by Johann Hari
A few years before his trip to camp, the United States government—determined to achieve Harry Anslinger’s mission of spreading the drug war to every country on earth—had decided to train an elite force within Mexico to win the war on drugs. The United States brought them to Fort Bragg13 to provide the best training, intelligence, and military equipment from America’s 7th Special Forces Group. Their motto was “Not even death14 will stop us.” Once it was over and they had learned all they could and received all the weapons they wanted, these expensively trained men went home and defected, en masse,15 to work for the Gulf Cartel. These breakaways16 called themselves the Zetas. It would be as if the Navy Seals defected from the U.S. Army to help the Crips take over Los Angeles—and succeeded.
Rosalio’s hometown, the dusty desert of Laredo in Texas, is right across the border from Nuevo Laredo in Mexico. He tells me: “Every cartel wants that route. It’s one of the biggest places of crossing from country to country . . . It’s a big commercial place. So everybody wants it . . . That’s what everybody’s fighting for: that I-35.” If your cartel controls that interstate highway, you control the flow of billions of dollars. If your enemies control it, they can strip you of your livelihood. That is a recipe for a war.
There are two different stories of how Rosalio became a Zeta. There is the story he told when he first talked to the police when he was sixteen, and then there is the story he told me when he was twenty-three. I have no way of knowing which of these is more accurate—so I have laid them out here, for you to judge.
We know this much for sure: He grew up17 in a house made of wood that was propped up on cinder blocks. His mother was a hairdresser. His father was an undocumented immigrant who worked on construction sites. They had ten children. Laredo is one of the poorest parts of the United States—a border town where, as he has said, “if you’re not a cop,18 you’re a drug dealer. If you’re not a drug dealer, you work for a cartel. That’s all there is down there.” He said another time: “A lot of people here [in the United States] want to be an attorney, a lawyer, a judge, a firefighter, a policeman. Over there [on the U.S.-Mexico border] they worship the Zetas. The little kids [say] ‘I want to be a Zeta when I grow up.’ ”
But he insists: “I wasn’t, like, poor poor poor. My mom and dad both worked, we had stuff to eat every day. We were normal. We were a family.” He had two best friends he spent all his time with: Jesse and Gabriel. They played football, hung out by the lake, played video games. All through his childhood, he skipped back and forth over the border. Sodas and candies are cheaper in Nuevo Laredo, so he would often head there with his friends. And as an adolescent, there are nightclubs there that will let you in as young as thirteen, so he and Jesse and Gabriel spent more time there. Here’s where the story splits, for a moment.
When Rosalio was first questioned by the police, he had spent three years immersed in Zeta life, a world where the culture of terror has been taken to its most extreme variant yet. In the tapes he looks hyped with this hatred, smirking and strutting and half-expecting the cops to be impressed by his boasts of mass murder. He tells them that at thirteen, he started hanging out at a nightclub in Nuevo Laredo and heard whispers of a man who had it all: Miguel Treviño. He came from nothing to be number two in the Zetas. Like Arnold Rothstein, he was an unassuming, almost anonymous-looking man: five feet eight, a teetotaler, drug-free, dressed in blue jeans and Walmart T-shirts. But he was the king of the town—he controlled the drug trade, the military, the police, everything. Rosalio wanted what he had. He met him and offered to prove his loyalty. Whatever it took.
Then there’s a different story about how it all started. He told me his friend had an older brother who worked for the cartels, and one day they went to eat in Nuevo Laredo. The brother received a call and said he had to go to deal with some business—so Rosalio hid himself in the back of his truck. He was curious. He wanted to know what it looked like. When they arrived, he discovered he was at one of the ranches used by Miguel Treviño to carry out his business—and he saw too much.
Here’s where the stories converge again. In both versions, the ranch was a typical Zeta workspace. There were about thirty people tied up. On one side, “they put them in an oil drum and they just burn them burn them burn them and there’s just ashes left.” On the other side, they were being “cut to pieces.” The Zetas usually torture members of other gangs, or anyone who irks them, to find out “safe houses, routes, who they work for . . . About what they do, who they working for, what is he doing?” before the killing starts. After they are dead, “they burn the bodies by [making] guiso [the Spanish word for stew]—throw ’em in there . . . and poke at the body until it dissolves.”
