Osiel met a girl at the maquiladora—smart, with pearls for eyes—but Osiel was ashamed whenever he asked her out, because he couldn’t afford a car to go pick her up, or dinner in even a modest restaurant. He started dealing. Quick, profitable, risky enough to provide an adrenaline high. For pushers just starting out, whoever is the most unscrupulous usually takes the lead. Cruelty is essential; without it you might appear weak, and your adversaries will take advantage of you. It’s like with dogs: Whichever one growls the loudest becomes the head of the pack.
He was arrested for the first time in 1989, when he was twenty-one, for homicide, but the charge didn’t stick. When he was twenty-five he was arrested in Brownsville, Texas, and accused of drug trafficking; he was in possession of 2 kilos of cocaine. Sentenced to five years in prison, he got lucky again; thanks to a prisoner exchange between Mexico and the United States, he was sent back to his own country. In 1995, after just one year behind bars, Osiel was free again.
Great criminal leaders often have in common the desire to create an aura for themselves, the desire to enchant, seduce. It matters little whether the objective is a woman to bed or a rival dealer to eliminate by convincing your accomplices that the bastard has it coming to him. Once you find the right opening, the way to a person’s will, you’ve won. Osiel knew he could cut off hands, threaten family members, or burn down warehouses, but he also knew that the fastest way to get what he wanted was to touch the right chord. Those who didn’t fear him adored him. Acting as a madrina, or informer, Osiel infiltrated the Federal Judicial Police, gradually acquiring the protection that allowed him to move about freely. Now he could control both fronts and network with the Gulf cartel men in the meantime. He knew Salvador Gómez Herrera, alias El Chava, who became the Gulf cartel leader after Juan García Ábrego was arrested. El Chava too told Osiel the story of El Padrino raising his glass to toast Ábrego’s receiving the Matamoros corridor.
In the second half of the 1990s the Gulf cartel faced a war of succession. Plenty of people were ready to write off the organization that only a few years earlier—after El Padrino’s arrest and after the Golden Age of García Ábrego as leader—had been one of Mexico’s most powerful cartels. But now it had the police on its back, as well as the FBI and rival cartels. Founded in the 1970s by a man with the high-sounding name of Juan Nepomuceno Guerra, who had smuggled alcohol into the United States during Prohibition, the cartel’s days now seemed numbered. The new leaders fell one by one. García Ábrego fell, arrested by the Mexican authorities and then extradited to the United States, where he is serving eleven life sentences. García Ábrego’s brother Humberto failed: too weak. Sergio “El Checo” Gómez fell, betrayed by a conspiracy orchestrated by his partners and his bodyguards. Óscar Malherbe de León fell, arrested immediately after he took command. Hugo Baldomero Medina Garza, the Lord of the Trailers, fell too: His arrest put a stop to the tons of cocaine he’d been shipping to the United States every month, hidden in crates of vegetables or bags of seafood. The police celebrated, but in the meantime, El Chava and Osiel became friends and accomplices. They seemed inseparable, helped each other out, and amassed power and money. Not enough, though, at least for Osiel. You can’t wield power as part of a pair, as he’d always say to whoever insisted on pulling out that El Padrino story: “If you can have the whole world, why be satisfied with just a piece?” And so, after they were arrested together, and after they bribed the prison guards to escape, Osiel killed El Chava. On that day in 1998 he obtained two things: absolute control of the Gulf cartel and a nickname, El Mata Amigos, or Friend Killer.
You’re someone who kills your friends. If you don’t have any ties, what is there to fear? If you’re bright, you have a radiant future ahead of you. El Mata Amigos restructured the organization and brought it into the twenty-first century. Protection was guaranteed through bribes. Even the Twenty-first Motorized Cavalry Regiment of Nuevo Laredo was in his pay. It was good theater: The authorities would receive a report that a shipment of cocaine was hidden in the warehouses of an abandoned factory on the edge of the desert. They’d rush to the site in force, followed by a host of obliging journalists: a rapid, bloodless raid, no one there, just some white powder. But never an arrest. Photos, handshakes, smiles. A good, clean job.
