Chavito fights back tears as he says, “Most of the victims were innocent. They were not vatos locos [gang brothers]. They were addicts trying to get better. They did not deserve to die.”
As we ride the bus out of Felipe Angeles back toward the border crossing to the United States, Christopher tells me he is saddened but not entirely surprised by Carlos’s death. “I always had the feeling he needed to be part of a group, to belong to something,” he says. “He was big on group identity and group loyalty.”
The Barrio Azteca gang, like most street-level criminal organizations, was founded on the concept of group loyalty and identity. Its origins are on the U.S. side of the border, in the Texas state prison system, where, in the mid-1980s, the Aztecas formed from an amalgam of various street gangs. As vatos were paroled or completed their sentences and returned to the street, they became prominent in neighborhoods in El Paso and other cities in Texas and parts of New Mexico. Some of the gang members were Mexican nationals who, upon release from prison in the United States were deported to Mexico, where they formed Azteca chapters in Felipe Angeles and other barrios, as well as in the prison systems in Juárez and elsewhere in the state of Chihuahua.
“The gang spread like a virus,” says David Cuthbertson, special agent in charge of the FBI’s El Paso Division. “In a short time, they became the dominant street organization that sold narcotics in El Paso and conducted other criminal activity such as collecting cuota [‘tax’] from nonaffiliated drug dealers.”
Given the gang’s cross-border affiliations, it was natural that the Barrio Azteca would be absorbed into the preeminent cartel in Juárez, led at the time by the ambitious drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Carrillo died on the operating table in 1997 while undergoing plastic surgery to alter his appearance. While he was alive, Carrillo put the gang to work as street enforcers and contract killers. If anything, the role of the Aztecas under the cartel’s current overlord, Amado’s brother Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, has grown. The gang organizes and carries out most of the cartel’s major hits and also plays a key role in narcotics distribution and sales.
“If you think of the cartel as a corporation,” says Cuthbertson, “with a CEO and directors overseeing different aspects like logistics, production, transportation, and so forth, then the Barrio Azteca represents the security wing. Structurally, they are more in the nature of a paramilitary organization, with capos, sergeants, and foot soldiers. They serve as contractors for the corporation, but they also do things on their own; they are not obligated to do crimes only on behalf of the corporation.”
Many Barrio Azteca Gang members on the U.S. side of the border have a distinguishing tattoo: Stenciled somewhere on their bodies are the numerals 2 and 1, representing the second and first letters of the alphabet, B and A, which stand for Barrio Azteca. Others may bear Aztec symbols on their skin.
As with most street gangs of any ethnicity, the quickest way to rise within the Azteca structure is through acts of criminal daring and violence.
One person whose pathway into the gang and ascension within the ranks followed the usual pattern is Jesús Ernesto Chávez Castillo, whose nickname is El Camello, “the Camel.” Chávez was born in 1969 in Juárez but moved to El Paso with his family when he was seventeen. An early brush with the law came in 1995 when he was arrested attempting to sell marijuana to undercover officers from the El Paso Police Department. He pleaded guilty to a reduced charge and was given probation. Later, in 2001, Chávez was charged with “intoxicated assault”; he was driving drunk when he crashed into another vehicle, seriously injuring four people. Again, he pleaded guilty, but this time he was deported from the United States to Mexico.
Chávez seems to have moved back and forth between Juárez and El Paso on a semi-regular basis. He had two marriages in the United States and fathered three children. In February 2003, he was detained on the U.S. side of the border. When he lied to border patrol agents about his status—a federal offense—he was charged with illegal reentry.
Chávez’s lawyer at the time was Carlos Spector, a renowned El Paso immigration attorney who recently represented several Mexican journalists seeking asylum in the United States on the grounds that their lives had been threatened not only by gangsters, but also by members of the Mexican military. Spector remembers Chávez as “a tough hombre, obviously a guy from the streets” but not a high-ranking or connected member of any cartel or gang. The manner by which Chávez, a lowly street thug, became the notorious El Camello is a tale that Spector says could be called “the making of a sicario.”
