Gangland (17 page)

As the long hot summer of 2009 went on, government forces suffered many setbacks. Ernesto Cornejo Valenzuela was a firebrand PAN politician who was actually in jail serving a sentence for his part in an anti-PRI riot when he was elected mayor of the Sonora town of Benito Juárez. On June 26, he was campaigning to become a congressman for the district when he and some campaign workers stopped at a taco stand in downtown Benito Juárez. When gunmen from an SUV opened fire, Cornejo Valenzuela managed to get safely to the ground, but two of his volunteers were killed. Many of his followers blamed PRI governor Eduardo Bours Castelo for the attack, who was never charged, but the mainstream media accused the Sinaloa Cartel, which had absorbed the Sonora Cartel, and considered pro-Calderón candidates to be their enemies.

Later that day, the normally tranquil Guanajuato city of Apaseo el Alto exploded as state police investigating a routine complaint of the sighting of an armed man at a nondescript house were shot at and had grenades thrown at them. Reinforced by the army (and .50 caliber machine guns), the police returned and the ensuing firefight left the twelve occupants of the house dead and one officer seriously wounded. Police linked the dead men to Los Zetas.

A new revenue stream: kidnapping

It had become routine for the cartels to kidnap individuals who were not involved with the drug trade or law enforcement for no reason other than to raise money through ransoms. Communities who were out of the mainstream were particularly hard hit, especially if they were thought to have money. One such community lived just outside the Chihuahua town of Galeana. A group of Mormons left Utah in the early 20
^th
century after the American government cracked down on polygamy and settled in the dry foothills of the Sierra Madre, founding Colonia LeBaron near Galeana. They made a good living growing pecans. Few, if any, of their descendants still practise polygamy and not all of them are even Mormons any more, but the 1,600-member community has retained its identity. All members speak English and Spanish fluently, and they live in a level of luxury in stark contrast to the farmers and laborers around them.

The group made headlines in 1974 when one of its leaders—Ervil LeBaron, son of the colony's founder, Alma Dayer LeBaron—was accused of ordering a series of revenge-motivated murders that included that of his brother Joel. His series of trials in Mexico ended in acquittals on technicalities (which many attributed to bribes), but he died in a Utah prison after he was extradited to the U.S. in 1980 when it was determined that one of his victims had retained U.S. citizenship.

In the summer of 2009, Colonia LeBaron was shocked by two kidnappings. The first was 72-year-old Meredith Romney, president of the area's Mormon organization, the Colonia Juárez Chihuahua México Temple, and a relative of U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney. After having the tires of his pickup truck shot out while he was driving, Romney was secured by three gunmen who hustled him into their car. He was held in a cave under armed guard. Concerned about his need for insulin, his family came up with a substantial ransom and he was released unharmed.

The second victim was 16-year-old Eric LeBaron, Joel's grandson. He and a younger brother were bringing fence posts to their father's farm from a Galeana lumberyard when their truck was surrounded by gunmen. The masked men forced Eric into their own truck and told the other boy to go home and tell their father, Julian, to wait for the phone to ring. When it did, the men demanded a $1-million ransom for Eric.

Julian refused to pay. “We knew the last thing we could do was give them the money, or we would be invaded by this scum,” he said later. Explaining the family's hard line, Julian's brother Craig told American reporters: “If you give them a cookie, they'll want a glass of milk. If we don't make a stand here, it's only a matter of time before it's my kid.” To show they were serious, the kidnappers put an empty coffin in the bed of a pickup owned by Galeana mayor Vern Ariel Ray Angel, a distant relative of the LeBarons.

The day after Eric was taken, about 150 community leaders met in a church to discuss strategy. Many wanted to form an armed posse, while others recommended hiring bounty hunters or even mercenaries. Eric's 32-year-old brother Benjamin (better known as Benji) had formed SOS (Sociedad Organizada Segura or Secure Organized Society) a group that trained local people in crime prevention, and lobbied the government for stiffer penalties for offenders and more transparent investigations.

The lobbying paid off when an army unit was sent into the area to find Eric. Eight days after his capture, Eric was simply told to go home. He walked for four hours until he found a pay phone and called home for a ride. Many in the LeBaron community attributed his safe return to prayer, but the army dragnet certainly didn't hurt.

