El Narco (18 page)

It is still unclear exactly what inspired such brutality. Many point to the influence of the Guatemalan Kaibiles working in the Zetas. In the Guatemalan civil war, troops cut off heads of captured rebels in front of villagers to terrify them from joining a leftist insurgency. Turning into mercenaries in Mexico, the Kaibiles might have reprised their trusted tactic to terrify enemies of the cartel. Others point to the influence of Al Qaeda decapitation videos from the Middle East, which were shown in full on some Mexican TV channels. Some anthropologists even point to the pre-Colombian use of beheadings and the way Mayans used them to show complete domination of their enemies.

The Zetas were not thinking like gangsters, but like a paramilitary group controlling territory. Their new way of fighting rapidly spread through the Mexican Drug War. In September the same year, La Familia gang—working with the Zetas in Michoacán state—rolled five human heads onto a disco dance floor. By the end of 2006, there had been dozens of decapitations. Over the next years, there were hundreds.

Gangsters throughout Mexico also copied the Zetas’ paramilitary way of organizing. Sinaloans created their own cells of combatants with heavy weaponry and combat fatigues. They had to fight fire with fire. “The Beard” Beltrán Leyva led particularly well-armed death squads. One was later busted in a residential house in Mexico City. They had twenty automatic rifles, ten pistols, twelve M4 grenade launchers, and flak jackets that even had their own logo—FEDA—an acronym for Fuerzas Especiales de Arturo, or Arturo’s Special Forces.

As corpses piled up from the border to beach resorts, reporters ran out to every scene of an execution-style killing or dumped body. The Mexican government had long been guarded about giving out homicide numbers. But the aggressive newspapers tallied up the killings and printed them in rather sanguine “execution meters.” Some regional tabloids decorated these counts with graphics like sports scorecards. The tallies caught flak for being dehumanizing. But they served as the first crucial barometer of the violence. In 2005, fifteen hundred murders bore the hallmarks of organized crime across the country. In 2006, there were two thousand.

The rising death toll sparked concern. But on an international level, the conflict grabbed little attention, still being viewed as an internal crime problem, albeit with some juicy stories of bad guys rolling heads. Meanwhile, the foreign press focused on Mexico’s first presidential election since the PRI had fallen—and how President Fox would pass the torch. By law, Fox was not allowed to stand for a second term.

The contest had promise as a great example of free franchise in action; it turned into a gripping two-horse race between conservative Felipe Calderón of Fox’s National Action Party and the silver-haired Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party. However, smears and political chicanery soured the contest and shook Mexico’s young democracy.

López Obrador was a charismatic political animal with an extraordinary gift for public speaking, stirring up crowds with tirades against the unjust Mexico in which the poor toiled and the rich robbed. The establishment threw everything at him, including hidden videos of his aides taking bribes. But he just wouldn’t go down. In a final attempt to shut López Obrador up, prosecutors charged him over an obscure land dispute, a case that would keep him off the ballot. It was clearly a political persecution. The feisty leftist rallied hundreds of thousands in protest, and editorials in London and Washington accused Fox of sabotaging Mexico’s democracy. Realizing his very legacy was at risk, Fox fired his attorney general and dropped the charges.

The case had collapsed. But it left a terrible scar. In the next years, every politician accused of a crime said it was a political persecution. This made the job of cleaning up Mexico’s rotten establishment that much harder. The left were right to defend López Obrador. But later, they rallied around politicians facing credible charges of working with the mafia. With police seen as a political tool, public confidence in the justice system plummeted.

As the presidential election approached, tensions reached fever pitch. López Obrador said the establishment was a gang of mafia capitalists. Calderón hit back by painting López Obrador as a mad, messianic populist who would plunge Mexico into crisis. His catchy slogan: “López Obrador—a Danger for Mexico.” It was extremely effective in frightening a nation that had stumbled through crisis after crisis.

