Gangland (18 page)

A new form of reprisal

Military intelligence received a tip that Arturo Beltrán Leyva, leader of the Beltrán Leyva Cartel and the third most-wanted man in Mexico, was staying at a friend's condo in Altitude Punta Vista Hermosa, the tallest and most exclusive building in the Lomas de la Selva neighborhood of Cuernavaca, the capital of the state of Morelos. When he was spotted there on December 16, 2009, while Calderón was at the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen, the building was surrounded by Naval Infantry (analogous to the U.S. Marine Corps).

In the ensuing battle, Beltrán Leyva and five of his gunmen were killed and another shot himself in the head just before he was to be apprehended. The losses did not cripple the organization, but it was a severe blow. Three of the special-forces soldiers were severely wounded when one of the cartel gunmen threw a fragmentation grenade at them, and one of them—30-year-old Petty Officer Melquisedet Angulo Córdova—later died from his wounds.

Angulo Córdova's grieving family was shown on national television, and he was regarded as a hero in the Drug War. The same news programs also aired pictures and video footage of Arturo Beltrán Leyva's bloodied corpse with his pants around his thighs.

Angulo Córdova's funeral, on December 21, was attended by Secretary of the Navy Mariano Francisco Saynez Mendoza, who presented the victim's mother, Irma Córdova Palma, with a ceremonial flag.

A few hours later, just after midnight, masked men invaded Córdova Palma's house in Villahermosa and shot everyone inside with AR-15s. She and her 22-year-old daughter Yolidabey died at the scene, and her sister Josefa Angulo Flores and 28-year-old son Angel Benito died later that night. Another daughter, 24-year-old Miraldelly, died the next day.

The attack horrified Mexico. The pointlessness of murdering the innocent family of an already dead soldier rocked the nation. It was yet another brutal new twist in a war that was raging out of control. The family had no official protection because that kind of attack was unprecedented. Authorities were harshly criticized for making the soldier's family so prominent on TV and for publishing their names. And experts warned that it would not be the end of this sort of deferred violence. “There will be more reprisals, both symbolic ones and strategic ones,” said Guillermo Zepeda Lecuona, a founding partner of the Mexico City-based Centro de Investigación para el Desarrollo (Center of Research for Development) think tank. “They will take revenge against not only the top people, but anybody who participates.”

And that's how 2009 ended for Mexico. It was a terrifying and depressing time. The fact that many well-known cartel leaders were being caught or killed seemed to have little to no effect on the volume of drugs being moved or levels of violence being meted out. The cartels were fighting each other, the police and the military. Their targets were getting farther and farther from the expected victims: they were drug users looking for help in rehab clinics, they were the families of soldiers, they were people standing on a street corner when a group of
sicarios
opened fire on a government official. The death rate in 2009 jumped more than 40 percent over 2008. According to authorities, 9,635 people were killed in Mexico as a direct result of the Drug War in 2009, more than 26 per day. Of those victims, 79 were Americans and one was Canadian. By comparison, the U.S. military, fighting two wars, lost 149 people in Iraq and 317 in Afghanistan over the same period.

The real fear—both inside and outside of Mexico—was that the government could actually lose the war, that it could either be pushed aside by the cartels or step aside after realizing the fight was futile. This situation is far from unprecedented, and countries like Somalia, Chad and Sudan, in which governments have been over-run and made redundant by armed non-government groups are collectively known as “failed states.”

As early as the middle of 2008, George Friedman, an American political scientist, author and CEO of STRATFOR, a private intelligence corporation, published a paper indicating that Mexico was well on its way to failed state status. By the middle of 2009, the phrase was commonly used in mainstream media describing what seemed like the nation's inevitable future.

And at the end of 2009, the transition of Mexico to failed state status looked like it began in the Michoacán town of Tancítaro. A week after seven bound bodies were found on the town's main street, town clerk Gonzalo Paz Torres was taken from his house by masked gunmen, tortured and shot five times in the head by AR-15s. His death, along with a constant barrage of anonymous threats, were cited on December 4, when the mayor, Jose Trinidad Meza Sánchez, and the entire city council tendered their resignations. One of them told a BBC reporter that being on council was like “having a rope around your neck.” Three days later, every one of Tancítaro's 60 police officers quit. The local government had—out of fear—essentially handed the town over to the cartels.

