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

by Ioan Grillo

  Amid a furor, Congress approved the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005, restricting sales of meds with pseudoephedrine. People can now only buy small amounts with prescriptions and their names and addresses are registered.

  The measures were impressive at smashing the American meth industry. The number of labs busted on U.S. soil went down from a peak of almost 24,000 in 2004 to less than half that, or 11,573, by 2013. But the industry migrated to Mexico. Meth seized on the southern border climbed steadily, from 2.3 metric tons in 2004 to 5.2 tons in 2009 to 15.8 tons in 2014.3 Such movement of drug production is known as the balloon effect; you pressure the balloon in one spot and the air moves to another.

  Several Mexican cartels moved into the meth trade. But Nazario and his Familia had distinct advantages. Many members had spent time in small U.S. towns and knew how to cook. I talk to one chef who first learned to make meth in San Bernardino, California, in the nineties—before he served seven years in U.S. prison and was deported. Nazario himself was indicted for meth in Texas in 2003—before the 2005 law.

  An even bigger advantage is that Michoacán is home to Lázaro Cárdenas, the busiest freight port in Mexico. Cartel contacts bought precursors in countries including China, India, Syria, Iran, and Egypt and smuggled them in titanic loads through the porous Pacific harbor. Once they had the ingredients, La Familia cooked it on an industrial scale; they ditched the biker bathtubs for “super labs” hidden in the mountains. Soldiers found water cisterns big enough to irrigate major food farms, along with dozens of barrels and generators. Instead of churning out meth by the pound, they made it by the ton.

  Mexican gangsters developed a stronger product than the bikers ever had. They favored a crystal form that comes out in white, blue, or pink colors. DEA agents said it was the cleanest meth they had seen, some close to 100 percent pure.

  With such immense production, many cooks themselves liked to tweak and sell it locally. In the Hot Land, they call it hielo, or “ice,” because of its transparent crystalline appearance. Gangsters in Apatzingán became bad speed freaks just like the meatpackers in Oelwein, Iowa.

  Nazario responded by banning the sale of his meth in Michoacán. He describes this in his writings, and residents that I talk to in Michoacán villages confirm it is true. The Maddest One did seem to have principles after all. As he had suffered from substance abuse himself, he didn’t want those around him suffering. Or maybe he knew that if his troops were meth heads, they would be too paranoid. Some ignored it and took ice anyway.

  But Nazario had no qualms about selling meth to the gringos. La Familia pumped it through their U.S. network, often among Michoacán émigrés. It established its biggest operations in California, Texas, and Georgia. But its tentacles reached many other states, including New York, Missouri, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Colorado, both Carolinas, and Washington.

  Narco economics are notoriously hard to calculate because of their clandestine nature. But DEA agents have said that Mexican meth now accounts for 80 to 90 percent of the drug used by Americans.4 A 2012 White House study called “What America’s Users Spend on Illegal Drugs” estimated there were 1.3 million chronic meth users and another half million occasional tweakers. It estimated that together they spent between six and twenty-two billion dollars on meth every year.5

  Mexican gangsters don’t take all of that. Cartels generally sell wholesale, only serving up multiple kilos. Unlike the Jamaican posses, they don’t want to expose themselves on street corners, where police can easily detain them. The meth dealers on the street include people of all races and social classes, often with no knowledge of which cartel might have handled their drugs.

  But wholesale meth is massively profitable because it is so cheap to make. To get cocaine you have to buy it from Colombians or Peruvians and ship it through Central America. But Mexican gangsters make meth themselves from precursors at industrial prices.

  “These guys get ingredients worth sixty-five dollars and turn them into drugs worth eighteen thousand dollars or more,” says Vigil, the DEA’s former head of international operations. “That wealth turns into power. It allows the cartels to buy sophisticated weapons. It gives them an opportunity to expand their distribution tentacles. It allows them to buy political favors through corruption and it allows them to buy the necessary equipment, boats, and aircraft to transport those drugs.”

