Cowards. - Cowards. Part 11
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Cowards. Part 11

Girl Gone Wild

All of this success didn't go unnoticed by the locals. In the 1920s, a Mexican woman by the name of Ignacia Jasso La Viuda de Gonzalez (thankfully she went by the shorter nickname of "La Nacha") entered the drug trade with her husband in Ciudad Juarez, directly across the border from El Paso, Texas. After he died, she continued to sell drugs from her home, supplying El Paso and other U.S. cities for decades. La Nacha controlled much of the Juarez heroin, morphine, and marijuana trade until her death (as a free woman) in the 1980s.

As you might imagine, the success of the poppy meant that Chinese traffickers soon became major players in the opium trade. Fast-forward a few decades and their role expanded even more when the U.S. government started ordering huge quantities of morphine for soldiers returning from World War II.

The landscape of drug trafficking in Mexico was dramatically altered again during the "hippie era" of the 1960s. As it just so happens, marijuana also grows extremely well in many parts of Mexico. As American demand for marijuana exploded, the drug trade evolved into a Mexican family business.

The next two decades turned into the golden era as powerful drug lords with nicknames like "the Godfather" and "the Lord of the Skies" emerged, living like kings in some Mexican version of the Don Corleone saga. This new breed of drug lords started out dealing in heroin and marijuana because cocaine isn't produced in Mexico. (And, not incidentally, also because cocaine was under the purview of the legendary Pablo Escobar and his buddies in Colombia-a group that didn't exactly have a reputation for tolerance when it came to competition.) Things were going along fine for everyone in the trade when suddenly, in the 1980s, a funny thing happened: the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's efforts against the Colombian cartels actually began to work. Trafficking routes from Colombia to the United States across the Florida straits into Miami were virtually shut down, leaving cocaine exporters in a jam: How could they continue to supply John Belushi without access to the United States?

Fortunately for the Colombians, Mexican "logisticians" were ready to step in and help. They began to develop a cocaine "trampoline" by which they would bring cocaine in from Colombia and transport it through Mexico and across the border into the States. Mexican traffickers became so adept at this trampoline so quickly that they began to dictate terms to the Colombians instead of the other way around.

And that is how the modern Mexican drug trade was born.

Juan Is the Loneliest Number

Oddly enough, the man who developed this method of bouncing Colombian cocaine off of Mexico and into the United States wasn't Mexican or Colombian; he was Honduran. His name is Juan Matta Ballesteros and, these days, he's pretty easy to find: he's living in the supermax prison in Colorado, where he's serving three consecutive life terms for drug and kidnapping charges.

THE GOOD OLD BAD OLD DAYS.

It may be hard to believe given all of the modern-day violence, but Mexican drug traffickers actually got along (more or less) in the 1980s. There were no such things as "cartels" back then (a term that is actually a misnomer since traffickers don't conspire to set drug prices), and traffickers never referred to themselves as such. No, back in the good old bad old days, one man pretty much ran the whole show: Miguel angel Felix Gallardo, aka "the Godfather."

Things went smoothly for Felix Gallardo for a while, but then, in 1985, he made a big mistake: he became involved in the kidnapping and murder of DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena.

Feeling the increasing heat from U.S. and Mexican authorities, Felix Gallardo decided to hold a narco powwow in the resort city of Acapulco. It was there that he made the historic decision to divide up his drug empire into five pieces, placing trusted and lesser-known (at least to the DEA) bosses in charge of each drug corridor.

Those five pieces lived and worked under the same unwritten and unspoken code as the Italian Mafia here in the United States: business is business, settle accounts professionally, and stay away from the wives and children. Alliances and partnerships between the cartels came and went, girlfriends and wives caused tempers to flare, but, for the most part, there was relative peace.

Then democracy came to Mexico, and everything went to hell.

It sounds like a strange thing to say, but Mexican politics had everything to do with transforming the fairly benign drug "trade" into the daily carnage we see today. From 1929 until 2000 there was one political party in power-the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). During that time it ruled Mexico with a very tight grip, and it had a nasty reputation for extreme corruption. It was an open secret that the PRI was in bed with the cartels, ignoring their illicit activities in exchange for having their bread buttered under the table with narco dollars.

But this is the crucial detail that people need to understand: the Mexican government had ultimate control over the cartels. If the drug lords or their underlings got out of hand and let things get too ugly, the government would immediately step in, make some arrests, or "disappear" some key people. The bad guys would step back into line, and everyone went back about their day in peace and harmony.

But in 2000 everything changed. The PRI got the boot, and Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN) was elected president. With Fox's win it wasn't just the PRI's total dominance of Mexican affairs that went out the window; so did the implicit agreement between the Mexican government and the cartels. As a result, the Pax Mafiosa was officially over.

Now the cartels were in charge.

THE GAME CHANGER.

