El Narco

by Ioan Grillo

  The camera shows a kid sitting cross-legged on a gray carpet in front of a white curtain. He is about thirteen years old and all skin and bone. He is stark naked except for a white bandage covering his eyes and nose, and a cord tying his hands together. His head is bent over and trembling, showing severe suffering. A voice off camera growls, “Start now.” The kid talks. His adolescent voice is shaking, signaling a pain way beyond tears.

  “Mama. Give them the money now. They know we have the consultancy and three properties over there. Please, or they are going to cut a finger off. And they know where my Aunt Guadalupe lives. Please, now. I want to go, Mama.”

  The gruff off-camera voice kicks in. “Are you suffering or are you tranquil?”

  “No. I’m suffering,” the kid begs.

  Then the beating begins. First the torturer kicks the boy in the head. Then he smacks him with a belt. Then he kicks him hard in the head again. Then he turns the skinny, naked boy around, showing bruises on his back, and beats the wounds with the belt. It is unbearable to watch. The beating goes on and on and on. The kid is begging for mercy and unleashing gasps of pain and saying, “No, no, no.” During the beating, the torturer is talking, addressing the mother whom the video is sent to.

  “This is what you want, you bitch? This is the beginning of the end, I warn you. It depends on you, how far we are going to go. The next step is a finger. This is what you want? It all depends on you. I want six million pesos.”1

  I can’t even begin to comprehend the suffering of this boy’s mother or father watching this video. I can’t even begin to think about the physical and psychological damage to an innocent thirteen-year-old boy.

  Mexico has a strong family culture. Parents often mollycoddle their children more than anything I saw in cold England. A twenty-year-old daughter will go out and her parents will wait in the front room until four A.M. when she comes home. An uncle goes to the hospital with a broken ankle, and within hours twenty family members are gathered outside to see if he is okay. There is so much family love. It is hard to understand how in this same culture some men can show so much cruelty preying on that love. Because that is how kidnapping for ransom functions. It pushes people to give away everything they have worked for to stop the pain against a loved one.

  Mexicans also find this cruelty hard to comprehend. When such atrocities are reported on, the stories are always met by rabid responses. After the arrest of one kidnapping gang, for example, the following comments were sent to the Web site of Mexico’s bestselling newspaper, El Universal.

  “A bullet in the head. They are trash that is not worth keeping alive.”

  “I wish divine power would arrive because it is the only punishment that we can hope for.”

  “Scum. Hang them up on trees.”

  “Cut them into pieces and feed them to dogs.”

  Such calls for violent revenge are highly understandable. People feel frustrated and helpless. Kidnapping for ransom is the cruelest of crimes, and as the Mexican Drug War has raged, the number of abductions has gone through the roof. A government study found that between 2005 and 2010, the number of reported kidnappings of Mexicans had risen by 317 percent.2 An average of 3.7 abductions were reported every day in 2010, some 1,350 over the year. Anticrime groups say for every kidnapping reported, as many as ten may go unreported because the kidnappers say if the police hear about it, the hostage is going to get hurt. Many, many families have suffered. By several counts, Mexico has become the worst place for kidnappings on the planet.

  The timing of this crime explosion is no coincidence. Many thugs linked to drug cartels are directly involved in kidnapping. The most notorious trafficking gang that carries out abductions for ransom is the Zetas. As they clash violently with police and soldiers and protect truckloads of cocaine, they also extort millions from sobbing families. When you have a militia that is so feared and with so many guns, kidnapping is an easy sideline.

  But kidnapping is only one of the ways that the Zetas have diversified. They have also branched out into extorting bars and discos; taxing shops; taking money from prostitution rings; stealing cars; robbing crude oil and gasoline; getting money from migrant trafficking; and even pirating their own Zetas-labeled DVDs of the latest blockbuster movies. Drug-trafficking organization is no longer a sufficient term for them; they are a criminal paramilitary complex.

