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

by Ioan Grillo

  This fighting caused homicides to shoot up at some of the most alarming rates in the Americas. The number of killings by cartels or the security forces assigned to fight them would surge from about fifteen hundred in 2004 to sixty-eight hundred in 2008 to almost seventeen thousand in 2011.2

  Such a sudden rise in violence grabbed global attention, and hardened war correspondents flew in to cover it. The conflict became known in Spanish as la narcoguerra, and in English as Mexico’s drug war, or even sometimes as the Mexican Drug War—a named war in uppercase letters. Unlike the fighting in Brazil’s favelas or Jamaica’s garrisons, it seemed to have a start date, cartel hit squads looked strikingly like paramilitaries, and there was a prolonged military campaign against them. This gets back to the central question: should we define these conflicts as actual wars?

  Despite the clear escalation of violence, Mexico’s cartel clash still falls into the gray space between crime and war. But it pushes those boundaries. Between 2007 and 2014, the Mexican drug war claimed more than eighty-three thousand lives in a mix of firefights, ambushes, massacres, and “executions.” It has also included car bombs, vigilante militias, and thousands of refugees.

  However, it is not all about drugs. The cartels fight over fiefs for a range of rackets. The questions of corruption and power are at the heart of the upheaval. Conflicts through the ages have also been about more than what they are named for; the Opium War wasn’t all about opium and the Soccer War wasn’t all about football.

  To describe the conflict in Northern Ireland, we use the term the Troubles—with a capital T—for the violence and unrest from 1968 to 1998. That included a mix of shootings, bombings, riots, and instability. Similarly, the Mexican drug war is a period of massacres, cartel ambushes, military crackdowns, corruption scandals, a systematic attack on journalists, narco blockades, protests, and widespread social unrest. Tragically, its end date is not yet clear.

  CHAPTER 37

  Nazario took over Michoacán through a serious of shifting alliances and betrayals. He took from one side, turned on them, and then took from the other. I normally favor viewing history as a series of events and reactions rather than something premeditated. But studying the climb to power of Nazario—the man who read The Art of War—I actually think he planned it. And it was a cunning plan.

  The Maddest One returned from Texas to his homeland around 2004. The U.S. indictment haunted him, and a vacuum had been created in Michaocán by the arrest of the drug lords Valencia and Rosales. He could fill it.

  This is a key problem for governments combating drug cartels. Whenever you take down one kingpin, you create a power vacuum, which hungry lieutenants and rivals fight over. Nazario was the hungriest to step into the void and reorganize the Michoacán traffickers into a force stronger than they had ever been before.

  First Nazario had to unite the fragments of Rosales’s organization and knock out the remnants of the Valencias. To complicate this, he was not Rosales’s only lieutenant who wanted to be top dog. Another trafficker called Jose de Jesus “Monkey” Mendez also vied for the honor. To avoid confronting the Monkey, Nazario made a deal with him to divide Michoacán between them. Mendez described this pact several years later in a video confession to the federal police.

  “We talked and came to an agreement,” says Mendez, who is quite softly spoken, despite his Monkey nickname. “Each one of us had to control his areas. Michoacán is divided in two parts. His side and my side.”1

  Mendez describes how they named a number of lieutenants to oversee the regions of Michoacán for them. Among them were Enrique “Kike” Plancarte from the city of New Italy, and his uncle, who they all called the Uncle, or El Tio. Another was a rural schoolteacher called Servando Gomez, alias “La Tuta.”

  Even as he smuggled drugs, La Tuta was still on the Michoacán school board’s payroll. He was older, more educated, and more articulate than the other smugglers, and became known as the “Teacher” (Just like William of Brazil’s Red Commando). Appealing to Nazario’s own pseudo-intellectual discourse, La Tuta gained the Maddest One’s trust and became his right-hand man. If Nazario was king, then La Tuta was the king’s hand. La Tuta helped shape the cartel’s ideology and became a public spokesman, calling up startled TV presenters as they broadcast live. He has a charismatic, friendly rap for TV, the air of a cultivated but down-to-earth tough guy.