On the night of July 7, between 15 and 20 masked, armed men broke into Benji LeBaron's home. He was bound, dragged out to the front yard and beaten. His brother-in-law, Luis Carlos Widmar, heard the commotion from his own house two doors away and rushed to his aid, but he too was captured, tied up and beaten. The gunmen threatened to rape LeBaron's wife, Miriam, in front of her children if she did not reveal where LeBaron kept his weapons, but she told them he had none. The gunmen then fled with the two captives. Their bodies, both with multiple bullet wounds to the head, were found the next day on a roadside just outside of town. A banner hung between two trees accused Benji LeBaron of being responsible for the 25 arrests at the ranch in Madera.

Chihuahua Attorney General Patricia González Rodríguez gave a press conference in which she accused La Linea (The Line), a secret society of former police officers who act as enforcers for the Juárez Cartel of the killings. Later that day, a banner was hung in a public square in Juárez that read:
La Sra. Fiscal, evitar problemas por ti mismo, y no culpar a La Línea
(Mrs. Prosecutor, avoid problems for yourself, and don't blame La Linea). Another one appeared on a Juárez overpass that accused LeBaron of being a gangster and implored people to
Pregúntate a ti mismo, De dónde provienen sus propiedades?
(Ask yourself, where did all his properties come from?)

The residents of Colonia LeBaron then formed a volunteer police force and González Rodríguez granted their request to arm themselves.

The week after LeBaron was killed, the cartels showed their boldness once again, this time in Morelia. Federales arrested Arnoldo “La Minsa” (the Tortilla Maker) Rueda Medina and a 17-year-old associate they referred to as “Francisco N” in Morelia. Authorities alleged that Rueda Media was third in command of La Familia in charge of their logistics and communications and that Francisco N. was responsible for organizing La Familia's safe houses.

The convoy carrying the prisoners was followed and as the police were transferring Rueda Medina from an armored car to a detention center, they were fired upon by gunmen. The gunmen were fought off by army troops and Federales, and the attempt to free Rueda Medina was unsuccessful. A police spokesman said that it appeared that the attackers were prepared to kill Rueda Medina in an effort to keep him from talking.

A few hours later, gunmen opened fire on police stations in six Michoacán cities—Morelia, Zitacuaro, Zamora, Lazaro Cardenas, Apatzingan, La Piedad and Huetamo—at virtually the same time. The attacks killed five Federales and two soldiers and wounded 10 more Federales. A search of the area yielded no suspects, but police did uncover a safe house with weapons and tables they said had been used for torture.

Later that day, a pedestrian in nearby Uruapan discovered three bodies—bound, tortured and shot in the head—under a blanket at the side of a road. In Tecate, across the border from southeastern California, police found three more bodies of men killed by assault rifles. And in the evening, soldiers, Federales and local police stormed the luxurious house of Eduardo Morquecho Hernandez, a U.S. citizen wanted by authorities for a domestic violence incident in Orange County back in 2003. Inside the residence, police seized 32 guns of various types, 1,500 pounds of marijuana and drums of sodium hydroxide, the same chemical “El Pozolero” Meza López admitted he used to dissolve corpses of the Tijuana Cartel's enemies.

The violence against police continued in Michoacán. Twelve state investigators on a bus to a crime scene were ambushed on a country road by La Familia gunmen. All of them—11 men and one woman—were tortured and executed. A note was found tied to one of the bodies that warned police officers that if they did not “line up” with La Familia, they would be killed.

The cycle of corruption

On the same day, the Michoacán attorney general's office issued arrest warrants for two politicians—Governor Godoy Rangel's half-brother Julio César Godoy Toscano, a PRD congressman and former mayor of Lázaro Cárdena, and Saul “El Lince” (the Lynx) Solis Solis, a PRD candidate who lost his bid for a congressional seat in the same election—who they alleged were working for La Familia's Servando Gomez Martinez. Gomez Martinez had recently admitted on a radio call-in show that he was part of the cartel's management team and that they were at war with police and the military.

And the government took another huge hit at the start of August. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat senator from Vermont and head of the U.S. Foreign Operations Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee, determined that the U.S. must withhold at least 15 percent (about $100 million) of its Mérida Initiative aid program because the Mexican government had not done enough to guarantee its military and police had improved their human rights violations records.

