El Narco (19 page)

I rushed with other reporters to follow troops into the battle, driving past the lush lakes of Michoacán and up to roughneck drug-producing communities in the mountains. The offensive certainly looked good. Long lines of military Humvees and jeeps full of masked federal police could be seen pouring down highways. In the hill town of Aguililla, long known as a hotbed of traffickers, pumped-up soldiers flooded streets, tossing pickup trucks and kicking down doors while helicopters buzzed relentlessly above. These images were flashed across the nation on daily newscasts. Here was a president who meant business, people remarked. The government was flexing its muscles.

Calderón rapidly spread the offensive to different states. Seven thousand troops rolled into the seaside resort of Acapulco, thirty-three hundred federal police and soldiers marched into Tijuana, six thousand more scoured the Sierra Madre. Soon, some fifty thousand men—including almost the entire federal police force and a substantial part of the effective military—were pulled into the war on drugs across half a dozen states.

Another early move was the mass extradition of kingpins. Just over a month into Calderón’s presidency, a plane left Mexico City for Houston, Texas, with fifteen traffickers shackled and guarded by masked
federales
. Among them were the top American targets of Osiel Cárdenas, head of the Gulf Cartel, and Hector “Whitey” Palma of the Sinaloa cartel. It was another big action that flashed across TV screens and made a big point.

Calderon flew into a military base in Michoacán. Breaking tradition, he donned a soldier’s cap and olive-green army jacket to salute the troops. Mexican presidents have shied away from wearing military colors since PRI civilian politicians took over from revolutionary generals in the 1940s. The photos of Calderón at the base became iconic Mexican political images—the president with his right hand raised and cap down to his spectacles, dwarfed by his muscular defense secretary. To make sure troops were on his side, Calderon pushed a pay hike for them through Congress and praised them as heroes of the republic at every opportunity. As he told the soldiers at Mexico’s number one military base two months into his presidency:

“New pages of glory will be written. I instruct you to persevere until victory is achieved … We are not going to surrender, neither from provocation nor attacks on the safety of Mexicans. We will give no truce or quarter to the enemies of Mexico.”
⁴

It was certainly tough talk. But how different was Calderón’s offensive from policies of the Fox administration? As the war dragged on, Calderón argued again and again that he had opened a new chapter. Previous presidents had let El Narco grow into a monster, he claimed, while he was the first to take it on. If there was violence, he retorted, that was the fault of those before him.

But in many ways, the differences between Calderón’s and Fox’s approaches to the drug war were more about style and scale rather than substance. Fox also sent soldiers to fight drug gangs, achieved major busts, and broke records for extraditions. Calderón’s most novel actions were to increase military presence in urban areas and boost publicity for all his antidrug efforts. And he accompanied the blows with a much more confrontational rhetoric: it was a struggle of good against bad, he said; a fight against enemies of the nation; a battle in which you are with us or against us. His style made it all very much his war. He was bound to the fight.

Calderón had learned from the lessons of Nixon and Reagan that a drug war was good politics. Upon taking power, both those American presidents tuned up the rhetoric and made spectacular mobilizations, and voters loved them for it. Calderón also had the precedent of Operation Condor in the 1970s. In that offensive, the Mexican government beat the hell out of narcos for a year and they got into line. Calderón likely imagined it would be a short and swift campaign, a mistake common to so many drawn-out conflicts. British troops sailing out to the First World War were promised they would be home in time for their Christmas turkey.

Like in Operation Condor, Calderón could also use his drug war to send a message out to leftist militants. During the previous six years, Calderón had watched Fox fold his arms as leftist-led movements had embarrassed the government. In the town of San Salvador Atenco, a group protested plans to build an airport, kidnapping police and threatening to kill them until the government backed down; in Oaxaca, protesters seized the state capital for five months; and in Mexico City, López Obrador supporters blocked the center for two months. The leftists argued they were fighting an unjust system that favored the rich and screwed the poor. Calderón sneered at what he considered vestiges of a backward, anarchic Mexico. He wouldn’t stand for such nonsense. In his first weeks in office, federal officials arrested a key Oaxaca rebel leader, while a judge handed an Atenco militant a hefty fifty-year sentence. Calderón spoke repeatedly about the need to restore order and reassert the power of the state. This message applied as much to street blockades and riots as drug decapitations.

