Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America

by Ioan Grillo

  Secondly, Alvarez says Nazario was left-handed. This anomaly of left-handed people using a different side of their brain has long fascinated researchers, who note that leaders in many spheres, including four of the five last U.S. presidents, share this trait (all except George W. Bush). Is it a coincidence or could using the brain in a different way help a gangster become top dog?

  In 1989, Nazario’s fierce temperament landed him behind bars. He was up to his usual weekend antics, getting plastered and mouthing off, when a young doctor made the mistake of crossing him. According to one account, Nazario liked the doctor’s car and ordered him to hand it over, which he refused to do. But the medic may have just stared too long. Whatever it was, the Maddest One whipped out his pistol and shot him. Luckily for the doctor, he survived the bullets.

  Nazario served much of the year in prison in the state capital, Morelia. The arresting officers also beat him heavily. He says the punishment did not cow him but made him hungry for revenge.

  During this incarceration, police took a mug shot of Nazario. There are few photos of him and this is the most commonly shown. He’s trim, young, tough looking, with a thick neck and light brown skin. Knowing the scale of mayhem he will cause, I can look back at the picture and say that I see his psychopathic stare, his frightening aura, the face of a leader but a diabolical one. It’s similar to the glare of Charles Manson in a 1966 mug shot before he went on to found the Manson family and unleash its orgy of bloodshed.

  But those observations come from the benefit of hindsight. Really, Nazario looks like one more small-town gunslinger just as Manson looked like one more car thief out of juvenile prison.

  * * *

  So how did the Maddest One turn from a drunken brawler into a self-styled spiritual leader? Two episodes stand out as having a major impact on the young Nazario.

  Firstly, four of his brothers were murdered in a series of killings. He writes that he was especially hurt by the slaying of his brother Canchola, in the border city of Reynosa in 1993. Canchola had been a role model for Nazario, sharing his love for comic hero Kaliman and taking him on his first trip to the United States. Nazario was furious as he says Canchola was killed in an argument with his own friends, an act of treachery. The death pushed Nazario to the edge, making him madder than ever.

  Secondly, Nazario himself suffered a beating in which he almost died. The fight was over an amateur game of soccer in Apatzingán in 1994. Following an altercation on the pitch, Nazario exploded with rage, swinging at the rival team, only to find himself on the floor getting kicked repeatedly in the head. The boots fractured his skull.

  Doctors at the Apatzingán hospital said it was beyond their skills to heal the wound and Nazario was transferred to Mexico City. In the capital, surgeons opened his head and inserted a metal plate to bind his fractured skull together.

  The injury made Nazario even more “loco,” and he writes that he saw hallucinations and visions. Alvarez said the metal plate would also make Nazario’s face bulge when he got angry.

  “If he was staring at you, his forehead would be swelling. It was freaky. He was a frightening man.”

  Nazario was turning into an authentic James Bond villain.

  The trauma made Nazario wake up to what a train wreck his life was. Like all good self-redeemers, he touched bottom. And it was at bottom that he met God.

  “I realized that I had fallen into the dark and scary maze of fantasy worlds and unsubstantiated pleasures. I admitted to myself that I had become a vulgar alcoholic, physically destroyed, with ghosts in my head.”

  Nazario based himself in McAllen, Texas, where he smuggled in marijuana. Here he joined Alcoholics Anonymous and worked through his twelve-step program. In giving up the booze, he was drawn to evangelical Christianity and became a fervent believer. He appears to have had an addictive personality, jumping headfirst into things.

  The Maddest One first followed Latino preachers before discovering Christian author John Eldredge. In his book Wild at Heart, Eldredge paints a dreamy picture of a muscular Christianity; of a macho man untamed but noble, fighting in a savage but beautiful habitat. Eldredge describes the world as a struggle, in which you “must desire life like water, and yet drink death like wine.” It connected with the Maddest One, also sharing his love for nature and his macho worldview.

