El Narco (41 page)

“I sold the crystal and every week I paid money to the Mexican Mafia. If I didn’t, I would be in real problems. The bosses of the Mexican Mafia are in prison, but they have reach on the street and can still kill people there.

“When I went down to Mexico, it was completely different. In Tijuana, all of the sellers have to pay up their quota to the cartel. In Mexico, the cartel controls both the traffic and the street selling.”

Some people may think this difference is academic. The Mexican Mafia or Sinaloa Cartel are both rabid criminal organizations selling narcotics and committing murder. But the difference is very real. The Sinaloa Cartel is a criminal paramilitary complex that has transformed amid the instability of Mexico; the Mexican Mafia is a prison and street gang nurtured in the realities of America. The Sinaloa Cartel can take out senior police commanders and leave piles of twenty bodies; the Mexican Mafia is involved in jail-yard stabbings and neighborhood shootings with pistols.

Most of the drug violence in the United States is the result of territorial disputes over these street corners. This has an obvious logic: corners are physical turf and are not big enough for two gangs. Killings that have haunted Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and dozens of other cities have roots in fights for this real estate. Countless street gangs have been involved. But the Mexican cartels themselves have not yet been pulled into this melee. Why should they? Their drugs go to whoever wins. The fear is that if Mexican cartels ever did get pulled into American corner politics, it would be cataclysmic.

The nightmare of El Narco stepping into American street-gang warfare is starting to play out—in the Lone Star State, which straddles half of the Mexican border. This spillover has two fronts: the central corridor of El Paso-Juárez, and a thousand miles east near the Gulf of Mexico.

In El Paso, the links between the American streets and Mexican drug lords have been strengthened by the growth of the Barrio Azteca gang. Unlike other Chicano gangs, the Barrio Azteca has forged a powerful bond with Mexican cartels and become a true cross-border organization.

Barrio Azteca was founded by El Paso gang members incarcerated in Texas’s high-security Coffield prison in the 1980s. They came together so the inmates from El Paso, known fondly as Chuco Town, could defend themselves against other prison mobs such as the Mexican Mafia, with its roots in California. They socked, stabbed, and strangled the bullies pushing them around and became themselves feared intimidators.

Like the Mexican Mafia, the Barrio Azteca gang spilled out into the street. They taxed dealers, and as members were released, they gained a fearsome reputation for violence on the outside, putting out murder contracts, known as green lights. By the late 1990s, they had more than a thousand members spread among the penitentiaries and Texas cities and made millions of dollars from drugs. Then two crucial developments took place: the Barrio Azteca formed cells over the border in Juárez, and they began to deal directly with the Juárez Cartel.

The growth of El Barrio Azteca south of the Rio Grande is linked to the area’s distinctive cross-border community. The urban sprawl of El Paso and Juárez is in many ways one community, with families, friends, businesses—and gangs—straddling the line. To compound this, some Mexicans without papers joined up with Barrio Azteca during jolts in Texas prisons. When they finished their sentences, they would be deported to Juárez, where they would carry on gangbanging. These converts recruited fresh members from Juárez’s own burgeoning street gangs and in its state and municipal prisons (where the Barrio Azteca now controls an entire wing).

Barrio Azteca members had long sold drugs moved by the Juárez Cartel. As they grew in power, they forged a much stronger alliance with the cartel. An Azteca member named Diablo even described this deal on U.S. television: “The cartel saw that we were doing a lot over there. So they offered us to, like, become a chapter.”
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He then describes how Barrio Azteca began to buy kilos of cocaine at cheaper rates directly from the cartel, and in return they would smuggle caches of assault rifles south from Texas gun shops. Furthermore, if the Juárez Cartel needed some intimidation or violence in the United States, Diablo says, they would call on the Barrio Azteca.

When the Sinaloa Cartel stormed into Juárez in 2008, the Barrio Azteca was called in to help defend the fort. They are alleged to have participated in some of the most brutal massacres south of the border. As Juárez police investigations are all full of holes, it is impossible to know exactly how many of the six thousand killings in Juárez the Barrio Azteca committed, but the number is considerable.