In the mid-1990s, Osiel Cardenas Guillen-then the head of the Gulf cartel-decided that he needed to raise his own private army to defend his territory and operations along the Texas border in northeast Mexico. To ensure he had the best of the best in his army, he turned to Mexican Special Forces troops and made them offers they couldn't refuse: Leave the army, come work for me, and I'll make you rich beyond your wildest dreams. It was not a difficult sell.

Real-Life Hunger Games

There were originally thirty-one Zetas recruited by Cardenas Guillen. Authorities believe that only three of them are still alive today.

And, with that, Los Zetas-the most fearsome, ruthless, brutal, and bloodthirsty killing machine that Mexico has ever seen-was born.

Now, fast-forward to 2006. Vicente Fox's term was coming to end, and while he had taken down the full leadership of the Tijuana cartel and the head of the Gulf cartel, he never did stage a dramatic fight against the cartels. Outside of a few skirmishes, there was no major escalation in violence.

Things, however, were about to change.

That year, the PAN continued its winning streak with the election of Felipe Calderon. Calderon hadn't run on an antidrug or antiviolence platform, but it didn't take long for him to make the drug war the focus of his administration. He adopted a strategy of "hit 'em hard" and "give them no quarter," dispatching tens of thousands of army soldiers to various narco hot spots throughout Mexico. Calderon felt (with very good reason) that he couldn't rely on the extremely corrupt state and local police to take care of business.

Needless to say, the cartels weren't exactly thrilled with his decision. It was bad enough that the government was no longer ignoring their activities or accepting their hush money; they were now actively fighting them. If the cartels wanted to keep the drug profits rolling in (and, believe me, they did), then they only had one choice: fight back, and fight back hard.

So that's exactly what they did.

The U.S. government once called Los Zetas "the most technologically advanced, sophisticated and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico." I think that's a massive understatement. The Zetas had an insane amount of urban and guerrilla warfare training, knowledge of surveillance and countersurveillance techniques, and expertise with weapons and explosives.

But they also had something else: no soul.

What's in a Name?

The "Zetas" name was derived from their founding member: Arturo Guzman Decena, whose military call sign was "Z1." Over the last fifteen years, the older members have passed down their skills to younger members, although many of them lack the extensive training and discipline of older members.

Around 2004, Los Zetas introduced a tactic into the fight that soon became the hallmark of drug war violence: decapitation. While the number of murders in Nuevo Laredo, a Mexican city across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas, during that time wasn't as high as it is now in places like Ciudad Juarez, Los Zetas made up for it with the sheer viciousness of their kills. The rules of the game had changed.

From that point on, it became a ruthless cartel game of keeping up with the Joneses. It was almost as if they were following the script from The Untouchables: "They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue." If Los Zetas cut off someone's head and hung the body from a bridge, their competitors had to do the same thing (or worse) to show they were just as fearless and intimidating. Of course, as time went on, and Calderon continued to pour fuel on the fire that democracy had started, the violent acts got continually worse.

In 2006, a new cartel called La Familia Michoacana emerged. Their "coming out" party consisted of rolling five severed heads onto the dance floor of a nightclub in the city of Uruapan.

In January 2010, a cartel murdered and dismembered a thirty-six-year-old man, putting his body parts into a few containers and leaving them in different places across the city of Los Mochis. Upping the ante even more, they sent a memorable message by separating the man's face from his skull and sewing it onto a soccer ball.

In September 2011, members of the Sinaloa Federation posted a video on YouTube of two men-accused of being snitches-being decapitated with a chain saw. While they were still alive.

THE CARTELS GET CREATIVE.

All of the violence is, of course, only about one thing: money. More specifically, the billions of dollars American drug users spend every year on the four drugs that Mexican cartels specialize in: marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. The United Nations estimates they're raking in anywhere from 8 to 30 billion dollars annually on these drugs, although this is just a mildly educated guess; it's not like PricewaterhouseCoopers is doing their books. As with any black market activity, we can only make educated ballpark estimates.

In 2010, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seized more than 1,725 tons of marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine along the southwest border. For comparison, that's the typical weight of a loaded Ariane 5 rocket, or four standard locomotive trains. Worse, the consensus among law enforcement agencies is that they're only catching about 10 percent of the drugs that are actually coming across the border. In other words, for every four train cars full of drugs that we're catching, thirty-six more make their way in without a hitch.

Much of those drugs come across our border in the "traditional" way-in the trunks or hidden compartments of cars and trucks at the ports of entry, on the backs of human mules traversing the desert in between the checkpoints, etc. Smugglers still use Miami Vicestyle boats and planes, but they are much less common these days. What are becoming more common, however, are border tunnels, drug submarines, and ultralight planes.

Diversifying Their Portfolio

The cartels' business portfolios don't end with drug smuggling. Believe it or not, Mexican and U.S. enforcement efforts are actually having an impact on drug trafficking, so some cartels-most notably Los Zetas and La Familia Michoacana-have diversified into other fun extracurricular activities, like kidnapping and ransom, extortion, fuel theft, piracy of DVDs, CDs, and software.

