Gangland

by Jerry Langton

  Onlookers watched as soldiers knocked down the front door and emerged with two men, one fat and one thin. The fat one was Teodoro El Teo García Simental, who had once been one of the most important men in the Tijuana Cartel until a downtown, broad daylight standoff in April 2008 between men loyal to him and those loyal to the Arellano Félix left 15 men dead and García Simental in charge of his own, smaller gang. The thin one was Diego Raymundo Guerrero García, one of his lieutenants.

  Using equipment and methods obtained from the DEA, Mexican military intelligence managed to track death threats made to Baja California attorney general Rommel Moreno Manjarrez and Julian Leyzaola Perez back to García Simental and his La Paz residence. “Today another Mexican cartel leader was taken off the street and is no longer able to carry out his bloody turf war,” said Michele Leonhart, acting administrator of the DEA. “This was not an isolated event; it exemplifies the growing effectiveness of our information-sharing with the [Calderón] administration, and our continued commitment to defeat the drug traffickers who have plagued both our nations.”

  Information gathered from that arrest—two laptops and 16 cell phones were seized—led to another massive blow against the Simental gang about three weeks later. In the same Fidepaz neighborhood on February 9, soldiers and Federales arrested José Manuel “El Chiquilín” (the Kid) García Simental and Raydel “El Muletas” (the Crutches) López Uriarte. El Chiquilín was El Teo's younger brother and second-in-command, while López Uriarte was the gang's enforcer. Although he was linked to about 250 murders, he was better known for torture, and his signature was to leave his victims using crutches for the rest of their lives. In fact, authorities seized uniforms with an insignia that featured a skull with crossed crutches underneath it and the name “Fuerzas Especiales de Muletas” (Crutches' Special Forces).

  Acting on information obtained through the arrests, soldiers and police raided a home in Tijuana. Inside, they found five police officers, six members of the García Simental gang and two rival members of the Tijuana Cartel who were being held captive.

  It was the end of the García Simental gang. Those members who were still alive and at large either fled or joined other groups. Although the demise of the gang would have little net effect on the levels of drug trafficking—other, even bigger gangs had been dissolved or absorbed before with only temporary results—it did make Tijuana a somewhat safer place. Shootouts between the followers of García Simental and those loyal to Arellano Félix (essentially two factions of the same cartel) had been commonplace. Police in the city had warned residents and visitors to steer clear of any collection of Cadillac Escalade SUVs or Ford F-250 pickups (especially if they were customized) because those were the vehicles favored by traffickers.

  Los Zetas versus the Gulf Cartel

  But as things were getting less violent in northwest Mexico, northeast Mexico erupted into another separate war. The Gulf Cartel had been working in conjunction with the Beltrán Leyva Cartel since the Gulf Cartel and Sinaloa Cartel declared a truce in 2008, which limited their need for Los Zetas to fight on their behalf. With less enforcement work to do, Los Zetas had become more independent of the Gulf Cartel and started making their own import and export deals. They had, in effect, become a de facto cartel in their own right—and declared independence from the Gulf Cartel in February 2010.

  It began when a high-ranking member of Los Zetas, Victor Mendoza Perez, was killed by a gang from the Gulf Cartel in January. When the Gulf Cartel refused a request by the leadership of Los Zetas to hand over the killers, war was declared. A mass e-mail warning of brutal violence circulated to a set of teenagers on February 17 spread rapidly around the region and set off the war. People all over Tamaulipas, Nuevo León and some of Coahuila panicked. Many businesses closed, few parents sent their children to school and the streets of most cities and towns were deserted. Violence broke out on the February 18 when a suspected Zetas safe house in Villahermosa, not far from Reynosa, was shot up in the afternoon. Later that night, a Petroleos Mexicanos (the state-owned petroleum company, better known as Pemex) filling station employee reported that armed men were forcing the station's staff to leave. It had been well-established that Pemex stations were often used as transfer and retailing spots for marijuana. A Navy helicopter was sent in to investigate, but it had to withdraw due to heavy ground fire.

