Gangland (22 page)

The Mexican media went wild, turning Hernandez Huereka into a martyr for illegal immigrants. The Border Patrol issued a statement in defense of the officers, stating: “No agent wants to have to shoot another human being, but when an agent is assaulted and fears for his life, then his hand is forced... . The loss of this teenager's life is regrettable, it is due solely to his decision to pick up a rock and assault a United States Border Patrol Agent. We stand behind the actions of the agents who did their duty in El Paso, and are confident that the investigation into this incident will justify their actions.” It also noted that the officers in question would undergo an investigation similar to the one that sent officers Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean to prison for shooting an unarmed drug smuggler on the border in 2006.

All of the north was violent. As death threats increased, the police force of Guadalupe Municipality—a mostly rural region analogous to a county on the Rio Grande just east of Juárez—dwindled from 40 to just four officers. Guadalupe's staunchly anti-cartel PRI mayor, Jesús Manuel Lara Rodríguez, moved in secret to the quiet tree-lined Santa Teresa neighborhood in eastern Juárez. His government-in-exile did not last long, though. At 4:30 on the afternoon of June 19, as he was getting out of his car, he was gunned down and killed in front of his wife and daughter. Investigators found 11 spent cartridges in the driveway. Chihuahua's PRI governor José Reyes Baeza Terrazas—who claimed he had not been aware that Lara Rodriguez had moved to Juárez—immediately ordered 100 state police and Federales into the region to establish order and act as local police.

The Lara Rodriguez assassination came just two weeks before municipal and state elections, throwing the race for mayor into disarray. Thing got worse in the northeast on June 28, six days before the election. A convoy of two brightly decorated Chevy Trailblazer SUVs carrying Tamaulipas gubernatorial candidate Rodolfo Torre Cantú and some supporters to Ciudad Victoria's General Pedro J. Méndez International Airport was stopped by two Ford SUVs bearing Naval Infantry markings. According to witnesses, the politicians' bodyguards exited the vehicles to tell the masked men who they were transporting. The men posing as Naval Infantry disarmed the security detail and forced the others out of the SUVs before opening fire with a mix of AK-47s and AR-15s. Torre Cantú was killed at the scene, along with state congressman Enrique Blackmore Smer and bodyguards Gerardo Soltero Subiate, Rubén López Zúñiga and Francisco David López Catache. Severely injured were PRI congressional candidate Enrique de la Garza Montoto (Torre Cantú's brother-in-law), Torre Cantú's personal secretary, Alejandro Martínez Villarreal, and bodyguard Aurelio Balleza Dante Quiroz. Torre Cantú's last-minute replacement—his older brother, Egidio Torre Cantú—won the election for a PRI/Green coalition.

As had been true since the war began, politicians were not the only assassination targets. On June 26, a rumor spread throughout Mexico that Sonora-born, Phoenix-based
narcocorrida
singer El Shaka (José Sergio Vega Cuamea) had been murdered. It prompted him to write that the rumors of his demise were premature. “It's happened to me for years now, someone tells a radio station or a newspaper I've been killed, or suffered an accident,” he wrote. “And then I have to call my dear mom, who has heart trouble, to reassure her.” He also mentioned that he had taken extra security measures.

Hours after publishing the update on his site, El Shaka was on his way to a concert in Culiacán. He stopped his red Cadillac to pay a toll in the picturesque Sinaloa town of San Miguel Zapotitlán. As he headed out of the tollbooth, his car was showered in heavy weapons fire. He was killed immediately. His manager, Jesus Tirado Camacho, claimed that he could not understand why anybody would want to kill his client and that the 40-year-old had left behind at least 18 children.

As the summer of 2010 dragged on, the level of violence became almost constant. The day after El Shaka was killed, gunmen attacked another drug rehab clinic—the Fuerza Para Vivir (Strength to Live) in the mainly quiet Durango city of Gómez Palacio. They arrived in three trucks at about 2:00 p.m. But unlike other attacks on rehab clinics, this one seemed directed. The assailants searched every room of the facility, shooting only those they recognized. Of the 49 people inside the building, only nine were killed and nine more injured. The dead ranged in age from 17 to 50. Surviving witnesses said that the masked men were looking in particular for the clinic's director, who they killed.

