Gangland (19 page)

The skyrocketing number of refugee claims led many Canadians to question their validity. “My concern is we're going to be swarmed by Mexicans [from] the U.S. who don't have status there and can come to the border because they don't need a visa to come to Canada,” said Francisco Rico-Martinez, a refugee who came from El Salvador in 1990 and who is now codirector of the Toronto-based Faith Companions of Jesus Centre, a resource center for Latin American refugees. “We're starting to get calls from Mexicans in the States—five to six a week—hoping to file refugee [claims] in Canada. But we may not even know half of the Mexicans here who are without status, because they don't need visas to come.”

The number rose so quickly that the Canadian government felt compelled to act. As of July 14, 2009, Mexican nationals would need to apply for visas to visit Canada. “In addition to creating significant delays and spiralling new costs in our refugee program, the sheer volume of these claims is undermining our ability to help people fleeing real persecution,” said Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney. “All too often, people who really need Canada's protection find themselves in a long line, waiting for months and sometimes years to have their claims heard. This is unacceptable.”

That made things hard for legitimate Mexicans refugees who now had to apply for visas in advance, meet the requirements and wait to hear for an answer. The concept angered people like Juan Escobedo, who fled to Toronto after finding his life threatened repeatedly in Mexico. His struggles began with a June 2008 incident in which men who said they were members of Los Zetas kidnapped him and his wife, nearly drowned him, beat him and then told him he was going to work for them and that they would use his house for trafficking. “They said, ‘We want a place from which to make sales and you are going to work for us, you understand?'” Escobedo told reporters. “My wife was sick [with cancer], and even so. They made her sell drugs from our house.” The Escobedos' four children also lived in the house with them.

Escobedo could not refuse—he said Los Zetas paid his neighbors to watch him—and could not leave because his wife, an Oaxaca state employee who worked as a cleaner at the Social Security Institute, only qualified for free chemotherapy in their home state. Escobedo said he openly dealt drugs on the private bus he drove, while passengers and police routinely ignored the transactions.

On one occasion, the couple were kidnapped and blindfolded. When the blindfolds were taken off, he said, they were in a room with other bound people, some he knew. Then two masked, armed men walked in with another bound man. They beheaded the third man in front of the crowd and warned everyone in the room that they would receive the same treatment if they tried to escape.

In September, Escobedo's wife died and he refused to work for the cartel any longer. He received a visit from a man he knew to be a state police officer. “He said, ‘You'll keep on working for us because you work for us,'” Escobedo told reporters. “I really didn't want to, so he said, ‘Here it's not whether you want to or not,' and he pulled out a knife. I didn't know if he wanted to kill me or what his intentions were, but he stabbed me twice in the leg.”

Unable to take it anymore, Escobedo sent his kids to live with relatives and used his life savings to buy a ticket to Toronto. When he arrived, he applied for refugee status. He had five dollars in his pocket. Fortunately for him, it was granted.

Canadians were sharply divided on the issue, with advocates on both sides of the visa requirement argument. Rico-Martinez, whose profession is to help refugees, said while there is a need for safe countries like Canada to take in authentic refuges, it had been all too easy in the past for Mexicans who were not actually in danger to abuse the system. “We can't have a blank-check solution that discriminates [between] people who need to come for protection [and] those with resources to come,” he said. “To address the issue, Canadian officials need to reach out to the Mexican public and educate them about our immigration and refugee system.”

While the Canadian mainstream media continued to stress the refugee angle (perhaps because it's a hot-button issue with two clearly defined sides), the bulk of arrests of Mexican nationals in Canada were not those who had made refugee claims. On September 22, 2010, a Sinaloan named Victor Perez Rodrigues was arrested along with Canadians Clifford Roger Montgomery, Barry Michael Ready and Tariq Mohammed Aslam when they attempted to import a fruit-grinding machine from Argentina to Kelowna, British Columbia. Inside the machine were a little more than 213 pounds of cocaine. On October 5, a raid on the Colour & Culture Trading Corporation, an import-export firm based in a downtown Vancouver office tower, netted the RCMP 600 pounds of meth, cocaine and marijuana. Arrested were Tijuana native Eduardo Sierra Gonzalez, as well as Jason Quinn Lawrence and Francisco Javier Gomez, owner of Colour & Culture, both of Vancouver. Neither Perez Rodrigues nor Sierra Gonzalez were asylum seekers, both having entered Canada as tourists and just hadn't left. The RCMP linked both to established Mexican cartels.

