Gangland (14 page)

These reduced-specification rifles are imported legally to Century International, a Delray, Florida-based company that specializes in surplus military and military-style weapons. The stripped-down AK-47s are marketed to gun shops—Century International sells only to registered retailers—as the WASR-10 hunting rifle which is legal in all American states, except New Jersey and California. Despite its power and wow appeal, the WASR-10 can be had in many parts of the U.S. for as little as $500 brand new.

Of course, the modifications made by RATMIL are easily reversed by a skilled gunsmith, and kits are sold online to change the WASR-10s back to full-featured AK-47s. The kits are strictly illegal, but companies get around the loophole by selling half the kit, while another company sells the other half. The finished AK-47s are then smuggled to Mexico, where they fetch prices of about $2,000. This was big business—of the 62 AK-47s confiscated by police in Mexico in the first half of 2008, more than half of them could eventually be traced back to X Caliber.

Guns across borders

The other commonly seen assault rifle in Mexico, the AR-15, follows a similar trajectory. A civilian version of the U.S. military's M-16, the AR-15 is widely available as a hunting rifle and is also easy to modify back to military specifications. Although it is lighter, has a higher rate of fire, higher muzzle velocity and is much more accurate than the AK-47, it's not as popular with the cartels because it is not nearly as reliable and its 5.56 mm ammunition is harder to acquire.

Mexican officials frequently blame the U.S. for the massive importation of weapons into Mexico, pointing out that the U.S. has 54,000 legal firearms dealers (Canada has about 520), while Mexico has just one, and it is strictly controlled by the army. American critics, meanwhile, have pointed out that only a tiny fraction of the weapons seized by the Mexican government have been tracked at all and only some of those originated in the U.S. They also noted that many of the AK-47s seized were made by Norinco, a Chinese firm long banned from importing to the U.S. for supplying weapons to Iran and other hostile groups, and that the cartels' heavy weapons like rocket-propelled grenades are hardly legal on the streets of Texas. While acknowledging that some weapons come from north of the border, those critics remind the Mexicans that at least 160,000 soldiers defected from their military in the period between 2003 and 2009—many of them with their weapons—and that cartels and rebel groups from Guatemala to Colombia regularly trade in heavy weapons for drugs.

Two days after the raid that killed seven Federales, President George W. Bush set his own precedent. He imposed sanctions on a number of groups he considered to be dangerous to the United States because they trafficked illegal drugs. They included the Kurdistan People's Party, the 'Ndrangheta (which had usurped the Costa Nostra as the dominant Italian mafia organization), as well as the Sinaloa and Beltrán Leyva Cartels. This allowed the Americans to arrest anyone caught doing business with them. “This action underscores the president's determination to do everything possible to pursue drug traffickers, undermine their operations and end the suffering that trade in illicit drugs inflicts on Americans and other people around the world, as well as prevent drug traffickers from supporting terrorists,” said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.

It was still open season on police commanders in Mexico. Igor Labastida Calderón was one of the few surviving officers remaining from the “executables” list. The chief of the Federales, Igor Labastida Calderón, agent Humberto Mendoza Alvaro Perez Morales Torices and Yezel Heidi Cruz Osorio, director of material resources for the Federales, sat down for lunch on June 26 at the popular Buenos Aires soup restaurant in the “Little Argentina” neighborhood of Mexico City. They were approached by two young men. One pulled out an Uzi and began firing, while the other had a video camera. When they were satisfied Labastida was dead (the other two were wounded, but survived), they continued filming for a few moments, then fled. Portions of the video showed up later on YouTube. The next day, national Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mourino said that the assassinations “have a clear objective to intimidate, frighten, paralyze society and, with that, force the federal government to retreat.” The day after that, four more Federales were killed after their car was forced off the road in Culiacán and gunmen emerged with AK-47s.

The Mérida Initiative in the war on trafficking

For months, the Bush and Calderón governments had been working on an arrangement to coordinate their offensives against drug traffickers and allow aid from the U.S. to get to Mexico. The Mexicans wanted the Americans to acknowledge that the problem was largely due to American demand and the relative abundance of firearms, while the Americans wanted the Mexicans to be more transparent in their financial dealings and to be more aggressive in investigating human rights abuses by its police and military.

