In the eyes of world power, Mexico’s one-party government was an ugly beast, outdated. So, on a February evening in 1993, when the seventy-year-old PRI faced its first viable political rival, limousines dropped the thirty richest oligarchs at the finance minister’s mansion high above Mexico City, in the fancy Polanco neighborhood, where President Carlos Salinas presided.
The evening’s agenda was how to fund the embattled beast, the PRI. Salinas wasn’t running again; the constitution prohibited it. But the left was making a serious challenge to the PRI. The PRI couldn’t afford to rely on government funding in the upcoming campaign, as it had in the past. If all went as planned, Mexico, via NAFTA, was about to expand its economy and could no longer afford to be seen as a state-party system. The oligarchs agreed that a leftist notion like campaign finance reform was a small price to pay for the money they stood to make when Mexico went public, turning their corporate holdings into attractive purchases for wealthy conglomerates abroad.
Since taking office in 1988, President Salinas had privatized 252 state companies. In exchange for sweet regulatory deals, the oligarchs paid high prices for those companies. Salinas returned their largesse, paving the way for more than a dozen monopolies. Among the guests that night were the new cement baron and the new soft drink baron. Carlos Slim, soon to be the world’s richest man, was the telephone baron. After Slim bought Telmex, the Salinas government authorized a phone rate increase of 247 percent.
Yes, they all agreed, save the Beast. The oligarchs would finance the PRI themselves.
A campaign chest of $500 million was thrown out as a figure. Someone suggested $25 million per man. The TV tycoon said why not make it $50 million? A few guests balked. Not everyone had done as well as the TV tycoon, whose Televisa enjoyed 95 percent audience share.
Carlos Slim said he supported whatever figure was decided. But why all this fuss? Why couldn’t the funds be collected in private, anonymously?
In a country where half the population lived in poverty, there would be questions, Slim knew, as to how these thirty magnates—all middle-class businessmen before the privatization—could come up with $25 million each for the PRI. People would wonder what favors they got, or would get. What idiot held a banquet? It would turn into a scandal when charges of corruption surfaced.
Slim understood something about Mexican history that his fellow oligarchs forgot. As Mexico’s Nobel laureate Octavio Paz said, the Mexican Revolution, from 1910 to 1917, was a struggle between opposing principles: nationalism versus imperialism; labor versus capital; democracy versus dictatorship. It was a struggle between a state-managed economy and free markets. Mexico’s northern intellectuals wanted a strong central power. Southern peasants fought for social justice.
The conservative armies of the north won. Post-1917, the new Mexican state aimed to keep order in a country riven by warring fiefdoms and local-boss rule, by a history of caciquismo. But how to achieve that stability? It would be done by writing some meaningless phrases into the constitution. To placate the left, the new rulers created six-year terms with no reelection. Under the logic of the new constitution, one ruling party would guarantee peaceful continuity. The only check on PRI power would be the kind of empty socialist rhetoric—enshrined in government-commissioned murals by artists like Diego Rivera—that made liberals feel better despite being ignored on most important issues. Ironically, observed Andrés Oppenheimer, a leading Latin American journalist, the new revolutionary state would maintain law and order, and extinguish Mexico’s historical sweep of dictatorships and revolt, by creating yet another dictatorship.
And now, with foreign cash flooding Mexico in anticipation of the 1994 implementation of NAFTA, Wall Street and Washington sided with Salinas and the oligarchs—and vice versa. European investors had focused on opportunities in the new markets of the former Soviet bloc, and paid little attention to free-market reforms in Latin America. The future of Salinas and Slim’s Mexico lay closer to home: with America. To hold up their end of the deal with Washington, however, the oligarchs needed to deliver stability. Well, that was thought to be no problem. Mexico’s revolutionary potential was feather-light—until the banquet.
The oligarchs rolled out, having settled on $25 million each. Hours later, the publisher of a financial daily called El Economista—in his capacity as businessman rather than journalist—attended a breakfast organized by a business lobbying group, where the cement baron and the department store tycoon talked openly about the previous evening’s fund-raising banquet. News of the event soon landed on the front pages of El Economista, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Miami Herald, threatening to ruin NAFTA. Salinas, the banquet proved, was not propelling Mexico into a free-market democratic society, but further into an oligarchic system marked by a mafia-style secret society. The blowback was mighty: another devaluation of the peso, a crash of Mexico’s stock market, and a peasant revolt in the southern state of Chiapas.