After being found guilty of illegal reentry, Chávez received a mandatory sentence of twenty years. He was sent to the notorious Las Tunas Federal Correctional Facility, ruled from within by the Barrio Azteca. By the time Chávez was released after serving five years, he was a hardened gangster with the criminal contacts on both sides of the border.
A spokesman for the Mexican federal police in Juárez says that Chávez confessed not only to his role in the killing of Enriquez, Redelfs, and Salcido in March, but also to the January slaughter of fifteen people, including eleven teenagers, at a birthday party in the Villas del Salvárcar barrio of Juárez. That killing, authorities say, was a case of mistaken identity; Chávez participated in the slaughter believing the students were members of a rival gang known as Artistas Asesinos (“Artist Assassins”).
Since his arrest, Chávez has been paraded on Mexican television, and his confession is cited as a major victory for the forces of the law. But for some who follow the narco scene in Mexico, the confession has a bad smell. It is not uncommon, they say, for a member of the Barrio Azteca to step up and take the fall for a crime he may or may not have committed, simply to satisfy the demands of the system. It is an arrangement designed to benefit both law enforcement and the gang: Government authorities get to parade the “perpetrator” before the public, and in return the investigation goes no further.
The gang member who is put forth to “take one for the team” goes off to prison, which is, in fact, the central base of operations of the Barrio Azteca. He enters prison revered by his fellow gang members for having sacrificed his freedom, and he leaves prison an even higher-ranking member of the gang than he was before he went in.
FBI Special Agent Samantha Mikeska, who heads a special unit devoted solely to investigating the Barrio Azteca Gang, is aware of the quandary. Like many cops and agents working the borderland, Mikeska has a personal as well as a professional imperative. In 2002, while participating in a sting against thieves who targeted cargo trains at the border, Mikeska and another agent were brutally assaulted with sticks, rocks, and a baseball bat until a fellow agent arrived and opened fire, chasing the gangsters away. Mikeska suffered a fractured cheekbone, a fractured orbital bone of the left eye, retinal hemorrhaging, fractured vertebrae, a ruptured cervical disk, and external wounds to her face and body. When she returned to work six weeks later, it was with seven plates and two pins in her left eye area and a plate of four screws in her neck.
“I got my butt kicked,” she says. “Afterward there were psychological issues, physical issues, but you have to learn to separate what happened from the responsibilities of your job. This is what I do; I’m sworn to try and make the world a better place. You adapt and overcome.”
In 2008, Mikeska was part of a task force that arrested and successfully prosecuted six Barrio Azteca leaders and associates on RICO charges. “To be honest,” she says, “I sometimes think we made them stronger. We basically put them in the same area, where they are not one hundred percent monitored. At least when they are out on the street, we could monitor them; we knew what they were up to. Prison commingles them into one big unit, and they have access to smuggled telephones, letters, phone privileges; they have a line of communications within the prison system that is strong.”
Since the 2008 convictions, Mikeska and her unit have been on the hunt for one Azteca in particular: Eduardo “Tablas” Ravelo, believed to be the gang’s boss on the Juár
ez side of the border. Ravelo is currently on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. There is a warrant out for his arrest in both the United States and Mexico. “He is a thug and a ruthless killer,” says Mikeska. “His power is based partly on the fact that he has a lot of law enforcement in his pocket. As we all know, there are some corrupt law enforcement personnel over there. Things are not investigated to the fullest.”
Given the nature of corruption in Mexico, I ask Mikeska if she is able to share information with her counterparts across the border. She looks at her supervisor, who has been sitting in on our interview, and asks, “How do I answer that?”
“Carefully,” says the supervisor.
Mikeska smiles ruefully and says, “I don’t share anything with the Mexican government. I really don’t. I have not been successful in gathering information from that side. A lot of the investigation I do is strictly in the United States. Ravelo’s name comes up; we know he is in Juárez. The names come up, but to actually go over and pursue investigative techniques in Mexico is pretty much impossible. Does that answer your question?”