  The drug business is funny money that makes millionaires and billionaires stupidly fast. Nazario, the man who grew up drinking river water, handled tens of millions of dollars. This made him an increasing megalomaniac. But he was also calculating, investing in the political protection and muscle to keep hold of his business.

  Nazario paid and armed foot soldiers, creating an army of thousands that moved into the entire 113 municipalities in Michoacán, and spilled into the surrounding states of Guerrero, Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Mexico State. Growing so fast, La Familia became a sprawling organization that Nazario would struggle to control. It also gained the attention of Mexican and U.S. agents. Michoacán traffickers were no longer scattered and weak but had become one of Mexico’s biggest cartels. When President Calderón took power in 2006 and declared a national offensive on drug cartels, he pointed to La Familia as the first mob he wanted to destroy.

  CHAPTER 39

  Soldiers force suspects to their knees and line them up along the side of the road into the Michoacán mountain town of Aguililla. Two helicopters buzz overheard, flying low over the curving street while a convoy of Humvees rumbles into the central plaza. Seeing the troops and their prisoners, many residents rush to their homes. Others stare at the soldiers like they are from a strange foreign army come to occupy their town.

  It was December 13, 2006, two days after President Calderón declared his offensive on drug cartels and I had rushed with other reporters to see it in action. Under orders to hit La Familia, the army swept through the Hot Land. By Christmas, the soldiers had arrested dozens of suspects, seized mountains of guns, marijuana, and meth, and shot dead several alleged cartel thugs in firefights.

  Calderón launched his offensive in Michoacán for several reasons. He was born in the capital, Morelia, so it was personal to him, his friends in business lobbies moaning about the shoot-outs and dumped bodies. Some owned holiday homes or hotels in the Hot Land. La Familia was also the newest cartel on the block and looked like a gang that the government could take down. If they decimated one cartel, security chiefs figured, then others should fall into line. Nazario may also have offended Calderón’s religious sensibilities. Calderón was a strict Roman Catholic and his father had supported the Cristero uprising back in the 1920s. Nazario was a blasphemer as well as a narco.

  Throughout Calderón’s six-year reign, Michoacán was a key and personal part of his offensive. He flew to the military base in Apatzingán and saluted troops while dressed in an olive green army jacket and floppy camouflage cap. This broke a tradition of Mexican presidents who have emphasized a clear separation from the military since the end of the Mexican Revolution.1 Later, when federal police claimed they had killed Nazario, Calderón spoke on national radio to personally celebrate the takedown.

  In Michoacán, the civil elected authority has to govern. Criminals cannot govern, however friendly or generous they might be. The law of the cartel cannot reign in a state. The government has to rule and that is what we are doing there.

  And in one of his last acts as president, Calderón returned to Michoacán to inaugurate a road and sang a popular ranchero song called “El Perro Negro,” or “The Black Dog,” along with a brass band. The song composed by José Alfredo Jiménez is fittingly about a tough from Apatzingán who is shot dead (read: Nazario?). It was written before the days of drug ballads but follows a similar tradition. The Apatzingán tough is referred to as a valiente or a brave one, which became a term for drug trafficker.

  On the other side of the bridge,

  From Piedad Michoacán,

  Lives Gilberto, the valiente,

&n
bsp; Born in Apatzingán.

  Calderón said his military offensive aimed to reestablish the rule of law in spaces where it had been lost, impose the power of government over the power of gangsters. His language moved into the gray area between crime and war. He never legally declared a war. But he spoke to his troops in martial terms, calling traffickers “the enemies of Mexico” and talking of “recovering territory.” He also relied overwhelmingly on the army. At the peak of the campaign, he had ninety-six thousand soldiers and sixteen thousand marines fighting cartels in a dozen states.2 Mexican governments had used the army against gangsters before, but never on this scale.

