Gangland (25 page)

November 2010 was a tumultuous time for Mexico, with crises on both coasts. Fears that oil from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill were headed towards Mexico's Gulf coast were joined by news that the Carnival Splendour—a luxury cruise ship with about 4,500 passengers and crew—was stranded without electricity, food or fresh water in the Pacific not far from Ensenada, Baja California.

Inside the country, however, it was business as usual. Nice weather in Chihuahua on the weekend of the November 6 and 7 led to a great number of the city's residents stepping out to enjoy it. Thirty of them and 25 people in Juárez were murdered.

The seesaw continues

A number of announcements in November showed that there seemed to be no end in sight for the seesaw battle for control of Mexico.

The first was a shocker from Denver on November 8. Retired fire department lieutenant David Cordova and Ronal Rocha, an assistant basketball coach at Regis University, were among 35 Sinaloa Cartel associates arrested for trafficking in a cross-border investigation. Twenty-one others were arrested in Denver, seven in Juárez, two in El Paso and one each in Alabama, Nevada and Illinois. Three other suspects were listed as fugitives. Officials seized 117 pounds of cocaine, 17 pounds of marijuana, nine firearms, $650,000 in cash and 15 vehicles. The Denver-based group operated in a number of cities, purchasing drugs from Sinaloa Cartel contacts in El Paso, then distributing it to street-level dealers. “If you purchased cocaine in the Denver area in the last two years, it's a very good probability that you purchased it from this supply chain,” said Dan Oates, chief of the Aurora, Colorado police force, which aided in the operation.

Information from the Denver arrests allowed authorities to find and arrest Manuel “La Puerca” (the Sow) Fernández Valencia and 17 other Sinaloa Cartel members and associates. After a 20-minute standoff in Culiacán without a shot fired,
La Puerca
and his men surrendered. Eight tons of marijuana were found in the house.
La Puerca
told police that his son had been assassinated after being mistaken for
El Chapo
's son because he was driving a white Ferrari.
El Chapo
's boy had a similar-looking white Lamborghini. He also stated that a month later,
El Chapo
had caught and killed the murderer.

And on the same day, Gregorio Barradas Miravete (who had recently been elected as a PAN mayor of Juan Rodríguez Clara, a largely rural municipality in the state of Veracruz) was kidnapped. He and two supporters—former PAN mayor Omar Manzur Assad and driver Ángel Landa Cárdenas—were stopped and forced out of their car by masked gunmen who had set up a military-style checkpoint just outside the village of Isla at about 4:30 p.m. The three men were then forced into the back seat of a blue-gray Hummer SUV. Their tortured bodies were found a few hours later inside the bullet-riddled truck about 60 miles away just outside the Oaxaca city of Tuxtepec. Their hands had been bound in duct tape and they were accompanied by a bright green sign. Written on it in black Sharpie was: “This is what will happen to all those who support Los Zetas.”

Many in the area had predicted the Barradas Miravete assassination, especially after he promised a complete investigation of the transactions of outgoing PRI mayor Amanda Gasperín Bulbarela.

Also on the November 9, U.S. inspector general Glenn A. Fine published a 138-page report on gun trafficking from the U.S. to Mexico. In it, he praised the joint ATF-Border Patrol Operation Gunrunner for seizing more than 5,400 firearms and 400,000 rounds of ammunition since 2006, but he also pointed out 15 ways to further decrease the supply that had not yet been implemented. The ATF said it welcomed the report and would consider his proposed initiatives.

Young assassins for the cartels

Outside of Mexico and the U.S. border states, the Mexican Drug War rarely made international headlines. Worldwide media paid attention to stories like the arrest of Valdez Villareal or the Taxco body dump and treated them almost as though they were isolated incidents. But there was one arrest on December 4 that caught the world's attention and demonstrated exactly how violent and entrenched in the culture the Mexican Drug War had become.

