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

by Ioan Grillo

  Influenced by the Guerrero community police, Purépechas over in Cheran, Michoacán rose up against the Knights Templar in 2011. Fed up with Templar gunmen illegally logging in their woods, they took up rifles and blocked their roads with defensive barricades made from sacks of sand and stone. These barricades would define the new type of trench warfare seen across Michoacán.

  Robert Bunker, the national security scholar, looks at these developments using the disease metaphor.

  “It is almost like the community has created its own antibodies. What has happened is the federal government is not providing security to the people. So the people have a choice. They can accept the abuses of the cartels and the gangs or they can arm themselves. This is a survival instinct.”

  Following these indigenous community police, the self-defense squads emerged in 2013 and spread to a dozen narco-ravaged states. The squads first rose in the Costa Chica area of Guerrero in January. In response to the kidnapping of a village spokesman in the town of Ayutla, vigilantes with shotguns and machetes went house to house until they found him tied up. The militias then spread like wildfire into nearby towns where people suffered from extortion and kidnapping.

  The new movement was spearheaded by activist Bruno Placido. While Placido had been in an indigenous community police force, his militias morphed into something different. They spread from indigenous villages to Spanish-speaking towns. And rather than just guarding their own streets, they would mass hundreds of vigilantes to go after cartel targets. Once they occupied towns, they would call people into squares and enlist residents into ten-man cells. (A similar number forms a squad in formal military units.)

  When vigilantes rose up in the Michoacán Hot Land the following month, they used identical tactics.

  The vigilantes who fought Nazario and his Knights began plotting in hushed voices and darkened rooms. Ranchers, builders, and teachers complained quietly to each other about the Templars, but it seemed too risky to take a public stand. However, as vigilantes rose against gangsters in neighboring Guerrero, the bravest decided it was time to fight.

  By 2013, the level of Templar abuse was off the chart. The thugs kept extending their extortion demands. They didn’t just limit shakedowns to businesses. They charged people for the right to hold private parties. They taxed people for buying new cars or plasma TVs. They charged them for the number of square meters of their homes. In response, thousands of residents fled to the United States and were among the rising claimants for political asylum.

  But the vigilantes say the real breaking point—or, as the Mexican saying goes, the drop that spilled the glass—was when the Templars used rape as a weapon of terror. As Templar thugs collected extortion payments they would abduct the wives or daughters of residents. They would also hang around outside schools, checking out the girls they wanted to rape, the vigilantes say.

  Vigilante leader Doctor Mireles discussed this terror in widely broadcast statements. He claimed that in his small-town clinic in the last quarter of 2012, he dealt with forty girls who were raped. The youngest was just eleven years old. It is hard to verify these numbers. But some level of rape was almost certainly taking place.

  The bastion of the Michoacán vigilante movement was in the farming towns of Tepalcatepec, Buenavista, and La Ruana. While they were Hot Land towns, many residents considered the Templars outsiders, from Apatzingán. Templar thugs also treated the towns as conquered territory they could loot. This is a common pattern across Mexico; cartels are more benevolent in their hometowns and more predatory in turf they take over.

  The first uprisings took place in La Ruana and Tepalcatepec. Only a few dozen were there on day one. The lime farmer Hipólitio was one. Another was Juventino Cisneros, a cattle rancher known as El Tilín.

  Cisneros is a wiry man who was fifty-two when the vigilantes rose. Like many in the movement he had been in the United States, spending eight years in Bakersfield, California. He returned to run his cattle business, only to find his town ravaged by the cartel. As well as paying Templar extortion, he suffered a deep personal loss when his son was murdered. He was sure the cartel did it, but no one was brought to justice.

  “You feel so impotent with all the odds stacked against you. The police were corrupt. Mayors were on the cartel payroll. The government had failed us. It had left us by ourselves. But finally our moment came.”

