ZeroZeroZero (40 page)

Now they all have to kneel to her, honor her. She coordinates shipments from Colombia from her luxurious headquarters in Guadalajara and launders the earnings, which get bigger every year. All that money is needed to carry out her most ambitious plan: to give women power. According to the Queen, women need to earn approval and respect, and the fastest, surest way to do that is through beauty. She invests the proceeds from cocaine in beauty clinics, both deluxe and plain, because all women have the right to lovers and husbands, jobs and suitable social standing. It’s tangible things she invests in. Bodies and buildings. Breasts and houses. Derrieres and villas. Smooth skin and apartments. Seated on her throne, Sandra rules an army of men who can climb the ranks only to a certain point, because above them, undisputed, is the silent Queen, who never exposes herself, never gets her hands dirty, does not allow her name to appear in the newspaper or, worse, in police reports.

Then one day everything changes. An important shipment has just arrived in the port of Manzanillo, in the state of Colima, on the Pacific: ten tons of cocaine worth more than $80 million. The authorities block it and seize the drugs. For the first time the Queen’s name appears in the media. She is now a public figure, and it may not be pure
coincidence that a few months later her only son, sixteen-year-old José Luis Fuentes Ávila, who lives in the exclusive Puerta de Hierro neighborhood in Guadalajara, is kidnapped. His captors demand $5 million in ransom. The Queen panics. The only man that really matters to her is in the hands of ruthless killers who threaten to skin him alive. She goes to the authorities. But that turns out to be a serious mistake, because from that moment on the police monitor her phone calls and movements. Which is how they discover that the ransom was paid directly by El Mayo Zambada, because after the shipment was seized in the port of Manzanillo, the Queen is short on cash.

While the Queen embraces her son again after seventeen days in captivity, AFI commander Juan Carlos Ventura Moussong announces that he has proof that the kidnapping was a setup to weaken the Queen’s power. Is it really credible that the son of one of the most important bosses can be kidnapped like that? For Moussong, those responsible must be sought among the Queen’s own men, who are eager to construct an independent microcartel and, above all, to free themselves of that woman. The AFI director’s suspicions are valid, but a short time later he is killed, shot point-blank on the street while coming back from a meeting with the other federal district commanders.

Still, power such as hers cannot easily be defeated, even when it is forced between the walls of the female prison in Santa Martha Acatitla, on the outskirts of Mexico City. It’s here that the Queen of the Pacific ends up after being snagged by the police in a fancy Thai restaurant, eating lunch with her companion El Tigre. She’d been going about incognito and using a fake name for years. After her son’s kidnapping, things got more difficult for her, but that doesn’t mean she is going to give up dining in expensive restaurants or buying the latest Chanel outfit. “I’m a housewife who earns a living selling clothes and houses.” In prison she carries on doing what she has always done: fighting for women’s emancipation. She teaches her cell mates not to neglect their bodies or their looks even in prison. “If you lose your body, you lose your soul. If you lose your soul, you lose your power. If you lose your
power, you lose everything,” she keeps telling her new “affiliates,” and she tries to set a good example. Apparently she even infects the prison director—a woman. One day some doctors are caught bringing Botox into the prison. The guards immediately think it’s for that prisoner who is obsessed with beauty, for the Queen and her new friends. Not true: The Botox is for the prison director. The Queen managed to convince even her that sensuality comes first, before everything else. Sandra parades in the hallways, showing off her big, dark, movie star glasses, and she never complains: never an attack of nerves; never a hysterical crying fit; never a protest other than for the slop the prison guards pass off as food. The Queen smiles at her misfortune and keeps fiery looks for the women who dare to complain to her about the world’s injustice: “If it’s disgusting to you, then change it!”

August 10, 2012: Sandra Ávila Beltrán is extradited to the United States to face drug-trafficking charges. But at the end of the trial all but one charge is dropped: providing money to her boyfriend, El Tigre, to help him avoid arrest. She is sentenced to seventy months in prison, a term she had already served almost entirely in her previous incarceration in Mexico. In August 2013 she is deported to Mexico, where she is immediately taken into custody in a penitentiary in Nayarit on money-laundering charges. But just after a few months a Mexican federal judge throws out a five-year sentence for money laundering, using the argument that she has already been tried for the same crime in both Mexico and the United States, and orders her immediate release. On February 7, 2015, at 10
P.M
., the Queen leaves prison: Three SUVs are waiting for her outside. She climbs into one of them, a white BMW X5, and drives away. She is free. Will she go back to her throne?

 • • • 

Then there’s the story of a very special recipe.

