Gangland (15 page)

The forces against the cartels got a much-needed shot in the arm on October 26, when, for the second time, the daughter of a drug lord made his arrest possible. An 11-year-old girl in the upscale Chapultepec neighborhood of Tijuana known as Alicia Bracamontes let it slip that this was not her real name. Investigators soon determined that her father, Samuel Bracamontes, was none other than Eduardo “El Doctor” Arellano Félix, chief financial officer for the Tijuana Cartel.

Their house was surrounded by 100 Federales, the special forces of the army's 28
^th
Infantry Battalion and the Second Motorized Cavalry Regiment. When asked to surrender, Arellano Félix and his men answered with gunfire. After a three-hour firefight, Arellano Félix was arrested, along with 28-year-old Luis “El Güero Camarón” (the Blond Shrimp) Ramirez Vázquez, a known cartel operative who was badly injured in the gunfight, and 21-year-old Benitez Villa Ester, a native of Culiacán. Alicia was found unharmed. Police confiscated $1.2 million in $100 bills, two AK-47s, a submachine gun, two fragmentation grenades, three bulletproof vests, eight vehicles, 12 cell phones and 15 radios.

The incident was hailed as a huge arrest, as the Arellano Félix brothers were being taken down one by one. Federal Undersecretary of Public Security Facundo Rosas Rosas warned that although the original generation of the Arellano Félix brothers was being neutralized, they had since passed on the day-to-day operations of the cartel to nephew Luis Fernando “El Ingeniero” (The Engineer) Sánchez Arellano, who is a known fugitive named as head of a gang by the Mexican government. Many believed he was assisted by his aunt, Enedina Arellano Félix, who is also a fugitive.

Rosas Rosas acknowledged men loyal to Teodoro García Simental and the Sinaloa Cartel were fighting their own war on the city's streets, recalling the five bodies (four decapitated) a month earlier. One of the bodies had his head placed on his lower back with “we are the people of the weakened engineer” scrawled in blood between his shoulder blades, a reference to new Tijuana capo Sánchez Arellano.

Corruption in the ranks

Before law enforcement could make an effective push against the cartels, it had to win the war inside its own ranks. In the month after the capture of Eduardo Arellano Félix, there was a series of high-profile arrests as part of Operación Limpiar (Operation Clean Up) within the police that revealed how widespread corruption was at the top. It kicked off on November 2 when Victor Gerardo Garay Cadena, chief of the Federales, resigned to pursue other career options. It had long been rumored that he had been taking bribes. “I am resigning because in the bloody fight against organized crime, it is our duty to strengthen institutions, which means it is essential to eliminate any shadows of doubt regarding me,” he said. Garay Cadena was arrested a month later after testimony from a number of captured traffickers revealed that he had received cash, jewels and even gold bricks in exchange for co-operating with the Beltrán Leyva Cartel, including calling off at least two different offensives against them and allowing them to escape police manhunts on several occasions. The investigation into his behavior began when three Colombian women who attended a party testified that Garay Cadena—who was sitting in a hot tub with four prostitutes at the time—ordered his men to rob them of nearly $500,000 worth of cash and jewelry.

Two weeks after Garay Cadena stepped down, the attorney general's office announced the arrest of Ricardo Gutiérrez Vargas, a former chief of Mexico's Federal Investigative Agency who had since become Interpol's top officer in Mexico, and his No. 2 man, Rodolfo de la Guardia García. They were accused of leaking police information to the Sinaloa Cartel.

And two days later, Noé Ramírez Mandujano, who had stepped down as the chief of Subprocuraduría de Investigación Especializada en Delincuencia Organizada (Specialized Investigation of Organized Crime or SIEDO, an investigative organization that answered to the attorney general) earlier in the year, was arrested after an investigation revealed that he had received $450,000 from the Sinaloa Cartel in exchange for inside information.

The mass arrests greatly weakened the upper echelons of law enforcement in Mexico, but they also rid it of a significant amount of corruption. Calderón again asked the Mexican people to stand firm with his war against traffickers: “The Mexican government is firmly committed to the fight against organized crime and not just organized crime but corruption.” The government was desperate to replace these high-ranking officers and had to hope that the new appointees were not only competent, but above corruption.