  Nazario then took advantage of the broader shifts in Mexico’s trafficking map. In 2005, the nation’s central battle pitted the Sinaloa Cartel of Chapo Guzmán against the Gulf Cartel and their paramilitary wing, the Zetas. Gulf boss “The Friend Killer” Cárdenas had founded the Zetas in 1998, recruiting fourteen former soldiers. He wanted men who could really fight, not just tattooed gangbangers. At the time, nobody noticed it as an earth-shattering event. But it started a trend of militarizing Mexico’s drug battles.

  The Zetas steadily expanded, recruiting former police and gangbangers that they trained in makeshift camps. As they grew into the thousands they became a semi-autonomous corporation that their masters struggled to control. If the Gulf Cartel was a country, then the Zetas were a state within a state, like the S.S. in Nazi Germany.

  After Cárdenas was arrested, the Sinaloa Cartel launched an attack on the Gulf–Zeta stronghold of Nuevo Laredo. Chapo Guzmán had not yet grasped the strength of the paramilitary Zetas and believed he could sweep into the city as he had northwest Mexico. In the first wave, he recruited Maras from Central America. This was when Zetas murdered the five Maras and piled their bodies in a Nuevo Laredo house.

  In response, the Sinaloans organized their own paramilitary hit squads. It was at this time, in 2004, that the Mexican drug war really began, with the fighters transforming from gangbangers to heavily armed militias.

  Nazario had worked with the Gulf Cartel and Zetas to smuggle drugs into Texas. When he returned to Michoacán, he went back to them to arm and train himself so he could wipe out the remains of the Valencias who had worked with the Sinaloans. This fit in with a wider Zetas tactic at the time. As they held Nuevo Laredo, they went after Sinaloan strongholds across the country. The best form of defense is attack. When Nazario wiped out the Valencias he would be handing them Michoacán. Or so they believed.

  Zeta training camps have been uncovered across Mexico. They consist of ranches where recruits learn ambush tactics and practice firing belt-driven machine guns and other heavy weapons. Nazario and his henchmen trained in one of these camps, according to Mexican and American agents.

  The Zetas brought their experience from the Mexican military. But it was turned on its head. They were no longer a government army fighting a guerrilla group, but acted more like a guerrilla group themselves. They would hide in the countryside and use dirt roads to launch ambushes on military convoys, opening with a 50-cal and following with grenades and rifle fire. Nazario took these tactics to Michoacán.

  Backed by the Zetas, Nazario won a swift victory against the Valencias, leaving a string of corpses around the Hot Land in 2005 and early 2006. But then Nazario made his tactical U-turn. He turned against the same Zetas who had armed and trained him. To rally Michoacán residents to his side, Nazario wrote in his propaganda messages (blankets hung from bridges) that the Zetas were “foreign invaders.” He pointed to the fact the Zetas who had come to Michoacán were shaking businesses down and kidnapping. This was true. But Nazario was mum about the fact that he had invited them in. It was classic power games; you create a threat and provide yourself as the solution to it. Read: The Art of War.

  In this fight with the Zetas in late 2006, Nazario, and his cohorts first called themselves La Familia Michoacana (The Michoacán Family). The name helped rally Michoacán people against an invader. Nazario was also a huge fan of the Godfather movies, which were perhaps an inspiration with their talk of mafia families. To announce its arrival, La Familia advertised its “mission” in local newspapers. One appeared in La Voz de Michoacán.

  “Our sole motive is that we love our state
and are no longer willing to see our people’s dignity trampled on,” said the advertisement, in which they also promised to “eradicate from the state of Michoacán kidnapping, extortion in person and by telephone, paid assassinations, express kidnapping, tractor-trailer and auto theft.”2

  This ad highlights the peculiarities of La Familia compared to other cartels. It immediately created a media face and presented itself as a kind of righteous vigilante group. This position was shaped by Nazario on his narco mission from God, but also reflects idiosyncrasies of Michoacán and its history of armed groups administering justice.

  Many residents of the Hot Land seemed to believe the propaganda. Alvarez, the businessmen and contemporary of Nazario, owned a gas station by this time. He said that La Familia called for funds to help drive the Zetas out and he complied.

