Gangland

by Jerry Langton

  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 massacre—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 re
prisals, 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 methamphetamine. 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.”

  Inside the apartment were the bodies of five men, all illegal immigrants from Mexico. They had duct tape binding their hands and feet and covering their mouths. There were burn marks on their ears from the clamps of booster cables that had been used to torture them by electrocution. All five had their throats slashed. Autopsies indicated that the men were all dead before their throats were cut.

  Investigators determined that the apartment was a drug stash, and that the men were involved with the Gulf Cartel. Shelby County, a quiet suburb with good schools and lots of retailers, was one of the fastest growing communities in the U.S. Latin Americans had been a rare sight in the area until 2005 or so, when Mexican day laborers started lining up on County Road 35 looking for work. Since then, investigators revealed that Pelham had become something of an area hub for drug trafficking.

  On the other side of the country, the DEA and local police forces began a painstaking 19-month investigation on the meth trade in the state of Washington. The investigation just kept getting bigger and bigger until the operation was launched on October 22 and 23, 2009, as Project Coronado. Three hundred and three people were arrested in 19 states. Items seized on those first two days included 140 pounds of cocaine, 740 pounds of methamphetamine, 970 pounds of marijuana, 144 firearms, 109 vehicles and two complete meth labs. By early 2011, information from Project Coronado had led to a total of 1,186 arrests and had added much more evidence, including 29 pounds of black-tar heroin (a type particular to Mexico), 4,400 pounds of cocaine, 2,700 pounds of meth, 16,400 pounds of marijuana, $32,795,000
in U.S. currency and two maritime vessels.

  Most of those arrested were Mexican nationals who had crossed the border illegally, and U.S. authorities named them as members and associates of La Familia, working in coordination with the Sinaloa Cartel. “This operation has dealt a significant blow to La Familia's supply chain of illegal drugs, weapons, and cash flowing between Mexico and the United States,” U.S. attorney general Eric Holder said. “The cartels should know that we here in the United States are not going to allow them to operate unfettered in our country.” American authorities had long considered La Familia among the most violent of the Mexican drug cartels, and with its quasi-religious shadow-state mentality, among the most dangerous. “The sheer level of depravity of violence that this cartel has exhibited far exceeds what we unfortunately have become accustomed to from other cartels,” said Holder.

  Despite the number of arrests and huge amounts of product confiscated, many observers countered that it was just a token effort when compared to the overall cartel picture in the U.S. “These raids indicate that the U.S. is beginning to roll up at least one of its sleeves in the war with the cartels,” said George Grayson, a Mexico specialist at the College of William and Mary. “Most of the arrests in this week's raids are probably of low-level dealers, couriers and look-outs.”

  While Mexican gangs had long been established in the southwestern U.S. and Florida, it surprised many to see how powerful they had become in places like Seattle, Boston, Syracuse, New York and St. Paul, Minnesota. And one other fact the case revealed opened many eyes in the U.S.—much of the marijuana seized was not from Mexico, nor even California, but was the legendary BC Bud.

  BC “Bud”

  In the 1960s and 70s, much of Canada's self-identified hippie population moved to its westernmost province, British Columbia. Large areas of B.C. are warmer and wetter than the rest of Canada, and the Gulf Islands (between the mainland and Vancouver Island) and the Kootenay Plateau in the province's southeast proved very suitable for marijuana cultivation.