That same night, masked assailants entered a bar in Juárez and killed four men and a woman sitting together at a table. Witnesses could offer nothing to help the authorities, and the victims' family and friends could not explain why they were targeted.

But as routine as that shooting seemed by the incredible standards the country and that city in particular had seen in recent months, something happened on July 15 that spread even more terror by introducing a new weapon, one that had been deadly effective in other campaigns. And it was caught live on video.

Car bombs—a new threat

At about 8:00 a.m., a call came into Chihuahua state police reporting shootings in Juárez in retaliation for the arrest of Jesús Armando “35” Acosta Guerrero, leader of La Linea and accused of the murders of at least two police officers. When a combined force of state and local police arrived, they found a man who had been shot in the head, but who was still alive. The video from Notimex news agency begins with paramedics in bright-red reflective vests treating the injured man. They are surrounded by a few cops all in black with masks on and weapons drawn. Off-screen, a pair of police officers check a suspicious car stopped in the middle of an intersection. Then boom! The screen goes first yellow, then bright red then finally gray as the cameraman runs away from the ear-splitting blast with the camera, still on, pointing at the sidewalk.

There are sirens, shouting and footsteps. When the cameraman is a safe distance away, he refocuses. The first thing he shoots is a paramedic, holding his ears, moaning in pain and wandering aimlessly. He then shoots the scene of the blast. The car that had been there is now a burning wreck with very little of its original structure intact. There are piles around the car—some burning, some not—that appear to be at least in part human remains. The cops, having shaken their initial shock, approach the scene. Some of them appear injured. Two others, without masks, help an injured man from the scene.

Two police officers, a paramedic and a bystander were killed at the scene. Nine other people, including the Notimex cameraman, were injured.

When the video was shown on national television (and CNN), it was an incredible shock. The entire nation saw that car bombs had joined the frightening array of weapons the cartels would use in public places. Comparisons to al Qaeda, Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations were commonplace. “It's a lot like Iraq,” said Claudio Arjon, the owner of a nearby restaurant and one of the first spectators on the scene, not realizing his city was already a more dangerous place than Baghdad, at least statistically. “Now, things are very different. It's very different. It's very ugly.”

The bomb had been triggered by a cell phone by someone watching the scene. They used a corpse as bait. “When (the two officers) went to check the car, there was a dead body in there, dressed up like a police officer, but it wasn't one of ours,” said Juárez police spokesman Jacinto Seguro. “They put him in a civilian car, but dressed him up in a municipal police uniform. That's when the bomb went off. It's like an act of terrorism.” An investigation determined that there was 22 pounds of C4 plastic explosive in the car.

The following day, graffiti appeared throughout the city, with the Juárez Cartel taking credit for the blast. One of them read:

“What happened on September Avenue will keep happening to all the authorities who keep supporting El Chapo. Sincerely, the Juárez Cartel. We still have car bombs.”

“This is significant because usually it's La Linea, the Juárez Cartel's operatives, that sign the messages,” said Juárez mayor José Reyes Ferriz. “It's as if to say: ‘Now it's the big guys in charge, not the operatives.'”

Many media outlets, in particular the influential
Christian Science Monitor
, referred to this new method of terror as indicating this was the final stage of the “Colombianization” of Mexico, a reference to how drug cartels had terrorized that country in the 1990s. And the Colombians were watching. Jose Ramirez Marulanda, a former Colombian army colonel and now principal of Bogotá-based Alpha Security, called the car bombing a “turning point” in the Mexican Drug War. “Because if they decide to start using car bombs one against the other ... then the whole society, bystanders, innocent people could be affected,” he said. “We could expect more sophistication day after day if they decided to go on with these car bombs.”

