by Ioan Grillo
Nazario’s messianic complex illuminates a memoir he wrote. While most drug lords erase details of their lives, Nazario actually self-published this autobiography and distributed it to his followers. It was never on sale, but thousands of copies flowed around Michoacán towns and villages. It was a hot book. If soldiers found people with them, they would often arrest them for being Templar affiliates.
The 101 pages are fittingly titled They Call Me “The Maddest One.” The book has a front cover with a silhouette of Nazario’s face over a deep red background. It is reminiscent of a silhouette image of Che Guevara printed on T-shirts throughout Latin America. As well as styling himself as a messiah, Nazario fancied himself a guerrilla hero.
Maddest One is written in decent grammar, maybe with the help of a writer with a gun to his head (Nazario says he didn’t do a day in school). Splattering its pages are amusing sayings such as, “Every nation has the government it deserves and every government has the criminals it deserves.” It also provides unusual insight into the life and deranged mind of this gangster warlord.
The memoir needs to be carefully scrutinized, but agents tracking him confirm many of the facts. A Mexican investigator who worked for the federal intelligence service and then a special unit fighting the Knights Templar gave me many rich details on the mob and shared his wealth of files. DEA agents also handed me information on the Maddest One.
Among the American agents who tracked Nazario’s mob was Mike Vigil, who spent thirteen years working in Mexico, more than any other DEA agent. He often went undercover posing as a drug trafficker to get into their crazed world. During Vigil’s time, a trafficker shot at him from three feet (the bullets missed). Vigil also had the pleasure of turning down the offer of a three-million-dollar bribe from Honduran kingpin Juan Matta Ballesteros—who was later convicted of the kidnapping of DEA agent Enrique “Kike” Camarena.
However, while the agents confirm many names and dates in Nazario’s account, they clash with his vision. Nazario portrays himself as a social bandit, subtitling his memoir “Diary of an Idealist.” Agents say he was one of the most dangerous serial murderers on the planet with few real ideals at all.
“I think he is a psychopath that wants to romanticize his criminal activities by writing these manifestoes,” Vigil says. “The fact of the matter is that he is a drug trafficker, he is a killer, and he represents the worst of Mexican society but has these delusional romantic ideas.”
I have lived in Mexico since 2000, so my work on it goes deeper than the other countries covered in this book. I also had great help from Michoacán journalists, including Francisco Castellanos, Leo Gonzalez, Dalia Martinez, Daniel Fernandez, and Jesus Lemus. Lemus may be the reporter who knows most about drug cartels in the world thanks to a quirk of fate; he was jailed for three years alongside top capos. It is a painful story. He had written an exposé of a corrupt politician and in revenge prosecutors filed trumped-up charges against him, accusing him of working for Nazario. Lemus thankfully resisted days of torture and refused to sign a confession and the charges were thrown out after three excruciating years.
My reconstruction of Nazario’s life is also helped by many people from his homeland who knew him. The vigilante uprising to topple the Maddest One created a euphoric atmosphere and people were unusually open in revealing details of the crime world. Among those I talked to who knew Nazario were several of his gunmen who later became vigilantes, Apatzingán businessmen Cristobal Alvarez, a woman married to Nazario’s cousin, and a lime farmer who Templars tortured while Nazario was present.
The valley he hails from is a tight-knit community with broad interlinking families. It is a land blighted by poverty, criminality, and beliefs in the supernatural. These features all helped mold the narco saint and his legend from when he was a small child.
CHAPTER 35
Nazario was born on March 8, 1970, in a Michoacán community called Guanajuatillo. It is more a hamlet than a village, a bundle of hovels of tin roofs and dirt floors scattered around wild hilly terrain infested with scorpions and snakes. Even now, it is only approachable down hours of dirt road—through what most insurance companies would label “bandit country.”
Michoacán is in central western Mexico, alongside the Pacific Ocean and at the foot of the southern Sierra Madre Mountains. It is spotted with beautiful lakes inspiring its name, which in the indigenous Nahuatl (or Aztec) language means “possessor of fish.” Amerindians such as the Purépecha people still have sizeable communities and maintain strong traditions and a level of self-rule. The state was also the destination of many immigrants, including Italians (it has a town called New Italy) and Dutch Germans. This northern European heritage can be found in strong-flavored cheese and tall blondes who could be on Paris runways. Some of these country folk with yellow and red hair are referred to affectionately as gueros de rancho—“ranch blondes.”
As well as being a historic home of immigrants, Michoacán is a massive source of emigrants to El Norte. There are more people from Michoacán living in the United States than from any other Mexican state; consular programs show 13 percent are from Michoacán, as opposed to just 2 percent from Sinaloa, Chihuahua, or Tamaulipas.1
With twenty-two thousand square miles, Michoacán is about the size of West Virginia. To its north, it borders Jalisco, home to Mexico’s second city Guadalajara, and to its south the combative state Guerrero, home to some of Mexico’s poorest villages. Its position makes it strategically useful for anybody shipping goods (or drugs) north along the Pacific Coast. It is also home to Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexico’s busiest port, where ships arrive daily from Asia and across the world.