This is where Rosalio carried out his first killing. “I didn’t look at him in the face,” he says. “He was tied up . . . He was kneeling down, tied up behind his back and his feet . . . They were all crying, begging, saying don’t kill me. Everybody. Some of them weren’t even saying anything. They knew they were going to get killed. Everyone was there to be killed.”
He took the gun and shot the man in the head. He would never find out who he was.
The first Rosalio, emerging blinking from the Zeta light, told the cops he loved this experience: “I thought I was Superman.19 I loved doing it, killing that first person. They tried to take the gun away, but it was like taking candy from a kid.” He said from then on, “there were others to do it, but I would volunteer. It was like a James Bond game . . . Anyone can do it, but not everyone wants to. Some are weak in the mind and cannot carry it in their conscience. Others sleep as peacefully20 as fish.” He added: “I like what I do. I don’t deny it.”
The second Rosalio, in the monochrome of the Texas prison system, says this was crazed babble, offered up in a moment of mania “because after a long while, I was safe. I was alive. I actually made it from Mexico alive. And the majority of everybody around me is dead. Everybody I really cared for, that I grew up with, is dead already. I was alive. I made it alive. After having been this close to being killed . . .”
No, he says, he didn’t enjoy it. He started killing on that day because he realized that once he had seen the ranch, they wouldn’t let him walk away as a witness. He had to either die, or become a participant. From that moment on, “you’re forced to do what they want. You have to do it, whether you want it or not. You’re forced to do it. If you don’t do it, they kill you. It’s just plain and simple. You kill or you get killed.”
And that’s it. That bullet made him a Zeta21 and blocked all the exits. “Whether you go in willingly or forcibly,” he says, “once you’re in, you’re in . . . It’s a done deal,” and, “whether I like it or not, these people molded me into one of their soldiers, doing their deeds.”
That account was confirmed, years later, by the U.S. police investigation. Rosalio is a very rare example of somebody who peers into the heart of the Mexican drug cartels and makes it out alive. For three years, he was working22 directly for Miguel Treviño. For long stretches, he was one of the paramilitary posse living with him in safe houses, by his side, killing on his orders. Treviño and his fellow Zetas refer to kids like Rosalio and Jesse and Gabriel by a name: the Expendables.23
“It happened so quick, since that first day. From there, everything went”—Rosalio makes a pppppft sound. “That’s when I knew I had stepped over the border already—I was in a different world.”
He didn’t tell his parents, because he was convinced if he did, they would be killed. He didn’t tell anyone.
When I met him, he wouldn’t even say Treviño’s name for a long time. He tells me: “It’s better you don’t even talk about him.” He repeats it: “It’s better if you don’t even talk about him . . . He don’t have any limits. That’s why a lot of people don’t even talk about him. Especially in Mexico. They’re afraid of even saying his name over there.”
But haltingly, in fragments, he painted a picture of a man who, like Rothstein, thought only of money, and would do anyt
hing to get it. While the violence was more extreme, it followed the same logic demanded by prohibition. He captured the market by violence and maintained it by terror. His killing was never random, even as it was psychotic. It was all geared, Rosalio explained, toward “intimidation. For the rival cartels. Trying to behead them on videos, so they can know they mean business. That they ain’t playing around.”
He was absorbing the same rules Chino learned on his block, cast onto a more extreme canvas. You have to be so terrifying nobody will ever try to fuck with you. For Brownsville teenagers that means whipping and shooting. For Nuevo Laredo teenagers that means beheading and burning. Rosalio was ordered to embark on a string of targeted killings—of rival cartels, and of anybody who got in the Zetas’ way.