Virtually all this bloodshed has been kept south of the border. But an increasing number of the victims are American citizens. In his TV interview, Diablo describes how the gang often kidnaps targets in El Paso and drives them south to kill them. A murder in Texas attracts a big investigation; in Juárez it is one more of the ten corpses hitting the streets daily. Mexico has become a killing field for American-reared psychos. Down in Juárez, Diablo goes on, the Barrio Azteca will often torture and murder its victims in front of a cheering crowd of gang members. As Diablo describes:

“We’ll have a hole in the ground. We’ll throw a bunch of mesquites in there, gasoline. And then beat the shit out of you and then throw you in there and light you on fire. Sometimes you’ll be dead. But not all the time. Sometimes they’ll light you so they can hear you scream. You can hear them and it smells real bad, like human flesh smells when it’s burning. The first time that I seen something like that, I couldn’t sleep for a while.”

Wonks at the State Department couldn’t sleep either when they heard about one ferocious Barrio Azteca attack: in March 2010 the gang murdered three people connected to the U.S. consulate in Juárez. The notorious killings took place minutes apart in separate attacks on two cars leaving a party at a U.S. consulate worker’s home. One car contained the husband of a Mexican employee at the consulate; the other an American consulate worker and her husband, who worked in the Texas prison system; she was pregnant, and the couple’s first child, a seven-month-old baby, watched her parents die from the back of the car.
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The murders sent shock waves through America’s diplomatic mission in Mexico, and under pressure, Mexican soldiers swiftly rounded up alleged Azteca hit men. Meanwhile, over the border, FBI agents busted dozens of Barrio Azteca members in El Paso. But despite all the shackled gangbangers, police couldn’t get a conclusive explanation for the hit. Was the consulate worker targeted because she was being slow with visas for cartel guys? Or was the husband targeted because he had angered Azteca members in the Texas prison? Or was the attack to send a message to American drug agents? Or was it a mistaken identity?

Whatever the reasons, the message sent home the danger of Barrio Azteca and their alliance with the Juárez Cartel. One major concern for the future is more such cross-border gangs linking cartels to U.S. streets, and of American gangs adopting more of El Narco’s brutal tactics.

More than five hundred miles east in Laredo, a different cartel has had the nerve to carry out execution-style hits right on American soil. While most gangsters try not to rock the boat north of the river, the men behind these East Texas killings are from the same psychopathic criminal army that has broken all the rules in Mexico: the Zetas.

The five Zetas murders in Texas came to public attention amid a high-profile trial in 2007. During the hearing, American-born Zetas recruits were heard plotting murders on tapped phones and confessing to their brutal techniques in the dock. Among those convicted was seventeen-year-old gunslinger Rosalio Reta, originally from Houston. A loud, brash teenager with tattoos on his face, Rosalio confessed to joining up with the Zetas when he was just thirteen and carrying out his first murder in the same year. He then says he was trained by former special forces at a Zetas camp in Mexico and carried out a spree of killings on both sides of the border. Agents believe he was involved in some thirty murders, although he was convicted of just two and given a forty-year sentence.
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Testimony by Rosalio and others described how the Zetas had set up three-man cells in Laredo and Dallas. Recruits were paid a $500-per-week retainer, and cells were given $10,000 to $50,000 for hits. It certainly paid better than murdering someone in Mexico, but then America has a more lucrative job market. The Zetas recruits were boarded in $300,000 homes and given brand-new cars. Rosalio describes the perks as a great incentive for a teenager from the rough end of town.

The motives for the Zetas’ Texas killings are mixed and not fully understood. Confessions say one man was targeted because he was dating a girl that the Zetas boss was interested in—the assassins first messed up and killed the target’s brother, then killed the target a few months later. Another victim was a local gang member who somehow angered the Zetas. A third was a hit man who had reportedly defected to the Sinaloans.

The murders were carried out in a similar way to the typical cartel murder in Mexico. The Zetas assassins followed victims and then ambushed them, gunning them down as they drove out of fast-food restaurants or went from their cars to their Laredo homes. The killers were less scandalous than is the norm south of the river, firing a few bullets straight into victims, rather than spraying more than three hundred rounds over the whole street. But they were loud enough for American police. Laredo officers worked with the the DEA and other federal agencies to break up the cells, also busting Zetas on drug and money charges.

