El Narco

by Ioan Grillo

  To try to get a handle on how this has happened, I talk to social worker Sandra Ramirez at a youth center in the westside slums. Sandra grew up in the barrios and worked on assembly lines before trying to steer young people away from crime. She says the teenage sicarios are the result of systematic alienation over the last two decades. The slums were a convenient place for factory workers but got nothing from the government. As the factory jobs slumped with the economy, the slums were left to rot. One 2010 study found that a stunning 120,000 Juárez youngsters aged thirteen to twenty-four—or 45 percent of the total—were not enrolled in any education nor had any formal employment.10

  “The government offers nothing. It can’t even compete with a thousand pesos. It is only the mafia that comes to these kids and offers them anything. They offer them money, cell phones, and guns to protect themselves. You think these kids are going to refuse? They have nothing to lose. They only see the day-to-day. They know they could die and they say so. But they don’t care. Because they have lived this way all their lives.”

  As members of Fríjol’s gang began working for the mafia, they were suddenly flush with more powerful weapons. They used to fight their gun battles with 9 mm pistols. Suddenly they had Kalashnikovs and Uzis. Giving an AK-47 to a bloodthirsty fifteen-year-old with no education is a ticket for disaster. Gangbangers killing under the name of cartels were involved in bloody massacres around the city.

  Many barrio members were absorbed into two much larger gangs working for the drug cartels. One is the Barrio Azteca, a mob first formed by Chicano inmates in a Texas prison in the 1980s. The Aztecas have since mutated into a huge organization of thugs, drug dealers, and gunslingers in Mexico working for the Juárez Cartel. The other is the Artist Assassins, an organization that grew out of a Juárez street gang and mushroomed as it allied with the Sinaloa Cartel. On the streets, these two organizations are known as crews. As well as bloodthirsty teenagers, their number includes many adults in their twenties, thirties, or older who have grown into career criminals.

  One of the founders of the Artist Assassins is a twenty-seven-year-old who goes by the nickname Saik. He is serving a sentence for doing a triple murder for the Sinaloa Cartel. Another gang member shows me a painting that Saik did; these thugs really are artists, hence the name. The morbid painting jumps out at me and keeps me staring hard. The basic idea is simple and common: a helmeted skeletal head smoking a reefer. But something in the depth and personality of this rotting cranium entrances me. It is as though the dark yellow skull stares right back into my eyes with a confident, almost smug expression in his green teeth. He is a mask of death. But the painting also emits a strong personality, showing off cockiness and ghetto panache.

  The war between the Double A’s and Aztecas has been catastrophic. Gunmen went into a drug rehab center in Juárez, lined up seventeen recovering addicts, and shot them all in the head. The killers were allegedly Double A members seeking to kill an Azteca leader hidden there. They exterminated everyone, leaving the world in stupefied horror.

  In apparent revenge, Aztecas were allegedly behind the horrendous Salvarcar massacre in January 2010 that shook Mexico to the core. According to confesions, the gunmen went to a party to seek out three Double A members. The killers blocked off the entrances to the street and sprayed everyone they could see, murdering thirteen high school students and two adults. Victims included a high school football star and a straight-A student. Most, maybe all, had nothing to do with the drug war.

  I ask Fríjol what it is like to be in firefights, to see your friends dead on the street and to be an accessory to a murder. He answers unblinkingly, “Being in shoot-outs in pure adrenaline. But you see dead bodies and you feel nothing. There is killing every day. Some days there are ten executions, others days there are thirty. It is just normal now.”

  Perhaps this teenager really is hardened to it. Or maybe he just puts up a shield. But it strikes me that adolescents experiencing such violence must go into adulthood with scars. What kind of man can this make you?

  I ask about this to school psychologist Elizabeth Villegas. The teenagers she works with have murdered and raped, I say. How does this hurt them psychologically? She stares back at me as if she hasn’t thought about it before. “They don’t feel anything that they have murdered people,” she replies. “They just don’t understand the pain that they have caused others. Most come from broken families. They don’t recognize rules or limits.”