  El Narco’s diversification has been rapid and painful for Mexico. As a journalist in Juárez said to me, “Until 2008, the only time we had heard of paying protection was in old American movies of Al Capone. Then suddenly every business in the city is being asked for a quota.” Like so many other features of the drug war, the tactic is rapidly copied from cartel to cartel. One month, the Zetas are shaking down businesses; the next month La Familia is reported getting protection money; the following month the Beltrán Leyva organization is extorting. It is a logical progression. When gangsters see what their rivals are getting away with and how much money they are pulling in, they want a piece of the action. The move to diversified crime has become an ominous trend across drug cartels. It points to a gloomy future for Mexican communities.

  Organized crime has two basic functions: it can offer a product that legal businesses cannot provide; and it can steal or extort. The first category includes the selling of drugs, prostitution, pirate goods, gambling, guns, immigrant smuggling. The second includes kidnapping, cargo robberies, car theft, bank heists.

  The first category is the least destructive for the economy. At least with drugs, prostitutes, or gambling, gangs are selling a product and moving money around. Shakedowns and kidnappings, however, terrorize the community, scare away investors, and burn businesses. The Juarez business association never complained much about tons of narcotics pumping through the city and billions of drug dollars flowing back. But when gangs began to shake down businesses, they called for United Nations blue helmets to come and take charge.3 Shakedowns hurt them hard in their pockets. On a personal level, the move from drugs to kidnapping and extortion is terrifying for the community and strains the social networks of an already troubled country. You start to fear that anyone—your neigbor, your mechanic, your colleague—could be passing information to a kidnapping gang. It is an environment of fear and paranoia.

  Maria Elena Morera is one of the prominent antikidnapping activists that have risen up amid the Mexican crime wave. These activists lead a citizen movement that has tried to break the scourge of abductions and antisocial crime. Up until now they have failed. But they may be key to resolving Mexico’s crime problem in the future.

  Maria says she never wanted to be a public figure. Born in 1958 of a Catalan family, the tall, blond woman trained as a dentist and spent her life happily pulling out teeth and enjoying a fruitful marriage and three healthy children. Then in 2000, her life was thrown on its head. One day, her husband didn’t come home from work. She tried his cell phone but there was no answer, called his office phone but no one had seen him. Then she got the unbearable call—the gruff voice telling her that her worst fears had come true: they had her husband.

  “Words can’t describe how painful that moment was. It is like when something happens and you can’t believe it is real, can’t believe that this is happening to you. But it is and you have to try and find strength to face it.”

  She recounts this experience years later and has told it many times. But it still pains her to discuss it. Her face shows anguish, her voice shudders, and she burns through half a packet of cigarettes as she talks to me. Her nightmare was drawn out. The kidnappers terrorized her husband, a businessman, to push for a multimillion-dollar ransom the family couldn’t muster. She was told to get a package by the side of a road. She went to the address and there was an envelope. Inside was her husband’s middle finger, cut off from the knuckle. A week later, she was given a second finger; then a third; then a fourth. How can you deal with something like that? I ask her. How can you recover?

  She replies slowly, “You can never recove
r from something like this. It is with you all your life. It changes you. It kills something inside you. I can’t imagine the suffering that my husband went through. You feel it is your fault. It burns a hole inside.”

  Maria did what most people are afraid to do—she went to the police. She pressured them to act, worked with them to trace the calls and follow the gang. After her husband had been a hostage for twenty-seven days, federal agents located him and stormed the house. Several gang members were arrested, including a doctor who had been hired to cut the fingers off. And her husband was free. But he had to go on with his life bearing the scars.

  The pain didn’t stop there. Her husband was withdrawn and distant and didn’t want to go to therapy. Maria found she herself couldn’t go back to her normal life. The only thing that made sense to her was to fight against this affliction, save others from suffering the same pain. She joined the group Mexico United Against Crime and became its president. She took testimonies from people who have suffered kidnapping, rape, and violence and hooked them up with psychological help and legal aid. She also collected stats to highlight how bad the problem is. Maria’s husband appeared in a commercial to support the campaign. He sits in a white polo shirt facing the camera.

