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.
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The disappearance of the two American women in Nuevo Laredo would eventually make headlines all over the U.S. and be a featured story on CNN, America’s Most Wanted, and Geraldo. But that fall, the incident was still only local news, and Lydia had not talked to Priscilla about it. After Brenda’s disappearance, Priscilla spent most of her time at work inside her small, spare office. When she walked out, she smiled at her co-workers meekly. Every morning, she woke up with the agonizing question of whether Brenda might return that day.
Brenda was a business accounting student at Laredo Community College. The last night her family spent with her, they were celebrating her twenty-third birthday at Logan’s Roadhouse in Laredo. Afterward, her friend Yvette, an attractive 27-year-old mother of two, had said she wanted to take her out. In the Logan’s parking lot, Brenda fished for her driver’s license and some cash, then handed her purse to her mother. She told her they were going to a club called Graham Central Station and waved good-bye with a smile.
But Brenda and Yvette did not visit the club that night. Instead, they crossed the border and attended a concert in Nuevo Laredo featuring Mexican singer Pepe Aguilar, whom Brenda admired. Yvette had apparently surprised her friend with the tickets. After the show, the women were supposed to have met up with a male friend of Yvette’s at a makeshift nightclub on the fairgrounds where the concert took place, but he never showed. The same young man—to date, his identity remains unknown—reached Yvette on her cell phone as she and Brenda drove back home at roughly four-fifteen in the morning on September 18. They were about five blocks from crossing the international bridge when her phone rang. That’s the last anyone heard of them.
After weeks of searching for clues, Yvette’s stepfather, William Slemaker, found her pearl-white Mitsubishi Galant in a towing yard in Nuevo Laredo. The towing company’s workers said that they’d picked up the car from the local police station under orders from the cops themselves. But when Slemaker spoke to the police, they denied having any record of the vehicle. There were no clues inside the car that would point to the women’s fate, but there were two fresh dents on its rear bumper that suggested someone may have bumped them from behind until they stopped the car. Their families concluded that this must have transpired shortly after Yvette received the mystery phone call from her friend. But to this day, no other clues have been uncovered.
After the women’s disappearance, Yvette’s and Brenda’s parents searched out other kidnapping victims’ families and organized a group called Laredo’s Missing. They presented their cases to law enforcement authorities and created a Web site and billboards asking the public for tips. When I spoke with Priscilla in March, she was tired of the press. Still, she continued to hope that the next journalist might be the angel who would somehow deliver her message to her daughter’s captors. “I don’t want to know who you are or why you did it,” she said, as though she were speaking to them directly. “Simply put her on the phone.” She finished our interview with a weary plea. “If I could talk to President Fox or President George Bush, I would tell them, ‘Please. Do something on our borders. Because they are no longer secure.’”
FIVE MONTHS AFTER OSIEL CÁRDENAS GUILLÁN’S ARREST, downtown Nuevo Laredo was momentarily paralyzed by what seemed like a war scene. It was a little past two in the morning on August 1, 2003, when a group of agents from the Agencia Federal de Investigaciones, the Mexican counterpart to the FBI, came across a convoy of late-model sport utility vehicles and tried to stop them for interrogation. The passengers, dressed head-to-toe in black, fired at the federal cops with assault rifles. The agents radioed desperately for help, and local police and the army came to their aid. The police returned fire at the men in the SUVs. Two of the cars’ gas tanks exploded with the hits, killing the drivers. The shoot-out, which occurred in the heart of downtown, lasted nearly an hour and was carried over to at least one other street intersection. Three men were killed, six were injured, and seven were detained. An investigation concluded that the armed convoy had belonged to a group allied with Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, a notorious and dangerous drug lord from Sinaloa, the birthplace of the Mexican drug mafia. It was the beginning of the turf war between El Chapo’s men and the Zetas for control of Nuevo Laredo.
“That was the day we lost our peace,” said Raymundo Ramos, a freelance journalist and human rights worker, recalling the shoot-out as he pulled out the day’s newspaper. We were sitting in a small office with peach-colored walls and maroon lace curtains that houses his human rights organization, Comité de Derechos Humanos Grupo 5 de Febrero. Its domesticity contrasted sharply with the ghastly photos of bloodied bodies that appeared on Ramos’s computer screen. “You tell me if you wouldn’t need psychological help to overcome this,” he said as he ran his mouse over the pictures. The images showed all the signatures of the business: the plastic bag, the silver duct tape. But instead of faces, there were red masses of flesh and brains. Ramos explained each photo as he clicked through them: This one was buried alive. This one had his head busted with an iron bar. This one had his mouth and nose taped up. Before he founded his organization, Ramos had worked for El Mañana,Nuevo Laredo’s largest newspaper, for more than a decade. During that time, the most shocking image he’d ever come across was a stabbing victim. “We’d never experienced the bazooka; now we have,” he said. “We’d never experienced shoot-outs in restaurants; now we have. What message do you send a society when you find a group of victims murdered in such a violent way? What is this group of people trying to sell? Terror, terror, terror.”
The spread of fear has been a potent method of social control. Locals say that some federal agents assigned to Nuevo Laredo have opted to resign from their jobs rather than move to this part of the border. From the infamous La Palma maximum-security prison near Mexico City, Cárdenas continues to manage his empire. He employs prison guards and attorneys, uses cell phones to communicate with his people, and negotiates with leaders of other cartels who are being held in the same prison, sometimes in adjoining cells. Fox’s plan of taking out the cartels’ heads has accomplished little on the streets or among local and state police, where corruption and secret alliances still flourish. Although he sent federal troops to the border several times in the first months of 2005, the rampant corruption among local law enforcement and state authorities made cooperation impossible. And perhaps the most disconcerting fact about the recent deluge of violence is its unabashedly democratic nature; even the cops are dying, including four police commanders by mid-June. FBI agents say those policemen had most likely aligned themselves with one of the battling groups and paid the price.
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