El Narco (39 page)

Nevertheless, once these capos have been extradited and made deals, they are truly out of the game. The greater good, agents argue, is to use them to nail more crooks. That is the central imperative of drug warriors: keep seizing, keep arresting.

However many traffickers that police bust, the good guys still face a fundamental problem: other villains always take their place. This is one of the major criticisms of the drug war—it can’t be won. As long there is the cash incentive to smuggle narcotics, some hungry crook is going to do it.

The argument is supported by much historical experience. When Richard Nixon first declared the war on drugs, he spoke in absolute terms, calling for “the complete annihilation of the merchants of death.”
⁴
Four decades later, no one dares show such optimism. The goal has changed to damage control. If we weren’t here, drug warriors claim, the situation would be a lot worse.

The Colombian experience is a classic example of this paradox. The Colombian police have got much better at busting traffickers, but good evidence shows that the amount of cocaine coming out of the Andean country has not significantly changed. Police spray crops, bust labs, seize submarines, nail capos. And other villains sow more coca leaves, build more labs, and ship out the new product on speedboats. So what has Colombia really achieved? I put the question to DEA Andean Bureau chief, Jay Bergman, who comes out with a persuasive answer. By hammering traffickers, he says, their power to threaten national security has severely been reduced.

“When you go back to Pablo Ecobar, this guy blew up a passenger plane, police headquarters, funded guerrillas to kill Supreme Court justices, and had the number one Colombian presidential candidate assassinated. Now there is no organization in Colombia that can go toe-to-toe with the government, that can threaten the national security of Colombia. In each successive generation of traffickers there has been a dilution of their power.

“Pablo Escobar lasted fifteen years. The average kingpin here now lasts fifteen months. If you are named as a kingpin here, you are gone. The government of Colombia and the government of the United States will not allow a trafficker to exist long enough to become a viable threat.”

In this analysis, drug enforcement can be seen as a giant hammer that keeps on falling. Any gangster that gets too big gets smashed by the hammer. This is known as cartel decapitation, taking out the heads of the gang. The villains are kept in check. But the drug trade does go on, and so does the war.

Soldiers and American agents are using the cartel decapitation tactic in Mexico, taking out kingpins such as the Beard Beltrán Leyva, Nazario el Más Loco Moreno, and Antonio “Tony Tormenta” Cárdenas. It has been an impressive list of hits. But will it hammer Mexican cartels hard enough that they won’t be a national security threat? Drug agents argue that is working already. With all the arrests, cartels are getting weaker, they say. The violence is a reaction to the attacks and a sign of desperation by criminals. Mexico simply has to see the struggle through. Maybe they are right.

But the dynamics of Mexican cartels have also developed in distinct ways from Colombia. Mexico has seven major cartels—Sinaloa, Juárez, Tijuana, La Familia, Beltrán Leyva, the Gulf, and the Zetas—so it is hard to decapitate them all at once. When leaders such as Osiel Cárdenas are taken out, their organizations have only become more violent, as rival lieutenants fight to become top dog. Groups such as the Zetas and Familia have also become powerful because of their brand names rather than the reputation of their capos. Even if Zetas leader Heriberto Lazcano, the Executioner, is arrested, the Zetas will likely continue as a fearsome militia.

Whether the cartels will get weaker or not, everybody agrees that Mexico needs to clean up its police to move forward. Different corrupt cops firing at each other and working for rival capos is nobody’s vision of progress. Such police reform is of course easier said than done. Mexican presidents have talked about it for years, going through numerous cleanups and reorganization of forces, only to create new rotten units. A central problem is the sheer number of different agencies. Mexico has several federal law enforcement departments, thirty-one state authorities, and 2,438 municipal police forces.

However, in October 2010, Calderón sent a bill to be approved by Congress that could make a real difference to the police. His controversial proposal was to absorb all Mexico’s numerous police forces into one unified authority like the Colombians have. It is a colossal reform with a huge amount of technical problems. But such a reform could be a key factor in pulling Mexico away from the brink. Even if drugs are eventually legalized, a single police force would be a better mechanism to fight other elements of organized crime, such as kidnapping.