In the official count, Calderón won by 0.6 percent of the vote, making it the closest race in the nation’s history. López Obrador shouted that the vote was rigged and set up protest camps in the capital. Meanwhile, in the southern state of Oaxaca, a teachers’ strike transformed into an unarmed insurrection against the unpopular PRI governor. That crisis boiled on for five months, in which protesters burned buses and built barricades, and political violence killed at least fifteen people—mainly leftist demonstrators. After the murder of American Indymedia journalist Brad Will,
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Fox finally sent in four thousand federal police to take Oaxaca city. To Calderón, Mexico looked a chaotic place. When he was sworn into power in December, the former lawyer was determined to restore order.

Leaving office, Fox retired to his ranch and carried on making frank comments to reporters. His presidency had seen the start of the Mexican Drug War. However, it is unfair to blame Fox for this (as some have). Fox dutifully followed the difficult law enforcement approach to drug cartels encouraged by the United States. Few foresaw that Mexico was on the edge of the abyss in 2006.

In an interesting footnote, Fox converted to the cause of drug legalization. “Legalizing in this sense does not mean drugs are good and don’t harm those who consume them,” he wrote from his ranch in 2010. “Rather we should look at it as a strategy to strike at and break the economic structure that allows gangs to generate huge profits in their trade, which feeds corruption and increases their areas of power.”
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The man whose “mother of all battles” was cheered by American agents had decided the fight was futile.

CHAPTER
7

Warlords

We have scorched the snake, not killed it.

She’ll close and be herself whilst our poor malice

Remains in danger of her former tooth …

Ere we will eat our meal in fear, and sleep

In the affliction of these terrible dreams

That shake us nightly. Better be with the dead,

Whom we, to gain our peace, have sent to peace.

—
MACBETH
,
WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE
,
CIRCA
1603

On December 1, 2006, federal deputies were brawling in Mexico’s Congress hours before Felipe Calderón was due to enter the chamber to be sworn in as president. It was a fight for space. The leftist deputies claimed their candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had really won the election but been robbed of his rightful victory. They were trying to gain control of the podium to stop Calderón from taking the oath and assuming office. The conservative deputies were defending the podium to allow the presidential accession. The conservatives won the scrap. There were more of them, and they seemed to be better fed.

Among those attending the ceremony were former U.S. president George Bush (Bush the First) and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. I was covering the Congress door, snatching interviews as guests went in. The elderly Bush hobbled past with six bodyguards with bald heads and microphones at their mouths. I asked him what he thought about the ruckus in the chamber. “Well, I hope that Mexicans can resolve their differences,” he replied diplomatically. Schwarzenegger strolled past with no bodyguards at all. I asked what he thought about the fisticuffs. The Terminator turned round, stared intensely, and uttered three words:

“It’s good action!”

I phoned the quote back to headquarters and it went out on a wire story. Suddenly, Schwarznegger’s statement was being bounced around California TV stations. Then the BBC led their newscast with it: “It takes a lot to impress Arnold Schwarznegger but today when he was in Mexico …” I got frantic phone calls from the governor’s office in Los Angeles. Was his quote perhaps being used out of context? Well, I replied, I asked him straight and he told me straight.

For President Calderón, all this good action made a very testing first day on the job. He had to sneak into the chamber by the back door, rapidly get sworn into office while his deputies fought off leftists, then speed out again, defended by police in riot gear. However, he pulled it all off. With that he rapidly defused a complicated situation and killed any argument that he had not taken the proper vow of office. In a chaotic Mexico, he seemed like a man of decisiveness and action.

Ten days later, Calderon declared war on drug cartels. Wow, thought the public again. Here is a man of decisiveness and action.