While the police and prosecutors acknowledge that there are Mexican cartel members (or at least associates) operating within the Canadian drug trafficking system, the consensus opinion is that they are not, at present, major players within the country. Instead, the overwhelming majority of cocaine in the country comes from people like Kendall and Ivan (if not specifically them) who travel to Mexican resorts like Acapulco and Mazatlán or American cities with strong Mexican gangs like San Diego, Los Angeles and Las Vegas to make deals for cocaine from the major cartels, especially the Sinaloa.

“Anywhere there are narcotics to be sold, [the Mexican cartels] want to be in on that action. They are consistently and constantly looking to expand,” said Robert Gordon, director of Simon Fraser University's School of Criminology. “So we're going to start seeing these organized criminal elements in places we've never seen them before.”

And law enforcement is seeing them in Canada. “I've dealt with Mexican cartel types up here [in British Columbia]; they do exist,” said Fogarty. “You have to see this as a north-south trade ... marijuana comes down and cocaine heads up.”

Chapter 13

The Violence Escalates

After the brutality of 2009, the nation breathed a tiny sigh of relief (or at least closure) when authorities arrested suspects for the killing of the Angulo Córdova family early in 2010.

Chiapas state police, reinforced by army soldiers, stopped a luxury car at a routine checkpoint in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the state's capital and largest city, on January 2. The men inside seemed nervous, so the police asked to search their vehicle. At that point, the group's leader admitted that they were
narcomenudistas
(street-level drug retailers) and offered the police a bribe to let them go. When the police refused, the man who appeared to be the group's ringleader changed his story. He told the cops that they were members of Los Zetas and it would be very dangerous for the officers if they were not allowed to continue.

Police arrested the three men—Gudiel Iván Sánchez Valdez, Dorilian López Alatorre and Elías León López—and seized their car, their weapons and an ounce of cocaine. The boss was Sánchez Valdez—a member of Los Zetas known as “El Chito” (the Cool) and “El Poblano” (the Guy from Puebla)—who later admitted to leading the group that assassinated the Angulo Córdova family. He said that the hit was ordered as retribution for the death of Arturo Beltrán Leyva and that he was paid $12,000.

This incident was followed by a stunning series of arrests. With intelligence gathered by sources they would not reveal, the Federales surrounded a car in Culiacán. The lone man inside presented a driver's license that indicated he was Carlos Gámez Orpineda. Police searched the car, finding a .45-caliber handgun and 31 small packages of what they believed was cocaine. Lab tests proved that the powder was indeed cocaine and that the driver's license was a fake. Interrogation led to the man admitting that he was actually Carlos Beltrán Leyva, brother of recently killed Arturo, the “jefe de jefes” (boss of bosses) of the Beltrán Leyva Cartel. Carlos' role in the gang was not made clear, but it was apparent that he had not taken over as boss.

At about the same time, the DEA informed Mexican authorities that their intelligence revealed a plot to break another brother, Alfredo Beltrán Leyva (who had taken over the reins of the gang for the period that began when Arturo was killed and ended when Alfredo was arrested), out of prison. The Mexicans beefed up security, but the assault never came.

Still, revenge for the arrest of Carlos Beltrán Leyva was swift and public. A man named Hugo Hernandez Robles was kidnapped in the Sinaloa city of Los Mochis the day Beltrán Leyva was arrested. His link to the drug trade or law enforcement is unclear. Hours after police announced who they had in custody on national television, Hernandez Robles turned up: pedestrians found his arms, legs and skull in a cardboard box on one side of town; his torso was dropped off in front of a police station in a plastic cooler; and the skin from his face was sewn over a soccer ball found in the town square in a clear plastic bag, It had a note with it that read “Happy New Year; it will be your last.”

Later that day, two more bodies were spotted hanging by their necks from a highway overpass in Culiacán. Spanning them was a banner that read, “This place already has an owner.”

These novel ways of sending messages were indicative of the war being played out by the cartels. Theirs was a terror campaign designed not just to frighten the public and intimidate the government, but also to show the other cartels that they were willing to go the extra mile to defend their territories. “Criminals earn respect and credibility with creative killing methods,” a high-ranking Mexican law enforcement official, who preferred not to have his name published, told
The Los Angeles Times
. “Your status is based on your capacity to commit the most sadistic acts. Burning corpses, using acid, beheading victims ... this generation is setting a new standard for savagery.”