  “When my kidnappers cut off my first finger, I felt pain. When they cut off the second, I felt fear. When they cut off the third, it gave me rage. And when they cut off the fourth, I filled with strength to demand of the authorities that they don’t lie, that they work, that they save our city of fear. And if their hand trembles, I’ll lend them mine.”

  He holds up his hands close to the camera. His right hand is missing the little finger; the left is missing the little, ring, and middle fingers. The stumps left behind are of varied lengths, painting a picture of cruelty.

  Another campaigner, Isabel Miranda de Wallace, took activism a step further. After kidnappers killed her son, Miranda pursued the case until she was authorized by the courts to become its official investigator. After five years, she located all the culprits and saw they were arrested. It was a great achievement, but also highlighted how weak Mexico’s justice system is.

  The anticrime movement has grown in strength to gain national prominence. It has organized two marches against insecurity, and a quarter of a million people took to the streets each time calling on the government to act. However, some reasons can be identified to explain its lack of effectiveness. First, the movement has been drawn into the bickering of Mexican politicians and been used by some officials to bash others. Mexico’s deep class divisions are also a barrier. Some on the left accuse the activists of being rich bourgeoise out of touch with the problems of poor Mexicans. This polarization has weakened Mexican society’s resistence to the crime wave.

  The biggest problem of all has been the involvement of drug cartels in kidnapping. When abductions first started in the 1990s, it was almost all done by freelance criminals who had nothing to do with the mafia. One such rogue psychopath was Daniel “the Ear Lopper” Arizmendi, a former police detective from the industrial city of Toluca just outside the capital. The long-haired sadist, who looks a bit like Charles Manson, secured various million-dollar ransoms before police locked him away in a secure unit.4

  Then some gunslingers linked to the mafia started partaking in kidnappings up in Sinaloa. One gang was known as the “finger choppers.” They worked with drug growers and smugglers in the Sierra but also kidnapped the families of wealthy ranchers. Their most famous victim was the son of superstar singer Vicente Fernández, who lost two fingers to the mobsters before being liberated for a reported $2.5 million.5 After a backlash from local businessmen, the Sinaloan Cartel apparently prohibited kidnapping in the region. The punishment for violating the ban: death.

  I arrive at one Culiacán murder scene that appears to be cartel justice in action. The corpses of two men are dumped on the side of the road with signs of torture and bullets in their heads. A note sits beside the bodies: DAMN KIDNAPPERS. WHAT’S UP. GET TO WORK. This iron rule has been effective. Sinaloa, the cradle of Mexican drug cartels, has had one of the lowest kidnapping rates in Mexico. The mafia offers itself as protectors of the people, including the rich and middle class.

  But while the Sinaloan Cartel prohibits kidnapping in its heartland, gunmen linked to the Sinaloa mob kidnap in other parts of Mexico. In 2007, the feisty magazine Zeta ran a story about abductions in Tijuana by the Sinaloan mafia. “For organized crime, the life of people from Baja California is worth very little,” the article began, tracing a wave of kidnappings of Tijuana businessmen to the Sinaloan “finger choppers” gang.6 A local commander of the Sinaloa Cartel was also accused of kidnapping Mennonites from a colony in Chihuahua state.

  Such contrasts are typical on Mexico’s mafia landscape. In one area, a mob can pose as protectors of the people and administer justice; in another, they can bleed the community. La Familia claims to execute kidnappers in their home state of Michoacán. But over the line in Mexico state, La Familia gunmen are accused of rampant kidnapping to fund their plazas.

  Kidnapping spiked to unprecedented levels from 2008 as the Mexican Drug War intensified. Many point to cartels reacting to major seizures and lashing out for other sources of income. The government says this shows gangsters are desperate, on the ropes. But there are also signs that kidnapping simply increased amid the lawless atmosphere generated by so much violence. When federal police are themselves being kidnapped and murdered, there is less hope they can save you or your loved ones.

  The original kidnappings in the 1990s targeted the rich, but many of the more recent victims have been middle or lower-middle class. Ransoms are often between $5,000 and $50,000, enough to force middle-class Mexicans to lose their life savings or sell their homes. Doctors, who are very visible, have suffered from rampant kidnappings, as have owners of car shops, engineers, and anyone seen getting a severance payment. People with close relatives making dollars in the United States are often targeted.

