El Narco (34 page)

The other big gripe with the insurgency label is about ideology. The Mexican government itself has said in statements that the cartels are not insurgents because “they do not have a political agenda.”
⁷
Surely, insurgents have to believe in some higher principle, critics argue, whether it be Marxism, a national flag, or Allah and the seventy-two virgins. The word
insurgent
, and even more so the Latin American word
guerrilla
, is synonymous with people who are fanatical about a cause, even if they are violent nut jobs. Mexico’s narcos, these naysayers argue, believe in little other than laundering their millions, buying gold chains, and having a dozen girlfriends. At best they are “primitive rebels” in the sense of historian Eric Hobsbawm’s work on bandits.
⁸
At worst, they aren’t rebels at all, just psychotic entrepreneurs.

However, analysts have pointed out that various modern insurgencies have nothing to do with ideology. Back in 1993, Steven Metz of the U.S. Strategic Studies Institute wrote an essay called “The Future of Insurgency,” in which he looked at uprisings in the post–Cold War era. Certain rebellions, he concluded, were solely about economic assets and could be better classified as “commercial insurgencies” or full-on “criminal insurgencies.”
⁹
Another example of a commercial/criminal insurgency that analysts point to is the rebellion in the Niger Delta over oil fields.

The motives of Mexican capos vary from cartel to cartel and change over time. In 2011, Mexico had seven major cartels. All have thousands of men at arms organized in paramilitary squads. (The definition of
paramilitary
is “of, relating to, being, or characteristic of a force formed on a military pattern.”) Four of the cartels use these troops to regularly attack federal forces. These are the Zetas, La Familia, the Juárez Cartel, and the Beltrán Leyva organization. The most insurgent of all are the Zetas, who fight daily battles with soldiers.

Attacks often have a specific motive and objective. Marco Vinicio Cobo, alias the Nut Job, was part of a Zetas cell that kidnapped and decapitated a solider in the southern state of Oaxaca. In his videotaped interrogation, he describes how the murder was ordered because the victim was a military intelligence officer who was getting too close to Zetas activities.
¹⁰
Across the country in Michoacán, La Familia gunmen attacked a dozen police bases and killed fifteen officers in response to the arrest of one of their lieutenants. Following that offensive, Familia capo Servando Gómez took the brash step of phoning a TV station. Talking to a startled anchor, he said La Familia responds to the harassment of gangsters and their families but offered a truce. “What we want is peace and tranquillity,” he said. “We want to achieve a national pact.”
¹¹

In these cases, narco violence is a reaction to concrete strikes on criminal organizations. They are pressuring the state to back off and signaling they want a soft government who will not mess with their business.

However, in other cases, they are more aggressive in actually controlling parts of the state. An example is to attack political candidates. The contenders are not even in office, so have not had the opportunity to hurt cartels’ business. But gangsters want to make sure the politicians are already in their pocket and hit those who refuse to make a deal or side with rivals. Of numerous attacks on candidates, the most high profile was on Rodolfo Torre, who ran for governor of Tamaulipas state in 2010. The physician, running on a PRI ticket, was predicted to win the race with a landslide margin of more than thirty points. But a week before the vote, gunmen showered his campaign convoy with rifle fire, killing him and four aides.
¹²
The ability to choose whether electoral front-runners live sends an ominous message to politicians about the power of El Narco.

But what prize is El Narco fighting for? If gangsters simply want the right to smuggle drugs, observers argue, it doesn’t pose such an destructive insurgent threat to society. However, as the Mexican Drug War has escalated, gangsters have got increasingly ambitious. Certain cartels now extort every business in sight. Moreover, they have muscled into industries traditionally shaken down by the Mexican government. The Zetas dominate the east of Mexico, where the oil industry is strongest. They “tax” as much as they can from it, both by extorting the union and stealing gas to sell off as contraband. Over in Michoacán, La Familia shakes down both the mining industry and illegal logging—both assets the government used to benefit from. Such activities vary from gang to gang. The Sinaloa Cartel is largely limited to the traditional traffic of drugs. Meanwhile, the criminal groups that have branched out most are the very same that attack federal forces hardest. When gangs can “tax” industry, there is a serious weakening of the state.

