by Ioan Grillo
Later, one Familia member gave an interview to Mexico’s top-selling newsmagazine, Proceso, while La Tuta phoned up a Michoacán news show to rant about Familia’s righteous defense of the homeland.13 In another publicity stunt, Familia soldiers rounded up dozens of alleged rapists and muggers in the town of Zamora. Five were shot dead while others were whipped and then ordered to march down the streets with banners confessing their crimes. Old Testament justice was played out for real in the family’s narco mission from God.
Carlos is adamant that La Familia’s claim to be vigilantes is simply posturing. They may kill kidnappers and extortionists, he says, but only to go ahead and kidnap and extort in their place. However, in the Tierra Caliente, some residents openly support La Familia and argue they are better at getting a debt back or solving a dispute than the courts. When its gunmen ask for money, people rarely refuse.
La Familia also uses regional pride to rally farmers and small-town hoodlums. They claim to be good Michoacán men who have driven out “foreign” Sinaloans and Zetas and even seen the federales off. In this spirit, the Maddest One made all his troops watch the movie Braveheart. As La Familia gunmen shoot down soldiers, they can feel like Scottish barbarians beating out the bastard English (except La Familia assassins don’t wear kilts). The Godfather trilogy was also compulsory viewing, educating men in loyalty and family values.
So what was Nazario? A deranged nut job on meth, or a religious visionary? One has to concede that there was a method to his madness. His religion and quasi ideology gave La Familia appeal and discipline, helping it become one of the fastest-growing outfits in the Mexican Drug War. As well as rapidly taking over Michoacán state, La Familia has pushed into Jalisco, Guanajuato, Guerrero, Puebla, and México state, including the slums around the capital. La Familia scripture may sound like a harebrained hodgepodge. But it is no more illogical than various loony religious or extreme nationalist movements that have sprung up around the globe—and sometimes claimed millions of followers. Having a quasi ideology adds punch. And in the experience of the Mexican Drug War, gangs imitate the successful techniques of their rivals. El Más Loco may not be the last Mexican capo to declare himself master of his own temple.
La Familia’s success, however, put it bang on the police radar. American agents rounded up La Familia operatives in cities including Dallas and Atlanta, and the Mexican government offered a 30 million peso reward for Moreno’s head. Someone close to the narco evangelist apparently went for this gold, informing the government he would be attending a Christmas party in the Tierra Caliente city of Apatzingán in December 2010. As federal police and soldiers stormed the city, the cartel rapidly responded by calling their foot soldiers to block roads and attack troops. Gunfights broke out on the streets, claiming eleven lives, including that of a baby hit in the cross fire. But federal police claimed they had killed their target, the Maddest One.14
However, Moreno had one last laugh—the federal police never captured his corpse. In the chaos of the shoot-out, federal police say, La Familia operatives carried Moreno’s cadaver into the mountains. The government released a tape of fellow kingpin La Tuta conceding that Moreno had died. But when there was no corpse, suspicion could always linger in people’s minds. Moreno became another source of fables, such as Carrillo Fuentes, who died in the plastic surgery accident in 1997. The Maddest One still wanders in the Tierra Caliente dressed as a peasant, people whispered. He is disguised as a priest giving mass in Apatzingán, they muttered. The mystical narco preacher has become a legend, and his teachings still have a potent power in the seething hills of his birth.
CHAPTER 12
Insurgency
If someone attacks my father, my mother, or my brother, then they are going to hear from me … Our fight is with the federal police because they are attacking our families.
—SERVANDO GÓMEZ, ALIAS LA TUTA, CAPO OF LA FAMILIA, 2009
The award-winning American TV series Breaking Bad has a scene in its second season set in the murder capital of Ciudad Juárez. In this episode, American and Mexican agents are lured to a patch of desert just south of the border looking for an informant. They discover the informant’s head has been cut off and stuck on the body of a giant turtle. But as they approach, the severed cranium, turned into an IED, explodes, killing agents. The episode was released in 2009.1 I thought it was unrealistic, a bit fantastic. Until July 15, 2010.