  Rumors abounded of massive gun fights and helicopters downed. There was no coverage of the event in the local media, though residents could hear the shooting. “Before, if there was a shootout, the scene would be full of journalists,” a Mexican reporter who admitted that he stopped covering cartel-related stories out of fear, told The New York Times. “Now, sometimes there will not be a single journalist. Everyone stays away.” On the following day, a Pemex truck carrying four tons of seismic booster pentolite, a powerful explosive, was hijacked.

  Because the media refused to cover the violence, a few brave people took it into their own hands. Among the boldest of them was CiudadanoReynoso100 (Reynoso Citizen 100), a woman in her early forties who took videos of the carnage and posted them on YouTube. She shot one video “Ciudadana graba evidencias de balaceras en Tamaulipas (Citizen's evidence of the shootings at Tamaulipas)” from the front passenger seat of a car. The six-minute video begins on a largely deserted highway. As they pass by the Pemex station, they come across at least 10 shot-up SUVs. She sees a lone boot surrounded by hundreds of spent cartridges from what she calls a “cuerno de chivo” (goat's horn), Mexican slang for an AK-47, and remarks “they must've taken that guy away in pieces.” As they pass the military checkpoint, there are two Escalades (one white, one black) about three feet away from each other, each riddled with literally hundreds of holes. In an instant, she notices a dead body in between them. At the end of the video, she complains about what the war has done to the local economy and points out, “Look, even the traffic lights don't work anymore.”

  Shootouts in the area became routine and, by February 24, officials admitted that 16 people had been killed in and around Reynosa, and the U.S. had closed its consulate there. Authorities on both sides of the border warned Americans not to visit the area. “Tamaulipas is at war, and if there is no coordination between state and local governments, then the federal government will have a hard time waging a frontal attack on organized crime,” PAN senator José Julián Sacramento Garza said. The American authorities agreed. “Some recent confrontations between Mexican authorities and drug cartel members have resembled small-unit combat, with cartels employing automatic weapons and grenades,” read a warning from the U.S. State Department. “During some of these incidents, U.S. citizens have been trapped and temporarily prevented from leaving the area.”

  The situation became so dire that a Mexican military helicopter shot at gunmen from the air on the night of March 4. The following day, the Red Cross—an organization founded to tend to victims of war—ceased operations in the area because its volunteers had been shot at too often.

  Criticism of the local media's unwillingness to put itself in the line of fire quieted down on March 8 when the Sociedad Interamericana de Prensa (SIP, or Inter-American Press Association) reported that eight local journalists had been kidnapped in Reynoso. One had been tortured and killed, two set free and another five were still missing. One of the men who was released told Milenio, a national newspaper, that his kidnappers identified themselves as sicarios and told him to warn his peers not to “stir things up.” The reporter told Milenio that “they have decided that nothing more should be known or told ... and we obeyed.”

  New alliances formed

  The split between Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel led to Mexico being basically divided between two warring factions. Los Zetas aligned with the Juárez Cartel, Tijuana Cartel and the Beltrán-Leyva Cartel, while the Gulf Cartel threw their lot in with the Sinaloa Cartel and La Familia. With the loss of Los Zetas, the Gulf Cartel formed a new enforcer unit, known as Los Escorpiones (the Scorpions).

  On the afternoo
n of March 14, Arthur Redelfs was driving his pregnant wife, Leslie Ann Enriquez, home from a children's party thrown by the U.S. consulate in Juárez. They had their seven-month-old daughter with them in the back seat. One or both of them noticed that they were being followed, so Redelfs stepped on the accelerator of their white Toyota RAV4 with Texas plates. Their pursuers followed and, when the El Paso family was trapped by traffic, opened fire. Redelfs, an El Paso prison guard, was killed by a bullet above his right eye and Enriquez, a ten-year veteran of the consulate, died from bullet wounds to her left arm and neck. Their daughter was screaming, but not injured.