As if to underline that comparison, three days later, in the Coahuila city of Torreón, a party was being thrown on behalf of a man who had been shot and injured on the city's streets earlier in the week. The guests at the party would not identify the man by name, instead calling him “Mota” (Speck), regional slang for marijuana. At 1:30 a.m., just as the party was beginning to climax, eight trucks pulled up outside the restaurant. A group of masked gunmen broke in and started firing indiscriminately. Twelve men, including Mota, and five women were killed immediately. Another 18 were severely injured. A cop, surveying the scene, told the only reporter who showed up, an American, “they shot anything that moved.”

Chihuahua attorney general Arturo Chávez Chávez told reporters that he thought the killing was a message from one faction of the Juárez Cartel to another. “When the organizations are split, the strongest keeps what it already has and the splinter group goes in search of new latitudes, and that means they invade spaces that already belonged to somebody,” he said. “That provokes conflicts and wars, which is what we're living.”

But it was all part of a bigger war with small victories on both sides. In the early morning rush hour, Jalisco state police spotted a luxury car with two men inside run a red light on Calle Patria in downtown Zapopan, a city that is part of the Guadalupe urban conglomerate. Reinforced by an army unit, the police gave chase into the suburban San Javier neighborhood. The car screeched to a stop in front of an ordinary-looking townhouse and both men jumped out of the car. The man in the passenger seat had an AR-15 and shot it at his pursuers, managing to kill one soldier and wound another. He was killed by a hail of gunfire. The driver ran inside the house and gave up after a half-hour of negotiations.

The dead man turned out to be Ignacio “Coronel Nacho” (Colonel Nacho) Coronel Villarreal. Head of the Coronel Villarreal Gang—whose job was to ferry drugs from Mexico's Pacific coast to the United States in variety of ways, mostly maritime—Coronel Villarreal answered only to Sinaloa Cartel chief Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera himself. The other man was Coronel Villarreal's No. 2, Irán Francisco “Cachas de Diamante” (Diamond Handle) Quiñónez Gastélum. Both had outstanding warrants from the U.S. dating back to 2003.

Although the house was nondescript, police found $7 million in U.S. currency inside and a huge number of luxury items like watches and jewelry. It was linked to another safe house in the same neighborhood with a similar cache of riches.

It was a huge arrest and both the U.S. and Mexican governments treated it as such, congratulating themselves and pointing out how important Coronel Villarreal was to the trafficking industry. Two days later, President Calderón visited Zapopan. While there, he gave a rousing speech about how Mexicans had to keep up with the good fight; that the days of a cartel-free country were not far off and that until then, the government would do what it could to protect law-abiding Mexicans. “We will continue working to strengthen the rule of law to achieve security, stability and tranquility of Jalisco families,' he said.

A year, or even six months earlier, that speech (and the death of Coronel Villarreal) would have meant a lot more. But after three-and-a-half years of war, most Mexicans knew that the removal of a capo really did little to alter the war or their way of life. The trafficking of drugs, cash and firearms didn't slow down. The violence on the street didn't slow down; if anything, it got worse. But there was still one hope. The one big boss was Guzmán Loera. Many believed that taking him down would be a huge step in defeating the cartels. Delighted by his nickname, the U.S. media began to call the strategy “Get Shorty.”

Chapter 14

“A Phase of Very Intense Violence ...”

Of course, while the hunt for
El Chapo
Guzmán Loera was the ultimate strategic goal, the Mexican government still had to keep peace and order as well it could, but the cartels were not going to cooperate.

The lion's share of the violence that had been suffered in Mexico had nothing to do with the police or army, but was a result of cartels fighting each other for territory. And since the death of Arturo Beltrán Leyva, the powerful Beltrán Leyva Cartel had split into two very distinct factions. One was based in Badirguato, Sinaloa, and was led by Héctor “El Ingeniero”
(the Engineer) Beltrán Leyva, Arturo's younger brother. They called themselves the Cartel Pacifico Sur (South Pacific Cartel).