The arrests in Michoacán represented another profound blow to Mexico. Since the war began it had confirmed long-held suspicions that state and local police were often in league with the traffickers. Then the Federales, who were held to a higher standard, were shown to be just as vulnerable to bribery and threats, followed by the military, who had been considered untouchable. By the end of the summer of 2009, it was clear that even elected officials were part of the immense drug trade. Mexicans who hoped for law and order were seriously disheartened. They didn't know who to trust.

And even if the people within the government forces could be trusted to be honest and not intimidated by threats and violence, it was looking very much as though they were seriously outgunned. No longer were the cartels hiding in the countryside. They were masquerading as cops and soldiers, ambushing the real authorities and even brazenly attacking police stations and other places of government power with sophisticated and powerful weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades.

By the middle of 2009, nobody doubted Mexico was at war. But for the first time, many people were openly wondering if the government could survive long enough to win it.

Chapter 11

The War Expands

The illusion that the violence in the Drug War was limited to the border or big cities was shattered on August 6, 2009. Pachuca is a small city in the state of Hidalgo that was settled primarily by English, particularly Cornish, immigrants. They brought with them tennis, golf and soccer, as well as an architectural style and a local cuisine not found elsewhere in Mexico. Pachuca is considered one of Mexico's most orderly, prosperous and safe cities.

That's why it was such a shock when news leaked of a prolonged gun battle there. Police had been tipped off about traffickers in the area and stopped four trucks at a routine checkpoint. Immediately men inside the trucks opened fire and fled. Three state police officers were killed at the scene and nine alleged cartel members were killed in a battle that destroyed all four of their vehicles. Along with weapons and cash, the police recovered almost seven pounds of cocaine.

Nobody, however, was surprised by the 13 bodies, including one of a police investigator, that were found on the streets of Juárez that day.

Two days later, Saturday August 8, the Federales announced that they had arrested Manuel Invanovich “El Jimmy” Zambrano Flores, a high-ranking lieutenant in the Tijuana cartel. When a state police cruiser attempted to pull over his black VW Touareg SUV on Tijuana's Calle Coahuila, he stepped on the gas, but quickly collided with other vehicles, stopping his progress. He emerged from the SUV with a gun, but dropped it when he was surrounded. Inside the car, police seized seven AK-47s, three AR-15s, seven handguns and fake state police identification. Zambrano Flores' job, they said, was to coordinate shipments over the border.

The government scored an even bigger media sensation the following day. Just as Calderón was about to open a summit meeting in Guadalajara with President Obama and Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the Federales announced that they had discovered and broken up a plot to assassinate Calderón at the summit. At a Sinaloa Cartel safe house in Culiacán, Federales arrested Dimas “El Dimas” Diaz Ramos, Miguel Angel Bagglieto Meraz, Joel “El Raspu” (Rasputin) Gonzalez Esparza, Benni “El Brother” Jassiel Ramirez and Jesus Aaron “El Tarraya” (the Fishnet) Acosta Montero. The attorney general's office said that the plot had been planned for months and was revenge for the huge coke bust aboard the
Polares 1.
Diaz Ramos was the ringleader of the group and his primary job for the cartel had been moving marijuana and methamphetamine up the coast from Michoacán to the border.

The Chicago connection

Another investigation that began two years earlier in the heavily Mexican neighborhood of Pilsen in Chicago yielded huge results. It started in 2007 when a cop arrested a man on suspicion of selling cocaine on a street corner. He had a bag of corn chips, but inside the bag was a hidden compartment that was used to smuggle cocaine. The suspect began to cooperate with police, leading them to another man who he claimed to be working for. Police stopped that man and found an unregistered gun in his car. He also cooperated with police, claiming the gun was for self-defense because another drug dealer, “Fat Mike,” had promised to kill him, producing a Hallmark greeting card with a threatening message as evidence. The police then recorded a call between Fat Mike, who also cooperated with the investigation and his connection, “Slow Poke,” who he assured the police was “cool” and “had lots of money.” It was Slow Poke who eventually led them to a prize bigger than they could have imagined.

A man named Guillermo Flores had come to Chicago from Sinaloa in the 1970s and supplemented his income with some small-time drug dealing. His twin sons, Pedro and Margarito, joined and expanded the family business to a ridiculous degree. Through a barbershop in Pilsen and a restaurant in nearby Little Village called Mama's Kitchen, the twins ran a drug distribution business making deals primarily with the Sinaloa Cartel and, astonishingly, the Beltrán Leyva Cartel as well.

