When undercover American police officers infiltrated the Flores Crew (as their gang was called), they discovered that the gang had been receiving threats of violence from both the Sinaloa and Beltrán Leyva Cartel who each wanted an exclusive arrangement, though neither cut off or even reduced their shipments.
When the indictments came down, the authorities seized $20.6 million in cash, almost 7,000 pounds of cocaine and 140 pounds of heroin. Half of the 46 suspects were arrested in Chicago, Atlanta and Brooklyn, while the rest—including the twins—were fugitives. The DEA said that the 28-year-old twins' business generated about $700 million a year and sued for the forfeiture of two houses, three cars, a tractor trailer and $1.8 billion. They also claimed that the Flores brothers had street-level dealers as far away as Washington DC, and Vancouver, B.C.
While the DEA and other agencies were ecstatic about dismantling the Flores Crew, the DEA's chief of intelligence, Anthony Placido, warned that the success of such a slapdash, unsophisticated organization prone to taking ridiculous risks like the Flores Crew was an indication that the drug traffickers were becoming more reckless and violent. “There have always been gatekeepers—people who use their familial relationships to facilitate the movement of drugs across the border,” he explained. “Those people used to be gods, and they would control an area for years. Now they often last months before they are arrested or assassinated. What that creates is opportunities for a 28-year-old who ... isn't worried about dying.”
Decriminalization of drugs in Mexico
The day after the Flores Crew was taken down, Calderón enacted a controversial law that had been under negotiation since 2006. On August 21, Mexico decriminalized the possession of small amounts of drugs. Under the legislation, Mexicans were allowed to carry five grams of marijuana, a half gram of cocaine, 50 milligrams of heroin, 40 milligrams of methamphetamine or 0.015 milligrams of LSD. If police found an individual with these new amounts of drugs, they were compelled to advise the individual to seek counseling. If an individual was caught a third time, the law stated that drug counseling would be mandatory, but it didn't mention any definite penalties if the individual did not seek counseling. Originally, Calderón had lobbied for first-time offenders to agree to voluntary counseling or face imprisonment, but he was voted down.
The Calderón government played down the move, saying that it only put on paper what was already happening in practice, reminding the public that their opponents were drug traffickers, not drug users. “The Mexican authorities were not [targeting] small-scale drug users before, so this law just legalizes the status quo,” said Juan Carlos Hidalgo, Latin-American project coordinator at the Washington DC-based Cato Institute. “But certainly it is a signal that Mexico is sending to the world that [going after] small-scale drug users is counter-productive.”
Another tacit effect of the law was that it reduced the ability of police officers to extort Mexicans caught with small amounts of drugs. Previously, it had been commonplace for police to accept bribes in such cases because they had the threat of jail time for the offender.
The North American reaction was mixed. By that time, possession of small amounts marijuana was illegal but not enforced in Canada and many U.S. states, and had actually been decriminalized in a dozen states. U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske did not immediately criticize the law, instead saying he would adopt a “wait-and-see attitude.” He actually said he would not be very concerned unless Mexico removed possession limits altogether. “If the sanction becomes completely nonexistent I think that would be a concern,” he said. “But I actually didn't read quite that level of de facto [decriminalization] in the law.”
Significantly, more criticism of the law came from within Mexico itself, largely because it seemed hypocritical on the part of the Calderón government, whose Drug War had cost so many lives and billions of dollars. “If they decriminalize drugs it could lead the army, which has been given the task of combating this, to say ‘What are we doing?’” said Javier Oliva Posada, a political science researcher at Mexico City's Autonomous University.
Many critics also pointed out that while allowing personal possession of drugs shifted criminality from the user to the trafficker, it did little to reduce the amount of trafficking or the violence involved with it. “As long as drug production remains illegal, we are going to see the drug traffickers running a black market,” said Hidalgo. “I don't see how the new measure will help calm down the drug violence in Mexico.”
