Gangland

by Jerry Langton

  While the murder of Millán Gómez was the most prominent in Mexico that week—his funeral was attended by Calderón and most of the top military brass—it was just one of more than 100 assassinations kicked off by that of Velasco Bravo.

  And while Millán Gómez was still clinging to life, another hit squad was at work. Just as the chief of Mexico City's investigative police force, Esteban Robles Espinosa, was getting into his Ford Fiesta at 8:30 a.m. on his way to work, his way was blocked by a gray Nissan Quest minivan. When the side door slid open, masked gunmen jumped out and shot 13 handgun bullets at Robles Espinosa. Eight hit him, including two in the head and another two in the chest. He was unarmed because a girlfriend had left with his gun after an argument the night before.

  Although most media sources believed the police assassinations were a sign of goodwill from the Sinaloa cartel to the Beltrán Leyva brothers, they did not improve relations between the two groups. In fact, Arturo Beltrán Leyva believed that Guzmán Loera had actually tipped off the Federales and was responsible for Alfredo's arrest. And he wanted revenge.

  Realigning alliances in the cartels

  At 8:30 in the evening of the day after Millán Gómez was shot, three SUVs roared into the parking lot of the City Club supermarket on Boulevard Universitarios in the north end of Culiacán. As soon as they stopped, some 15 masked men opened fire with pistols and assault rifles. The three targeted men were too surprised to draw their weapons or flee. Two of them were killed at the scene and one was critically injured. One of the dead men was Edgar Guzmán Lopez, Guzmán Loera's 22-year-old son. He was in his second year at Sinaloa Autonomous University, studying business administration and had a two-year-old daughter with his girlfriend, Frida Muñoz Roman. More than 500 cartridges were recovered by investigators and 20 vehicles were damaged beyond repair.

  It was clear that the Beltrán Leyvas could no longer work with the Sinaloa Cartel. Instead, they aligned with (but did not join) the Gulf Cartel, dealing particularly with Los Zetas. This shift in the balance of power also affected relations between the Sinaloa and the Juárez cartels. Although weakened by the loss of the Beltrán Leyva Cartel's support, the Sinaloa Cartel had since absorbed the Colima Cartel, Sonora Cartel, Milenio Cartel and what remained of the original Guadalajara Cartel. Now it was the Juárez Cartel who appeared to be the weakest and most vulnerable of all the major gangs, despite controlling some of the most lucrative crossings into Texas.

  But the Juárez Cartel was willing to fight. Back in January, someone had taped a poster to the police memorial in Juárez that showed the names and pictures of 12 high-ranking police officers and described them as “executable.” It was addressed to “those who still don't believe.” For much of that year, someone hacked into the police radio frequency and threatened individual cops over their two-way radios. The day after Guzmán Lopez was killed, Juan Antonio Roman Garcia, the second-in-command of the Juárez police force, was headed to a family party when his official car was intercepted by two trucks. Without getting out of their vehicles, the gunmen pumped 50 rounds into Roman Garcia and his car. He was the eighth victim of the 12 officers on the executables list. Hours after Roman Garcia was killed, his boss, police chief Guillermo Prieto Quintana quit and moved to El Paso, Texas. He didn't make any elaborate excuses; he was just scared.

  On a giant billboard that read “Juárez Needs You! Join up and become part of the city police,” someone had painted “Los Zetas want you—we offer good salaries to soldiers.” Less than a week later, a banner was stretched across Nuevo Laredo's Avenida Reforma reading: “Los Zetas operations group wants you, soldier or ex-soldier. We offer you a good salary, food and attention for your family. Don't suffer hunger and abuse anymore.” In smaller text there was note that pointed out Los Zetas did not serve their men instant ramen noodles, a jab at the military's rations. Not to be outdone, the Gulf cartel put one up in Tampico that read: “Join the ranks of the Gulf Cartel. We offer benefits: life insurance, a house for your family and children. Stop living in the slums and riding the bus. A new car or truck, your choice.”