The arrests did not stop the government from launching its own offensives. On November 7, in the midst of Operation Clean Up, the attorney general's office announced the arrest of an original member of Los Zetas, Jaime “El Hummer” González Durán. He surrendered without violence, but police uncovered a huge cache of weapons at his residence. He was charged with a laundry list of drug-related charges and revealed that he orchestrated the violent rescue of Gulf Cartel member Daniel “El Mejilla” (the Cheek) Perez Rojas from police custody four months earlier. González Durán was also widely believed to be responsible for the murder of singer Valentin Elizalde Valencia.

But there was little for Calderón and his allies to celebrate at the end of the year, as news that the war was spilling over Mexico's northern and southern borders. A story broke in
The Houston Chronicle
that cartel members were fraudulently purchasing massive numbers of firearms in Texas and smuggling them south. “Our investigations show Houston is the top source for firearms going into Mexico, top source in the country,” said J. Dewey Webb, special agent in charge of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Houston division. He pointed out that many of the weapons were purchased for the cartels by American citizens or had been sold to the cartels by unscrupulous gun dealers. “They are just as responsible for the killing of that person in Mexico, that police officer or innocent bystander as if they had pulled the trigger themselves,” he said. “They have blood on their hands, just like that person who pulled the trigger in Mexico.”

Then on December 5, a firefight broke out in La Libertad, Guatemala, just over the border from Mexico. When it was over, 18 bodies were recovered. Some of the vehicles abandoned at the scene had license plates from the northern state of Tamaulipas, the heart of Gulf Cartel territory.

Guatemalan officials were quick to accuse rival Mexican cartels of bringing their war into their country. “The hypothesis we have is clear, and it is that several cartels here that are operating in Guatemalan territory already have certain alliances with Mexican cartels, specifically the alliances that have been made for the trafficking of drugs,” said the chief of Guatemala's National Civil Police, Marlene Blanco Lapola. “We are studying the arrival of many Mexicans, specifically members of Los Zetas, who have wanted to come to take advantage of the Guatemalan territory, a situation that we, as authorities, will not allow.”

Nor did the cartels want to let Mexicans forget that the war was in their own front yard as well. On December 22, a woman who did not want to be named and her mother drove their beat-up blue Dodge pickup truck into the parking lot at the giant Sam's Club department store in the medium-sized Guerrero city of Chilpancingo for a little late Christmas shopping. They chanced upon a large black plastic garbage bag. Inside were nine severed heads, some still with duct tape over their mouths. Three had their military identification badges stuffed into their mouths.

Later that day, their bodies were found at two separate locations on opposite ends of town. Each had a cardboard sign attached which read “For every one of mine that you kill, I will kill 10.” Eight of the dead were soldiers and the other was a former Chilpancingo chief of police.

It was a sobering reminder that the government was at war with a well-armed, well-disciplined and dedicated enemy. In 2006, when the cartels were mainly fighting each other and President Fox had sent the first government troops into Nuevo Laredo, there were 62 deaths—about one every six days—associated with the War Against Drug Trafficking. In 2007, after President Calderón kicked off the New Year by deploying huge numbers of soldiers throughout the country, that number rose to 2,837. And as the cartels reorganized and went on the offensive in 2008, the death toll increased to 6,844 or about 19 per day.

Chapter 9

Carnage in 2009

The Mexican government decided to wait until after New Year's Day 2009 to announce two huge arrests that had been made the previous week. The first was the latest corrupt official caught up in Operation Clean Up: SIEDO determined that army major Arturo González Rodríguez, who had once been part of President Calderón's personal security detail, had been receiving $100,000 a month for providing weapons to and coordinating military-style training for Los Zetas.

His arrest, and the admission by Secretary of Defense Guillermo Galván Galván that at least 100,000 Mexican soldiers had switched sides and gone to work for the cartels for higher pay, led many to criticize the military and its role in the war on drug trafficking. Even the most ardent critics had to admit, however, that the war had reached a scale at which intervention by the military was inevitable. “The participation by [the military] is necessary because there is a threat and harm to national security,” said Guillermo Velasco Arzac, spokesperson for Mejor Sociedad, Mejor Gobierno (Better Society, Better Government), a citizen's rights advocacy group that had been highly critical of Calderón in the past. “It's known that many of the successes have come from the work done by military intelligence and investigation.”