The other faction, based in Torreón, Coahuila, followed Edgar “Barbie” Valdez Villarreal. It was made up of his former gang, Los Negros, and some other members of the Beltrán Leyva who found Hector's leadership less than inspiring. They went by a variety of names, but were usually known as the Valdez Cartel because of their leader's notoriety.

Of course, much of Barbie's allure to cartel members and media alike lay in the fact that he was generally regarded as the most ruthless capo in all of Mexico. So to counter that, Beltrán Leyva had to strike with an even more shocking blow.

It happened on August 22, 2010. Early morning commuter traffic in the Morelos city of Cuernavaca came to a standstill when drivers discovered four nude, mutilated corpses hanging from an overpass. Their index fingers and genitals were found strewn along the roadside, and their heads were piled up against the stucco walls of the bridge supports. Propped against them was a handwritten cardboard sign that read: “This is what will happen to all those who support the traitor Edgar Valdez Villarreal.” It was signed “CPS,” which authorities said stood for Cartel Pacifico Sur.

Later that day, police found a body in a car with Georgia licence plates on the Pacific coast highway Carretera 200 between Zihuatanejo and Acapulco. The U.S. State Department said that the victim was a U.S. citizen from Georgia, but gave no other details about the person's identity or any possible connection with the drug trade.

The death ranch

Two days later, soldiers at a routine checkpoint just outside the city of San Fernando in Tamaulipas saw a badly injured man in ragged clothes step out of the scrub. When he saw them he started shouting in Spanish but in a dialect so thick they had a hard time understanding him. He eventually communicated that he was an Ecuadorean who had been approached by some coyotes who offered to help him sneak into the United States. Once he agreed, the coyotes took him to a ranch, took all his money and told him he had to work for a drug cartel as a
sicario
before they would take him over the Rio Grande. When he refused, they shot him and left him for dead. Once he was convinced they had left, he escaped. The man, an 18-year-old farmhand named Luis Freddy Lala Pomavilla, said he was not the only one the kidnappers were holding.

An armed convoy was sent out down Carretera 101 to investigate his claims. As soon as they were within sight of the ranch, the soldiers were subjected to assault rifle fire and grenade attacks. The resulting gunfight left one soldier dead and another severely injured. One cartel gunman was killed in the melée and another (a minor) captured, but “dozens” (according to contemporary press reports) managed to escape.

The overwhelming odor of the ranch gave away its purpose. Forensic investigators found the bodies of 58 men and 14 women in a sloppy pile against the cinder-block wall of a roofless building. Little or no attempt had been made to hide them. “The bodies were dumped about the ranch and were not buried,” said a military spokesman who refused to be identified. “We are still investigating how long they had been there.” Eventually, all 72 were determined to be illegal immigrants from Central and South America, who were traveling through Mexico as a group. “They carry fairly large amounts of cash with them, in order to pay for the transport and every expense they need to make to reach the border,” Miguel Molina, a Mexican immigration affairs analyst, said of immigrants who pass through Mexico. “All the drug cartels operating in Mexico also have a role to play in the kidnappings of illegal immigrants and otherwise regular people.”

The military—who named Los Zetas as the likely culprit—also found 21 assault rifles, four bulletproof vests, police and army uniforms and four trucks, one with state police markings.

The next day, President Calderón addressed the incident on local radio. “Yesterday's crime, for example, shows (the cartels') beastliness, their brutality and their absolute lack of human scruples,” he said. “I am sure we will still see a phase of very intense violence, principally among cartels.”

The road to Barbie

Calderón would have better news to report in the following month, however. It began on May 25 with a raid at an Acapulco strip joint called XXXoticas, which many claimed was owned by Barbie, that ended with the arrest of eight men. They seized four AK-47s, a Smith & Wesson handgun, a fragmentation grenade and, most important, four cell phones.