Rather than let that happen unopposed, Michoacán Governor Leonel Godoy Rangel, stepped in and appointed a new council to oversee the town and moved 100 state police in to take over for Tancítaro's defunct police force. “Unfortunately, these terrible incidents not only occur in Michoacán, but also in other parts of the country, and they demonstrate the degree of power of organized crime,” he said. “But it also shows the authorities' determination to fight it, while creating opportunities for education, health and employment—it's how we can ultimately defeat this terrible cancer that has invaded Mexico.”

It was Calderón's plan in a nutshell—when there's trouble, move in progressively higher levels of authority. But there's a problem with that theory. As those organizations are eroded by defections due to fear, better offers from the cartels, arrests or assassinations, their numbers dwindle. And the number of people fighting on the other side gets bigger.

Chapter 12

Exporting Drugs and Crime

If the cartels were transforming Mexico into a failed state, they were also exporting a little anarchy along with drugs.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, U.S. cities had experienced unprecedented levels of violence as the availability of crack from Colombian cartels led to numerous turf wars. For a variety of reasons, the violence levelled off and then declined precipitously, especially in big cities. By the turn of the millennium, New York City—which had been one of the worst hit by the crack wars but has since become a model of crime fighting—was recording crime rates as low as it had in the early 1960s.

Crime rates were actually rising over that same period in the western United States and Canada, often in communities that were not hit hard by crack. One factor, of course, was methamphetamine. Although arguably the most addictive and destructive of all stimulant drugs, it finds many users in part because it is often confused with amphetamine, a much milder stimulant that was legal and popular until 1971.

Traditionally, meth was made in small quantities by amateur chemists called “cooks” in a dangerous process that has caused thousands of explosions and severe burns over the years. The finished product was then distributed locally by motorcycle gangs like the Hells Angels, Outlaws and Bandidos.

After the Sinaloa Cartel took over the Colima Cartel (the meth manufacturing and trafficking ring run by the Amezcua Contreras brothers) in 2007, the amount of meth on the North American market exploded. No longer was the bulk of meth being made piecemeal in what police call “Beavis and Butt-head labs.” The Sinaloa Cartel made tons of meth every day in purpose-built labs in Apatzingán, Michoacán, then later in the U.S. itself, in abandoned factories and warehouses, and even national forests guarded by masked men with AK-47s.

• • •

Of course, when the cartels established a meth trafficking infrastructure in North America, they also brought their traditional marijuana and cocaine products along with them, and crime too. For example, Phoenix—an Arizona city just a three-hour drive from the Mexican border—was largely untouched by the crack epidemic, but suffered 370 kidnappings in 2008, more than any other city in the world outside of Mexico, and an almost eightfold increase over the 48 it experienced in 2004.

On April 21, 2009, Americans were shocked to see that cartel violence had hit in a place few would have expected. Hoover, Alabama, is a quaint suburb of Birmingham more than 1,000 miles from the Mexican border. That morning, Shelby County Sheriff Chris Curry responded to a call for help from one of his officers investigating a disturbance call at the low-rent cahaba lakes apartment building not far from downtown. He drove up from Columbiana, a half hour's drive away. As soon as he arrived at the crime scene, Curry started calling for more help. He first called the state troopers, then the FBI and finally the DEA. “I don't know what I've got,” he told them. “But I'm gonna need help.”

Inside the apartment were the bodies of five men, all illegal immigrants from Mexico. They had duct tape binding their hands and feet and covering their mouths. There were burn marks on their ears from the clamps of booster cables that had been used to torture them by electrocution. All five had their throats slashed. Autopsies indicated that the men were all dead before their throats were cut.

Investigators determined that the apartment was a drug stash, and that the men were involved with the Gulf Cartel. Shelby County, a quiet suburb with good schools and lots of retailers, was one of the fastest growing communities in the U.S. Latin Americans had been a rare sight in the area until 2005 or so, when Mexican day laborers started lining up on County Road 35 looking for work. Since then, investigators revealed that Pelham had become something of an area hub for drug trafficking.

On the other side of the country, the DEA and local police forces began a painstaking 19-month investigation on the meth trade in the state of Washington. The investigation just kept getting bigger and bigger until the operation was launched on October 22 and 23, 2009, as Project Coronado. Three hundred and three people were arrested in 19 states. Items seized on those first two days included 140 pounds of cocaine, 740 pounds of methamphetamine, 970 pounds of marijuana, 144 firearms, 109 vehicles and two complete meth labs. By early 2011, information from Project Coronado had led to a total of 1,186 arrests and had added much more evidence, including 29 pounds of black-tar heroin (a type particular to Mexico), 4,400 pounds of cocaine, 2,700 pounds of meth, 16,400 pounds of marijuana, $32,795,000 in U.S. currency and two maritime vessels.

