The Cartel (75 page)

He never stopped taking heads.

He lost count.

Six? Eight? Twelve?

He left them by the sides of roads, he hung them from bridges, he did it again and again as if in a dream.

Some things he remembers.

Others he doesn’t.

He does remember the ambush on the convoy of
federales,
when he led twelve men onto a highway overpass outside Maravatío and waited for the convoy to finish getting gas at a station down the road. When the convoy came close, they popped up from behind the railing and opened fire, killing five and wounding seven others.

They used the same trick again a month later, this time killing twelve, and then the
federales
caught on and started sending helicopters ahead of their convoys, but Nazario himself praised Chuy for those attacks.

He remembers the day when they marched six thieves around the traffic circle in Zamora and whipped them with barbed wire and made the thieves carry placards that read
I AM A CRIMINAL AND LA FAMILIA IS PUNISHING ME
. And they hung up a banner—
THIS IS FOR ALL THE PEOPLE. DON
’
T JUDGE US. LA FAMILIA IS CLEANSING YOUR CITY
.

Chuy remembers when Nazario announced “La Fusión de los Antizetas,” allying them officially with Sinaloa and the Gulf to rid the country of the Zeta menace, and this was one of the best days, because the Zetas had raped and murdered Flor.

He took four Zeta heads in Apatzingán that week.

And Nazario made him one of the Twelve Apostles, his personal bodyguard. He went everywhere with the Leader, keeping him safe as he gave out loans to needy farmers, built clinics and schools, dug wells and irrigation ditches.

The people loved Nazario.

They loved La Familia.

Then it happened.

Nazario was giving a Christmas party for the children of El Alcate, outside Apatzingán. It was a happy day, and Chuy stood guard as Nazario handed out toys, clothes, and candy. Chuy heard the helicopters before he saw them, the bass rumble splitting the sky. He grabbed Nazario by the elbow and ran him toward a house as
federales
and troops came in with trucks and armored cars.

With Nazario inside the house, Chuy and some of the others set fire to cars and tried to block the roads, but the troops came in by helicopters. Bullets ripped through the air, striking, yes, La Familia soldiers, but also parents and children who were outside for the fiesta.

Chuy saw the teenage girl go down, smoke coming from the back of her blouse where the bullet hit. He saw a baby shot in its mother’s arms.

He made it back into the house, knocked the glass out of a window, and started to return fire with his
erre.
Another man in the house phoned comrades in Morelia to block roads and attack barracks to keep the army and
policía
from sending reinforcements.

All that afternoon, that night, and all the next day they fought. Chuy led the covering fire as they moved Nazario from house to house and the soldiers came on with grenades, rockets, and tear gas, setting fire to houses and little shacks. The townspeople who could, fled; others huddled in bathtubs or lay flat on floors.

The comrades in Morelia told them that there were two thousand soldiers surrounding the village. Bullhorns called for Nazario to surrender, but he wouldn’t, saying that if this was the garden of Gethsemane only God could take the cup from his hand.

By the afternoon of the second day, the La Familia troops were out of ammunition and the six Apostles who were still alive decided that they would try to punch a hole in the soldiers’ line and break Nazario out when the sun went down.

They settled into a siege as the battle slowed to a match of sniper against sniper. Marshaling ammunition, two rocket launchers, and some grenades, the six gathered with Nazario in a house at the west edge of the village, nearest a tree line, and waited for dark.

Two of the six were already hit, their wounds bound up with strips torn from their shirts.

As the sun went down, Nazario led them in prayer.

Our Father, Who art in Heaven

Hallowed be Thy Name

Thy Kingdom come

Thy will be done…

Two comrades who volunteered to stay laid down cover fire as Chuy burst from the door, shielding Nazario behind him. Another comrade had Nazario’s left arm, a third his right.

The rocket from a launcher blasted the soldiers and Chuy ran for that space. Tracer fire cut the night. The man to Nazario’s right went down, and Chuy dropped back and took his place, firing his rifle with his left hand and running, and then they were in the trees and then they were through and then Chuy felt Nazario slow down and get heavier and when he turned to look he saw the gaping hole and then he was too small to hold the Leader up, and Nazario staggered and fell to the ground. They picked him up and carried him but he died before they got a hundred yards.

