El Narco (43 page)

“When my kidnappers cut off my first finger, I felt pain. When they cut off the second, I felt fear. When they cut off the third, it gave me rage. And when they cut off the fourth, I filled with strength to demand of the authorities that they don’t lie, that they work, that they save our city of fear. And if their hand trembles, I’ll lend them mine.”

He holds up his hands close to the camera. His right hand is missing the little finger; the left is missing the little, ring, and middle fingers. The stumps left behind are of varied lengths, painting a picture of cruelty.

Another campaigner, Isabel Miranda de Wallace, took activism a step further. After kidnappers killed her son, Miranda pursued the case until she was authorized by the courts to become its official investigator. After five years, she located all the culprits and saw they were arrested. It was a great achievement, but also highlighted how weak Mexico’s justice system is.

The anticrime movement has grown in strength to gain national prominence. It has organized two marches against insecurity, and a quarter of a million people took to the streets each time calling on the government to act. However, some reasons can be identified to explain its lack of effectiveness. First, the movement has been drawn into the bickering of Mexican politicians and been used by some officials to bash others. Mexico’s deep class divisions are also a barrier. Some on the left accuse the activists of being rich bourgeoise out of touch with the problems of poor Mexicans. This polarization has weakened Mexican society’s resistence to the crime wave.

The biggest problem of all has been the involvement of drug cartels in kidnapping. When abductions first started in the 1990s, it was almost all done by freelance criminals who had nothing to do with the mafia. One such rogue psychopath was Daniel “the Ear Lopper” Arizmendi, a former police detective from the industrial city of Toluca just outside the capital. The long-haired sadist, who looks a bit like Charles Manson, secured various million-dollar ransoms before police locked him away in a secure unit.
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Then some gunslingers linked to the mafia started partaking in kidnappings up in Sinaloa. One gang was known as the “finger choppers.” They worked with drug growers and smugglers in the Sierra but also kidnapped the families of wealthy ranchers. Their most famous victim was the son of superstar singer Vicente Fernández, who lost two fingers to the mobsters before being liberated for a reported $2.5 million.
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After a backlash from local businessmen, the Sinaloan Cartel apparently prohibited kidnapping in the region. The punishment for violating the ban: death.

I arrive at one Culiacán murder scene that appears to be cartel justice in action. The corpses of two men are dumped on the side of the road with signs of torture and bullets in their heads. A note sits beside the bodies: DAMN KIDNAPPERS. WHAT’S UP. GET TO WORK. This iron rule has been effective. Sinaloa, the cradle of Mexican drug cartels, has had one of the lowest kidnapping rates in Mexico. The mafia offers itself as protectors of the people, including the rich and middle class.

But while the Sinaloan Cartel prohibits kidnapping in its heartland, gunmen linked to the Sinaloa mob kidnap in other parts of Mexico. In 2007, the feisty magazine
Zeta
ran a story about abductions in Tijuana by the Sinaloan mafia. “For organized crime, the life of people from Baja California is worth very little,” the article began, tracing a wave of kidnappings of Tijuana businessmen to the Sinaloan “finger choppers” gang.
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A local commander of the Sinaloa Cartel was also accused of kidnapping Mennonites from a colony in Chihuahua state.

Such contrasts are typical on Mexico’s mafia landscape. In one area, a mob can pose as protectors of the people and administer justice; in another, they can bleed the community. La Familia claims to execute kidnappers in their home state of Michoacán. But over the line in Mexico state, La Familia gunmen are accused of rampant kidnapping to fund their plazas.

Kidnapping spiked to unprecedented levels from 2008 as the Mexican Drug War intensified. Many point to cartels reacting to major seizures and lashing out for other sources of income. The government says this shows gangsters are desperate, on the ropes. But there are also signs that kidnapping simply increased amid the lawless atmosphere generated by so much violence. When federal police are themselves being kidnapped and murdered, there is less hope they can save you or your loved ones.

