The World's Most Evil Gangs

by Nigel Blundell

  Massacres of civilians, beheadings and mass graves have also become increasingly common. For instance, on one Sunday in September 2012 as Mexicans celebrated their Independence Day, the dismembered corpses of 17 men were found dumped beside a highway in Jalisco, a part of central Mexico disputed by drug cartels. The bodies were naked, mutilated and stacked with chains around their necks. Only a week earlier, a shoot-out between local police and an armed convoy left two people dead and two injured in the same municipality. And in May of that year, police found 18 human heads and remains packed into two abandoned cars along a Jalisco highway. Even those figures pale into insignificance when compared with the 74 dead migrants found near the town of San Fernando in August 2010. Mexico’s crime groups regularly leave behind such grisly remains as they battle for control of trafficking routes and markets.

  In this chaotically administered, crime-ridden country, no one can be certain about the true value and cost of the narcotics trade. Analysts have estimated that wholesale earnings from illicit drug sales range from £10 billion to £30 billion a year. And the government figure for the cost in lives of its six-year war on the trade was put at 72,000. In 2013, however, a civil rights group said this was a ‘wild under-estimate of the slaughter’. Propuesta Cívica (Civic Proposal) published the grim statistic that an additional 20,851 victims had simply disappeared. This possible death toll put Mexico far ahead of other Latin American nations ravaged by organised crime. In Colombia, where drug barons have torn the country apart for decades, it is estimated that 50,000 people have gone missing, but this figure is over the past 40 years.

  The Propuesta Cívica report listed 138 soldiers, 1,300 police officers and 58 journalists who were known to have been assassinated by cartel hitmen. Tragically, it also included missing women and children – many of whom were believed still to be alive, kidnapped by the cartels from remote villages and put to use as sex slaves. The group’s director Pilar Talavera said: ‘We published our results so the public, and the world, can begin to understand the scale of violence. We also want to pressure the authorities to disclose official information on the disappeared. What the relatives need most is to learn what may have happened to their loved ones.’

  The civil rights report sent those desperate to learn the fate of loved ones onto the streets carrying placards with photos of the missing. But it also triggered a wider wave of anger in Mexico, where President Enrique Peña Nieto, who assumed office in December 2012, promised ‘greater transparency’ than his predecessor Felipe Calderón, who declared war on the six cartels battling for control of trafficking routes into the US.

  Although Mexican drug trafficking organisations have existed for decades, they have become more powerful since the demise of Colombia’s Medellín and Cali cartels in the 1990s and the more recent fragmentation of the Norte del Valle and El Dorado cartels. Their influence further grew as the US stepped up anti-narcotics operations in the Caribbean and Florida.

  The ties between Mexican and Colombian gangs were forged by a bent policeman. The birth of all Mexican drug cartels is traced to former Mexican Judicial Federal Police agent Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, known as ‘the Godfather’, who founded the Guadalajara Cartel in 1980 and controlled all the smuggling corridors across the Mexico-USA border throughout that decade. He started by exporting marijuana and opium into the US and was the first Mexican drug chief to organise an international alliance with the South American cartels in the 1980s.

  For decades, drug trafficking organisations used Mexico’s entrenched political system to create what the US Council on Foreign Relations in a 2011 report described as ‘a system-wide network of corruption that ensured distribution rights, market access, and even official government protection for drug traffickers in exchange for lucrative bribes’. However, it was not until the late Eighties that Mexican gangs rose to their current prominence, in the wake of the successful dismantling of Colombia’s drug cartels. As the Colombian route was disrupted, Mexican gangs shifted from being mere couriers for Colombia to wholesalers. Thus, with the Colombians losing their monopoly position, the Mexican cartels quickly came to dominate the trade, controlling 90 per cent of all the drugs that cross the border into the United States.

