Whitey's Payback (21 page)

“These are the techniques of terrorists,” says Jordan.

His observations are echoed by Secretary Clinton, who compared what is happening in Mexico to an “insurgency,” with the cartels attempting to take over sectors of government and whole regions of the country.

Much of the mayhem is facilitated by corruption, with
federales
, municipal police and elected officials on the take. The temptations of narco dollars is seductive, and the threat of violence is persuasive. Public officials and average citizens are often coerced into the narco trade by the drug organizations, which make them an offer:
plato o plomo
, silver or lead. Either you take the cartels' money and cooperate, or you will be shot dead.

Corruption is sometimes a two-way street. Although the United States does not have the deeply entrenched institutional corruption that permeates Mexican society, the drug trade is sometimes facilitated by dirty U.S. border patrol agents, law enforcement personnel, and other government officials on the take.

The killings of the consulate worker and her husband are a case in point. In July, Mexican authorities arrested a local Mexican member of the infamous Barrio Azteca Gang, which operates on both sides of the border (in Mexico it is known as Los Aztecas). According to the Mexican federal police, this gangster—Jesús Ernesto Chávez Castillo—claims that the target of the hit was Lesley Enriquez, the U.S. consulate employee. Chávez says he was the organizer of the assassination, which was ordered by the Juárez drug cartel because Enriquez was corrupt. She was helping to supply a rival gang with visas and had to die. The other victim, in the other white SUV, was murdered simply because the hit men weren’t sure which car belonged to their target, so they decided, just in case, to ambush both vehicles.

The FBI office in El Paso publicly expresses doubt about the explanation for the killings, stating it has no evidence that Enriquez was corrupt. Over the following months, many theories about the killings appear in the press. This speculation takes place against a backdrop of further killings, bombings, kidnappings, and extortion that have turned the narco war into a killing field unlike anything else taking place on the planet.

The narcosphere is a battlefield without borders. Politicians, businessmen, lawmen, bankers, drug lords, gangsters, and poor Mexicans and American citizens all have a role to play in an illicit business that generates, according to some estimates, up to $23 million annually from the United States alone. It is difficult to pinpoint the narcosphere’s central nervous system, but in terms of violence, the central war zone is Mexico’s northern borderland—encompassing the state of Chihuahua and its largest city, Juárez—which produces more victims of narco-terrorism than anywhere else in the country.

Howard Campbell, professor of sociology and anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso, refers to the phenomenon as “partly an accident of geography.” Campbell is author of the 2009 book
Drug War Zone
, a fascinating oral history that explores the Juárez–El Paso narco-economy from myriad perspectives.

For nearly a century, going back to the days of Prohibition and before, America’s southwestern borderland has existed as a storied smuggling route. Some of this history, particularly as it relates to the narco trade, is glorified in
narcocorridos
—melodramatic musical ballads that celebrate drug smuggling, usually sung in the
norteño
style in a wavering falsetto accompanied by accordions and heavy brass. The
narcocorridos
have become the soundtrack to the current war. In 2008, when a drug lord from a rival cartel began a violent offensive to take over drug operations in Juárez, police radio frequencies were hacked to broadcast a
narcocorrido
that glorified his organization. To police in Juárez, it was a warning: We are everywhere. Join our cartel, or you will die.

Says Campbell, “Juárez has become a drug war zone primarily because of its proximity to the world’s largest marketplace for narcotics—the United States.” The professor’s comments are an alternative phrasing of the famous observation of Porfirio Díaz, Mexican president in the late nineteenth century. Said Díaz, “Poor Mexico. So far from God and so close to the United States.”

Diaz was talking about the entire country, but his words resonate with the force of a shotgun blast in Juárez. Since 2008, when the U.S. government signed the Mérida Initiative—an agreement by which the U.S. Congress earmarked $1.3 billion in training, equipment, and intelligence to facilitate the Mexican narco war—there have been close to 7,000 murders in Juárez, a city of 1.3 million people. (By comparison, New York City, a city of more than 8 million, had fewer than 500 murders in 2009.) President Felipe Calderón and others in the Mexican government have claimed that these murders are mostly a consequence of cartel gangsters killing other gangsters. In fact, the victims comprise a broad swath of Mexican society—women, children, policemen, businessmen, public officials, and journalists—leading some observers to note that what is happening in Juárez as a result of a drug war is the full-scale disintegration of civil society.