The shocking video that was seen all over the world begins with two masked soldiers with bulletproof vest escorting a schoolboy out of a building at Cuernavaca Mariano Matamoros Airport and up against a brick wall. It's 9:00 p.m. and dark, but the area is well lit. The boy, who comes up the soldiers' shoulders, looks scared. He's slight, with a wide face and closely cropped curly hair. His lip is swollen and he has a bruise on his forehead. He's wearing a loose black shirt and baggy cotton pants. He looks for all the while like he's about to cry until he starts to answer questions with a tough-guy smirk. Though it was widely reported in the news that the boy was 12, he was actually 14, but small for his age. As reporters' cameras constantly flash and advance, he then tells the soldiers that his name is Edgar Jiménez Lugo, and that he was born in San Diego, in the U.S. He then goes on to tell a story that is both shocking and sickening. As he tells it, his smirk goes away and his voice begins to shake as though it was the first time he articulated the facts of his life to himself.

His parents were illegal immigrants and crack addicts. When his father was arrested and sent back to Mexico, he was sent with him. Jiménez Lugo lived in a crowded home with his father, an aunt and uncle, his grandmother and five siblings. He dropped out of school after third grade. He spent his time hanging out with other boys of various ages until the gang recruited him. They trained him to be a
sicario
. “I participated in four executions,” he said, admitting to beheading his victims. “When we don't find the rivals, we kill innocent people, maybe a construction worker or a taxi driver.” A reporter asked him if killing people scared him. “No,” he replied. “They drugged me and forced me to do it.”

Jiménez Lugo, better known as
El Ponchis
(literally, the Cloak, but it's also local slang for barrel-chested, and is a joke on how slight Jiménez Lugo was) was arrested along with his 19-year-old sister Elizabeth while attempting to board an airplane to Tijuana. Once there, they intended to cross the border on foot to join their mother in San Diego. He admitted that he worked as a
sicario
for the Cartel Pacifica Sur (CPS) and his boss was
El Negro
(whom police knew to be Jesús Radilla Hernández, leader of the CPS).and his sister, who claimed to be one of
El Negro
's girlfriends, was in charge of disposing of bodies. Pictures and videos on one of El Ponchis' cell phones show him posing with AK-47s and even beating tied men with a stick marked CPS, chatting and giggling the whole time. In the background of one video, as El Ponchis is beating a man suspended from the ceiling, you can hear a child singing “Hit him, hit him, hit him. Don't lose your aim”—a play on a traditional song from children's
piñata
parties. The victims were later identified as the men whose bodies were hanging from the overpass in Cuernavaca in August.

El Ponchis told them that he had been kidnapped by the CPS—then the Beltrán Leyva Cartel—when he was 11 and had worked for them ever since, with a starting salary of $2,500 a murder. He, Elizabeth and 23-year-old sister Ericka were the ringleaders of a gang called
Las Chabelas
(the Isabels) based in Jiutepec, a poor Cuernevaca neighborhood.

Six other men arrested in connection with the case said that it was El Ponchis who cut off the victim's heads, fingers and genitals. He denied it, but did admit to multiple murders. “I've killed four people. I slit their throats. I felt awful doing it,” he said. “They forced me, told me if I didn't do it they would kill me. I only cut their throats, but I never went to hang [bodies] from bridges, never.” Both Lugo and his sisters were convicted and imprisoned.

One person the arrest did not shock was Morelos Attorney General Pedro Luis Benitez Velez. He told reporters that it's not uncommon for cartels to recruit children. They are easily fooled, he said, and can be coerced into violent acts without complaint. “They're persuaded to carry out terrible acts,” he said. “They don't realize what they are doing.” He also pointed out that unlike the U.S. and Canada, Mexico has no protocol for trying youths as adults. The cartels, he said, are aware of that and use children and teenagers for the dirtiest jobs, knowing they'll be free again soon. In the El Ponchis case, the maximum penalty for his actions was three years in a juvenile detention center. “Even if he killed a hundred people, the maximum he could get is three years,” said Armando Prieto, the juvenile court judge who presided over Jimenez Lugo's trial. “That's the constitution.”

When asked about the arrest, Calderón said that “in the most violent areas of the country, there is an unending recruitment of young people without hope, without opportunities.”

A noted Mexican psychologist told media that the whole family had been transformed into psychopaths by their environment and lack of family structure. “In this case there is no mother figure, nor a father, to guide them. There is no one to rescue them because they don't go to school, they have no master or psychologist,” said Peggy Ostrosky, head of Laboratory of Neuropsychology and Fisicopsicología of the Faculty of Psychology, National Autonomous University of Mexico. “They like to kill, to steal, and they don't need to conform to society because they are mistreated and become very hostile from a young age.” She reported that it is likely they were abused, probably sexually, at an early age and that there is no effective cure or even treatment for their mental condition.