In the narcosphere, things are not always what they appear to be. Four months after the killing of the U.S. consulate worker and her husband, an incident occurs in Juárez that, at the time, represents a new downward demarcation in the narco war. On Avenida 16 de Septiembre, a car bomb is detonated, killing four people and injuring eleven others. It is the first use of a car bomb in Mexico’s drug war, evoking the tactics of Iraqi insurgents and the narco-terrorism that wracked Colombia in the 1990s.
The bombing is the result of a diabolical deception. Earlier that day, gangsters affiliated with the Juárez cartel kidnap the owner of an auto repair shop, dress him in a police uniform, and then shoot him—not to kill him but to fill him with bullet holes so he bleeds profusely. They then leave him incapacitated near Avenida 16 de Septiembre and Bolivia Street. A doctor in a nearby office hears the man screaming for help and responds to the scene. A policeman also responds, arriving to aid what appears to be a fellow officer in distress. What they do not know is that the gangsters placed a call to emergency services to bring officials into the trap, or that they have planted twenty-two kilos of C-4 explosives in a nearby car, which they detonate via cell phone. The doctor, policeman, rescue worker, and a bystander are blown to smithereens.
Almost immediately, Mexico’s federal police issue a statement that the ambush was perpetrated by La Línea, a wing of the Juárez cartel, in retaliation for the arrest days earlier of a prominent cartel leader. Soon after, a statement—understood to be from La Línea—appears pinned to the fence of a local primary school. It claims responsibility for the incident but states it was in response to corrupt Chihuahua police intelligence officials acting in consort with La Línea’s main rival, the Sinaloa cartel. The statement reads, “FBI and DEA, start investigating officials who give support to the Sinaloa cartel, because if not, we will use more car bombs [against] those federal agents.”
For those who closely follow the narco war, La Línea’s accusation of corruption has a familiar ring. Ever since President Calderón unleashed the Mexican military to become more directly involved in the conflict, La Línea and the Juárez cartel have been taking a beating at the hands of the Sinaloa cartel. Led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán—a ruthless drug lord who, according to Forbes magazine, is one of the wealthiest men in the world—the Sinaloa cartel has emerged as the most powerful criminal organization in all of Mexico. Compared with the Juárez cartel, its crackdowns at the hands of Mexican military police have been remarkably low. The Sinaloa cartel appears to be operating with near impunity.
Some in the press—including National Public Radio, which broadcast an investigative report in May—have suggested that the Calderón administration has formed an alliance with the Sinaloa cartel. A benign interpretation of the theory is that by establishing hegemony in the narco trade, officials feel one cartel in charge will cause less mayhem and murder across the land. Calderón’s administration has denied the accusation.
The car bombing in Juárez is followed by events that seem to be aimed at U.S. interests in Mexico. A series of threats forces the closing of the U.S. consulate in the city for periods of three and four days throughout the summer. After La Línea’s demands that the U.S. government investigate connections between corrupt Mexican government officials and the Sinaloa cartel or by a specified date there will be a massive bombing, the U.S. consulate closes. When the date passes without incident, the consulate reopens.
The question arises: Why is the Juárez cartel and its security arm, La Línea, focusing their wrath on the U.S. government?
One organization that is very interested in this question is Stratfor, an Austin-based company whose team of intelligence professionals analyzes world events for business leaders, investors, law enforcement officials, and government agencies. In August, in an internal report entitled “Mexico’s Juárez Cartel Gets Desperate,” Stratfor notes that the actions of the Juárez cartel appear designed to prevent the Sinaloa cartel from taking over “the Plaza.”
In Mexican narco-speak, the Plaza refers to a cartel stronghold, secured by the complex set of relationships among traffickers, law enforcement agencies, and local governments that makes it possible for an organization to control the narco trade in a given region. Whoever controls the Plaza by paying off police and public officials—and through extortion, intimidation, and murder of the civilian population—reigns as the supreme overlord of crime in that area.
