El Narco (21 page)

Suddenly, at eleven A.M., a commando troop of gunmen stormed the car shop. At the moment they entered, César was under his SUV, looking at the brakes. His brother, Cristóbal, and the other eight customers and mechanics were all exposed.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The assassins sprayed everyone in sight, unleashing hundreds of bullets around the workshop. In seconds, nine people, including Cristóbal, were shot dead.

César was under the SUV so the assassins didn’t see him. This saved his life. But he was hit by two bullets in his leg. He couldn’t even feel the wounds. All he could think was, “If these assassins see me, I’m dead.” He felt his cell phone in his pocket. If it rang, the gunmen would hear it and he would be dead. But if he tried to turn it off, it might make a bleep, and he would be dead. One of the assassins dropped a circular ammunition clip right next to the SUV. “If he ducks down to pick it up,” Cesar thought, “I will be dead.”

Minutes seemed like hours. The gunmen paced around the car shop, checking that there were no survivors who could identify them. By a miracle, they didn’t see César. And they marched out.

César waited for more eternal minutes. Then he crawled out from under the SUV and stared at the corpses around him. There were nine bodies; two more than in the St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago. And this was just one forgotten incident in the Mexican Drug War. One of the corpses was Cristóbal. César could do nothing for his younger brother, the sibling that he saw grow from a baby to a sixteen-year-old.

César had two bullets in his leg but still had so much adrenaline in his blood that he couldn’t feel them. He rushed out onto the street, managing to wander away before policemen arrived to seal the scene. The killers were causing more havoc, shooting at a local patrol car as they sped away through town.

César walked a few blocks into a swarm of people going about their daily routines—shopping, thinking about collecting kids from school, planning what they would have for lunch—oblivious to the massacre. The adrenaline started to go down. César stopped on the street. The first thing he thought about was not getting to hospital and saving his leg; it was about his brother, Cristóbal, and his mother, Alma. He phoned Alma. “Mama, there was a shooting in the mechanics shop. I am okay. But I don’t know where Cristóbal is.” It is hard to tell your mother that your brother is gone.

Alma picked César up and took him to hospital. A surgeon removed the bullets and he was in pretty good shape. He couldn’t run fast anymore. But he could walk. One local newspaper erroneously reported that he was killed in the massacre. He didn’t correct it; he didn’t need to attract attention to his being there. He saw nothing from under the car. But some may have feared otherwise. His friends kept a distance. They worried that he could be hit and didn’t want to be standing next to him to catch a bullet.

Alma had lost her youngest son. No one should have to bury his or her child, especially when he is sixteen and perfectly healthy. I have another friend who lost a young daughter and described it to me in the following way: “Once you have lost a child, there is nothing anyone can do to you that is worse.” I filmed Alma crying by Cristóbal’s grave, holding up a large framed photo of him, an image that flickered for a few seconds on television sets in far-off lands.

César and Alma later heard the mechanics shop was part of the financial network of a drug trafficker. A rival crew hit it as part of the turf war. You bring your enemy down by destroying their whole infrastructure: their police protection, their soldiers, and their assets. But did an innocent sixteen-year-old really need to die for that? Did that really bring a capo closer to victory?

After pressure from Alma and other families, the federal attorney general’s office finally picked up the case. Two years later, they still had nothing on it. The government is dealing with thirty-five thousand drug-related murders, including the deaths of a leading gubernatorial candidate and dozens of mayors and police chiefs. The massacre in the Culiacán car shop is way down on its list of priorities. Alma and other mothers traveled to Mexico City and protested in the central plaza. They stood in a sea of people, one more rally in a swarming metropolis with demonstrations daily.

Chapo and Beltrán Leyva carried on blowing the hell out of each other throughout 2008. But by 2009, federal forces and American agents started to close in on the Beard.
Federales
raided a narco fiesta where famous musicians were playing, but the Beard narrowly escaped the sweep. Then in December 2009, American intelligence agents tracked Beltrán Leyva down to an apartment block in Cuernavaca, a spa town an hour’s drive from Mexico City, where conquistador Hernán Cortés had built a huge plantation in the sixteenth century. The Beard used the area’s green pastures to fly in cocaine.

