El Narco (35 page)

“That is how we put the new people to the test. We made them kill. Then we made them quarter the bodies, because the new people coming in lose their fear by cutting off an arm or a leg or something. It is not easy. You have to cut through the bone and everything. But we need them to suffer a bit so they lose fear little by little. We used butcher’s knives or little machetes about thirty cm [ten inches] long. It would take the new people about ten minutes to cut off an arm, as some of them were nervous. But I could do it in three or four.”

Carlos, the intelligence officer who follows La Familia, says the gangsters are particularly adept at cutting up bodies because many of the original members were butchers. More recent recruits, he says, often worked in taco joints. Their skills for cutting up sizzling pork are applied to human flesh.

When Ortiz’s
sicarios
carried out killings, they would leave a message signed “La Resistencia,” or the Resistance, a title used by certain cells in La Familia. The name celebrates rebellion, but for authorities it was a mark of intimidation. Ortiz confesses to being personally involved in the murder of a Michoacán state undersecretary for security. That attack was ordered because the official angered La Familia by messing with its system of police protection, Ortiz says. He then went higher up the chain after the State Security Secretary Minerva Bautista. First he put a hawk on her trail.

“We put a trustworthy lad to follow her for ten days—where she ate, where she slept, what time she went to the office and everything. We found the best day for the attack.”

As Bautista left a state fair with her entourage, Ortiz and his assassins blocked a narrow highway passage with a disabled truck and opened fire from two sides. An incredible twenty-seven hundred bullets were shot at Bautista’s heavily armored SUV. Two of Baustista’s bodyguards died and the secretary took a bullet. The gunmen left believing the target was dead. But Bautista miraculously survived the hit.
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Shortly after the bungled attack, federal agents nabbed Ortiz in a Morelia safe house.

“I heard rumors that they were getting close to me. Then they got me. I always had it in my mind that one day I was going to be arrested.”

To try to make sure gunmen do hit their targets, cartels have developed training camps. The first such camps were discovered in northeast Mexico and linked to the Zetas, but they have since been found all across the country and even over the border in Guatemala. Most are built on ranches and farmlands, such as one discovered in the community of Camargo just south of the Texas border. They are equipped with shooting ranges and makeshift assault courses and have been found storing arsenals of heavy weaponry, including boxes of grenades.

Arrested gangsters have described courses as lasting two months and involving the use of grenade launchers and .50-caliber machine guns. A training video captured by police in 2011 shows recruits running across a field, taking cover on the grass, and firing assault rifles.
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Sometimes training can be deadly. One recruit drowned during an exercise that required him to swim carrying his backpack and rifle. The discovery of these camps has sparked the obvious comparison to Al Qaeda training grounds in Afghanistan.

But however much schooling they give, cartels still love gunslingers with real military experience. In the first decade of democracy, up until 2010, one hundred thousand soldiers had deserted from the Mexican military.
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There is a startling implication: country and ghetto boys sign up for the army, get the government to pay for their training, then make real money with the mob.

A crucial ingredient to sustain paramilitaries is access to military-grade weaponry. This has been no problem for cartels, which keep themselves supplied with an insane abundance of assault rifles and bullets. Who can fire two thousand seven hundred rounds in a hit unless they have more ammo than sense? Browning machine guns keep spitting fat .50-caliber shells while hundreds of grenades have been thrown in single battles. Where is all this firepower coming from? Mexican officials point their fingers straight north over the Rio Grande. Uncle Sam, they say, arms to the teeth the same narco insurgents it pays the Mexican government to fight. It is a seething indictment. But is it true?

The gun trade from America to Mexico has been a bone of contention for decades that has heated up through the Mexican Drug War. Mexican officials scream again and again that the United States needs to clamp down on illegal weapons sales. America promises new measures that will miraculously stop the flow of firepower. They fail. As bodies keep piling up, and the media keeps highlighting the role of American guns, U.S. authorities have been incapable of stopping the trade.

America’s gun lobby is supersensitive about the issue. Why should American gun enthusiasts suffer because of Mexico’s problems? they cry. Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. Reports on the issue are posted on pro-gun Web sites along with angry comments, sometimes personally insulting the journalists.