  “People were scared of the Zetas. We were hearing about how the Zetas were carrying out massacres and kidnapping like crazy. There was a lot of fear. And La Famila presented itself as the answer, a way to protect us. We thought it would. But we fell into a trap. Nazario and his mob were just as bad as the Zetas. And the payments we made would turn into extortion.”

  The fight between La Familia and the Zetas was bloody. Anyone accused of giving information to the other side was murdered. La Familia stuck bodies on public display with threatening messages. And they began decapitating.

  The technique of head-chopping may seem ancient, but it only began in a big way in the Mexican drug war in 2006. The inspiration for the technique is hard to pin down exactly. Genaro García Luna, the federal security chief under Calderón, said it was a copy of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Others have pointed to former Guatemalan special forces in the Zetas, who used the technique in the civil war. Whatever the inspiration, it was effective at spreading terror.

  La Familia hiked the stakes. They rolled five heads onto a disco dance floor while it was packed with revelers. A cameraman filmed the atrocity and sold the video to a news agency, but the editors decided not to release it because it was too disturbing. In the film, you see the view of the cameraman walking into the Sol y Sombra club in the town of Uruapan soon after the heads have been thrown. He first fixes on the faces, which look spookily peaceful, the tension drained away with their lives. But as the image opens out you see the necks are severed and bleeding onto the white tiled floor. A message is written on a large white piece of paper and dumped by the heads.

  “LA FAMILIA DOESN’T KILL FOR MONEY. IT DOESN’T KILL WOMEN. IT DOESN’T KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE. THOSE DIE WHO HAVE TO DIE.” It then ends with the uncanny phrase that left journalists wondering who this new cartel was: “LET THE PEOPLE KNOW, THIS IS DIVINE JUSTICE.”

  This claim to be looking after people’s security was a constant feature of Nazario’s rule. He installed an alternative justice system, in which local bosses judged and punished those who carried out “anti-social” crimes such as robbing or raping. This was the same street justice that takes place in the favelas of Brazil and garrisons of Jamaica. But the Maddest One added his loco twist. He pronounced in the name of the lord and punishments were in the style of Old Testament justice. Alleged criminals were flogged, like in Roman times, or even crucified.

  In the town of Zamora, the mob made a line of alleged criminals march through the main street in the evening. They had no shirts, showing deep whip marks on their backs, and carried signs admitting their crimes. Mexicans refer to petty criminals as rats and they were named as such. “I am a rat and for this La Familia punishes me,” said one sign.3

  Hot Land residents also described to me how the cartel offered a debt-collecting service. If people were owed money, they could go to La Familia, who made sure they got paid—and kept a third themselves for the service. If people didn’t cough up, the cartel would take their houses and force them into exile.

  This alternative justice system won support. Mexico’s poor rural areas have always been on the edge of the law and crime increased with the opening of Mexico’s political system. This comes back to the central problem that Mexico’s democratic transition focused on elections and markets, but not on the justice system. While Mexico became more democratic and opened its borders, it had not become safer, allowing gangsters such as Nazario to step into this void.

  Nazario had likely been dreaming of his quasi-religious rule before he established it. For a start, he had to have had the time to write his Pensamientos, or “Thoughts.” He distributed this to his followers from late 2006 once he controlled the Hot Land.

  Pensamientos reflects the hodgepodge of Nazario’s ideas. Some phrases sound like the evangelical preachers he followed.

  “I ask God for strength and he gives me challenges that make me strong; I ask him for wisdom and he gives me problems to resolve,” reads one entry.

  Others are reminiscent of revolutionary Zapata.

  “It is better to be a master of one peso than a slave of two.”

  And others, still, sound like they come from his beloved Kaliman.

  “He who has fear and confronts it is valiant. He who has fear and runs from it is a coward.”

  I want to find out how much the cartel troops believed in this narco religion. So in the town of Antunez, I talk to Hilario, a former gunman for Nazario’s army, who served with a mob lieutenant called Toucan (named after the tropical bird found in southern Mexico). A wiry thirty-four-year-old with tattoos on his neck, Hilario was jailed for cooking meth in California before being deported to Mexico and joining the Maddest One’s militia.