“As we noted some months back,” states the Stratfor report, “there have been persistent rumors that the Mexican government has favored the Sinaloa cartel… . Whether or not such charges are true, it is quite evident that the Juárez cartel believes them to be so, and has reacted accordingly.” In a reference to Jesús Ernesto Chávez Castillo, alleged mastermind of the Enriquez-Redelfs hit, the report adds, “According to El Diario [a daily newspaper published in Juárez], the arrested Azteca member said that a decision was made by leaders in the Barrio Azteca Gang and Juárez cartel to attack U.S. citizens in the Juárez area in an effort to force the U.S. government to intervene in the Mexican government’s war against the cartels and act as a ‘neutral referee,’ thereby helping to counter the Mexican government’s favoritism toward El Chapo and the Sinaloa Federation.”
The Stratfor conclusions resonate throughout U.S. law enforcement; many agents I interview tell me it is a “solid theory.” It is also an advanced state-of-war strategy in which lives are cruelly sacrificed for a larger objective and events are presented in the public domain in a way that is often a deliberate obfuscation of the manipulations and maneuverings for control that lie below the surface.
It is a sweltering afternoon, and I am back in Juárez. This time my guide is José Mario Sánchez Soledad, a former assistant to the mayor of Juárez and former head of the city planning commission who is now a proud member of the Juárez city council. Sánchez is erudite and passionate. Along with his career in politics, he is an opera singer and the owner of a modest-sized furniture-manufacturing business.
Like many people born in Juárez, Sánchez grew up on both sides of the border. “I used to tell people I was very lucky. I grew up in two cultures: the strong family life of Mexican culture and, on the other side, the economic and educational opportunities of the United States.” In the borderland, it is common for families and family businesses to exist in a binational universe, but with the narco terror have come drastic changes. According to Alfredo Corchado, who covers the border beat for the Dallas Morning News, Ciudad Juárez has lost more than 10,000 private businesses in recent years. Many have closed or moved across the border to El Paso due to extortion and kidnappings by gangsters. The climate of violence has brought about a mass exodus; the civilian population has decreased by about 200,000 since late 2006.
“It is heartbreaking,” says Sánchez. “We can feel our city slipping through our fingers, and there is nothing we can do about it.”
The dev
otion that Sánchez feels for Juárez is infectious; he begins his tour downtown, near the Mission de Guadalupe, with a treatise on the historical forces that shaped what has traditionally been Mexico’s most unique and thriving border culture. It is the middle of a workday afternoon. Traffic on the streets, which used to crawl with migrant comerciantes (“merchants”) from all over Mexico, as well as with U.S. tourists and soldiers from Fort Bliss across the border in El Paso, has slowed to a trickle. Fort Bliss now forbids its soldiers from crossing the border. The reasons for this were made clear in October when a soldier from the Texas National Guard, Private First Class José Gil Hernandez, twenty-two, was shot dead on a street in south Juárez. The reasons for this killing are being investigated but remain unknown.
Unsolved murders contribute to a mood of fear, which descends over Juárez as the day wears on, with people hustling to take care of business and cross to the U.S. side before nightfall. After dark, the sound of gunfire is not uncommon; the bodies of murder victims are dumped in the streets, in parks or on the dusty banks of the Rio Grande.
Pointing out the sites of narco murders, body disposals, and other criminal atrocities is a familiar parlor game in Juárez. In Sánchez’s car, as we drive along Avenida 16 de Septiembre, my guide casually points out the location where, three weeks earlier, La Línea detonated its car bomb. The sidewalk has been blown away, and the wall of a nearby building is pockmarked with shrapnel from the explosion. It looks like exactly what it is: an urban street corner that has been hit by a bomb.
We head out of the city into the desert. Sánchez wants to show me the maquiladoras, the massive factories that expanded exponentially in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Sánchez is not entirely critical of the factories; he acknowledges that right now they are the only form of steady employment in the area. But he notes that they have sucked the economic life out of the city center. The working population has been lured into the desert by multinational corporations to work the assembly lines and manufacturing plants for wages as low as $4.21 a day. The multinationals pay low taxes and are provided cheap labor. Business is good. Last year, the industrial parks on the outskirts of town added more company permits and jobs than in the previous two years combined.
American Gangsters Page 17