American agents gave the address of the Beltrán Leyva safe house to Mexican marines, an elite force who had been trained with the U.S. Northern Command. Two hundred marines surrounded the building and a helicopter hovered overhead. Beltrán Leyva phoned his old friend and protégé Édgar Valdéz, the Barbie Doll, asking for hit men to break him out. The Barbie replied that the situation was hopeless and advised the Beard to give himself up. Beltrán Leyva said he would never go peacefully.

Marines tried to shoot their way in. Beltrán Leyva and his band of desperadoes fired back out of the windows and lobbed grenades. After two hours, marines stormed the apartment and blew away everything in sight. Beltrán Leyva and five of his aides were torn to pieces. The Beard had gone down like Al Pacino in
Scarface
, blasting his way to the next world. He was forty-eight years old.
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Someone decided to have some fun with the body. Perhaps it was the victorious marines, or maybe it was the forensics team. They pulled Beltrán Leyva’s trousers around his ankles and decorated the bloody corpse with dollar bills. Gangsters played with the cadavers of dead policemen, so why shouldn’t the good guys do the same to humiliate their victims? Photographers were invited in to snap pictures of the defiled body of the Beard. Within hours, it was all over the Internet.

Calderón’s administration made the mistake of giving a public funeral to a marine who died in the raid. Uniformed men lowered his coffin into the earth and fired a salute into the sky. The next day, the marine’s family held a wake in their swampy, southern hometown of El Paraiso—a name that means “paradise.” Gunmen stormed into the candlelit vigil and killed the marine’s mother, aunt, brother, and sister. Calderón called the assassins “cowards.” But it was hard for a president to drown out a clear message: if you come after us, we will wipe out your entire family. Marines’ identities were kept secret after that.

Family members buried the Beard in the Humaya cemetery in Culiacán, a graveyard packed with the grandiose tombs of generations of Sinaloan narcos. Police and soldiers stood by waiting for his villainous brothers to turn up. They all stayed away, with only women and children attending the funeral. A few weeks later, a severed head was stuck on the Beard’s grave. A gruesome photo shows it in graphic detail; the victim is a mustachioed man in his thirties, the cranium between two enormous bouquets of flowers on the tomb. Even with death, the beef had not completely stopped.

The killing of the Beard, one of Mexico’s most-powerful-ever traffickers, was a big victory for Calderón. But it did nothing to stop the violence. Instead it encouraged local mafias to try to seize Beltrán Leyva’s lucrative territories, spreading the war from the Sinaloan empire of the northwest to Mexico’s center and south. The warmongers switched alliances, betrayed each other, and wreaked bloody vengeance, exacerbating an already tangled conflict. The Mexican Drug War thus entered a third and even bloodier phase: fighting in a dozen states involving a dozen warlords.

Meanwhile, the ruckus between Sinaloan capos raged on in Ciudad Juárez, taking a city turf war to new depths. Thousands of gangbangers from the city’s sprawling slums were pulled into the conflict, barrios warring against barrios. In 2009, Juárez famously became the most murderous city on the planet, overtaking Mogadishu, Baghdad, and Cape Town.
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Tens of thousands who had papers fled over the border to live in El Paso. This exodus bled the economy, in turn leaving more jobless young men to fall into the ranks of the cartels. It was a vicious cycle. Juárez became a case study for urban failure.

By the end of 2009, things looked as if they couldn’t get any worse. Then they did. While the army and the police had been dragged into the Sinaloan war in the northwest, the Zetas had multiplied across the whole of eastern Mexico, down into the southern states of Oaxaca and Chiapas and over the border into Guatemala. Many Zetas had been born poor country boys, and now they recruited thousands more of their ilk, forming cells in every small town, village, or barrio they touched. By 2010, the Zetas were estimated to have more than ten thousand soldiers.
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Everywhere they went, they recklessly extorted, kidnapped, and looted. The old bosses in the Gulf Cartel could not restrain them; they were an army run by hit men such as Lazcano, the Executioner. Violence was no longer a way of control but a basic language of communication. They committed atrocities that made even seasoned cartel bosses sick, such as the massacre of the seventy-two migrants. They had gone beyond the pale.

