El Narco (33 page)

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 out 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.