  Cisneros joined with the plotters. They had a few guns stashed and got relatives to bring others from the United States. They planned their action for February 24, 2013, which was symbolic as it is Mexico’s flag day.

  They used the word “uprising,” to describe their stand against the Templars. They would be in revolt, but against the cartel, not the federal government. This reflects the weirdness of narco politics in Mexico, and what it means to have chunks of the state captured by cartels.

  La Ruana rose first under Hipólito, with Tepalcatepec following several hours after. Just fourteen of them launched the revolt in Tepalcatepec, marching with their guns to the cattle market where Templars would come to extort them.

  “Of course, we were scared. We thought we might all be killed. But we knew it was now or never. And people joined us. Within an hour, there were fifty of us. By the end of the day we were hundreds strong. The people were ready.”

  The Templar gunmen did not come that day, giving the self-defense squads the chance to build barricades. The Templars finally attacked some weeks later, killing a vigilante, but the squads shot dead several cartel gunmen.

  “Many of us were in rifle clubs and knew how to shoot. A lot of these cartel assassins were young and drugged up,” Cisneros says. “We showed them they were not invincible.”

  The war was on.

  CHAPTER 44

  When the Michoacán self-defense squads won their first victories, new members flocked to their ranks. Some were well-meaning. Others were paid to fight. Many ranch owners got their workers to take up guns for the cause. They often paid the same two hundred pesos, or about sixteen dollars, a day they gave them working on the farm. Instead of picking limes or milking cows, they bore rifles and slept in the trenches.

  I find a paid vigilante at the barricades who had just been deported from the United States for drunk driving. Coming home jobless, he joined the militias, going within a few weeks from $150 a day working construction in San Jose, California, to $16 a day risking his life. But he said he was happy to fight the tyrannical Templars.

  Some dubious characters with gangster connections also joined the movement. The vigilante leaders made the call to let anyone join if they were against the Templars. This was perhaps their biggest error. However, at the time they faced a powerful enemy and wanted all the help they could get. Some recruits had criminal records for guns or fighting. Others had drug trafficking and cartel connections. Some of these hustlers wanted to topple Nazario because of the Templars’ predatory behavior; they might grow marijuana but be against kidnapping. Others wanted to take over Nazario’s trafficking routes, and worked for rival gangs such as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

  I don’t believe (as some people have claimed) that the Jalisco Cartel ever orchestrated the entire self-defense movement. But they controlled certain players within it, supplying them with guns and money, which made their factions some of the strongest. Mexico’s federal attorney general also cited evidence of these links.1

  War costs. Vigilantes needed to buy food, gas, and bullets. As they liberated areas from Templar extortion, some businessmen were happy to contribute. Michoacán émigrés also sent money to help their brethren, with the vigilantes setting up Facebook pages. And players with cartel connections brought in suitcases of cash.

  The self-defense squads created a paramilitary structure. They formed squad-sized units of ten to twenty men, each with a point man. These reported to midlevel commanders, who in turn reported to regional commanders, natural leaders like Doctor Mireles and Mora. About thirty of the regional commanders formed a ruling council. However,
there was never a single supreme leader and the commanders jockeyed among themselves, later bickering and acting like petty warlords in their own turfs.

  Some vigilantes had served in the army, and they trained others in battle techniques such as how to advance into gunfire. They got many guns from the United States; the vast majority of cars entering Mexico are not searched so it is easy to drive south with trucks of rifles, as the cartels do. As they gained territory, vigilantes also ransacked Templar safe houses and seized their rifles, cars, and bulletproof jackets.

  To increase their odds against the Templars, the vigilantes built their own homemade armored vehicles. The Zetas had built such road machines, so the vigilantes followed their designs. The media joyfully calls these fighting machines “monsters” or “narco tanks.” They don’t actually have treads or cannons like tanks, but they look plenty nuts enough, resembling the souped-up trucks of Mad Max.