To President Bill Clinton, NAFTA was the deal of a century, a centerpiece of Clintonian prosperity. Over the objections of angry unions, domestic producers, and political foes like Ross Perot, Clinton kept NAFTA alive with a $50 billion bailout for Mexico. Even when it was alleged that Raul Salinas, the Mexican president’s brother, colluded with the Gulf Cartel to have his own brother-in-law, the majority leader of Congress, killed, and police arrested Raul’s wife in Switzerland as she tried to remove funds from a $120 million bank account, NAFTA backers in Washington saw little reason to dwell on Mexico’s burgeoning criminal class.
Washington shunned comparisons between Mexico and Colombia. Mexican traffickers were nowhere near Pablo Escobar’s level of power. Chapo Guzmán was in prison. So was El Padrino. Those guys weren’t running for office, as Escobar had done in Colombia. Washington was still proud of the manhunt that led to Escobar’s 1993 death. But Escobar’s fame eclipsed his true legacy: The resources poured into his pursuit revealed the killing of a single drug lord as an end in itself, a symbol detached from the drug war. The only entity more invested in Escobar’s outsize legend than Escobar himself was the American government, which needed to justify turning Colombia upside down to kill him. Mexico was about to become a country of Escobars—mass murderers and bad cops elevated to world-historical status by a media-besotted society bent on getting the criminals it deserved.
But it was not only Mexico’s myriad police forces that were vulnerable to corruption; it was soldiers as well. Created in 1986 to provide security for the FIFA World Cup, Mexico’s Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales, or GAFE, the Special Airborne Forces Group, became Mexico’s elite military squad. During the 1990s, GAFE soldiers attended school at Fort Benning, Georgia, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina, under a program overseen by American general Barry McCaffrey. Known as the School of the Americas, the program was intended to train Latin American militaries to counter perceived communist subversion. Trained by veterans of the counterinsurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala, about 3,200 GAFE officers—the equivalent of Green Berets—learned rapid deployment, aerial assaults, marksmanship, ambushes, small-group tactics, intelligence collection, prisoner rescue, and communications. In late 1993, in the wake of the infamous oligarch banquet, the Mexican government enlisted GAFE troops to crush the Chiapas uprising in southern Mexico. Within hours of GAFE deployment, thirty Chiapas rebels were killed, their bodies displayed on a riverbank with ears and noses sliced off.
After Chiapas, GAFE officers formed an antinarcotics unit that coordinated with DEA and FBI. But members of the GAFE narc squad quickly formed their own drug-trafficking group, another police mafia.
BY THE MID-1990S, WITH THE overseas route to South Florida shut down, following the Reagan-era focus on Miami and Colombia, more than 90 percent of U.S.-bound cocaine came through Mexico. The Mexican profit margin on coke appreciated, then appreciated again, and again, as Mexico became more valuable as cocaine’s byway to the bank of America. Mexicans leveraged their position until they became the “owners” of South American cocaine. Where they once made $2,000 per kilo working as mules for the Colombians or Peruvians or Bolivians, they could now buy a kilo from Colombia for $2,000 and sell it for five times that at the border, ten times in Dallas, or twenty times in New York. Clinton’s focus on chasing away domestic methamphetamine—another low-weight, high-value product—shifted production of that drug south of the border as well. As the millennium approached, Mexico was becoming the Bordeaux region of the drug trade.
By 2000, cross-border trade between the United States and Mexico would quadruple, to more than $250 billion. But Nuevo Laredo would see a disproportionate share of the new commerce—more than twice the trucking activity of Tijuana or Juárez. The increasingly fractious cartels of Mexico coveted the new power that NAFTA gave the eastern Gulf Cartel.
When Gulf Cartel leader Juan García Ábrego, the first Mexican trafficker to make the FBI’s Most Wanted list, was arrested by Mexican authorities in 1996 and extradited to the United States, leadership of the Gulf Cartel fell to two men: Osiel Cárdenas Guillén and Salvador “Chava” Gómez Herrera.