Since the resulting trials, no more Zeta hits have been confirmed in Texas, and the overall murder rate is down. Maybe the Zetas have got the message that piling up bodies in America means trouble. Or maybe we just don’t know about other killings yet. But if it has happened before, it can certainly happen again. A growth of Zetas cells of assassins in the United States would really be a nightmare.

Poorer, weaker nations have been less successful at containing Mexican cartel violence. In Guatemala, the Zetas have unleashed massacres as bad as in their homeland, especially in the jungle region across Mexico’s southern border. The Guatemalan government hit back, declaring martial law in the area in December 2010 and seizing one Zetas training camp with a stockpile of five hundred grenades. But in retaliation, the Zetas have fought pitched battles with the Guatemalan army and are one of the suspects behind a bus bomb that killed seven in Guatemala City in January 2011.

As an army of poor country boys, the Zetas are among their ilk in Guatemala and have been able to recruit plenty of locals to fight for their cause. Not only do these Zetas cells protect drug routes, they also set up their own franchises of drug selling and extortion just as in Mexico. While most legitimate Mexican companies have failed to take advantage of the Central American market, El Narco Inc. has solid international ambitions.

These global goals take Mexican cartels far and wide. Mexican crooks have been spotted as far afield as Australia, Africa, and even Azerbaijan. Often their excursions are to buy ingredients for their drug labs, especially pseudoephedrine and ephedrine for crystal meth. In 2008, a U.N.-sponsored initiative called Operation Ice Block seized forty-six illegal shipments of meth precursors around the globe; half were headed for Mexico. The countries of origin included China, India, Syria, Iran, and Egypt. One shipment of ephedrine nabbed just outside Baghdad was alleged to be headed to Mexican mobsters.
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In many cases, the chemical shipments stop first in West Africa before crossing the Atlantic. Impoverished African nations along this old slaving coast are increasingly used as trampolines by international criminals of different stripes; the Colombians also jump on them to bounce cocaine into Europe. Guinea-Bissau—the world’s fifth-poorest nation, where there is no central electricity grid and the average wage is a dollar a day—is one of the most notorious captured states. Latin American gangsters can buy the country for peanuts. Powerful governments have yet to make any efforts to defend these nations, and El Narco’s growth in these vulnerable corners looms on the horizon.

Bang in between Colombia and Mexico, the sweaty tropical country of Honduras has long been an important stopping point for cocaine. Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros ran his empire there in the eighties, while the right-wing Nicaraguan contra army, which was partially financed by cocaine, was also trained there. Honduras was dubbed the “banana republic” in a 1904 book by American writer William Sydney Porter about the power of foreign fruit companies. Bananas still dominate the economy, and Honduras stumbles on with half the population in poverty, political instability that produced a 2009 coup, and one of the worst levels of violence on the planet. It is ideal pickings for Mexican cartels.

General Julian Aristides Gonzalez is the Honduran official who most followed the rise of El Narco. A square-jawed military officer, Gonzalez left the army in 1999 to join the National Directorate for the Fight Against Narco-Trafficking and later became its head, a kind of antidrug czar. I spoke to him in December 2009 in his office, amid piles of maps and 140 kilos of seized cocaine sitting beside his desk. He had the rigid manners of a military man, but was one of the frankest and most open Latin American drug officials I had ever talked to. In the last decade, General Gonzalez says, the rising Mexican presence in Honduras has been startling.

“It is like a tidal wave we are trying to stop. We bust criminals and seize tons of cocaine, but they are coming at us with a huge amount of money and strength. We are fighting an uphill battle.”

Mexican gangsters, Gonzalez goes on, have bought a huge amount of real estate in Honduras, especially in the vast swathes of jungles, mountains, and coast that are sparsely inhabited. The purchases launder money as well as provide storage and waypoints for cocaine. Gonzalez shows me photos and maps of one such narco estate seized by police. It is an old banana plantation deep in the jungle, complete with colonial hacienda buildings and thousands of acres of land. The mobsters built a concrete runway on the plantation, where they landed airplanes packed with white gold.