Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (32 page)

Many think the narco-corridos are popular hits with no value beyond their unusual and amusing lyrics. But the Mexican army takes a different view. At the Army and Air Force Studies Center, part of the Defense Secretariat, there is a module in the Military Intelligence course entitled “Content Analysis of Narco-corridos.” In the class, officers deconstruct the songs to learn more about the enemy. They know that most narco-corridos have been authorized by the individuals they extol, and that at least some of the words tend to be true. The singers, in their cowboy boots and Texan hats, are the modern minstrels of war and destruction.

If there’s anything to be learned from “Suicide Bodyguard”, it is two of the features that set the Zetas apart from other armed drug gangs: its members are kamikazes, and they have built up around the organization a sense of brotherhood that is almost religious. They are bound by a cult of death.

The Executioner

Heriberto Lazcano was always getting into trouble, ever since he was a boy. The military strictness imposed by his father led him to take it out on his classmates at a boys’ primary school in Mexico City. Yet nobody would have imagined that this kid would become the most bloody, feared, and wanted man in Mexico. He is the perfect assassin. Now in his mid-thirties, he is dark-skinned with almond eyes, and of athletic build. People know him as El LazcaI or Z3, but the nickname that suits him best is El Verdugo, The Executioner. It’s a title he’s earned by the merciless way he puts traitors and enemies to death.

In war, the difference between victory and defeat can hang upon a single man. This is the case with Lazcano, one of the founders of Los Zetas, the indestructible group that for years was the armed wing of the Gulf Cartel. Today it is regarded by the United States government as an “international threat.” In the deals made by the armed forces and police of the Fox government with the Sinaloa Cartel, they never reckoned with the strength of El Verdugo and his armed group:
violent men turned into veritable killing machines. When Lazcano is asked why his paramilitary group adopted the name Los Zetas, he answers chillingly: “Because nothing comes after ‘Z.’ ”
¹

Originally Los Zetas were mostly comprised of highly-trained former soldiers in the Mexican army. Some of them had belonged to the Special Forces Airmobile Group (GAFE), set up at the end of the 1990s to combat the drugs trade. Later they recruited members of the Guatemalan army’s elite unit, the Kaibiles. Now it’s said that any bandit, for less than 5,000 pesos ($400), can join the paramilitary group and kill who they want.

Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano was born in 1974, in Pachuca, Hidalgo. His father, Gregorio, was in the Mexican army and his mother, Amelia, was a housewife. Following in his father’s footsteps, Heriberto joined the army in 1991, when he was just seventeen. Some say he attended the Heroic Military College, graduating as a lieutenant. However, Sedena insists there is no record of him ever attending this institution.
²

He is a violent and profoundly mistrustful man, but insists he has never hurt women or children. He places his own idea of “honor” above even the interests of the drug business. And where honor is at stake, no amount of killing will suffice to compensate for the offense. What happened with his accountant provides a graphic illustration. At the end of 2008, the Mexican army arrested her in Acapulco. Now she is behind bars in the Topo Chico prison in Monterrey. At the time of her arrest, she was brutally raped by soldiers taking part in the operation, as she herself has recounted in her sworn statement.
³
When Lazcano learned what had happened, he was incandescent, and ordered the soldiers who raped her to be hunted down.

On December 21, 2008, residents in Chilpancingo, Guerrero, were treated to a scene out of Dante’s
Inferno
that rocked the whole country. The severed heads of eight soldiers attached to the 35
^th
Military Region were left in a shopping mall. Their bodies, bearing signs of unspeakable torture, were dumped on different stretches of the highway that leads to the state capital.

In the middle of the turf wars between drug traffickers, Lazcano is like Nero: he’d rather see the country go up in flames than lose the war to El Chapo Guzmán, or the government that defends him. El
Verdugo belongs to a generation of drug traffickers who fear neither death nor chaos. Between them all, they have turned Mexico into a graveyard.