  The teenage sicarios know the legal consequences for their crimes cannot be that grave. Under Mexican law, minors can only be sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison no matter how many murders, kidnappings, or rapes they have committed.11 If they were over the border in Texas, they could be sentenced for up to forty years or life if they were tried as an adult. Many convicted killers in the school will be back on the streets before they turn twenty. Fríjol himself will be out when he is nineteen.

  But the law is the least of their worries; the mafias administer their own justice. Juárez Cartel gunmen went to neighborhoods where gang members had been recruited for the Sinaloans. It didn’t matter that only two or three kids from the barrio had joined the mob. A death sentence was passed on the whole barrio. The Sinaloan mafia returned the favor on barrios that had joined the Juárez Cartel. I went to a neighborhood where twenty teenagers and young men had hung out on a street corner a year ago. Fifteen of them had been gunned down in a spree of shootings, a bar they hung out in torched. A few of the survivors are incarcerated, the rest have fled the city, leaving their old neighborhood looking like a ghost town. Fríjol recognizes that youth prison may be hard, but it is a lot safer than the streets now.

  “I keep hearing about friends who have been killed out there. Maybe I would be dead too. Prison could have saved my life.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Culture

  A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.

  —MOHANDAS (MAHATMA) GANDHI

  When Fausto “Tano” Castro suffered a near-death experience, he saw no pearly gates or angels. But, as may be expected from a musician, he did notice an abrupt transformation in the sound. As more than a hundred Kalashnikov bullets rained into his black Chevrolet Suburban and seven caps embedded in his arms, legs, and torso, he felt the noises around him become suddenly crystal clear, as if he were in a soundproof studio. Meanwhile, his body felt perfectly numb, registering no physical pain.

  But when he realized he was indeed still alive and turned his head to inspect the damage, he burst into tears. Sprawled next to him on the passenger seat was his cousin and one of the most beloved singers in northern Mexico, Valentín Elizalde, alias the Golden Rooster. Elizalde had been ripped apart by twenty-eight shells and died instantly.

  “I took him in my arms and kissed him. The moment felt unreal. Twenty minutes earlier we had been playing to this great crowd. They were going crazy for Valentin. Then there he was beside me, soaked in blood.”

  Castro recounts the story to me eighteen months after the ambush, which took place in November 2006 after a palenque, or cockfighting event, in Reynosa, just over the border from McAllen, Texas. He has recovered surprisingly well. The bullet wounds have healed up to become red, fleshy patches dotted up the right side of his body. After six months in the hospital, he is walking around unaided and is even back playing trumpet with his band—albeit with a replacement lead singer.

  In fact, his group, Banda Guasaveña, has never been more in demand. Elizalde has posthumously been nominated for a Latin Grammy and is being compared to all-time great Mexican singers such as Pedro Infante. Fans pack venues to hear the group play Valentín’s most raucous numbers, including songs with such names as “118 Bullets” and “The Narco Battalion.” Meanwhile, in the year and a half since the shooting, fourteen more Mexican musicians have been gunned down, burned, or suffocated to death in murders that bear the hallmarks of organized crime.

  To understand why sicarios would target crooners, comp
osers, trumpet players, and drummers, one has to venture into the surreal world known as narcocultura and its most emblematic form, the narcocorrido, or drug ballad. Valentín Elizalde was one of the biggest stars the genre has ever produced. While the music may have the folksy twang of accordions and twelve-stringed guitars, the lyrics sing the glories of Kalashnikovs, cocaine kingpins, and contract killings.

  Compared to gangster rap in the United States, the music is lambasted by the Mexican government and banned on the radio. Critics say it glorifies drug traffickers and is part of the cause of so much violence. Whether that is true or not, the incredible popularity of narco culture does illustrate just how entrenched traffickers are in society. Narcocorridos have boomed in sales, rocking parties from the jungles of Central America to the immigrant ghettos of Los Angeles. As gangsters haul tons of white gold over the border and blow each other apart in turf wars, these balladeers provide the sound track.

  But the crooners do more than just put earthy tunes to the carnage. They also give it a script. Following a centuries-old tradition, the ballads bring news to the street, describing prison escapes, massacres, new alliances, and broken pacts to a public that reads few newspapers. While minstrels of nineteenth-century Mexico toured town squares, the contemporary balladeers emit their messages from pickup-truck stereos in Brownsville to jukeboxes in Guatemalan cantinas.