“El Teo would bring me the corpses. I’d have everything ready: barrels, water, a hundred pounds or so of caustic soda. Latex gloves, gas mask. I’d fill the barrels with fifty gallons of water and two bags of
caustic soda and heat them up. When the mix started to boil, I’d strip the bodies and throw them in. Cooking time’s about fourteen, fifteen hours. In the end all that’s left is the teeth, but it’s easy to get rid of those.”

The originator of this recipe is Santiago Meza López, nicknamed, not coincidentally, El Pozolero.
Pozole
is a typical Mexican meat stew. El Pozolero had long been on the FBI’s twenty most wanted list, and was arrested in January 2009. He confessed to dissolving three hundred bodies of members of a rival gang. The Tijuana cartel paid him six hundred dollars a week. Teodoro García Simental El Teo, head of a bloodthirsty gang tied to the Tijuana cartel, delivered the corpses and the cash.

“Never a woman, though. Only men,” El Pozolero insisted at the end of his interrogation.

 • • • 

Stories, stories, stories. I can’t get away from them. Stories of people, of torturers and victims. Stories of reporters who would like to tell about them and sometimes end up dead. Like Bladimir Antuna García, who had become a ghost of his former self. Haggard, prematurely gray around the temples and beard, which only took half a day to grow in. His weight fluctuated; his physique went haywire: two sticks instead of legs, protruding stomach. The prototypical drug addict. A consequence of his work, because Bladimir knew how to tell stories, and knew how to investigate, a difficult occupation in a place like Durango. He had crawled through the grimiest canals, the ones that collect wastewater stories, stories of sewers and of power. But those stories start to gnaw at your insides, you slam into the disgust, and when you can’t understand it, you trip, and then look for an explanation elsewhere. Whiskey and cocaine seemed like the solution. But Bladimir decided to leave all that behind; he wanted to go back to being considered one of the best reporters in Durango. He cleaned himself up, found work as a busboy in a tavern in the center of town. He did everything. Humble tasks, but
not for Bladimir, who, thanks to his stories, had discovered just how ephemeral the boundaries of human dignity are. Meanwhile he tried to get back into the world of journalism. But the editors didn’t want anything to do with him; he was too unreliable, too well known, but for the wrong reasons. Sure, he’d been a talented reporter, but what if they found him crouched over a table again, his nose buried in a line of cocaine? For people who’ve seen you messed up, even if it was only once, you’re always a drunkard and an addict. But a new paper opened in Durango,
El Tiempo,
edited by Víctor Garza Ayala. The paper wasn’t doing so well. Maybe some crime stories, which readers really love, could help turn things around. Garza decided to hire Bladimir to cover the crime beat, but just in case, he relegated his section to the back, to the back page, so as not to cut into the politics section on the front page, which is what really matters to him. It’s that way all over the world. If a judge is killed or a car bomb explodes, the story conquers the most important pages. Otherwise crime gets relegated to the back. But Bladimir didn’t care; what mattered to him was the chance to start writing again, writing about cartels and the Zetas. And avoiding, at least at first, causing too much of a stir. But at a certain point the newspaper vendors started displaying the paper backward, with the last page in full view. Sales went through the roof.

Bladimir was relentless; he wrote dozens of news stories, some of which were exclusives, thanks to his excellent contacts in the army and police. To pay for his oldest son’s college education he got a second job with another newspaper,
La Voz de Durango
.

The first threat he gets is on his cell phone, in the middle of the night. A cavernous but clear voice utters two simple words: “Stop it.” His wife pretends to be asleep, but she hears everything and bites her pillow in silence. In the months that follow the phone calls become more frequent, always to his cell, always at night, always those two simple words: “Stop it.” Sometimes the speaker identifies himself as a Zetas member. Postcards start arriving at the newspaper, tropical
beaches and beautiful women, and on the back, in childish lettering, that same command: “Stop it.”