I followed this gun trail closely from seizures in Sinaloa to gun shops in Texas and Arizona. In the United States, I met some upstanding gun-shop owners and enthusiasts who make some valid points. The war in Mexico, they point out, is sustained by many factors besides guns, such as corruption in Mexican police forces. They are absolutely right.

But the ugly truth is that a huge number of weapons made or sold in the United States go to Mexican cartels. This is an irrefutable fact. Mexico itself has almost no gun stores and weapons factories and gives away few licenses. Almost all weapons in the hands of cartel armies are illegal. In 2008, Mexico submitted the serial numbers from close to six thousand guns they had seized from gangsters to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. About 90 percent, or 5,114 of the weapons, were traced to American gun sellers.

The ATF and Obama administration acknowledged America’s responsibility in this tragedy. But the gun lobby still refused to concede the point. What about tens of thousands of other seized weapons in Mexico that hadn’t been traced? gun activists said. The Mexican government, they alleged, was only tracing guns that looked as if they had come from America to sway the debate. So to make it easier to trace weapons seized in Mexico, the ATF introduced a new computer system. Between 2009 and April 2010, this traced another 63,700 firearms to U.S. gun stores.
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And those are only the ones they have captured. People can argue endlessly about the exact percentages, but the underlying fact is that tens of thousands of guns go from American stores to Mexican gangsters. However much anyone supports the right to bear arms, they must admit this is a pressing problem.

American stores are not the only source of weapons for Mexico’s mafias. They also steal them from the Mexican security forces and have been found taking huge caches from the Guatemalan military. International arms traffickers have also long moved guns through Central America and the Caribbean. If Mexican cartels didn’t buy firearms from America, gun advocates argue, they would just get them from these sources. Maybe. But a flow of weapons into seaports or up through Central America would be slower and easier to fight, making guns and ammo more expensive. The flood of guns over the two-thousand-mile border from the United States is a tide as tough to stop as the drugs and migrants going north.

Global production and sale of small arms is a key factor making modern criminal insurgents so lethal. America is a big part of this. The AR-15 assault rifle, the civilian version of the M16, is one of the preferred weapons of Mexican mobsters. The gun is built by Colt and sold freely in Texas and Arizona, among other states.

The preferred cartel gun is of course the Kalashnikov, or AK-47, fondly known as the Goat’s Horn. That is not American, gun enthusiasts point out, it is Russian. Actually, the Kalashnikov is now manufactured in at least fifteen countries, including the United States, by firms such as Arsenal Inc. in Las Vegas. Gun stores in Arizona and Texas also sell a huge quantity of imported Kalashnikovs from China, Hungary, and other countries. Guns, like drugs and dollars, go through their own surreal journeys in modern commerce: weapons are built in Beijing, sold in San Antonio, and used to murder in Matamoros. American stores only sell semiautomatic versions of the AK. But these are easy for Mexican mobsters to customize into fully automatic weapons. The vast majority of killings in the Mexican Drug War are committed with assault rifles.

Many versions of these weapons were prohibited by the assault weapons ban, which came in under Bill Clinton in 1994. That ban was lifted under George W. Bush in September 2004—exactly the time the Mexican Drug War erupted on the Texas border. Relaxed gun control was not the main cause of the conflict, but it surely threw oil on the fire.

In downtown Phoenix, Arizona, I walk into glass-paneled ATF offices to meet Peter Forcelli, who runs the anti-firearms-trafficking squad. Forcelli is a lively New Yorker with an accent as broad as it is long. “Can I speak Spanish?” he says. “No, I can’t even speak English.” He takes me down in the elevator to the basement vault where all the guns captured from smugglers are kept. It is arsenal fit for a militia.

