by Don Winslow
“Know that now,” Ramón says.
“Who gave the order?”
Ramón shrugs. “Who the fuck knows? No one’s in charge anymore. No one knows…anything. Someone above you tells you to kill someone, you kill someone. You don’t know why, you don’t know for who. Then the guy above you is dead, and it’s someone else.”
“Was it Fuentes?”
“That pussy bitch?” Ramón asks. “He’s gone. He ran away. He don’t care no more. Fuck, I don’t care no more. Nobody cares about shit no more.”
Ramón starts to cry. Then he says, “You better get out of here, ’Blo. Isn’t safe. They’re killing us all, man. La Línea, Los Aztecas, they’re killing us all.”
“Who is?”
“The Gente Nueva,” Ramón says. “They’re the New People, right?”
Pablo tosses back his drink and slides out of the booth.
“Hey, come to the house sometime,” Ramón says. “We’ll have a beer, watch some fútbol.”
“We’ll do that.”
Pablo walks out of the bar.
—
The next day, Pablo is in the city room with Ana and Óscar when the president gives a press conference from Switzerland to comment on the Villas de Salvárcar massacre.
“The most probable hypothesis,” Calderón said, “is that the attacks were related to the rivalry between drug organizations, and that the youths had some sort of link to the cartels.”
“Did he really just say that?” Ana asks.
“He did,” Óscar answers. “We run it.”
Calderón’s statement infuriates Juárez and thousands of other Mexican citizens across the country. Calls for his resignation come from every quarter, not the least of which from the families of those killed.
Óscar Herrera writes a scathing editorial, demanding that the president step down.
The president and members of his cabinet come to visit the families, apologize, offer their condolences, and announce over $260 million in new social programs for the city.
It does little good.
It certainly does little to mollify the Juarenses.
The day after Calderón’s visit, a narcomanta is hung up over a major Juárez street. It reads THIS IS FOR CITIZENS SO THAT THEY KNOW THAT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PROTECTS ADÁN BARRERA, WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE MASSACRE OF INNOCENT PEOPLE…ADÁN BARRERA IS PROTECTED BY PAN SINCE THEY SET HIM FREE. THE DEAL IS STILL IN PLACE TODAY. WHY DO THEY MASSACRE INNOCENT PEOPLE? WHY DO THEY NOT FIGHT WITH US FACE-TO-FACE? WHAT IS THEIR MENTALITY? WE INVITE THE GOVERNMENT TO FIGHT ALL THE CARTELS.
The next day, hundreds gather at the base of the Free Bridge to protest drug violence.
Villas de Salvárcar comes to symbolize opposition to the government’s war on drugs, a symbol of confusion and futility.
It’s a watershed moment in the war on drugs.
Another follows in short order.
La Tuna, Sinaloa
February 2010
The CDG and the Zetas have split.
The war is on.
The deck of cartel alliances is going to be shuffled again.
Adán knew that it couldn’t last—that eventually the Zeta servants would turn on their CDG masters—but he can’t believe it would happen this soon and in such a spectacular fashion.
He goes down to the kitchen to make some breakfast. It’s become one of his small pleasures—he likes the solitude of early morning and the simplicity of cooking an egg and making his own coffee.
It’s good, quiet time to think before a day of incessant demands.
Adán heats some canola oil and cracks a single egg into the pan. He’s picked up a few pounds and his last physical revealed that his cholesterol was a little high, so he’s cut his morning eggs in half. Watching the egg crackle, he thinks about Gordo Contreras, the putative head of the CDG.
Gordo made a serious mistake.
Some of his people in Reynosa kidnapped and then killed a high-ranked Zeta, a close friend of Forty’s.
Forty was outraged and gave Gordo a week to turn over the killers.
Gordo was in a tough spot. If he turned his own people over, he was done as boss of the CDG and became Forty’s bitch; if he didn’t, he was at war with the Zetas. Gordo has his own armed force, Los Escorpiones, but they’re not a match for the Zetas.