A onetime car mechanic who also worked as a madrina, or informant, for the Policía Judicial Federal—Mexico’s federal police force—Osiel was skilled at using law enforcement against his smuggling rivals. Osiel was the Gulf Cartel’s primary earner. Chava Gómez maintained control of the smuggling corridors. But Chava, Osiel believed, asked for money too often. He’d call and say: “Oye, Osiel, necesito que me mandes $50,000.” Hey, Osiel, I need fifty grand. This arrangement made Osiel feel like Chava’s employee. “Mi compadre ya me tiene hasta la madre,” Osiel would say. “Me exige como si él no pudiera generar sus ingresos.” I’ve had it with my buddy. He demands money like he can’t generate it on his own.
The man Osiel hired to kill his Gulf Cartel coleader was a young GAFE soldier. Arturo Guzmán-Decena became the first employee—“Z-1”—of the Gulf Cartel’s new enforcement arm, Los Zetas.
“What type of workers do you need?” Guzmán-Decena asked.
“The best armed men there are,” Osiel replied.
“These are only in the army.”
“I want them.”
Word of employment spread. Recruitment methods were bold, and included intercepting military radio frequencies to inform soldiers about the benefits of “shifting bands.” GAFE soldiers knew Osiel as “Fantasma,” “Ingeniero,” and “Matamigo”—the Ghost, the Engineer, and the Friend Killer. They heard their former colleagues were calling themselves Los Zetas and making cañonazos de dolares, cannonballs of dollars.
Typical among the recruits was “Z-7,” known as Mamito (“the Gentleman”). In 1994, when he was sixteen, Mamito joined GAFE and later worked as part of the narc squad. In 1999, when the Mexican government prosecuted him for corruption, Mamito deserted the military, went to Tamaulipas—the northeastern Mexican state that contains Nuevo Laredo—and found work with Osiel, collecting debts, carrying out assassinations, and overseeing drug shipments for the Gulf Cartel.
In 2002, when Z-1 was killed by the Mexican army in a restaurant, another former GAFE soldier, Heriberto “Z-3” Lazcano, took over. Distinguished for his movie-star looks and tactical brilliance, Lazcano was known as “El Verdugo” (“The Executioner”). He ran Los Zetas with another former GAFE man, Efraín Teodoro Torres, “Z-14,” known as “Catorce” (“Fourteen”).
Los Zetas soon numbered about fifty former soldiers and a few nonsoldiers. There were rumors about the origin of the name “Zeta,” which means “Z” in Spanish. Some said it was a radio call sign. Others believed Osiel called his enforcers the Zetas because z was the first letter in zapatos, shoes. “A man without shoes cannot walk,” he was fond of saying, charmed, surely, that a once-shoeless child now commanded an army of boots. The Zetas wore black tactical uniforms and bulletproof vests. Shoulder patches featured a Z superimposed on the state of Tamaulipas, encircled by the words: Special Forces of the Gulf Cartel. Osiel sent the Zetas to Nuevo Laredo with instructions to establish control.
In the old days, Mexican police used informants to track how much the local narco-boss made in the “plaza”—a town or area through which drugs passed in exchange for a tax paid to the controlling authority, the cops—and adjusted the monthly payola accordingly. The term comandante did not refer to the drug lord but to the police commander, whose power included having the office of the attorney general, the army, and the PRI behind him. A drug lord lasted for as long as he could keep up with bribes and beat away competitors. But as the Zetas, on behalf of the Gulf Cartel, swept northeast Mexico—“cleaning” the states of Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas—they transformed the old system of corruption.
One day, a young federal prosecutor named Carlos Hinojosa was called to a meeting with other local law enforcement officials.
“Don’t interfere with trafficking,” Catorce, the Zeta leader, told them. “La Compañía will work freely.” La Compañía—the Company—now referred to the larger corporate entity formed by the combination of the Gulf Cartel and its enforcers, the Zetas.
As a prosecutor, it had been Hinojosa’s job to process complaints and make decisions about whom to charge with crimes. He also served as liaison between the prosecutor’s office and the cartels. He knew all the traffickers, and collected the bribes. But those days were over, he was told now. The bribe would no longer be a matter of negotiation. Many cops, hearing this, switched sides, dropping the pretense of public servant and joining La Compañía outright. Catorce approached Hinojosa: “So, are you working for them or are you working for me?”
What did it take to join the Company? Hinojosa wondered.
As long as Hinojosa generated income for the Company he was welcome, he was told. When he stopped generating income, he was no longer welcome. It was that simple. So the bespectacled Hinojosa became a Company accountant. He collected money from the smugglers who worked for the Company or did business with the Company. Hinojosa’s new colleagues in the cartel called him Jotillo, Little Faggot. It was unclear whether this nickname demeaned his status as a back-office man, or referred to actual homosexuality.
In the early 2000s, the Zetas arrived in Nuevo Laredo to a black market already transformed. The old smuggling families had given way to larger smuggling groups. The groups originated with families but included recruits from their local communities. As drug traffic spiked, these groups carved up Nuevo Laredo and divided the spoils of taxation. Now the groups faced a choice: They could operate under Zeta rule, paying a smuggling tax to the Company, or they could get borrado del mapa, erased from the earth.
The leader of the first group, Los Chachos, refused to cede his territory. He was found facedown in a ditch, naked but for a leopard-print thong.
The second group, the Flores Soto gang, was led by Meme Flores, the man who bought cars and weapons from Gabriel Cardona. Meme became an ambassador to the Zetas in Nuevo Laredo, in charge of sourcing cars and weapons and doing whatever else the Zetas asked of him.
The third group, Los Tejas, included two rising stars in the border underworld: the Treviño brothers, Omar and Miguel. But their boss in the Tejas didn’t want to cooperate with the Zetas. So the Zetas approached Miguel Treviño instead.
ONE OF THIRTEEN CHILDREN, MIGUEL Treviño grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Nuevo Laredo where he did odd jobs for the wealthy while his father managed ranches. They never starved. Every Treviño son was taught to hunt. As a teenager, Miguel learned the drug business from his oldest brother. He traveled back and forth to Dallas on I-35, mastering that four-hundred-mile stretch of highway that could make a kilo of coke, or an eighty-pound bundle of pot, 100 percent more valuable.
After a car chase in 1993, Dallas police arrested Miguel, then nineteen, in a pink Cadillac with a broken steering column. He paid a $672 fine for evading arrest. But when his oldest brother was convicted of marijuana trafficking in Texas and sentenced to twenty years in prison, Miguel was furious. America treated Mexicans like shit. Miguel tattooed Hecho en Mexico—Made in Mexico—on the back of his neck, and a cobra slithering down his forearm. He returned to Nuevo Laredo and worked as a cop, feeding info to the Tejas, then joined the Tejas with his brother Omar. Miguel controlled a neighborhood called Hidalgo, a crucial staging point for smugglers in the north-central section of Nuevo Laredo, just east of the railroad tracks that cross the river and shoot up the west side of Laredo, zipping past Martin High. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, neither Miguel nor Omar Treviño was known beyond their small corner of the Nuevo Laredo underworld—but that was about to change.
“The narcos frequently act with loyalty toward their bosses, but it’s just camouflage,” writes Ricardo Ravelo in his biography of Osiel Cárdenas. “Acting loyal or honest doesn’t mean being one or the other. Even if the mafia has its rules, there are no values. In this agitated environment, the premise that keeps them going is frialdad”—cold-bloodedness. Though not a former GAFE soldier, Miguel must’ve felt that his value system, or lack thereof, meshed with the Zetas’ cold-blooded, take-all approach to business. To cement a role for himself in the Zetas, Miguel murdered his Tejas leader, then eliminated the leader’s family as well.
Miguel and Omar Treviño were two of many who joined the Zetas when they came to Nuevo Laredo to take over. But the Treviño brothers did what successful gangsters do: acquire power through ruthlessness. Miguel, now in his early thirties, rose in the Zeta ranks by maintaining tight control over Nuevo Laredo, always erring on the side of caution when he encountered perceived enemies.
One night, in early 2004, he mistook two American teenagers for adversaries.