  But rather than being emblematic of victory, Michoacán highlighted the problems that Mexican security forces faced against cartels. In May 2007, a convoy of soldiers traversed the hills near a town called Carácuaro, when about thirty gunmen ambushed them. Five soldiers died, the biggest loss for Mexico’s army since the 1994 Zapatista uprising.

  Calderón called the soldiers “national heroes” and ordered in more troops. They came under more fire. While soldiers shot dead and arrested hundreds of La Familia operatives, they lost a steady stream of their own men. In Apatzingán, a group of gunmen holed up in a house and held off soldiers for two hours in a prolonged firefight in broad daylight. The shooting caused children to flee their kindergarten and panic rippled across the city. A colleague, Mauricio Estrada, took video of the firefight on a camcorder. It looks like footage from Iraq, soldiers crouching behind their Humvees and trees as bullets hit the dirt street, tearing up dust.

  La Familia thugs had training from the Zetas and meth money to buy a huge stockpile of guns. They got these largely from U.S. gun shops, smuggling them back in the same trap cars that they took their meth north with.3 And they fought like a guerrilla group, ambushing and hiding inside their communities—like Mao’s fish in the sea.

  Robert Bunker, the external researcher for the U.S. War College, describes how the cartel battle tactics mirror those of insurgents.

  “These guys use the fifty cals and burning vehicles to create avenues of approach, and they create kill zones. These are all very military-like behaviors. If we look in the United States, criminals don’t tend to stand and fight. They tend to run. And criminals don’t tend to set up ambushes.”

  Narcos often fight with platoon-size units, like the thirty gunmen who ambushed soldiers in Carácuaro. Other times, they are as large as companies with more than a hundred gunmen. In the biggest battles, the cartel thugs have reached battalion level, with more three hundred men-at-arms.

  President Calderón faced the old problem of fighting against guerrilla tactics: You cannot control the territory simply with military bases and patrols. The enemy hides and then comes out when the troops are out of sight. You need to control every inch of ground.

  The U.S Army Field Manual says that in counter-insurgency you need a ratio of one soldier for every fifty residents.4 The Mexican troops never had close to these odds. During Calderón’s presidency, there were rarely more than ten thousand troops in Michoacán, giving them one soldier for every four hundred. The troop levels were low because the army was spread out fighting cartels in eleven other states. This was another of Calderón’s problems: he couldn’t fight cartels on so many fronts at once.

  Meanwhile, El Tio claimed in a 2006 interview with the Mexican magazine Proceso that La Familia had four thousand gunmen. Later La Tuta would claim they had ten thousand. These spokesmen could be exaggerating their strength. But even if they were tripling it, La Familia had an immense force by guerrilla standards.

  In some cases, La Familia gunmen would ambush soldiers and lose, suffering heavy casualties. The soldiers were better trained and disciplined than the gangsters, some of who would be stoned or high on meth. I long wondered why cartels waged such suicidal tactics. A lieutenant colonel who fought in Michoacán offers me an answer. He says it was a way to put constant pressure on the army. And the cartel had plenty of young triggermen who it treated like cannon fodder.

  “The cartel wants to show the population that it is powerful and can attack the army. They want people to lose respect for us. And soldiers suffer from bad morale because they are being shot at all the time. Another problem is that they pin us down with gunfire, while they could be moving drugs somewhere else.”

  The Mexican army hit back hard. But those it hit were often innocent civilians. Within six months, Mexico’s human rights commissioner had received more than fifty complaints from Michoacán residents of soldiers beating them with rifle butts or torturing them. In one horrific incident, four teenage girls described soldiers taking them to a base and beating and raping them over several days. A medical examiner confirmed the assaults. The attack happened shortly after the ambush that killed the five soldiers. Maybe this was the soldiers’ revenge.

  On the other side, La Familia targeted anyone accused of giving information to the army. “See. Hear. Shut Up. If you want to stay alive,” said a note in the town of Tepalcatepec. Next to it was a severed head. Residents were caught between two brutal sides.

