El Narco (42 page)

Gonzalez’s men have busted dozens of such planes. They are mostly light, single-engine aircraft like the ones the Sinaloan cartel uses. But the gangsters also have some bigger planes for multiton cocaine loads. As well as flying out of Colombia, many cocaine planes actually fly from Venezuela, Gonzalez says. Colombia’s leftist FARC guerrillas cross the jungles into Venezuela to run flights, he alleges, which can avoid Colombia’s more sophisticated air defenses. Such accusations get into South America’s left-right political chasm. Conservatives use the drug issue as a stick to bash Venezuela’s leftist leader, Hugo Chávez. The firebrand Chávez retorts that the CIA has been in bed with cocaine traffickers for decades.

But whoever moves the cocaine out of Colombia, it is the Mexicans receiving the billion-dollar bundles. The Sinaloa Cartel has been particularly active in Honduras, Gonzalez says, with rumors that Chapo Guzmán has been in the country. “We heard that he was here from various sources. We tried to zero in, but we were never able to pinpoint him. Maybe he was never here. Maybe he is here right now.” Gonzalez smiles. Other gangs have also built up a presence, including the Zetas and even the Bible-bashing head choppers themselves: La Famila. When rival Mexican gangs run into each other in Honduras, Gonzalez says, they start blasting.

Mexican gangsters subcontract local crooks to support their operations, Gonzalez elaborates. To enforce their control over these employees, they “execute” anyone who steps out of line, providing yet another source of bloodshed. Mexican capos also work with Honduras’s own sanguine villains, the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 gangs. The Honduran thugs serve up large amounts of the cartel drugs to the local market, Gonzalez says, while also hiring on as paid assassins. Several massacres committed by the Maras and 18 in recent years are believed to be on orders of the Mexican criminals.

“The Maras are violent anyway—they are a real social problem. But when they get big international organizations behind them like the Mexicans, they are much more threatening. That is the danger we face in the future: the criminals here getting more organized, better armed, and really becoming a problem.”

I spoke with General Gonzalez on a Thursday. The next Tuesday, back in Mexico, I got a phone call while having breakfast. Gonzalez had been assassinated. He was taking his seven-year-old daughter to school just after dawn when the
sicarios
came for him. They drove up beside his car on a motorcycle and fired eleven bullets, hitting him seven times.
¹¹

Prosecutors made no arrests on the murder. It had the hallmarks of Colombian
sicarios
, who typically strike on motorcycles, but who knows? He had given a press conference on the Monday, reitering his accusations that the FARC flys cocaine out of Venezuela. But he had angered many people during ten years busting traffickers; back in 2008, he said he received death threats and didn’t know whom they were from.

Despite his danger, he never had bodyguards. His widow, Leslie Portillo, was asked about this at the funeral.
¹²
Her eyes full of tears, she replied that she had always urged him to protect himself, but he never responded. “I would say to him, ‘Are you not going to have security?’ He replied to me, ‘My security is God walking beside me.’”

CHAPTER
15

Diversification

The wickedness of bad men also compels good men to have recourse, for their own protection … In such condition, there is no place for Industry because the fruit thereof is uncertain … no Society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.

—
THOMAS
HOBBES
,
LEVIATHAN
, 1651

I watch the video leaked by a police commander to journalists. It gives me nightmares. It is the most disturbing footage I have seen in my life. It is worse than seeing the bodies full of bullets on the concrete; the severed heads on public display; the images of masked Zetas shooting prisoners in the head. It is worse than listening to thugs talk about decapitating victims or listening to the pops of bullets echo down sweltering streets. And there is no actual killing or shooting or cutting up limbs in this film. But there is pure cruelty.

The camera shows a kid sitting cross-legged on a gray carpet in front of a white curtain. He is about thirteen years old and all skin and bone. He is stark naked except for a white bandage covering his eyes and nose, and a cord tying his hands together. His head is bent over and trembling, showing severe suffering. A voice off camera growls, “Start now.” The kid talks. His adolescent voice is shaking, signaling a pain way beyond tears.

“Mama. Give them the money now. They know we have the consultancy and three properties over there. Please, or they are going to cut a finger off. And they know where my Aunt Guadalupe lives. Please, now. I want to go, Mama.”

The gruff off-camera voice kicks in. “Are you suffering or are you tranquil?”

“
No.
I’m suffering,” the kid begs.

Then the beating begins. First the torturer kicks the boy in the head. Then he smacks him with a belt. Then he kicks him hard in the head again. Then he turns the skinny, naked boy around, showing bruises on his back, and beats the wounds with the belt. It is unbearable to watch. The beating goes on and on and on. The kid is begging for mercy and unleashing gasps of pain and saying, “No, no, no.” During the beating, the torturer is talking, addressing the mother whom the video is sent to.

“This is what you want, you bitch? This is the beginning of the end, I warn you. It depends on you, how far we are going to go. The next step is a finger. This is what you want? It all depends on you. I want six million pesos.”
¹

I can’t even begin to comprehend the suffering of this boy’s mother or father watching this video. I can’t even begin to think about the physical and psychological damage to an innocent thirteen-year-old boy.

Mexico has a strong family culture. Parents often mollycoddle their children more than anything I saw in cold England. A twenty-year-old daughter will go out and her parents will wait in the front room until four A.M. when she comes home. An uncle goes to the hospital with a broken ankle, and within hours twenty family members are gathered outside to see if he is okay. There is so much family love. It is hard to understand how in this same culture some men can show so much cruelty preying on that love. Because that is how kidnapping for ransom functions. It pushes people to give away everything they have worked for to stop the pain against a loved one.

Mexicans also find this cruelty hard to comprehend. When such atrocities are reported on, the stories are always met by rabid responses. After the arrest of one kidnapping gang, for example, the following comments were sent to the Web site of Mexico’s bestselling newspaper,
El Universal.