  By the time Calderón took office in 2006 with a pledge to eradicate trafficking organisations, drug violence was already on the rise. In fairness to the ex-president, his six-year campaign did break up most of the cartels. He deployed more than 50,000 troops and federal police against them and many of the main gang leaders were either arrested or killed. The Calderón administration argued that the violence proved that this aggressive strategy was forcing gangs to split and take on one another – though often in increasingly brutal and gruesome fashion. The principal cartels were the Sinaloa, Beltran Leyva, Arellano Felix, Carillo Fuentes, La Familia, The Gulf Cartel (also known as New Federation) and Los Zetas.

  At the start of Calderón’s crackdown, violence was concentrated in Mexico’s northern border regions, especially Chihuahua, as well as Pacific states like Sinaloa, Michoacán and Guerrero. Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, was the most violent city, blighted by a gang-related death toll of more than 3,000 in 2010. Violence has dropped markedly since. However, Guerrero, home to the resort of Acapulco, as well as Sinaloa and Nuevo León remains among some of the most violent regions. One of the focal points for violence since 2010 has been Mexico’s third-largest city, Monterrey.

  In a 2012 report by the US security firm Stratfor, experts argued that the proliferation of cartels had by then been reduced to two main players: the Sinaloa and the Los Zetas, with the latter being the biggest cartel in terms of geographic presence. The US government has described Los Zetas as ‘the most technologically advanced, sophisticated, and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico’.

  The Los Zetas Cartel originated in the Mexican Army, when several commandos joined forces to form a drug trafficking organisation under brothers Osiel and Antonio Cárdenas Guillén. Los Zetas is based in the industrial hub of Monterrey, once touted as Latin America’s safest city but now plagued by gang-related violence as rivals battle for control of drug distribution and other rackets. In May 2012 horrified citizens awoke to find nine bodies, four of them women, hanging from an overpass leading to a main highway in Nuevo Laredo. Hours later, police found 14 human heads inside coolers outside the city hall along with a threatening note. Shortly afterwards, a Zetas killer, described as Mexico’s deadliest female assasin, was arrested in Monterrey. Maria Jimenez, a 26-year-old widow nicknamed ‘La Tosca’, confessed to 20 killings and several other violent crimes. She had personally gunned down rival drug traffickers and a police officer.

  The arrest of ‘La Tosca’ failed to stem the violence, however. A week later, 18 people were found decapitated and dismembered near Mexico’s second largest city, Guadalajara. Within days, a further 49 bodies, decapitated and mutilated, were found dumped on a roadside near Monterrey. The victims, six of them women, had their heads, feet, and hands cut off to make identification difficult. Police suspected the dead were members of the opposition Gulf Cartel but were certain that the perpetrators were Zetas gangsters.

  There were a few immediate victories in Mexico’s federal police war against Los Zetas. In late May 2012 Daniel Jesus Elizondo Ramírez, nicknamed ‘El Loco’, was arrested in Monterrey after throwing a hand grenade at pursuing cops and was charged with the dumping of the 49 decapitated bodies. A month later, another Zetas member, Gregorio Villanueva Salas, known as the ‘Piracy Czar’ because of his control of the pirated music industry, was also charged with several grenade attacks. The pair admitted they were acting on orders from their leader, Miguel Angel Trevino Morales, but it would be another year before this cartel kingpin was caged.

  The ultra-brutal Morales regularly ordered beheadings, hanging and massacres of rivals. His trademark was the use of ice picks to pin warning signs on the chests of his victims’ bodies but his favoured technique was the ‘guiso’, or stew, in which
enemies would be placed in 55-gallon oil drums and cooked alive. Among crimes for which the 40-year-old Zetas leader was wanted was the murder of more than 260 migrants who were dumped in mass graves after being kidnapped in two separate incidents in 2010 and 2011. They are believed to have refused to work for him as drugs mules. Morales was seized on a dirt road outside Nuevo Laredo while heading for the US border in a pick-up laden with eight guns and $2million in cash. His arrest, along with his bodyguard and his accountant, was a much needed boost to President Nieto, under criticism for failing to take a tough enough stance against the cartels.

