Wolf Boys

by Dan Slater

  But it was not only Mexico’s myriad police forces that were vulnerable to corruption; it was soldiers as well. Created in 1986 to provide security for the FIFA World Cup, Mexico’s Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales, or GAFE, the Special Airborne Forces Group, became Mexico’s elite military squad. During the 1990s, GAFE soldiers attended school at Fort Benning, Georgia, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina, under a program overseen by American general Barry McCaffrey. Known as the School of the Americas, the program was intended to train Latin American militaries to counter perceived communist subversion. Trained by veterans of the counterinsurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala, about 3,200 GAFE officers—the equivalent of Green Berets—learned rapid deployment, aerial assaults, marksmanship, ambushes, small-group tactics, intelligence collection, prisoner rescue, and communications. In late 1993, in the wake of the infamous oligarch banquet, the Mexican government enlisted GAFE troops to crush the Chiapas uprising in southern Mexico. Within hours of GAFE deployment, thirty Chiapas rebels were killed, their bodies displayed on a riverbank with ears and noses sliced off.

  After Chiapas, GAFE officers formed an antinarcotics unit that coordinated with DEA and FBI. But members of the GAFE narc squad quickly formed their own drug-trafficking group, another police mafia.

  BY THE MID-1990S, WITH THE overseas route to South Florida shut down, following the Reagan-era focus on Miami and Colombia, more than 90 percent of U.S.-bound cocaine came through Mexico. The Mexican profit margin on coke appreciated, then appreciated again, and again, as Mexico became more valuable as cocaine’s byway to the bank of America. Mexicans leveraged their position until they became the “owners” of South American cocaine. Where they once made $2,000 per kilo working as mules for the Colombians or Peruvians or Bolivians, they could now buy a kilo from Colombia for $2,000 and sell it for five times that at the border, ten times in Dallas, or twenty times in New York. Clinton’s focus on chasing away domestic methamphetamine—another low-weight, high-value product—shifted production of that drug south of the border as well. As the millennium approached, Mexico was becoming the Bordeaux region of the drug trade.

  By 2000, cross-border trade between the United States and Mexico would quadruple, to more than $250 billion. But Nuevo Laredo would see a disproportionate share of the new commerce—more than twice the trucking activity of Tijuana or Juárez. The increasingly fractious cartels of Mexico coveted the new power that NAFTA gave the eastern Gulf Cartel.

  When Gulf Cartel leader Juan García Ábrego, the first Mexican trafficker to make the FBI’s Most Wanted list, was arrested by Mexican authorities in 1996 and extradited to the United States, leadership of the Gulf Cartel fell to two men: Osiel Cárdenas Guillén and Salvador “Chava” Gómez Herrera.

  A onetime car mechanic who also worked as a madrina, or informant, for the Policía Judicial Federal—Mexico’s federal police force—Osiel was skilled at using law enforcement against his smuggling rivals. Osiel was the Gulf Cartel’s primary earner. Chava Gómez maintained control of the smuggling corridors. But Chava, Osiel believed, asked for money too often. He’d call and say: “Oye, Osiel, necesito que me mandes $50,000.” Hey, Osiel, I need fifty grand. This arrangement made Osiel feel like Chava’s employee. “Mi compadre ya me tiene hasta la madre,” Osiel would say. “Me exige como si él no pudiera generar sus ingresos.” I’ve had it with my buddy. He demands money like he can’t generate it on his own.

  The man Osiel hired to kill his Gulf Cartel coleader was a young GAFE soldier. Arturo Guzmán-Decena became the first employee—“Z-1”—of the Gulf Cartel’s new enforcement arm, Los Zetas.

  “What type of workers do you need?” Guzmán-Decena asked.

  “The best armed men there are,” Osiel replied.

  “These are only in the army.”

  “I want them.”

  Word of employment spread. Recruitment methods were bold, and included intercepting military radio frequencies to inform soldiers about the benefits of “shifting bands.” GAFE soldiers knew Osiel as “Fantasma,” “Ingeniero,” and “Matamigo”—the Ghost, the Engineer, and the Friend Killer. They heard their former colleagues were calling themselves Los Zetas and making cañonazos de dolares, cannonballs of dollars.