  “A hesitant man is the last thing in the world a woman needs. She needs a lover and a warrior, not a Really Nice Guy,” Eldredge writes. “We don’t need accountability groups; we need fellow warriors, someone to fight alongside, someone to watch our back.”3

  Eldredge describes aggression as being a healthy part of masculinity.

  “Despite what many modern educators would say, this is not a psychological disturbance brought on by violent television or chemical imbalance. Aggression is part of the masculine design; we are hardwired for it.”4

  Many men can read such words and feel less bad about shouting at a car cutting them off. Nazario could feel better about stabbing dealers and shooting doctors. He was hardwired for it.

  Copies of Eldredge’s books were later found with detained followers of Nazario. In response, Eldredge condemned their use of his work. “It brings me sorrow and anger to know they are doing this and I renounce their use of my words in this way,” he said in a statement. “Submission to Jesus is central to the entire message. They seemed to have missed the central point, which gives context to everything else.”5

  Unlike the Catholicism that Nazario grew up with, evangelical preachers often emphasize improving your lot and fulfilling your dreams. This struck a chord with Nazario. Despite all his hang-ups, he developed an incredible self-belief, a conviction he was destined to be somebody.

  However, Nazario’s dream was to become a brutal gangster warlord. This is the obvious contradiction: how could the Maddest One consider himself a follower of Christ while he sold meth and chopped off heads? It’s irrational. But then human beings can be irrational animals.

  Those who knew him tell me that Nazario really believed what he preached. In his mind, he was righteous. When he punished people, he felt like he was dishing out Old Testament justice. He took what he wanted from evangelical Christianity and ignored what was inconvenient. You can’t blame evangelical writings for Nazario’s actions. He twisted them for his own ends.

  Nazario also drew inspiration from other curious places. He became a huge fan of the film Braveheart, which he would later make his followers watch. The kilted warriors of Scotland fighting the evil English king resonated with his own struggle in the countryside against the Mexico City elite and their federales. When vigilantes stormed one of his last homes they found books including The Art of War—classic warlord reading. Meanwhile, Nazario would quote Mexican revolutionary Zapata.

  It was a contradictory hodgepodge of ideas. But many leaders around the world have managed to gain followers with conflicting and bizarre programs (Jim Jones, Joseph Kony, Pol Pot …). The pseudo-ideology, Nazario found, was a cement that could bind his criminal empire together.

  CHAPTER 36

  Cartels are often seen as the basic building block of Mexican drug trafficking. They are gigantic organizations with their names on indictments, and police wall charts showing their pyramidal structures. But some drug agents and academics also look at the wider networks of traffickers in regions of Mexico that cross cartel lines. In different areas, gangster families tend to know and work with each other, intermarry and feud, like extended tribes. Writers on the Italian Mafia don’t just break it down into crime families but into criminal systems dominating geographical areas. In Mexico, you can identify similar systems spreading their tentacles into a spattering of gangs and cartels.

  The oldest and biggest network is from Sinaloa, the cradle of Mexican drug trafficking. The Sinaloan narco tribe spread out from its Pacific state to more than half of the U.S. border. It gave birth to the Guadalajara Cartel, Tijuana Cartel, Juárez Cartel, and Beltran Leyva Cartel, all run by Sinaloans. Traffickers worke
d together across the Sinaloan empire, but they also fought. Viciously. One reason that Sinaloan civil wars are so bloody is that personal feuds mix in with turf battles.

  Mexico’s second gangster system developed in the east by the Gulf of Mexico. Here a network of bootleggers evolved into the Gulf Cartel, dominating border rackets for seven decades and giving birth to the Zetas. The Mexico border has a sparsely populated area from the east of Chihuahua into Coahuila that creates a natural break between the Sinaloan and Gulf gangster systems. The legal business empires in the northeastern states of Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas also have a common regional identity that is separate from the West. The Gulf gangsters rode on the back of this business network, creating front companies and trucking firms to move drugs.

