El Narco (20 page)

The government decries such accusations as the scrawling of ignorant gangsters who don’t even sign their names. Calderón urges the media not to reprint such narco propaganda. And as I have said, no solid evidence links Calderón to the Sinaloa cartel.

But there is certainly evidence that some federal officials supported Chapo Guzmán’s offensive. Toward the end of 2008, a government probe code-named Operation Clean House uncovered a network of twenty-five federal officials on the payroll of the Sinaloa Cartel. Among them were soldiers, federal police commanders, and detectives. However, contrary to the conspiracy theory, evidence suggests that some of these federal forces worked with Chapo Guzmán’s rivals. As part of the same cleanup operation, police arrested fifty agents allegedly working for the Beard Beltrán Leyva.

As I have said, I prefer the cock-up theory to the conspiracy theory. Calderón may be honest, but he declared war on drug cartels with a rotten state apparatus, one that he could not fully control. Behind his push, police and soldiers hit gangsters harder than ever before, but these enforcers were still susceptible to bribes. As a result, Calderón’s offensive just threw oil onto the fire. Drug violence had steadily been rising since 2004. And like water over a flame, this violence finally came to the boil.

Throughout 2008, my phone rang relentlessly with unknown numbers from round the globe. I would answer to hear the voices of anxious TV producers from Tokyo to Toronto eager to jet in and film the Mexican Drug War. “We want to ride around in a Mexican tank for a month getting action on the front line,” they would demand. “We want an interview with Chapo Guzmán.” At the same time, the nervous producers would demand absolute safety. “We have to make sure our crew is unharmed. Can you give us a hundred percent guarantee they will not be shot or kidnapped?”

Networks sent their seasoned war correspondents for the task. Veterans arrived with stories of running with Bosnian militias, escaping bombs in Chechnya, or riding through Kuwait as its oil fields burned. Many had just come from embeds with the American army in Iraq and Afghanistan. They wanted to organize such embeds with the Mexican army. But they soon realized the Mexican war was a totally different type of conflict. There was no elite Mexican squadron, such as Battle Company in Afghanistan, which they could follow in action, talking to its hard-bitten soldiers and filming its rocket attacks with a night-vision camera. They could not stare over valleys at insurgent outposts.

The Mexican army and police moved freely around the whole country; but then they could also be attacked everywhere. They were not hit by aerial bombings or rockets but Kalashnikov rifles and the odd grenade. One day seven federal police would be gunned down in Culiacán; the next, twenty bodies would be piled up in Tijuana; the next, a commander would be assassinated in his home in Mexico City. How could you be in the right place to catch the action?

I built up my strongest contacts in Sinaloa and focused on covering the war from there. Every month I would jet up to Culiacán with different TV crews to film thugs working for Chapo Guzmán and the Beard Beltrán Leyva blowing each other apart. Sinaloa tragically witnessed 1,162 homicides in 2008, the vast majority in Culiacán, so film crews were guaranteed to see at least a dozen corpses. It is a sad and dirty business covering death.

A Culiacán cartoonist was so bemused by the tall, white gringos running around in bulletproof jackets, he wrote a comic strip about it. “With the unexpected arrival of reporters, cameramen, journalists and photographers from the whole world to our state and their difficulty in decoding the particular slang of crime reporting, we have decided to lend them a hand and give them this guide for war correspondents to Culichi-English,” he wrote in the Sinaloan comic
La Locha
. He then followed with amusing translations of Culiacán narco-speak such as the following:

Sicario: A very elegant way to call a killer for hire.

Cartel: A big family.

Ejecutado: The final outcome of the express method of judging and sentencing a member of the rival cartel.

Balacera or Tiroteo: Shooting or shoot-out. Run for your lives!
¹⁰

To get closer to the Culiacán action, I worked with seasoned Sinaloan crime photographer Fidel Duran. A bear of a man in his forties, Fidel had a bushy beard, gold chain of San Judas Tadeo, and thick Sinaloan drawl, making him very much a local macho. He had snapped pictures of mafia victims for decades and had a deep understanding of the conflict playing out. After filling the crime pages of various local papers, he and a colleague set up their own Web site called Culiacán AM, dominated by pictures of murder and gore. Some criticized it for being in poor taste. But it gained a huge number of hits, not only in Sinaloa but across all Mexico and in the United States. It also gained an enviable amount of advertising, hawking everything from cell phones to table-dance clubs.