It didn't. At about 5:15 p.m. on September 3, Michoacán's deputy public safety secretary, José Manuel Revuelta Lopez, was being driven home from work in Morelia when his car was intercepted about 200 yards from his office and forced to stop. As was becoming routine, gunmen burst out of the trucks and showered his vehicle with gunfire. Revuelta Lopez, who had been on the job just two weeks, two bodyguards and an innocent bystander were killed.
A new target: drug rehab centers
Later that day, in Juárez, a new terror tactic emerged. Members of cartels had long hung out in and around Mexican drug rehab centers. Not only were sales easy—although La Familia forbade selling drugs within Mexico, the other cartels did not—but so was recruitment. Nobody, they quickly discovered, is more willing to take on a risky, illegal assignment that a desperate addict.
About a dozen masked gunmen arrived at El Aviane rehab clinic and forced all 23 people inside to line up against a wall. Then they opened fire. Seventeen people died immediately and one other hung on until that evening; the other five were seriously injured. The belief at the time was that one cartel believed that the patients inside the clinic were actually traffickers posing at addicts. “At the very least, it was one organized crime group thinking that another group was operating in that place,” Juárez mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz told reporters from his office in El Paso. Another 21 bodies were found throughout northern Mexico that day, one of them beheaded.
On the morning of September 6, José Francisco Fuentes Esperón—a former university rector who had declared his candidacy as a PRI member for a congressional seat in the southern state of Tabasco two days earlier—was late for a campaign meeting. When he wouldn't answer his phone, an aide was sent to retrieve him. When she arrived at his home in Villahermosa, the state capital, she was surprised to find his front door was open. Inside, she found the bodies of Fuentes Esperón and his wife, Lilian Arguelles Beltran, both shot in the head, and those of his two sons, eight and ten, both asphyxiated. “There are no words to express these events,” said Rafael Gonzalez Lastra, Tabasco's attorney general. “We are deeply moved and at the same time indignant.” All candidates took two days off campaigning, and Gonzalez Lastra offered them all bodyguards.
A few hours later, the military announced the arrest of Jose Rodolfo “El Riquin” (the Hindu) Escajeda Escajeda. Acting on an anonymous tip, they arrested him and three other armed men who were driving a bulletproof Mercedes-Benz ML350 SUV in Nuevo Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, not far from Colonia LeBaron. He was wanted in connection with an incident back in January 23, 2006—before the Drug War began in earnest—in which 10 men dressed as Mexican soldiers in three green Humvee-style SUVs were spotted by Texas Rangers driving north on a dirt road surrounded by forest about 50 miles down the Rio Grande from El Paso. On the Mexican side, the road ends literally in the river at a spot known as Neely's Crossing because, for most of the year, the Rio Grande is shallow enough to wade across. The three vehicles drove through the river to the American side, but when they spotted the Rangers with weapons drawn, they U-turned and drove back into Mexico, escaping arrest.
Initially Hudspeth County sherriff Arvin West called the incident “a military incursion” and accused the Mexican army of “escorting drug dealers” across the border, but an investigation by the U.S. Border Patrol and DEA absolved the military and fingered Escajeda Escajeda. After his arrest more than three years later, evidence emerged that Escajeda Escajeda was the most prolific assassin for the Juárez Cartel and was behind the El Aviane mass
acre—he suspected the patients were actually working for the Sinaloa Cartel, which was still attempting to use the Juárez–El Paso crossing—and was also probably responsible for the murders of LeBaron and Widmar on July 7.
Putting Escajeda Escajeda behind bars did little to stop the violence in Juárez. The murders kept coming, with gunmen taking out victims in hardware stores, car washes and out on the streets. And, at 10:30 p.m. on September 16, a dozen masked, armed men stormed the Anexo de Vida drug rehab clinic. It was lights-out time for the patients who were compelled to pray before going to bed. The sicarios lined up the 10 patients and shot them, leaving the staff unharmed. Pools of blood spilled out into the dirt road, which had been made almost impassable for vehicles because of heavy rains.