The other major arrest was that of Alberto “La Fresa” (the Strawberry) Espinoza Barrón, a high-ranking lieutenant in La Familia. Acting on an anonymous tip (many Mexicans believe it was a former La Familia member who had switched sides to Los Zetas), a special forces unit of the army surrounded his home on December 29, 2008, and he surrendered without a shot fired. Despite La Familia's vehement denials of involvement in the grenade attack in Morelia, it was among the many charges leveled at Espinoza Barrón. From his home and vehicles, police confiscated three AR-15s, an AK-47, 37 ammunition clips, six pistols, five fragmentation grenades and four plastic bags containing marijuana and crack cocaine. They also found a list of 150 “workers” he was to have paid that day.

National journalists are targets again

The news, literally, took a turn for the worse on January 7, 2009. The cast and crew at the Televisa's Monterrey affiliate were getting ready for their Tuesday night newscast when they heard shots and then a loud explosion. Nobody was hurt, but the gunfire and grenade thrown at the front entrance damaged the building and 16 nearby vehicles. When the smoke cleared, a note was discovered tied to the front door. It read: “Stop broadcasting only about us, broadcast about narco-political leaders too; this is a warning.”

That the cartels were attempting to bully the national media into reporting only what they would allow was a huge blow to the collective Mexican psyche. At least 11 journalists were killed in Mexico in 2008 alone (second only to Iraq's 15), but none were noteworthy on a national scale. For years, reporters in hot areas like Juárez, Nuevo Laredo, Tijuana, Culiacán and Morelia routinely refused to cover drug-related stories or reported under assumed names.

But Televisa—Mexico's biggest broadcaster and a trusted national institution—was another matter entirely. “We face a huge risk of becoming a blind and deaf country, because the messengers are not telling us what they are observing out of sheer fear,” said Gerardo Priego Tapia, a PAN congressman who many consider a future presidential candidate. “We think that this case, against the most important TV company in Mexico in one of the most important business capitals in Latin America, is not an accident. It's a symbol and a warning of how this year is going to be.”

The Stewmaker

Mexicans, now inured to news of shootings, bombings and even beheadings, were shocked again later that month. On January 22, police and army troops stormed a beach house near Tijuana owned by Tijuana Cartel boss Teodoro García Simental. He managed yet another narrow escape, but the authorities arrested a man named Santiago Meza López as he was attempting to get into his car. Under interrogation, Meza López revealed that he was paid about $600 a week by García Simental to dissolve the bodies of the cartel's victims in drums of sodium hydroxide, also known as lye or caustic soda. After he “cooked” them for eight hours, all that remained were teeth and nails. He disposed of those final pieces by burning them with gasoline in a nearby landfill. He was known in the cartel as “El Pozolero” (the Stewmaker), because his mixtures of bodies and lye reminded them of
pozole
, a local delicacy. Interestingly, in the days before the
conquistadores
,
pozole
was actually made with human meat, the remains of prisoners sacrificed by the Aztecs.

Meza López claimed to have disposed of more than 300 corpses that way. “They brought me the bodies and I just got rid of them,” he told reporters. “I didn't feel anything.” The next story on Televisa's newscast that night was about a cooler containing two severed heads and a note threatening La Familia that showed up on the doorstep of a Guanajuato police station. The contents of the note were not made public, but police acknowledged that it was signed by Los Zetas.

New authorities in Quintana Roo

On February 2, retired army General Mauro Enrique Tello Quiñonez was sworn in as special drug investigator for the Benito Juárez municipality in Quintana Roo, which includes the popular tourist destination of Cancún. A former leader of the nation's infantry, Tello Quiñonez left the military after reaching the mandatory retirement age of 63. Less than 24 hours after assuming his new post, his body, along with those of his aide, Lieutenant Julio Cesar Roman Zuniga, and his civilian driver, Juan Ramirez Sanchez, were found in a white four-door pickup truck in a roadside ditch just outside Cancún. All three had been tortured before they were killed. “The general was the most mistreated,” said Quintana Roo State Prosecutor Bello Melchor Rodriguez y Carrillo. “He had burns on his skin and the bones in his hands and wrists were broken.” An autopsy showed Tello Quiñonez had also had both his knees broken before he died and was shot 11 times. Only the last shot was fatal.