Where cartels are strongest, their power seeps from politics into the private sector and media. In Juárez, business leaders argued that if they have to pay protection money to the mafia, they shouldn’t have to cough up taxes to the federal government. It was a telling argument. The city’s main newspaper,
El Diario de Juárez
, made the point even harder following the mafia murder of a twenty-one-year-old photographer on his lunch break. In a front-page editorial entitled “What Do You Want from Us?”
El Diario
addressed the cartels directly—and touched nerves in the Calderón government:

“You are at this time the de facto authorities in this city because the legal authorities have not been able to stop our colleagues from falling, despite the fact that we’ve repeatedly demanded it from them … Even war has rules. In any outbreak of violence protocols or guarantees exist for the groups in conflict, in order to safeguard the integrity of the journalists who cover it. This is why we reiterate, gentlemen of the various narco-trafficking organizations, that you explain what it is you want from us so we don’t have to pay tribute with the lives of our colleagues.”
¹³

What does such narco power mean for the future of Mexico? The frightening prospect of a “failed state” is thrown around. But when broken down, the failed-state concept is not very useful in understanding the Mexican Drug War. The Fund for Peace and
Foreign Policy
magazine compile a Failed States Index every year. In 2010, Somalia was listed as number one, as the most failing state of all. Mexico was up at ninety-six, better off than such powers as India and China. A key factor is that Mexico has better public services and a wealthier middle class than much of the developing world. China or Cuba may have stronger governments, but wealth per capita is relatively low in both those countries. Meanwhile, violence has not stopped Mexico’s ability to provide electricity, water, and schooling to most of its citizens. Yet.

More useful is the concept of “state capture.” The idea emerged to describe how oligarchs and mafia capitalists seized control of chunks of state apparatus in Eastern Europe following the fall of communism. In Mexico, cartels definitely battle over hunks of the state, particularly regional police forces. When a cartel controls a territory, it becomes a shadow local government, one that officials and businessmen have to answer to. If you are being shaken down in such a realm, you don’t know which police commanders are in the pockets of the mafia and usually prefer to pay up—or run for your life. It is a frightening reality.

The other big gauge of Mexico’s degradation is by now an old chestnut: the Colombia comparison. Talk of Colombianization and the Andean narco insurgency has long dogged the discussion on Mexico, sliding into Clinton’s comments. Colombia’s experience of cocaine-funded guerrillas and paramilitaries is certainly worth learning from. In all the world, Colombia is the country that has faced a criminal insurgency most similar to Mexico’s.

But in many ways, the comparison is a red herring. Colombia is Colombia; Mexico is Mexico. The nations have different histories and dynamics, and their drug wars play out in different ways. Thankfully, the Mexican Drug War has not yet slid to the depths of the Colombian Civil War in the mid-1990s, which displaced some 2 million people and cut off swathes of the country from the capital. Colombia has a Marxist guerrilla army larger than any in Mexico’s history. But that doesn’t mean Mexico is not dealing with a serious armed conflict. In South American countries, they now talk about the Mexicanization of their own drug industries and the use of
sicarios
and paramilitary hit squads. Mexico is becoming the new point of comparison for a criminal insurgency.

Miguel Ortiz ran La Familia’s operations in the Michoacán state capital, Morelia, until his arrest in 2010. Before working as a mob lieutenant, he was a Familia operator for five years within the Michoacán state police. He was involved in various attacks on federal forces, including the offensive that killed fifteen officers, and hits on state officials. After his arrest, his interrogation video was released to the public.
¹⁴

It’s chilling viewing. He graphically describes techniques for cutting up corpses as well as assassinating functionaries. When it was shown on Mexican television, gasps were released from sofas and dining seats as families watched the 10:30 P.M. news. What a psychopath, people groaned. Thank God he is behind bars. That is the point of federal officials releasing such videos, to show the public they are arresting highly dangerous criminals. But interrogation films demonstrate a rather rough and skewed version of the justice system. They also tend to frighten the public more than making them feel safe, as they think about all the other psychos who are not behind bars. However, Ortiz reveals some startling insights into cartel guerrilla tactics, and his testimony is a great illustration of how the insurgency functions.

