Arturo’s Special Forces.
As corpses piled up from the border to beach resorts, reporters ran out to every scene of an execution-style killing or dumped body. The Mexican government had long been guarded about giving out homicide numbers. But the aggressive newspapers tallied up the killings and printed them in rather sanguine “execution meters.” Some regional tabloids decorated these counts with graphics like sports scorecards. The tallies caught flak for being dehumanizing. But they served as the first crucial barometer of the violence. In 2005, fifteen hundred murders bore the hallmarks of organized crime across the country. In 2006, there were two thousand.
The rising death toll sparked concern. But on an international level, the conflict grabbed little attention, still being viewed as an internal crime problem, albeit with some juicy stories of bad guys rolling heads. Meanwhile, the foreign press focused on Mexico’s first presidential election since the PRI had fallen—and how President Fox would pass the torch. By law, Fox was not allowed to stand for a second term.
The contest had promise as a great example of free franchise in action; it turned into a gripping two-horse race between conservative Felipe Calderón of Fox’s National Action Party and the silver-haired Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party. However, smears and political chicanery soured the contest and shook Mexico’s young democracy.
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López Obrador was a charismatic political animal with an extraordinary gift for public speaking, stirring up crowds with tirades against the unjust Mexico in which the poor toiled and the rich robbed. The establishment threw everything at him, including hidden videos of his aides taking bribes. But he just wouldn’t go down. In a final attempt to shut López Obrador up, prosecutors charged him over an obscure land dispute, a case that would keep him off the ballot. It was clearly a political persecution. The feisty leftist rallied hundreds of thousands in protest, and editorials in London and Washington accused Fox of sabotaging Mexico’s democracy. Realizing his very legacy was at risk, Fox fired his attorney general and dropped the charges.
The case had collapsed. But it left a terrible scar. In the next years, every politician accused of a crime said it was a political persecution. This made the job of cleaning up Mexico’s rotten establishment that much harder. The left were right to defend López Obrador. But later, they rallied around politicians facing credible charges of working with the mafia. With police seen as a political tool, public confidence in the justice system plummeted.
As the presidential election approached, tensions reached fever pitch. López Obrador said the establishment was a gang of mafia capitalists. Calderón hit back by painting López Obrador as a mad, messianic populist who would plunge Mexico into crisis. His catchy slogan: “López Obrador—a Danger for Mexico.” It was extremely effective in frightening a nation that had stumbled through crisis after crisis.
In the official count, Calderón won by 0.6 percent of the vote, making it the closest race in the nation’s history. López Obrador shouted that the vote was rigged and set up protest camps in the capital. Meanwhile, in the southern state of Oaxaca, a teachers’ strike transformed into an unarmed insurrection against the unpopular PRI governor. That crisis boiled on for five months, in which protesters burned buses and built barricades, and political violence killed at least fifteen people—mainly leftist demonstrators. After the murder of American Indymedia journalist Brad Will,17 Fox finally sent in four thousand federal police to take Oaxaca city. To Calderón, Mexico looked a chaotic place. When he was sworn into power in December, the former lawyer was determined to restore order.