Tons of minerals from Michoacán’s rich earth pour through the port en route to China. The state also produces some of the world’s best avocadoes and limes in its fertile valleys. The mining and agricultural wealth can be seen in elegant colonial buildings in the state capital, Morelia. But despite these blessings, Michoacán is one of Mexico’s poorer states; money is in the hands of few, and many scrape by as peasant farmers and day laborers.
The poverty in Michoacán and neighboring Guerrero led them to become bastions of a leftist guerrilla movement. Mexico escaped the intensity of Cold War battles in much of Latin America. During the twentieth century, the ruling PRI incorporated much of the left into its own ranks, even while it was the political home of billionaire capitalists. Furthermore, Mexico recognized Cuba so Castro held back from funding rebels in the Aztec nation. However, student protests flared up in the late sixties, culminating in the bloody massacre of demonstrators in the capital’s Tlatelolco Square. In the following years, a small guerrilla movement launched a limited insurgency.
The most well-known guerrilla was Lucio Cabañas, a schoolteacher in Guerrero, who headed the Party of the Poor. His band kidnapped the governor before soldiers gunned him down in 1974. Over in Michoacán, there was a prominent guerilla commander in the town Zamora and another in the Purépecha town of Cheran.2 This guerrilla tradition would be exploited by Nazario, but also be key to the vigilantes fighting the Knights Templar.
Michoacán is also one of Mexico’s most religious states. It was at the heart of the Cristero rebellion of the 1920s, in which people took up guns against the revolutionary government that banned masses. Many of the thirty thousand Cristeros who died in the three-year rebellion hailed from Michoacán. Some were beatified by Rome, including fourteen-year-old child soldier José Sánchez del Río. “People are so religious here,” a priest called Gregorio Lopez tells me, “because this earth was bathed in the blood of martyrs.” Shrines to saints cover even the most humble villages.
Nazario’s hamlet is in one of the poorest parts of Michoacán, a seething hot valley known as the Tierra Caliente, or Hot Land. Locals refer to the valley as El Infiernillo, or Little Hell—a name proudly used by a delicious taco joint in its principal market town Apatzingán. According to folklore, the good people of Morelia banished their criminals to the Little Hell to scrape out a living
among cacti and lime trees in the scorching heat. However true the tale is, the Hot Land is certainly on the fringes of the law.
Many people have left the Hot Land to seek a living in the United States, creating strong cross-border links (and smuggling routes) to towns from Los Angeles to Atlanta. The Hot Land is a big drug-producing area. Mexican traffickers have grown opium poppies and smuggled opium to the United States since Washington first made it illegal in the 1914 Harrison Act. The earliest traffickers came from Sinaloa State, where Chinese workers brought opium poppies. But the custom of producing drugs spread south down the Sierra Madre, and Michoacán farmers have raised opium since at least the 1940s. They also grow an abundance of marijuana, which they have shipped to the United States since the explosion of American demand in the sixties.
The ganja plantations also feed a bounteous local market. Many in the Hot Land smoke joints of weed casually and openly, when they break from work and when they while their evenings away along with their mescal. This was particularly apparent during the vigilante uprising against Nazario. As vigilantes ran around with Kalashnikovs and grenades, clashing with Templar gunmen and reclaiming towns, many were seriously stoned.
Nazario. The name itself is curious, uncommon in Mexico. It means one from Nazareth, and I wonder if this could have helped give the Maddest One his Jesus complex. Our names sometimes shape us.
Even by the standards of a poor valley in a poor state, Nazario’s family was considered pitiable. He was one of twelve brothers and sisters abandoned by their alcoholic abusive father. They were half-starved and ragged.
Nazario naturally dwells on this hardship in his memoir. He also uses it to justify his life of crime. This is common in Mexico’s drug trafficking culture. Popular “narco ballads” celebrate the villains, portraying them as poor rebels who have the balls to fight the rich man’s system. This echoes the same class rhetoric as the Red Commando in Brazil. As Nazario recalls:
My family and I lived a poverty so cruel and humiliating that we all dressed as bums or in used clothes they sell cheap in the market that weren’t in our size. When we ate refried beans with butter it was a luxury and normally we just ate beans in the pan. In my infant mind, I thought the rich ate bread instead of tortillas and Coca-Cola instead of river water. Not one fruit, not one sweet, not anything, just hunger and too much work …
A child grows up in such a bad situation, walking alone on the dirt paths of his ranch, bitter, only accompanied by misery, by hopelessness and premature death. Is it only him who is guilty of temporarily choosing the path of violence and illegality? … Is the government not guilty for betraying the people and allowing extreme wealth in the hands of a few, and extreme poverty in others?
Nazario’s mother, Maria, was alone with twelve children and kept them in line with her fists. Nazario says they called her “the beater” as she smacked them so often. In his memoir, he writes bitterly of these hidings, which seemed to traumatize him. One time he played with a neighbor’s horse without permission, and his mother forced him to stand for hours with arms like a cross while everyone passed by, a humiliation that still made his blood boil years afterwards. Later in the book, he says his mother would apologize for the torments when he became a powerful drug lord.
