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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On the U.S. side of the border, an entire infrastructure of financial and human capital supports the trade. In Laredo, there is a surplus of young males looking for work. With few traditional job or educational prospects, they are no less easily lured by the promise of riches than those wealthy businessmen whose banking and trade businesses are tainted by drug money. The Zetas have formed alliances with major prison gangs in South Texas, including the Mexican Mafia, the Hermandad de Pistoleros Latinos, and the Texas Syndicate. In turn, these groups hire juvenile gangs from Laredo and other border cities to move drugs, pose as lookouts, execute drive-by shootings, and steal. In this way, the narcotics trade has become a very American, very local crime problem that lately has emulated the style of the Mexicans’. Laredo police have raided homes where they’ve confiscated high-caliber weapons, as well as assault rifles, and have rescued kidnapping victims. Already in 2005, the city has witnessed at least nine drug-related murders, some of them resembling the gang-style executions of Nuevo Laredo. And although the United States has a vastly more effective law enforcement system and a rule of law, impunity related to drug crimes is a problem here too. Most of the homicides in Laredo that appear to be drug-related remain unsolved. “These people are hiring hit men from somewhere else,” Laredo police lieutenant Jesus Torres, who is in charge of investigating kidnappings and homicides, told me. “They’re complete strangers. They move on to another city. They just completely disappear off the face of Laredo.”
“If before we were only twenty, now I’ve lost count./Disposed to die, they know us as Zetas./We’ve earned our position, that’s why we’re respected.” This ballad, sung in a nasal voice to the raw riffs of an accordion, is recorded on a CD that sells in the street markets of the border. It contains nineteen swaggering songs that describe the history and workings of the Zetas. They document perhaps most faithfully the vast cultural transformation that is unfolding in tandem with the crime on the South Texas—Mexico border. An army of young men nicknamed the Zetitas, or Zetillas, has coalesced in Matamoros, Reynosa, and Nuevo Laredo, where members do odd jobs for the cartel in hopes of climbing up the ranks and tasting power and money in a way that never seemed possible in their low-end, dead-end lives. The struggle to control the trade is also a class war, a hybrid of American economic promise and Mexican-style justice. It is the poor imitating the lifestyle and business strategies of the rich. They have bought homes in the most expensive neighborhoods in Nuevo Laredo, which they use as stash houses or meeting places, sending the original residents scurrying quietly across the border. They are stealing and driving the upper crust’s cars. These new gang leaders have little tolerance for rich kids or for anyone who they think might be encroaching on their turf.
PRISCILLA CISNEROS wasn’t the only person Lydia knew who had been caught up in the random violence. One afternoon I visited Sylvia, who manages the building where Lydia lives. Like other women of her class in Laredo, she was very put together, with curls folded into her golden-brown hair and blue eyeshadow brushed over her eyelids. She recounted the December day, just a few weeks before Lydia was held at gunpoint, when her 22-year-old nephew lived the most frightening day of his life. As she told the story, her voice ran a range of volumes, at times reaching an extremely high, barely audible pitch.
“My nephew’s got a home in Sabinas Hidalgo, which is a town near Monterrey, but he also owns property here in Laredo. His family owns a forwarding agency—you know, the trailers, the import and export. He had been taking courses at TAMIU [Texas A&M International University], and he finished a course, his English course. So he says, you know what, I’m going to start doing the business here in Laredo—all the business that goes into Mexico. And the family in Mexico ship the merchandise over to the U.S.
“It was mid-December when he was coming to Laredo from Sabinas. He was driving a Grand Marquis. I guess it was probably a 2002. He was coming on Degollado Avenue, and a cop just puts on the lights and stops him. This was daylight. It was probably about three-thirty, four o’clock. And he’s freaking out: Why are they stopping me? [The policeman] radioes in some other officers—well, my nephew’s thinking they’re officers. All of a sudden, an unmarked car gets behind him so he couldn’t move backward, and a guy gets out and opens his door with a machine gun. You see how the police are involved in this?
“The guy comes over with an AK-47 and sits right next to [my nephew] and says, ‘Let’s go.’ In my nephew’s car. ‘Let’s go, let’s go.’ My nephew says, ‘What’s going on? What have I done?’ He says: ‘Let’s go.’ He had him driving for two hours around Nuevo Laredo. Right around five-thirty, when it started getting dark, he says, ‘Turn here. Go here. Go there. Go there.’ And he took him into the ranches. My nephew didn’t know where he was going. He doesn’t know Nuevo Laredo.
“It was pitch-black, and they drove him into, like, a warehouse. They asked him to get down, and they asked for his little credential for voting—your picture identification in Mexico. And so they start interrogating him and all this go-around. There was a bunch of men, older men around him at this warehouse out in the boonies. They start asking him all these questions, and it was the same questions: Who’s your father? Who’s your mother? What do you do? Where do you live? The same questions, over and over. Kind of like what cops do to try to get the truth out of you, and if you mess up, they know that you’re lying. He says all these were cops that had gone bad. None of them were dressed in uniform, only the one that stopped him. He kept thinking, ‘I can’t mess up.’ He started crying. He said, ‘God, help me. I can’t mess up.’
“Finally, they grabbed his cell and they started going down his directory. And he thinks that the one that saved him was his grandmother. Because he had Tío I-Don’t-Know-What and Tía I-Don’t-Know-What and just different names of uncles and aunts and nieces and whatever. And then finally, it said, ‘Abuelita.’ ‘Grandmother’? They said, ‘You know what? This is a momma’s boy.’ But, of course, they used the word cabrón. ‘This guy is nothing but a joto,a faggot.’ Like he doesn’t amount to anything. By that time, they had already hit him here in the back with a gun—oh, they had guns, machine guns all around him. And they kept on asking him who he worked for. He said, ‘All I do—I have a forwarding agency.’ He told them, ‘That’s all I do, and it’s my parents’, and I’m on dispatch, trying to get customers. I’m the one who connects the U.S. to the Mexican side.’
“They hit him in the back, and he made sure he wouldn’t fall because he kept on thinking, ‘If I fall, they’re going to get me on the ground.’ So he never fell, but they kept on kicking him. Finally, they threw the cell on the floor, together with the ID. They told him, ‘Hurry up and leave, before we kill you.’ So right away he fell to the ground and grabbed his stuff. And they’re going, ‘Go, go, go!’ Like, ‘Hurry, hurry!’ He was all nervous. He grabbed his things, and then he went into his car and turned it on. This was late. Six-thirty or seven o’clock. By the time he reached the road, he didn’t know where he was at. He was freaking out, crying and crying. Finally, he saw some lights far away. So he started heading towards those lights, and he was able to get to Nuevo Laredo.
“The next day, his mother came into my office, crying. It was as if they had just murdered her son. She was so scared of how she was seeing him. He couldn’t go in the car. He was 21 at the time. He’s young, but it just hit him real bad.
“What I found out—or what I think, from talking to people—I heard that in the Zetas, there’s a lot of young kids involved in their twenties, and very good-looking. Like, there’s ‘La Barbie,’ and they call him La Barbie because he’s so good-looking. He’s murdered many, many other ones. His name has come up a lot. My nephew is also very handsome. And they said that at that time, [the police and rival gangs] were checking any young, good-looking kids with nice vehicles, just stopping them at random to say, ‘Hey, what the heck?’”
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