El Narco (47 page)

Mexico needs a similar hands-on strategy to fight kidnappings. Gaviria suggested a federal antikidnapping unit to handle every case. (In the current mess, some kidnappings in Mexico are handled by
federales
and others by state cops, whom victims fear going to in case they are part of the gang.) If a carefully watched federal unit achieved a high clearance rate, it would inspire others to trust in them rather than to pay ransoms. Once victims start consistently turning to police rather than paying the bounties, kidnapping ceases to be a growth industry.

Even if Mexico’s police force is transformed, bad barrios are going to keep churning out killers. When teenagers are out of school, from broken homes, in violent gangs, with no jobs, harassed by soldiers, with no hopes for the future, and struggling even to get enough to eat, they will keep turning to the mafia. Every politician promises better job opportunities, and these are easier said than delivered. But ways exist to fix broken communities even with limited resources.

The Mexico City government instigated a scholarship program to stop kids from dropping out of high school. If they could keep up a certain grade average, they would get a token monthly allowance to help them get by. The program was wildly popular, with fifty thousand drawing from it. Mexico City authorities say this is one of the key reasons the capital has kept a violent crime rate akin to U.S. cities rather than falling to the devastating levels of Juárez or Culiacán. These fifty thousand poor kids are off the streets and not working as hawks, hustlers, or hit men. Why isn’t such a program instituted across the whole of Mexico? Sometimes a little bit of investment in teenagers is cheaper than locking them up when they go down the wrong path. (It costs 125 pesos a day to hold a prisoner, but 23 pesos a day to keep a kid in school.)
¹⁰

Sometimes all kids need is more attention. Sandra Ramirez is a social worker in Ciudad Juárez’s westside slums, home to many cartel foot soldiers. She works in the Casa center, which offers guidance as well as art, music, and computer workshops and a place to hang out. On a baking-hot day, a few dozen kids are jumping around on skateboards and sitting in the shade strumming on guitars. Sandra, who grew up in the barrio and used to work in an assembly plant, labors hard with each kid to steer him or her away from a life of crime.

“One boy I am working with is fourteen years old and just studied in elementary school. His mother uses drugs and he doesn’t live with her. He told me that a car came by with some guys he hadn’t seen before. And they offered him five hundred pesos [$40] a week, a cell phone, and work. And all he had to do is to stand at a post and keep watch. And there are hundreds of cases like this in Juárez, hundreds. Nobody else has come to offer him anything. Nobody but them.”

The young boy is on a knife edge, and Sandra and the Casa social center are all that is keeping him from falling. Another older teenager at the center shows off his art, a painting of his neighborhood in surreal form, the people blurred, immersed in fog. On one side is a sanguine depiction of mafia bosses, on the other a sadistic-looking soldier. The barrio kids are stuck in the middle. It is a grim image, but the artist says he got rid of a lot of stress painting it—and discovered a bright artistic talent. When people start finding something of worth in themsleves, they are pulled away from the street and crime.

Sandra and Casa have saved the lives of dozens of kids, but only a couple of centers like that exist, while miles more westside slums have nothing. The Casa center, which relies on donations from NGOs or the government, has actually lost funding during the very time the drug war has exploded and it is most needed. Perhaps more of the Mexican budget that gives politicians some of the highest salaries in the world—or even a tiny fraction of the $1.6 billion of the Mérida Initiative giving Mexico Black Hawks—could be used to fund centers in the slums. Social workers are better than soldiers at helping neglected teenagers.

In other countries, two mafia capitals have been regenerated by inspired leadership. One is Palermo, Sicily, home of the most famous mafia of all. The city was long notorious for cutthroats and thieves. However, when former university professor Leoluca Orlando saved two terms as mayor in the eighties and nineties, he oversaw a renaissance, restoring 150 endangered buildings, constructing parks, and lighting dark streets. Crucially, he instigated programs to engage citizens, including schoolchildren, to help maintain these assets and take pride in their community. These may not be traditional crime-fighting methods, but the crime rate went down drastically.
¹¹

Over the pond in Medellín, Colombia, long-haired mathematician Sergio Fajardo took over as mayor in 2004 and took the ideas of Orlando further. He poured city resources into building high-tech cable cars up the mountains into the Medellín slums (
comunas
) and hired world-famous architects to construct public buildings, including an eccentric-shaped library and the best music conservatory in the city. It made the middle class travel into the
comunas
, many for the first time. During his term in office, homicides went down drastically. Visiting Medellín, I asked Fajardo if such regeneration could possibly take place in a city as ugly as Juárez.

He replied swiftly, “It has to be done. We have no other options. The government has a responsibility to do it. I see it like a mathematical problem. How can you readdress the social inequalities? It is simple. The most beautiful buildings have to be in the poorest areas.”

Critics point out that Fajardo was not the only reason for the decline in Medellín’s murder rate. He also benefited from a strong mafia godfather, Diego Murillo, alias Don Berna, who kept assassins in check through his Office of Envigado. Anyone who wanted to kill had to get permission or be killed themselves. Even from prison, Don Berna could broker peace in his empire. But when he was extradited to the United States in 2008, the office broke into two and a turf war pushed Medellín’s murder rate back up.