  The Sinaloa Cartel, based on the Pacific coast, is no less violent than the Zetas. They operate in Mexico’s ‘Golden Triangle’, covering the states of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua. Through mergers with other gangs, by the mid-1990s, the Sinaloa Syndicate was believed to have reached the size of Colombia’s Medellín Cartel during its prime. In 2008 the cartel split into a number of warring factions, which became a major cause of the epidemic of drug violence Mexico has since suffered. Murders by the cartel often involve beheadings or bodies dissolved in vats of alkali and are sometimes filmed and posted on the Internet as a warning to rival gangs.

  In 2008, 12 decapitated bodies were found piled up outside the Yucatán state capital of Merida. The same year, nine headless men were found in the Guerrero state capital of Chilpancingo. In 2011 the bodies of 15 men, all but one of them headless, were found on a street outside a shopping centre in the resort city of Acapulco. Handwritten signs were left on the corpses signed by ‘El Chapo’s People’ – a reference to Sinaloa leader Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán. His cartel is thought to have killed the men for trying to intrude on the gang’s turf. The executions were particularly gory even for Acapulco – a city where 27 people had been killed on the streets over the previous weekend alone. Those victims included two police officers cut down on a main road in front of tourists and locals, six people who were shot dead and stuffed in a taxi, their hands and feet bound, and four others elsewhere in the city.

  The most sickening Sinaloa act of violence occurred in September 2011 when the cartel put a ‘warning’ video on the Web showing the execution of two of their own members – beheaded with a chainsaw while still alive. Both men, a drug runner and his uncle who had somehow upset the cartel leadership, were seated shirtless against a wall as they answered questions posed to them by their executioners. The older man, who mentions ‘El Chapo’, says resignedly: ‘Think next time you decide to “give the finger” [to cheat], think about it very carefully, because it’s not easy being here, and you never return back. With these people you don’t play around.’

  ‘El Chapo’ himself has been on the run since 2001 when he escaped from a Mexican prison in a laundry truck. There has been a $7 million bounty on his head ever since. Joaquin Guzmán, whose fortune was estimated by Forbes magazine at more than $1 billion, was named by the US Treasury Department in 2012 as the ‘world’s most powerful drugs trafficker’. Authorities said his cartel has recently been expanding its drug business abroad, building international operations in Central and South America and the Pacific. In 2013 Guzmán formally received the title of Chicago’s ‘Public Enemy Number One’ because of his cartel’s control of narcotics supply to the city – the first time the Chicago Crime Commission had used the infamous label since Al Capone in the 1920s. Shortly afterwards, there was speculation that the kingpin had been killed in a jungle shootout with a rival gang in Guatemala’s Petén province, near the border with Mexico.

  So, after six years of ex-President Calderón’s military onslaught against the cartels and the subsequent more measured approach of his successor President Nieto, who is winning the Mexican drugs war? A gloomy verdict on Calderón’s campaign came from the US Department of Justice which reported that Mexico remained a major supplier of heroin to the American market, and the largest foreign supplier of methamphetamine and marijuana. Mexican production of all three of these drugs had increased since 2006, as had the amount of drugs seized at the US-Mexican border. While assessments vary as to how much of the marijuana originates in Mexico, a 2010 report estimated it at anywhere from 40 to 67 per cent. An estimated 95 per cent of cocaine travels through Mexico into North America, up from 77 per cent a decade earlier. Overall, the US State Department found that its nation’s drug users send between $19 billion and $29 billion into the coffers of Mexican drug cartels.

  There were other depressing side-effects of Calderón’s strategy. From 2006 to 2012, the President sent more than 50,000 soldiers onto Mexico’s streets, invested billions of dollars on equipment and training, attempted to reform the police and judicial systems, and strengthened Mexico’s partnership with the United States. But the Council on Foreign Relations reported that a legacy of ‘political manipulation of law enforcement and judicial branches, which limited professionalisation and enabled widespread corruption’ had left the government with ‘only weak tools to counter increasingly aggressive crime networks’.