Most of those arrested were Mexican nationals who had crossed the border illegally, and U.S. authorities named them as members and associates of La Familia, working in coordination with the Sinaloa Cartel. “This operation has dealt a significant blow to La Familia's supply chain of illegal drugs, weapons, and cash flowing between Mexico and the United States,” U.S. attorney general Eric Holder said. “The cartels should know that we here in the United States are not going to allow them to operate unfettered in our country.” American authorities had long considered La Familia among the most violent of the Mexican drug cartels, and with its quasi-religious shadow-state mentality, among the most dangerous. “The sheer level of depravity of violence that this cartel has exhibited far exceeds what we unfortunately have become accustomed to from other cartels,” said Holder.

Despite the number of arrests and huge amounts of product confiscated, many observers countered that it was just a token effort when compared to the overall cartel picture in the U.S. “These raids indicate that the U.S. is beginning to roll up at least one of its sleeves in the war with the cartels,” said George Grayson, a Mexico specialist at the College of William and Mary. “Most of the arrests in this week's raids are probably of low-level dealers, couriers and look-outs.”

While Mexican gangs had long been established in the southwestern U.S. and Florida, it surprised many to see how powerful they had become in places like Seattle, Boston, Syracuse, New York and St. Paul, Minnesota. And one other fact the case revealed opened many eyes in the U.S.—much of the marijuana seized was not from Mexico, nor even California, but was the legendary BC Bud.

BC “Bud”

In the 1960s and 70s, much of Canada's self-identified hippie population moved to its westernmost province, British Columbia. Large areas of B.C. are warmer and wetter than the rest of Canada, and the Gulf Islands (between the mainland and Vancouver Island) and the Kootenay Plateau in the province's southeast proved very suitable for marijuana cultivation.

Since then, marijuana farming in B.C. has become a huge industry. A 2006 study by Burnaby, B.C.-based Simon Fraser University indicated that the people of BC not only have a much more relaxed attitude toward marijuana than other Canadians do, they are also much bigger consumers. The province itself estimated the value of the rapidly growing crop in 2006 at $6.3 billion, and Larry Campbell, a senator and former mayor of Vancouver, has made repeated calls for marijuana not simply to be decriminalized in the province, but legalized.

The farming of BC Bud has become incredibly sophisticated. While there are still thousands of amateur marijuana farmers in British Columbia, the BC Bud brand name refers to a specific type of super-potent pot grown using specific methods. The process begins with shipping containers which are taken to isolated rural or wild areas. They are then fitted with halogen lights that are computer-timed to provide an optimum amount of artificial daylight. These are supplemented by sprayers that provide a constant cloud of mist, keeping the plants moist and heaters to maintain a constant temperature. Since the primary method of detecting marijuana farms in Canada—where they are usually called “grow-ops”—is to investigate residences that use much higher than normal levels of electricity, BC Bud growers often use their own electricity from diesel generators, solar panels and/or wind turbines.

The resulting product is so potent, that it is considered the gold standard of marijuana. And its high quality guarantees it a high price. The price it demands tends to rise the farther away it gets and many published reports have stated that in places like Miami, BC Bud is sometimes traded ounce for ounce for cocaine, a transaction that would be unthinkable with any other type of marijuana.

So high are the profits in dealing with BC Bud that police have arrested traffickers transporting it by kayak, through tunnels under the border, by airplane and helicopter and even in the backpacks of teenagers on a school bus taking Canadian kids to study in Port Roberts, Washington.

Enter the Hells Angels

And, of course, wherever that kind of money is being made illegally, there will be violence. For generations, British Columbia's drug trade had been in the hands of the Hells Angels, who left the work of dealing and distributing to support groups, or what police call “puppet gangs.” The most notable of them—the United Nations—was actually formed in opposition to the Hells Angels, whose puppet gangs would often target teens of Asian descent for abuse. Despite engaging in a number of brawls with Hells Angels supporters, the management of the United Nations could not resist the rewards of trafficking and became the Hells Angels' primary puppet gang in mainland British Columbia. Because the United Nations was a multiethnic gang, they could more easily make deals with communities the Hells Angels and their supporters could not reach. “We have a completely new infrastructure that supports the movement of cocaine, ecstasy, marijuana, you name it,” said Pat Fogarty, RCMP superintendent with the combined forces special enforcement unit.

