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

by Ioan Grillo

  In Mexico, Calderón unleashed the army to fight drug cartels in 2006, in what was supposed to be a temporary measure. Almost a decade later, they are still there. Agents arrested soldiers for “executing” prisoners, during the massacre of twenty-two people in the town of Tlatlaya in 2014. This is likely the tip of the iceberg. According to the Mexican army’s own numbers, soldiers killed more than two thousand alleged criminals under Calderón. Most cases were never investigated, so it is impossible to know how often lethal force was justified.

  Yet, police forces have to fit the conditions. If you sent an unarmed bobby of an English village into Tivoli, he would be lucky to come back with his head on his shoulders. Unfortunately, you need police who are well armed and combat trained. Latin American countries also need to invest more than European countries. This is tough as they are poorer. But if you are dealing with a hundred times the murders you need more officers to solve them. Colombia has reduced its murder rate by spending 5 percent of its entire budget on security.

  In Monterrey, Mexico, I watch young recruits of the Fuerza Civil force training in a black room with a video simulator. They are practicing getting ambushed by cartel gunmen and responding in milliseconds to avoid getting their heads blown off. They train in five man (and woman) units, covering each other. However, their training is different from the military in that they are prepped to only fire when their lives are threatened and arrest, not kill, their enemy.

  Nuevo León State formed the Fuerza Civil in 2011 when violence hit record levels there. They brought in academics and local businesses to design something outside the box. Their first requirement was that recruits could not have been police officers anywhere in Mexico, so they weren’t dirty from the job.

  To fight the inevitable corruption, the Fuerza Civil also created a large internal affairs department. This is a crucial element needed in forces across the continent as a constant check and balance.

  When internal affairs punishes officers it causes bad headlines. The Nuevo León force found three officers slept with some female detainees, causing a stink. Yet it is better to suffer the short-term bad publicity than let the rot grow. The Nuevo León force also makes most officers stay in a barracks, leaving them less exposed to bribery and less vulnerable to attack. This is a difficult tactic to sustain in the long term, but housing estates for officers could be viable.

  The Fuerza Civil oversaw the reduction of murders by three quarters—from more than two thousand in 2011 to some five hundred by 2014. It is a potential that could be followed across Mexico.

  One challenge is that that the country still has more than two thousand town and city police forces, many rotten to the core. City police in Iguala worked with the Warriors United to disappear the students. Both Mexican presidents Calderón and Peña Nieto called for all local police to be abolished and replaced by thirty-one state forces.

  The proposal has met resistance, especially from some local mayors who want to keep their budgets. Critics also point out that it doesn’t matter how many forces you have if they are corrupt and that Mexican state and federal police also moonlight for cartels. This is true, but to begin to build new forces it is easier with a state model, where you can create effective internal affairs departments. Eradicating the hundreds of corrupt municipal forces would be a step forward.

  Other examples of more effective police forces in the region include those of Nicaragua, created by the Sandinistas, Chile, and Colombia. All have flaws. But they also have elements that can be incorporated into working models.

  To monitor the success or failure of police, society needs good data. Governments have to hand out homicide numbers and allow them to be checked independently. The Violence Observatory in Honduras was advanced in this, but unfortunately the government took it over in 2014, eliminating its autonomy.

  A Latin America tradition of aggressive crime reporting helps by trailing the streets to find corpses. If the government claims there are fifty murders and reporters have found a hundred bodies, they know something is up. Overall homicide numbers are better than trying to guess exactly how many killings cartels carried out; the problem with the latter is the data is too ambiguous so it is easy to manipulate the figures.

  Alongside better police, a mammoth challenge is creating effective prosecutors and courts. Mexico is carrying out the biggest judicial reforms in centuries, moving from a closed-door to an open model with juries, which is supposed to be ready in 2016. This change is good but needs much more work. A side effect of a more open judicial system is that some villains could be freed because the evidence isn’t there. The media needs to adjust to covering this. If the evidence is full of holes you cannot blame a judge for throwing out the case.

  Fighting impunity starts at the top. Gangbangers in Central America often pointed out to me how their politicians get away with stealing hundreds of millions. Why should they be honest, they asked, if their leaders are filthy? The Shower Posse or Knights Templar would never have grown so powerful without their political alliances.

