Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle

by Jerry Langton

  The federal election of 2006 may have been the most tense in Mexican history. Such a long history of rigged outcomes had put many watchful eyes—both domestic and international—on the campaigns, polling stations and vote counts. Fox's term had achieved some economic success, but many criticized him and his party PAN for not taking a harder line on the drug cartels as organized crime-related murders climbed into the thousands during his tenure.

  PAN nominated Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa as Fox's successor, a career politician from Michoacán whose father had helped create the party. After losing the election, the PRI had since split into two groups. The socialist Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution or PRD) had spun off in 1989 and by 2006 appeared to be even more powerful than the traditional PRI. Its candidate was Mexico City's mayor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The PRI in alliance with the Green Party ran Roberto Madrazo Pintado, who was later caught cheating at the Berlin Marathon.

  The vote was close enough to force a series of recounts. They eventually determined that Calderón had 15,000,284 votes (35.89 percent) and won 16 states; López Obrador received 14,756,350 votes (35.31 percent) and won 15 states plus the Federal Capital District; while Madrazo took 9,301,441 votes (22.26 percent) and won no states. It looked very much like an even standoff between the Conservative north against the Socialist south.

  A tribunal appointed by the Mexican Supreme Court, with the approval of the European Union, named Calderón president over the peaceful protests of López Obrador and the PRD. Calderón's first moves were popular. He worked hard to stabilize corn prices, which had risen sharply with the sudden rise in popularity of ethanol as a fuel, and started an incentive program for first-time job seekers. To help quell government corruption, he put a cap on how much top government officials could earn and announced significant pay raises for the military and the Federales. He announced a War on Drug Trafficking, making it clear that his enemies were not users, but importers and exporters.

  He made good on his word almost immediately. On December 12, 2006, less than two weeks after taking office, Calderón ordered a force of 4,000 soldiers and Federales into his home state, to launch Operation Michoacán.

  La Familia Michoacáno

  Michoacán had long been seen as something of a safe haven for organized crime. It was known worldwide for growing top-quality marijuana—though the business had become far less profitable in recent years because of competition from growers in the United States and Canada—and as a transit point for cocaine. The people—who had a lot in common with those in Chiapas—had long been aware of the existence of La Familia Michoacáno (The Michoacán Family), which began as a quasi-religious group of vigilantes and activists who served primarily to settle disputes between locals who did not trust the federal or state governments. They financed themselves first by “taxing” local businesses, then turned to trafficking marijuana and later cocaine in close association with the Gulf Cartel. They also distributed bibles and cash to the needy and supported schools and anti-government activists.

  Based in Apatzingán, their leader was Nazario “El Mas Loco” (the Craziest) Moreno González. He had published a book of his thoughts, and claimed it was his and the organization's divine right to murder their enemies and anyone else who hindered their path. The DEA described La Familia as having a “Robin Hood mentality,” honestly believing they were protecting the people from a corrupt government and the other drug cartels. It also described them as “unusually violent.” Like most other cartels, they also took part in other operations, like pirating DVDs, smuggling people across borders and kidnapping, usually while wearing police uniforms.

  They announced their independence for the Gulf Cartel in November 25, 2006 in a bizarre and cruel manner. As revelers partied at Apatzingán's Sol y Sombra nightclub, 20 armed men stormed in, firing their weapons in the air. Two of them, who were carrying large bags, walked to the edge of the dance floor and rolled five severed heads in among the horrified dancers and left a note that read: “La Familia doesn't kill for money. It doesn't kill women. It doesn't kill innocent people, only those who deserve to die. Know that this is divine justice.” The heads belonged to men affiliated with the Gulf Cartel.

  The club's manager, Carlos Alvarez Olmos, leapt to La Familia's defense when questioned by an American reporter. “These men didn't come here to hurt anyone,” he said. “They work against bad people; those men whose heads they cut off were like bugs.” The reporter described him as “nervous.”

  After severing ties with the Gulf Cartel, La Familia aligned with the more powerful and geographically closer Sinaloa Cartel. Sinaloa's Guzmán Loera introduced La Familia to the manufacture of methamphetamine, and Apatzingán quickly became the meth-making capital of the entire world with several factories, the DEA claims, each capable of producing 300 pounds of product a day.