Adán takes a spatula and slides the egg onto his plate. He shakes some Tabasco sauce on it in place of the salt that Eva won’t let him have, then sits down to eat.
Gordo didn’t turn over the killers.
As a result, Forty kidnapped sixteen CDG sicarios and tortured them to death in a basement.
Adán places a private bet with himself to see who will call him first. It would be a smart move for the Zetas to offer to withdraw from Juárez in exchange for his help against the CDG.
But Ochoa and the Zetas are doing stupid things lately.
They’ve changed.
Their original cadre of veteran special forces has been depleted by arrests and attrition and now they have to recruit men with little or no experience and train them. Some of the people running around calling themselves “Zetas” aren’t part of the organization at all, and “Zeta” has become something of a brand name, like “Al Qaeda.”
Adán wonders if Ochoa is deteriorating as well. The decision to kill that marine’s family after the funeral was so phenomenally stupid as to boggle the mind. The public reacted with predictable outrage, and the marine special forces, the FES, have launched the predictable vendetta and are pounding the Zetas.
With the help of North American intelligence.
Of course Keller would find his way into the elite unit of killers. It’s a natural evolution, water seeking its own level. And with the FES relentlessly pursuing the Zetas, Adán is not self-indulgent enough to attract their attention by killing Art Keller.
No, let him do my killing for me.
There will be time enough to deal with him later. Still, it’s frustrating. Patience is a virtue, but like most virtues, also a burden.
But if Ochoa thought he could win hearts and minds by slaughtering a hero’s grieving family in their beds, he was wrong. Maybe he can intimidate the general public, but he’s not going to intimidate Orduña and his men, who are more than willing to get into a fight to the death.
And the Zetas continue to do things that alienate the public—principally kidnapping and extortion. They now make as much money from these activities as they do from drug trafficking, but while the public doesn’t pay much attention to trafficking, it deeply resents being held for ransom.
It plays right into my hands, Adán thinks as he puts his dishes in the sink. The Zetas make us look good—or at least the lesser of evils. After the Córdova murders, no one objects to the government making the Zetas its priority.
So now Ochoa and his boys are fighting me in Juárez and Sinaloa, Eddie Ruiz in Monterrey, Veracruz, and Acapulco, La Familia in Michoacán, the marines everywhere, and now the CDG in Tamaulipas.
Nevertheless, the Zetas are expanding, and it’s worrisome.
The most worrying expansion isn’t in Mexico at all.
It’s in Guatemala.
The Zetas have been moving into Guatemala for the last three years, gaining favor with the Lorenzana family by killing their chief rival, Juancho León, and ten others in an ambush at a supposed peace meeting.
In recent months they’ve fought—successfully—pitched battles against Guatemalan special forces troops to defend airstrips used for bringing in cocaine, and now Adán has word that there are over four hundred Zeta operatives in the country focusing on Guatemala City and the Petén, the province on the border with Mexico, and have advertised for ex-soldiers on pirate radio stations.
It’s significant—70 percent of the cocaine that flows through Mexico comes in via Guatemala.
All the cartels have used Guatemala for years.
It goes back to the old “Mexican Trampoline” days of the ’80s, because flights from Colombi
a needed a place to refuel before flying into Guadalajara. With the current war on drugs, Guatemala has become even more important, as a market, but also as a transshipment point. Cocaine flown into the Petén can simply be carried into Mexico and moved up to the border from there. Now the Zetas are forcing peasants from their land so they can use it as a string of bases.
The Guatemalan government has sent a thousand troops, with armored vehicles, helicopters, and surveillance equipment, into the Petén. The Petén has always been neutral territory—safe and quiescent—and now Ochoa, in making a move to control it, has brought government attention, not to mention the DEA.
It can’t be allowed—Adán’s cocaine imports depend on El Salvador and Guatemala, and he can’t yield either to the Zetas.
Adán walks out of the kitchen onto the broad stretch of lawn and walks down toward a grove of fresno trees at the bottom of the slope. The morning is cool and quiet, with birdsong just starting as the sun comes up.
