Bordertown Letter From Tamaulipas
Ghost Town
Just a few miles across the Rio Grande, the residents of Ciudad Mier lived in terror, forgotten by their government and at the mercy of drug cartels. Could anyone survive this nightmare?
YEAR OF FEAR: After last February, when a war broke out between two rival cartels, Ciudad Mier descended into chaos.
Debbie Menchaca says: It was with great sadness that I read the article on Mier. My husband descends from 5 of the original families that settled that community in 1753. A beautiful city so rich in history, it’s horrible the way the drug cartels have destroyed the very fiber of the community. This is first time I have heard about the violence in Mier. We who live in South Texas are very much aware of the crime that continues to plague our border. I am truly grateful for the courage Ms. Balli has to risk her own life to get the real facts and expose the hardships the families who do still live in Mier face on a daily basis. Keep up the good work... (February 20th, 2011 at 5:53pm)
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The Bad Ones came to town around eight o’clock on a cold February evening, and no one was prepared. When the gunfire and the explosions began, panic coursed through the narrow streets and spilled into the small cement and cinder-block homes where families were warming their dinners. Children cried, doors and windows slammed shut, people dropped to the ground. They closed their eyes and felt their hearts race. Outside they could hear the ceaseless spitting of AK-47’s and .50-caliber sniper rifles, the thunder of blasting grenades. Just three miles south of the Rio Grande, the Mexican town of Ciudad Mier would never be the same.
It’s not like the Bad Ones—this is what the Mierenses would come to call them—hadn’t been there already. It’s not like they hadn’t been running their operations out of Mier and the surrounding towns, carrying their loads of cocaine and marijuana through the surrounding brushland and up to the lip of the river, where they placed them on boats or rafts or inner tubes and floated them across into Texas. Even if no one spoke of them by name, they were already deeply woven into the social fabric. But on this day, they came like an invading army. The following morning, on February 23, the onslaught resumed before the sun had even risen. Forty SUVs swarmed the local police station. Armed to the teeth, dozens of men descended and forced their way in, taking every one of the officers, confiscating files, radios, and weapons. Then they scattered about town, setting houses on fire. Word spread that they were kidnapping dozens of people, perhaps entire families. It took more than three hours for the military to respond, and when soldiers finally confronted the men, bodies fell on both sides.
As people would come to tell it, that was the day, one year ago this month, “when the war began.” Thirty-five days before, 63 miles away, one man had killed another in the border city of Reynosa, and now it was raining fire. The murder was the culmination of more than a year of tension between the Gulf cartel and Los Zetas. Although the Zetas, originally a group of deserters from the Mexican army’s special forces, had begun as the enforcement arm of the Gulf, they gradually gained clout after 2003, when the Gulf’s leader, Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, was arrested. By 2008, they were an organization in their own right, operating alongside the Gulf in an alliance known as the Company. While both groups held ground in the larger cities, the area around Mier became more tightly controlled by the Zetas. Then the tension exploded. The man who had been killed in Reynosa was a plaza boss for the Zetas, managing the flow of drugs through the city. The Zetas demanded the killer, but the Gulf refused. That is how the war began.
After the explosions subsided, Mayor José Iván Mancillas Hinojosa phoned the governor of Tamaulipas and begged for help. But the reinforcements would take nine months to arrive. The state had been embroiled in conflict ever since President Felipe Calderón, who had declared war on the cartels immediately following his inauguration, in 2006, had unleashed the marines on the Gulf and the Zetas. But now it became a three-way battle that would bring Tamaulipas to its knees. The same days that Mier was attacked by the Gulf last February, the cities of Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo and the towns of Valle Hermoso, Díaz Ordaz, Camargo, and Miguel Alemán all experienced terrifying gun battles. Over the next months, decapitated and dismembered bodies appeared hanging from trees and utility poles. The severed head of a state police commander was delivered to a military post. Banners were strung in which the Gulf cartel exhorted the government to step aside and allow them to wipe out the Zetas, since “poison can only be combated with poison.”
For the average resident in Mier whose life was not directly touched by the drug trade, the Zetas and the Gulf cartel were one and the same: Los Malos, “the Bad Ones.” But now Mier became a battleground between the two. Throughout that spring, summer, and fall, the townspeople would have to withstand more gunfights, each lasting six, seven, eight hours at a time. The police station was bombed. The buildings became so severely scarred by repeated rounds from AK-47’s and heavy-caliber rifles that they began to look like sieves. Then, on November 5, in Matamoros, marines tracked down one of the Gulf’s top leaders, Ezequiel Cárdenas Guillén, a.k.a. Tony Tormenta, and killed him. The Zetas saw an opportunity to regain the upper hand in Mier. The same day that Cárdenas fell, word spread that the Bad Ones were out in the streets, shouting for all Mierenses to leave town or be killed. Of the families who remained, hundreds panicked and fled, leaving behind only those who were too frail to move.