“They’re just words.” That’s how Bladimir dismissed the escalating intimidations. He started working even harder, using his articles to attack corrupt policemen in the state of Durango and reporting loudly the threats he was receiving in the media and to the State Attorney’s office. Lifting the veil on criminal organizations in Mexico and naming famous narco-trafficking accomplices became a sort of creed for him. In July 2009 he talked about the phone calls in a series of interviews with the Mexico City magazine
Buzos
. He also told of the failed attempt on his life: On April 28, 2009, a man shot at him in broad daylight in the middle of the street, but missed. But when you start talking about threats, the community around you is always ready to say you’re paranoid, you’re exaggerating. Bladimir reported the threats and the attempt on his life to the authorities, but they didn’t do anything. Bladimir was working with Eliseo Barrón Hernández on a story about some policemen in the pay of the cartels. With Eliseo, they did what they always do. They waited till he left his house with his family, humiliated him by kicking and punching him in front of his daughters and wife, then took him away. Then they put a bullet in his head. His mistake had been to stick his nose in a story of corrupt policemen. “We’re here, reporters. Just ask Eliseo Barrón. El Chapo and the cartel don’t forgive. Be careful, soldiers and reporters.” These were Chapo Guzmán’s words, which appeared on several narco-banners hung in the streets of Torreón on the day of Eliseo’s funeral. A clear claim of responsibility, the way terrorists do it. An unequivocal message. Another one arrives at Bladimir’s newspaper office a few hours later: “He’s next, that son of a bitch.”

Bladimir rarely left his house. Almost never. He would write holed up inside. Some of his colleagues said he’d resigned himself to the idea that he’d be killed: The government offered no assistance; no inquiries were being conducted about the threats; no protection had been
assigned to him. His biggest fear wasn’t being killed, though. It’s the same for everyone. But it’s not madness, or a secret suicide wish. You don’t go looking for death—you’d be a fool if you did. But you know it’s there.

November 2, 2009: It happened very quickly. Kidnapped. Tortured. Killed.

His colleagues’ efforts were all in vain. They were scandalized by the apathy of the forces of law and order, who had called Bladimir paranoid. The usual defamation technique: no investigations; no inquiries into what Bladimir had uncovered. There’s no investigative journalism in Durango anymore. It died along with Bladimir Antuna García.

I looked into the abyss and I became a monster. It couldn’t have gone any other way. With one hand you touch the origins of violence, with the other you caress the roots of ferocity. You’ve got one eye trained on the foundations of buildings, one ear tuned to the beat of financial flows. At first it’s all a dark cauldron; you can’t see a thing, just something simmering below the surface, teeming as if with worms, trying to break through the top crust. Then the figures start to take shape, but it’s still all confused, embryonic, superimposed. Drawing on all your skills and senses you push yourself forward and lean out over the abyss. The chronology of powers begins to make sense, the blood that before ran off in a thousand different directions now flows into one big river; the money stops fluttering around and comes to settle on the ground so you can count it. You lean out a little more. You hook your foot to the rock, practically suspended over the void now. And then . . . darkness. Like at the beginning, but this time there’s no simmering; there’s only a smooth, shiny surface, a mirror of black pitch. That’s when you realize you’ve gone over to the other side; now it’s the abyss that wants to peer inside you. Rummage around. Tear you to pieces. Break you apart. The
abyss of narco-trafficking that looks inside you is not the—all things considered—reassuring rite of indignation. It is not the fear that nothing makes any sense. That would be too simple. Too easy. You’ve identified your target; now it’s up to you to strike, up to you to put things right. The abyss of narco-trafficking opens onto a world that works, an efficient world, a world with rules. A world that makes sense. Then you don’t trust anyone anymore: the media, your family, your friends. Everyone is talking about a reality that you know is bogus. Slowly everything starts feeling foreign to you, and your world fills with new protagonists. Bosses, massacres, trials. Killings, tortures, cartels. Dividends, stocks, banks. Betrayals, suspicions, accusations. Cocaine. All you know is them, and they know you, but it doesn’t mean that the world that was yours before disappears. No. You go on living in the midst of it. You keep on doing what you were doing before, but now the questions you ask yourself rise up out of the abyss. The businessman, the professor, the manager. The student, the dairy farmer, the policeman. Your friend, your relative, your girlfriend. Do they come from the abyss as well? And even if they’re honest, how much like the abyss are they? It’s not that you suspect they’re all corrupt, or mafiosi. It’s worse than that. You have looked humanity in the face, have seen how disgusting it is, and now you see similarities to that disgust in everyone you know. You see everyone’s shadow.

I have become a monster.

When everything around you starts fitting into this sort of reflection. When you insert everything into the universe of meaning you’ve constructed by observing the powers of narco-trafficking. When everything seems to make sense only on the other side, in the abyss. When all this happens you’ve become a monster. You scream, whisper, shout your truths, because you’re afraid that otherwise they’ll vanish. And everything you’d always considered to be happiness—going for a walk, making love, standing in line for a concert, swimming—becomes superfluous. Secondary. Less important. Negligible. Every hour seems pointless, wasted, if you don’t dedicate your energies to discovering,
flushing out, telling. You’ve sacrificed everything not only in order to understand but to show, to point out, to describe the abyss. Was it worth it? No. It’s never worth abandoning any path that brings you happiness. Even a small happiness. It’s never worth it, even if you believe that your sacrifice will be rewarded by history, by your sense of ethics, by looks of approval. But it’s only a moment. The only possible sacrifice is the one that expects no reward. I didn’t want sacrifices, and I didn’t want rewards. I wanted to understand, to write, to tell. Tell everyone. To go door to door, house to house, day and night to share these stories, to display these wounds. Proud of having chosen the right words, the right tone. That’s what I wanted. But the wound of these stories swallowed me up.