Barely aware of the sicarios that follow from a discreet distance, Adán walks into the grove. It’s peaceful here, it feels so far away from the conflicts and strife that inhabit the rest of his life.
Eva is well, but Eva is also not pregnant.
Which seems to be the central fact of her life.
If sex with a beautiful twenty-year-old woman can be deemed a chore, that’s what it’s become, a chore—Eva running around with a thermometer in her mouth, checking calendars and clocks, summoning him to perform when the moment is ripe, suggesting new positions not for enjoyment but for the efficiency of physics.
Eva is frustrated and fearful—despite his assurances to the contrary—that he’ll leave her.
And she’s restless.
He understands.
Life on a remote finca is not exactly ideal for a vivacious girl her age. Adán understands that she feels like a prisoner here, even with the swimming pool, the home gym, the horses, the satellite dish, and Netflix. She goes on shopping trips to Badiraguato and Culiacán, but he knows that she wants to hit the clubs in Mazatlán and Cabo. He tries to facilitate that, but it’s difficult, and she doesn’t appreciate the level of organization and planning even a quick trip off the finca requires.
She misses her friends, and he brings them in from time to time, but each visitor is a potential security risk, and with two wars going on and the FES rampaging through the narco ranks, he can’t afford unnecessary risks.
As a sop, he’s arranged for her to go to Mexico City every few weeks for a few days, and she’s leaving later this morning, but he knows that it’s a temporary respite at best.
The issue is that she’s bored, has nothing to do with her time, and refuses to grow up. Some women let the vicissitudes of life make them hard and bitter, but Eva has gone in the other direction—willfully naïve, consciously unaware, almost defiantly childlike. Always cheerful, perpetually, annoyingly “bubbly,” still the virgin bride in bed—enthusiastic, energetic, unskillful.
The brutal fact is that Eva has failed in the one job that she was required to do—produce an heir.
“She has given you a child,” Magda said during one of their assignations in Badiraguato. “Herself.”
“Very funny.”
“So, seriously, what are you going to do?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“Get a new wife.” She let that sit for a second and then continued, “Oh, come on, you don’t love her. You can’t tell me that you love her.”
“I’ve grown fond.”
“I’m fond of my golden retriever,” Magda said. “Eva’s a child, and she gets younger every day. It’s almost creepy. Seriously, I wonder about her mental health, don’t you?”
“It’s a hard life for a woman.”
“Thank you for telling me. I didn’t know,” Magda said.
How would Nacho react, Adán wonders, if I do divorce his daughter? Would he accept it, or use it as a pretext to break the alliance? No, that’s too direct for Nacho—he would pretend to accept it and then use the power base I gave him in Tijuana to move against me. He’d go back to his old allies in Juárez and start stirring up a rebellion, while denying it all the time.
Adán has the fleeting thought that he should kill him now. Easy enough to blame on the Zetas. Then after Nacho is in the ground and a suitable mourning period, send Eva packing, with enough money, of course, to live in the manner to which she’s become accustomed.
He walks back up to the house.
Eva isn’t up yet, and for some reason it annoys him. He’d like to wake her up on the pretext that she’s going to miss her flight, but as they own two Learjets with crews standing by it wouldn’t work.
He watches her sleep.
Magda’s right, Adán thinks.
She’s a child.
—
Like any civil war, the conflict between the CDG and the Zetas has been extraordinarily vicious.
And it can only be called a war.
Whereas gangs of sicarios used to move covertly, now trucks with hundreds of armed men openly roll on the roads of northern Tamaulipas as machine-gun and grenade attacks erupt in Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, and Matamoros, as well as the small border towns along La Frontera Chica between Matamoros and Laredo.
“The Little Border” is strategically important for three reasons.
One, it lies between the two strongholds of the CDG and the Zetas, Matamoros and Nuevo Laredo respectively.
Two, it lies along the lucrative drug-smuggling border into the U.S.
The third reason has nothing to do with drugs at all, but with that other precious commodity of the twenty-first century.
Energy.