In 2010, civic leaders, including a well-known priest and a former guerrilla, went to meet with mafia leaders in a Medellín prison and brokered a new truce between them. It was a controversial move, talking to gangsters. But it seemed to have an immediate result in the lowering of deaths on the street. The civic leaders did not have the official backing of the government and did not offer the mafia anything in return. It was simply a plea: “For the good of the community, can you stop murdering each other in broad daylight?”

Calls for truces could also bring relief to Mexico’s murder capitals. Asking for peace is not sanctioning organized crime, it is just appealing to gang leaders to stop killing. The United States uses such tactics in its penitentiaries, actively working with prison gangs to broker truces. Some gang leaders will listen to these pleas—they themselves do not want to see their own family murdered. You don’t need to talk to the mafia godfathers in their palaces, but the low-level street-gang affiliates have an interest in their community. The bloody turf wars and sky-high murder rates do not help defeat the mafia; they just create an insecure atmosphere in which crime prevails.

Mexico also has a challenge to heal the wounds of the many who have lost family in the bloodshed. The increasing number of drug-war orphans need help or they will turn into an even more lost generation seeking bloody revenge. Other conflict-scarred countries have created national programs for victims. In some cases orphans or widows need financial help; but in many cases the need is psychological.

Families of victims help themselves now by sharing their pain. In Culiacán, a group of men and women meet to talk about the suffering from losing their loved ones. Many are mothers. They can never let go of burying their sons, but can at least feel that others suffer like them.

Alma Herrera, the mother whose son was shot in the car shop, takes me to meet a grieving friend one evening. We go to a park in the center of Culiacán, where old men rest their weary feet, children play by fountains, and young couples flirt on benches, sowing the seeds of their own marriages and families. The light in Sinaloa just before dusk looks beautiful, a rich, bright blue filling the streets.

Alma’s friend is a forty-year-old woman called Guadalupe. She lost her eldest son, Juan Carlos, who was gunned down by police. She clutches a huge photo of him, a handsome twenty-three-year-old staring upright at the camera. The police had gone after somebody else in the neighborhood, she said, and Juan Carlos was shot down in the cross fire. She sobs hard, uncontrollably, as she tells the story. She gave birth to him when she was just seventeen, carried him in her womb, changed his nappies, watched his first steps, took him to school … and then kissed his corpse.

Guadalupe carries a three-month-old baby with her. The infant sleeps as she sobs and tells her story, then wakes up for milk, then sleeps again. I ask his name. “Juan Carlos,” she says. It is the same name as that of her firstborn who was gunned down. This is a new son for the one that was lost. His mother has put hope in the fresh blood to grow up and make a better world than the one that killed his brother. We have to put our hope there too.

Books

The literature on Latin American trafficking is almost as jumbled as the drug trade itself. It includes breathtaking investigations, profound academic studies, accounts by American agents, scrawling by semiliterate gangsters and wonderful novels—which are often the safest way to tell the dark story. I have tried to read everything printed on Mexican gangsters, but it is hard to keep up with the flurry of books on El Narco that have come out of Mexico in recent years. One that stands out is
El Cártel de Sinaloa
by Diego Osorno, which among other things put the diaries of godfather Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo into our hands. The books of José Reveles, Julio Scherer, Ricardo Reveles, Javier Valdez, and Marcela Turati have also been crucial to build up the complicated big picture.

The older work of Jesús Blancornelas’s still shines, especially his landmark volume
El Cártel: Los Arellano Félix, la mafia más poderosa en la historia de America Latina.
Among Mexican academics, or narco-ologists, the undisputed champion remains Luis Astorga. I find his books
El Siglo de las Drogas
and
Drogas Sin Fronteras
especially useful. The wave of narco-fiction includes great novels by Élmer Mendoza and Alejandro Almazán, while the most famous is
La Reina del Sur
by Spaniard Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

Books in English on the Mexican drug trade have been more sporadic.
Desperados
by Elaine Shannon is a jewel for historic context, telling the tale of DEA agents in the 1980s, while Terrence Poppa’s
Drug Lord
offers a compelling account of traffickers themselves in the period. Charles Bowden has authored a series of influential books on the issue, and
Down By The River
gave me great context on the Salinas era. Among American academics, John Bailey and George Grayson are some of the most renowned Mexican-ologists. I also found anthropologist Howard Campbell’s
Drug War Zone
very useful for its interviews with traffickers on the U.S. side of the border. For Mexico in general,
Distant Neighbors
by Alan Riding holds up after three decades. Andres Oppenheimer’s
Bordering on Chaos
and Julia Preston and Samuel Dillion’s
Opening Mexico
also helped me piece together the turbulent transition to democracy in the 1990s.

I found many books on organized crime in other countries helpful in deciphering Mexico.
McMafia
by Misha Glenny offers great insight into the Russian mafia and how organized crime has mushroomed globally since the end of the Cold War. Roberto Saviano’s classic,
Gomorrah
, is useful in identifying criminal systems rather than just crime families.
Confesiones de un paraco
by José Gabriel Jaraba helped me understand the growth of Colombian paramilitaries and their parallels with Mexico.
Cocaine
by Dominic Streatfield gives a wonderfully written history of the drug itself. But one of the best crime journalists of all time writes on the New York mob. Nicolas Pileggi’s classics,
Goodfellas
(originally called
Wiseguy
) and
Casino
, show that books on organized crime can be rigid with the facts and still read like novels.

Image Section

God’s own medicine. Opium poppies in the Sierra Madre Occidental. (Fernando Brito)