  News of more violence—some of it against U.S. nationals—from that weekend emerged. Three men driving a gray Ford Crown Victoria home from a horseracing track stopped at a red light on Avenida Vicente Guerrero in downtown Nuevo Laredo and were showered by more than 70 shots from assault rifles from a white van. Lorenzo Juárez Aguayo and Agustin Damian Navarrete died, while backseat passenger Juan Verdugo was critically wounded. It is believed they were shot because their Crown Victoria looked like an undercover police or DEA vehicle. And four more Americans from El Paso—Juan Manuel Contreras Machado, Luz Elena Velazquez, Jorge Jimenez and Alejandro Vazquez—were shot as they exited the Arriba Chihuahua nightclub in Juárez. They were not known to be connected to the drug trade.

  The U.S. government increased its warnings to Americans about traveling to Mexico, especially to border cities like Juárez, Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo where the violence had been most frequent. “It's almost like a military fight,” said Jayson Ahern, the deputy commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. “I don't think that generally the American public has any sense of the level of violence that occurs on the border.”

  But at the same time, they indicated that people should not be worried about the violence if they stayed north of the Rio Grande. “We just trust and believe that it will not come across to our side of the border,” acting El Paso county sheriff Jimmy Apodaca said. “If it does, we are ready.”

  Later that month, the cartels set a new and disturbing precedent. Previously, when the army and/or Federales surrounded one of their houses or clubs, the men inside would surrender. But on May 28 that changed. A raid on a house containing suspected Sinaloa Cartel members took place that evening as, but this time, the men inside decided to fight their way out. Seven Federales were killed in the ensuing melée. Two men were arrested, but they were just foot soldiers, the important cartel members having escaped. It had been abundantly clear that the cartels were as well armed as the police (if not better) and were now willing to fight to stay out of custody.

  The weapon of choice—the AK-47

  One of the guns confiscated in the raid was a Romanian-made copy of an AK-47. The AK-47—arguably the world's favorite weapon—is an assault rifle developed by Soviet general Mikhail Kalashnikov just after World War II. It is capable of firing ten 7.62 mm cartridges a second at 1,600 miles per hour for an effective range of about 330 feet. Its simple, rugged construction makes it a reliable weapon in any climate and under strenuous conditions, and keeps its price down. The AK-47, variants and copies, have been produced in more than two dozen countries and have been used by countless armies, both official and rebels, around the world. It has even appeared on national flags.

  What was interesting about this particular AK-47, though, was the fact that it could be traced by the FBI. Four months earlier, a 21-year-old American named Cameron Scott Galloway walked into X Caliber Guns, a weapons shop in a sleepy strip mall next to the Little Shoppe of Hair in northwestern Phoenix, not far from the Phoenix National Forest. He paid $3,000 for six AK-47s, getting an impressive deal. The FBI tracked him down, arrested him, but reduced the charges after he became a cooperative witness. He told them that all he knew was that a co-worker's brother had offered him $3,600 for the guns and all he had to do was sign for them. He knew they were going to Mexico, but claimed he did not know that they were to be used by people in organized crime.

  Digging further, the FBI traced the gun back to the factory, getting a clear indication of how these dangerous weapons get into the hands of cartels, despite being illegal not just in Mexico, but also in the U.S. The gun was manufactured at the Regia Autonom pentru producia de Tehnic Militar (RATMIL) factory in Cugir, a small town in the Transylvanian district of Romania. RATMIL makes both military and civilian versions of the rifle. The civilian models are heavily modified, with features such as automatic fire removed.

  These reduced-specification
rifles are imported legally to Century International, a Delray, Florida-based company that specializes in surplus military and military-style weapons. The stripped-down AK-47s are marketed to gun shops—Century International sells only to registered retailers—as the WASR-10 hunting rifle which is legal in all American states, except New Jersey and California. Despite its power and wow appeal, the WASR-10 can be had in many parts of the U.S. for as little as $500 brand new.