Relatives of the dead insisted that they were innocent people seeking help, not cartel members. “Why? Why them?” said Pilar Macias, whose brother, 39-year-old Juan Carlos Macias, was one of the victims. “He was recovering, he wanted to get back on the right track and they didn't let him, they didn't give him a chance. This is going to kill my mother.” Maria Hernandez, whose 25-year-old son Carlos was also killed said: “He was good, he didn't hang out with gangs, he didn't have narco friends. He just began with marijuana, and then they killed him.”
At about the same time in Tijuana, police came across a burning car. Once doused, they found four bodies in the car's seats and two more in the trunk. All had been bound, tortured and shot in the back of the head.
A new form of reprisal
Military intelligence received a tip that Arturo Beltrán Leyva, leader of the Beltrán Leyva Cartel and the third most-wanted man in Mexico, was staying at a friend's condo in Altitude Punta Vista Hermosa, the tallest and most exclusive building in the Lomas de la Selva neighborhood of Cuernavaca, the capital of the state of Morelos. When he was spotted there on December 16, 2009, while Calderón was at the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen, the building was surrounded by Naval Infantry (analogous to the U.S. Marine Corps).
In the ensuing battle, Beltrán Leyva and five of his gunmen were killed and another shot himself in the head just before he was to be apprehended. The losses did not cripple the organization, but it was a severe blow. Three of the special-forces soldiers were severely wounded when one of the cartel gunmen threw a fragmentation grenade at them, and one of them—30-year-old Petty Officer Melquisedet Angulo Córdova—later died from his wounds.
Angulo Córdova's grieving family was shown on national television, and he was regarded as a hero in the Drug War. The same news programs also aired pictures and video footage of Arturo Beltrán Leyva's bloodied corpse with his pants around his thighs.
Angulo Córdova's funeral, on December 21, was attended by Secretary of the Navy Mariano Francisco Saynez Mendoza, who presented the victim's mother, Irma Córdova Palma, with a ceremonial flag.
A few hours later, just after midnight, masked men invaded Córdova Palma's house in Villahermosa and shot everyone inside with AR-15s. She and her 22-year-old daughter Yolidabey died at the scene, and her sister Josefa Angulo Flores and 28-year-old son Angel Benito died later that night. Another daughter, 24-year-old Miraldelly, died the next day.
The attack horrified Mexico. The pointlessness of murdering the innocent family of an already dead soldier rocked the nation. It was yet another brutal new twist in a war that was raging out of control. The family had no official protection because that kind of attack was unprecedented. Authorities were harshly criticized for making the soldier's family so prominent on TV and for publishing their names. And experts warned that it would not be the end of this sort of deferred violence. “There will be more reprisals, both symbolic ones and strategic ones,” said Guillermo Zepeda Lecuona, a founding partner of the Mexico City-based Centro de Investigación para el Desarrollo (Center of Research for Development) think tank. “They will take revenge against not only the top people, but anybody who participates.”
And that's how 2009 ended for Mexico. It was a terrifying and depressing time. The fact that many well-known cartel leaders were being caught or killed seemed to have little to no effect on the volume of drugs being moved or levels of violence being meted out. The cartels were fighting each other, the police and the military. Their targets were getting farther and farther from the expected victims: they were drug users looking for help in rehab clinics, they were the families of soldiers, they were people standing on a street corner when a group of sicarios opened fire on a government official. The death rate in 2009 jumped more than 40 percent over 2008. According to authorities, 9,635 people were killed in Mexico as a direct result of the Drug War in 2009, more than 26 per day. Of those victims, 79 were Americans and one was Canadian. By comparison, the U.S. military, fighting two wars, lost 149 people in Iraq and 317 in Afghanistan over the same period.
The real fear—both inside and outside of Mexico—was that the government could actually lose the war, that it could either be pushed aside by the cartels or step aside after realizing the fight was futile. This situation is far from unprecedented, and countries like Somalia, Chad and Sudan, in which governments have been over-run and made redundant by armed non-government groups are collectively known as “failed states.”
As early as the middle of 2008, George Friedman, an American political scientist, author and CEO of STRATFOR, a private intelligence corporation, published a paper indicating that Mexico was well on its way to failed state status. By the middle of 2009, the phrase was commonly used in mainstream media describing what seemed like the nation's inevitable future.