Mexican children's rights advocates pointed out that the drug war had led to thousands of orphans turning to street gangs for some semblance of family and security. Many of them turn to crime at very young ages. “Youth prisons in Mexico are now full of minors who have been arrested for crimes linked to the drug war. Most of the inmates had been convicted of drug-related murders, kidnapping and drug trafficking,” said Oswaldo Hogaz, Juárez prison's director of inmates. “These kids are cheap, bloodthirsty, and they know the government can't punish them much.”

Mexican authorities released a video of
El Ponchis
. In the video of his confession, he looks small and thin, with his curly hair almost as wide as his narrow shoulders. They ask him how much he was paid for an assassination. He replied “$3,000 for a head.” At the end, the interviewer asked Jiménez Lugo what his future plans were. “I know what will happen to me now,” he said. “I regret getting involved in this and killing people. But when I'm released I want to go straight. I'll work, do anything, as long as it's not a return to this.”

It might not be that easy. “Whether he's found guilty or not, he can't come back here,” said David Jiménez, his father. “The families of those he is said to have killed will want their revenge.”

Chapter 15

Mexican Cartel Violence Moves North

Mainstream media in North America frequently pose questions asking when the Mexican cartels will bring their war north of the Rio Grande. The simple answer is that they already have.

Effective law enforcement has kept much of the violence at bay, but—as Americans saw in the crack-fueled territory wars of the late '80s and early '90s—when there is competition for drug sales, violence follows.

As early as 2008, the U.S. Department of Justice declared that Mexican cartels “are the dominant distributors of wholesale quantities of cocaine in the United States, and no other group is positioned to challenge them in the near term,” in its annual
National Drug Threat Assessment
. The Mexicans had in fact replaced the traditional Italian and Irish mafias and motorcycle gangs at the top of the cocaine-trafficking pyramid, and in many places, members of those groups work in the employ of Mexicans. The report linked the cartels' ascendance to a number of factors, including higher quality drugs, a seemingly unending supply of workers and the threat of violence.

The two big differences between the drug trade in Mexico and North America are the level of violence and the widespread corruption of authorities. Despite just being a few yards away from Juárez—one of the most dangerous cities in the world—having masses of illegal immigrants and some of the most relaxed gun-control laws in the nation, El Paso is one of the safest cities in the United States. In 2010, there were 5 murders in El Paso, compared to 223 in similarly sized Baltimore, which is nowhere near Mexico and has very strict gun laws. In fact, more El Paso residents have been murdered in Juárez than in their own city in the past decade. In the same period, Juárez suffered 3,111.

Many sociologists have attributed the comparative safety of U.S. border cities to the number of legal immigrants in them. “If you want to find a safe city, first determine the size of the immigrant population. If the immigrant community represents a large proportion of the population, you're likely in one of the country's safer cities. San Diego, Laredo, El Paso—these cities are teeming with immigrants, and they're some of the safest places in the country,” said Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University. “Overall, immigrants have a stake in this country, and they recognize it. They're really an exceptional sort of American. They come here having left their family and friends back home. They come at some cost to themselves in terms of security and social relationships. They are extremely success-oriented, and adjust very well to the competitive circumstances in the United States.”

Throughout North America, the cartels are in charge of trafficking, but we have not seen the kind of megaviolence Mexicans have. And when there has been violence—as with the five men whose throats were slashed in Hoover, Alabama—it has been carried out not just by illegal immigrants, but against them. Jack Killorin, head of the federal Atlanta High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Task Force, said that the Atlanta area, particularly suburban Gwinnett County, is a major hub for Mexican cartels. But their presence has not affected the larger community with violence. “The same folks who are rolling heads in the streets of Ciudad Juárez are operating in Atlanta. Here, they are just better behaved,”

That “good behavior” means fewer murders. “We're not seeing violence across the cartels,” he said. “They're just not in conflict. Some people would say that at this end of the distribution chain they're more interested in cooperating and making money than in conflict. Others would say there's plenty [of business] to go around, so there's no need for conflict.”

But while murder rates in border cities are not increasing, kidnapping is. But again, the victims are almost entirely illegal immigrants involved in trafficking. “We don't know how many have been kidnapped, but guesstimates by local law enforcement put abductions in border towns at four to eight a week,” said Fred Burton, STRATFOR's vice-president in charge of counterterrorism studies. “They are snatched in the U.S. and taken to Mexico.”