The original kidnappings in the 1990s targeted the rich, but many of the more recent victims have been middle or lower-middle class. Ransoms are often between $5,000 and $50,000, enough to force middle-class Mexicans to lose their life savings or sell their homes. Doctors, who are very visible, have suffered from rampant kidnappings, as have owners of car shops, engineers, and anyone seen getting a severance payment. People with close relatives making dollars in the United States are often targeted.

The drug traffickers most often accused of kidnapping are the usual baddest of the bad, the Zetas. Kidnapping is one of the basic ways Zetas cells fund themselves. They kidnap on an industrial scale. In cities from the Gulf of Mexico to the Guatemalan border, Zetas cells are said to pore over lists of potential abductees, taking anyone they think can pay up. One businessman who was kidnapped in the city of Tampico in 2010 said he personally knew of fifty cases within a year of the Zetas’ taking over the town.

The Zetas have also targeted an even poorer class of victim—Central American migrants. The territory controlled by the Zetas on the east of Mexico is one of the busiest corridors for migrants attempting to reach the United States. The vast majority are from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, traveling on cargo trains and then switching to buses before swimming over the Rio Grande. It is a tough road to the American Dream, and it often leads to a hellish fate because of the Zetas.

Poor migrants may seem an odd target for a kidnapping. Surely they have no money. That is why they risk their lives migrating. But even poor people have relatives with savings, and the Zetas can often get $2,000 from kidnapping migrants. If you multiply that by ten thousand, you get $20 million—truly kidnapping en masse.

This holocaust has been detailed most thoroughly by Oscar Martinez, a brave Salvadoran journalist who spent a year following his countrymen on the dark roads through Mexico, jumping trains with them, sleeping at hostels, and hearing of their terror. Oscar traced the beginning of the mass kidnapping to the middle of 2007. But the story was largely ignored for years, Oscar writes, for two reasons: local journalists were threatened with death if they reported on it; and few cared about what was happening to the poorest of the poor.

By 2009, the tragedy at last began to gain attention. Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission released a report based on testimonies of migrants who had been kidnapped. It estimated a stunning ten thousand had been abducted in six months. The scale was unbelievable.
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To capture so many migrants, Zetas gunmen kidnap huge groups from trains, buses, or trekking though the bush. They are aided in their mission by their huge network of corruption, especially of municipal police. An army of the poor, the Zetas are particularly adept at flipping rank-and-file police officers.

Zetas then take the mass-kidnapped groups to ranches until they get payments from family members up in the United States or down in Central America. They usually collect the bounty by money-transfer services such as Western Union. These detention camps exist right up the east coast of Mexico, especially in Tamaulipas state, across the border from Texas, in Veracruz, and in Tabasco.

One such camp was located on the Victoria ranch, near the town of Tenosique in the swampy south. The horror story that played out there is told in detail in testimonies collected by human rights workers. In July 2009, fifty-two migrants were hauled off a cargo train by fifteen armed men. Arriving in the camp, their captors announced, “We are the Zetas. If anyone moves, we will kill them.” They selected captives and made them kneel down in front of the group, then smashed their lower backs with a wooden board. This torture method is so common to Zetas that they even have their own verb for it,
tablear.
It causes intense pain, threatens vital organs, and leaves distinct bruises. They also starved victims, suffocated them with bags, and beat them with bats. Captive women were repeatedly raped.

Two migrants managed to escape one night. But a commando went after them into the nearby swamps. The migrants were strangers to the terrain, but the Zetas had local men who knew it like the back of their hand. Both escapees were recaptured and dragged back. The Zetas shot them in the head in front of the rest of the terrified prisoners.

To get a better understanding of this terror, I traveled to a migrant shelter in the southern state of Oaxaca. I soon heard stories from several people who had survived kidnappings, confirming the reach of the tragedy. Among them was Edwin, a forthcoming Afro-Honduran in his twenties with warm eyes and well-kept dreadlocks. Zetas had captured Edwin along with a group of sixty-five migrants in Veracruz state and taken him hundreds of miles in a car until he was stashed in a safehouse in Reynosa, on the border. “The only thing that goes through your head is that you are going to die,” he told me, remembering his ordeal. “You think they are going to take you some place and it is all going to end.”

