Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America

398 Pages·2016·4.17 MB·English

by  Ioan Grillo

Contents
Part I: War?
Part II: The Red: Brazil
Part III: The President: Jamaica
Part IV: He Who Holds the Word: Northern Triangle
Part V: The Saint: Mexico
Part VI: Peace?
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes
Index
By the Same Author
PART I
War?
CHAPTER 1
This book is about the move from the Cold War to a chain of crime wars soaking
Latin America and the Caribbean in blood. But it starts in the United States.
Specifically, in a Barnes and Noble bookshop in a mall in El Paso, Texas.
I am sitting in the bookshop café, nursing my third cup of coffee and flicking
through a pile of new books. As you do with new books, I am eyeing the photos,
skimming the intros, and just feeling and smelling the paper. I am also waiting
for a drug trafficker who has spent four decades delivering the products of
Mexican gangsters to all corners of the United States.
The man I am waiting for is no criminal warlord controlling a fiefdom in Latin
America. He’s a white New Yorker with a university education. That is why I
want to start the book here. Latin American journalists complain the U.S. side of
the equation is never examined. Who are the partners of the cartels wreaking
havoc south of the Rio Grande, they ask. Where is the American narco? Here, I
found one.
A curious twist of fate led me to this meeting. A fellow Brit was cycling
through the southwest United States on an extended holiday. Texas was nice, but
he fancied something edgier, so he slipped over the border to Chihuahua,
Mexico. Unwittingly, he entered one of the most violent spheres in the Mexican
drug war, venturing into small towns to the west of Ciudad Juárez, at the time
the world’s most murderous city. He didn’t do too badly, hanging out in cantinas
and raising glasses with shady locals. Until gangsters held him in a house,
threatened to cut his head off, and got him to call his wife in England and plead
for a ransom payment.
Attacks on wealthy foreigners in Mexico are actually very rare, but there have
been sporadic cases, some of them deadly. In this case, the thugs had jumped at
an opportunity that fell in their lap. Thankfully, they released the Brit on receipt
of the cash, and he made it home unscathed. He kept in contact with one of the
people he had met on the border, an older man called Robert. While Robert
knew the kidnappers, he apparently wasn’t involved. He is the man I am going to
meet now, one of the gangsters’ U.S. connections.
The British cyclist had put us in touch, and I talked to Robert over e-mail and
then phone to arrange the get-together. He lives on the Mexican side of the
border in one of the Chihuahuan towns. But I told him I didn’t want to go there
after the kidnapping and suggested we meet in El Paso, a stone’s throw from
Juárez but one of the safest cities in the United States. In a Barnes and Noble
bookshop. Who would hold you up in a Barnes and Noble?
As I finish my beverage, I spy Robert strolling toward me. He probably
spotted me first. He is in his sixties, in jeans and a baseball cap, with sun-worn
skin and a raspy voice. I get yet more coffee, and we chat. He’s good company.
Soon we decide we want something stronger and move on to a cowboy-themed
bar in the mall where they serve local brews in ridiculous-size glasses. I hear
Robert’s tale as we sip from the flagons.
It goes back to 1968, when the United States was in the midst of the hippie
movement and fighting its hottest Cold War battle in Vietnam; when
dictatorships ruled most of Latin America, and a recently martyred Che Guevara
inspired guerrillas across the continent. Robert is from upstate New York, but in
1968 he went to university in New Mexico. Here he had the fate of landing a
roommate from El Paso who had a cousin in Ciudad Juárez. His roommate told
him he could buy marijuana for forty dollars a kilo from his cousin. This lit a
fuse in Robert’s mind; he knew that back home in New York, this amount sold
for three hundred dollars.
The basic business of importing is buying for a dollar and selling for two. But
with drugs, Robert realized, he could buy for a dollar and sell for more than
seven. And he didn’t even need to advertise. This was after the summer of love,