That relative calm seemed to ebb in the summer of 2008. With gunfire from Mexico sometimes heard on the U.S. side of the border and the Red Cross having abandoned its efforts in places like Reynoso, it was a tense time for border cities. On August 25, the El Paso police department received an alert from the Department of Homeland Security that violence could well slip over the border soon. “We received credible information that drug cartels in Mexico have given permission to hit targets on the U.S. side of the border,” said El Paso police spokesperson Chris Mears. While police forces in border cities and the Border Patrol were on heightened levels of security, nothing major occurred.

Mexico on the edge

In November, the still-new Obama administration commissioned a report on national security from the U.S. Joint Forces Command. It said that Mexico and Pakistan were at risk of a “rapid and sudden collapse” and stated that: “The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state.”

Retiring CIA director Michael Hayden agreed. He described the Mexican drug cartels as the biggest concern to the U.S. after Iran and ahead of al Qaeda, North Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not surprisingly, the Mexican government tried to downplay the idea that it was in danger of collapsing. “It seems inappropriate to me that you would call Mexico a security risk,” Interior Secretary Fernando Gómez Mont said. “There are problems in Mexico that are being dealt with, that we can continue to deal with, and that's what we are doing.”

That following February 2011, the U.S. State Department issued its most strongly worded warning about traveling to Mexico. It particularly warned spring breakers, many of whom go to Mexico's beaches every year, and, in an unprecedented move, also warned people traveling to vacation spots on the U.S. side of the border, like South Padre Island, Texas. It advised visitors to border areas to “exercise common sense precautions such as visiting only the well-traveled business and tourism areas of border towns during daylight and early evening hours.”

Home invasions escalate in Arizona

While little violence has spilled over into Texas, it is another story in Arizona. The city of Tucson, not far from the Sonora border, has seen a rash of home invasions with more than 200 in 2008, a crime, authorities said, that was “unheard of” in Tucson just a few years ago. “The amount of violence has drastically increased in the last six to 12 months, especially in the area of home invasions,” said Pima County Sherriff's department Lieutenant Michael O'Connor. “The people we have arrested, a high percentage are from Mexico.”

Tuscon police sergeant David Azuelo was investigating one such home invasion with a reporter from
The New York Times
in tow. In this particular attack, masked, armed men burst into a Tuscon home and pistol-whipped the father until he was unconscious. Upon finding a mother bathing her three-year-old son, they demanded money and drugs. “At least they didn't put the gun in the baby's mouth like we've seen before,” Azuelo told the reporter. Azuelo also told the reporter about a similar home invasion in which a 14-year-old boy was abducted and another in which the attackers got the wrong house and shot a very surprised woman who was watching television.

While Azuelo was asking the pistol-whipped man questions, he determined that the attack—like the bulk of Arizona home invasions—was linked to the cartels. A quick search of the house revealed a blood-stained scale, marijuana buds and leaves and a bundle of cellophane wrap. Police acknowledge that most home invasions are to collect debts, but there is a growing number that are simply robberies. When dealers find out that another dealer has received a large shipment, Azuelo claimed, they will just go and take it from them and sell it themselves.

Azuelo said that the assailants he saw “were not very sophisticated.” But they had an easy time escaping because the victims frequently refused to cooperate. “For me, the question is how much they got away with,” he said. “The family may never tell.”

One of his detectives predicted that the trend in home invasions would continue to increase. “I think this is the tip of the iceberg,” Tucson detective Kris Bollingmo said. “The problem is only going to get worse.”

And, as had been the modus operandi in Mexico for years, the home invaders in Arizona were beginning to masquerade as police. “We are finding home invasion and attacks involving people impersonating law enforcement officers,” said Commander Dan Allen of Arizona's State Department of Public Safety. “They are very forceful and aggressive; they are heavily armed, and they threaten, assail, bind and sometimes kill victims.”

International drug dealing

According to Homeland Security Director and former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano, it was getting worse. Appearing before a senate panel on February 19 asking for authorization for National Guard troops to help the Border Patrol, she pointed out that the cartels had established themselves in at least 230 U.S. cities. “The cartels have fingertips that reach throughout the United States,” she said.