Meanwhile, the frontier between Mexico and the United States was being violated day after day, hour after hour. But other organizations also wanted the sinuous tongue of Tamaulipas, which licks America’s ass it is said, and they declared war on the Gulf cartel. The Valencia brothers, together with the Tijuana cartel, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes’s Juárez cartel, and even Los Negros, the death squad in the service of Sinaloa—they all challenged the Gulf cartel. A real war. Cities such as Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, and Matamoros became battlegrounds. There wasn’t an hour day or night when executions and kidnappings weren’t taking place; it wasn’t unusual to find bodies on the street, hacked to pieces and stuffed into plastic bags.
The escalation of violence and deaths increased national and international pressure for the capture of Osiel Cárdenas Guillén. He was finally arrested and four years later was extradited to the United States. The cartel subsequently decentralized, with two drug lords sharing control: Osiel’s brother Antonio Ezequiel Cárdenas Guillén, alias Tony Tormenta (killed by the Mexican army in Matamoros on November 5, 2010), and Jorge Eduardo Costilla Sánchez, alias El Coss (arrested by the Mexican navy in Tampico on September 12, 2012), leaders who proved unable to put an end to the internal feuds devouring the cartel. And soon enough, once their suns had set, it was Mario Armando Ramírez Treviño’s turn. But Mario, known as El Pelón, Baldy, or X20, was arrested in Reynosa on August 17, 2013. So now who? The DEA bet on one of three men: Luis Alberto Trinidad Cerón, known as El Guicho, Juan Francisco Carrizales, known as El 98, and Juan Alberto de la Cruz Álvarez, known as El Juanillo. But there would also be room for another of Osiel’s brothers, Homero Cárdenas Guillén, known as El Majadero, or Stupid. Some say he sits atop the Gulf command structure; others say he died of a heart attack in March 2014.
Today the Gulf cartel continues to take advantage of its proximity to the U.S. border. It is an efficient money-making machine, using an unbelievable variety of means to transport cocaine north, including underground tunnels, which are also used for human trafficking. These humans are the new drug mailmen: In exchange for the mirage of a new life beyond the border, they carry up to half a million dollars of drugs on them. Or they use the buses on I-35, which goes from the border city of Laredo, Texas, all the way to Minnesota, or I-25, which you can pick up twenty-five miles from El Paso, Texas, and take all the way to Wyoming. Buses are the perfect mode of transport for narcos, because they’re not usually X-rayed. But the Gulf cartel doesn’t disdain more creative options either, such as trains or submarines: fast, safe, and capable of carrying astronomical quantities of cocaine.
• • •
“In the heart of every man is a desperate desire for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue.” Nazario Moreno González, one of the most powerful bosses of The Michoacán Family, often quoted these words, by writer and Christian activist John Eldredge. Moreno González preached the divine right to eliminate his enemies and was never without his “bible” of teachings. “It is better to die fighting face to face than to live your whole life humiliated and on your knees,” Moreno wrote, taking his cue from the sayings of the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.
For some he was El Chayo, for others El Más Loco, the Craziest One. But everyone remembers him as the Mexican boss who died twice. In December 2010, the Mexican authorities declared that the boss of The Michoacán Family had been killed by the Federal Police of Apatzingán. Even the then president, Felipe Calderón, went out of his way to explain that the forces of order had surprised Nazario Moreno González during a party organized by some La Familia members, and that he had been killed during the ensuing shoot-out. His body was never found, but no one doub
ted the official version: It had been taken away by La Familia members. Not until October 2011, that is, almost a year later, when Mario Buenrostro Quiroz, the leader of Los Aboytes, a group of kidnappers with ties to The Michoacán Family, was arrested. Under interrogation Buenrostro revealed that El Chayo was alive and had become the head of the Knights Templar cartel, which had broken away from The Michoacán Family. Rumors started flying. Confirmation came on March 9, 2014, when marine and army special forces killed a man who had forcefully resisted arrest during a shootout in Tumbiscatío, Michoacán. Fingerprints and a DNA test left no room for doubt this time: It was Nazario Moreno González, who had officially been dead for more than three years. During those dead years he’d been able to command undisturbed from his stronghold in Michoacán, without even having to worry about being arrested: No one hunts down a dead man.