After much negotiation, the $1.6 billion Mérida Initiative was signed into law on June 30. It began with $400 million in aid to Mexico, $65 million to neighboring Central American countries to fight the trafficking of drugs into the United States and $74 million to American agencies to try to stem the flow of weapons into Mexico. The deal included:

• Non-intrusive inspection equipment including ion scanners, gamma-ray scanners, X-ray scanners and drug-sniffing dogs
  
• Software that improved telecommunications for Mexican investigators
  
• Training for investigators and prosecutors
  
• The establishment of offices for citizen complaints and professional responsibility and the introduction of witness protection programs
  
• Thirteen Bell 412 EP utility helicopters and eight much larger UH-60 Black Hawk transport helicopters
  
• Four Spanish-built CASA CN-235 military transport airplanes
  
• Anti-gang equipment, training and community action programs for the Central American countries.
  

There was a great deal of criticism of the deal on both sides. Many Americans thought the money could be better spent on drug education and rehabilitation rather than more interdiction, while many around the world found the concept of further militarization of Mexican society to be frightening. That criticism reached a crescendo on August 2, when a videotape from the city of León in Guanajuato was leaked to the media of police training methods that included torture techniques like forcing trainees to roll in their own vomit or blasting carbonated water into their nostrils. One of the instructors was an American, speaking in English, but he was later determined to have been a non-government contractor hired before the Mérida Initiative came into effect.

As the video was broadcast over and over again on Mexican TV, it sparked outrage. “This is troubling,” said Sergio Aguayo Quezada, founder of the nonprofit Mexican Academy for Human Rights. “In the past, torture was usually hidden; now they don't even bother.”

Some Mexican officials, however, defended the videos and the methods, explaining that a different kind of war demanded different tactics. “Perhaps it looks inhumane to us,” León Mayor Vicente Guerrero Reynoso told
El Heraldo de León
, the newspaper that broke the story. “But it is part of a preparation method that is used all over the world.”

That didn't inspire much faith in the Mexican government among human rights observers around the world. “The only thing that I thought when I saw those videos was: ‘Thank God the U.S. Congress attached some human rights conditions,'” said José Miguel Vivanco, director of the Americas for Human Rights Watch.

The killing moves to civilians

For the most part, the people who had been killed or injured in Mexico were cartel members, informants, police officers, military personnel or politicians. There were a few targeted celebrities and journalists, some mistaken identities and some collateral damage (an infant and his four-year-old brother had been killed by stray bullets in an assassination attempt in Chihuahua in August), but ordinary civilians had never been in the crosshairs until Mexican Independence Day.

At about 11:00 p.m. on September 15, 2008 in the Plaza Melchor Ocampo in the center of the Michoacán city of Morelia, Governor Leonel Godoy Rangel was introducing his speech with the traditional
vivas
to Mexican revolutionary heroes in preparation for a reenactment of Hidalgo's “Grito de Dolores” when somebody threw a hand grenade into the crowd. The resulting panic sent townspeople stampeding down a side street, where an assailant threw another grenade among them. Later that night two more explosions were heard on a road out of town. A local journalist described people “falling like dominoes.” When the dust settled, eight people—including a 13-year-old boy—were dead and more than 100 were injured.

Godoy toured local hospitals and blamed the unprecedented and terrifying attack on “organized crime,” but no group claimed responsibility for it. In fact, La Familia vehemently denied it would ever attack women and children, going as far as to distribute pamphlets and hang up banners to that effect, as well as text messaging reporters denying they would ever stoop so low. “Coward is the word for those who attack the country's peace and tranquility,” said one typical message.

Most people blamed the other cartels, particularly Los Zetas, who were well known as the most aggressive and most likely to use terroristic tactics. But since the blast occurred in President Calderón's hometown on Independence Day, some blamed the attack on paramilitary groups affiliated with the PRI or even the Zapatistas.

In an interview with
The New York Times
, Calderón expressed sympathy for the victims of violence all over Mexico, but said that the upsurge in terror tactics indicated that the cartels were feeling the heat from his offensives and were fighting among themselves for a diminishing market. He defended his long-range plan. “What are the alternatives?” he said. “Is the alternative to allow organized crime to take over the country?”