The cartels' major center for export, according to the DEA, is Dallas. “We've got some of the major cartel members established here dealing their wares in Europe,” said James Capra, head of the U.S. DEA's Dallas office. “[The cartels] are dealing with Italy, Spain, you name it. They can operate their logistical center from here and coordinate between Mexico, Central America and Europe.”

This information came after a 23-year-old Dallas-area jail employee named Brenda Medina Salinas illegally used the jail's database to check up on two ex-boyfriends who had been arrested on drug charges. The two men—Moises Duarte and Henry Hernandez—were questioned and agreed to cooperate with police. Wiretaps revealed that the men (and others) had been importing cocaine to Dallas, then moving it to the eastern United States and Europe in coordination with the Camorra (Neapolitan Mafia).

In April 2010, the U.S. military announced that it would be using the techniques it had acquired from fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan to assist the Mexican military in combating the drug cartels. “We've learned and grown a great deal as we've conducted operations against networks of terrorists and insurgent fighters,” said U.S. Air Force General Gene Renuart, commander of Northern Command. “Many of the skills that you use to go after a network like those apply ... to drug-trafficking organizations.” He pointed out that the Mexican military had been much more successful fighting the cartels than police had, and that their tasks were not unlike urban warfare.

But while the effort was well publicized in the U.S., it was largely kept quiet in Mexico. “The Mexican army doesn't want to be seen in the press as cooperating too closely with the U.S. Army,” said Craig Deare, a professor at National Defense University. “One of the conditions of the cooperation is staying out of the visibility of the press.” Not only was the Mexican military's pride at stake, but many people south of the border remembered how the U.S. and other sophisticated militaries had trained the soldiers who later became Los Zetas. If the best-trained and armed members of the Mexican military had left for the cartels' higher pay a few years ago, there would be little, they speculated, to prevent it from happening again.

Gunfire in the desert in Pinal County

Just a week after the passage of Arizona's controversial law regarding illegal immigrants on April 23, 15-year-veteran Pinal County deputy sheriff Louie Puroll was patrolling a lonely stretch of Interstate 8 on April 30. The region, known as the Vekol Valley, is true desert, where vegetation is sparse and plants over a foot high are very rare. He said he came across five men, two with rifles, and what appeared to be bales of marijuana in heavy backpacks. He followed them discreetly for about a mile to a trash-strewn area known by locals as an illegal immigration route just under Antelope Peak. He lost sight of them, then as he crested a ridge he came face to face with the smugglers. One shot at him with an AK-47. The bullet sliced through his back, just above his left kidney, but caused only a superficial wound. He fled and the men kept firing, but missed him. He called 911 from his cell phone. Shots could be heard in the background of the call. Puroll gave his location coordinates from a handheld GPS, then shouted “Triple 9s!” the universal police code for an officer in danger and requiring assistance. Then he said: “I'm taking fire! Get me some help! Send Ranger [the force's helicopter]! I've been hit! I've been hit! I've been hit!”

The following day, 17 illegal immigrants were rounded up as the sheriff's office collected suspects in the Puroll case. None had AK-47s or backpacks full of marijuana.

Of course, the incident caused a firestorm of controversy in the media. Supporters and opponents of the new law rallied on each side of the Puroll case. Many people claimed Puroll was lying to further the state's clampdown on illegal immigration. One of them was
Phoenix New Times
reporter Paul Rubin, who wrote an article called “Pinalcchio: Renowned Forensics Experts Say a Pinal County Deputy's High-Profile Tale About Getting Shot After Encountering Drug Smugglers Doesn't Add Up.” In it, he accused Puroll of embellishing the story and Sheriff Paul Babeu of using it as leverage for his own political aims.

After the story appeared, Rubin met with Puroll again. This is how he described the meeting:

After four hours of dialogue, I shut down my tape-recorder at the truck stop. Puroll tells me: “Now that that's off, let me tell you something. You're lucky to be alive right now.” The deputy explains that a friend of his, a “rancher of Mexican descent,” recently offered to murder me because of what I wrote in “Pinalcchio.” I ask the deputy what he'd said to his pal. “I said that it wouldn't be a good idea, not to worry about it,” he says evenly. I ask him why he's telling me this. He sees me taking notes, but continues. “Thought you'd like to know some people were upset with you, that's all,” the deputy replies, smiling slightly.