  A third weaker gangster system developed to the south in Michoacán and Guerrero. Here, interlocking crime families grew marijuana and opium. But they didn’t control any border themselves and had to work with one of the two dominant networks to move their drugs into the United States.

  By the end of the twentieth century, the most powerful trafficking family to emerge in Michoacán was the Valencia brothers, based out of the mountain town of Aguililla. Led by Armando Valencia, alias Maradona (he looks vaguely like the Argentine soccer star), they allied with the Sinaloans and trafficked through northwest Mexico.

  Competing with the Valencias was Carlos Rosales, who hails from a Guerrero town called La Union, on the border with Michoacán. To move his produce, Rosales allied with the Gulf Cartel and became close to its leader Osiel Cárdenas, alias the Friend Killer (he murdered his friend because he liked his wife).

  Rosales recruited Nazario and he is identified as the Maddest One’s mentor. Nazario doesn’t actually mention Rosales in his memoir; he was probably cautious about giving prosecutors more evidence to use against him. However, both Mexican and American agents say that Rosales was key in elevating Nazario from small-time trafficker to major player.

  At this stage, Nazario ran operations inside the United States. With his base in McAllen, just across from the Gulf Cartel stronghold of Reynosa, Nazario moved drugs into Texas.

  There are reports that police nabbed Nazario for marijuana in McAllen in 1994 and he did a stint in a Texas prison. Some sources say that his Christian conversion actually happened behind bars. However, I cannot find any record of this arrest in the U.S. court system. If it happened, he could have been detained under a different name. Either way, he managed to win his freedom and continue to grow his drug distribution.

  Finally, in 2003, a federal grand jury in McAllen indicted Nazario for trafficking marijuana and crystal meth. Nazario is identified as a leader of a network of smugglers linked to various Texas drug busts.

  Nazario’s rise coincided with seismic changes in the narco world. The first was an expansion of Mexican cartels at the turn of the millennium as they got rich off cocaine profits. Mexican gangsters had reaped the bounty of marijuana and heroin for decades. Then as U.S. drug agents cracked down on the Caribbean trafficking route in the eighties and nineties, Colombians turned to the Mexicans to bounce their white powder over their two-thousand-mile border.

  The Mexicans began as paid couriers but ate more and more of the pie. By the twenty-first century, drug agents believed Mexicans moved 90 percent of the cocaine into the United States. Furthermore, Mexican traffickers were now buying the drug from Colombians for about two thousand dollars a kilo brick and selling these in the United States for upwards of thirty thousand dollars, the agents say. The lion’s share of the profits had emigrated from Colombia to Mexico. Along with the cash came the bloodshed.

  The second change was political. Mexico went through a democratic opening and this inadvertently shook the deep political connections of the Mexican drug trade.

  In the twentieth century, Mexican trafficking was organized under the one-party rule of the PRI. The PRI created an elaborate system for controlling gangsters: it arrested some and taxed the rest. The traffickers were organized into plazas—or drug trafficking territories—along the lines of police jurisdictions. The plaza bosses paid off cops, who passed the bribes up the system. If a plaza boss got out of line, police could take him down. Money flows up like gas, and power flows down like water.

  This corruption system was not static but evolved over the years. It began all the way back in 1915 when the Chinese-Sinaloans first took opium to the United States. The very first U.S. government report into this trade in 1916 alleges Mexican officials were involved.1 In these early days, drugs were a small-scale business, but by the end of the twentieth century, drug trafficking made billions and accusations were made that the system was organized from the pinnacle of power. Under pressure, Mexican police arrested high-ranking officials, including a governor and even the drug czar.

  At the turn of the millennium, this corruption system shattered. Mexico’s pro-democracy movement grew along with the opening of political systems across the region after the Cold War. Finally, the PRI lost its grip on the presidency in 2000 to Vicente Fox, a straight-talking former Coca-Cola executive. Mexicans hoped that multi-party democracy would bring them prosperity and freedom. In the euphoric atmosphere, President Fox promised “the mother of all battles against organized crime.”