Two days after the Morelia grenade attack, the DEA—in conjunction with the FBI and Italian police—launched what U.S. attorney general Michael Mukasey called a “massive raid,” arresting 200 people in New York City and the southern Italian state of Calabria. The culmination of a 15-month investigation of the 'Ndrangheta, Operation Solare (also known as Operation Reckoning) also implicated some allies of the 'Ndrangheta that surprised few at the DEA. Among those were Gulf Cartel chief Ezequiel “Tony Tormenta” (Tony Storm) Cardenas Guillen, his second-in-command Jorge Eduardo “El Coss” Costilla Sánchez and Heriberto “El Verdugo” (the Executioner) Lazcano Lazcano, the leader of Los Zetas. The Mexican government issued 30-million peso bounties for each of them and the DEA added another $5 million for the head of Lazcano Lazcano.

Although the arrests put away many of the most important members of the Aquino-Coluccio clan of the 'Ndrangheta, Calabrian deputy prosecutor Nicola Gratteri said that the drug trade between the Mexicans and the Italians (who imported cocaine and heroin throughout Europe, the U.S. and Canada) would go on because there was just too much money to be made, and because the Mexicans charged much less than the Colombians while being more reliable.

On September 28, three men—Juan Carlos Castro Galeana, Julio Cesar Mondragon Mendoza and Alfredo Rosas Elicea—were arrested for the Morelia grenade incident. Under heavy interrogation, they admitted to the attack and revealed that they were paid to do it by Los Zetas in an effort to “provoke” the government. “I was hiding it in my hands, and it made me shudder,” Castro Galeana said of the first grenade in a videotaped confession. “I was desperate to get rid of it.”

Mexico was not the only government the cartels wanted to provoke. Just after sundown on October 12, two masked men got out of a car in front of the U.S. consulate in Monterrey and opened fire with handguns. One of them threw a fragmentation grenade over the fence, but it failed to explode. Nobody was hurt and the overall damage was negligible, but the message was clear. The U.S. government was a target because of its support of the Calderón war on drug trafficking.

Law enforcement scored a huge hit on October 22, coinciding with a visit to Puerta Vallarta by American secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. Acting on a tip from an informant, the army and Federales stormed a mansion in the Desierto de los Leones neighborhood of Mexico City. After a prolonged firefight, they made 16 arrests, the most important being Jesus “El Rey” (the King) Zambada García, one of the four regional bosses of the Sinaloa Cartel. He handled the Central Mexico/Capital region, answering only to Guzmán Loera. Also arrested were his son, 21-year-old Jesus Zambada Reyes, and nephew, 23-year-old Jorge Zambada Niebla, both accused of being cartel bigwigs.

The arrested men were shown on nationwide TV and, for the first time, so were some of the incredible luxury items they owned. By showing gaudy and expensive goods like customized Bentleys and gold-plated AK-47s, the government was stressing the point that the men who ran the cartels were hardly fitting the mold of Robin Hood.

The day after the arrest, children in the central city of Cuautitlán found a human head in a black plastic garbage bag. It was later identified to have belonged to a state police officer. Later that day, a courier dropped off a cooler at the police station of Ascensión, a small town about 20 miles south of the border with New Mexico. It sat there most of the day until a curious cop opened it to find four severed heads inside and a note from the Gulf Cartel warning them not to cross them.

The following day, Assistant Attorney General for the State of Morelos Andres Dimitriadis Juárez was driving his Ford Focus in the Diana Delicias neighborhood of Cuernevaca when his way was blocked by two small cars, one white and one red. As he honked his horn for them to move on, gunmen emerged and pumped more that 100 shells into his car no more than 100 yards away from the Federales local headquarters. He and two assistants riding with him died. Dimitriadis Juárez was new to the job when he was killed, having taken over when his boss, Victor Enrique Payan, was found in the trunk of a car in May. Just as news of his assassination was being broadcast, another severed head with a warning note to La Familia from the Gulf Cartel was found in a cooler in the central square of the Michoacán port city of Lázaro Ramirez.