  Of course, the modifications made by RATMIL are easily reversed by a skilled gunsmith, and kits are sold online to change the WASR-10s back to full-featured AK-47s. The kits are strictly illegal, but companies get around the loophole by selling half the kit, while another company sells the other half. The finished AK-47s are then smuggled to Mexico, where they fetch prices of about $2,000. This was big business—of the 62 AK-47s confiscated by police in Mexico in the first half of 2008, more than half of them could eventually be traced back to X Caliber.

  Guns across borders

  The other commonly seen assault rifle in Mexico, the AR-15, follows a similar trajectory. A civilian version of the U.S. military's M-16, the AR-15 is widely available as a hunting rifle and is also easy to modify back to military specifications. Although it is lighter, has a higher rate of fire, higher muzzle velocity and is much more accurate than the AK-47, it's not as popular with the cartels because it is not nearly as reliable and its 5.56 mm ammunition is harder to acquire.

  Mexican officials frequently blame the U.S. for the massive importation of weapons into Mexico, pointing out that the U.S. has 54,000 legal firearms dealers (Canada has about 520), while Mexico has just one, and it is strictly controlled by the army. American critics, meanwhile, have pointed out that only a tiny fraction of the weapons seized by the Mexican government have been tracked at all and only some of those originated in the U.S. They also noted that many of the AK-47s seized were made by Norinco, a Chinese firm long banned from importing to the U.S. for supplying weapons to Iran and other hostile groups, and that the cartels' heavy weapons like rocket-propelled grenades are hardly legal on the streets of Texas. While acknowledging that some weapons come from north of the border, those critics remind the Mexicans that at least 160,000 soldiers defected from their military in the period between 2003 and 2009—many of them with their weapons—and that cartels and rebel groups from Guatemala to Colombia regularly trade in heavy weapons for drugs.

  Two days after the raid that killed seven Federales, President George W. Bush set his own precedent. He imposed sanctions on a number of groups he considered to be dangerous to the United States because they trafficked illegal drugs. They included the Kurdistan People's Party, the 'Ndrangheta (which had usurped the Costa Nostra as the dominant Italian mafia organization), as well as the Sinaloa and Beltrán Leyva Cartels. This allowed the Americans to arrest anyone caught doing business with them. “This action underscores the president's determination to do everything possible to pursue drug traffickers, undermine their operations and end the suffering that trade in illicit drugs inflicts on Americans and other people around the world, as well as prevent drug traffickers from supporting terrorists,” said White House spokeswoman Dana Perino.

  It was still open season on police commanders in Mexico. Igor Labastida Calderón was one of the few surviving officers remaining from the “executables” list. The chief of the Federales, Igor Labastida Calderón, agent Humberto Mendoza Alvaro Perez Morales Torices and Yezel Heidi Cruz Osorio, director of material resources for the Federales, sat down for lunch on June 26 at the popular Buenos Aires soup restaurant in the “Little Argentina” neighborhood of Mexico City. They were approached by two young men. One pulled out an Uzi and began firing, while the other had a video camera. When they were satisfied Labastida was dead (the other two were wounded, but survived), they continued filming for a few moments, then fled. Portions of the video showed up later on YouTube. The next day, national Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mourino said that the assassinations “have a clear objective to intimidate, frighten, paralyze society and, with that, force the federal government to retreat.” The day after that, four more Federales were killed after their car was forced off the road in Culiacán and gunmen emerged with AK-47s.

  The Mérida Initiative in the war on trafficking

  For months, the Bush and Calderón governments had been working on an arrangement to coordinate their offensives against drug traffickers and allow aid from the U.S. to get to Mexico. The Mexicans wanted the Americans to acknowledge that the problem was largely due to American demand and the relative abundance of firearms, while the Americans wanted the Mexicans to be more transparent in their financial dealings and to be more aggressive in investigating human rights abuses by its police and military.