  Typical among the recruits was “Z-7,” known as Mamito (“the Gentleman”). In 1994, when he was sixteen, Mamito joined GAFE and later worked as part of the narc squad. In 1999, when the Mexican government prosecuted him for corruption, Mamito deserted the military, went to Tamaulipas—the northeastern Mexican state that contains Nuevo Laredo—and found work with Osiel, collecting debts, carrying out assassinations, and overseeing drug shipments for the Gulf Cartel.

  In 2002, when Z-1 was killed by the Mexican army in a restaurant, another former GAFE soldier, Heriberto “Z-3” Lazcano, took over. Distinguished for his movie-star looks and tactical brilliance, Lazcano was known as “El Verdugo” (“The Executioner”). He ran Los Zetas with another former GAFE man, Efraín Teodoro Torres, “Z-14,” known as “Catorce” (“Fourteen”).

  Los Zetas soon numbered about fifty former soldiers and a few nonsoldiers. There were rumors about the origin of the name “Zeta,” which means “Z” in Spanish. Some said it was a radio call sign. Others believed Osiel called his enforcers the Zetas because z was the first letter in zapatos, shoes. “A man without shoes cannot walk,” he was fond of saying, charmed, surely, that a once-shoeless child now commanded an army of boots. The Zetas wore black tactical uniforms and bulletproof vests. Shoulder patches featured a Z superimposed on the state of Tamaulipas, encircled by the words: Special Forces of the Gulf Cartel. Osiel sent the Zetas to Nuevo Laredo with instructions to establish control.

  In the old days, Mexican police used informants to track how much the local narco-boss made in the “plaza”—a town or area through which drugs passed in exchange for a tax paid to the controlling authority, the cops—and adjusted the monthly payola accordingly. The term comandante did not refer to the drug lord but to the police commander, whose power included having the office of the attorney general, the army, and the PRI behind him. A drug lord lasted for as long as he could keep up with bribes and beat away competitors. But as the Zetas, on behalf of the Gulf Cartel, swept northeast Mexico—“cleaning” the states of Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas—they transformed the old system of corruption.

  One day, a young federal prosecutor named Carlos Hinojosa was called to a meeting with other local law enforcement officials.

  “Don’t interfere with trafficking,” Catorce, the Zeta leader, told them. “La Compañía will work freely.” La Compañía—the Company—now referred to the larger corporate entity formed by the combination of the Gulf Cartel and its enforcers, the Zetas.

  As a prosecutor, it had been Hinojosa’s job to process complaints and make decisions about whom to charge with crimes. He also served as liaison between the prosecutor’s office and the cartels. He knew all the traffickers, and collected the bribes. But those days were over, he was told now. The bribe would no longer be a matter of negotiation. Many cops, hearing this, switched sides, dropping the pretense of public servant and joining La Compañía outright. Catorce approached Hinojosa: “So, are you working for them or are you working for me?”

  What did it take to join the Company? Hinojosa wondered.

  As long as Hinojosa generated income for the Company he was welcome, he was told. When he stopped generating income, he was no longer welcome. It was that simple. So the bespectacled Hinojosa became a Company accountant. He collected money from the smugglers who worked for the Company or did business with the Company. Hinojosa’s new colleagues in the cartel called him Jotillo, Little Faggot. It was unclear whether this nickname demeaned his status as a back-office man, or referred to actual homosexuality.

  In the early 2000s, the Zetas arrived in Nuevo Laredo to a black market already transformed. The old smuggling families had given way to larger smuggling groups. The groups originated with families but included recruits from their
local communities. As drug traffic spiked, these groups carved up Nuevo Laredo and divided the spoils of taxation. Now the groups faced a choice: They could operate under Zeta rule, paying a smuggling tax to the Company, or they could get borrado del mapa, erased from the earth.

  The leader of the first group, Los Chachos, refused to cede his territory. He was found facedown in a ditch, naked but for a leopard-print thong.

  The second group, the Flores Soto gang, was led by Meme Flores, the man who bought cars and weapons from Gabriel Cardona. Meme became an ambassador to the Zetas in Nuevo Laredo, in charge of sourcing cars and weapons and doing whatever else the Zetas asked of him.

  The third group, Los Tejas, included two rising stars in the border underworld: the Treviño brothers, Omar and Miguel. But their boss in the Tejas didn’t want to cooperate with the Zetas. So the Zetas approached Miguel Treviño instead.