  I check out the fleet of trucks at the vigilante HQ in Tepalcatepec (in a cattle stables). Each machine looks more crazy than the next. Francisco Espinoza, a twenty-six-year-old cowboy turned vigilante, explains how they built them.

  “We were going into heavy gunfire and we needed protection. So we made these monsters of our own, based on the vehicles that the Zetas had built. There were people in the town with metal workshops and they helped us put them together. As we learned what worked in the field we improved the designs.”

  The trucks have armor up to four inches and even mobile sand trenches to soak up bullets. They have swiveling gun turrets and shooting galleries to fire from inside, with slits that remind me of the arrow holes at English castles. And they have battering rams to smash enemy cars or even plow into buildings.

  * * *

  The self-defense movement erupted shortly after Calderón finished his term and President Peña Nieto took over. Calderón left office after his military offensive had turned into a humanitarian disaster, with sixty-six thousand cartel-related deaths, twenty thousand disappearances, and widespread cases of soldiers torturing and killing. Peña Nieto brought the PRI back to power after twelve years in the wilderness, partly because many voters felt it had been safer in the old days.

  Taking office, Peña Nieto’s team launched a campaign dubbed in political circles “changing the narrative.” In laymen’s terms, this meant changing the conversation. They steered officials away from talking about crime and got them to talk about reform and investment. Captured gangsters were no longer paraded in perp walks. Peña Nieto stuck to suits and business talk rather than flak jackets and warmongering. In his first days in power, the tactic was blissfully successful. Magazines ran stories about “Mexico’s Moment,” a time when the Aztec tiger was finding its place in the sun.

  When the vigilante movement erupted a month into Peña Nieto’s term, some thought this could also be a presidential plot. The conspiracy theorists found ammunition when Peña Nieto hired Colombia’s former top cop Oscar Naranjo as an adviser. In Colombia, paramilitaries also called themselves self-defense squads as they fought FARC guerrillas and carried out massacres. Mexico was copying the Colombian tactic of using militias to do the dirty work, they mused.

  Personally, I prefer the cock-up theory to the conspiracy theory. I think Peña Nieto was as surprised as everyone else by the vigilantes. His handling of them over the following years shows a stumbling change of positions rather any clear strategy. He switched from attacking them to ignoring them to working with them to attacking them again.

  The federal government first clamped down on Michoacán vigilantes in March, two weeks after they had risen. Soldiers stormed the town of Buenavista and nabbed thirty-four from a self-defense squad, accusing them of links to the Jalisco cartel. They also seized forty-nine Kalashni-kovs and Uzis, bulletproof vests, and three ounces of marijuana. (Many vigilantes smoked weed.)

  However, the arrests had no deterrent effect, and the vigilante movement kept growing. Within months, clamping down would mean arresting thousands, so the Peña Nieto government switched tack to ignoring it. It accompanied this with denial. Vigilantes were not a real problem, officials said. There were hardly operating anywhere.

  The reality was that self-defense squads had become a formidable force that was transforming the Mexican drug war.

  Principal battlefield commanders emerged among the vigilantes. These included a former Texas car salesmen known as Simon the Americano and a rancher called Alberto Gutierrez, who went by the nom de guerre Comandante Cinco. Along with leaders such as Doctor Mireles, these commanders moved from sporadic gun battles to a strategy of conquest.

  I followed Cinco on his operations. Until a few months before, the forty-year-old had led the life of a wealthy farmer. Now he led convoys of vigilantes to seize towns. He always carried an AR-15 and sidearm and sported a bulletproof vest and baseball cap with “Cinco” stitched on it.

  “Did I ever I think I would be in a war? No way,” he tells me, between shouting orders on a chain of cell phones and radios. “I never imagined this happening in a million years. But this shit can just come to you. I couldn’t let the Templars hurt us anymore.”