I arrive at the border crossing on the El Paso side on a hot August morning at 6:00 a.m. My guide is an
hombre
we shall call Christopher. Although Christopher is a gringo, he knows Juárez like the back of his hand. For seven years, from 1997 to 2004, Christopher lived as a heroin addict in one of Juárez’s toughest
colonias
, or slums, situated on the hillside overlooking downtown and across the Rio Grande into El Paso.

My intention is to get a visual sense of the
colonia
known as Felipe Angeles, believed to be a home base of the Azteca Gang, which has been identified as the culprit behind the murders of Enriquez, Redelfs, and Salcido at the border. My guide tells me, “We must go early before most people are awake, like the Comanche used to do it.”

We cross through the checkpoint on foot, passing over the brackish, bone-dry Rio Grande, then grab a bus in downtown Juárez. The bus rambles through the mostly deserted streets of downtown, along Avenida 16 de Septiembre toward Felipe Angeles. After ten minutes, we exit the bus and walk the rest of the way, up a steep hill into
el barrio
.

We pass a police station, where half a dozen municipal cops are arriving for work. They look at us, two gringos walking alone through el barrio before the sun has risen, as if we must be escapees from a mental institution. Curiosity becomes hostility; we are outside the norm and therefore suspicious. A few minutes later, I notice a police jeep following us at a distance.

“We are being clocked,” I tell Chris.

“No big deal,” he says. “The way we’re going, they won’t be able to follow.”

Chris leads me off the streets to narrow gravel pathways, up rocky cliffs, and down hills that no car or jeep could traverse, on our way to find an old friend of his by the name of Chavito. At this hour, the only inhabitants are goats, mangy dogs, and runaway chickens.

We find Chavito, whose home is more like a garage than a house. In the yard is the shell of an abandoned ambulance. We rustle Chavito out of bed. He and Chris embrace.

Chavito is around fifty years old, grizzled, with many missing teeth and a sweet disposition. His stomach is alarmingly distended, he says, from a recent surgery gone wrong. He occasionally winces in pain.

Chris and Chavito talk about old times. Excitedly, Chavito tells a story that is both shocking and familiar.

When Chavito and Chris were at the rehab clinic down the street, they became friendly with two recovering addicts named Carlos and Juan Pablo. Eventually, Carlos and Juan Pablo left and organized their own rehab clinic, a converted house in downtown Juárez that they named El Aliviane. Eventually, Carlos relapsed and again started using heroin; he also became a member of the Aztecas.

The Aztecas have a rule about dope. You can sell it, but if you become a user yourself, oftentimes you are killed. Carlos was targeted for execution. According to Chavito, Juan Pablo met with leaders of the gang and said, “Please don’t kill Carlos. In fact, your policy of killing the addicts among you is wrong. It is inhumane. Please let me take in the Azteca dope addicts, and I will show you that they can be cured. They can be saved.”

The Azteca leadership agreed. A number of gang members, including Carlos, were allowed to stay at El Aliviane, which supplied a mattress, a place to sleep, and a roof overhead.

The problem was that a rival drug organization caught wind of the fact that a number of Aztecas were now residing at El Aliviane. One night in early September 2009, the Sinaloa drug cartel, which is engaged in a turf war with the Juárez cartel for control of drug distribution routes, sent a team of
sicarios
, or assassins, to the clinic. Wearing hoods and carrying submachine guns, they busted down doors and stormed the house. Although only five or six of the twenty people present were Azteca Gang members, the assassins did not discriminate. They rounded up the rehab patients—including Carlos—and made them line up against a wall, then slaughtered them with staccato blasts of machine-gun fire.

Chavito fights back tears as he says, “Most of the victims were innocent. They were not
vatos locos
[gang brothers]. They were addicts trying to get better. They did not deserve to die.”

