El Narco (36 page)

Car bombs are less common. Up until 2010, a few IEDs scattered around the country caused damage and injury but no deaths. But after the Juárez bomb exploded killing three people in July 2010, fear surged through Mexico about more carnage. Sure enough, in January 2011 another car bomb exploded in Hidalgo state, killing a policeman and injuring three others. The big worry about car bombs is that they are less discriminating about whom they kill then guns and often take down civilians. ATF agents explain the Juárez bomb was a remote-operated device set off by a cell phone and was of a similar complexity to the IEDs that blow up on American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The explosive itself was an industrial material called Tovex. A report by the United States Bomb Data Center could shed light as to where it came from, and American manufacturers could be involved yet again, although not of their own will. The report explains that a Texas-based company had suffered a raid on its installations at an explosives magazine down in Durango state, Mexico. A father-and-son team were guarding the gates, the report says, when two Suburban SUVs rolled up and fifteen to twenty masked men stepped out bearing automatic rifles. They snatched a whopping 267.75 pounds or 900 cartridges of the explosives as well as 230 electric detonators. (The attack used just 22 pounds to make the bomb.) It is dangerous storing explosive materials in a region swarming with cartel paramilitaries.
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Federal agents nabbed several men whom they accused of being behind the bomb, including one who they said made the cell phone call to set it off. The bombers, the agents allege, were a cell of thugs from the Juárez Cartel, using the terror tactic in reaction to arrests. As bombs spread fear, they cause more pressure than mere guns and are a natural escalation. It is the same logic that led Pablo Ecobar to use bombs; or the Irish Republican Army; or Spanish separatists; or Al Qaeda: bombs make a big bang.

Graffiti on city walls indicate the Juárez Cartel was indeed behind the bomb. But the mafia scrawlings add an extra dimension. They weren’t just hitting
federales
because they busted their dope, they claim, but because the
federales
were allied with their rival Chapo Guzmán. As one graffiti said, FBI AND DEA. INVESTIGATE AUTHORITIES WHO ARE SUPPORTING THE SINALOA CARTEL OR ELSE WE WILL SET OFF MORE CAR BOMBS.

Calderón tells us not to read the scrawlings of mafia murderers. But whether you want to consider whether federal agents are corrupt or not, the line of thinking expressed in the graffiti fits in with the twisted reasoning of Mexican drug cartels. The enemies they see first and foremost are rival cartels. When they hit police or civilians, it is often to hurt these rivals by breaking their system of protection. This logic helps explain the motivations behind many assaults in the drug war.

A similar thinking surrounds the grenade attack that killed eight civilians celebrating Independence Day in 2008. The explosives were lobbed into the main square of Morelia shortly after the state governor had rung the bell for independence. Revelers thought they were firecrackers at first, then saw dozens of men, women, and children fall over covered in blood. If you want to use the word
terrorism
to describe the drug war, this is a solid place.

Federales
captured one man who confessed to tossing a grenade. He said he was paid by the Zetas for the work of terror. But true to the strength of the command structure, he had no idea why the attack had been ordered. Cartel paramilitaries are experts at keeping information on a need-to-know basis.

However, Mexican intelligence officer Carlos explains the motivation of the grenade attack. The Zetas hit Michoacán state as it was the home of La Familia, he says, who had betrayed them. By hurting civilians, they were putting their finger up at La Familia’s Michoacán regionalism. More crucially, they were also forcing the government to crack down on the area—and hurt La Familia’s drug operations. In Spanish they call this
calentar la plaza
, or heat up the territory. As in Juárez, the first thought is for cartels. Civilians are collateral.

Severed heads; grenades; car bombs—the terror tactics get bloodier each time. It’s as if the cartels were playing poker and have to keep raising the stakes to buy the pot. The bets just keep getting bigger. You have killed five of my men; I’ll kill ten of yours. You assassinate a federal police officer on my payroll; I’ll kidnap and kill fifteen on yours. You throw grenades; I’ll drop a bomb. No one feels he can stand down, or he will lose all the chips he has already thrown in.