Working as a child laborer in corn and lime fields, Nazario was illiterate until he was ten. He was finally inspired to learn to read by a cult Mexican comic called El Kaliman. The adventures of this superhero, he writes, provided him with a refuge from his violent, impoverished reality and he devoured the weekly installments with passion.
In the comic, Kaliman is a mysterious crusader who dresses all in white with a jeweled K on a white turban. His special powers include levitation and telepathy as well as being a martial arts champ. He’s also a kind of warrior philosopher who says a wise phrase in each edition. One of Kaliman’s most iconic sayings: “There is no force more powerful than the human mind, and whoever dominates it, dominates everything.”
In the tradition of superheroes, Kaliman fights for justice and defeats evil. One old comic has him on the cover, muscles bulging out of his tight white suit, his right hand raised in victory. “The light of truth and justice will always overcome,” he says.
The details of this Mexican superhero are notable because Kaliman was such a major influence on Nazario. The drug lord too would later dress in white. And his religious rant Pensamientos contains many phrases that are startlingly similar to the psychic Kung Fu master’s. The Maddest One wanted to be his own superhero.
Nazario also believed he had gained psychic powers like Kaliman. As a boy on the ranch, he claimed to be able to telepathize with animals. As he writes, “I mentally ordered a donkey to come close and he immediately obeyed me … These were my childhood pastimes, to become like Kaliman and be able to do good for humanity.”
Later, he would claim to control people’s minds. It is easy to dismiss this as his delusional megalomania. But several of those who knew him say they were also convinced he could take hold of people’s brains. In the Hot Land of Michoacán, many believe in the supernatural. Nazario would create himself as the narco saint because people around him would believe it. In their world, demons, visions, and mind control exist. It would be harder to create the narco saint in a stronghold of atheism and disbelief.
When Nazario was sixteen, he headed to California to seek his fortune. When he recalls this, he emphasizes the negative more than the positive. “Like all poor people without hope, I went to El Norte,” he writes. He didn’t head to the opportunity of the United States, but escaped the poverty of his homeland. Unlike many migrants looking to become American, he always gravitated back south.
He took a two-day bus ride to Tijuana with an elder brother, before they sneaked over countryside east of the city into what he called “Gringolandia.” This was back in 1986, when it was easier to cross than with today’s fences and radars.
Staying with a cousin south of San Francisco in Redwood City (which he calls “Red Good City” in classic Spanglish), Nazario briefly worked eleven-hour shifts for a landscape gardener. But he soon gave up hard labor for the world of drug dealing. He was attracted to it, he describes, when he sat in the park and saw a house on the corner serve up a steady stream of customers with marijuana.
I confess that this drug trafficking in plain sight surprised me. It was evident that they made a lot of dollars practically without any risk.
Like all good traffickers, Nazario started at the bottom, selling ganja in the park and guarding stash houses. When an African American and another Mexican dealer tried to bully him off a park corner, he writes, he took their own knife and stabbed them with it, earning his Maddest One reputation. With twelve brothers and sisters he had been fighting all his life.
The Maddest One enrolled briefly in a school in Humboldt County—so he could sell weed on the local reservation. Then, to help his sprouting enterprise, he got himself a three-year work permit so he could go legally back and forth from the United States to his homeland.
With papers, Nazario made his business a cross-border venture. He went back to Michoacán and grew marijuana in the hills to traffic it north. He also brought U.S. cars and drove them south to sell without documents, a classic racket in the Hot Land.
Spending parts of the year between Mexico and the United States is common among people in Michoacán, creating a fluid binational community that links the politics of Hot Land villages constantly to migrant enclaves in Redwood, California; Portland, Oregon; McAllen, Texas.
While in Mexico, Nazario now lived down the dirt roads from his ranch in nearby Apatzingán, which would become the center of his crime empire. Apatzingán boasts a colonial center and is proud to be where Mexico’s first constitution was signed. But away from its elegant cathedral and plaza, it’s a plain sprawl with 140,000 residents. As the principal city of the Hot Land, it’s a meeting point for roughneck farm workers and marijuana growers and has a reputation for being tough and brawly. A nice thing a
bout Apatzingán is that (unlike Mexico City) people don’t honk their horns every two minutes. They are worried the driver could pull a gun if they do. Nazario fit in like a deer in the forest.
Cristobal Alvarez, an Apatzingán businessman who later became a vigilante, knew Nazario at this time from the cantinas and dance halls in the town center. He describes him as a vicioso (vice-ridden) and violent young man.
He would always be drunk and stoned and was either chasing girls or starting fights. He liked to intimidate people, to make them scared of him. But he was also smart. He had this incredible memory and would recall people and things exactly. People would follow him.
Alvarez remembers two striking physical details about Nazario. First, the Maddest One was a muscular but short man; he is registered as being just five foot four. Small tough guys are a well-known phenomenon, with actor Joe Pesci making a career playing them. Small men are also among the most notorious megalomaniac rulers, from Hitler to Napoléon. And it’s striking how many gangster warlords are short: Jamaican Dudus was only five foot four, while “Chapo” means Shorty, as he is five foot six.