and American youngsters were desperate for ganja from wherever they could get
it, feeding a mushrooming industry south of the border.
“I was young, I was broke, and I was hungry,” Robert says. “Then marijuana
came like a blessing … We scraped our money together for the first load. When
it came through, we bought another. Then another.”
It is hard for most of us to fathom a business with a markup of 650 percent.
You put in fifteen hundred bucks and you get back more than ten grand. You put
in ten and get back seventy-five. And in two more deals you can be a
multimillionaire. Narco finances turn economics inside out.
As Robert made regular drives back east with his car trunk stuffed with ganja,
he could go through school without even having loans. “I was living like a rich
kid, driving a nice car, living in a big place,” he says.
When he graduated, he had a business to go into. He traveled to Chihuahua to
buy bulk loads of marijuana and partied in Juárez discos with rising drug lords.
He spread out his commerce to new horizons. He traveled to Mississippi and
Alabama, where he sold to the Dixie Mafia, a network of villains in the
Appalachian states. He went to San Francisco to sell to students on the lawns of
Berkeley. He bought houses and nightclubs with suitcases of cash.
However, Robert’s drug-dealing dream hit a wall in the late seventies when he
got nabbed by agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA did
what it calls a “buy and bust.” An undercover agent pretended to be a dealer and
asked for three hundred pounds of grass from Robert’s partner. After police
nabbed the partner in his car, they stormed Robert’s luxury house, arrested him
in his swimming trunks, and grabbed sacks of weed from the kitchen and garage.
This is the flip side of narco economics. Robert splurged on lawyers, got his
assets seized, and served close to a decade in federal prison. Yet after he got out,
he went back into the trade, moving ganja and a little cocaine with a new
generation of Mexican traffickers. This time, he kept a lower profile, shifting
smaller amounts to stay off the radar. He carried on past middle age, through
marriages and divorces, booms and busts, through the end of the Cold War and
the opening of democracy across the Americas. By the time he hit his sixties, he
suffered from chronic asthma and heart disease. And he was still smuggling
weed.
When Robert started trafficking drugs, his Mexican colleagues were a handful
of growers and smugglers earning chump change. They needed Americans like
him to get into the market. But over the decades, the narco trafficking networks
grew into an industry that is worth tens of billions of dollars and stretches from
Mexico into the Caribbean to Colombia to Brazil. Mexican gangsters
transformed into cartels and established their own people stateside, often their
family members. Two of their biggest distributors were the Chicago-born twin
sons of a Durango heroin king. While Robert had been a big shot back in the
day, he fell to the position of a small-time smuggler.
South of the border, the cartels spent their billions building armies of assassins
who carry out massacres comparable to those in war zones and outgun police.
They have diversified from drugs to a portfolio of crimes including extortion,
kidnapping, theft of crude oil, and even wildcat mining. And they have grown to
control the governments of entire cities and states in Latin America.
“Back in the old days, it was nothing like this,” Robert says. “They were just
smugglers. Now they prey on their communities. They have become too
powerful. And many of the young guys working for them are crazy fucking
killers who are high on crystal meth. You can’t deal with these people.”
I ask Robert if he feels guilty about pumping these organizations with cash
year after year. They could never have gotten so big without working with
Americans.
He looks into his glass for a while and sighs. “It is just business,” he says.
“They should have legalized many of these drugs a long time ago.”
Some months after I interview him, Robert is arrested again, driving over the
border with a trunk full of ganja. He is sixty-eight. He spends four months in
prison, pleads guilty, and is given supervised release on time served and medical
grounds. He tells the judge his trafficking career is over.