  The army moves in

  Whether it was because it was his home state, was due to the outrage over the Sol y Sombra incident or because they were the newest and presumably weakest cartel, Calderón struck La Familia first. The heavily armed soldiers—most of them wearing facemasks so that cartel members would not recognize them and undertake retribution against their families—met little resistance at first patrolling major roads and squares and setting up roadblocks and curfews. There was so little action in the beginning, many critics accused the conservative Calderón government of targeting not the cartels, but the Zapatistas and other activist movements in the south.

  He quickly followed Operation Michoacán with Operation Baja California (widely known in the media as Operation Tijuana) on January 2, 2007. With help from the navy, 3,296 soldiers and Federales, using 21 airplanes, nine helicopters, 28 ships, 247 tactical vehicles and 10 drug-sniffing dogs, took control of Tijuana in the middle of a record cold snap that had left a light dusting of snow on the city. If Operation Michoacán—taking place in a largely agrarian, heavily indigenous state—could be compared to the American military taking over New Mexico, the invasion of a large, diverse port city of Tijuana would be like taking over Seattle.

  Their first major arrests were police officers. On January 26, video surveillance captured a group of Federales and state police taking a bribe—a $100 bill and a 200-peso note are clearly seen changing hands—to allow a luxury SUV to pass through a checkpoint. As an experiment, the army disarmed all local and state police in Tijuana—on the pretext that they were checking their weapons for fingerprints and other evidence—and, according to Zeta, petty crime surged by 50 percent in those two weeks.

  Major arrests

  On January 20, Calderón delivered on a campaign promise to break with Mexican tradition and extradited convicted Gulf Cartel kingpin Osiel Cárdenas Guillén and 14 other convicted traffickers to the United States on the understanding that prosecutors there would not pursue the death penalty. This was a move that impressed many Mexicans, as Cárdenas Guillén had been taunting Mexican authorities by throwing lavish children's parties in his own honor all over northern Mexico, which he coordinated from his prison cell. Children in the area referred to him as “Abuelo Coca” (Grandpa Coke).

  Back in Tijuana, on April 3, 2007, the army made headlines when they arrested Víctor Magno “El Matapolicías” (the Cop Killer) Escobar Luna, a former Baja California state police officer who led a small army of kidnappers and assassins for the Tijuana Cartel. In 2005, the corpse of his brother Ricardo had been dumped at a busy intersection in the Bonita neighborhood, likely the work of assassins from the Sinaloa Cartel.

  Two weeks later, the army captured cartel member Teodoro “El Teo” Garcia Simental. He was injured in the raid and taken to Tijuana's General Hospital. On April 18, the cartel led its first offensive against the military when a group of armed, masked men stormed the hospital searching for Garcia Simental, and taking hostages at the same time. In the resulting three-hour firefight, an army private, a Federale and a hospital custodian were killed. After one of the gang's leaders,
Ernesto Sánchez Vega, was captured, the raiders abandoned their plan and retreated. Their vehicles were later intercepted by state police who let them pass. Five of the officers were identified by eyewitness accounts and arrested soon after the incident. Their official excuse was that they believed they were too outgunned to apprehend the fleeing suspects.

  Mexican authorities extended their targets beyond the obvious, but Calderón's next move was a public relations disaster. Zhen-Li “El Chino” (the Chinaman) Ye Gon was a Shanghai-born businessman who came to Mexico in 2002, becoming a citizen later that year. One of his many businesses was a pharmaceutical firm called Unimed Pharm Chem. With it, he received a license to import huge quantities of pseudoephedrine and its precursor, raw ephedrine, into Mexico from China. Of course, while pseudoephedrine is the basic active ingredient in many over-the-counter decongestants, it is also the primary ingredient for methamphetamine. When Ye Gon allowed his import license to lapse in the summer of 2005, the DEA alleged that he was continuing to import pseudoephedrine for the sole purpose of making methamphetamine and named him as a member of the Sinaloa Cartel.