Michoacán is on the Pacific coast. This was where the Sinaloa gomeros had moved with their opium poppies, and they were the ones who taught the campesinos how to cultivate them. Michoacán-Sinaloa-United States: For years this was the route.
The Michoacán Family claimed to be born to oppose violence and protect and defend the weak. For several years the Gulf cartel, which was expanding in those areas, relied on La Familia for paramilitary support. But La Familia ultimately became an independent cartel specializing in methamphetamine trafficking, and it became the principal supplier of meth for the United States. This area, with its hills—a natural refuge—and Pacific shoreline—that facilitates transportation—and above all with the vast stretches of fertile terrain in the so-called Tierra Caliente, or Hot Land—perfect for growing marijuana—has attracted traffickers for decades. But today it is dotted with meth labs. According to Michael Braun, former DEA chief of operations, La Familia has specialized laboratories that can produce up to 50 kilos of methamphetamine in eight hours. La Familia also has very strict rules about selling it: never to its own members; never to Mexicans. The cartel hangs banners in its territories: “We are against the use of drugs and we say no to the exploitation of women and children.”
La Familia cartel celebrated its entry into the world of Mexican drug trafficking in high style: On the night of September 6, 2006, twenty men dressed in black, their faces covered with ski masks, burst into the discotheque Sol y Sombra in Uruapan, some sixty miles from Morelia, the capital of Michoacán. Armed to the teeth, they fired into the air and shouted at the public and the girls dancing on cubes to get down on the floor. Amid general panic, they raced up to the second level, opened black plastic trash bags, and rolled five decapitated heads across the dance floor. On their way out the hit men left a note on the floor, next to the severed heads: “La Familia doesn’t kill for money, it doesn’t kill women, it doesn’t kill innocent people. The only ones who die are those who deserve it. Let it be known by all: this is divine justice.” The Michoacán Family had introduced itself to Mexico.
The organization’s members view their territory as sacred and will not tolerate it being sullied by drugs or disease. This makes them quite similar to Italian mafias, which stop and punish whoever deals in their territory. The Michoacán Family has a sui generis welfare system. They fight drug addiction in an unusual, martial fashion: They go to the rehab clinics and encourage the addicts to come clean in every way possible, including through the help of prayer. Then they make them work for the cartel. If they refuse, they are killed. Prayer meetings play an important role in the organization; one’s career depends on them. The cartel lavishes money on peasants, businesses, schools, and churches, and it promotes itself in the local papers in order to gain public support. In an ad in La Voz de Michoacán in November 2006, La Familia announced: “Our strategies may be aggressive at times, but this is the only way to impose order in the state. Some people might not understand our actions right now, but we know that in the hardest hit zones they do, because it is possible to fight these delinquents, who have come here from other states, and we’re not going to let them come to Michoacán and commit crimes.” La Familia is like a parallel state within the state of Michoacán. It finances community projects, controls petty crime, resolves local disputes. And it demands protection money from businesses: a hundred pesos a month for a stall at the local market; thirty thousand for a car dealership. Businesses are often forced to close and turn operations over to the organization, which then uses them for money laundering.