The end of the Simental gang

The Carlos Beltrán Leyva arrest paled in comparison to what happened January 12. At 6:00 a.m. on a calm Tuesday morning, residents of and visitors to the well-heeled resort town of La Paz on the southern end of the Baja Peninsula were awakened by what sounded like an explosion followed by the roar of two military helicopters. Five busloads of soldiers had been deployed at the corner of Avenida del Paz Vela and Calle Sardina, in the heart of Fidepaz, the town's ritziest neighborhood.

Onlookers watched as soldiers knocked down the front door and emerged with two men, one fat and one thin. The fat one was Teodoro
El Teo
García Simental, who had once been one of the most important men in the Tijuana Cartel until a downtown, broad daylight standoff in April 2008 between men loyal to him and those loyal to the Arellano Félix left 15 men dead and García Simental in charge of his own, smaller gang. The thin one was Diego Raymundo Guerrero García, one of his lieutenants.

Using equipment and methods obtained from the DEA, Mexican military intelligence managed to track death threats made to Baja California attorney general Rommel Moreno Manjarrez and Julian Leyzaola Perez back to García Simental and his La Paz residence. “Today another Mexican cartel leader was taken off the street and is no longer able to carry out his bloody turf war,” said Michele Leonhart, acting administrator of the DEA. “This was not an isolated event; it exemplifies the growing effectiveness of our information-sharing with the [Calderón] administration, and our continued commitment to defeat the drug traffickers who have plagued both our nations.”

Information gathered from that arrest—two laptops and 16 cell phones were seized—led to another massive blow against the Simental gang about three weeks later. In the same Fidepaz neighborhood on February 9, soldiers and Federales arrested José Manuel “El Chiquilín” (the Kid) García Simental and Raydel “El Muletas” (the Crutches) López Uriarte. El Chiquilín was El Teo's younger brother and second-in-command, while López Uriarte was the gang's enforcer. Although he was linked to about 250 murders, he was better known for torture, and his signature was to leave his victims using crutches for the rest of their lives. In fact, authorities seized uniforms with an insignia that featured a skull with crossed crutches underneath it and the name “Fuerzas Especiales de Muletas” (Crutches' Special Forces).

Acting on information obtained through the arrests, soldiers and police raided a home in Tijuana. Inside, they found five police officers, six members of the García Simental gang and two rival members of the Tijuana Cartel who were being held captive.

It was the end of the García Simental gang. Those members who were still alive and at large either fled or joined other groups. Although the demise of the gang would have little net effect on the levels of drug trafficking—other, even bigger gangs had been dissolved or absorbed before with only temporary results—it did make Tijuana a somewhat safer place. Shootouts between the followers of García Simental and those loyal to Arellano Félix (essentially two factions of the same cartel) had been commonplace. Police in the city had warned residents and visitors to steer clear of any collection of Cadillac Escalade SUVs or Ford F-250 pickups (especially if they were customized) because those were the vehicles favored by traffickers.

Los Zetas versus the Gulf Cartel

But as things were getting less violent in northwest Mexico, northeast Mexico erupted into another separate war. The Gulf Cartel had been working in conjunction with the Beltrán Leyva Cartel since the Gulf Cartel and Sinaloa Cartel declared a truce in 2008, which limited their need for Los Zetas to fight on their behalf. With less enforcement work to do, Los Zetas had become more independent of the Gulf Cartel and started making their own import and export deals. They had, in effect, become a de facto cartel in their own right—and declared independence from the Gulf Cartel in February 2010.

It began when a high-ranking member of Los Zetas, Victor Mendoza Perez, was killed by a gang from the Gulf Cartel in January. When the Gulf Cartel refused a request by the leadership of Los Zetas to hand over the killers, war was declared. A mass e-mail warning of brutal violence circulated to a set of teenagers on February 17 spread rapidly around the region and set off the war. People all over Tamaulipas, Nuevo León and some of Coahuila panicked. Many businesses closed, few parents sent their children to school and the streets of most cities and towns were deserted. Violence broke out on the February 18 when a suspected Zetas safe house in Villahermosa, not far from Reynosa, was shot up in the afternoon. Later that night, a Petroleos Mexicanos (the state-owned petroleum company, better known as Pemex) filling station employee reported that armed men were forcing the station's staff to leave. It had been well-established that Pemex stations were often used as transfer and retailing spots for marijuana. A Navy helicopter was sent in to investigate, but it had to withdraw due to heavy ground fire.