Before Tello Quiñonez was killed, Quintano Roo—despite its desirable location on the route from Colombia to Mexico and the notoriety it gained after the Ianiero murders—had been relatively tranquil, with an average of just 12 murders a year since the Drug War began. That image was changing rapidly. “The reality is that Cancún, like the rest of Mexico, is at war,” said Cesar Muñoz Sola, editor-in-chief of
Novedades Quintana Roo
, Cancún's leading daily newspaper. “It's at war with the drug cartels.”

And that war came back to resort town a week later when an army special forces unit stormed the Cancún central police headquarters, disarming and interrogating every one of its officers on February 10. Cancún mayor Gregorio Sanchez Martinez said the show of force was necessary “to facilitate all types of investigations into the triple murder that happened last week.”

The army arrested Francisco “El Vikingo” Velasco Delgado, the chief of police, on suspicion that he aided and protected the 11 men accused of kidnapping, torturing and killing Tello Quiñonez and his men. Velasco Delgado, witnesses testified, had a habit of frequenting Cancún's vibrant beach strip in a Nissan Armada SUV with police markings. Investigators determined that the vehicle had been stolen in Mexico City and had been provided to Velasco Delgado as a gift from the Gulf Cartel. Inside the vehicle, they found CDs with
narcocorridas
celebrating the exploits of Los Zetas. He was later convicted.

The war didn't take a break in the rest of the country, either. On February 5, Federales arrested Jerónimo “El Barba” (the Beard) Gámez Garcia—cousin of Arturo Beltrán Leyva, and head of the Beltrán Leyva Cartel's logistics and finances—Pablo Emilio “El Chapiritto” (Little Shorty) Robles Hoyos—a representative of the Colombian Valle del Norte Cartel—and seven other men as they met in a restaurant in Naulcalpan, a small city just northwest of Mexico City. They seized $1 million in U.S. currency and some weapons, but no drugs.

Two months later, Gámez Garcia was being transported in secret from the airport at Tepic, not far from Guadalajara, to a nearby prison when the convoy containing the nine prisoners from the Naulcalpan raid was intercepted by a group of SUVs and pickups loaded with gunmen. Six Federales and two prison guards died in the firefight, but the attempt to free the prisoners was unsuccessful.

Brazen attacks on law enforcement continued. Ramón Jasso Rodríguez, chief of homicide investigation for the Nuevo León state police, was getting into his dark blue Chevy Malibu in front of his home at the corner of Avenida Ciudad de Pamplona and Calle Pedro Infante in the upscale Cumbres Oro neighborhood of Monterrey on February 12 when a white Nissan Sentra and a silver Chevy Equinox slowly pulled up beside him. Men burst out of the compact car and the SUV and rained 58 shells from AK-47s into Jasso Rodríguez's car. Eleven of the bullets embedded in his body. He died at the scene.

Three days later, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter was patrolling international waters about 800 miles offshore of Puerta Chiapas when it came upon a Mexican-flagged fishing vessel named
Polares
1
. Although it was a popular spot for commercial fishing, the
Polares
1
aroused the Americans' suspicions because of the poor weather conditions and the fact that the ship seemed much lower than would be considered safe, as though it was carrying too heavy a load.

Rather than intercept, the captain of the cutter alerted the Mexican navy, which sent in a special forces team. After boarding, they found nearly eight tons of cocaine in 299 individually wrapped packages. The five men aboard—Mexican nationals José Martín Oleas Solís, Mario Partida Chiquette, Juan Martín Martínez, Joaquín Moreno Díaz and Juan José García Mexta—were arrested.

With a wholesale value of over $300 million, the cocaine taken from the
Polares
1
interception angered the cartels in much the same way the Rancho Búfalo raid had years before, and they reacted in an unprecedented way.