In the real Ciudad Juárez on that day, gangsters kidnapped a man, dressed him in a police uniform, shot him, and dumped him bleeding on a downtown street. A cameraman filmed what happened after federal police and paramedics got close. The video shows medics bent over the dumped man, checking for vital signs. Suddenly a bang rings out, and the image shakes vigorously as the cameraman runs for his life. Gangsters had used a cell phone to detonate twenty-two pounds of explosives packed into a nearby car. A minute later, the camera turns back around to reveal the burning car pouring smoke over screaming victims. A medic lies on the ground, covered in blood but still moving, a stunned look on his face. Panicked officers are scared to go near him. The medic dies minutes later along with a federal agent and a civilian.
I’m not suggesting that Breaking Bad inspired the murders. TV shows don’t kill people. Car bombs kill people. The point of the story is that the Mexican Drug War is saturated with stranger-than-fiction violence. Mexican writer Alejandro Almazán suffered from a similar dilemma. As he was writing his novel Among Dogs,2 he envisioned a scene in which thugs decapitate a man and stick a hound’s head on his corpse. It seemed pretty out there. But then in real life some gangsters did exactly that, only with a pig’s head. It is just hard to compete with the sanguine criminal imagination. Cartel thugs have put a severed head in a cooler and delivered it to a newspaper; they have dressed up a murdered policeman in a comedy sombrero and carved a smile on his cheeks; and they have even sewn a human face onto a soccer ball.
Many reports have gone into the social impact of such terror. But a central question is still hotly debated: Why? Why do cartel soldiers hack off heads, ambush policemen, and set off car bombs? And why do they throw grenades into crowds of revelers or massacre innocent teenagers at parties? What do they stand to gain by such bloodshed? Whom are they fighting? What do they want?
This puzzle goes to the heart of the debate about what El Narco has become. For the gangsters’ motivations in many ways define what they are. If they deliberately kill civilians to make a point, that would make them, by many definitions, terrorists. If they are trying to win the monopoly of violence in a certain territory, that would make them warlords. And if they are fighting a full-on war against the government, many would argue it would make them insurgents.
It’s a touchy issue. Words such as terrorists and insurgents set off alarm bells, scare away investment dollars, and wake up American spooks at night. The language influences how you deal with the Mexican Drug War, and how many drones and Black Hawk helicopters you fly in.
Journalists first started throwing the term narco insurgents into stories in 2008, as the war escalated and Beltrán Leyva’s hit squads assassinated the chief of federal police and dozens of agents. The term was then analyzed in greater detail in journals and think tanks with loose links to the American law enforcement and military community, including in a series of articles published in Small Wars Journal, which looks at low-intensity conflicts the globe over. As it said in one story by John Sullivan and Adam Elkus entitled “Cartel v. Cartel: Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency”:
“From the beginning, the criminal insurgency was never a unified project. Cartels fought each other as well as the government for control of crucial drug smuggling routes, the plazas. The fragmented and post ideological quality of the struggle often confused American commentators used to the idea of a unified and ideological Maoist-type insurgency. Yet the essential character of the insurgency is something that Clausewitz [a German military genius] were he around today and tuning into gangster-promoting narco corrido music pumping o
ut of Tijuana radios, could definitely understand.”3
The concept soon filtered into the Pentagon, appearing in a December 2008 report by the United States Joint Forces Command. Among military concerns over the next decades, it said, was the worry that Mexican drug violence could trigger a rapid collapse, comparable to that of Yugoslavia. “Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone,” it said.4 This was incendiary stuff. Not only was the report suggesting the drug war could actually push Mexico over the brink, it was actually imagining a scenario in which U.S. troops would cross the Rio Grande for the first time since the Mexican Revolution. It was only in a speculative report in the Pentagon’s darkest depths. But as violence intensified, the concept shot to the top of the administration in the voice of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. As Clinton said in now infamous comments in September 2010:
“We face an increasing threat from a well-organized network, drug-trafficking threat that is, in some cases, morphing into or making common cause with what we would consider an insurgency, in Mexico and in Central America … And these drug cartels are now showing more and more indices of insurgency—you know, all of a sudden car bombs show up, which weren’t there before. So it’s becoming—it’s looking more and more like Colombia looked twenty years ago.”5
The declaration sparked a whirlwind of indignant responses. Mexico retorted that the Colombia comparison was misleading and that its security forces were not seriously threatened. Any suggestion that the government is losing control is of course disastrous for Brand Mexico.