  The drug traffickers most often accused of kidnapping are the usual baddest of the bad, the Zetas. Kidnapping is one of the basic ways Zetas cells fund themselves. They kidnap on an industrial scale. In cities from the Gulf of Mexico to the Guatemalan border, Zetas cells are said to pore over lists of potential abductees, taking anyone they think can pay up. One businessman who was kidnapped in the city of Tampico in 2010 said he personally knew of fifty cases within a year of the Zetas’ taking over the town.

  The Zetas have also targeted an even poorer class of victim—Central American migrants. The territory controlled by the Zetas on the east of Mexico is one of the busiest corridors for migrants attempting to reach the United States. The vast majority are from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, traveling on cargo trains and then switching to buses before swimming over the Rio Grande. It is a tough road to the American Dream, and it often leads to a hellish fate because of the Zetas.

  Poor migrants may seem an odd target for a kidnapping. Surely they have no money. That is why they risk their lives migrating. But even poor people have relatives with savings, and the Zetas can often get $2,000 from kidnapping migrants. If you multiply that by ten thousand, you get $20 million—truly kidnapping en masse.

  This holocaust has been detailed most thoroughly by Oscar Martinez, a brave Salvadoran journalist who spent a year following his countrymen on the dark roads through Mexico, jumping trains with them, sleeping at hostels, and hearing of their terror. Oscar traced the beginning of the mass kidnapping to the middle of 2007. But the story was largely ignored for years, Oscar writes, for two reasons: local journalists were threatened with death if they reported on it; and few cared about what was happening to the poorest of the poor.

  By 2009, the tragedy at last began to gain attention. Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission released a report based on testimonies of migrants who had been kidnapped. It estimated a stunning ten thousand had been abducted in six months. The scale was unbelievable.7 To capture so many migrants, Zetas gunmen kidnap huge group
s from trains, buses, or trekking though the bush. They are aided in their mission by their huge network of corruption, especially of municipal police. An army of the poor, the Zetas are particularly adept at flipping rank-and-file police officers.

  Zetas then take the mass-kidnapped groups to ranches until they get payments from family members up in the United States or down in Central America. They usually collect the bounty by money-transfer services such as Western Union. These detention camps exist right up the east coast of Mexico, especially in Tamaulipas state, across the border from Texas, in Veracruz, and in Tabasco.

  One such camp was located on the Victoria ranch, near the town of Tenosique in the swampy south. The horror story that played out there is told in detail in testimonies collected by human rights workers. In July 2009, fifty-two migrants were hauled off a cargo train by fifteen armed men. Arriving in the camp, their captors announced, “We are the Zetas. If anyone moves, we will kill them.” They selected captives and made them kneel down in front of the group, then smashed their lower backs with a wooden board. This torture method is so common to Zetas that they even have their own verb for it, tablear. It causes intense pain, threatens vital organs, and leaves distinct bruises. They also starved victims, suffocated them with bags, and beat them with bats. Captive women were repeatedly raped.

  Two migrants managed to escape one night. But a commando went after them into the nearby swamps. The migrants were strangers to the terrain, but the Zetas had local men who knew it like the back of their hand. Both escapees were recaptured and dragged back. The Zetas shot them in the head in front of the rest of the terrified prisoners.

  To get a better understanding of this terror, I traveled to a migrant shelter in the southern state of Oaxaca. I soon heard stories from several people who had survived kidnappings, confirming the reach of the tragedy. Among them was Edwin, a forthcoming Afro-Honduran in his twenties with warm eyes and well-kept dreadlocks. Zetas had captured Edwin along with a group of sixty-five migrants in Veracruz state and taken him hundreds of miles in a car until he was stashed in a safehouse in Reynosa, on the border. “The only thing that goes through your head is that you are going to die,” he told me, remembering his ordeal. “You think they are going to take you some place and it is all going to end.”