  The songs paint color onto the shady figures of the crime capos. King of kingpins Ismael “the Mayo” Zambada was for a long time only known from one grainy photo from the 1970s. But many on the street had vivid pictures of him from hundreds of songs detailing his exploits. The verses flatteringly speak about how he bribes top politicians, slaughters rivals, and has a fleet of planes to traffic his merchandise. One ode apparently dedicated to him even features on the 2007 album of the bestselling group Los Tucanes de Tijuana, released by Universal Music in the United States and Mexico.

  His alias is the MZ,

  Others call him the Godfather,

  His name is well-known,

  Even by newborn babies,

  They look for him everywhere,

  But he is not even hiding.

  The dollars protect him,

  And also the Goat Horns [Kalashnikovs].

  At the heart of narcocultura is the figure of the mafia godfather. The personage is celebrated in mythological terms as the ragged peasant who rose to riches; the great outlaw who defies the Mexican army and the DEA; the benefactor who hands out rolls of dollar bills to hungry mothers; the scarlet pimpernel who disappears in a puff of smoke.

  Mexico is not the only nation to idolize outlaws. England has celebrated the cult of Robin Hood in popular verse and literature from the thirteenth century. (“Robyn hode in scherewode stod.”)1 Sicily romanticizes peasant bandit Salvatore Giuliano in cinema and opera. And where would popular U.S. culture be without Jesse James, Pretty Boy Floyd, Al Capone, and John Dillinger? Or without the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur?

  But in the hinterlands of northern Mexico, the cult of the outlaw has a special ring. The region was a frontier conquered by tough adventurers far from the center of power—either in Mexico City, Washington, or Madrid. Added to this, many feel (and are) particularly hard done by in a land where rich politicians revel in palaces and keep several mistresses while the poor struggle to survive. Narcos are revered as rebels who have the balls to beat this system. On the streets of Sinaloa, people traditionally refer to gangsters as los valientes, “the brave ones.”

  The movie The Godfather—the zenith of cinema glorification of a capo—was a storming hit in Sinaloa. Even today, La Familia Cartel instructs all its followers to watch the trilogy. The films are particularly pertinent as Michael Corleone’s godfather holds dear family values and loyalty, albeit in his own warped way (he kills his brother for being disloyal).

  Al Pacino’s other great gangster role, Scarface, is also a favorite south of the Rio Grande. I went to a prison in Nuevo Laredo after a criminal boss had been shot dead. Federal troops had stormed the penitentiary and were carting out all the luxury contraband the capo had stashed in his cell, including a pool table and disco sound system. (Incarceration was quite a party for him.) But the item that most grabbed my attention was an enormous framed photo of Al Pacino in Scarface. The fictional Cuban American Tony Montana is beloved by testosterone-filled men the world over. So it is natural that Latino gangsters themselves should find it easy to identify with the cocaine-snorting desperado who goes out with the words, “Say hello to my little friend!”

  Mexico’s own narco-cinema has churned out literally thousands of movies since the 1980s. The industry took off with the invention of home video, which allowed producers to make cheap B movies straight to VHS and later DVD. Known as video homes, productions are banged out in incredibly compact two-week shoots, often using genuine people in their roles—real campesinos, real prostitutes, and some real pistol-packing thugs. They have also turned out two superstars: Mario Almada, a lean Clint Eastwood–type gunslinger who normally plays cops; and Jorge Reynoso, alias El Senor de las Pistolas, a natural movie badass who plays bloodthirsty villains. Almada and Reynoso have made more than fifteen hundred narco movies between them and have many adoring aficionados, including lots of the traffickers. They also both confess to having met some of the top wanted capos, who are big fans of their flicks.

  The violent, sexy tales have inspiring names such as Coca Inc., The Black Hummer, and Me Chingaron los Gringos (The Gringos Fucked Me). Some of the most popular titles have up to seven sequels. As one may guess, they are packed with cocaine deals, scantily dressed women, crazy shoot-outs, and lots of big trucks burning through the desert.