But there were also critiques from liberal academics and NGOs in the United States. These voices argue that Mexican drug cartels are not insurgents because they do not, like Islamic or communist insurgents, want to take power (and sit in the presidential palace, run schools, etc.). More pertinently, they rail against the expansion of military, anti-insurgency tactics used in Colombia or Afghanistan, and particularly the idea of American soldiers pushing into the Sierra Madre the way they reclaimed the Korengal Valley from the Taliban.
They have some real fears. Counterinsurgency campaigns have historically been disastrous for human rights—in Colombia, Iraq, Peru, El Salvador, Algeria, and dozens of other countries. And American troops pushing over the Rio Grande in the coming years is a genuine possibility. The narco-insurgency concept also plays into the hands of some in America’s extreme right-wing circles. Islamic radicals, communist guerrillas, drug traffickers, narco terrorists, insurgent narcos—all get thrown into one toxic cauldron of anti-Americans. The war on drugs gets tied up neatly with the war on terror—and the use of any means necessary to fight a conceptual devil.
The Mexican conflict cuts through politics in strange ways, sparking responses from everyone from gun lobbyists and anti-immigrant groups to foreign policy critics and drug legalization activists. Phrases such as “criminal insurgency” invariably anger, or gratify, certain interest groups in the debate. But whatever the politics, the threat in Mexico needs to be understood. Mexican cartels have clearly morphed into organizations with a capacity for violence that goes way beyond the bounds of criminals—and into the realm of national security. The argument that gangsters do not want to seize the presidential palace does little to diminish their threat. Many classical insurgent groups have not tried to seize power. Al Qaeda in Iraq is only estimated to have a thousand fighters and no realistic chance of defeating the government. But it bombs soldiers and civilians with global goals in mind. The Irish Republican Army or the Basque-separatist ETA also had no chance of taking power, but fought as a form of pressure. Even Mexico’s great insurgents Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata did not want to take the throne themselves, only to defeat tyrants to get a president more suited to their interests.
Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines insurgent as “a person who revolts against civil authority or an established government.”6 We can presume that to qualify as a real “revolt,” it must be by force of arms rather than peaceful protest. So does El Narco fulfill this definition? Some gangsters surely do. They are not regular outlaws who shoot it out with a couple of police and run. Their revolt against civil authority includes attacks by more than fifty men on army barracks; assassination of high-ranking police and politicians; and mass kidnappings of ten or more policemen and soldiers. Who can say with a straight face that these are not serious challenges to the state?
Cartels also use more traditional political tactics in their insurgency. From Monterrey to Michoacán, gangs have organized marches against the army, some in which demonstrators held placards in support of specific cartels, such as La Familia. And to add pressure, gangsters increasingly block main streets with burning trucks, a measure that costs the economy dearly and terrifies the general public. These tactics are copied from opposition groups across Latin America and illustrate a clear politicization of the rebellion.
The other big gripe with the insurgency label is about ideology. The Mexican government itself has said in statements that the cartels are not insurgents because “they do not have a political agenda.”7 Surely, insurgents have to believe in some higher principle, critics argue, whether it be Marxism, a national flag, or Allah and the seventy-two virgins. The word insurgent, and even more so the Latin American word guerrilla, is synonymous with people who are fanatical about a cause, even if they are violent nut jobs. Mexico’s narcos, these naysayers argue, believe in little other than laundering their millions, buying gold chains, and having a dozen girlfriends. At best they are “primitive rebels” in the sense of historian Eric Hobsbawm’s work on bandits.8 At worst, they aren’t rebels at all, just psychotic entrepreneurs.