Edwin was locked up for four months. His captors fed him just once a day with a hard boiled egg and beans, starving him to his skin and bone. He was finally released after his family wired a ransom of $1,400—a small fortune to them. He said he was scared to attempt the trip through Mexico again, but poverty drove him to do it. “In my country, things are very difficult and I have no option but to risk a journey through here. I hope to God it will be all right.”

International human rights groups picked up on the news of the mass kidnappings with Amnesty International describing it as “a major human rights crisis.”
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But governments were still depressingly inactive about it, deriding it as a marginal issue. Until August 2010. Then came the massacre that shocked the world.

The San Fernando massacre is a landmark in the Mexican Drug War. It surely woke up anyone who still doubted the existence of a serious armed conflict south of the Rio Grande. But for those following the mass attacks on migrants, it was a tragedy waiting to happen.

San Fernando began just like all the rest of the mass kidnappings. Zetas gunmen stopped the victims at a checkpoint and abducted them, in this case from two buses. The group featured many of the usual Central Americans, but was atypical in that it also had large numbers of Brazilians and Ecuadorians. The Zetas marched the prisoners to the San Fernando ranch, which is in Tamaulipas state, just a hundred miles from the U.S. border. After a long, hard journey, the migrants were closer than ever to their destination. Then something went wrong, and the Zetas decided to murder everybody.

The pure scale of death shocked the world. The seventy-two corpses were piled haphazardly around the edge of the breeze-block barn, arms and legs twisted over one another, waists and backs contorted. There were teenagers, middle-aged men, young girls, even a pregnant woman. This horror could not be ignored.

How, people gasped, had a massacre, comparable to war crimes, taken place in one of Mexico’s most developed regions? San Fernando brought home the erosion of society. In the discussion among Mexicans following the tragedy, one telling word was repeated again and again:
vergüenza
, “shame.” How would other nations look at what Mexicans had done to their citizens? And how could Mexicans now condemn the maltreatment of migrants in the United States?

The exact circumstances leading to the mass execution are still unclear. Most details we know came from a nineteen-year-old Ecuadorian who, against all odds, survived the massacre. When the gunmen fired, a bullet went through his neck and out his jaw. He fell down as if dead but was still conscious, and after waiting patiently for hours, he got up and stumbled miles on foot. He passed several people, but they were all too frightened to help him; the terror of cartels has left people scared even to help a dying man. Finally, he reached a military checkpoint. A day later, marines stormed the ranch and found the corpses.
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However, journalists never a got a full testimony from this survivor. For his own protection, the Ecuadorian was kept at a marine base before being flown back to his homeland. He still fears for his life.

There should have been a relentless investigation into the massacre in Mexico, but it soon turned into a typical botched case. First a prosecutor assigned to it was assassinated. Then a caller phoned police to announce that three dead bodies on the side of the road were men responisble for the massacre. The Zetas, it seemed, had offered their own justice.

As families buried their dead in their homelands, they screamed for answers. What could anyone gain from such an atrocity? Was it a message to others not to resist? Or were all the captured migrants too poor to pay? Or did the prisoners rebel? Or was the Zetas leader at the scene just a total psychopath? Perhaps we will never know.

An even deeper concern is that the massacre is not really isolated. The Salvadoran journalist Oscar Martinez has found countless accounts of migrants who have disappeared on their journey through Mexico. Authorities need to excavate around the ranches used as detention camps, he writes. There could be mass graves, he fears, with thousands of corpses.

The Zetas also use their muscle in less bloody ways to make a buck. Among them is the manufacture of pirate DVDs. The group actually prints up its own versions of blockbuster movies and sells them to market stalls. I see the cover of a Zetas copy of the zombie-slaying action film
Resident Evil.
The sleeve has some grainy photos from the flick with the words PRODUCCIONES ZETA in blue letters in the top left-hand corner. Market-stall owners say they buy them from the Zetas’ distributor for ten pesos (eighty cents) a movie. The Zetas demand that the stall owner buy from no other providers. But in return, the Zetas promise protection from any problems with police.