  Previously, American casualties in the Mexican Drug War had been accidental—people caught in the cross-fire, misidentified or simply in the wrong place when someone decided to shoot. But the assassination of Redelfs and Enriquez had all the hallmarks of a directed hit. “We know that the U.S. citizens were targeted,” Juárez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz told CNN, noting that a police officer witnessed the car chase. “We know they were chasing them. We know they wanted to kill them.”

  Ten minutes before Redelfs and Enriquez were killed, Jorge Alberto Salcido Ceniceros—a supervisor at a Juárez factory who was married to Hilda Antillon Jimenez, a Mexican employee at the U.S. consulate—was found shot to death in his white Honda Pilot SUV, a car that looked a great deal like the RAV4 Redelfs was driving. His children—four and seven—were injured but survived. They had attended the same party.

  “These appalling assaults on members of our own State Department family are, sadly, part of a growing tragedy besetting many communities in Mexico,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said. “They underscore the imperative of our continued commitment to work closely with the government of President Calderón to cripple the influence of trafficking organizations at work in Mexico.”

  While the media concentrated on connections to the consulate, the Department of Homeland Security investigated and determined that the Redelfs/Enriquez murders were actually retaliation by an El Paso gang called El Barrio Azteca and that the target was actually Redelfs, not Enriquez.

  Five days after the killing, the DEA and El Paso police launched Operation Knockdown against El Barrio Azteca, making 26 felony arrests. Ricardo Valles de la Rosa—a Mexican native who grew up in El Paso and became a member of the gang in prison – was among those charged. He admitted to both murders and said that El Barrio Azteca had a close relationship with the Juárez Cartel. The murder of Salcido Ceniceros had been a mistake. The American authorities found out that members of El Barrio Azteca worked on both sides of the border and carried out many different tasks for the Juárez Cartel, including contract killing. “Within their business of killing, they have surveillance people, intel people and shooters. They have a degree of specialization,” said David Cuthbertson, head of the FBI's El Paso division. “They work day in and day out, with a list of people to kill, and they get proficient at it.” It was also determined that another El Paso gang, the Artistic Assassins, did similar work for rival cartels.

  Murder north of the border

  While much of the U.S. media's attention on the Mexican Drug War focused on Texas, a story emerged from Arizona that led to a national outcry, military mobilization and one of the most controversial laws in U.S. history. Robert Krentz was a well-known rancher. His family had established a cattle farm just outside Douglas, Arizona (a small, still mostly non-Hispanic town across the border fence from the much larger Mexican city of Agua Prieta) in 1907 and he had been voted into the Arizona Farming and Ranchering Hall of Fame.

  After seeing what he described as literally thousands of illegal immigrants cross over his property, he became an outspoken critic of the contemporary border policy and called for more security. “A bear of a man with a reserved nature, he could seem imposing at first glance,” read The New York Times’ description of him. “But almost always rendered help to those who needed it, friends and family said.”

  He was doing just that at about 10:30 on the morning of March 27. A neighbor, Wendy Glenn, heard him broadcast a message to his brother Phil on a shared radio. “He says, ‘I see an immigrant out here, and he appears to need help. Call the Border Patrol,'” recalled Glenn. “He was not frantic. He was not calling for help.”

  When nobody heard from him again after a few hours, his family and friends organized a search party. The body of Krentz's dog was found on a remote part of his ranch just before midnight. He had been shot several times. Searchers followed the tracks of Krentz's all-terrain vehicle and found his body at the wheel. His gun was still in its holster and his wallet was still in his pocket. Because it appeared as though Krentz was neither confronted nor robbed, Glenn came up with a theory for his murder. “There are a lot of people out here who are unarmed that need help, and I'm sure Rob didn't realize [the killer] was armed,” she said. “I think he approached to see if he could help him and the guy thought maybe he was going to get arrested, that maybe Rob was the law ... I don't know what the guy thought, but he never gave Rob a chance.”

  The Krentz family issued a statement in which they said they did not blame the Mexican people for the murder, but the governments of both countries. “Their disregard of our repeated pleas and warnings of impending violence toward our community fell on deaf ears shrouded in political correctness,” it read. “As a result, we have paid the ultimate price for their negligence in credibly securing our borderlands.”