They hid in some trees until some comrades made it in from Morelia, and then they put the Leader in the back of the truck and drove into the hills and buried him in a secret place where no one could desecrate the grave.

But three days later people were saying that they had seen Nazario, that he came to them and told them that everything would be well, that he would never leave them, but Chuy didn’t see Nazario and didn’t hear him say that everything would be well.

Chuy walked into Morelia.

He found a cheap room in a slum and slept for two days. When he finally got up, he realized that it was over.

Flor was dead.

And now the Leader was gone.

Chuy decided to go home. He took what money he had and bought a bus ticket to Uruapan, and from there to Guadalajara, and from there to Nuevo Laredo. From there, he planned to cross the bridge one more time and be home.

He hasn’t seen home in five years.

A war veteran, he’s just sixteen years old.

Now he looks out at the mesquite, creosote, and prickly pear, and beyond them the reddish-brown fields of sorghum.

The bus is hot and crowded.

There are maybe seventy people on board, three-quarters of them men, most of them immigrants from El Salvador and Guatemala trying to make it
el norte
for the work. Chuy sits beside a woman and her small child, a little boy. Chuy figures that she’s Guatemalan, but she keeps mostly to herself and so does he.

Chuy looks like any other teenager.

Blue jeans, a black T-shirt, a dirty old L.A. Dodgers ball cap.

The bus stops in the town of San Fernando, where Chuy buys an orange soda and a burrito and gets back on board, eats the burrito, drinks the soda, and falls asleep.

The hissing of the bus’s brakes wakes him up and he’s confused. It’s way too soon to be stopping in Valle Hermoso. Chuy looks through the windshield and sees four pickup trucks pulled across the road, blocking it. Men with AR-15s stand beside the trucks and Chuy knows they’re either CDG or Zetas.

The men come up to the bus and one of them hollers, “Open up, asshole! Unless you want me to shoot you dead!”

He wears a black uniform, bulletproof vest, and kit belt.

It’s Forty.

Chuy slowly pulls the bill of his cap lower over his face.

If Forty recognizes him, he’s dead.

Trembling, the driver opens the door and the men get on the bus, point their guns at the passengers, and shout, “You’re all fucked!”

Forty orders the driver to pull off on a dirt road, and the bus bounces for about ten miles until they’re on a flat, desolate piece of ground in the middle of nowhere. Chuy sees some old army trucks with canvas hoods and a few old buses with broken windows and flat tires.

The Zetas order all the men off the bus.

Chuy gets off, looking at the ground. It’s hot out. No shade under the blazing summer sun.

The Zetas push the men into a line and then start to sort them by age and physique. The older and the weaker are cut out, tied foot to foot, and shuffled off into one of the trucks. Chuy watches as Zetas take the better-looking young women off the bus and load them into a different truck, separating them from their children.

The woman who was sitting next to him screams as a Zeta puts his hand over her mouth and drags her away from her little boy. Chuy knows that she’ll be raped, and, if lucky, survive to be put out on the streets. Other Zetas take the older or homelier women off the bus and put them into another truck.

Chuy knows their fate, too.

Now Forty stands in front of the rest and asks, “Okay, who wants to live?”

A teenage boy pisses himself. Forty sees the stain spread across the front of the boy’s faded jeans, walks up to him, pulls his pistol, and shoots him in the head. “Okay, I’ll ask again! Who here wants to live? Raise your hands!”

All the men raise their hands.

Chuy stares off a thousand yards and raises his.

“Good!” Forty yells. “So here’s what we’re going to do! We’re going to test your skills and see who has balls!”

He whistles and the other Zetas bring out baseball bats and clubs with nails driven into them and toss them in front of the men. Then Forty yells, “Pick up a weapon, pair off with the man next to you, and fight. If you win, you become a Zeta, if you don’t. Well…then you’re fucked.”

An older man near Chuy starts to cry. He’s nicely dressed in a white shirt and khaki pants and talks as if he’s from El Salvador. “Please, sir. Don’t make me do this. I’ll give you all the money I have. I have a house, I’ll give you the deed, only please don’t make me do this.”