  Under Fox, troops rounded up drug lords like never before. In 2003, they seized “Maradona” Valencia in Michoacán and the “Friend Killer” Cárdenas in Tamaulipas, on the border with Texas. The next year, they nabbed Rosales, Nazario’s mentor, who they said was plotting to bust Cárdenas out of prison. Fox’s government was ripping up the map of plaza bosses.

  However, Fox’s mother of all battles wasn’t a simple fight of good police against bad traffickers. While federal forces took down some kingpins, gangster Chapo Guzmán escaped from prison and expanded into new realms—backed by some officers on his payroll. Other police sided with his rivals in the Gulf Cartel.

  The escape and rise of Chapo has led to an accusation that he was supported from the top, by President Fox and then his successor Felipe Calderón. Traffickers have voiced this charge in their narco mantas, blankets with messages they hang from bridges. The war on drugs, they say, was only against selected cartels. Some journalists and academics also support this idea. The most prominent is Anabel Hernández in her work Los Señores del Narco.

  Los Señores is a phenomenon in itself. The book accusing Mexico’s very leaders of being in cahoots with narcos is one of the nation’s bestselling nonfiction works. Hernández has not been sued for it. Yet criminal charges have not been filed against the presidents either.

  Hernández is from of a generation of strong female Mexican journalists who have taken on the powerful. She was propelled to investigative reporting, she tells me, when her own father was kidnapped and murdered in December 2000 (the same month that Fox took power and Mexico’s era of democracy was supposed to start).

  “It is difficult for me to say this, but my father was abducted, beaten, put in a car trunk, and tied up in such a way that he suffocated. The case was never solved. The authorities asked for money to continue the investigation, which we refused to pay. It’s very frustrating. What are you as an individual going to do against a corrupt system? This issue of my father made me change my outlook on life. For me, investigative journalism was a refuge.”

  Hernández soldiered on, making important exposés. She suffered threats and harassment and lived years under protection from the Mexico City police before going to the United States. She views Mexican corruption as still hierarchical and organized from the top.

  “I am convinced that this war on drug trafficking was never real. Its only intention was to protect the Sinaloa cartel and attack others,” Hernández tells me. “Fox started his administration with just one thousand dollars in the bank. His companies were all bankrupt. Chapo Guzmán escaped on January 19, 2001. In February, Fox started to spend money, to buy property and remodel his ranch. Where did he get this money? It is completely inexplicable … He has neve
r been able to sue me because he cannot justify this wealth.”

  When I interviewed Fox, he firmly denied helping Chapo, as he has done on numerous occasions. “It is an important case, but it is not the hallmark of my government,” he said. “One swallow does not make a summer.”

  Despite the charges, no evidence has directly linked Fox or Calderón to the Sinaloa Cartel. It remains on the record as an accusation without a smoking gun.

  Whatever the truth, there is another dynamic I view as central in understanding the Mexican drug war. With the democratic opening, the government became weak and was incapable of imposing its will on drug traffickers.

  Democracy did not, as people hoped, make Mexican officials honest. Many were still on the take. But they were not all on the same side anymore. Mexico’s multiparty system meant competing cliques of politicians ran different states and towns and their police forces. Fox’s center right National Action Party held the federal government. But the PRI still ran most states, including the trafficking heartlands in the north. Meanwhile, the leftist Democratic Revolution Party took power in Michoacán and Guerrero, bastions of the old guerrillas and leftist trade unions.

  Drug traffickers might pay off officials in a town or state, but federal officers could be working for their rival. The corruption system became disorganized and turned on itself. Police began competing and actually fighting each other. In 2005, federal officers had a shoot-out with city police in Nuevo Laredo. It was a sign of the violent chaos that would spread across Mexico.

  The government lost the ability to be the arbitrator that could control organized crime. Instead, gangsters disputed power themselves under strength of arms. Amid this bloodshed, the mobsters turned from traffickers into warlords. And rather than the police ordering gangsters about, gangsters fought over who could control police forces.