The approach has many critics. Some argue it would only streamline corruption. But even that would be a better thing for peace. At least corrupt cops could be on the same side instead of actively gunning each other down. Others argue an all-powerful force would be authoritarian. Maybe. But any such force would still be controlled by democratic government. The spiderweb of different police forces only worked because one party ran everything. In democracy, this arrangement needs reform. If a crucial cause of the breakdown in Mexico has been the fragmentation of government power, then a way forward could be to unify its police under one command. Some of the fundamental problems and core solutions lie in Mexico’s institutions.

CHAPTER
14

Expansion

It has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the laws of gravity.

—
KOFI
ANNAN
,
SECRETARY
-
GENERAL
OF
THE
UNITED
NATIONS
, 2000

It wasn’t poverty that drove Jacobo Guillen to sell crack and crystal in his East Los Angeles neighborhood; he had no problems getting jobs in restaurants and car shops and making enough money to get by. The cause wasn’t a broken family either; his parents were together, hardworking and encouraging. He just loved gangbanging.

“I just fucking loved the crazy life. I loved getting high. And I loved being to able to score ten thousand dollars in a couple of hours. And I loved the adrenaline of someone wanting to fight me. I didn’t care about anything.

“I’ve got no one to blame but myself. My brothers and sisters all became doctors and accountants and shit. I’m the only one that fucked up.”

Jacobo is paying quite a cost for his mistakes. While he grew up in California, he was born in Mexico, in the state of Jalisco. After he was arrested in L.A. with a bag of crystal, he was incarcerated and then deported. Border agents dropped him off at the Tijuana gate and told him not to come back. He was in a strange land with no money and spoke broken L.A. Spanish. If he had been a foreigner in California, he was even more of a foreigner in Mexico. But he did have one marketabe skill: drug dealing. He was soon on a Tijuana street corner serving up crystal meth.

“Down in Mexico, I really did need to sell drugs to survive. But it was way more fucked-up and dangerous than Los Angeles. There is a real mafia down here to deal with. And some people are really crazy. Right after I got here, someone stabbed me. I survived that and kept on selling and smoking crystal. Then someone tried to shoot me over a deal. I only survived by a miracle—because their gun jammed. That was when I realized I had to stop. I had to get out of the drugs and the gangbanging.”

He tells me the story two months after this attempted murder. We are sitting in an evangelical Christian drug-rehab center in Tijuana where he has been drying out. He is twenty-five years old with a crew cut, round, chubby face, and pudgy hands. In the spirit of the Christian rehab, he wears a black T-shirt declaring I GANGBANG FOR JESUS. He also listens to Christian hip-hop and plays me songs from the tiny speakers of his cell phone. Some are in Spanish, but he prefers the English ones, many made by rappers in Los Angeles. Living in Tijuana has made his Spanish improve dramatically, but he still feels more comfortable with English, and his heart is in L.A.

The product of a cross-border culture, Jacobo is one of the many links between the drug-trafficking world of Mexico and the drug-distribution world of the United States. He has sold crystal meth in both Tijuana and Los Angeles. He has also smuggled drugs over the border, walking across the California desert with backpacks full of marijuana. In his trafficking, he has dealt with organized-crime figures on both sides of the line.

But while Jacobo’s illustrious career illustrates how these worlds are linked, it also illustrates how those links are tenuous. As he discovered painfully, the rules are different in Mexico from in the United States. Different bosses and organizations hold power on either side of the border. And the attitude of gangsters toward police and government changes radically as soon as you cross the Rio Grande.

These sharp contrasts can help us see what El Narco will look like in the future. A central theme in the outlook for Mexican gangsters is their expansion beyond the borders of Mexico as cartel thugs establish themselves across the western hemisphere and over the Atlantic Ocean. El Narco’s destiny, some fear, is to emerge as a global power. But what form will it take in these other countries? Experience shows that cartels are likely to take different forms in the different realms where they take root.