For me it’s too late. I should have kept a distance I wasn’t able to keep. That’s what Anglo-Saxon journalists often say to me: Don’t get involved; keep a clear gaze between your subject and yourself. But I’ve never been able to. For me it’s the opposite. Exactly the opposite. To have a primary, penetrating, contaminated gaze. To chronicle not the facts but one’s own soul. And to imprint on one’s soul, like on Play-Doh, the objects and the things one sees, so they leave behind a deep impression, but one that can be eliminated by remolding the Play-Doh. By kneading it. In the end all that remains of one’s soul is a frame that could have assumed a thousand different shapes but that hasn’t taken on even one.

When you follow the stories of narco-trafficking you learn to read people’s faces. Or at least you convince yourself you can. You learn to see if someone was loved as a child—truly loved. If he was looked after, if he was raised with someone at his side, or if he always had to run off with his tail between his legs. You understand right away what sort of life he’s had. If he was lonely, bullied, thrown out on the street. Or if, on the other hand, he was spoiled to the point of rotting in comfort. You learn. That’s how you learn to sum people up. But you never learn to distinguish the good guy from the bad guy. You don’t know who is screwing you or stealing your soul, who is lying to you in order to get
an interview, or who is telling you what he thinks you want to hear in order to please you and so to be immortalized in your words. I carry that certainty inside me without too much self-indulgent melancholy: No one comes near you except for a favor. A smile is a way of lowering your defenses; a relationship aims to extort money from you, or a story to tell at dinner, or a photo to give someone, like a scalp. You end up thinking like a mafioso; paranoia becomes your line of conduct, and you thank the people of the abyss for teaching you to be suspicious. Loyalty and trust become foreign, suspect words. You are surrounded by enemies and people eager to take advantage of you. This is my life today. Congratulations to me.

It’s too easy to believe what I believed in at the beginning of all this. To believe in what Thoreau said: “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” I believed that following these routes and rivers, sniffing around continents, sinking my legs into the mire would help me to get at the truth: renounce everything else in order to grasp the truth. But it doesn’t work that way, Thoreau. You can’t find it. The closer you come to thinking you’ve understood how markets move, the closer you come to the logic of he who corrupts those close to you, of he who makes restaurants open and banks close, of he who is prepared to die for money; the more you understand the mechanisms, the more you realize you should have taken a completely different route. Which is why I don’t have greater respect for myself, that I keep investigating, taking notes, filling agendas, preserving flavors. I don’t have greater respect for myself at the end of a journey that is unable to bring me happiness and to share it. And I may not even be aware of it. All I know is that I couldn’t have done anything else.

And if I had done things differently? If I had chosen the straight line of art? The life of a writer whom some would define as pure, for example, with his bad moods, his psychoses, his normalcy. One who tells inspiring stories. Who’s all engaged in style and narrative technique. I didn’t know how to do that. Mine is the life of a fugitive, a story runner, a multiplier of tales. I am a monster, as is anyone who
sacrifices himself for something he believed to be superior. But I still have some respect. Respect for those who read. For those who snatch important time from their lives so as to construct a new one. Nothing is more powerful than reading; no one is a greater liar than he who holds that reading a book is a passive gesture. To read, hear, study, understand—these are the only ways to construct life beyond life, life alongside of life. Reading is a dangerous act, because it gives shape and dimension to words, it incarnates and disperses them in all directions. It turns everything upside down and makes change and tickets and lint fall out of the pockets of the world. To get to know narco-trafficking, to get to know the connection between the rationality of evil and money, to rip open the veil that obscures the supposed familiarity with the world. To know is the first step toward change. My respect goes to those people who don’t throw these stories away, who don’t neglect them, but who make them their own. Those who feel the words on their skin, who carve them in their flesh, who build a new vocabulary—they are altering the direction of the world, because they have understood how to be in it. It’s like breaking one’s chains. Words are action, connection tissue. Only those who are familiar with these stories can defend themselves from them. Only those who tell them to their child, a friend, their husband, only those who carry them into public places, into living rooms and classrooms are articulating the possibility to resist. Being alone in the abyss is like being in a cage, but if lots of people decide to face the abyss, then the bars of that prison cell will melt. And a cell without bars is no longer a prison.