From day to day, “you never know what they’re going to do. They might want to torture somebody to death today, or they might drown him today, they might hang him today, or they’re going to cut him to pieces and burn him alive. You never know what they’re going to do. It depends what they feel like doing.” He added: “Everything was always the same. They killed people on a daily basis. There’s not a day that goes by [that] they don’t kill someone. That they don’t torture someone. That they don’t burn someone alive . . . That’s your daily routine. That’s what they do for a living.” When he was sent to kill a person, “I don’t know the person who was in front of me. I don’t know what they had done. Anything.” He just knew to make sure they died.
The cartels send messages written in human flesh. They have a system of signals known to everyone. If you betray the cartel, they’ll shoot you in the neck. If you talk too much, they’ll shoot you in the mouth. If you are a spy, they’ll shoot you in the ear. Each body is a billboard,24 advertising that your cartel is the most vicious.
His friends, Jesse and Gabriel, started to work with him for the Zetas. He won’t say how this started, but the police investigation—and their subsequent fates—confirm their involvement is real. Did he introduce them? Did he bring them in? It’s not clear. But it was becoming obvious to everyone that, as he said, “it’s not a game anymore.”
“We have to stay up a lot of time—sometimes a week, a week and a half,” he explained. “Almost two weeks. No sleep. And everybody used to do cocaine so they used to give us that . . . We had to go from one place to another, so we couldn’t sleep.” At some point, Gabriel had eyeballs tattooed on his eyelids, so it looked as if he was always awake, always watching.25 Which you had to be if you wanted to be safe. In the house with Treviño, “there’s a lot of people they have taking care of the place—lookouts and everything. They see some rivals or anything, they call all groups to a shoot-out.” Everybody was afraid of everybody else. After a while, “I couldn’t trust them,” he says. “I’d just stay to myself. You never know if one of them might try to kill you, from the back. I’ve seen it happen so many times. It’s a lot of people over there when you’re working for them, if somebody doesn’t like you, you at the wrong place, they sneak up on you and kill you. The same people you’re working with.”
Everybody knew “all [Treviño] has to say is”—he snaps his fingers—“kill him. That’s all he has to do. Just give the order and I’m gone.”
He called his mother every now and then to let her know he was still alive. He didn’t tell her what he was doing.
The worst nightmares aren’t where you are killed; they are where you are a killer.
But in the midst of the terror,26 there were treats. “They were throwing around money, everything you wanted. Everything.” Treviño held raffles. He put everybody’s name in a cup, and the winner—Rosalio!—got a brand-new Mercedes. There were girls whenever you wanted them, and coke. Rosalio was paid $50027 a week as a retainer, and much more for big hits: $375,00028 for killing one of Chapo Guzman’s associates, at the age of fifteen. Forgetting his story about being forced from the start for a moment, Rosalio told me that when the treats began, “you didn’t have to do anything then and there. But once they lured you in, it was a trap.” Then he seemed to realize what he had said and added quickly that he was talking about his friends, but not himself: he was forced, he insists, he was forced.
Sometimes, they lived in a fancy safe house29 back over the border in Laredo. Gabriel spent all his time there with his girlfriend. Rosalio and Jesse would ride around their old neighborhoods and play by the lake, as they used to. Why, I asked Rosalio, did the cartels use American teenagers and not Mexicans? “Because of the easy access to both sides of the border,” he says. But what’s the advantage to that if they’re killing people in Mexico? What would you do in the United States for them? “I don’t want to talk about that. There’s a lot of things I’d just rather not talk about.”
Later, as I listened again and again to the recording of this interview, I found myself returning to the work of Philippe Bourgois, the French sociologist whose writing helped me to understand Chino’s story. Under prohibition, he explains, if you are the first to abandon a moral restraint, you gain a competitive advantage over your rivals, and get to control more of the drug market. So the Expendables are sent to butcher not just rival cartel members, but their relatives.