  I sit through hours of narco-movies, but find it hard to get into them. The plots seem too illogical and confused, the dialogue laughable. So I ask about their appeal to Efrain Bautista, the native of the southern Sierra Madre who grew up in a marijuana-raising village. What do people see in these B movies? As soon as I mention them, Efrain flashes a grin from ear to ear.

  “You have to see what my cousins in the mountains are like when they watch these films. They look at them like they are real life, like they are really happening at that moment. When the hero makes a bad decision, they curse at him, shouting at the TV. When the guns start firing, they crouch down, as if they could be hit by a bullet.”

  However, the biggest spenders on the movies and drug-ballad CDs are not in ramshackle Mexican villages but in Texas, California, Chicago, and other Latino parts of the United States. Immigrants identify with the struggles of the poor and enjoy a romanticized vision of their homeland. They also buy more originals, while in Mexico every market sells pirate copies.

  However many films actually sell, narco-cinema producers have another special source of financing: drug dollars. Capos bankroll movies to launder money or get their own exploits immortalized on the silver screen. In a police interrogation, capo Édgar Valdéz, alias the Barbie Doll, said that he had given a producer $200,000 to make a biopic on him.2 For broke, frustrated filmmakers, anybody throwing that kind of money seems like a fairy godmother (even if he is a mafia godfather).

  Such spending by minted kingpins shapes all aspects of narcocultura. The capos’ ostentatious homes have created their own architectural style, narco-tecture, which mixes Greek villas with Jacuzzis and tiger cages. They finance a whole industry of artisans bathing guns in gold and diamonds with elaborate engravings. And they pay for designer bulletproof clothes in the form of frilled cowboy jackets. Such spending makes capos like the lords of medieval Europe who patronized the arts and pioneered fashions that filtered down to the commoners. And the art form that capos favor most, the style that has the most impact on the streets, is the narcocorrido, or drug ballad.

  Like so many elements of Mexican culture, the origin of the corrido stretches back to the blood-soaked Spanish conquest and the fusion of the European and indigenous worlds. Its base is in Iberian romance ballads, plucked on guitars by Spanish troubadours who f
ollowed in the footsteps of swashbuckling conquistadores. However, in the New World, poor mestizos—mixed-race Mexicans—inherited and developed this genre.

  The ballads were especially popular in the ragged hinterlands of Chihuahua and Texas, in the days when the Lone Star State was in Mexican hands. Small communities separated by arid plains and thick forests were starved of newspapers, so wandering musicians were relied on to bring the news of conquests and coronations. Their role became crucial during the bloody war of independence in 1810. Tales of the priest Miguel Hidalgo ringing the church bells and crying, “Viva México,” were spread in rhyming verse. From these early days, the ballads were rebellious and subversive.

  But the corrido really came into its own in Mexico’s decade of sanguine revolutionary war from 1910 to 1920. Calls for land and freedom and the dynamiting of cities were transplanted into endless ballads sung from the firesides of militia camps to the caravans of refugees. In this period, the corrido found its modern and epic form. “The songs that were most genuine and best represented our popular sentiments flowered on the battlefield and in the bivouacs,” wrote Vicente T. Mendoza, the foremost scholar of the genre.3

  Showing remarkable folk memory, singers in the countryside of northern Mexico can still recite these rhymes of blood and betrayal, such as the popular “Corrido of the Revolution”:

  Wake up, Mexicans,

  Those who have been able to see,

  That they have been spilling blood,

  Just to get another tyrant to power,

  Look at my beloved homeland,

  How has it been left,

  And the men so brave,

  Have now all been betrayed.

  With the rise of radio and television, ballads lost importance as a media, leaving many crooners to focus on personal tales of hard work and lost love. But in one area they kept on the cutting edge of news: criminality. As early as the 1930s, balladeers sang about bandits and bootleggers. A popular verse of the era was the “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez,” about a Mexican Texan who shot a sheriff in self-defense and fled over the Rio Grande. Celebrated folklorist Américo Paredes revived the verse in his 1958 book, With His Pistol in Hand, and it was eventually made into a movie in 1982.