Four years on, knowing that Calderón’s war would lead to thirty-five thousand murders, car bombs, grenade attacks on revelers, scores of political assassinations, a single massacre of seventy-two people, and an endless list of other atrocities, the president’s decision to attack cartels seems an earthshaking moment. Everyone figures that he must have had a grand plan. But it is so easy to read history backward. At the time, Calderon probably had no intention of still battling on with his offensive four years later, and he certainly didn’t calculate on the country blowing up in his face. Like his pushing onto the Congress podium, his declaration of war was a reaction to events and a showing of strength and decisiveness. And like the swearing in, he hoped he would quickly resolve a messy situation. With the former, his bet was spot-on. But with the drug war, he seriously miscalculated.

Calderón is from the same conservative National Action Party as Vicente Fox, but they have little else in common. While Fox entered politics in middle age, Calderón was born into it. His father, Luis Calderón, was a militant Roman Catholic who joined the Cristero rebellion in the late 1920s to defend the Church against the repression of revolutionary generals. The Cristero War claimed the lives of ninety thousand people in three years, marking it as the last major conflict in Mexico before the current drug war. It finished with a truce: Catholics could pray uninhibited while the government would still be secular. In 1939, Luis Calderón cofounded the National Action Party as a political force to fight for godly values. The senior Calderón believed in a political Catholicism that demanded social justice as well as faith, a third line between the atheist socialism and Protestant capitalism of the era.

With the PRI cheating National Action politicians out of office, Luis Calderón brought up his children in a middle-class home in stark contrast to the vast haciendas of ruling-party stalwarts. The president described it as an intensely political environment, and four of five children went into politics for the rising PAN. “My home was often a campaign headquarters. We folded printed leaflets in what we called the ‘paper train.’ In the kitchen we cooked up flour glue in big saucepans. My brothers and I went out at night to put up the propaganda.”
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Felipe Calderón, the youngest, won a scholarship to a Marist Catholic school before studying law at a private university, then doing a master’s in economics and finally a second master’s in public administration at Harvard. Such an extensive education made him well qualified to be a Latin American technocrat. He went into politics full-time at twenty-six, became a federal deputy, PAN president, energy secretary, and was finally elected to the top job at the ripe age of forty-three.

Felipe Calderón’s politics differed markedly from his father’s in that he largely kept his Catholicism private. As they climbed to power, National Action politicians decided they didn’t want to appear like religious zealots and focused on promoting free-market economic policies. Mexico’s leftists unfairly accuse the PAN of being extreme right-wing fascists. The PAN deny this, claiming to be centrists, and accuse the leftists of being raving populists. Calderón spent his election campaign tarring López Obrador as a messianic lunatic who would plunge the country into crisis.

Calderón was little known to the public before the election, so there was no track record for opponents to attack. Rivals turned to the oldest slagging point in the book: physical appearance. Calderon is short, balding, and bespectacled. In the first presidential debate, PRI candidate Roberto Madrazo turned round to him and waved his hand in the air, signaling a low height. “You can’t stand up to me,” Madrazo smirked, “because you don’t have the stature.”
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The president’s squat appearance soon became the central joke of political cartoonists. The short Calderón was shown struggling into an army uniform, trying desperately to look tough; he was drawn sitting in a tank, fighting to look over the steering wheel; and he was later depicted dwarfed by the tall gringo President Obama, who patted him on the head. The more he made tough war talk, the more cartoonists played on the joke. He was depicted as a little man going to battle—like other stumpy warmongers who have dotted history.

The declaration of war was made on December 11 by Calderón’s new security cabinet, including the defense minister, attorney general, and public safety secretary. The first strike would be in Calderón’s native state of Michoacán, where the Zetas-affiliated gang La Familia had left trails of headless corpses. Operation Michoacán, the team announced, would involve sixty-five hundred ground troops backed by helicopters and navy gunboats. The ministers threw around the phrase “reconquering territory” a lot. That was a key message of Calderón’s campaign that was echoed again and again, a thrust to take back parts of Mexico where gangsters had got too strong. “It’s about recovering the calm day-to-day life of Mexicans,” Calderón said.
³