El Narco (3 page)

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.

Every day, Mexican soldiers buzz over the Triangle in helicopters searching for the light green of marijuana crops or the pink of opium. The troops find crops and burn them; they are such experts now, they can rip up and torch an acre of marijuana in less than an hour. Then mountain farmers sow more marijuana and poppy seeds and raise more green and pink blobs to be spotted from the sky. And the ritual starts again.

The crossroads where I gawk at opium is on the southwest corner of this Golden Triangle in the state of Sinaloa. There are gangsters all over these mountains, but most of the top dogs come from here. While Sicily is the home of the Italian mafia, Sinaloa is the cradle of Mexican drug gangs, the birthplace of the nation’s oldest and most powerful network of traffickers, known as the Sinaloa Cartel.

American agents only started using the name Sinaloa Cartel in indictments in the last couple of years. Before that they called it the Federation, and before that a host of other names such as the Guadalajara Cartel—named after Mexico’s second city, which Sinaloan crime bosses used as a base of operations. But all these names are just approximations to describe a quarrelsome empire of traffickers that spans out from Sinaloa across half the U.S. border. Some capos of this empire are linked by blood or marriage to the very first peasants who grew opium in the heights a century ago. It is an unbroken dynasty.

Like Sicily, Sinaloa has geographical traits that are condusive to organized crime. The state is a little smaller than West Virginia, but anyone who wants to disappear can move rapidly into the Sierra Madre and slip over peaks into Sonora, Chihuahua, or Durango. Beneath the highlands, Sinaloa boasts four hundred miles of Pacific coastline, where contraband has been smuggled in and out for centuries. Silver, muskets, opium, and pseudophedrine pills to make crystal meth have all been sneaked across its shores. Between the sea and the mountains, Sinaloa has fertile valleys that have spawned great plantations—particularly in tomatoes and onions—and earth teeming with gold, silver, and copper. This natural wealth fueled the growth of the state capital, Culiacán, a lively city built where the gushing Tamazula and Humaya rivers meet, and the buzzing port of Mazatlán.

Commercial hubs are crucial for organized crime, providing headquarters and businesses to launder money. Again, such merchant centers mark a similarity between Sinaloa and other criminal hot spots. Sicily developed a mafia that bridged an unruly countryside and the commercial hub of Palermo, a port linking North Africa and Europe. Medellín in Colombia was a buzzing market city surrounded by bandit hills when its infamous son Pablo Escobar rose to be the world’s number one cocaine trafficker. Criminal conspiracies do not spring up in certain regions by pure chance.