Some of the men refused to speak, but others cooperated. One of their cell phones showed repeated calls to a man named Aarón Arturo Ginez Becerril, who one cooperative suspect acknowledged to be one of Barbie's top confidantes. Ginez Becerril's phone was located via GPS in the parking lot of a shopping mall in southern Mexico City, but he was dead before the police arrived, shot once in the head. Using the same technology, they located the number most frequently called on Becerril's phone. It led them to the tranquil mountain village of Cañada de Alférez in the town of Lerma in the state of Mexico, just north of the capital.

Despite being aware that they might well find the notorious Barbie in the area, an elite U.S.-trained unit of Federales set up operations in the town, including a series of checkpoints, without military assistance. On their first day there, they stopped a trio of cars—a Chevy Cruze, a Ford Focus and a Chevy Malibu—they described as “exceeding the speed limit without discretion.” When they pulled them over, the first person to exit the vehicles, who they described as a “large, white man,” came to speak with them. It was only after they arrested him for traffic violations that they realized they had captured Valdez Villarreal—the second-most sought-after and certainly the most feared criminal in Mexico—virtually unarmed and unprotected. Six others in the cars drew weapons, but were arrested without gunfire. Besides Barbie, the Federales captured Maricela Reyes Lozada, Juan Antonio Lopez Reyes, Maritzel Lopez Reyes, Mauricio Lopez Reyes, Arturo Ivan Arroyo and Jorge Valentin Landa Coronado.

Barbie's arrest caused a media sensation on both sides of the border. In Mexico, the reasons were obvious. Valdez Villarreal was an incredibly violent warlord whose presence in custody made the entire country feel safer. And it showed that the Federales could mount and finish a successful operation against a difficult target without military assistance. “The capture of Valdez Villarreal is a high-impact blow against organized crime,” said Calderón spokesman Alejandro Poiré Romero. “This is an important step in the national security strategy.”

Not everyone in Mexico was convinced that putting Valdez Villarreal behind bars would actually change anything. “The arrest of these drug lords does not have any significant effects in terms of flow of drugs to the U.S. It did not happen in Colombia, where the government has dismantled the big cartels, but they are producing
more
cocaine,” said Jorge Chabat, an expert on the drug war at Mexico City's
Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas
(Center for Research and Teaching of Economics). “In the long term, the dismantling of these cartels would in principle produce a reduction in levels of violence, but it is not going to happen in the short term. In the shorter term, there is no significant change.”

In the U.S., Barbie's arrest brought home how close the drug war was. When he was paraded in front of the cameras, it was clear to Americans that Barbie was one of their own. Wearing an expensive green polo shirt with the word “London” stitched on the front, the blonde, green-eyed and tall man was actually quite photogenic (at least by cartel standards), looking far less like a Mexican gangster than a Texas high-school baller who had let himself go a little. In fact, he was both. “He seems to be a pretty bright kid, (but) very brutal and ruthless,” said Scott Stewart, an analyst with the Austin, Texas-based STRATFOR security consulting firm. “In a period of cartel warfare, the enforcers will tend to rise in the organization.”

Even more compelling was his confession. Captured on video, Barbie is seen smiling and occasionally laughing. He keeps wiping perspiration from his head with a tissue and his sleeve, but he doesn't actually appear to be stressed or nervous. He admits that he became involved in the gang lifestyle because of the fast money and he decided to go hardcore because he was appalled at Los Zetas' habit of melting people's bodies and extorting local businesses, so he felt he had to fight them. Barbie quickly admitted to trafficking drugs, mainly from Panama, and that he had extensive “investments” in Colombia. When he is asked if they were drugs, he grinned and said yes. Barbie then boasts of receiving trailer loads of cash from the U.S. in return.

While other capos tend to mumble or stay silent in their taped interrogations, Valdez Villarreal was the opposite, talking openly, even bragging, about his career. He pointed out that he hired “some movie guys” to make a cinematic version of the story of his life, but had cut ties with them—despite a $200,000 investment—when he decided their script was too incriminatory. He said he regretted the violence in Mexico, but blamed it all on
El Chapo
, who he claimed broke a non-aggression pact agreed to by all the major cartels back in 2007.