The drugs were smuggled in shipments of fruit, vegetables or electronics to a warehouse outside Los Angeles where they were loaded into tractor trailers and driven to a set of Chicago warehouses and condominiums where they would be distributed among the twins' street-level dealers. Cash was then shrink-wrapped and sent back to Mexico.

When undercover American police officers infiltrated the Flores Crew (as their gang was called), they discovered that the gang had been receiving threats of violence from both the Sinaloa and Beltrán Leyva Cartel who each wanted an exclusive arrangement, though neither cut off or even reduced their shipments.

When the indictments came down, the authorities seized $20.6 million in cash, almost 7,000 pounds of cocaine and 140 pounds of heroin. Half of the 46 suspects were arrested in Chicago, Atlanta and Brooklyn, while the rest—including the twins—were fugitives. The DEA said that the 28-year-old twins' business generated about $700 million a year and sued for the forfeiture of two houses, three cars, a tractor trailer and $1.8 billion. They also claimed that the Flores brothers had street-level dealers as far away as Washington DC, and Vancouver, B.C.

While the DEA and other agencies were ecstatic about dismantling the Flores Crew, the DEA's chief of intelligence, Anthony Placido, warned that the success of such a slapdash, unsophisticated organization prone to taking ridiculous risks like the Flores Crew was an indication that the drug traffickers were becoming more reckless and violent. “There have always been gatekeepers—people who use their familial relationships to facilitate the movement of drugs across the border,” he explained. “Those people used to be gods, and they would control an area for years. Now they often last months before they are arrested or assassinated. What that creates is opportunities for a 28-year-old who ... isn't worried about dying.”

Decriminalization of drugs in Mexico

The day after the Flores Crew was taken down, Calderón enacted a controversial law that had been under negotiation since 2006. On August 21, Mexico decriminalized the possession of small amounts of drugs. Under the legislation, Mexicans were allowed to carry five grams of marijuana, a half gram of cocaine, 50 milligrams of heroin, 40 milligrams of methamphetamine or 0.015 milligrams of LSD. If police found an individual with these new amounts of drugs, they were compelled to advise the individual to seek counseling. If an individual was caught a third time, the law stated that drug counseling would be mandatory, but it didn't mention any definite penalties if the individual did not seek counseling. Originally, Calderón had lobbied for first-time offenders to agree to voluntary counseling or face imprisonment, but he was voted down.

The Calderón government played down the move, saying that it only put on paper what was already happening in practice, reminding the public that their opponents were drug traffickers, not drug users. “The Mexican authorities were not [targeting] small-scale drug users before, so this law just legalizes the status quo,” said Juan Carlos Hidalgo, Latin-American project coordinator at the Washington DC-based Cato Institute. “But certainly it is a signal that Mexico is sending to the world that [going after] small-scale drug users is counter-productive.”

Another tacit effect of the law was that it reduced the ability of police officers to extort Mexicans caught with small amounts of drugs. Previously, it had been commonplace for police to accept bribes in such cases because they had the threat of jail time for the offender.

The North American reaction was mixed. By that time, possession of small amounts marijuana was illegal but not enforced in Canada and many U.S. states, and had actually been decriminalized in a dozen states. U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske did not immediately criticize the law, instead saying he would adopt a “wait-and-see attitude.” He actually said he would not be very concerned unless Mexico removed possession limits altogether. “If the sanction becomes completely nonexistent I think that would be a concern,” he said. “But I actually didn't read quite that level of de facto [decriminalization] in the law.”

Significantly, more criticism of the law came from within Mexico itself, largely because it seemed hypocritical on the part of the Calderón government, whose Drug War had cost so many lives and billions of dollars. “If they decriminalize drugs it could lead the army, which has been given the task of combating this, to say ‘What are we doing?'” said Javier Oliva Posada, a political science researcher at Mexico City's Autonomous University.

Many critics also pointed out that while allowing personal possession of drugs shifted criminality from the user to the trafficker, it did little to reduce the amount of trafficking or the violence involved with it. “As long as drug production remains illegal, we are going to see the drug traffickers running a black market,” said Hidalgo. “I don't see how the new measure will help calm down the drug violence in Mexico.”

It didn't. At about 5:15 p.m. on September 3, Michoacán's deputy public safety secretary, José Manuel Revuelta Lopez, was being driven home from work in Morelia when his car was intercepted about 200 yards from his office and forced to stop. As was becoming routine, gunmen burst out of the trucks and showered his vehicle with gunfire. Revuelta Lopez, who had been on the job just two weeks, two bodyguards and an innocent bystander were killed.