Attacks are designed to be as sanguine as possible for maximum media impact. Sometimes, killers will phone up newsrooms and tell them about a pile of corpses or severed heads to make sure it gets in the paper. It is unnerving when you get to a crime scene before the police. A Juárez thug arrested for the car bomb attack said atrocities will also be timed around the media schedules. “A lot of the attacks are made an hour before news bulletins so they get out to the public,” Noe Fuentes said on an interrogation video, “so people know what problem they are involved in.”
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Blaring out on plasma-TV sets, this carnage tells different stories to different audiences: the general public learns to fear El Narco; but young thugs on the street see who is the winning team.

Mexican media are caught up in a difficult discussion about how to handle this. In 2011, many editors have toned down coverage of the violence so as not to play into El Narco’s game of terror. At the same time, they don’t want to censor reporting on the conflict, which obviously involves a huge public interest.

In front-line states, these decisions are often taken out of journalists’ hands. Gangsters will instruct newspapers not to cover a certain massacre or battle. For the safety of their staff and families, editors have to concede. Other times, the drug mafia will tell a newspaper specifically to cover certain murders. Again, it is best to do what they say. Sometimes, one gang will tell a paper to cover something and the rivals will tell them not to. Then editors are stuck between a rock and a hard place and often think the best move is to run for their lives.

Under such intense pressures, the mainstream media are getting less relevant in front-line states. Residents will often go to Twitter to find out if there are any shoot-outs on their way to work or log on to YouTube to see amateur video of them. New Web sites have emerged purely to cover narco violence. The most well-known is the notorious Blog del Narco. It is run from an unknown location, reportedly by a student, and airs no-holds-barred videos from all cartels as well as citizen journalists. The government tells people not to watch narco propaganda, but federal agents carefully study all content coming on the blog. It gets millions of hits and its advertising sales are booming.

Some of the first narco snuff videos looked almost frame for frame like Al Qaeda execution videos: a victim strapped to a chair; a ski-masked man grasping a sword; a head sliced off. As the poker pot heated up, so did the videos. A Zetas cell in Tabasco put twelve bleeding heads on YouTube. From the close-up shot, the faces look peaceful, death having drained the tension from their cheeks, their eyes shut above thick mustaches and square jaws. But as the shot pans out, the horror of their end is revealed: the necks reach stubs where they have roughly been cut off, the corpses hang upside down across the room on meat hooks, their blood draining away onto white floor tiles. “This is your responsibility for not respecting the deals you have made with us,” reads a handwritten note in Spanish by the craniums.
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Snuff videos have got increasingly common as the conflict burns on. Tortured victims often reveal names of corrupt officials working for rival cartels before the ax falls. First it was just hit men tied with duct tape to the chair; then captured policemen; then politicians. Some videotaped confessions spark startling scandals, such as the revelation that prisoners were leaving their cells to commit massacres and then returning to the jail to sleep. Other times they just spread more suspicion that is not corroborated. Many narco videos look painfully similar to the government’s own footage of interrogations of captured cartel thugs. Grainy shots of blood and torture have become a sanguine backdrop to Mexican political life.

One video really stuck in my head. From part of the babbling it looks to be by the Zetas. They have four prisoners on their knees, blindfolded, with their hands tied behind their backs. The prisoners are wearing military uniforms but they are not soldiers; a Zetas interrogator indicates they are a squad who worked for the Gulf Cartel whom the Zetas are fighting. The interrogator curses them for being fooled into murdering for the wrong side. Then the executions begin. “We are going to kill three and let one live,” says the interrogator.
Bang.
They shoot the first prisoner in the head. He falls down like a sack of potatoes. The other three are still. They all pray to be the one who will be spared.
Bang.
They shoot a second prisoner. “We are going to leave one,” the interrogator says again. The last two prisoners kneel still. They calculate they have a fifty-fifty chance of being the one survivor.
Bang.
They shoot a third prisoner and he hits the ground like a rag doll. Wow, the last prisoner is thinking. I am the one who has been spared.
Bang.
They kill him as well. The interrogator was lying. They had planned to massacre the four all along. Maybe the interrogator lied so the victims would be still while they were shot in the skull. Maybe he wanted to fuck with their heads. Maybe he just played the sick game to give the video an extra punch.