Fidel seemed to know every Culiacán resident and state policeman and warmly greeted them with hugs and hand slaps before chatting with them about family and friends. However, the federal police and soldiers were all “foreigners” from other parts of Mexico. They treated Sinaloan crime photographers with suspicion; and in turn the photographers saw them as outsiders who wanted to loot the city. When the photographers followed federal operations, they would say they were keeping an eye to make sure the troops didn’t rob homes or hurt people.

Fidel had also covered local mobsters. He even once trekked with reporters to the family home of Chapo Guzmán in the mountains to get an interview with his mother. She lived in the ramshackle village of La Tuna in a fairly simple house, although she did have a maid. Senora Guzmán railed against blaming so much destruction on her son and described his escape from jail as “taking a leave without permission.” Then she made the journalists lunch.

Anytime a murder, shoot-out, or raid happened, Fidel was one of the first on the scene. His radio never stopped buzzing. Police officers, colleagues, or his enormous network of friends would all phone with news of gunshots, bodies, or grenades popping. Calls always seemed to come as we were eating; Fidel loved to devour enormous plates of food, and I would make sure visiting TV crews took us to the best Sinaloan seafood restaurants or charcoaled-chicken joints. As calls came about firefights, we would rush out, Fidel still grabbing prawns and marlin off the plates while they were taken away. Out on the road, he would burn the rubber as if he were a NASCAR racer. Mexican crime photographers are the most aggressive drivers I have ever seen, as moving fast is key to getting the photo. We would zoom through stoplights and arrive to see another crowd staring at bullets on the concrete, another bloody pile of corpses, another family crying.

While I had thought the 2005 turf war in Nuevo Laredo was bad, the 2008 fight in Culiacán was horrific. The rival capos hit back and forth across the urban area as if it were a game of toy soldiers. Gunmen for Chapo Guzmán would attack a Beltrán Leyva safe house with grenades and firebombs. Beltrán Leyva would strike back the next day, dumping cut-up bodies of Chapo employees in a car trunk. Chapo gunmen would shoot up a bar where the Beard’s men drank. Beltrán Leyva killers would go into a car chop shop owned by a Chapo affiliate and massacre everybody inside.

Shorty versus the Beard! The two men had grown up together in the mountains, smuggled drugs together for years, gone to war against the Zetas together. Now they were fighting a war of annihilation. As they had worked in concert, they had crucial information on each other: they knew where each other’s safe houses were; which police they had on their payroll; which front companies they owned. This was the key to why both sides could kill people at such a fast rate, why the fight was so bloody.

The rival gangsters were physical opposites: Chapo was small and mustachioed or clean-shaven; Beltrán Leyva was a hulk with his trademark wild-man beard. Chapo headed his own operations; Beltrán Leyva worked with his four brothers, who were all arch-villains. It was a family thing.

On May 9, Beltrán Leyva made the war even more personal—his men killed Chapo’s son. Édgar Guzmán was a twenty-two-year-old university student who locals said wasn’t particularly active in his father’s organization. He was with two friends in a Culiacán mall parking lot, standing and talking in front of his bulletproof Ford Lobo. Fifteen gunmen attacked, spraying five hundred bullets on the three youngsters. A local cameraman arrived shortly after the murder and filmed the corpse of Édgar Guzmán sprawled over the concrete, his right hand grasping a Belgian-made pistol known as the cop-killer. When Culiacán residents saw the footage, they knew this would mean catastrophe.

Chapo Guzmán reportedly brought every rose in northwest Mexico to lay his son to rest, putting fifty thousand flowers on his tomb. A ballad was composed for the death of Édgar. Then Chapo went to war. Firefights broke out all over the center of Culiacán. On a May evening, guests were sitting in a restaurant in Culiacán’s central plaza when a shoot-out broke out just one block away. They dove under tables for cover. Residents began a self-imposed curfew and stayed indoors at night throughout May and June, leaving the streets to the killers. Then people gradually returned to their old routines, absorbing the new level of violence into their lives.