The official, Sedena version of Lazcano’s career is that he joined the army as a private in the infantry. His number was B-9223601. As a result of good performance, in July 1993 he was promoted to the rank of corporal.
⁴
In this capacity he learnt to use special weapons and to command squads of men. The Secretariat will never admit it, but El Verdugo did indeed belong to the GAFE.
⁵
As such he was trained to carry out special and covert operations. He took the best courses in intelligence, counter-intelligence, and combat that the Mexican army had to offer. In fact, the United States armed forces gave part of the training at Fort Benning in Georgia.
⁶
However, according to US government archives, no Zeta has been trained by them.

On May 15, 1997, Lazcano was seconded to the Attorney General’s Office (PGR)
⁷
when the secretary of defense, Enrique Cervantes Aguirre, assigned hundreds of soldiers to reinforce the work of the Federal Judicial Police (PJF), headed by General Guillermo Álvarez Nahara. President Ernesto Zedillo had been persuaded that the soldiers would bring to the PGR order, discipline, and improved results in the fight against organized crime. The soldiers-turned-policemen were sent mainly to the border area of Nuevo León and Tamaulipas. General Álvarez gave strict instructions that only the soldiers seconded to the PJF should enter this region. If any civil judicial police officer were found patrolling or carrying out operations in the area, they were immediately sanctioned and sent to Mexico City.
⁸

On September 30, 1997, the PGR dismissed Lazcano, although we do not know why. The Secretariat of Defense only became suspicious of him on February 18, 1998, when he was arrested in Reynosa along with several others; all were released.
⁹
Contrary to what many think, Lazcano was not a deserter, which is a capital offense in most armies. Before fully joining the Gulf Cartel, he requested his discharge from the Mexican army, and this was granted on March 27, 1998.

His right-hand man, among the handful of blood brothers who have been at his side for a decade of mayhem, is Miguel Ángel
Treviño, alias El Muerto, or Z40. Though he does not come from a military background, he seems to have been born with a machine gun in each hand.

With the fortune amassed through his criminal activities, Lazcano appears to have acquired numerous properties. A house in Plaza San Marcos, in Garza García, Nuevo León, is apparently used by Kaibiles as well as by Lazcano himself.
¹⁰
There are four properties in Pachuca, Hidalgo, and it is said that one of these, close to the military zone, is where he resides most of the time, next door to his parents and a sister. Another home has been identified in Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz.
¹¹
His main operating base is in the little municipality of Valle Hermoso, a few miles from Matamoros.
¹²

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the corrupting power of Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, the leader of the Gulf Cartel, was immeasurable. He had the idea of recruiting former soldiers to be his personal bodyguards. The first soldier to get caught up in the web was Arturo Guzmán Decena, Z1, a young lieutenant from Puebla who had been trained in the GAFE. Lazcano and others soon followed. It’s not known exactly how many men Guzmán initially commanded, but reports range from thirty-one to sixty-seven former members of the GAFE.
¹³
In time, the paramilitaries were given responsibility for guarding drug shipments from Mexico to the United States. With the attacks from El Chapo and the government, the Zetas’s role changed substantially: from being the boss’s bodyguards, they became the armed wing of the Gulf Cartel. Now the Zetas conduct their own drug trafficking operations, with contacts in Guatemala, Belize, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela; they operate in alliance with criminal gangs like the Ndrangheta of Calabria, Italy, one of the most powerful in Europe, and they also have a presence in the United States.

In order to replace their casualties, and deal with the attacks from The Federation, the Zetas set up training camps to recruit civilians and drill them in military skills and discipline. Among the instructors were Kaibiles—veterans of the ugly battle against Guatemalan left-wing guerrillas, who brought to Mexico the fashion for beheading and dismembering their victims as an example to anyone who dared defy them. One of these training camps was
on a ranch between the communities of Villa Hermosa and Río Bravo, Tamaulipas.
¹⁴