A new target: drug rehab centers

Later that day, in Juárez, a new terror tactic emerged. Members of cartels had long hung out in and around Mexican drug rehab centers. Not only were sales easy—although La Familia forbade selling drugs within Mexico, the other cartels did not—but so was recruitment. Nobody, they quickly discovered, is more willing to take on a risky, illegal assignment that a desperate addict.

About a dozen masked gunmen arrived at El Aviane rehab clinic and forced all 23 people inside to line up against a wall. Then they opened fire. Seventeen people died immediately and one other hung on until that evening; the other five were seriously injured. The belief at the time was that one cartel believed that the patients inside the clinic were actually traffickers posing at addicts. “At the very least, it was one organized crime group thinking that another group was operating in that place,” Juárez mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz told reporters from his office in El Paso. Another 21 bodies were found throughout northern Mexico that day, one of them beheaded.

On the morning of September 6, José Francisco Fuentes Esperón—a former university rector who had declared his candidacy as a PRI member for a congressional seat in the southern state of Tabasco two days earlier—was late for a campaign meeting. When he wouldn't answer his phone, an aide was sent to retrieve him. When she arrived at his home in Villahermosa, the state capital, she was surprised to find his front door was open. Inside, she found the bodies of Fuentes Esperón and his wife, Lilian Arguelles Beltran, both shot in the head, and those of his two sons, eight and ten, both asphyxiated. “There are no words to express these events,” said Rafael Gonzalez Lastra, Tabasco's attorney general. “We are deeply moved and at the same time indignant.” All candidates took two days off campaigning, and Gonzalez Lastra offered them all bodyguards.

A few hours later, the military announced the arrest of Jose Rodolfo “El Riquin” (the Hindu) Escajeda Escajeda. Acting on an anonymous tip, they arrested him and three other armed men who were driving a bulletproof Mercedes-Benz ML350 SUV in Nuevo Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, not far from Colonia LeBaron. He was wanted in connection with an incident back in January 23, 2006—before the Drug War began in earnest—in which 10 men dressed as Mexican soldiers in three green Humvee-style SUVs were spotted by Texas Rangers driving north on a dirt road surrounded by forest about 50 miles down the Rio Grande from El Paso. On the Mexican side, the road ends literally in the river at a spot known as Neely's Crossing because, for most of the year, the Rio Grande is shallow enough to wade across. The three vehicles drove through the river to the American side, but when they spotted the Rangers with weapons drawn, they U-turned and drove back into Mexico, escaping arrest.

Initially Hudspeth County sherriff Arvin West called the incident “a military incursion” and accused the Mexican army of “escorting drug dealers” across the border, but an investigation by the U.S. Border Patrol and DEA absolved the military and fingered Escajeda Escajeda. After his arrest more than three years later, evidence emerged that Escajeda Escajeda was the most prolific assassin for the Juárez Cartel and was behind the El Aviane massacre—he suspected the patients were actually working for the Sinaloa Cartel, which was still attempting to use the Juárez–El Paso crossing—and was also probably responsible for the murders of LeBaron and Widmar on July 7.

Putting Escajeda Escajeda behind bars did little to stop the violence in Juárez. The murders kept coming, with gunmen taking out victims in hardware stores, car washes and out on the streets. And, at 10:30 p.m. on September 16, a dozen masked, armed men stormed the Anexo de Vida drug rehab clinic. It was lights-out time for the patients who were compelled to pray before going to bed. The
sicarios
lined up the 10 patients and shot them, leaving the staff unharmed. Pools of blood spilled out into the dirt road, which had been made almost impassable for vehicles because of heavy rains.

Relatives of the dead insisted that they were innocent people seeking help, not cartel members. “Why? Why them?” said Pilar Macias, whose brother, 39-year-old Juan Carlos Macias, was one of the victims. “He was recovering, he wanted to get back on the right track and they didn't let him, they didn't give him a chance. This is going to kill my mother.” Maria Hernandez, whose 25-year-old son Carlos was also killed said: “He was good, he didn't hang out with gangs, he didn't have narco friends. He just began with marijuana, and then they killed him.”

At about the same time in Tijuana, police came across a burning car. Once doused, they found four bodies in the car's seats and two more in the trunk. All had been bound, tortured and shot in the back of the head.