Mexican cartels have certainly grown, in the same logical enlargement that spurs other entities in capitalism. The big fish get bigger, allowing them to make more money and get bigger still. In this way Mexican cartels, after usurping the Colombians as the biggest crime syndicates of the Americas, have crept into a number of countries. Not only are they pushing hard into weak Central American states and going to the south of the hemisphere into Peru and Argentina. There are also reports of their buying power in weak African states, dealing with the Russian mafia, and even supplying drugs to dealers in Liverpool, England (and fathoming their high-pitched Scouser accents). But the expansion that has sparked most worry is growth over the Rio Grande in the United States.

The export of cartel power into the USA is a sensitive issue. The discussion about Mexican cartels’ northward push gets pulled, often unfairly, into the flaming American immigration debate. The anti-immigrant brigade talk about Mexican laborers as an invading army; and they see all undocumented workers as potential cartel emissaries, using migrant communities to hide undercover ops. The Mexican Drug War, they say, is a reason to militarize the border. Residents of border states vex about the danger of spillover. If thugs are decapitating in Juárez, they fret, how long before they cut off heads in El Paso? Is the Mexican disease contagious?

Down in Mexico, the argument is reversed. A common complaint by politicians and journalists is that there aren’t enough arrests of big players in El Norte. Why haven’t we heard of the capos in the United States? they ask. How come some Mexican fugitives live unharmed north of the border? Why has Mexico been goaded into a drug war while narcotics move freely around the fifty states of the union?

Mexican drug cartels certainly operate throughout the United States. Murders clearly linked to these cartels have occurred on American soil. But there has been no major spillover of violence from Mexico to its northern neighbor. As of 2011, after five years of cartel devastation south of the Rio Grande, the war simply hasn’t crossed the border.

The numbers bear this out. According to the FBI, the four large U.S. cities with the lowest violent-crime rates are all in border states—San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso, and Austin. While Juárez had more than three thousand murders in 2010, a stone’s throw over the river in El Paso, there were just five homicides, the lowest number in twenty-three years. Farther west, the city of Nogales sits over from the Mexican state of Sonora, a key turf of the Sinaloa Cartel, which has seen raging firefights and piles of chopped-up corpses. But in 2008 and 2009, there wasn’t a single homicide in Nogales. Overall, crime in Arizona dropped by 35 percent between 2004 and 2009, exactly the same time when the Mexican Drug War exploded.
¹

American lawmen offer an explanation for this oxymoron: themselves. While cartels can overwhelm and buy off chunks of the Mexican police, they gloat, in the United States, criminals avoid the police as much as possible. As Sergeant Tommy Thompson of the Phoenix Police Department says:

“In the United States, the cartels want to move their drugs and make money. Police are a hindrance to this. But the best tactic for gangsters is to try and keep a low profile to get off the police radar. If they commit a murder, the police will be on them. If they attack the policemen themselves, authorities will go crazy. And it is a lot harder in the United States to buy off police officers.”

These U.S. lawmen have a good point; no one doubts that American cops are better than Mexicans at keeping crooks in their place. But however hard-nosed and square-jawed the U.S. police are, it is still significant that Mexican cartels have had no major turf wars in the United States. It is their land of milk and honey, after all, where all the dirty drug dollars come from. If capos fight over Ciudad Juárez, why don’t they fight over billions spent on their narcotics in New York City?

Following the trail of drugs helps explain why not. DEA agent Daniel tracked shipments of cocaine, heroin, crystal, and marijuana as they crossed into America from Tijuana. He would flip smugglers so he could follow the drugs to warehouses in the United States and on to distribution points. Much of the drugs, he found, would zoom through San Diego and go into houses scattered all over Los Angeles. These warehouses are typically rented homes found with little furniture, piles of drugs, and hoods watching them. From these warehouses in L.A., Daniel found, the drugs could then be taken to anywhere in the United States.