The existence of Los Zetas went unnoticed by the authorities for several years. The US government didn’t identify them until March 2002, when there was a spectacular firefight in which the drug traffickers used weapons and tactics never seen before. In the process, they managed to prevent the capture of Jorge Eduardo Costilla, El Coss, Cárdenas’s second-in-command.
¹⁵
In 2005, FBI reports suggested there were between 300 and 350 Zetas, including old and new members.
¹⁶
Today there may be thousands, including what the FBI calls Zetitas (baby Zetas), or “Zetas wannabes,” criminal bands that borrow the name and the methods to spread terror through kidnapping and extortion. In 2005, an intelligence center in McAllen, Texas, had identified around 270 such groups. Some of these were set up by Joaquin Guzmán himself, to gather intelligence on his enemies, and to “discredit” them by means of acts the Zetas would not normally commit.
¹⁷

The paramilitary group created by Cárdenas spread like poison ivy. It soon made an alliance with a faction of the Hermanos Pistoleros Latinos gang, based in Laredo, Texas; part of that organization had previously worked for El Chapo Guzmán.
¹⁸
Los Zetas also linked up with members of the so-called Mexican Mafia in California, who they have contracted as hit men.
¹⁹
Los Zetas became an indestructible military force, and the organizations that imitate them have turned into a national curse more difficult to eradicate than the drug traffickers themselves. Their membership soars, because they will accept anyone who’s prepared to pull a trigger for no reason. The droves of Mexican youth without a future are fertile ground for them and other criminal organizations—mere boys and girls, robbed of all chance for a meaningful life.

Currently, the government and some NGOs accuse the Zetas of organizing mass captures of Central American migrants who pass through Mexico just hoping to make it alive to the States. Many don’t. Between 2010 and 2011, more than five mass graves were found full of brutalized bodies, many of them beaten to death; undocumented, anonymous workers whose families will never know their fate.

The horrors told by some survivors are beyond comprehension. They even tell of migrants forced to eat the flesh of their dead companions, to prove the loyalty they have promised in exchange for their lives.
²⁰
Are these real Zetas? Copycats? It hardly matters. It is the impunity enjoyed by some that makes such hell possible.

The Federation started the war

In 2002, when the strength of the Arellano Félix brothers was in dramatic decline, The Federation’s consigliere had a brainwave. Juan José Esparragoza, El Azul, suggested opening a new battle front, this time against the Gulf Cartel.
²¹
He proposed to liquidate the Zetas, who all now saw as their main enemy (and they weren’t wrong). To implement the plan, they would have to invade the Nuevo Laredo territory. This delicate operation was decided at a meeting of The Federation’s leaders in Monterrey.
²²

It was The Federation’s clear intention to make itself the leading force in drug trafficking in Mexico. To do that it had to control the main border crossings into the United States. In those days, if the organization wanted to move drugs across the porous frontier in Tamaulipas state, it had to ask for permission and pay a fee, which was getting more and more expensive. Osiel Cárdenas knew exactly how much every inch of his territory was worth.

No cartel had ever thought of eliminating the Gulf Cartel before. If Amado Carrillo Fuentes had lived, he surely wouldn’t have authorized such a move. But El Azul was very persuasive when he reminded his partners that since 2001 they’d had support from the government officials at the highest level, especially from the AFI—led by Genaro García Luna—and the PGR, particularly in the person of Deputy Attorney General Gilberto Higuera, who supposedly took money for appointing the people they wanted as state representatives of the PGR. What’s more, they were protected by Los Pinos, the presidential palace itself.

The first step towards war was taken by a man born for warfare, Arturo Beltrán Leyva, El Barbas. He contacted someone he trusted, Dionicio García, El Chacho, with whom he’d organized many drug shipments in the past. In 2002 El Chacho was operating in Nuevo
Laredo with permission from Osiel Cárdenas, who had sent the Zetas to look after the territory. When he was already working with The Federation, El Chacho kidnapped and murdered a member of Los Zetas, unleashing a wave of killings in the border town. To put an end to the bloodshed and win the trust of Los Zetas, El Barbas went to see their leader, Guzmán Decena, and told him he didn’t want any problems with his men. He offered to give them access to El Chacho to do what they liked with him, and in exchange he asked for a fresh chance to work that territory. Guzmán Decena accepted, on condition that no member of The Federation would come armed to the area, and that they would always advise them of every drug shipment.