On a wiretap, a conversation between Rosalio and Gabriel was recorded. Gabriel described kidnapping two teenagers who were the cousins of a rival. “They died on their own from the beating,” he said. “They just died. They just died and shit.30 You should have been there. You should have seen Pancho, dude. He was crying like a faggot—‘No, man, I’m your friend.’ ‘What friend, you son of a bitch? Shut your mouth!’ And poom! I grabbed a fucking bottle and slash! I slit his whole fucking belly. And poom! He was bleeding. I grabbed a little cup and poom! The little cup! Poom! Poom! I filled it with blood and poom! . . . And then I went to the other faggot and slash! I slit him with the same thing.” Rosalio laughed. The local cops disposed31 of the bodies for Gabriel.
He said later: “I’ve killed men while they were32 tied and bound, but there is no thrill, no excitement in that for me. I prefer to stalk my targets, hunt them down, and then, after I know their moves front to back, I sneak up on ’em, look ’em in the eyes, and pull the trigger—now that’s a rush.”
If you are the first to kill your rivals’ relatives, including their pregnant women,33 you get a brief competitive advantage: people are more scared of your cartel and they will cede more of the drug market to you. Then every cartel does it: it becomes part of standard practice. If you are the first to behead people, you get a brief competitive advantage. Then every cartel does it. If you are the first to behead people on camera and post it on YouTube, you get a brief competitive advantage. Then every cartel does it. If you are the first to mount people’s heads on pikes and display them in public,34 you gain a brief competitive advantage. Then every cartel does it. If you are the first to behead a person, cut off his face, and sew it onto a soccer ball,35 you get a brief competitive advantage. And on it goes.
Prohibition, Bourgois explains in his writing, creates a system in which the most insane and sadistic violence has a sane and functional logic. It is required. It is rewarded.
In the midst of all this killing, Rosalio and his friends were never once worried about the police, or being caught by them. Why? Rosalio started to notice something strange about Treviño from the first day he worked for him. Carolyn Rothstein said36 that her husband Arnold would often argue that “probably the best job in public life for which he was fitted was that of Police Commissioner of New York.” Treviño has achieved it.
Wherever they went in Mexico, Rosalio observed that the police worked for Treviño: “There’s no police now37 . . . Everything was under his control. Military. Police. Everything.” He bribed them—he drove everywhere with two million dollars in cash, in case any impromptu payments were necessary. And where that didn’t work, “they know if they mess something up [like a drug-smuggling route] they’re going to get killed, so they just stay out of the way.” Indeed, “sometimes the police escort you to do an as
sassination . . . The same police kidnaps a person and takes them to the cartel.” Treviño’s associates went right to the top of the Mexican state: “They might be working for the president by day, and by night they’re working for the cartels.”
Why have these drug gangs been able to capture Mexico, when drug gangs in the United States can’t? As I tried to understand this, I started to picture prohibited drugs as a river being redirected to wash across a town. If a river washes into a skyscraper, it might erode the walls and break some windows. But if it washes into a wooden house, it will wash it away entirely. In Mexico, the foundations of law and democracy are made of wood—it was governed by one semidictatorial party for seven decades until 2000, so a culture of feeling that the law is something citizens write together and should obey together has not yet properly developed. And the river is flowing much faster and it is carrying much more water relative to its surroundings: in Juárez, it is believed that 60 to 70 percent38 of the economy runs on laundered drug money, while drug money represents a vastly smaller fraction of the U.S. economy.
Nothing can withstand this force.
Rosalio was in the woods. He could see that, even though he couldn’t see much else. One eye was swollen shut; he could only see a little through the swelling in the other.
And his throat was bleeding.
Treviño’s men had tried to slice it open. They cut him up, all over. He will have the scars from this attack covering his body for the rest of his life.
So Rosalio was running.
There are, once again, two stories about how Rosalio got here, to these woods and this throat cutting.
The first story—advanced by the U.S. television documentary Nothing Personal—is that after training him to be a killer, the cartels lost control of him. He was running off Treviño’s leash and killing freelance. They sent him to kill a cartel rival in Monterrey and instead he threw a grenade into a nightclub, killing four people and wounding twenty-four. The cartels’ sadism is unimaginably vicious, but it always has a purpose. If you simply go Jeffrey Dahmer on them, if you are spraying your sadism randomly instead of focusing it where they tell you to, that’s a distraction they don’t need and won’t tolerate.