Hours before gunmen had murdered the young Edgar Guzmán, a fellow narco assassin carried out another hit with deadly implications eight hundred miles away in Mexico City. Édgar Millán, the acting head of the federal police, walked into his home in the Guerrero neighborhood. The waiting assassin shot him at point-blank range. Millán’s bodyguard fired back, wounding the assailant. The dying police chief used his last breath to start the interrogation. “Who sent you? Who sent you?” he demanded. Millán passed away before the assassin could answer.

Federal police rounded up suspects, including a corrupt officer who had given the assassin the keys to the house. After interrogations,
federales
announced that the mastermind of this killing was none other than Beltrán Leyva. The attack had been revenge for the arrest of his brother in January. The Beard was becoming an even bigger insurgent than the Zetas.

For the Mexican establishment, the murder of the federal police chief was a wake-up call. How could a high-ranking official be assassinated in his own home in the capital? This was no longer a crime problem; it was a national security problem.

Federal police stormed Culiacán, going after Beltrán Leyva thugs. A police unit got lured into a middle-class Culiacán neighborhood chasing a suspect. Then a gang of gunmen ambushed the officers with a barrage of automatic-rifle fire. Seven federal policemen were shot to pieces; the killers escaped into the night. Beltrán Leyva’s rebellion was in full swing.

I went to the scene of the ambush. The gunmen had fired right through a metal garage door, using it as cover. It looked like a cheese grater with a hundred bullet holes in it. Other killers had fired from windows, raining caps down on the federal agents from above. The house was abandoned, so I walked in and snooped around. The assassins had left their garbage strewn over the building—old pizza boxes with half-eaten pies and heavily thumbed pornographic magazines. You could picture the scene: a dozen thugs holed up in the building, munching on pizza, staring at skin mags and waiting to kill
federales
.

Next door lived a fishmonger. He had thought the men going into the safe house were suspicious but sensibly kept his mouth shut. When the firefight broke out, he lay on his bedroom floor with his wife and two children, praying that no bullets would fly through his window.

As the turf war in Culiacán raged through a seething-hot summer, residents tried to get on with their lives. But bullets hit more and more civilians. Those who lost loved ones felt devastated, scared, isolated. They dreaded talking to the police or the press for fear of reprisals. But some mothers of murdered children started to meet and share their pain. Together, they felt stronger about denouncing the deaths and fighting for justice.

I met these families to try to persuade them to tell their stories to the TV crews I worked with. They were worried about being seen talking to foreign journalists. They wondered if they were being watched by gangsters, by police, by government spies. Could the cases of their dead sons upset someone in power? Could they put their other children at risk? I told them that we needed to document their cases to make the government do something about them. Only about 5 percent of these murders are ever solved, I said, media pressure will force the government to solve more. I was being half-truthful. I did want to get them crying on TV; but I didn’t know if it would really make a difference to government investigations.

The bravest and most outspoken parent was Alma Herrera, a fifty-year-old businesswoman and single mother. Alma was in startlingly good shape for her age, looking fifteen years younger, her light brown skin immaculately cared for, her dresses elegant. Her first name means “soul” in Spanish. She spoke in a sweet, melodic Sinaloan tone, making such a powerful indictment of the situation that I felt scared for her just hearing her answer the questions. I was reminded of the brave mother in Tijuana who wrote the letter to
Zeta
magazine attacking the Arellano Félix for killing her sons. As Alma said:

“Our sons have been shot dead in their prime. Their lives have been stolen so early. And we see no justice. Are the authorities scared to discover the truth of these cases? Are they scared because so many police and politicians here in Sinaloa are involved with the mafia?”

Alma had lived with her two sons César, twenty-eight, and Cristóbal, sixteen. César, was a stocky, friendly young man with meaty hands and thick, black hair; Cristóbal, a slim, gregarious teenager.

One night, the brakes busted on the family SUV. César was good with cars but couldn’t fix a brake system, so he promised to take it to the mechanic the next day. First thing in the morning, he and Cristóbal carefully drove the SUV down to the car shop. It was a blazing-hot Wednesday; a perfectly ordinary morning. There was a queue at the mechanics, and César and Cristóbal waited, talking and joking with other customers. In total, ten people were in the yard.