However, analysts have pointed out that various modern insurgencies have nothing to do with ideology. Back in 1993, Steven Metz of the U.S. Strategic Studies Institute wrote an essay called “The Future of Insurgency,” in which he looked at uprisings in the post–Cold War era. Certain rebellions, he concluded, were solely about economic assets and could be better classified as “commercial insurgencies” or full-on “criminal insurgencies.”9 Another example of a commercial/criminal insurgency that analysts point to is the rebellion in the Niger Delta over oil fields.
The motives of Mexican capos vary from cartel to cartel and change over time. In 2011, Mexico had seven major cartels. All have thousands of men at arms organized in paramilitary squads. (The definition of paramilitary is “of, relating to, being, or characteristic of a force formed on a military pattern.”) Four of the cartels use these troops to regularly attack federal forces. These are the Zetas, La Familia, the Juárez Cartel, and the Beltrán Leyva organization. The most insurgent of all are the Zetas, who fight daily battles with soldiers.
Attacks often have a specific motive and objective. Marco Vinicio Cobo, alias the Nut Job, was part of a Zetas cell that kidnapped and decapitated a solider in the southern state of Oaxaca. In his videotaped interrogation, he describes how the murder was ordered because the victim was a military intelligence officer who was getting too close to Zetas activities.10 Across the country in Michoacán, La Familia gunmen attacked a dozen police bases and killed fifteen officers in response to the arrest of one of their lieutenants. Following that offensive, Familia capo Servando Gómez took the brash step of phoning a TV station. Talking to a startled anchor, he said La Familia responds to the harassment of gangsters and their families but offered a truce. “What we want is peace and tranquillity,” he said. “We want to achieve a national pact.”11
In these cases, narco violence is a reaction to concrete strikes on criminal organizations. They are pressuring the state to back off and signaling they want a soft government who will not mess with their business.
However, in other cases, they are more aggressive in actually controlling parts of the state. An example is to attack political candidates. The contenders are not even in office, so have not had the opportunity to hurt cartels’ business. But gangsters want to make sure the politicians
are already in their pocket and hit those who refuse to make a deal or side with rivals. Of numerous attacks on candidates, the most high profile was on Rodolfo Torre, who ran for governor of Tamaulipas state in 2010. The physician, running on a PRI ticket, was predicted to win the race with a landslide margin of more than thirty points. But a week before the vote, gunmen showered his campaign convoy with rifle fire, killing him and four aides.12 The ability to choose whether electoral front-runners live sends an ominous message to politicians about the power of El Narco.
But what prize is El Narco fighting for? If gangsters simply want the right to smuggle drugs, observers argue, it doesn’t pose such an destructive insurgent threat to society. However, as the Mexican Drug War has escalated, gangsters have got increasingly ambitious. Certain cartels now extort every business in sight. Moreover, they have muscled into industries traditionally shaken down by the Mexican government. The Zetas dominate the east of Mexico, where the oil industry is strongest. They “tax” as much as they can from it, both by extorting the union and stealing gas to sell off as contraband. Over in Michoacán, La Familia shakes down both the mining industry and illegal logging—both assets the government used to benefit from. Such activities vary from gang to gang. The Sinaloa Cartel is largely limited to the traditional traffic of drugs. Meanwhile, the criminal groups that have branched out most are the very same that attack federal forces hardest. When gangs can “tax” industry, there is a serious weakening of the state.
Where cartels are strongest, their power seeps from politics into the private sector and media. In Juárez, business leaders argued that if they have to pay protection money to the mafia, they shouldn’t have to cough up taxes to the federal government. It was a telling argument. The city’s main newspaper, El Diario de Juárez, made the point even harder following the mafia murder of a twenty-one-year-old photographer on his lunch break. In a front-page editorial entitled “What Do You Want from Us?” El Diario addressed the cartels directly—and touched nerves in the Calderón government: