BY THE END OF 2010, THE ZETAS WERE FIRMLY IN CONTROL OF THE STRATEGIC state of Veracruz, a former jewel in the Gulf Cartel’s empire. For months, murders and kidnappings had engulfed the state as the former allies fought to the death for the territory. The city of Veracruz was the home of the biggest, most valuable heavy cargo port on the Gulf coast and the largest in the country. And it was as vital to Mexico’s drug trade as Nuevo Laredo.
As gun battles, kidnappings, and killings intensified in the city, the violence began to touch even the most privileged Veracruzanos, like Alfonso del Rayo Mora, a young and wealthy real estate developer. A member of the PRI, del Rayo had dipped his toe into politics in Veracruz as a member of the city council, but he’d never dived in so deep that he’d become acquainted with men like Miguel Treviño. But that would soon change.
In early December, del Rayo was on his way home from a nightclub in the early morning hours when at a stoplight a small four-door Nissan pulled up alongside his Porsche SUV. Two men in black tactical gear sitting in the back of the Nissan pointed their AK-47s at his driver’s side window, and the Nissan’s driver gestured for him to pull to the curb. Del Rayo put his foot on the gas.
He pushed the accelerator past a hundred miles per hour as he took a traffic circle, and for a moment he felt the SUV go airborne. In his rearview mirror he could see the Nissan laboring to keep up. But behind it were two more cars filled with heavily armed men. The whole thing had to be a case of mistaken identity, he thought. He decided to circle back to the nightclub, El Candelabro, that he’d just left.
He pulled into the valet parking and ran toward the front door. He could hear music and laughter inside. Some of his friends were still there. But the doors were locked. Desperate, he banged on the front doors wildly with his fists. “Help me!” he screamed. “Let me in. It’s me, Alfonso.”
The convoy of armed men pulled into the parking lot. At least twelve of them surrounded del Rayo. The men wore uniforms of the Agencia Federal de Investigación, or AFI, a federal police agency tasked with fighting narcotrafficking. But del Rayo knew they couldn’t be police. Some of them were barely out of their teens. He’d heard of other wealthy businessmen who’d been kidnapped. They even had a verb for it now—levantar—to be “picked up,” as if they were being lifted to the heavens rather than bundled into SUVs by hooded commandos. Maybe they were, in a certain sense. Because most never returned, which meant they were surely dead. Because of fear and the stigma, the wealthy never talked about it openly. They would assume the kidnapped person was somehow mixed up in some dirty business with the cartel. No one knew for sure, and chances were they never would. It would never be reported to the police, never investigated, because the police often worked in tandem with the Zetas. This reality haunted their daily lives, yet they all felt that the rash of kidnappings would never touch them or their families. That had been del Rayo’s feeling too, until now.
“I’ve done nothing!” del Rayo yelled. “You’ve got the wrong person!” Two of the men grabbed him and tried to throw him headfirst into the backseat of the Nissan. Del Rayo kicked wildly as the two piled on top of him and bashed his head with the muzzles of their AK-47s. Blood poured down his face. Del Rayo thought they’d kill him right there. One of the men forced him into the backseat facedown. He imagined his friends watching from behind the tinted windows of the nightclub. Where was the club’s security team? The other handcuffed his wrists behind his back and shackled his feet. Then another gunman lay on top of him so he couldn’t struggle anymore. Del Rayo tasted the salt of his own blood.
A few miles down the road, the sicario lying on top of him realized he’d left his AK-47 in the parking lot. The other men cursed at him—pendejo, they yelled. The wheels of the car squealed as they did a U-turn on the boulevard. They pulled into the parking lot again. Del Rayo heard one of the gunmen thanking someone from the club. The security guys were taking care of the AK-47 in case the men came back for it. Now he knew he was truly alone. The world went dark.
When del Rayo regained consciousness, they were pulling him up a flight of stairs. The sun was beginning to rise. He was handcuffed and his ankles shackled. He groped for the wall or a railing; the blood from his head wounds stained everything he touched. His shirt was soaked. From the outside, the house looked ordinary, like any other in a working-class neighborhood. But inside, the barred windows were covered with sheets. It was the smell that assaulted him first—a stench like an overflowing toilet. There was no furniture, just a few chairs and a folding table in the front room.
The gunmen stripped him of his clothes and shoes. The sicario who had shoved him into the Nissan slipped on del Rayo’s Gucci loafers and looked at them admiringly, while another put on his designer jeans and paraded around for the other men, who wolf whistled. A third complained that he’d only been left with the shirt and it was soaked in blood. “It’s ruined,” he said, pouting.
After a few minutes of this, they faced del Rayo, who was left only in his underwear, toward the living room wall and began beating him with long wooden sticks. “This is what you get for fighting back,” said the sicario wearing his Gucci loafers. He was the one who had been lying on top of del Rayo in the back of the Nissan and who had forgotten his AK-47 at the nightclub, which had made him the object of ridicule. “This is what you get for messing up our car,” said the sicario in del Rayo’s designer jeans, who whacked him violently in the kidneys.
It felt like the beating would never end, that he would die right there. But, finally, they seemed to grow tired of it. A man who called himself Capitán Muñeco, “Captain Doll,” addressed del Rayo, who lay in a crumpled heap on the floor. “We are the Zetas,” he said. “We are the law, and what we do for a living is kill people. We want $4.5 million. You have three days to pay us.”
“I don’t have that kind of cash,” del Rayo said. “I need to sell properties, land, to get you the money. You’ll have to release me. I need more time.”
“Three days or consider yourself dead,” said Capitán Muñeco. He assured del Rayo that the Zetas knew he could pay. “We’ve been to your house, we know where your children go to school, what cars you drive; that you have a pretty wife.” He leered. “We’ve even watched you in El Candelabro.”
The sicario wearing del Rayo’s Gucci loafers took him to the back of the small house. In the service room, where there would normally be a washer and dryer, there was a family being held hostage. The Zetas were trying to find a relative, anyone who might pay up for their release. But they were so poor just to look at them del Rayo could only feel pity. The old man, with his gnarled hands, and his ancient wife sat tied up next to their two middle-aged sons and their wives and children. Campesinos from Central America, they had nothing but threadbare clothes and worn shoes. They had been on their way to the United States. It seemed they had been in the room for several days without access to a toilet. The smell made his eyes water. But next door it was even worse. Several blindfolded teenagers were on their knees, also covered in their own mess. The stench almost made him throw up. The kids, covered in gang tattoos, had been reduced to an almost animal state. Del Rayo felt that if he were left there they would tear him limb from limb and consume him.
He was relieved when he was taken to another room—this one empty—where he would be kept isolated. But he would not be entirely alone. The sicario, who couldn’t have been older than twenty, handcuffed himself to del Rayo. He told del Rayo that Capitán Muñeco was second in command in the city of Veracruz, and that he was in one of his safe houses. He would be in charge of him, he said, until del Rayo paid the $4.5 million.
Two days passed and del Rayo waited for some sign of whether he might live or die. At night Capitán Muñeco and his lieutenant, a large fat man, stayed up doing lines of coke and groping prostitutes. The front room was illuminated with Santa Muerte candles, the Grim Reaper–like saint whom many of the Zetas followed, and candles of San Judas Tadeo, the patron saint of lost causes. Del Rayo, a Catholic, was offended by the desecration of San Judas. Everyone who worked at the safe house snorted cocaine day and night. The gunmen were twitchy and paranoid, especially Capitán Muñeco, who was prone to violent, erratic moods. Del Rayo could hear laughter and the screams of people being tortured in other rooms. One day, a coked-up Capitán Muñeco lectured the Central Americans against traveling to the United States. “What do you want to go there for? You’ll only get yourselves killed,” he said, laughing.
Each morning, one of Muñeco’s gunmen would take del Rayo’s bank card to an ATM and withdraw the maximum amount. He’d also been forced to direct one of his servants to leave his Range Rover and other cars in the parking lot of a strip mall with the keys. The Zetas were bleeding him of whatever assets he had available. But he had still not come up with the $4.5 million. The properties were in his name, he explained to Capitán Muñeco, but his wife couldn’t sell anything unless he signed the papers first. “You’ve got rich friends, don’t you?” Muñeco said. “Ask them for the money.”
After nearly a week, Capitán Muñeco and his sicarios were called to a meeting. Del Rayo wondered whether it was about him. When the young sicario returned to the safe house, he seemed to have a secret weighing on him. Back in the room, he handcuffed their wrists together. “Relax,” he whispered to del Rayo. “We decided we’re not going to kill you. Some people in the organization are mad because they didn’t give the authorization for you to be kidnapped. Capitán Muñeco wants to get rid of you soon as possible.”
Del Rayo was elated. For the first time, he felt he might live. But when he woke up the next morning his guard was gone and Capitán Muñeco was in a rage, kicking him as he lay on the ground in the fetal position. “What did you do?” he screamed. “Did you offer him money?”
“I don’t know anything,” del Rayo grunted between the kicks. “He never said anything.”
Capitán Muñeco threw del Rayo into the room with the feral street dealers. The floor was covered in urine and he could only prop himself up against the wall. His wrists and ankles were shackled. All of the hope he’d felt yesterday was gone. Today they’d kill him for sure, he thought. But as the day progressed, something unusual was going on in the city. Capitán Muñeco and his sicarios were even edgier than normal. He could hear military helicopters rumbling low over the neighborhood. Muñeco had put tinfoil over the antennas of their radios so the military wouldn’t pick up their signals. Del Rayo heard chatter coming through the radio from other Zeta safe houses in the city. Halcones, or lookouts, were radioing in the locations of the military in case they had to flee. Del Rayo heard the men discussing him in the other room. Coked out and paranoid, they believed that all of the commotion was because of him.
Capitán Muñeco entered and shoved del Rayo back into the adjoining room where he’d been held for the last eight days. “We’re going to let you go,” he said. “But if for any reason you tell anyone what you’ve seen here, we’ll kill you and your family. Because of the situation, I want to make things up with my boss, so I want $500,000 from you. I want it right away,” he said.
“Of course,” del Rayo said, nodding. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He refused to believe it until he was out of the house of horrors.
The next afternoon, they led him out of the safe house and into a car. He was surrounded by three heavily armed sicarios. They arrived at a shopping mall, and as they entered the parking lot, del Rayo saw a state police truck with three policemen in the back. They looked at the car and the shirtless del Rayo with his battered, blood-smeared face. One of the gunmen placed the muzzle of his AR-15 in the window so that the police would see it. The policemen looked away, and the police truck turned and drove in the opposite direction.
Surprisingly, Capitán Muñeco had left del Rayo’s Porsche SUV in the parking lot. He’d already taken four other cars, including two Porsches and a Range Rover. One of the sicarios pushed del Rayo out the door. Startled, he ran toward his SUV barefoot and in his underwear. The keys were on top of the front tire as they had told him. He turned the ignition. He knew it was a miracle he had survived. He wondered, who could have intervened on his behalf, and why?