  Hilario describes how he was made to attend a course to study Nazario’s writings. I had heard of these courses before, but he gives me fascinating details.

  “A bus came to the town and picked us up. It took us to Morelia for the course, which lasted all week. We studied Pensamientos and all we ate was rice and beans. On the last day, Nazario came out to talk to us. He was wearing all white like Jesus.”

  When he describes this, I think of Colonel Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness. Nazario took over his tribe, got a God complex, and went off the rails.

  Nazario also spread his message in evangelical temples and Christian drug rehab centers he funded. This came at a time when many Mexicans turned to Protestant groups amid a historic decline of Catholicism. In 1950, more than 98 percent of Mexicans professed to be Catholics. By 2010, the number had dropped to 82 percent. Many in poor criminalized communities felt the staid Catholic Church didn’t speak to them like the new sects. Some turned to religious deviations such as the Santa Muerte, or Holy Death, a female grim reaper figure.

  Hilario says that he was going through a tough patch when he first came back from the United States and Nazario’s religion helped him. But as he got closer to Nazario, guarding meetings when he met with Toucan, he saw the Maddest One as a hypocrite. He said Nazario could switch between his alter egos of righteous preacher and cold killer.

  “He would suddenly flip. One second he was talking about religion and the next he was ordering a hit on somebody.”

  However hypocritical he was, Nazario’s faith served a purpose. His rules kept troops in line and gave the movement a semblance of purpose, a mission. His narco hit men weren’t just carrying out wanton murder. They were waging holy war.

  CHAPTER 38

  While Nazario delivered his unholy justice, two thousand miles away in Washington, lawmakers grappled with America’s latest drug craze: methamphetamines. Their efforts would inadvertently hand the Maddest One a billion-dollar business opportunity.

  Like with cocaine, German scientists discovered amphetamines in the nineteenth century. They are cheap and effective stimulants that give you energy to move fast, work fast, and speak fast, hence the nickname: speed. Japanese scientists improved the formula to make the stronger methamphetamine. Meth gives a rush of energy that can last more than four hours, along with the ability to have sex for a generous chunk of that. (It has an inhibitory effect on ejaculation.) Several sides in the Second World War used meth to keep soldiers alert during gru
eling campaigns; German pilots took it in a pill form called Pervitin before their blitzkrieg airstrikes and there are claims that Japanese kamikazes were on it during suicide missions.1

  In postwar America, some people used meth for work, especially truck drivers on long hauls. Pharmacists also sold a meth diet pill called Obetrol. An old newspaper advertisement for it shows a fat skier unable to move. “Either lose 45 pounds or wait for six more inches of snow,” says his slim skiing buddy.2 The answer: take Obetrol and shake like a speed freak until the pounds burn off.

  In 1970, Congress banned meth under the Controlled Substances Act—a cornerstone of Nixon’s War on Drugs. Enterprising crooks realized it was easy to make your own from ingredients such as pseudoephedrine, which is found in cold medicine. The chefs walked out of pharmacies with box loads of meds and cooked the meth in bathtubs. Biker gangs dominated this industry, not only serving truck drivers but also a growing number of partiers wanting a boost. It became a poor man’s cocaine, used in rural America. It was also a hit in the gay scene in San Francisco.

  By the turn of the millennium, American meth use had rocketed, especially in small towns in the American heartland. In his beautiful book Methland, Nick Reding explores the causes, focusing on Oelwein, Iowa, population 6,126. He paints a portrait of the industrialization of agriculture and the loss of community leaving a depressed and soul-searching town turning to crank. Meth also gained popularity among workers sweating long hours in meatpacking factories, many of whom were undocumented Mexicans.

  As meth use spiraled, doctors saw its horrific side effects. It wasn’t all speeded up fun and marathon sex. Tweakers, as users are known, came with meth mouths of rotted teeth and black gums. They also suffered insomnia, hallucinations, and paranoia. Some scientists argue the drug causes brain damage, irreversibly changing the pleasure, learning, and motor systems.