And at the end of 2009, the transition of Mexico to failed state status looked like it began in the Michoacán town of Tancítaro. A week after seven bound bodies were found on the town's main street, town clerk Gonzalo Paz Torres was taken from his house by masked gunmen, tortured and shot five times in the head by AR-15s. His death, along with a constant barrage of anonymous threats, were cited on December 4, when the mayor, Jose Trinidad Meza Sánchez, and the entire city council tendered their resignations. One of them told a BBC reporter that being on council was like “having a rope around your neck.” Three days later, every one of Tancítaro's 60 police officers quit. The local government had—out of fear—essentially handed the town over to the cartels.
Rather than let that happen unopposed, Michoacán Governor Leonel Godoy Rangel, stepped in and appointed a new council to oversee the town and moved 100 state police in to take over for Tancítaro's defunct police force. “Unfortunately, these terrible incidents not only occur in Michoacán, but also in other parts of the country, and they demonstrate the degree of power of organized crime,” he said. “But it also shows the authorities' determination to fight it, while creating opportunities for education, health and employment—it's how we can ultimately defeat this terrible cancer that has invaded Mexico.”
It was Calderón's plan in a nutshell—when there's trouble, move in progressively higher levels of authority. But there's a problem with that theory. As those organizations are eroded by defections due to fear, better offers from the cartels, arrests or assassinations, their numbers dwindle. And the number of people fighting on the other side gets bigger.
Chapter 12
Exporting Drugs and Crime
If the cartels were transforming Mexico into a failed state, they were also exporting a little anarchy along with drugs.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, U.S. cities had experienced unprecedented levels of violence as the availability of crack from Colombian cartels led to numerous turf wars. For a variety of reasons, the violence levelled off and then declined precipitously, especially in big cities. By the turn of the millennium, New York City—which had been one of the worst hit by the crack wars but has since become a model of crime fighting—was recording crime rates as low as it had in the early 1960s.
Crime rates were actually rising over that same period in the western United States and Canada, often in communities that were not hit hard by crack. One factor, of course, was methamphetam
ine. Although arguably the most addictive and destructive of all stimulant drugs, it finds many users in part because it is often confused with amphetamine, a much milder stimulant that was legal and popular until 1971.
Traditionally, meth was made in small quantities by amateur chemists called “cooks” in a dangerous process that has caused thousands of explosions and severe burns over the years. The finished product was then distributed locally by motorcycle gangs like the Hells Angels, Outlaws and Bandidos.
After the Sinaloa Cartel took over the Colima Cartel (the meth manufacturing and trafficking ring run by the Amezcua Contreras brothers) in 2007, the amount of meth on the North American market exploded. No longer was the bulk of meth being made piecemeal in what police call “Beavis and Butt-head labs.” The Sinaloa Cartel made tons of meth every day in purpose-built labs in Apatzingán, Michoacán, then later in the U.S. itself, in abandoned factories and warehouses, and even national forests guarded by masked men with AK-47s.
• • •
Of course, when the cartels established a meth trafficking infrastructure in North America, they also brought their traditional marijuana and cocaine products along with them, and crime too. For example, Phoenix—an Arizona city just a three-hour drive from the Mexican border—was largely untouched by the crack epidemic, but suffered 370 kidnappings in 2008, more than any other city in the world outside of Mexico, and an almost eightfold increase over the 48 it experienced in 2004.
On April 21, 2009, Americans were shocked to see that cartel violence had hit in a place few would have expected. Hoover, Alabama, is a quaint suburb of Birmingham more than 1,000 miles from the Mexican border. That morning, Shelby County Sheriff Chris Curry responded to a call for help from one of his officers investigating a disturbance call at the low-rent cahaba lakes apartment building not far from downtown. He drove up from Columbiana, a half hour's drive away. As soon as he arrived at the crime scene, Curry started calling for more help. He first called the state troopers, then the FBI and finally the DEA. “I don't know what I've got,” he told them. “But I'm gonna need help.”
Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle Page 76