Marching in the streets

Throughout Mexico, but mostly in three big cities on the U.S. border—Juárez, Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa—masses of people began to protest the military presence in their cities and the Calderón government in general. Thousands of people marched through the streets—Monterrey joined a few days later—disrupting commerce and blocking traffic. Eventually, the mobs—carrying placards accusing the soldiers as being “crooks,” “kidnappers” and “terrorists”—closed the borders to the U.S., crippling legitimate businesses in their cities. The mainstream Mexican media began to call them “narco-protests,” claiming that the demonstrators were protesting not so much against the government, as for the cartels.

There is a long history of paying people to protest in Mexico—depending on a person's status, the cause and the sponsors, the fee for a protest can range from a free lunch to a new car—and that's what the government claimed was happening in the border cities. José Natividad González Parás, governor of Nuevo León (Monterrey's state), accused Los Zetas, then still part of the Gulf Cartel, of orchestrating the demonstrations. “There are reasons to believe that the Gulf Cartel is behind the protests,” he said. General Edgar Luis Villegas Meléndez, commander of the Eighth Military Zone in Reynosa, went further, claiming he had actually seen cash change hands between masked men and the protest leaders. At least two protestors (who refused to be named) told a British reporter that they had been paid to march.

Human rights activists around the world called for an investigation into the military's conduct in Mexico, but even non-government officials within the country itself openly questioned the ethics and goals of the protestors, and whether they were simply a peasant army recruited by the traffickers. “It's a hypothesis you have to consider,” said Jorge Chabat, a security expert at Mexico City's Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (Center for Research and Teaching in Economics). “Someone is organizing these protests. They don't seem spontaneous. Whoever the organizer happens to be, is not showing their face.”

The tension erupted into violence on the morning of February 17. Police stopped a black Jeep Grand Cherokee at a routine checkpoint in an upscale neighborhood of Reynosa, across the Rio Grande from Hidalgo, Texas, and not far from the much larger city of McAllen. Despite being right in front of the playground at Felipe Carrillo Puerto middle school and across from the busy Plaza Real shopping mall, the men in the Jeep opened fired with assault rifles as did the occupants of the silver Chevy Suburban behind them. Inside the school, children ducked for cover. “We were hearing the gunfire,” said the school's assistant director, Enrique Marquez Perez, who used its public address system to tell “everyone to stay calm, to exit (on the other side of the building) calmly.” None of the children was hurt, but the school remained closed until February 19.

As the gunmen fled, some of them forced drivers to block intersections to delay police pursuit. When it was over, there were four people (two civilians and two gunmen) dead and one of the gunmen from the Suburban was severely injured. The suspect was taken to a nearby hospital under heavy guard and died later that day. Although Mexican authorities never revealed his identity, U.S. officials announced he was Hector Manuel “El Karis” Sauceda Gamboa, head of the Reynosa branch of the Gulf Cartel.

Although Reynosa Mayor Oscar Luebbert Gutiérrez repeatedly called for people to stay calm and get back to business as usual, the city changed. Few people were seen on the streets after 6:00 p.m., restaurants and nightclubs were empty and those parents who didn't keep their children home from school began to pick them up and drop them off as quickly as possible.

Juárez: a hotbed of violence

It was Juárez, though, that has taken the crown of most violent city in Mexico from Tijuana. The least protected but one of most traveled of major border crossings, the Juárez–El Paso corridor attracted the attention of the Sinaloa and Gulf Cartels, who were fighting with the traditional Juárez Cartel for the territory. The U.S. State Department issued a warning about traveling to the city of 1.5 million, which it said suffered 1,800 murders (including 71 police officers), 1,650 carjackings and 17,000 auto thefts in 2008. That gave it a murder rate far higher even that Baghdad, Khandahar or Beirut. On the day after the Reynosa gunfight, second-in-command of the Juárez police force, retired army captain Sacramento Perez Serrano and three other officers were ambushed and sprayed with assault rifle fire when their four-door Ford pickup stopped at a red light in the upscale Zona Dorado neighborhood. Perez Serrano and two others died at the scene, while the other officer was severely injured.