“A bullet in the head. They are trash that is not worth keeping alive.”

“I wish divine power would arrive because it is the only punishment that we can hope for.”

“Scum. Hang them up on trees.”

“Cut them into pieces and feed them to dogs.”

Such calls for violent revenge are highly understandable. People feel frustrated and helpless. Kidnapping for ransom is the cruelest of crimes, and as the Mexican Drug War has raged, the number of abductions has gone through the roof. A government study found that between 2005 and 2010, the number of reported kidnappings of Mexicans had risen by 317 percent.
²
An average of 3.7 abductions were reported every day in 2010, some 1,350 over the year. Anticrime groups say for every kidnapping reported, as many as ten may go unreported because the kidnappers say if the police hear about it, the hostage is going to get hurt. Many, many families have suffered. By several counts, Mexico has become the worst place for kidnappings on the planet.

The timing of this crime explosion is no coincidence. Many thugs linked to drug cartels are directly involved in kidnapping. The most notorious trafficking gang that carries out abductions for ransom is the Zetas. As they clash violently with police and soldiers and protect truckloads of cocaine, they also extort millions from sobbing families. When you have a militia that is so feared and with so many guns, kidnapping is an easy sideline.

But kidnapping is only one of the ways that the Zetas have diversified. They have also branched out into extorting bars and discos; taxing shops; taking money from prostitution rings; stealing cars; robbing crude oil and gasoline; getting money from migrant trafficking; and even pirating their own Zetas-labeled DVDs of the latest blockbuster movies.
Drug-trafficking organization
is no longer a sufficient term for them; they are a
criminal paramilitary complex.

El Narco’s diversification has been rapid and painful for Mexico. As a journalist in Juárez said to me, “Until 2008, the only time we had heard of paying protection was in old American movies of Al Capone. Then suddenly every business in the city is being asked for a quota.” Like so many other features of the drug war, the tactic is rapidly copied from cartel to cartel. One month, the Zetas are shaking down businesses; the next month La Familia is reported getting protection money; the following month the Beltrán Leyva organization is extorting. It is a logical progression. When gangsters see what their rivals are getting away with and how much money they are pulling in, they want a piece of the action. The move to diversified crime has become an ominous trend across drug cartels. It points to a gloomy future for Mexican communities.

Organized crime has two basic functions: it can offer a product that legal businesses cannot provide; and it can steal or extort. The first category includes the selling of drugs, prostitution, pirate goods, gambling, guns, immigrant smuggling. The second includes kidnapping, cargo robberies, car theft, bank heists.

The first category is the least destructive for the economy. At least with drugs, prostitutes, or gambling, gangs are selling a product and moving money around. Shakedowns and kidnappings, however, terrorize the community, scare away investors, and burn businesses. The Juarez business association never complained much about tons of narcotics pumping through the city and billions of drug dollars flowing back. But when gangs began to shake down businesses, they called for United Nations blue helmets to come and take charge.
³
Shakedowns hurt them hard in their pockets. On a personal level, the move from drugs to kidnapping and extortion is terrifying for the community and strains the social networks of an already troubled country. You start to fear that anyone—your neigbor, your mechanic, your colleague—could be passing information to a kidnapping gang. It is an environment of fear and paranoia.

Maria Elena Morera is one of the prominent antikidnapping activists that have risen up amid the Mexican crime wave. These activists lead a citizen movement that has tried to break the scourge of abductions and antisocial crime. Up until now they have failed. But they may be key to resolving Mexico’s crime problem in the future.

Maria says she never wanted to be a public figure. Born in 1958 of a Catalan family, the tall, blond woman trained as a dentist and spent her life happily pulling out teeth and enjoying a fruitful marriage and three healthy children. Then in 2000, her life was thrown on its head. One day, her husband didn’t come home from work. She tried his cell phone but there was no answer, called his office phone but no one had seen him. Then she got the unbearable call—the gruff voice telling her that her worst fears had come true: they had her husband.

“Words can’t describe how painful that moment was. It is like when something happens and you can’t believe it is real, can’t believe that this is happening to you. But it is and you have to try and find strength to face it.”

She recounts this experience years later and has told it many times. But it still pains her to discuss it. Her face shows anguish, her voice shudders, and she burns through half a packet of cigarettes as she talks to me. Her nightmare was drawn out. The kidnappers terrorized her husband, a businessman, to push for a multimillion-dollar ransom the family couldn’t muster. She was told to get a package by the side of a road. She went to the address and there was an envelope. Inside was her husband’s middle finger, cut off from the knuckle. A week later, she was given a second finger; then a third; then a fourth. How can you deal with something like that? I ask her. How can you recover?

She replies slowly, “You can never recover from something like this. It is with you all your life. It changes you. It kills something inside you. I can’t imagine the suffering that my husband went through. You feel it is your fault. It burns a hole inside.”

Maria did what most people are afraid to do—she went to the police. She pressured them to act, worked with them to trace the calls and follow the gang. After her husband had been a hostage for twenty-seven days, federal agents located him and stormed the house. Several gang members were arrested, including a doctor who had been hired to cut the fingers off. And her husband was free. But he had to go on with his life bearing the scars.

The pain didn’t stop there. Her husband was withdrawn and distant and didn’t want to go to therapy. Maria found she herself couldn’t go back to her normal life. The only thing that made sense to her was to fight against this affliction, save others from suffering the same pain. She joined the group Mexico United Against Crime and became its president. She took testimonies from people who have suffered kidnapping, rape, and violence and hooked them up with psychological help and legal aid. She also collected stats to highlight how bad the problem is. Maria’s husband appeared in a commercial to support the campaign. He sits in a white polo shirt facing the camera.