“We want President Felipe Calderón to know that we are not his enemies, that we admire him. We are open to dialogue. We do not want Los Zetas in Michoacán. What we want is peace and tranquillity. We know we are a necessary evil. . . . We want to reach an agreement, we want to establish a national pact.” This was the voice of Servando Gómez Martínez, alias La Tuta, speaking in a phone call to the show Voz y Solución, hosted by the journalist Marcos Knapp on a local channel of Michoacán CB Televisión. Gómez, a high-ranking member of the cartel and one of Moreno González’s associates, was proposing nothing less than an alliance with President Calderón to eliminate their most feared competitors, but the government refused to negotiate. Nevertheless, La Familia has been one of the fastest-growing cartels during the years of Mexico’s war on drugs. Its power has spread from Michoacán to the neighboring states of Guerrero, Queretaro, and México. And also into the United States: In October 2009, federal authorities released the findings of a four-year investigation—known as Project Coronado—on La Familia’s activities in the United States. It led to one of the biggest operations against Mexican drug cartels operating in U.S. territory. More than three thousand agents took part in just one raid, which lasted two days and involved local, state, and federal authorities: 303 men were arrested in nineteen different U.S. states; 62 kilos of cocaine, 330 kilos of methamphetamine, 440 kilos of marijuana, 144 weapons, 109 vehicles, and 2 drug labs were seized, along with $3.4 million in cash. In November 2010 La Familia proposed another pact: It offered to dismantle its own cartel on the condition that the state, the federal government, and the federal police guarantee Michoacán’s security. The proposal appeared on flyers slipped under the doors of homes and shops, in phone booths, on cartel banners hung across streets, in letters sent to blogs, radio stations, newspapers, and national and international press agencies. It claimed that La Familia was created to make up for the government’s failure to provide for the safety of its citizens, and that it was composed of Michoacán men and women who were prepared to give their lives to defend the state. But once again Felipe Calderón, who was born in Michoacán, refused to negotiate with the cartel.
The conflict between La Familia and Los Zetas reduced Michoacán to a war zone. What is considered to be the first act of narco-terrorism in Mexican history took place in Morelia, Michoacán’s capital city, on September 15, 2008, the eve of Mexico’s Independence Day. Shortly after Governor Leonel Godoy rang the Independence bell and declared three times “¡Viva Mexico!” two frag grenades exploded in the crowded square, killing eight people and wounding over a hundred, all of them innocent civilians. Even the innocent are victims in the narcos’ war. The authorities pointed a finger at La Familia, which in turn hung banners blaming Los Zetas: “‘Coward’ is the correct term for those who undermine the peace and tranquillity of the country. Mexico and Michoacán are not alone. Thank you, Zetas, for your contemptible acts.”
The Morelia attack marked a turning point, a shift from El Chapo’s methods to those of Los Zetas and La Familia. Before there were rules. If you betrayed El Chapo, you were simply put to death, period. No macabre or gruesome scenes. Today ferocity is theatrically displayed. Extreme violence is compounded by public humiliation. El Chapo understood the shift immediately. The day after the attack he sent around a prounouncement via e-mail denying responsibility for this and similar attacks that was signed by El Mayo as well. “We of Sinaloa have always defended the people, we have always respected the families of capos and the crew, we have always respected the government, we have always respected women and children. When the Sina
loa cartel ruled all over Mexico, there were no executions, and do you know why? Because we know how to do our job, and we have feelings. Soon you will see more Sinaloans in Michoacán (we will take back all the territory that was snatched from us and kill all those who have offended the Sinaloa family), and neither the government nor the cartels will be able to stop us.”
The new cartels flaunt their ferocity, which serves as a sort of ambassador. Sinaloa resorts to ferocity only when necessary. It is a confrontation between postmodernism and modernism. Between screams and silence. The rules of the game have changed. The number of players has increased. New cartels spring up quickly, devouring territories and entire regions. It’s crazy making, all these new cartels. More flexible structures, faster responses, familiarity with new technology, ostentatiously lurid killings, and obscure, pseudoreligious philosophies. It is altogether a new level of frenzy.
• • •
A residential neighborhood in Cancún. A small van, left parked for days, started attracting people’s attention, so they called the police: “That van stinks of rotting meat.” When the police opened the door they discovered three bodies, handcuffed, with plastic bags over their heads. A note next to them: “We are the new group Mata Zetas. We are against kidnapping and extortion, and we will fight against them in every state, for a cleaner Mexico.” Signed: “Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (Los Mata Zetas).” It was later discovered that before being killed the three were interrogated by men with ski masks and assault rifles. A video was posted on YouTube. This was how the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación—Los Mata Zetas, the Zetas Killers—introduced itself.