Many in both the Mexican security services and the old cartels saw the Zetas as a psychotically antisocial movement that needed to be wiped out. Gangsters put out messages on blankets and Web sites calling for a national effort to destroy them. This unleashed some of the worst battles to date, particularly in the Zetas’ heartland of the northeast. The Zetas fought off army units and rival cartel hit squads with heavy-caliber machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. The fighting made the Mexican Drug War at last start to look like a more traditional war, with battles that lasted six hours and left dozens of bodies. In 2010, drug-related murders shot up drastically, to a stunning fifteen thousand over the year.

Calderón desperately threw more resources into his military offensive, repeating his mantra: “We won’t back down against the enemies of Mexico.” But as troops hit back, it only gave him another headache: they kept shooting civilians. When you unleash soldiers to fight criminals, you invariably end up breaking a few innocent heads. This has occurred in so-called peacekeeping missions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Northern Ireland, to name a few. True, Mexican soldiers were not foreigners, such as Americans smashing their way through Fallujah. But they were from different states, normally hailing from Mexico’s poor south and being sent on missions to its commercial north. They fought an enemy that blended into communities just as insurgents did in Baghdad, Kandahar, or Belfast. Soldiers quickly became an occupying force who eyed all locals as potential narco assassins. And many of those locals did indeed act as the eyes and ears of drug mafias.

Like troops in Iraq or Northern Ireland, Mexican security forces got hit with guerrilla tactics. Some of the worst attacks included the kidnapping and murder of ten soldiers in Monterrey; the ambush and killing of five soldiers in Michoacán; and a car bombing in Ciudad Juárez that killed a federal police officer and two others. More grinding were daily ambushes and kidnappings of agents in small groups. Troops were angry, scared, and aggressive. With itchy fingers, they opened fired on cars stopping too slow at checkpoints such as one in Sinaloa, in which they killed two women and three young children. On other occasions, they inadvertently shot civilians in the midst of running battles with cartel gunmen, such as two students killed in Monterrey. Worse still, soldiers were accused of premeditated abuses, including torture, rape, and murder. One case involved four teenage girls in Michoacán who said they were taken to a military barracks and repeatedly raped. After four years of Calderón’s offensive, police and military bullets had killed more than a hundred innocent civilians.
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Calderón was in an impossible spot. The war he had promoted triumphantly in his first year had sprung rudely from his hands like a wild dog. On several occasions, he tried to push the drug war off the top of the agenda and say he was now focusing on other issues. But every time, a new massacre or atrocity would hit the headlines, pulling him back in. The conflict was compared to the Iraq War in its worst years, a fight that Calderón couldn’t win but couldn’t pull out of.

In 2011, four and a half years after his triumphant taking of power, Calderón looked concerned and exhausted. Soldiers and federal police kept nailing major kingpins, but violence only flared up more. Calderón backed away from his bellicose rhetoric, arguing it was a crime problem after all. He blamed the media for focusing too much on the bloodshed and giving Mexico a bad name. He promised unconvincingly that he would defeat El Narco by the time a new government took power in 2012. The constitution banned him from standing for a second term, and Mexican presidents generally become lame ducks toward the end of their term.

The Obama administration stumbled on with a befuddled agenda on Mexico. Publically, officials kept cheering on Calderón’s campaign. But WikiLeaks showed that privately diplomats had serious concerns about where the drug war was headed. In January 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton shot down to Mexico to say Calderón was winning the war—as part of a Wiki Leaks-damage-limitation tour. But then in February, the U.S. army’s number two civilian leader, Joseph Westphal, contradicted her, saying criminal insurgents were in danger of controlling Mexico:

“This is about potentially the takeover of a government by individuals who are corrupt and have a different agenda … I don’t want to see a situation in which we have to send soldiers to fight an insurgency on our border.”
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The Mexican government reiterated its argument that it is not fighting an insurgency and Westphal retracted his statement. But the Obama adminsitration’s flip-flop had sent a telling message—that it was increasingly confused on Mexico and shaky in its support for the current strategy.