  Trying to stop corruption in Latin America can seem like trying to count grains of sand on a beach—impossible. But battles over corruption are raging in a big way now, and victories are happening. Anti-graft activists have created online tools to try and force political candidates to show their wealth and conflicts of interests.4 Aggressive journalists and campaigners have caught out powerful politicians in Mexico, Jamaica, Brazil, Honduras, Salvador. In September 2015, Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina was even forced to resign over corruption allegations. It is not pretty. But the scandals mean the poison is coming to the surface where it can be drawn out.

  CHAPTER 51

  HEARTS AND MINDS

  Boys Town football club lies in the heart of the West Kingston ghettos, a bone-dry field across the road from Trench Town. I sit in the shade of the stands talking to coach Carl Brown on a baking afternoon. Carl grew up in Trench Town, went on to play professional soccer, and coached the Jamaica national team. Now he is back home, using his love for the game to battle for the hearts and minds of the next generation.

  It is not easy. Carl competes with dons who turn youths into murderers. He can offer a kid a stipend and the adrenaline of scoring a goal in Jamaica’s semi-professional league. Perhaps he can nourish their dream of one day playing in the English premiership, like Raheem Sterling or John Barnes. But dons offer cash and cheap fame right now.

  “Boys Town loses some of them to criminality.” Carl speaks slowly, sits with a straight back, the discipline of a sportsman. “But if I save one life, just one life from the path of destruction, then I have achieved something.”

  Despite the struggle, Carl feels a magic every time the team plays. When the youths are on the field, they are escaping from the ghetto and guns, the hunger and hustle. They are safe at that instant.

  “This takes them away from an environment where the police or bad men can shoot them. Here they can express themselves and they are free. It gives some hope. And hopelessness is very cruel.”

  Carl is part of an army of community workers fighting the real battle in Kingston, San Pedro Sula, San Salvador, Ciudad Juárez, Apatzingán, Antares, and countless other hot spots across the continent. Most are involved in independent projects that take sport, art, music, and love to transform lives. Like many who make this effort, Carl says the struggle is uphill because criminals offer more than the authorities.

  “We have been let down by the government. Nobody cares about these people. Education has been a failure. So when the don comes along and provides some basic needs, they see him as a messiah.”

  This fight for hearts and minds is often labeled as crime prevention. It is more than that. It is a struggle for a just and functioning society. It is the search for an environment where a thirteen-year-old mass murderer, a decapitated head in the street, would be unthinkable.

  Hearts and minds is the label applied by forces fighting insurgency. The Americans lost in Vietnam, they realized, beca
use the population was against these foreign invaders. But this comparison holds strong in crime wars of the Americas. One reason people will join a cartel and fire on police is because they don’t recognize the legitimacy of the state, or at least don’t see it as offering anything.

  As crime wars rage, there has been a growing recognition of how important this battle is. After Ciudad Juárez became the most murderous city in the world, national and foreign aid flooded to social schemes in the city, helping to drastically reduce the homicide rate. Following this, Peña Nieto took office and launched a national crime-prevention program.

  However, the thinking on effective social work needs to be developed much more. Peña Nieto’s prevention scheme lacks direction. In its opening booklet, not only did it talk about keeping kids out of gangs, it discussed chasing things as banal as vendors selling cigarettes in singles. One problem is that many in both government and media don’t take these schemes as seriously as military strikes. Unlike gun battles, it doesn’t make for sexy copy. (Believe me, I’ve tried.)

  Prevention can also be an ambiguous term, covering anything from building a road to opening a school. When Peña Nieto launched his prevention campaign he said they were backing it with nine billion dollars. It sounded incredible. That kind of money could really turn things around. But on closer inspection, it turned out he was just relabeling $8.75 billion that was already going to education, infrastructure, etc. He only earmarked $250 million of new money.

  In contrast, community workers on the ground have succinct ideas on how to stop youths from joining the crime armies. Among them is Gustavo de la Rosa, a human rights defender in Ciudad Juárez.

  “You can identify exactly who the ten kids are on the corner who are being drawn into gangs. You have to work with them one on one, help them to stay in schools, offer them options. You may not save every life. But you can save many.”

  De la Rosa points out the government cannot only launch these schemes when a city becomes the most homicidal on the planet. It needs to operate them constantly, make them institutional, part of the structures of the state.