Kalashnikovs and AR-15s in all shapes and sizes line racks or are shoved into huge buckets. In one corner sit some ultramodern rifles that look like something out of
Starship Troopers
, which are made by Belgium’s Fabrique Nationale and sold in Arizona stores. There are also some Fabrique Nationale 5.7 pistols, known as cop killers because of their ability to fire armor-piercing ammunition. The same type of gun was in the hand of Chapo Guzmán’s son when he lay bleeding dead on the Culiacán concrete. Overall, the Phoenix stash is one of the biggest stockpiles of captured weapons in all America. “I saw more Kalashnikovs here my first week than in fifteen years in the New York police,” Forcelli tells me.

To buy guns in Arizona, you need to be a resident, Forcelli explains. So, gun traffickers pay American citizens to walk into the shops and buy the weapons for them. These are known as straw purchases. A straw purchaser can be paid about $100 to buy a firearm, Forcelli says. The traffickers can always find someone willing to do it. Gun sellers are meant to report suspicious customers, such as when you get a pallid woman coming in and ordering half a dozen Kalashnikovs. Forcelli’s squad will then follow up the intelligence to bust safe houses and grab key players. They have made many successful raids, netting the huge arsenal below. But Forcelli concedes that the ATF is only capturing a fraction of the guns going south. “We have twenty dedicated firearms investigators in a city with thousands of gun sellers,” he says. “Some shops don’t get inspected for years.”

The Obama administration’s big move was to put troops on Arizona and Texas roads to catch the gunrunners as they drive their purchases to Mexico. But the money might have been better spent on ATF intelligence, as random stops are ineffective at catching the guns amid the thousands of vehicles. The vast majority of traffic into Mexico cruises straight over the border without any check. This is another gripe of the gun lobby. If Mexico doesn’t want firearms smuggled into its country, they ask, why doesn’t it police its border better? It is a valid point. Perhaps more of the Mexican soldiers burning marijuana fields would be better off guarding the American border.

Many of the same trap cars used to smuggle drugs north carry the guns south, with weapons filling the hidden compartments. Some guns filter down in ones and twos, known as ant traffic. But as the war has intensified, increasingly bigger loads have shown up. One bumper seizure came in May 2010, when the Laredo police, acting on intelligence, stopped a truck heading to Mexico. The truck carried 175 brand-new, boxed assault rifles, 200 high-capacity magazines, 53 bayonets, and 10,000 rounds of ammunition—an arsenal fit for a potent death squad.
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When the ATF raided one gunrunner’s house in Yuma, Arizona, they found gangsters had left behind a rather foolish piece of evidence, a video of themselves trying out a weapon bought from an Arizona seller. It was such a nice piece of hardware, they couldn’t resist. The film, recorded onto a laptop, shows the two thugs taking shots with a top-of-the-range Barret .50 caliber. It is such a big gun it has been mounted on a tripod, while the shooters sit down and use both hands to fire it. The bullets are 13.8 cm long, the size of small knives. The men are firing the weapon in what appears to be a patch of Arizona desert. Shots scream out, making the cameraman shake before panning round to a metal sheet that the bullets have torn through. One of those shown was arrested and charged, with some evidence provided by the video. The other man, and the gun, were believed to be in Mexico, waging war.

By most people’s definition, .50-caliber guns are weapons of war and should only be in military hands. But they are available in Arizona stores, and they are increasingly favored by drug gangs. Gun enthusiasts insist their shells can’t really fire through armored vehicles. But a Mexican officer I talk to insists they can and says he has faced them on the battlefield. When cartels set up ambushes on groups of soldiers, he says, they will often open fire with .50-caliber guns, set up on mountain paths or country roads. They then follow up with rocket-propelled grenades.

Grenades are not available in American stores, so that is one weapon the gun lobby doesn’t need to defend. But many were still made in America. ATF agents have identified some captured grenades as M67 explosives that the United States supplied to Central American forces during the Cold War a generation ago. They have been traced to Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Plenty of them are around. Some 266,000 M67 grenades went to El Salvador alone between 1980 and 1993.
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That nation’s civil war is now long forgotten in America. But agents say the grenades sell on the black market from $100 to $500 apiece. The first four years of Calderón’s government saw more than a hundred grenade attacks. Furthemore, in one single battle—when marines shot dead kingpin Ezequiel Cárdenas, alias Tony Tormenta, in Matamoros—more than three hundred grenades were set off.
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