The United Nations had been fighting a bloody turf war in Vancouver and the nearby Fraser Valley with another multiethnic gang, the Red Scorpions. After dozens of shootings and stabbings of young people associated with those and other gangs, and the seizure of items like AK-47s and bulletproof vests, the police acknowledged that drug trafficking violence had created a gang war in British Columbia. “As police, we've always been told by media experts to never say or admit that there is a gang war,” said Vancouver chief constable Jim Chu. “Well, let's get serious. There is a gang war, and it's brutal.”

On the morning of September 27, 2009, residents of a Puerto Vallarta condominium community heard gun shots. Witnesses say that a masked man with an AR-15 shot two men in the pool area from a distance, and that another man with a handgun shot them again at close range. The local paper
Noticias Puerta Vallarta
ran pictures of the two bodies. One was shirtless, the other was wearing a souvenir T-shirt from Toronto's Hockey Hall of Fame.

The victims were identified as B.C. natives and former construction workers Gordon Douglas Kendall and Jeffrey Ronald Ivan, who had moved to Puerta Vallarta a year earlier. When the names were released, Canadian reporters phoned their friends and family but nobody would describe what the two did for a living. The Canadian consulate in Puerta Vallarta issued a press release stating that the murders looked like they were done to “settle a score.” Then the police made it a little clearer. “Both the organized crime team and the gang task force have been aware of these two males for a while,” said Sergeant Bill Whalen of the RCMP's Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit. “We've been aware that these two males have been involved with the drug trade for a while. We've been aware of ... some of their activities recently in Mexico.” And a friend of theirs eventually came forward. “He went down there to do some stuff for the Hells Angels, as far as I know,” the man, who refused to be identified, told reporters. “I tried to talk him out of it. I knew this was going to happen. He was involved in a nefarious venture, to say the least.” The Hells Angels denied the two men were members of their organization—but they always do.

And Kendall and Ivan were hardly the first shooting victims in Mexico from B.C. and not the first connected to organized crime, either. On July 12, 2008, two Vancouver-area residents—Guatemala-born Elliott “Taco” Casteneda, a 28-year-old Abbotsford, B.C., realtor, and Lebanon-born Ahmet “Lou” Kaawach, a 26-year-old car customizer from Vancouver—were sitting down to lunch at a restaurant in the Santa Teresita neighborhood of Guadalupe when they were shot and killed. Both men were high-ranking members of the United Nations gang and were said to be “close friends” with its leader, Clayton Roueche. Kaawach had fled to Mexico after he was deported from Canada due to a weapons charge.

Six months later, two other men from British Columbia—28-year-old Brendhan Stowe and 26-year-old Nguyen Minh Trung Do—were shot by a lone gunman with an automatic weapon as they were enjoying the show at Mermaids, a topless bar in Cabo San Lucas, at about 1:30 a.m. Stowe was hit in the leg, while Trung Do took a serious hit to the neck and is now in a wheelchair. Though neither man had extensive criminal records, or was ever charged, the RCMP said they “were well known to police.”

Mexican refugee claims in Canada

As the Drug War in Mexico intensified, the number of Mexicans applying for refugee status in Canada jumped from a steady 1,000 a year to a peak of 9,309 in 2008. Almost all of them came through British Columbia. Far more Mexicans traveled to Canada as tourists, and simply stayed in the country without documentation. The RCMP and other organizations said that many of the immigrants came to traffic BC Bud. Since the Mexican military and the U.S. Border Patrol had clamped down on the Mexico–U.S. border, it made sense for traffickers to target the U.S. from the comparatively relaxed Canadian border. And they were not, police allege, all low-level cartel mules. Some came to purchase large amounts of BC Bud, and since large amounts of cash are difficult to smuggle into Canada, they were bartering cocaine for BC Bud. Suddenly, even small towns in British Columbia had communities of Mexican immigrants, mostly undocumented. And at the same time, those places started seeing rapid increases in cocaine and methamphetamine arrests, as well as gunfire. “The Mexican cartels are a factor that has contributed to the violence,” said Fogarty. “The situation is quite serious insofar as historically there have not been shootouts in public places here, so the people are concerned for their safety.”