  Cinco seems a natural leader, charismatic and respected by the troops. He is also seen as a good fighter, a keen marksman in shooting clubs who went from firing at bull’s-eyes to firing at narcos. As vigilantes advanced, he got into fierce gunfights with Templars. He was at a barricade one night when more than twenty Templars attacked. He fought them off, killing several and avoiding casualties, he says.

  “They like to intimidate people. To kidnap. To rape. But now we are intimidating them. Violence is all they understand.”

  I ask about what they do with prisoners. Does he really believe the vigilantes have a right to take life?

  He gives me a hard look.

  “If they captured me, do you think they would let me live?”

  It was a grueling campaign. Templars ambushed vigilante barricades and disappeared people who sympathized with them. A frontline emerged on the road from Buenavista to Apatzingán. The vigilantes built a network of five barricades on it to repel the Templar attacks. At night, they put flaming torches on the road to warn people of their checkpoints. But it was still tricky for motorists to drive through with both sides having itchy fingers on the triggers.

  As a result, the frontline became a wall that people avoided crossing. The vigilantes were also scared about venturing into Templar territory in case gangsters recognized and murdered them. For months, they were cut off from Apatzingán where they bought supplies, and instead traveled long distances into neighboring Jalisco for goods.

  The vigilantes broke this deadlock by working their way through the mountains around Apatzingán, taking key towns such as the narco stronghold of Aguililla. The self-defense squads developed a tactic for taking communities. First, they contacted locals who would help fight the cartel. Then they stormed in using overwhelming force, with hundreds of gunmen and dozens of trucks. When they occupied the town they would gather residents in the square and declare the community liberated. The locals would then build their own barricades, extending the territory of the movement.

  By October, seven months after the uprising, the vigilantes were reaching far across the mountains. The Templars realized this movement was a challenge to their very existence. They hit back, provoking shoot-outs that left twenty-three dead on a single day.

  Then the lights went out.

  In the early morning of October 27, half a million people in Michoacán were jolted by their TV sets, fridges, and lamps switching off. Electric pumps also shut down, leaving houses without water. Power cuts are common in Mexico, normally in limited areas for short times. But this blackout covered town after town across the Hot Land and lasted most of the day.

  It was no accident. Gunmen had stormed eighteen electricity substations. When workers fled, the gunmen opened fire on the generators and hurled Molotov cocktails. For extra impact, they set six gas stations ablaze. Politicians claimed it was an act of “
terrorism.” It definitely made people terrified.

  While the Templars did not claim responsibility, they were almost certainly behind the blackout. However, their motives differed from previous attacks. Before they had pressured police to back off. Now it seemed they wanted security forces to come. If the army swept into the Hot Land, they hoped, it would stop the vigilante advance. It was a twist on “violent lobbying.”

  The attack was backed by a propaganda campaign. The Templars displayed narco mantas saying the vigilantes were hit men from the Jalisco cartel. Spokesman La Tuta also released a video. In the footage, he was filmed in a woodland in front of a dozen masked gunmen with military grade weapons.

  “Those from Jalisco bring the vigilantes to Michoacán. They are behind them. The proof? The arsenal of arms they have. From Jalisco, they come, they come,” La Tuta says, waving his arms in the air. “Why don’t the police and soldiers uphold the rule of law, and arrest them and hand them over to be prosecuted? Why are the vigilantes hiding their faces? I am categorized a criminal and I know I’m wanted. But it is not my intention to hurt people.”

  The video got millions of hits on YouTube, partly because people are just damn curious to see a gangster boss speaking on film.

  Peña Nieto still lacked any strategy for dealing with the Michoacán crisis. His mind was elsewhere. His government was at a key moment in passing reforms to overhaul Mexico’s fiscal, education, and energy laws. After tough negotiations, Congress approved the biggest change to oil laws in seventy years, allowing foreign companies a piece of Mexican petroleum. Peña Nieto signed it on December 21 and went into his Christmas holidays with a political victory. As he celebrated the New Year, Michoacán reached a boiling point.