As always, the American carrot was on offer. Three months into his presidency, Felipe Calderón sat down with U.S. president George W. Bush in the southwestern city of Mérida, and they bashed out the terms of their famous Mérida Initiative of American aid for the war. It was agreed that the United States would pitch in with $1.6 billion worth of hardware and training over three years.
⁵
The aid included thirteen Bell helicopters, eight Black Hawk helicopters, four transport aircraft, and the latest gamma scanners and phone-tap gear.

The initiative was quickly compared to Plan Colombia, which beefed up the Andean nation to fight cartels and guerrillas. However, there are some key differences. Plan Colombia was more money to a smaller country and helped transform Colombian security forces from the Keystone Kops to a regional power. The Mérida initiative meanwhile only gave about $500 million a year to Mexico, whose combined federal security budget was already $15 billion.
⁶
Such a sum from the Americans could not drastically change the balance of power. However, advocates argued the Mérida Initiative showed the United States was finally taking responsibility for all the gringo drug takers. Now, it was a U.S.-backed offensive, and whatever Mexican troops did on the ground became American business.

Calderón’s offensive soon posted some whopping results in drug busts. Federal agents stormed a Mexico City mansion and nabbed $207 million of alleged meth money. It was the biggest cash bust anywhere in the world ever. In October 2007, Mexican marines broke another record. The troops made a surprise raid on the industrial port of Manzanillo halfway up Mexico’s Pacific coastline. Steaming through the harbor, marines stormed a ship called
La Esmeralda
, a container boat with a Hong Kong flag that had traveled from the Colombian port of Buenaventura. The troops inspected the floor but it didn’t feel right. So they ripped it open and … bingo. Bricks of cocaine were everywhere. It took them three days to count it. In the end they uncovered 23,562 kilo bricks or more than 23.5 metric tons of the white lady, the biggest cocaine bust in history. It was burned in the biggest cocaine bonfire the world has ever seen.

This enormous amount of cocaine is hard to comprehend. To put in more easily imaginable quantities, it is 23 million gram packets of yayo—or about 200 million white lines cut up on 200 million bathroom mirrors. Sold at gram level on the American street, it would be worth about $1.5 billion, and that is before it is cut up with flour. Calderón was earning his reputation as the Eliot Ness of Mexico. And gangsters were getting seriously pissed.

On the Mexican streets, violence raged on in Calderón’s first year in office much as it had in Fox’s last. The Zetas battled the Sinaloa cartel and its allies in half a dozen states. Both sides increasingly made snuff videos and put beheaded corpses on public display. But the total number of victims was only a little higher than it had been during 2006.

Then in August, some fantastic news arrived: the Zetas and Sinaloa cartel had agreed to a cease-fire. Like so many events in the Mexican Drug War, the first sign of the truce was a rumor from an unnamed source, in this case a DEA agent. But Mexican officials, including the attorney general, soon corroborated it. And narco Édgar Valdéz, called the Barbie Doll because of his blond hair, later gave a videotaped confession in which he described details of the meeting where the truce was hammered out.
⁷

The narco peace summit took place in the northern industrial city of Monterrey between the headquarters of the world’s third-largest cement company and Sol beer factories. It is amazing how capos who had been cutting each other’s head off could sit down for a nice chat. But business trumps bad blood. The two mafias agreed to stop massacring each other and redraw a map of their turf, the Barbie Doll related. The Gulf Cartel and its Zetas army would keep northeastern Mexico, including the city of Nuevo Laredo, as well as the eastern state of Veracruz; the Sinaloa cartel would keep their old territories including Acapulco and also acquire the Monterrey suburb of San Pedro Garza, the richest municipality in all Mexico. The Beard Beltrán Leyva was made the Sinaloan point man to keep peace with the Zetas.