  On March 15, 2007, Federales entered his $2–million house in the posh Las Lomas de Chapultepec neighborhood in northwest Mexico City. Inside, they found $207 million in U.S. currency, 18 million pesos, 200,000 euros, 113,000 Hong Kong dollars and 11 centenarios (Mexican gold coins). The police also uncovered a high-output, medical-quality laboratory. They arrested nine people, including Ye Gon. Four of those arrested were Chinese citizens.

  Ye Gon denied being involved in the drug trade or having ties with the cartels. He explained that he did not realize his license had lapsed and that the money was not actually his. Ye Gon claimed that they were illegal contributions to the Calderón presidential campaign and that Secretary of Labor Javier Lozano Alarcón forced him to hide them, by threatening his life, saying “coopera o cuello” (cooperate or it's your neck).

  His story became an overnight sensation, with much of the media referring to the story as “coopela o cuello,” making fun of Ye Gon's accent. Although Calderón and Lozano Alarcón denied the allegations and were never indicted, many believed Ye Gon's story and there is still a thriving business printing T-shirts, bumper stickers and house signs reading Creo que el Chino (I believe the Chinaman). Ye Gon was not indicted and did not appear in court.

  The Cartels' brutal retaliation

  National attention returned to the cartels on May 14. In Mexico City, Federal Prosecutor Jose Nemesio Lugo was driving to work in a Pontiac minivan when he was surrounded by gunmen with AR-15s. He was working on a case against the Arellano Félix brothers when he was killed. A few hours later, an army patrol in a crime-ridden neighborhood came across a body. It was that of Jorge Altriste Espinoza, head of the Tijuana's police's special forces. He had been brutally tortured and there were three bullet holes in the back of his head.

  In June, the U.S. State Department warned Americans to exercise extreme caution when visiting Mexico. In response, the Mexican government criticized the Americans for their contributions to the Drug War. Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora called Washington “cynical” for maintaining that the existence of the cartels was just a Mexican problem, saying that the Americans had done nothing effective to reduce demand for illegal drugs. He also called U.S. gun control laws “absurd” and blamed easy access to high-powered and easily concealed weapons for allowing the cartels to become as well-armed and confident as they had become. This was a break from the Fox government, whom many critics had accused of being subservient to Washington.

  Adding to the confusion in Tijuana, a new player stepped into the fray. On August 27, 2007, city workers found three headless corpses in a dump. Investigators later found the men's heads and a note threatening the Tijuana Cartel, specifically mentioning the Arellano Félix brothers. The consensus among the media and public was that the Sinaloa Cartel was taking advantage of the siege, hoping to eliminate the local traffickers and stake the territory for themselves once the army left.

  Headless corpses with notes quickly became the calling card for all cartels. “Why do you decapitate people?” Bruce Bagley, a professor at the University of Miami who researches U.S.–Latin American relations, explained to American reporters who were trying to understand the macabre habit. “They are doing this to intimidate authorities, other gangs and the civilian population. The bitterness of the fight has intensified. There's a very unsettled and uncertain set of strategic alliances between these groups that are changing from day to day.”

  New targets: musicians and journalists

  While things were largely calm in the northeast compared to Tijuana, all of Mexico was shocked by what happened there at the beginning of winter. Three days after former Rio Bravo Mayor Juan Gajardo Anzaldua, his brother, two bodyguards and an innocent bystander were mowed down by machine gunfire—an act that forced the army to secure the town—on November 29, a masked man kicked down the door of Room 11 of the Motel Mónaco in nearby Matamoros and opened fire with an AK-47. He hit and critically wounded Zayda Peña Arjona—the popular lead singer of the band Zayda y Los Culpables (Zayda and the Guilty Ones)—and killed her friend Ana Berta Gonzalez and the motel's manager Leonardo Sanchez. The following day, a group of armed men broke into the hospital that was treating her and intercepted her on the way out of emergency surgery. “One can't confront those people, there are more patients around,” said a hospital employee who did not want to be named. “What can you do about it?” Seconds after finding her, one of the men put two bullets into Peña Arjona's head. There was no evidence that she was ever linked to the drug trade, and the media postulated that Peña Arjona had angered the cartels by refusing to sing narcocorridas.