  ONE OF THIRTEEN CHILDREN, MIGUEL Treviño grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Nuevo Laredo where he did odd jobs for the wealthy while his father managed ranches. They never starved. Every Treviño son was taught to hunt. As a teenager, Miguel learned the drug business from his oldest brother. He traveled back and forth to Dallas on I-35, mastering that four-hundred-mile stretch of highway that could make a kilo of coke, or an eighty-pound bundle of pot, 100 percent more valuable.

  After a car chase in 1993, Dallas police arrested Miguel, then nineteen, in a pink Cadillac with a broken steering column. He paid a $672 fine for evading arrest. But when his oldest brother was convicted of marijuana trafficking in Texas and sentenced to twenty years in prison, Miguel was furious. America treated Mexicans like shit. Miguel tattooed Hecho en Mexico—Made in Mexico—on the back of his neck, and a cobra slithering down his forearm. He returned to Nuevo Laredo and worked as a cop, feeding info to the Tejas, then joined the Tejas with his brother Omar. Miguel controlled a neighborhood called Hidalgo, a crucial staging point for smugglers in the north-central section of Nuevo Laredo, just east of the railroad tracks that cross the river and shoot up the west side of Laredo, zipping past Martin High. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, neither Miguel nor Omar Treviño was known beyond their small corner of the Nuevo Laredo underworld—but that was about to change.

  “The narcos frequently act with loyalty toward their bosses, but it’s just camouflage,” writes Ricardo Ravelo in his biography of Osiel Cárdenas. “Acting loyal or honest doesn’t mean being one or the other. Even if the mafia has its rules, there are no values. In this agitated environment, the premise that keeps them going is frialdad”—cold-bloodedness. Though not a former GAFE soldier, Miguel must’ve felt that his value system, or lack thereof, meshed with the Zetas’ cold-blooded, take-all approach to business. To cement a role for himself in the Zetas, Miguel murdered his Tejas leader, then eliminated the leader’s family as well.

  Miguel and Omar Treviño were two of many who joined the Zetas when they came to Nuevo Laredo to take over. But the Treviño brothers did what successful gangsters do: acquire power through ruthlessness. Miguel, now in his early thirties, rose in the Zeta ranks by maintaining tight control over Nuevo Laredo, always erring on the side of caution when he encountered perceived enemies.

  One night, in early 2004, he mistook two American teenagers for adversaries.

  9

  The New People

  What are you doing here?” the man who looked like Rambo asked again, English and Spanish bleeding into one another. He took a grenade off his chest belt, tossed it from hand to hand like a tennis ball.

  “Nothing,” Gabriel said, his jaw sore; his eyes hard, glazed, drifting.

  “Where are you from?”

  “We go to college in Texas,” Gabriel said. “We work in McDonald’s.”

  “Oh yeah? What do you study?”

  “Law.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “Yes, sir. I mean no, sir.”

  He stepped closer to Gabriel. “Se mira tranquilo. Demasiado tranquilo. ¿Porque?” You look calm. Too calm. Why?

  “Yo no sé.” I don’t know.

  “Hijo de tu pinche madre. Te crees bien verga.” Son of a fucking bitch. You think you’re all that. “¿Con quien jala? ¿A quién le andabas vendiendo la troca?” Who do you work with? Who were you selling that car to?

  Earlier that night, Gabriel and Wences Tovar had taken a Jeep Cherokee to Nuevo Laredo. Wences said he had a new connection, a Mexican cop who would pay a little more than the standard rate of one thousand dollars per SUV. Sure, Gabriel said, always game to expand his network. He and Wences drove to the Nuevo Laredo police barracks, and asked for the cop. They met blank stares. So they left. It was dark. As they headed back to Guerrero Street, which would return them to International Bridge One and Texas, a Mexican police truck pulled them over. Gabriel and Wences were handcuffed, led into the brush, and told to stand still. The cops made a call.

  La gente nueva, Gabriel knew, were cleaning Nuevo Laredo, wiping away past dealers and putting a halt to all local drug selling. If you possessed drugs, and they didn’t know you, it meant someone was selling them to you, or you were selling them without authority. You’d be tortured until you spilled your source. Gabriel hurried to step through his handcuffs, arranging them at his front, and reached inside his jeans. He was about to throw the baggie into the brush, but thought better of it and swallowed all five roches instead.