“You want to leave?” Forty asks.

“Please, yes.”

“So leave.” Forty takes the bat from the man’s hand. The man starts to walk away. As soon as he steps past, Forty swings his bat into the back of his head. The man staggers and falls to the dirt, raising a small cloud of dust. Forty chops with the bat until the man’s head is just a smear on the dirt. Then he turns back to the men and asks, “Anyone else want to leave?”

No one moves.

Forty yells, “Now, fight!”

Chuy’s opponent is clearly a campesino—big, hard hands, big knuckles, but not a fighter—and he looks scared. Still, he has six inches and fifty pounds on Chuy and he advances swinging the bat at Chuy’s head.

Chuy ducks under, swings his nailed club and shatters the campesino’s kneecap. The campesino goes down face first, then tries to push himself back up, but Chuy finishes him with two blows to the back of the neck.

Forty yells, “This skinny one can fight!”

For a horrible moment Chuy thinks that Forty recognizes him, but the Zeta’s attention goes to other fights. Most of them last a long time—these men don’t have combat skills and their struggles are long, slow, and brutal.

Finally, it’s done.

Half the men are left standing, some of them badly wounded with cuts, broken bones, and fractured skulls.

The Zetas march the ones who can walk back to the bus.

They shoot the others.

The bus drives the survivors farther into the countryside, to a camp that Chuy remembers.

The party goes on that night.

As Chuy and the others sit in a line in the dirt, he hears the women’s screams coming from inside a corrugated steel building. Fifty-gallon barrels are set outside, and every few minutes a body—dead or still barely alive—is shoved into a barrel and lit on fire.

He hears the screams.

And the laughter.

Chuy will never forget the sound.

Never get the smell out of his nose.

Forty walks over to the eleven survivors and says, “Congratulations. Welcome to the Z Company.”

Chuy is a Zeta again.

They don’t send him to Nuevo Laredo or to Monterrey.

They send him to the Juárez Valley.

Valverde, Chihuahua

It’s the nightmare call.

Keller rolls over in bed to answer the phone and hear Taylor say,
“One of our people has been killed.”

Keller’s heart drops in his chest.

It’s Ernie Hidalgo all over again.

“Who?” he asks.

“You know him,” Taylor tells Keller. “Richard Jiménez. A good man.”

Yeah, he was, Keller thinks. “What happened?”

Jiménez and another agent were on the highway from Monterrey to Mexico City. No one knows what the two agents were even doing on that road by themselves, in a car marked with diplomatic license plates. All they know is that their car was run down, forced to pull over, and surrounded by fourteen armed Zetas demanding that they get out of the car.

The agents refused, and yelled that they were American agents.

“Me vale madre,”
the Zeta leader said.

I don’t give a fuck.

The agents phoned the U.S. consulate in Monterrey, and then the American embassy in Mexico City. They were told a federal helicopter would be there in forty minutes.

They didn’t get those minutes.

The Zetas emptied their clips through the car windows. By the time the chopper got there, Jiménez had bled to death, the other agent was in traumatic shock, badly wounded but expected to live. He’d been medevaced to a Laredo hospital.

“Get down to Monterrey,” Taylor says. “Now.”

“What is it?” Marisol asks.

“I have to go.”

She’s knows better than to ask where. “Is everything all right?”

“No.”

Keller gets on the phone again while he’s still dressing and gets Orduña on the special line. The FES commander picks up on the first ring.
“I heard. I’m on my way. A plane is waiting for you in Juárez.”

Marisol is out of bed now, balancing on her cane while she puts on her bathrobe. She looks at Keller questioningly.

“One of our guys got killed,” he says.

“I’m so sorry,” Marisol says.

She’s too kind, Keller thinks, to note that Mexicans are killed every single day and that it’s considered nothing special.

“Yeah,” Keller says, “me too.”

—

Marisol sits at her desk and works her way through piles of paperwork.

The red tape required to manage even a small town is endless, and she wants to finish so that she can get over to the clinic for afternoon hours. She decides to eat lunch at her desk, and calls Erika to see if she wants to join her, but the girl is out in the countryside looking into the theft of someone’s chickens.