Flip from El Paso over the Rio Grande and fourteen hundred miles south onto a
hillside in southern Mexico. I am in the mountains in the state of Guerrero, close
to where traffickers grow marijuana and produce heroin. The fate of these hills is
locked with that of smugglers in Texas and drug users across America by the
pretty green and pink plants here. It’s the domain of a cartel called Guerreros
Unidos, or Warriors United, a small but deadly splinter of an older trafficking
network. The hill is beautiful, thick with pine trees and bright orange flowers.
Strange crickets jump on the earth, and exquisite butterflies arc through the air.
The smell of death is overwhelming. It’s like walking into a butcher’s shop
stuffed with decaying meat; putrid, yet somehow a little sweet. While I would
describe the smell as sickening, it’s not noxious. It’s a movie cliché that people
throw up when they see or smell corpses. That doesn’t happen in real life.
Corpses don’t make you physically nauseous. The sickness is deep down, more
an emotional repulsion. It’s the smell and sight of our own mortality.
The stench of rotting human flesh is all over this hill from a series of pits
where police and soldiers are pulling out corpses. They are dank, maggot-ridden
holes that the victims probably dug themselves. The corpses are charred,
mutilated, decomposed.
In Mexico, they call this a narcofosa, or drug trafficking grave. But many of
the victims here are neither drug traffickers nor police officers, nor in any way
connected to the world of narcotics. They are shopkeepers, laborers, students
who somehow ran afoul of the Warriors’ criminal empire. The troops dig up
thirty corpses on this site, near the town of Iguala. And it’s just one of a series of
narcofosas dotting these hills.
Residents in close-by shacks describe in hushed voices how the Warriors
brought their victims here. They would come at night in convoys of pickups,
openly holding Kalashnikov rifles to their terrified hostages. Often they were
with police officers. The Warriors were alleged to control most of the Iguala
police force as well as the town’s mayor and his wife.1
Some of the corpses have been here for months, but no one came searching—
until an atrocity that made world headlines. On September 26, 2014, Iguala’s
police and their colleagues, the Warrior gunmen, attacked student teachers,
killing three and abducting forty-three.
The global media finally learned where Iguala was. How could forty-three
students disappear off the face of the earth? It sounded like Boko Haram in
Nigeria kidnapping schoolchildren, but this was right next to the United States.
Thousands of troops poured in, uncovering mass graves like the one that I am
standing in. But they still couldn’t find the students.
After more than a month, they followed the trail to a garbage dump ten miles
away. Mexico’s attorney general said the Warriors murdered the forty-three
there, burning their corpses on a huge bonfire with wood, tires, and diesel and
throwing the remains into the nearby river San Juan.2 Police found charred bones
in a bag, which was allegedly in the river, and sent them to a laboratory in
Austria. It confirmed that the DNA in a bone fragment matched that of one of
the disappeared.
However, family members and many journalists refused to believe the
government’s account. Mexican prosecutors have a history of cover-ups that
have left widespread distrust. An independent report by experts also rejected
many of the official conclusions. The families demanded police keep searching
for the other forty-two students and further investigate the web of corruption that
led to this atrocity.
Mexico seemed to have gotten numb to murder. Between 2007 and 2014, drug
cartels and the security forces fighting them had killed more than eighty-three
thousand people, according to a count by Mexico’s government intelligence
agency.3 Some claimed it was many more. I covered massacres where nearby
residents seemed eerily detached. When an individual goes through a traumatic
experience, the gut reaction is to block it out. Communities do the same. People
became weary of killers, cartels, and carnage. Victims become statistics.
Iguala changed that. The fact that the victims were students, the blatant police
involvement, the inept government response—all shook the heart of Mexican
society. Maybe the moment had just come. At the end of 2014, people took to
the streets in hundreds of thousands to protest narco corruption and violence.
The faces of the disappeared students filled posters on Mexico City walls and
were held up in solidarity from Argentina to Austria to Australia. They were
humans, not numbers.
The attacks and protests shattered an illusion called Mexico’s Moment. It was
a mirage conjured up by the team of President Enrique Peña Nieto and bought by
some American pundits and media. It said that drug cartel violence wasn’t really
that bad, that we could sweep it aside and talk about an expanding Mexican
middle class, spring break in Cancún, and iPad sales.
Iguala put violence back on the front page. It highlighted the problems that
had been building up for years—of cartels that have become an alternate power
controlling mayors and governors, of their tenuous links to federal security
forces, of the international community failing to change a disastrous drug policy.
It made many realize that the problems will not go away if we ignore them but
only if we confront them and change things.

In a painful irony, the disappeared students in Iguala had planned to attend a
march commemorating a massacre of students in Mexico in 1968. This takes us
back to the height of the Cold War, the era of dictatorships and Guevara
guerrillas (and when Robert first bought weed in Juárez). As Mexico was about
to open the Olympics that year, soldiers shot dead at least forty-four people at a
protest in Tlatelolco square in Mexico City.4 The Iguala attack on students
created an agonizing equation:

46 years after soldiers killed
44 protesters,
46 students were murdered or disappeared

*

Despite this dark similarity, the atrocities reflect the different worlds of the Cold
War in the twentieth century and the crime wars in the twenty-first. The
Tlatelolco massacre was almost certainly orchestrated from the top. The one-
party government of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, dubbed the
Perfect Dictatorship, was worried students would disrupt the first ever Olympics
in Latin America.5 It massacred protesters to scare them off the streets. This was
in line with authoritarian regimes across the continent in the era, fighting descent
with bullets.
In contrast, Iguala reflected the brave and twisted new world of narco power.