  A caravan of black Suburbans arrived on the side of the road, police lights flickering. These people didn’t look like cops. They wore all black. Gabriel and Wences were blindfolded and put in the back of a truck. Ten minutes later they arrived at another place, got out, and were escorted into some kind of structure. The blindfolds removed, their eyes adjusted to a narrow, windowless room. It looked like a caballeriza, a horse stall made of brick. Beyond the open door was a circular driveway and what appeared to be a large ranch, an ejido with a bunch of small houses on it. They were left alone. More Suburbans arrived.

  Gabriel and Wences had been searched for guns, but Gabriel still had his cell phone. He dialed his older brother.

  “¿Qué onda, güey?” his brother answered. What’s up, dude?

  “They picked us up across,” Gabriel said. “Now we’re at some finca and I don’t know whether . . .” Gabriel tried to spit the words but couldn’t accelerate his speech.

  More men were getting out of the Suburbans. In the illumination of headlights, a cloud of dust rose and hung in the air, moved forward, then dissolved. “Qué?” Gabriel heard his brother say before snapping the phone shut. From the shadow plodded a phalanx of men led by an individual wearing a gun holstered on one thigh, a knife on the other: Miguel Treviño.

  “Who were you just calling?” Miguel asked.

  “Nobody, sir.”

  “Don’t bullshit me.” Miguel threw his head back, flexed his neck, and looked down his nose with penetrating eyes. “Are you fucked up?”

  “No, sir,” Gabriel said, then glanced at Wences for confirmation. Terrified, and without roches to steel his confidence, Wences’s sober eyes looked to Gabriel as if they had a conscience of their own, and wanted to get out of the sockets and run away. Gabriel pursed his lips, but couldn’t stop himself: He erupted in laughter.

  Miguel, surprised, knocked Gabriel down with a powerful hook. Gabriel fell; was helped up. More questions were asked, and more bullshit answers provided.

  The grenade came out. Miguel left the horse stall.

  Gabriel now told Wences that he loved him, and that it was good to have been friends. Wences, his heart beating wildly, couldn’t understand how Gabriel remained so calm. Wences didn’t want to die! Gabriel continued: It was a shame to go like this, but there were worse ways. They both watched Miguel confer with the others outside, holding the grenade against his hip like a pitcher cups a baseball.

  A thought popped into Gabriel’s mind: Meme.

  “I work for Cero Dos!” Gabriel shouted, using the code name for Meme Flores: 02.

  Miguel turned around. “What?”<
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  “I bring him cars and trucks. I also cross juguetes”—toys, guns.

  Miguel laughed. “Why the fuck didn’t you say something?”

  “I didn’t know who we were dealing with. I didn’t want to be saying something to the wrong people. Nuevo Laredo is still mixed.”

  “It’s not mixed anymore. We’re the only dominant ones.”

  Gabriel nodded. Miguel explained that the cop they tried to sell the troca to was a contra, an enemy, and had been borrado del mapa the previous day.

  Thirty minutes passed, then Meme arrived.

  “Yeah, he’s my guy,” Meme said. “Get him off.”

  Gabriel and Wences were uncuffed.

  Meme introduced Miguel to the boys as a comandante for Los Zetas. Meme had never met Wences. But Meme told Miguel that he could vouch for anyone whom Gabriel called a pareja, a partner. Gabriel, Meme explained, was a stellar worker, a firme vato who supplied Meme with vehicles and guns from Texas.

  In his mind, Gabriel now made the connection: All those stolen trucks and smuggled guns went, ultimately, to la gente nueva, the Zetas. Neither Gabriel nor Wences had heard of Miguel Treviño until this evening, but they now understood him to be a high-ranking member of the new cartel.

  “You can call me Cuarenta,” Miguel told the boys, referring to his Zeta call sign, Z-40. He slapped Gabriel on the back. No hard feelings, eh?

  That night, Miguel, Gabriel, Wences, and Meme drove around Nuevo Laredo in a caravan. Gabriel smelled burning rubber and branches; outside, he saw ragged groups of huddled Mexicans stretching their arms over tambos, fifty-five gallon drums, nudging each other aside for access to the flame. The driver called ahead to a restaurant, and by the time they arrived it was empty.