  It is important to get to kids when they are young. Once they have been initiated into a gang or a cartel, committed murder, become addicted to killing, they are beyond redemption in many ways. Thousands of children and teenagers are on the streets right now at this crucial turning point. We have to stop them becoming the next generation kill.

  As well as the focused youth programs, wider schemes to regenerate communities make a difference. City mayors such as Leoluca Orlando in Palermo, Sicily, and Andres Fajardo in Medellín, Colombia, transformed slums, which successfully reduced crime. Such techniques could also overhaul San Pedro Sula, the slums of San Salvador, the favelas of Rio. If residents see paved streets, parks, and monuments they can feel a sense of belonging; if they see dirt roads, blackouts, and garbage, it is easy to believe the system is against them.

  People often point to cultural elements to explain how sweet children transform into gun-toting assassins. You don’t need to be a social conservative to recognize that many gang members grow up in broken families immersed in addiction and violence.

  Carl Brown at the football ground sees the problem as a change from a collective spirit he knew growing up in the ghetto to rampant individualism. He uses the example that Trench Town residents used to share big pots of stew, putting in what they could and all taking a bowl. Now everyone buys their own bag of food, or goes hungry.

  “People have become self-centered. They think, ‘If I am full then the world is fine,’” Carl says. “They have stopped caring about others.”

  Priests, preachers, and teachers all try to improve values, with limited success. Politicians have also tried to clamp down on gangster culture. Mexican censors have fined producers for putting on shows of narco ballad artists. Brazil’s gangster beats are called funk proibidão because they are just that—prohibited.

  I think the effects of culture are real. But they are also limited and tough to change. Middle-class kids in London or New York also grow up in single-parent families, listen to gangster music, and take drugs, yet almost never get pulled into such ultraviolent gangs.

  Perhaps it is a combination of factors. When you mix broken families and gangster culture with poverty, cartels, and impunity, it is a lethal cocktail.

  In communities scarred by violence, many don’t know what peace looks like. Teenagers in Brazilian favelas, Jamaican garrisons, and Honduran slums see these crime wars as a natural state of affairs. It’s normal to have men on the corner with Kalashnikovs, shots ringing out at night, corpses hanging from bridges.

  How will they know when peace has arrived? Will it be when soldiers no longer storm the ghetto? When they no longer see gangster militias? When they are no longer scared? Is it when the murder rate has dropped from a hundred and fifty per hundred thousand to fifty? Or not until it reaches twenty?

  Back in Kingston, Jamaica, I visit Rose Town, a ghetto sliced in two by warring posses. Next to the frontline, activists used charity money to build a library. I go there at dusk. A few hours earlier, I drove through a murder scene on the edge of Rose Town. But now it looks peaceful. Teenagers, young men, old women sit in the library reading.

  I wouldn’t go so far as to say the library has transformed the community. It is still a homicidal ghetto. The frontline is a no-man’s-land of burned out houses. Many youths still wield guns. Amid this, the library stands out like an odd appendage. But it does provide an oasis. And perhaps it is a seed.

  One of the librarians, Calvin Gibbs, is a sixty-year-old who has lived in Rose Town all his life. Calvin talks eagerly about the history of the slum and goes to a desk in the library to pull out newspaper cuttings about political violence as far back as the 1960s, and even earlier.

  We take the conversation outside, sitting on the sidewalk. It is getting dark, and the street buzzes, dance hall music banging from speakers, a dozen people moseying at a crossroads, sipping rum, smoking. Calvin describes how the violence developed over the years. He recalls the battles in 1980 at the height of the Cold War when the posses would fight in the name of Manley and his socialism against the shock troops of conservative Seaga.

  “They came down that street there with pickax, sticks and guns.” He points his finger up the road. “Them shoot a woman right there.”

  He chats on about drug trafficking and the rise of Dudus, the President. Like others, he explains how people turn to the don because he provides a degree of order. He names dozens of young men from the community who have died by the gun. We talk about the youth killed that day, apparently at the hands of a ranking posse member.

  Reflecting on this bloody history, I feel that despair that the killing is somehow inevitable.

  “There has been decades of violence,” I say. “Can you envision it any other way? Can this really change?”