  Born in the Michoacán city of Hidalgo, Paulo Sergio Gómez Sánchez emigrated to a part of Chicago populated mainly by other Mexicans. When the members of the popular band Montez de Durango broke up on Christmas Eve of 2002, many of the members re-formed as a new band called K-Paz de la Sierra, with Sergio Gómez as their singer. K-Paz, and especially the handsome Gomez, became very popular in Mexico and on Spanish-language radio in the United States. The group's success helped Gómez buy a house in Avon, Indiana, an upscale suburb of Indianapolis. He stayed mainly in the United States, but traveled back to Mexico on occasion to perform.

  On December 2, he gave a concert at an open-air festival in the Michoacán city of Morelia. After the show, he and two staff members were driving to their next gig in Puerta Vallarta when their rented Dodge Neon was surrounded by a number of SUVs and forced to stop. The three men were kidnapped and driven away. After two hours of questioning, the two staff members were released.

  When the band's publicist, Sergio Gómez Vega (who also went by the name Sergio Gómez), contacted police, he told them that the singer had received death threats before the show in Michoacán, but didn't take them seriously and said he felt he owed his home state a good show. Gómez Vega claimed he had no idea who would want to kill his client or why.

  A few hours later, a pair of farm workers found a body by the side of the road. They could not identify his face but said they feared it was Sergio Gómez because of a recognizable tattoo he had on his left bicep. The Michoacán assistant attorney general later told the media that it was indeed Gómez and that he had been severely beaten and burned by acid before being choked to death. His body was returned to his family in Indiana.

  On the same day, popular trumpeter Jose Luis Aquino went missing. Three days later, his body was found on a rural Oaxaca roadside with his hands and feet bound and a plastic bag tied over his head.

  The killing of three popular musicians in less than a week shocked the nation. Neither Peña nor Gómez sang narcocorridas nor had either had any been known to use drugs let alone have connection to the cartels. Peña's father was a deputy prosecutor, but had not been involved in any cases involving the cartels. Aquino's father maintained that although his group, Los Condes (The Counts), did sing narcocorridas, he had no connection
to the cartels and that his death was likely the result of a car theft. He could not explain why his son was brutally tortured before being put to death, though.

  The deaths of the popular musicians not related to the drug trade indicated that nobody was safe—you no longer had to actively oppose (or favor) a cartel to be murdered, you just had to be in Mexico.

  A few days later, on December 9, another brazen killing shocked Mexico. Gerardo Israel García Pimentel had just finished his shift at La Opinión de Michoacán, a daily newspaper with about 6,500 readers. He was riding his motorcycle to his Uruapan apartment when an SUV tried to force him off the road. He raced home as fast as his little 125cc bike could go, and was followed by the truck. He got to his apartment building, jumped off his bike and ran to his door. Just as he reached the stairwell, the men in the truck fired 45 shells from a pair of AR-15s and three from a Super .38 handgun. At least 28 of those rounds went into or through García Pimentel.

  Journalists had certainly been targeted by the cartels before—look at the staff of Zeta—but García Pimentel was no investigative reporter causing trouble for the cartels or the police. He worked on La Opinión's farm beat, occasionally writing a low-ball crime story when all of the paper's more senior reporters were too busy, but nothing that would appear to endanger his life. His killing struck many Mexicans as senseless, as though the cartels were picking their targets almost at random.

  Faith in local authorities took another big hit near the end of the year. On December 28, the entire 65-strong police force of Playas de Rosarito—a popular vacation spot for young Americans just outside Tijuana—was disarmed and interrogated. “We recognize that the enemy is inside our house and for this reason we are purging the ranks,” said Baja California state police chief Daniel de la Rosa Anaya. “We need to have confidence in our police.”

  As 2007 drew to a close, many in Mexico openly questioned whether the army's presence in Nuevo Laredo, Michoacán and Tijuana was actually helping the overall national situation. Murders and kidnappings were down slightly, but police corruption was still rampant. Critics, like the editors of Zeta, pointed out one particularly chilling statistic—that arrests among minors had quadrupled since the invasion. The cartels were outsourcing their criminal tasks, including assassination, to youngsters who were much less likely to arouse suspicion and would, by constitutional law, not face stiff prison terms if caught.