  While Nazario battled the army, he carried on fighting the Zetas, pushing them out of the state. The Zetas hit back. They were furious that Nazario had double-crossed them. Their revenge, it appears, was a heinous attack on Michoacán civilians.

  On September 15, 2008, revelers in Morelia celebrated Mexico’s Independence Day in the central plaza. Per tradition, people ate, drank, and sprayed each other with foam. At eleven P.M., the governor made his cry of “Viva Michoacán, Viva Mexico,” and rang a bell. On the third ring, people heard two thundering bangs. For a moment, they thought they were fireworks. Then bloody victims fell onto the ground. Panic surged through the crowd. The assailants had thrown two grenades into the packed square of revelers.

  A cell phone video shows the instant. People are still cheering the Viva Mexico when the bangs go off, and applauses turn to screams. Many run, terror on their faces. Dozens crouch in pain. The Mexican national anthem booms in the background. Eight people died and more than a hundred were injured, some crippled.

  A week later, security forces arrested three men for the attack. They confessed on camera to being Zetas and throwing the grenades. La Familia also blamed the Zetas, in messages written on blankets. “We unite ourselves to the pain of our countrymen, innocent people that do not need to live with the terrorism of the Zetas,” said one of the narco mantas.

  A raging President Calderon also called it a terrorist attack. The term can be tricky to define. But in this case, I agree with him. I think slaughtering civilians in a public celebration for some ulterior gain is terrorism.

  But whatever you call it, shocked Mexicans asked the underlying question: Why? Why were gangsters hurting civilians if their fight was with a rival cartel?

  The answer could be that the Zetas wanted to hurt La Familia by doing what they call calentar la plaza, or “heating up territory.” By causing such violence, they would force Calderón to launch further operations into Michoacán, which would disrupt La Familia’s operations.

  But as always in the fog of the Mexican drug war, clouds of doubt exist. Rumors spread that Nazario himself might have been behind the attack. He was responding to the military offensive with terror that would hurt the government—but he blamed it on the Zetas to keep the support of his people. In 2015, more doubt was added when a judge released the three suspects, ruling that they had been tortured into making their confessions.

  I still think Zetas the most likely culprits. But people spending their lives suffering from shrapnel wounds may never be sure.

  Following the Morelia attack, Calderón pushed harder into Michoacán. If the Zetas had wanted to heat up the plaza, it had worked. The lead was now taken by the rapidly expanding federal police.

  The federales are built on paramilitary lines, wearing black armor and often hiding their faces with ski masks. They pack a level of firepower akin to the soldiers but boast a higher level of education. While army r
ecruits are mostly from Mexico’s poor south, many federales hail from Mexico City.

  When Calderón took power, the federales only had six thousand officers for the whole of Mexico. But raising the security budget—with the help of three hundred million dollars a year from Washington under the Merida Initiative—the president expanded the force exponentially. When Calderon left office, the force would boast thirty-seven thousand officers. They operated inside Mexico’s Security Ministry, under Genaro García Luna, a square-jawed former intelligence agent. García Luna was a key architect in the offensive on cartels and close to the president, in many ways, the real number two in Calderón’s administration.

  I talk to Elias Alvarez, a tall beefy commissioner, who headed the federal operation in Michoacán for several years. Alvarez gives me the official line that federales played by the rules and respected human rights. But I also want to get a more candid perspective from the rank and file. For this, I find an officer called Ramon. Meeting Ramon through a mutual friend, I get his detailed and frank revelations of what the feds really did.

  Raised in the working-class Iztapalapa borough of Mexico City, Ramon had begun a law degree at the National University but dropped out after his girlfriend got pregnant. The federal police was a decent career option, with a starting salary of more than a thousand dollars a month, way above the $180 minimum wage. Ramon signed up in 2006 and rose a couple of ranks, before going to Michoacán in 2009.

  Like many federales, the first thing that grabbed Ramon’s attention was the lure of women while away from home.