Those who had visas crossed into Texas. Others crowded in with friends in nearby Miguel Alemán, where the mayor set up a temporary shelter in the Lions Club for some five hundred people who had no place to go. Relief aid trickled in. Then the journalists came, Mexican and American, and wrote stories that described the shelter as the first for drug war “refugees” in Mexico. On November 20 the Wall Street Journal suggested that Tamaulipas was a failed state.
This was a public relations disaster for the federal government, which was still reveling in the killing of Cárdenas. Its strategy of targeting cartel leaders had once again unleashed a wave of violence, and it had no plan for containing the resulting unrest in Mier and across Tamaulipas. So four days later, officials announced a new mission, dubbed Coordinated Operation Northeast, which would finally send additional troops and federal police to the state (and to neighboring Nuevo León, where the Gulf and Zetas were also fighting). It had taken them three weeks to respond to the mass exodus of Mier, a town of 6,500 citizens. But just five days after the reinforcements arrived, a spokesman for Calderón declared that crime in Tamaulipas was down by almost half. Then came the order to shut down the shelter, since, according to the government, it was safe for the Mierenses to go home.
Although Mier is a few miles from the Rio Grande, it has no “twin city” on the Texas side and no international bridge. To get there, you cross upriver at Falcon Dam or downriver at the Roma toll bridge and proceed along Mexican Federal Highway 2, which parallels the border. The drive takes less than fifteen minutes from the crossings, but it can quickly feel desolate. They call this region La Ribereña, “land of the river,” a long, narrow strip of territory bound by the highway and the Rio Grande and running from Nuevo Laredo down to Matamoros and the Gulf of Mexico. The 150-mile stretch between Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa is more affectionately known as La Frontera Chica, “the small frontier.” The four towns along it—Guerrero, Mier, Miguel Alemán, and Camargo—are small in population but rich in history. Along with Nuevo Laredo and Reynosa, they form the cradle of the borderlands: More than 250 years ago, when the river was not yet an international boundary, Spanish colonizers founded three of the towns (Miguel Alemán came later), and the newly landed families dispersed north and south. Today all the longtime Mexican American families of South Texas can trace their roots to one of these settlements. Yet the vastness of the area, its proximity to the international line, and the rugged and desolate terrain make it a prime spot for drug smuggling. Most of the drugs that enter South Texas come through here; once on American soil, they get transported up to Laredo or down to McAllen, then stuffed into hidden compartments in cars and trucks or mingled with legitimate goods in tractor-trailers and rolled out north to an insatiable market.
In early December, a day after the shelter had been shuttered and the families had supposedly returned to Mier, I visited the town with a friend whose ancestors were from there. I had already looked at photos of the scorched buildings, the pockmarked walls, the charred hulks of trucks, the shattered windows everywhere. But seeing the entire landscape of devastation in person left me speechless. I had reported from Nuevo Laredo in 2005 and Ciudad Juárez in 2009, when each border city was considered the most unstable in Mexico due to drug violence. Yet Mier was the first place I’d seen that embodied the true meaning of “war.” As we drove into town, dozens of soldiers stood guard at a checkpoint, some of them hiding behind piles of sandbags with mounted rifles. No signs of normal life remained, even on a sunny Saturday at noon: On the surface, Mier appeared all but empty. Occasionally a car or pickup truck rattled down the desolate streets, breaking the silence. Up ahead of us, two soldiers waded through knee-high weeds that had sprouted in a lot where only the blackened skeleton of a building remained.
Turning down a side street, I glimpsed a flash of life. Two older women were hunched over, vigorously sweeping the ground outside their house, which stood between buildings that had been ravaged by fire. I rolled down my window and asked for directions to the main plaza and whether it was safe to drive there. “I can’t assure you of anything right now,” one of them replied. I told her that we were looking for a friend of a friend who lived there; the woman recognized the name, but she informed us that the person had left town months before. I said that we were journalists and asked if she might let us inside her home to chat. She seemed to frown, so I started to explain that I didn’t want to be seen with my notebook, but a military convoy rolled by just then and slowed to a crawl, the soldiers eyeing us suspiciously. The woman motioned for us to park and follow her inside.
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