Borderline Insanity
In what is shaping up to be the deadliest year in Nuevo Laredo’s history, 77 people have died in Mexico’s drug cartel turf war. Now the violence is seeping into Texas.
(Page 2 of 5)
Fifteen minutes later, Lydia glimpsed Claudia, who had supposedly left the club. She panicked, sensing immediately that something had gone wrong. “What happened?!” she barked at Claudia, but her friend’s face was blank. “Where is the key to my car?”
“Miguel has it,” Claudia said.
Lydia shouted a string of curse words and derogatory names. She followed Miguel, who began to head out of the club when he saw her face. Lydia stepped outside and noticed that her car was gone. Her heart stopped. She spotted a pickup parked nearby with at least eight policemen with assault rifles in the cab and in the bed. “Hey, I need your help!” she shouted desperately. But none of them moved; it was as though she had never opened her mouth.
“What’s going on here?!” Lydia yelled as she pursued Miguel, who was now striding across the street. “Please, give me my car. Look, you’re a drug dealer. You have tons of money. I’m an educator.”
Miguel smirked. “The police put a gun to my head and took your car,” he said.
Hector had followed Lydia out of the club and was now surrounded by Miguel’s friends. They were standing at the rear of the club’s parking lot, near a dark alleyway. Lydia heard the ring of cell phones all around her, as about ten men began to emerge from the shadows, as if they had been summoned.
“I’m an American citizen!” Lydia said. “You’re violating my rights!” The men laughed.
Her blood was boiling, and she was trying to think of the worst words she could use for self-defense. “You’re all pieces of shit!” she shouted at them, using the loaded Spanish word mierda. “I’m somebody in the United States!” She remembered how close she was to the border. She turned to her nephew and said in the most threatening tone she could muster: “F— all this shit! Dial 9-1-1 and see if these f—ers won’t listen to me.”
One of them pulled out a gun.
THE CITIZENS OF NUEVO LAREDO have witnessed the violent effects of organized crime for more than twenty years. In the eighties, a group called Los Texas ruled much of the territory in the city, but they were more interested in smuggling immigrants than drugs. At the time, the violence they caused was mostly small-scale, and there were implicit agreements between local gangs that women and children were not to be hurt. That began to change in the mid-nineties, when the well-organized Mexican drug cartels, armed with assault rifles and heavier weapons, began reaching their tentacles into the city. One of the most powerful was the Gulf Cartel, headquartered only two hundred miles down the Rio Grande in Matamoros. When its new leader, Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, stepped into power in 1996, the style of the cartel shifted dramatically. Victims were no longer shot and abandoned on the street; now they were often tortured gruesomely and sometimes incinerated.
Cárdenas had a wide jaw, protruding ears, a receding hairline, and a menacing stare. He was a former federal police officer and a native of Matamoros. Unlike his predecessors, he was known for his abnormally defiant and vicious streak; according to federal authorities, he ordered his own boss shot so that he could take over the cartel’s operations. From his new perch, he came to understand the importance of Nuevo Laredo. U.S.-Mexico trade was increasing, and more and more eighteen-wheelers were rumbling across the international land port. The financial stakes within the drug business had grown too. Cárdenas inherited a $2 billion cocaine business with ties to the Cali Cartel in Colombia, and he continued to expand it. He co-opted fourteen federal special-forces agents who’d been sent by the Mexican government to the border to fight organized crime. They were part of a larger group—the equivalent of the U.S. Navy Seals—that had received training in small-group tactics, mission planning, aerial assaults, and sophisticated communications methods at army bases throughout the world, including the United States. The men became Cárdenas’s enforcers and dubbed themselves Los Zetas, after their radio code name. With time, their ranks would multiply, and they’d become the most mythologized gang on the border.
Cárdenas extended the reaches of the Gulf Cartel in unprecedented ways. His operation evolved into an elaborate nexus of criminals, cops, politicians, and businessmen who controlled every form of contraband, from drugs to weapons to migrants to cars to fine jewelry—even used clothing. Anybody who wanted to dabble in these enterprises had to pay the organization. The money was funneled to Matamoros, where the group’s leaders took care of sending some of the cash to high-ranking government officials for protection. At a minimum, dozens of local and state police officers were put directly on the cartel’s payroll, with payments determined by their rank and their usefulness to the group. The Zetas also controlled their physical territory. They carved up cities into sectors and placed lookouts on main roads and at airports, police and bus stations, and government offices. They purchased sophisticated wiretapping devices and bought off their prey’s cell phone codes from phone companies and service providers. Information became a priceless source of power. Cárdenas also understood the importance of the media, and his men began monitoring and kidnapping journalists.
In 2000, when President Fox’s administration came to power, the Gulf Cartel faced its first serious law enforcement threat. Fox announced that he was unleashing “the mother of all battles” against Mexico’s drug traffickers. His team shared intelligence with the DEA and began arresting high-profile leaders from at least four major drug groups. Mexican federal agents raided one of the Zetas’ properties in Nuevo Laredo and discovered a twelve-page list of payees who were receiving anywhere from $300 to $1,500 a week, including two commanders and a supervisor from the Nuevo Laredo police department. Cárdenas became ever more insolent. He directly threatened U.S. drug agents, Mexican army leaders, and the federal attorney general, and he instituted a style reminiscent of Colombia, where the drug trade had flowered in opposition to the government—not, as in Mexico, in collusion with it. But on March 14, 2003, a shoot-out erupted in downtown Matamoros, and the unthinkable happened. Cárdenas finally became a hostage of the government.
Drug agents and border residents cheered the president. But in retrospect, Fox’s seemingly heroic action produced a power vacuum, one that some have dubbed the “gelatin effect”: The once highly organized Gulf Cartel was left leaderless and in disarray. The Zetas shifted from enforcing for Cárdenas to moving their own drugs. Confusion ruled the streets, especially in Nuevo Laredo, where most of the men left to run the cartel’s operations were young, irreverent, and inexperienced. Ranging from their mid-twenties to early thirties, they were criminals whose résumés consisted mainly of using drugs and stealing cars. Overnight, they became bosses. They began taxing, kidnapping, and extorting whom they could, and any remaining boundaries of respect toward certain citizens of the border were quickly forgotten.
WHEN SHE SAW THE GUN, Lydia’s body froze,but the words that tumbled out of her mouth would later make her roar with laughter. “I’m sorry! I didn’t know you had guns!” she blurted. “Please, please, please. If you want the car, it’s yours.”
She saw the man point the gun at her, and she saw her nephew grab the man’s arm and the gun. She remembers thinking: “One of them is going to die.” It occurred to her to change her strategy, and she considered trying to negotiate with the criminals. But her voice was still pleading. “I’ll give you whatever you want!”
“Shut your mouth, you whore.”
Another man leaped forward with a gun in his hand and smacked Hector across the brow. He stumbled forward, and Lydia caught him to keep him from falling. His blood spattered her white blouse. In the dizzying blur of events, she had a gruesome vision. She pictured herself on the ground, dead. Then she pictured something different. She saw the face of Priscilla Cisneros’s daughter.
At the time, Lydia knew Priscilla simply as Ms. Cisneros, a colleague she’d met at a school in her district. For the past three months, a chilling story had circulated quietly among Laredo teachers that in September, Priscilla’s daughter, Brenda, had been kidnapped with her friend Yvette Martinez across the border.
My Library