According to the Motion Picture Association of America, movie piracy in Mexico costs Hollywood at least $590 million annually. Within the countries that make up the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Mexico has the third-highest rate of pirated software at 60 percent, after Chile and Turkey. Microsoft's associate general counsel for antipiracy, David Finn, wrote that La Familia alone could have as many as 180,000 points of sale, with profits reaching $2.2 million a day.

Another profitable expansion of their business has been cattle rusting. Yes, drug traffickers are now stealing Mexican cows.

Livestock organizations in eleven Mexican states have said that cattle rustling has significantly increased in the last three years. Why? Why else: money. It seems that cattle rustling can raise a decent chunk of change. A bull can sell for $10,000, a cow for $12,000, a horse for up to $30,000, and a calf for up to $20,000.

If necessity is the mother of invention then drug cartels are modern-day Benjamin Franklins.

The Tunnels More than one hundred cross-border tunnels have been discovered in the past decade, including seven major tunnels along the San Diego border with Mexico in the past five years alone, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Some of these tunnels are engineering wonders, with concrete-reinforced walls, ventilation systems, wired-in lighting, and track systems for transporting drugs quickly. Other tunnels are more like rabbit holes, where one person can barely squeeze through on his belly with a rope tied to his ankle and several bales of dope. But no matter their size or complexity, these tunnels can be extremely difficult to detect. Human intelligence is crucial, but some Border Patrol agents will tell you that the best way to find a border tunnel is to run over it with your truck.

The Drug Subs Drug subs, which are more formally known as "self-propelled semi-submersible vessels" (see why they just call them "drug subs"?), because they don't fully submerge, can be total marvels of construction-multimillion-dollar affairs built by Russian engineers in the Colombian jungle that look like they were just pulled out of the Finding Nemo ride at Disneyland. Others . . . not so much. The cheaper versions appear to have been cobbled together with cardboard, PVC pipe, and a few rolls of duct tape. But all of the drug subs have one thing in common: an enormous capacity for holding illegal narcotics. Many can haul up to six tons at a time and, if intercepted, can be completely scuttled in less than two minutes.

If Only Amtrak Ran This Well . . .

In November 2011, ICE discovered thirty-two tons of marijuana in a major cross-border tunnel linking warehouses in San Diego and Tijuana. The six-hundred-yard passage was equipped with a hydraulic lift, electric railcars, a wooden staircase, and wood floors from one end to the other. It was also lighted and ventilated.

Working on one of these things is not exactly like spending a week on the Queen Mary 2. Drug subs are almost always bare-bones deals, with no midnight buffet or rock-climbing wall. The navigators have to endure a one-to-two-week journey with no air-conditioning, no showers, minimal food and water, and no functioning toilet. But they get the job done. And they're paid handsomely for their sacrifice.

The Ultralights Depending on the model, an ultralight can carry one person and roughly 250 pounds of drug cargo. They fly below the radar, so they're very difficult to detect, but occasionally they have the pesky problem of running into power lines. Some pilots land in the United States to drop off their load with a courier, then take off again and head home. Others are getting better at releasing their drug loads while in flight, although this can mean disaster if they're dropped unevenly. Ultralight pilots who aren't trained properly can easily meet a grisly fate in some Arizona lettuce field.

There is nothing quite like drugs and money to bring out maximum creativity in criminals. For example, there was the load of Jesus statues in one woman's trunk, which were made of a plaster and cocaine mixture (yes, that cocaine-doll-dissolved-in-water scene in the movie Traffic is entirely realistic). Then there was the shipment of frozen sharks that had been hollowed out and filled with packages of cocaine. And there are plenty of people who are happy to use their own bodies as vehicles, swallowing dozens of little drug-filled balloons until their insides are close to bursting. Of course, what goes in must come out, and I'd hate to be the smuggler or CBP agent on the receiving end of that delivery.

This drug tunnel connected Tijuana and San Diego. It was 600 yards long and was equipped with lighting and ventilation.

YES, IN YOUR BACKYARD.

To really understand the nature of Mexico's drug war today, it's important to know how new criminal entities like Los Zetas differ from the other "old school" cartels. Remember, Los Zetas didn't start out the way the other cartels did; they began as a private army for the Gulf cartel-essentially very well-trained professional killers. Their boss, Cardenas Guillen, was arrested in 2003 and extradited to the United States in 2007. And, well, when the cat is away, the mice will play.

Los Zetas grew in confidence and drug trafficking expertise during this time. Finally, by 2008, they'd had enough of being under the Gulf cartel's control. They took advantage of Guillen's extradition to the States the prior year and officially broke away to become their own cartel.

If you take a look at an organizational chart for a Fortune 500 company, you're likely to see many similarities with a chart for the Tijuana or Juarez cartels. There is a CEO at the top, several layers of top managers underneath, and so forth, with each level of management reporting directly to the layer above.

But Los Zetas is run more like a franchise. They do have a boss at the top, but each Zetas cell more or less operates independently and gets to make its own decisions. Unfortunately, those decisions usually involve various ways to kill people.

You Look Familiar