It is psychotic and hateful behavior. But such behaviour is typical in many war zones. Cartel thugs have gone beyond the pale because they are completely immersed in a violent conflict, living like soldiers in the trenches. Imagine the life of Zetas thugs in the war-torn northeast of Mexico, fighting daily with soldiers and rival gangs, moving from safe house to safe house, completely divorced from the reality of normal citizens. In these ghastly conditions they commit atrocities that the world finds so hard to comprehend. For many of these cartel soldiers on the front line, war and insurgency have become their central mission. While thugs have traditionally talked about fighting over drug smuggling, now many are talking about smuggling drugs to finance their war.

However much Calderón argues that the government is winning, the widening of the criminal insurgency is seriously shaking power brokers from Mexico City to Washington. Intelligence officers in the Pentagon continue to brainstorm about the prospects of the conflict on U.S. security. Their reports all pose a fundamental question: Where is the Mexican Drug War going? Will police and soliders, they ask, knock El Narco down to size as Calderón and the DEA claim? Or is the beast going to keep expanding in Mexico, the United States, and around the world? And could the criminal insurgency even explode into a wider civil war? It is to this destiny of El Narco that we now turn.

PART
III

Destiny

CHAPTER
13

Prosecution

All my life I’ve tried to be the good guy, the guy in the white fucking hat. And for what? For nothing. I’m not becoming like them; I am them.

—
JOHNNY
DEPP
IN
DONNIE
BRASCO
, 1997

When DEA agent Daniel saw the movie
Miami Vice
at a cinema in Panama City, Panama, his heart jumped through his mouth. In the film, a remake of the iconic eighties cop series, detectives Crockett and Tubbs run an elaborate sting operation on Colombian cocaine traffickers. Wearing their trademark white suits and T-shirts, they pose as freelance drug transporters so they can arrange to move a cargo of the white lady, then seize it. It sounds like a funny contradiction: cops transporting drugs so they can bust them. But that is exactly the same sting Daniel was trying to set up in Panama in real life.

Daniel was also meeting Colombian cocaine barons, and he was also posing as a freelance drug transporter. After months of careful infiltration he was close to convincing the gangsters to put three tons of cocaine on a DEA-controlled ship sailing out of Panama City. It was the bust of a lifetime. Then
Miami Vice
hit the theaters. If those gangsters saw it, Daniel thought, he was dead.

“That was bad. I saw it and I was like ‘Ain’t that a motherfucker.’ We were completely compromised. This is bullshit. This is the same fucking thing we are selling. Because agents made that movie. That it is why it is so fucking solid. It is very, very close.

“Then you have to grow some balls. Fuck the movie. This is me. I don’t fucking care. That is the way I saw it at that time: make or break.”

Such a sting may sound like rather sordid business. It is. Drug busting is a grimy game. And in the modern drug war, it has become downright filthy. Agents have to get down in the trenches with psychotic criminals to get ahead of them. They have to recruit informants close to these villains. And they have to know how to use them to stick the knife in.

The huge drug busts aren’t made by luck and brute force. They are about intelligence, about knowing where the shipment is going to be or which safe house the capo will be hiding in next Tuesday. Only then you can send in the marines to start blasting. This intelligence, as drug agents have found after four decades in the war, usually comes from infiltrators or informants.

Many narco kingpins are behind bars or on the concrete full of bullets because of treachery. This makes gangsters extremely violent toward suspected turncoats. In Mexico, they call informants
soplones
, or blabbermouths, and like to slice their fingers off and stick them in their mouths; in Colombia, they call them toads.