Bones: A Story of Brothers, a Champion Horse and the Race to Stop America’s Most Brutal Cartel. Joe Tone

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СКАЧАТЬ criminal gang, MS-13, and showed up in Nuevo Laredo with a message for the Zetas: Retreat or face the wrath of Los Negros, which is what Barbie had dubbed his own mercenary unit. The name translated to “the Black Ones.”

      As the Zetas battled Los Negros, Miguel revealed himself to be a charismatic leader but also happy—desperate even—to mix it up in firefights. The specific roots of Miguel’s bloodlust are hard to pinpoint. People who have fought and done business alongside him take it for granted now, as if his thirst for violence is among his immutable traits, like his chocolate skin or night-sky hair. But there was no known violence in his childhood; his de facto patriarch, Kiko, wasn’t believed to spill any blood during his short-lived criminal career.

      It appeared that Miguel was driven by a combustible combination of resentment, ambition, and cynicism, a man seizing at power that was once, and would soon be, laughably out of grasp. He didn’t expect to live into his forties, and he behaved that way as he and the Zetas seized Nuevo Laredo. He and the Zetas murdered four cops associated with El Chacho, then killed El Chacho, dumping his body in the town square clad in women’s underwear. Later, he ordered the Nuevo Laredo police, whom the Zetas now basically controlled, to round up any smuggler who had resisted the Gulf’s takeover. There were thirty-four such holdouts crammed into the house by the time Miguel arrived dressed in black fatigue pants and black boots, a makeshift uniform designed to evoke the power of a Special Forces unit. He picked one out and brought him forward, then asked the assembled men whether anyone knew the location of the heart. No one answered, so Miguel offered a visual anatomy lesson, plunging his knife into the man’s chest and watching him die.

      As the battle for Nuevo Laredo raged, the Zetas continued recruiting ex-soldiers, growing in power as the arm of the Gulf Cartel. Each was assigned a call number based on seniority: the first to defect was Z-1; the second, Z-2; and so on. Technically, only soldiers could be Zetas. But Miguel exhibited such savagery that he was bequeathed a call number, despite never having served a day in the military. By then he was the fortieth so-called Zeta, Z-40, but everyone just called him Cuarenta. “Forty.”

      Throughout the 2000s, Forty accumulated enough power within the Zetas, and enough enemies outside of it, that he could have gotten away with hiding out on his ranches all day while his killers fought his war. But he remained a grunt. He dressed modestly and ready for battle, in fatigues and T-shirts, with knives, assault rifles, and grenades on his hips. He was still among the first out of the truck when the bullets started flying.

      He continued roaming the streets of Nuevo Laredo, enticing poor teenagers to join up. But there was a problem: they couldn’t fight. Though the Zetas now included hundreds of members, most had no military training at all. So Forty improvised.

      He traveled to Guatemala to recruit former Special Forces, known as Kaibiles, to train his young recruits. He shipped them to a camp in the mountains near Ciudad Victoria, the state capital, where they slept side by side on cots. In grueling training sessions, former Special Forces from Mexico and the Kaibiles taught them to wage war. They crawled and breached and ran, stripped guns and shot all manner of weapons. They learned the art of urban warfare, practicing bursting through doors and clearing houses.

      Forty himself taught them to kill. He tied up some enemy he’d captured and offered his recruit the choice of a sledgehammer or a machete. The ones who didn’t start swinging were relegated to duty as halcones—“hawks,” or lookouts. The ones who did became Forty’s sicarios, and they helped the Zetas grow their brand, which was defined by headline-grabbing violence. From decapitations to swinging corpses to bodies burned in oil drums, Zeta-style killings would come to define Mexico’s drug war.

      It was a blood binge fueled by several factors, starting with the Zetas’ background as paramilitary soldiers. Smuggling had long been a family business in Mexico, governed by unwritten rules like the ones that governed the American mob wars. But the Zetas weren’t a party to that social contract. They were mercenaries, with all the training of an elite killing squad but none of the duty to protect.

      There were other factors at play, too. Scholars believe the Zetas’ penchant for beheadings was influenced by the Kaibiles, who favored the practice. It’s believed the Zetas’ desire to videotape the beheadings, and to use social media to disseminate them, was inspired by Al-Qaeda.

      There may have been religious influences, too. Though Forty and most other traffickers practiced Catholicism, some Zetas worshipped at the feet of Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, a folkloric goddess whose graces are sought by some impoverished Mexicans. Shrines to her stand tall in stash houses and prison cells across Mexico. Some other Zetas practiced Santería, an Afro-Caribbean faith that borrows from Catholicism. One early Zeta named Mamito considered himself a brujo of this faith, someone to whom the burden of violence fell directly from the hands of God.

      Or maybe the extreme violence was a simple business calculation. Forty and the Zetas were disrupters, a small upstart seeking power in a system tightly guarded by dynastic, politically influential families. They’d come to fuck things up.

      If fighting off La Barbie and the Mexican government wasn’t enough, the Zetas soon discovered a new enemy: its patrones at the Gulf Cartel. In 2007, four years after he was captured, Osiel Cárdenas, the Zetas’ founder, was extradited to Texas, where he faced charges that would land most drug dealers in prison for life. But Cárdenas agreed to plead guilty and forfeit fifty million dollars in assets. In exchange, the inventor of an elite killing squad would spend just twenty-five years in prison.

      Though his agreement was shrouded in secrecy, it was easy for the Zetas to deduce how Cárdenas had landed such a sweet deal. He’d agreed to snitch. Feeling betrayed, Forty and the Zetas started to splinter off from the Gulf Cartel, a division that would alter the criminal landscape and increase bloodshed across Mexico.

      It was the rise of the paramilitaries. As the Zetas helped the Gulf expand, and Barbie’s Los Negros fought for Sinaloa, rival cartels responded the way rival businesses do: they chased the trend. The Juárez Cartel recruited former police officers for its enforcement wing, La Linea. Artistas Asesinos, a Juárez street gang, went to work there as enforcers for the Sinaloa cartel.

      These new groups weren’t generational smugglers, inheriting traditions from their poppy-farming fathers and grandfathers. They were embittered warriors who had opted out of Mexico’s rule of law. Human smuggling, gun-running, oil thievery—all crime was now on the table. All violence in its pursuit was an acceptable cost of doing business. Paramilitary tactics became the norm.

      Local politicians and business owners, once in contract with community-oriented, moblike smuggling enterprises, decried the new tactics, putting even more pressure on the Mexican government to respond. It did. Capos kept falling. Leadership shifted. New factions and alliances formed. The paramilitary groups, the best equipped to seize power, seized it. The Zetas seized the most.

      Vicente Fox’s strategy—using military force to aggressively target cartel leaders—was clearly hopeless. Yet in 2006, his successor, Felipe Calderón, doubled down, declaring “war” on the cartels. He found a willing partner in the Bush administration, which agreed to send billions of dollars in aid, to be spent on training, military helicopters, and surveillance planes.

      In accepting the Americans’ aid, Calderón was accepting the American strategy of attacking the source of supply (the farmers in Colombia, the traffickers in Mexico, the dealers in the States) rather than the source of demand (American users and drug prohibition laws). It was plainly Sisyphean, if Sisyphus had lugged his boulder by Black Hawk. Economists far and wide argued that spending money on treatment and education in the United States would have a greater impact on the flow of drugs. Even more impactful would be decriminalization. Reducing the risk involved in making and selling drugs would, economists believed, reduce prices, decrease the value of the shipping channels, and decrease the СКАЧАТЬ