In the Book of Revelation Saint John writes, “And I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it; it was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it my stomach was made bitter.” I believe that readers need to do this with words. Put them in their mouths, chew them, grind them up, and swallow them, so that the chemistry they are made of can work inside of us, can illuminate the dark night and draw a line between happiness and pain.

You feel empty when your words seem to be enhanced by the threats
they provoke, as if people are suddenly listening to every word you utter merely because they risk getting you killed. This is what happens: It happens that silence on these topics doesn’t exist. There is a buzz: news flashes, trials, a narco is arrested. Everything becomes physiological. And when everything becomes physiological, no one notices it anymore. And this is how someone writes: He dies writing; he is threatened writing; he stumbles writing. When the threat comes it seems that a part of the world notices what has been written, at least for a while. But then it forgets. The truth is that there’s no alternative. Cocaine is a carburant. Cocaine is a devastating, terrible, deadly energy. There never seem to be enough arrests. Policies to fight it always seem to miss the mark. As terrible as it may seem, total legalization may be the only answer. A horrendous response, horrible perhaps, agonizing. But the only one that can stop everything. That can halt the inflated earnings. That can put an end to the war. Or, at least, it’s the only response that comes to mind when in the end you ask yourself, now what?

I have let myself be overwhelmed by voices every day for years. Voices that shout at the top of their lungs that alcohol is the substance that claims the most victims. Sharp, hammering voices that every now and then are silenced by other voices that boldly claim that yes, of course, alcohol is bad, but only if you abuse it, if that mug of beer on a Saturday night becomes a habit, and that there’s a big difference between alcohol and cocaine. Then the chorus chimes in, those who think that legalization is the lesser evil; all things considered, the voices suggest, legalized cocaine would come under the control of doctors. And so let’s legalize murder then! a portentous, baritone voice replies, momentarily silencing everyone. But the silence doesn’t last long, because then come those cawing reactions—like knife stabs—one after the other, of those who maintain that drug users really only harm themselves, that if you outlaw cocaine then you have to outlaw tobacco too, and that if you say yes, then the state is a pusher state, a criminal state. And what about weapons then? Aren’t they worse? At which point yet another voice—that calm voice with a know-it-all tone that gets stuck on consonants—
affirms that weapons are necessary for self-defense, tobacco can be used in moderation, and . . . But in the end it’s an ethical problem, and who are we to curb a individual choice with rules and decrees?

At this point the voices start to overlap and get all muddled. The confusion of voices always ends up this way. In silence. And I have to start all over again. But I’m convinced that legalization really could be the answer. Because it hits where cocaine finds its fertile terrain, at the law of supply and demand. If the requests were to dry up, everything above them would shrivel, like a flower without water. Is it a gamble? A fantasy? The ravings of a monster? Maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s another fragment of the abyss that few have the courage to face.

For me the word “narco-capitalism” has become a ball of cud that continues to swell. I can’t swallow it; every time I try it goes down the wrong way, and I risk choking to death. All the words I chew on stick to that cud, and the blob expands, like a tumor. I’d like to swallow it down so that it can be attacked by gastric acid. I would like to melt down this word and grab the heart of it. But I can’t. Besides, it’s pointless, because I already know I would find a grain of white powder. Of cocaine. Regardless of the policies and seizures the demand for cocaine will always be huge: The faster the world moves, the more there’s cocaine; the less time there is for stable relationships, for authentic exchanges, the more there’s coke.

I calm down; I have to calm down. I lie down and stare at the ceiling. I’ve collected quite a few ceilings over the years. From those so close to your nose that you can touch them if you stretch out your neck, to those so high up you have to squint to see if they’re frescos or humidity stains you’re looking at. I stare at the ceiling and imagine the entire globe. The world is a round ball of dough that is rising. It’s rising because of petroleum. It’s rising because of coltan. It’s rising because of gas. It’s rising because of the web. If you removed all these ingredients, the dough would risk falling, collapsing. But there’s one ingredient that works faster than all the others and that everyone wants. Cocaine. That plant that connects South America and Italy. Like an elastic band across
the Atlantic, an elastic that can stretch infinitely without ever breaking. The roots there, the leaves here. Coke is the ingredient without which there could be no dough. Just as with flour, which in Italy and in South America is categorized by zeros, depending on its purity: The more zeros, the purer it is.