  One of the main problems was local policing – or the lack of it. The drug cartels, with their massive resources, had repeatedly infiltrated the ranks of underpaid cops, from lowly traffic officers to the very top. The Calderón administration attempted to counter police corruption by dramatically increasing the role of the military in the fight against drug cartels. Not only were tens of thousands of military personnel deployed to supplement, and in many cases replace, local police forces, they were also recruited to lead civilian law enforcement agencies. Mexico’s judicial system, with its autocratic judges and lack of transparency, was also highly susceptible to corruption. The US Congressional Research Service noted that even when public officials were arrested for working with a cartel, they were rarely convicted.

  Calderón’s militarisation strategy also resulted in accusations of serious human rights abuses. A 2011 report by Human Rights Watch found that ‘rather than strengthening public security in Mexico, Calderón’s war has exacerbated a climate of violence, lawlessness, and fear in many parts of the country’. The report, which looked at five states, documented more than 175 cases of torture, 39 disappearances, and 24 ‘extrajudicial’ killings. The Mexican administration countered these accusations by heralding the successes of its offensive against the cartels. Through bilateral cooperation with the United States, it boasted, the government had killed or captured 25 of the country’s top 37 most wanted drug kingpins.

  A year before the change of presidential leadership, a report by the US National Drug Intelligence Center forecast: ‘Major Mexican-based trans-national criminal organisations will continue to dominate wholesale drug trafficking in the US for the foreseeable future and will further solidify their positions through collaboration with US gangs’. Nieto’s main election promise in 2012 was to switch the focus of the drugs war from tackling the gangs and hunting drug barons to reducing the crime and violence that affect the lives of ordinary citizens. He announced a national gendarmerie, initially 10,000 strong, to take over from the troops on the ground and focus on law enforcement. The federal police force would also be boosted.

  Analysts differ on how to address Mexico’s growing internal strife but an increasing number reluctantly agree that the US war on drugs is a failure and necessitates a new approach. As President Nieto changed his internal strategy, gradual moves were being made at state level in the US towards legalisation and decriminalisation of marijuana, one of the primary substances involved in the drugs war, raising new questions about overall policy. Regardless of the various proposals, most observers are less than optimistic. An academic who is one of America’s leading experts on Mexican organised crime, David Shirk of the University of San Diego, said: ‘It is ultimately the great shame of the last decade that we’ve made all this effort, we’ve lost all of these lives, and at the end of the day we’ve made no real substantive progress in reducing the availability of drugs – and the cost is extraordinary violence.’

  CHAPTER 23

  HORRIFIC HUMAN S
ACRIFICES OF THE VOODOO KILLERS

  The spookiest drugs gang of all time were sickeningly brutal but also unbelievably brave … because they believed they could defy death! They used voodoo to ‘protect’ themselves, to wield power over others and to satiate their bloodlust.

  The group were led by handsome Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, born in Miami of Cuban extraction, who in the early Eighties moved to Mexico to offer his gang’s backing to local drugs lords. But the ‘services’ they provided were more vile than even the warring narcotics cartels were accustomed to. For Constanzo and his drug-crazed followers were adherents of the black magic arts of Palo Mayombe, a violent African cult who believe the spirits of the dead can be harnessed if the gods are regularly appeased with living human sacrifices.

  Born on 1 November 1962, in Miami Beach to a 15-year-old mother, Constanzo grew up in Florida and Puerto Rico. His mother followed the Santeria, or Saint’s Path, a quasi-Christian religion brought to the New World by African slaves hundreds of years ago and adapted to fit in with the ways of their Catholic masters. Palo Mayombe is the dark sister of the Santeria. If the Santeria, which involves sacrifice of animals, could be likened to ‘white’ magic, Palo Mayombe is definitely ‘black’. The religion accepts no afterlife, so an adherent is free to do whatever he wants here on earth; the spirits of the dead exist in a kind of limbo, forced to wander the material plane. Newly-dead spirits can be harnessed by a Palo Mayombe priest, if regularly fed with fresh blood.

  The religion centres round a nganga – a cauldron kept constantly filled with blood, a goat’s head, a roasted turtle and, most importantly, a human skull – preferably that of a person who has died a violent and painful death. Non-believers, especially Christians, are considered to be animals and natural victims. The more painful and horrific their death, the more potent the spell that the high priest can cast.