  The reaction to the Krentz murder was quick and huge. Locally, the first response people had was to arm themselves. Lynn Kartchner, owner of Allsafe Security, the most popular gun shop in Douglas, reported an immediate 20 percent increase in sales. “We've been selling a lot of the concealed type of guns,” he said. “Most of these people who have been buying guns have told me if these people will shoot Rob, they will shoot anybody.”

  People in the state of Arizona made calls for federal help. “The federal government must do all it can within its power to curb this violence and protect its citizens from criminals coming across the border from Mexico,” John McCain, the state's senior senator and a former Republican presidential candidate, wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, herself a former governor of Arizona. He pointed out that in the 262-mile strip of border known as the Tucson Zone, Border Patrol made about a quarter-million arrests in 2009. The request was bipartisan. McCain's sentiments were joined by those of Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who said: “The federal government must respond appropriately. All options should be on the table.”

  Heeding their plea, Obama deployed 1,200 National Guard soldiers to help train and reinforce Border Patrol, immigration and customs agents along the border. McCain replied that 6,000 would have been a more appropriate number.

  Mexico's ambassador to Washington, Arturo Sarukhán Casamitjana, used the opportunity to put a spin on the move that echoed much of what Calderón had been saying, by praising “additional U.S. resources to enhance efforts to prevent the illegal flows of weapons and bulk cash into Mexico, which provide organized crime with its firepower and its ability to corrupt.”

  The Krentz murder became a rallying cry for supporters of Arizona's controversial Bill SB 1070 (better known as the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act), which, if passed, would allow authorities to enforce a federal law already on the books that requires non-citizens to provide documentation upon request. The Act also bars state and local legislatures from restricting enforcement of immigration laws and increases penalties on anyone sheltering, transporting or employing illegal immigrants.

  SB 1070's future was in doubt as the national (and international) media cast it as racist and many boycotts were threatened, but it was signed into law by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer on April 23. Reaction to the law was negative in Mexico. Calderón said: “The Mexican government condemns the approval of the law [and] the criminalization of migration” and called it a “violation of human rights.” But American journalist and Mexico specialist Chris Hawley poi
nted out that Mexico has essentially the same law on its books, allowing Federales to check the documents and even detain suspected illegal immigrants and that Federales and other Mexican police routinely engage in ethnic profiling when dealing with Central and South Americans.

  Business as usual in Mexico

  While the central part of the border was caught up in political rhetoric, the northeast was still awash in violence. After a motorcade carrying the chief of police of a suburb of Juárez was shot up, tensions in Monterrey were high. On March 19, army soldiers engaged in a shootout with suspected Gulf Cartel members just outside the campus of Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, a prestigious university often referred to as Monterrey Tech. When the smoke cleared, authorities announced they had killed two sicarios. It was later revealed that the two dead men were actually accomplished graduate students at the school.

  On the morning on March 28, 40 prisoners held at Centro de Ejecución de Sanciones de Santa Adelaida, a state prison in Matamoros, escaped without violence. Fifty of the prison's staff were arrested for complicity.

  Two days later, just hours after authorities tried to douse rumors of impending violence after several key members of Los Zetas were arrested, the cartels surprised the military by staging seven different assaults on army bases throughout Nuevo León. It began when cartel members attempted to block the entranceway to a military compound near Matamoros by moving tractor trailers in front of it. In the end, 18 cartel members were killed in the ensuing gun battle, and authorities seized 54 assault rifles, 61 grenades, eight improvised explosive devices (IEDs), three rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and six armored SUVs. The only casualty suffered by the government forces was a soldier with an injured toe.

  But like the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War, while the attacks of March 30 were a military failure, they had an enormous psychological impact. Soldiers had been killed on patrol or in ambushes throughout the war, but these incidents marked the first time the cartels were willing to launch full-scale attacks on the military. It seemed just a matter of time before the cartels came out of hiding and confronted the police and military openly. The authorities, however, said that the brazen attacks were a show of desperation on the parts of the cartels.