As we ride the bus out of Felipe Angeles back toward the border crossing to the United States, Christopher tells me he is saddened but not entirely surprised by Carlos’s death. “I always had the feeling he needed to be part of a group, to belong to something,” he says. “He was big on group identity and group loyalty.”

The Barrio Azteca gang, like most street-level criminal organizations, was founded on the concept of group loyalty and identity. Its origins are on the U.S. side of the border, in the Texas state prison system, where, in the mid-1980s, the Aztecas formed from an amalgam of various street gangs. As
vatos
were paroled or completed their sentences and returned to the street, they became prominent in neighborhoods in El Paso and other cities in Texas and parts of New Mexico. Some of the gang members were Mexican nationals who, upon release from prison in the United States were deported to Mexico, where they formed Azteca chapters in Felipe Angeles and other barrios, as well as in the prison systems in Juárez and elsewhere in the state of Chihuahua.

“The gang spread like a virus,” says David Cuthbertson, special agent in charge of the FBI’s El Paso Division. “In a short time, they became the dominant street organization that sold narcotics in El Paso and conducted other criminal activity such as collecting
cuota
[‘tax’] from nonaffiliated drug dealers.”

Given the gang’s cross-border affiliations, it was natural that the Barrio Azteca would be absorbed into the preeminent cartel in Juárez, led at the time by the ambitious drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Carrillo died on the operating table in 1997 while undergoing plastic surgery to alter his appearance. While he was alive, Carrillo put the gang to work as street enforcers and contract killers. If anything, the role of the Aztecas under the cartel’s current overlord, Amado’s brother Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, has grown. The gang organizes and carries out most of the cartel’s major hits and also plays a key role in narcotics distribution and sales.

“If you think of the cartel as a corporation,” says Cuthbertson, “with a CEO and directors overseeing different aspects like logistics, production, transportation, and so forth, then the Barrio Azteca represents the security wing. Structurally, they are more in the nature of a paramilitary organization, with capos, sergeants, and foot soldiers. They serve as contractors for the corporation, but they also do things on their own; they are not obligated to do crimes only on behalf of the corporation.”

Many Barrio Azteca Gang members on the U.S. side of the border have a distinguishing tattoo: Stenciled somewhere on their bodies are the numerals
2
and
1
, representing the second and first letters of the alphabet,
B
and
A
, which stand for Barrio Azteca. Others may bear Aztec symbols on their skin.

As with most street gangs of any ethnicity, the quickest way to rise within the Azteca structure is through acts of criminal daring and violence.

One person whose pathway into the gang and ascension within the ranks followed the usual pattern is Jesús Ernesto Chávez Castillo, whose nickname is El Camello, “the Camel.” Chávez was born in 1969 in Juárez but moved to El Paso with his family when he was seventeen. An early brush with the law came in 1995 when he was arrested attempting to sell marijuana to undercover officers from the El Paso Police Department. He pleaded guilty to a reduced charge and was given probation. Later, in 2001, Chávez was charged with “intoxicated assault”; he was driving drunk when he crashed into another vehicle, seriously injuring four people. Again, he pleaded guilty, but this time he was deported from the United States to Mexico.

Chávez seems to have moved back and forth between Juárez and El Paso on a semi-regular basis. He had two marriages in the United States and fathered three children. In February 2003, he was detained on the U.S. side of the border. When he lied to border patrol agents about his status—a federal offense—he was charged with illegal reentry.

Chávez’s lawyer at the time was Carlos Spector, a renowned El Paso immigration attorney who recently represented several Mexican journalists seeking asylum in the United States on the grounds that their lives had been threatened not only by gangsters, but also by members of the Mexican military. Spector remembers Chávez as “a tough
hombre
, obviously a guy from the streets” but not a high-ranking or connected member of any cartel or gang. The manner by which Chávez, a lowly street thug, became the notorious El Camello is a tale that Spector says could be called “the making of a
sicario
.”

After being found guilty of illegal reentry, Chávez received a mandatory sentence of twenty years. He was sent to the notorious Las Tunas Federal Correctional Facility, ruled from within by the Barrio Azteca. By the time Chávez was released after serving five years, he was a hardened gangster with the criminal contacts on both sides of the border.