As 2007 ended, I talked to an upbeat Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora. Killings had finally gone down in the months following the truce; the year finished with twenty-five hundred drug-related murders. This was higher than 2006, Medina said, but finally the war had swung in the right direction. The government had made record seizures, extradited hot-potato kingpins, and was regaining control, he argued. American drug agents said they were working with the best Mexican president in history, and U.S. Black Hawk helicopters were due to arrive. After his first year in office, Calderón’s war looked pretty damn good. The president said he would now start focusing on other issues, such as reforming the oil industry.

And then Mexico exploded.

In 2008, the Mexican Drug War intensified drastically and became a full-scale criminal insurgency. In 2007, an average of two hundred drug-related murders occurred per month. In 2008, this shot up to five hundred murders per month. The year saw an extraordinary rise in attacks on police and officials; and the conflict started to have a major impact on civilians, including the grenade attack on revelers during the 2008 Independence Day celebrations. Prolonged firefights in residential areas and massacres of fifteen or more victims at a time became widespread. As the year wore on, American TV networks jumped on the story, and newspapers started saying a real war was being fought in Mexico (although they still struggled to fathom what kind of war it was).

The geographical concentration of the 2008 fighting can also clearly be recognized. Nuevo Laredo was relatively peaceful, albeit under the iron grip of the Zetas. Meanwhile, 80 percent of all killings took place in three northwestern states that form a triangle from the Sierra Madre to the U.S. border: Sinaloa, Chihuahua, and Baja California. This was the region long controlled by the Sinaloan narco tribe. While the capos of this drug realm had always been at each other’s throats, this was the first time that they sent whole armies at each other. Thus, while the first phase of the Mexican Drug War had been Sinaloans against Zetas, the second phase was a civil war in the Sinaloan empire.

The war between Sinaloan capos had three main flashpoints: Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana, and Culiacán. The kingpins of the Sinaloa Cartel, including Joaquin “Chapo” Guzmán and Ismael Zambada, were involved in all three of these fronts. In Juárez, they fought against Sinaloan Vicente Carrillo Fuentes; in Tijuana they backed Sinaloan Teodoro Garcia against the inheritors of the Arellano Félix cartel (also Sinaloans); and in the heartland of Sinaloa they fought against their longtime friend and ally “the Beard” Beltrán Leyva. It is easy to understand how this civil war could produce such massive casualties. But why did the empire blow up in 2008?

Two main arguments float around to explain the implosion. The first was put out by the Mexican government and supported by the DEA. According to this thesis, the war was a result of Calderón’s intense pressure on cartels. With such record-breaking seizures as the 23.5 tons of cocaine,
⁸
they say, gangsters were all losing billions of dollars. This stress pushed them to argue over their plaza payments and who would cough up for lost tons of drugs. The Sinaloans had always been a quarrelsome clan, killing each other in mountain feuds or shooting each other in the Tierra Blanca ghetto. Under Calderón’s push, these tensions boiled over into open warfare, both among themselves and in a desperate lash back against police. Violence was therefore a sign of success, the government argued, and signaled cartels were getting weaker.

The other argument was put out by gangsters themselves and supported by a substantial group of Mexican journalists and academics. According to this critique, the war was linked to government corruption. The Sinaloan cartel of Chapo Guzmán and Mayo Zambada, they say, became emboldened by an alliance with federal officials to attempt a takeover of all of Mexico’s trafficking supported by federal troops. Chapo Guzmán then helped arrest his rivals, such as the Beard’s brother Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, whom soldiers nabbed in Culiacán on January 21, 2008. In reaction, the afflicted capos hit back against federal forces because they were working with Chapo. This accusation was put out on hundreds of messages, or
narcomantas
, written on blankets and dangled from bridges. A typical note, hung up in Juarez, said:

“This letter is for citizens so that they know that the federal government protects Chapo Guzmán, who is responsible for the massacre of innocent people … Chapo Guzmán is protected by the National Action Party since Vicente Fox, who came in and set him free. The deal is still on today … Why do they massacre innocent people? Why do they not fight with us face-to-face? What is their mentality? We invite the government to attack all the cartels.”
⁹