The video shows Ortiz at twenty-eight years wearing a dark shirt buttoned up to the top. He has a squat face with a slight double chin and muscular neck that gives him a bulldog look that earned him his nickname: Tyson. He talks in cold military terms about the bloodshed, using a language that has become common in cartel paramilitaries: execution victims are
targets
; kidnapped people tied up in safe houses are
cargo.

Ortiz joined the police force when he was eighteen in 1999. At twenty-one, he says, he began to moonlight for La Familia, just as the mob was establishing itself in Michoacán. He picked the winning team. In the next few years, La Familia would mushroom in power to dominate the region. Working in the police force, he could arrest targets and hand them to Familia gunmen or even dispose of victims himself. This shows the classic modus operandi developed by gangs such as the Zetas and Juárez Cartels—where the local police once shook down crooks, the officers now work as executioners for the mob. It’s state capture in action.

Ortiz left the police force in 2008 to work full-time for La Familia. But he would still ride around in police cars, wear a uniform, and work with other officers, he says. The benefits of owning a member of the police force were too good for the mafia to give away.

In July 2009, La Familia launched a major attack on federal police bases. Ortiz was called at five in the morning and told he had to work. Familia gunmen from the countryside drove into Morelia for the insurgent attack, and Ortiz supported them with as many state police vehicles as he could move. State police backing for an assault on
federales
is a startling example of the fragmentation of the Mexican state. After the insurgents had shot up the federal police base, one Mitsubishi minivan full of
sicarios
got a punctured tire. So Ortiz quickly transferred the hit men into patrol cars, drove them to a Walmart, and put them in taxis. The
sicarios
got away to fight another day.

The next month, Ortiz was rewarded with the powerful job of head of the Morelia plaza, a position known in Spanish as
encargado de la plaza.
Familia operatives took him deep into the Tierra Caliente countryside for the promotion ceremony on a burning-hot August weekend. He passed through the city of Apatzingán and onto the winding mountain road up to Aguililla, where they stopped the car and walked for two hours into the mountains. Arriving at a ranch, he was greeted by La Familia’s top brass, including Nazario “El Más Loco” Moreno and Servando “La Tuta” Gómez themselves.

“It was very brief. They say the less you see them the better; we lasted at the most ten, fifteen minutes in the talk. They said what they had to say and said from this moment you are the
encargado de la plaza
of Morelia and your direct commander is Chuke [another code-named operative].”

This organizational structure of La Familia, described by Ortiz, is derived from that of the Zetas, who trained them. Plaza heads run cells, which are semiautonomous. They make money in their turf and kick back to the commander, who in turn deals with the capos. Lower down the ranks are the
sicarios
, and below them
halcones
, or hawks, who work as the eyes and ears of the cartel. Everyone is given nicknames to limit the information they have on each other. When
sicarios
are given a job, they normally have no idea why the person is targeted. They just carry out orders.

The Zetas initially modeled this chain of command based on the Mexican army they came from. Ranks included first commanders and second commanders, just as in the military. But the war evolved their structure to become closer to Latin America’s guerrilla armies or right-wing paramilitaries, who use autonomous cells to coordinate thousands of men at arms. The Zetas trained La Familia members in this guerrilla warfare in 2005 and 2006, before the Michoacán mob betrayed them to claim the turf.

Ortiz instructed new recruits in his cell in the use of terror. He describes one night when about forty Familia mobsters gathered on a hill outside Morelia. Captured prisoners were brought up so rookies could be blooded.