  He glances at a group of youngsters boogying on the corner outside the rum shop and answers slowly. I write his reply in big uppercase letters in my notebook. Months later, when I pick up the pad and read it back, I stare long at the six words of his answer, soaking them in.

  I THINK THERE IS ALWAYS HOPE.

  Acknowledgments

  Dudley Althaus was my boss and mentor covering Mexico for the Houston Chronicle from 2003 to 2005. He had discussed the idea of a regional project on the new crime groups of the Americas back then. Who were these gangsters that had become a strange and impending threat, he asked; how did they wield power; how did they challenge governments? He was always ahead of the curve. The Chronicle never did it and eventually shut down its foreign operation amid the meltdown of international newspaper coverage. Later, that seed helped me form the thesis for this book; I hope it does service to Dudley’s notion.

  Dudley taught me countless things about being a journalist. But the best advice was in three words: “Maybe I’m wrong.” You get into a story. You think you have it figured out. But wait, “Maybe I’m the fuck wrong.” Then you g
et deeper into it and discover things you had never thought of. Saludos al padrino de la cantina.

  Reporting on this book from 2011 to 2015, I conducted interviews with hundreds of people, as well as drawing on thousands of interviews from covering Latin America since 2001. Some are cited. Many aren’t, but their words shaped it and helped me understand this phenomenon better. Thanks to every one of you, from academics to fellow journos, police to politicians and priests, mothers, fathers, brothers and daughters, drug addicts to drug growers, social workers to sociopaths, coyotes to killers. I know some of you literally risked your life telling those things. Some of you are already in the next world.

  Special thanks to those who helped me in the field, the Brazil commando, Joe Carter, Wellington Magalhaes, Florian Pfeiffer, Ali Rocha, Paxton Winters, Andre Fernandes, Camila Nunes Dias, Flora Charner, Vagner Marques, Sylvia Colombo, the Jamaica and Caribbean posse, Colin Smikle, Nick Davis, Karyl Walker, Horace Levy, Anthony Harriott, Daurius Figueira, Roslyn Ellison at the Trench Town Reading Center, Gavin Judd, Sandy, Chez and Maru, the Central America gang, Orlin Castro (and Fresa, Mango, and the rest of his crew), Iris Amador, Freddy Pineda, Eddie Murillo, Juan Carlos Llosa (RIP), Karla Ramos, El Sueco, Elio Garcia, the Martinez brothers, Juan, Carlos, and Oscar and the rest of the El Faro crew especially Jose Luis Sanz, the Mexico media mafia, Juan Alberto Cedillo, Alejandra Chombo, Fernando Brito, Diego Enrique Osorno, Alejandro Almazan, Alejandro Sanchez, Jose Gil Omos, Sanjuana Martinez, Brett Gundlock, James Frederick, Mike O’Boyle, Marcela Turati, Luciano Campos, Frankie Castellanos, Frankie Contreras, Dalia Martinez, Jesus Lemus, Leo Gonzalez, Daniel Fernandez, Daniel Hernandez, Daniel Becerrill, Kieran Murray, Dave Graham, Frank Jack and all the Reuters team, Sayda Chinas, Rodrigo Soberanes, Emilio Lugo, Cynthia Ramirez and all at Letras Libres, Tomas Bravo, Javier Verdin, Sergio Ocampo, the Nuevo Leon crew, Alfredo Corchado, Jose de Cordoba, Keith Dannemiller, Jonathan Roeder, Jo Tuckman, Elizabeth Malkin, Marion Lloyd, Dave Agren, Eduardo Castillo, Hans Maximo, Erik and Liz Vance, Nathaniel Parish, Nara Gonzalez, the esteemed, Enrique Krauze, Lorenzo Meyer, Edgardo Buscaglia, Cristobal Pera, Enrique Calderon, Alejandro Hope, Jorge Chabat, Raul Benitez, all the professors that used my book, James Creechan, Ben Lessing, Chris White, and globe-trotters, Adam Saytanides, Myles Estey, Ross McDonnell, Mike Kirsch, Debs Bonello and Ulises, Kirsten Luce, Bernardo Ruiz, Alex Leff, Lizzy Tomei, David Case and the GlobalPost team, George Grayson (RIP), Sam Logan, Steven Dudley and the Insight Crime team, Robert Bunker, John Sullivan, Oscar, Nancy, Luigi, and my compadre Rob Winder.