La Frontera Chica contains the Burgo Basin, rich in natural gas. Mexico’s national energy company, Pemex, has been exploring and drilling there for years, and there are almost 130 natural gas stations pumping now, with another 1,000 as yet to be exploited. American oil companies are eager to invest and start drilling. The cartels have long wanted to get into the energy business, and La Frontera Chica is the perfect place to do it.
So the little towns like Ciudad Mier, Camargo, and Miguel Alemán become battlefields.
It started in Mier, when fifteen pickup trucks marked with the CDG logo roared into town. Sicarios spilled out of the trucks and opened fire with machine guns on the town police station. Then the sicarios went in and hauled out six policemen, who were never seen again.
The CDG set up roadblocks, sealed off the town, and started the executions of Zeta loyalists, lining them up against a wall in the town square. The dead were decapitated, their heads set in a corner of the plaza. One young man, accused of being a Zeta lookout, screamed as his arm was sawed off before he was hanged from a tree.
The fighting went on for six days.
The Zetas struck back, and it became a battle of sniper versus sniper in Mier, Camargo, and Miguel Alemán. For all practical purposes, northern Tamaulipas could be Iraq, Gaza, or Lebanon as the rival factions fought in the streets, burned shops and houses, and evicted people from their homes.
Barricades went up.
Towns became ghost towns.
—
Ochoa doesn’t call.
Gordo Contreras does.
Adán says to Magda, “You owe me a hundred dollars.”
“I would have sworn it would have been Ochoa.”
“He’s too arrogant.”
“You know the CDG is going to lose,” Magda says, “and you don’t care. You’ll give them just enough help to keep the war going until both sides bleed each other out. Then you’ll step in and take Tamaulipas. Matamoros, Reynosa, Laredo—all of it.”
Adán shrugs. As usual, she’s read both him and the situation exactly.
“Have you thought about your price?” Magda asks. “Gordo will think that you’ll settle for just having an ally against Ochoa, but I think we could get more. Free use of their ports. It would be an easier route to the European market.”
“You’re still on tha
t?”
“You should be, too,” Magda says.
—
It only makes sense, Magda thinks. A kilo of cocaine sells for about $24,000 in the United States, in Europe, more than twice that. Even after cutting in European partners and paying the usual bribes, the profit margin is simply too good to ignore. If Adán doesn’t want in on it, she’s going to do it anyway, although his protective umbrella would be useful.
“You’re talking ’Ndrangheta,” Adán says, referring to the Italian Mafia that dominates the drug trade in most of Europe. “The CDG has them wrapped up.”
“Because we haven’t made the effort,” Magda answers. “If I went there, I’m sure I could persuade them to work with us.”
Not because of her undoubted sex appeal, but because it’s to ’Ndrangheta’s advantage to have more than one source of supply. And the European market, especially for cocaine, is rapidly expanding. Most of the heroin still comes in from Afghanistan and Pakistan via Turkey, the marijuana from North Africa via Morocco, but the CDG’s cocaine monopoly could be pried open. And if she can buy at $5,500 and sell at $55,000, well, do the math.
Besides, she’d like to see Europe again, through her own eyes instead of as a rapt naïf under Jorge’s tutelage. She could mix in some museums and galleries, and maybe a little shopping, with business. The fact is, she could use a vacation—only now does she understand Adán’s disciplined, busy days back at Puente Grande—the thousand and one details of running a multimillion-dollar enterprise.
La Reina Amante, indeed.
“But if you don’t want in, I’ll do it on my own. Just get the CDG out of my way. By the way, have you knocked up your queen yet?”
“Be nice.”
“I am being nice,” Magda says.
“Not yet.”
“They say that the doggie position—”
“For God’s sake, Magda.”
“I don’t remember this puritanical attitude in Puente Grande,” Magda says. “Let’s fuck—I’ll give you your hundred dollars in trade.”
“In her house?”
“There must be other beds, if you’re squeamish,” Magda says. “Oh, never mind, if you’re going to be such a little househusband about it.”
He grabs her.