One of the others arrested—a protected witness known only as “Jennifer”—revealed that Valdez Villarreal controlled the airports at Cancún and Toluca, a city of a million residents just north of the capital, by bribing the top federal agents there, José Antonio “El Buen Hombre” (the Good Man) Rosales Carvajal and Edgar Octavio “El Chuta” (the Shooter) Ramos Cervantes. To gain access to the runways in Cancún, Barbie gave Rosales Carvajal $65,000 in cash and a new BMW. Jennifer also testified that the security detail at the airport was forbidden from inspecting Valdez Villarreal, his friends or their baggage.

And Jennifer dropped another bombshell. Earlier that year a video of four men, bound and obviously beaten, was shown all over Mexican media. The men are interrogated on the video. They reveal that they are members of Los Zetas and they have killed for the gang. At one point, the obvious leader of the quartet is asked “why did you kill my brother?” in reference to a gang member who was murdered. He doesn't answer. Then a handgun comes into the frame and the man is shot in the head. Jennifer testified that the men were kidnapped in Acapulco and brought to Valdez Villarreal, and that the voice of the interrogator was Barbie's.

Soon after his confession, Valdez Villarreal recanted it all, claiming it had been delivered under extreme duress. The DEA and Mexican government agreed that leadership of his gang passed to his father-in-law, Carlos “El Charro”(the Cowboy) Montemayor González.

As their rivals were weakened, Los Zetas, now fully independent of the Gulf Cartel and working hard to push them out of their territory, increased their aggressiveness in the northeast. On September 3, soldiers were fired upon as they approached a ranch near the small town of General Treviño in Nuevo León. The resulting firefight killed five people, who the military claimed were members of Los Zetas.

Training assassins in Ciudad Mier

Later that day, informants led authorities to believe that much of Los Zetas' operation was centered around Cuidad Mier, a Tamaulipas town of 6,000 a few miles from the Rio Grande. The town had been a staging area for Santa Anna's troops in the war for Texas and played host to Fidel Castro in 1956 when he set up a weapons smuggling operation there.

Aerial reconnaissance from a military helicopter revealed what appeared to be a marijuana farm at an old ranch locally known as “El Troncón” (the Stump). There were a number of large vehicles, temporary buildings and camouflage netting. The cameras from the helicopter also showed video footage of armed, masked men in front of the ranch house.

That prompted a combined force of army and naval infantry to stage a large-scale raid on the house. A gun battle that began at about 11:00 p.m. and lasted for about 90 minutes, left 27 accused Los Zetas members dead and two soldiers wounded. Two more suspected cartel members were injured and taken prisoner and three bound men who claimed to have been kidnapped were also taken into custody. Once inside, the soldiers determined that the ranch was not a farm at all, but a training facility for
sicarios
. They uncovered 25 assault rifles, 4,200 rounds of ammunition, four grenades and 23 vehicles, two of which were painted to look like military vehicles.

For many residents of Ciudad Mier, this was the last straw. Things had been tough there for a while. Armed masked men would occasionally engage in gunfights in the town's streets. Sometimes they would drive down the main drag and shoot assault rifles out the windows of their armored SUVs just for the sheer enjoyment of it. One of their favorite targets were transformers, which, when shot, could send whole neighborhoods into total darkness. In May, PAN gubernatorial candidate José Julián Garza Sacramento announced that his party would not field candidates in municipal elections in three towns, including Ciudad Mier, because of cartel-related violence. Later that month—in broad daylight—masked men tied a man to a tree branch and dismembered him alive. Also that summer, a shopping center had been burned out and the local water treatment plant had been attacked and disabled. Since workers were too frightened to return to the building, the region was left without tap water. The town's police station was burned and gutted. Nobody was hurt, but the entire force had long since walked off the job.