Rumors abounded of massive gun fights and helicopters downed. There was no coverage of the event in the local media, though residents could hear the shooting. “Before, if there was a shootout, the scene would be full of journalists,” a Mexican reporter who admitted that he stopped covering cartel-related stories out of fear, told
The New York Times
. “Now, sometimes there will not be a single journalist. Everyone stays away.” On the following day, a Pemex truck carrying four tons of seismic booster pentolite, a powerful explosive, was hijacked.

Because the media refused to cover the violence, a few brave people took it into their own hands. Among the boldest of them was CiudadanoReynoso100 (Reynoso Citizen 100), a woman in her early forties who took videos of the carnage and posted them on YouTube. She shot one video “Ciudadana graba evidencias de balaceras en Tamaulipas (Citizen's evidence of the shootings at Tamaulipas)” from the front passenger seat of a car. The six-minute video begins on a largely deserted highway. As they pass by the Pemex station, they come across at least 10 shot-up SUVs. She sees a lone boot surrounded by hundreds of spent cartridges from what she calls a “cuerno de chivo” (goat's horn), Mexican slang for an AK-47, and remarks “they must've taken that guy away in pieces.” As they pass the military checkpoint, there are two Escalades (one white, one black) about three feet away from each other, each riddled with literally hundreds of holes. In an instant, she notices a dead body in between them. At the end of the video, she complains about what the war has done to the local economy and points out, “Look, even the traffic lights don't work anymore.”

Shootouts in the area became routine and, by February 24, officials admitted that 16 people had been killed in and around Reynosa, and the U.S. had closed its consulate there. Authorities on both sides of the border warned Americans not to visit the area. “Tamaulipas is at war, and if there is no coordination between state and local governments, then the federal government will have a hard time waging a frontal attack on organized crime,” PAN senator José Julián Sacramento Garza said. The American authorities agreed. “Some recent confrontations between Mexican authorities and drug cartel members have resembled small-unit combat, with cartels employing automatic weapons and grenades,” read a warning from the U.S. State Department. “During some of these incidents, U.S. citizens have been trapped and temporarily prevented from leaving the area.”

The situation became so dire that a Mexican military helicopter shot at gunmen from the air on the night of March 4. The following day, the Red Cross—an organization founded to tend to victims of war—ceased operations in the area because its volunteers had been shot at too often.

Criticism of the local media's unwillingness to put itself in the line of fire quieted down on March 8 when the Sociedad Interamericana de Prensa (SIP, or Inter-American Press Association) reported that eight local journalists had been kidnapped in Reynoso. One had been tortured and killed, two set free and another five were still missing. One of the men who was released told
Milenio
, a national newspaper, that his kidnappers identified themselves as
sicarios
and told him to warn his peers not to “stir things up.” The reporter told
Milenio
that “they have decided that nothing more should be known or told ... and we obeyed.”

New alliances formed

The split between Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel led to Mexico being basically divided between two warring factions. Los Zetas aligned with the Juárez Cartel, Tijuana Cartel and the Beltrán-Leyva Cartel, while the Gulf Cartel threw their lot in with the Sinaloa Cartel and La Familia. With the loss of Los Zetas, the Gulf Cartel formed a new enforcer unit, known as Los Escorpiones (the Scorpions).

On the afternoon of March 14, Arthur Redelfs was driving his pregnant wife, Leslie Ann Enriquez, home from a children's party thrown by the U.S. consulate in Juárez. They had their seven-month-old daughter with them in the back seat. One or both of them noticed that they were being followed, so Redelfs stepped on the accelerator of their white Toyota RAV4 with Texas plates. Their pursuers followed and, when the El Paso family was trapped by traffic, opened fire. Redelfs, an El Paso prison guard, was killed by a bullet above his right eye and Enriquez, a ten-year veteran of the consulate, died from bullet wounds to her left arm and neck. Their daughter was screaming, but not injured.

Previously, American casualties in the Mexican Drug War had been accidental—people caught in the cross-fire, misidentified or simply in the wrong place when someone decided to shoot. But the assassination of Redelfs and Enriquez had all the hallmarks of a directed hit. “We know that the U.S. citizens were targeted,” Juárez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz told CNN, noting that a police officer witnessed the car chase. “We know they were chasing them. We know they wanted to kill them.”

Ten minutes before Redelfs and Enriquez were killed, Jorge Alberto Salcido Ceniceros—a supervisor at a Juárez factory who was married to Hilda Antillon Jimenez, a Mexican employee at the U.S. consulate—was found shot to death in his white Honda Pilot SUV, a car that looked a great deal like the RAV4 Redelfs was driving. His children—four and seven—were injured but survived. They had attended the same party.