  After much negotiation, the $1.6 billion Mérida Initiative was signed into law on June 30. It began with $400 million in aid to Mexico, $65 million to neighboring Central American countries to fight the trafficking of drugs into the United States and $74 million to American agencies to try to stem the flow of weapons into Mexico. The deal included:

  Non-intrusive inspection equipment including ion scanners, gamma-ray scanners, X-ray scanners and drug-sniffing dogs

  Software that improved telecommunications for Mexican investigators

  Training for investigators and prosecutors

  The establishment of offices for citizen complaints and professional responsibility and the introduction of witness protection programs

  Thirteen Bell 412 EP utility helicopters and eight much larger UH-60 Black Hawk transport helicopters

  Four Spanish-built CASA CN-235 military transport airplanes

  Anti-gang equipment, training and community action programs for the Central American countries.

  There was a great deal of criticism of the deal on both sides. Many Americans thought the money could be better spent on drug education and rehabilitation rather than more interdiction, while many around the world found the concept of further militarization of Mexican society to be frightening. That criticism reached a crescendo on August 2, when a videotape from the city of León in Guanajuato was leaked to the media of police training methods that included torture techniques like forcing trainees to roll in their own vomit or blasting carbonated water into their nostrils. One of the instructors was an American, speaking in English, but he was later determined to have been a non-government contractor hired before the Mérida Initiative came into effect.

  As the video was broadcast over and over again on Mexican TV, it sparked outrage. “This is troubling,” said Sergio Aguayo Quezada, founder of the nonprofit Mexican Academy for Human Rights. “In the past, torture was usually hidden; now they don't even bother.”

  Some Mexican officials, however, defended the videos and the methods, explaining that a different kind of war demanded different tactics. “Perhaps it looks inhumane to us,” León Mayor Vicente Guerrero Reynoso told El Heraldo de León, the newspaper that broke the story. “But it is part of a preparation method that is used all over the world.”

  That didn't inspire much faith in the Mexican government among human rights observers around the world. “The only thing that I thought when I saw those videos was: ‘Thank God the U.S. Congress attached some human rights conditions,’” said José Miguel Vivanco, director of the Americas for Human Rights Watch.

  The killing moves to civilians

  For the most part, the people who had been killed or injured in Mexico were cartel members, informants, police officers, military personnel or politicians. There were a few targeted celebrities and journalists, some mistaken identities and some collateral damage (an infant and his four-year-old brother had been killed by stray bullets in an assassination attempt in Chihuahua in August), but ordinary civilians had never been in the crosshairs until Mexican Independence Day.

  At about 11:00 p.m. on September 15, 2008 in the Plaza Melchor Ocampo in the center of the Michoacán city of Morelia, Governor Leonel Godoy Rangel was introducing his speech with the traditional viva
s to Mexican revolutionary heroes in preparation for a reenactment of Hidalgo's “Grito de Dolores” when somebody threw a hand grenade into the crowd. The resulting panic sent townspeople stampeding down a side street, where an assailant threw another grenade among them. Later that night two more explosions were heard on a road out of town. A local journalist described people “falling like dominoes.” When the dust settled, eight people—including a 13-year-old boy—were dead and more than 100 were injured.

  Godoy toured local hospitals and blamed the unprecedented and terrifying attack on “organized crime,” but no group claimed responsibility for it. In fact, La Familia vehemently denied it would ever attack women and children, going as far as to distribute pamphlets and hang up banners to that effect, as well as text messaging reporters denying they would ever stoop so low. “Coward is the word for those who attack the country's peace and tranquility,” said one typical message.

  Most people blamed the other cartels, particularly Los Zetas, who were well known as the most aggressive and most likely to use terroristic tactics. But since the blast occurred in President Calderón's hometown on Independence Day, some blamed the attack on paramilitary groups affiliated with the PRI or even the Zapatistas.

  In an interview with The New York Times, Calderón expressed sympathy for the victims of violence all over Mexico, but said that the upsurge in terror tactics indicated that the cartels were feeling the heat from his offensives and were fighting among themselves for a diminishing market. He defended his long-range plan. “What are the alternatives?” he said. “Is the alternative to allow organized crime to take over the country?”