Every morning at eight thirty, print and TV reporters filed in to La Parroquia, a two-hundred-year-old coffeehouse in Veracruz, Mexico, that overlooked the Gulf Coast. La Parroquia’s concrete façade faced the busy port walkway in Veracruz, where carts and stalls sold ices, sodas, and tourist trinkets. Barges from all over the world offloaded electronics, furniture, and multi-ton shipments of South American cocaine.
From Veracruz, the coke traveled north by plane to towns such as San Fernando, Reynosa, and Matamoros. Once a week, plaza bosses received the planes, each carrying 400 kilos, half a ton. They unpacked 25-kilo suitcases, repacked the merchandise as one-kilo bricks, and loaded the bricks into smuggling vehicles. Drivers then took the vehicles north to Texas border towns like Brownsville and Laredo, then on to distribution hubs in Houston and Dallas.
Here, in Veracruz, one of Mexico’s largest drug gateways—and therefore one of its most corrupt cities—the criminal elite controlled the media, and La Parroquia was where it happened. By 9 a.m., tables filled with politicians, businesspeople, and anyone else wishing to be heard by local journalists, many of whom accepted money from entities outside the news organizations that officially employed them. Shoeshine boys crouched on the terrazzo floor. Men wolfed down huevos rancheros while a nurse roamed the café and charged five pesos to check their blood pressure. White-jacketed waiters poured steamed milk into glasses of thick coffee for a buzzy drink called lechero. Over the next four hours the day’s news was gathered, invented, negotiated, and paid for.
The Zeta coleader, Z-14—Catorce—managed the Veracruz plaza. A smaller plaza like San Fernando—halfway between Veracruz and the border—might be worth $50 million a year as a gateway to border cities. Matamoros, a border city, might be worth twice that. But in Veracruz, a leading site of cocaine import, a competent plaza boss like Catorce could make several hundred million dollars a year. So Miguel Treviño traveled there in 2004 and learned everything he could about plaza management.
This is what Miguel apparently learned, and what he would apply when he returned to Nuevo Laredo:
SECURITY: Under Company protocol, the first task for any new plaza boss was to train and arm a security force. The cost of running a typical plaza ran about $1 million per month in peacetime, two or three times that during war. Expenses included bribes, payroll, houses, and equipment: .50-caliber weapons, thousands of magazines, grenades, bazookas, and bulletproof SUVs that cost $160,000 after customization.
Catorce insisted that a GAFE soldier train all recruits. Each trainee learned how to use firearms, walk in the brush, fight with a rival cartel, rescue a dead or injured partner, look after a boss, jump from moving cars, and speak in Company radio codes. Training lasted two or three months. Each trainee made $130 per week. With salary and equipment, it cost $8,000 to train one Zeta soldier. As graduates, each soldier made $250 per week plus commission.
EMPLOYEE PERKS: Catorce offered his men an employee-investment program called la polla. A group could pool their money and invest in a load at the Company’s border cost of $10,000 a kilo. If the kilo made it to Brownsville or Laredo, it sold for $12,500; $14,500 in Houston; $18,000 in Dallas; $24,000 in Atlanta; and $30,000 or more in New York. Like a futures contract, each polla was labeled with a city. One polla was for “Atlanta prices,” another for “Chicago prices.” Company men could make their own risk-reward calculations, allowing them to feel as though they owned a stake in the business.
PAYOFFS: The two most important law enforcement people—the boss of the federal preventive police and the boss of the federal highway police—made between $6,000 and $10,000 per month in bribes, while lieutenants made $3,000. Many journalists “reported to” a politician, and about 5 percent also “reported to” a cartel. At La Parroquia, politicians, many of whom took money from the cartels, paid off reporters who printed fawning coverage of their agenda and ghostwrote their guest columns. TV and print reporters made $1,300 to $3,300 per month—as much as eight times their salary.
In Veracruz, Miguel saw how a well-compensated media paid for itself. As punishment for tax evasion, two outlets of a popular sandwich chain might burn down in the same afternoon. The largest newspaper in Veracruz would run the next day’s editorial on winemaking. Several bars could be sprayed with machine-gun fire in broad daylight, and the following day’s front page would feature a thoughtful meditation on the city’s street dogs. There was no telling what a journalist might find newsworthy.
REVENUE: The main source of revenue was the cuota or piso, the smuggling tax. To come through the plaza, immigrants paid a tax of $250 if from Mexico; $500 if from Central America; and $1,500 if from Europe. Coyotes, their escorts, paid $100. Drug traffickers paid $50 per kilo of marijuana (about $50,000 per ton) and $500 per kilo of cocaine (about $500,000 per ton). Some paid their tax in kind, such as 5 kilos for every 100. After “stepping on” a kilo of coke, making two or three kilos out of the original by cutting it with things like baby laxative, the cartel could make $50,000 per kilo by selling small amounts—known as grampillas, staples—to Veracruz townies.
The plaza boss also extracted tax revenue from businesses. Grocers paid around $1,000 per month. Pharmacies paid $3,000 per month; bars, nightclubs, and brothels two or three times that. The piso purchased more than protection; it also bought a buffer from government oversight. Whereas failure to pay the cartel tax could bring violence or legal problems in the form of a city inspector concocting health violations, dutiful payment meant that the grocer could sell alcohol twenty-four hours a day, that the nightclub could serve the underage, and that the restaurant could cut corners on health protocol.
If a business had an electric bill of 20,000 pesos per month ($1,300), the person in charge of the federal electric commission saw that the business paid only one-third of the bill. In return, the business paid the utility manager 1,000 pesos for fixing the bill, and 3,000 pesos to Catorce for ensuring that the bill would be fixed. For some, the spoils of anarchy justified the piso.
SPIES: Panteras—female informants—were crucial to Catorce’s business. Tax revenue was reinvested in dancers and barmaids who could monitor subversive chatter and provide information about, and photographs of, the condemned. Hotel workers and taxi drivers also made great sources.
BANKING: In 2004, Catorce gave $12 million to Pancho Colorado, a respected magnate who owned an oil-services company in Veracruz called ADT Petros Servicios. Colorado bid on government contracts for work, such as remediation, that Pemex, the national oil company, outsourced. A generous man who also owned resorts and employed the mentally disabled because everyone deserves a job, Colorado was always smiling in La Parroquia. With the Company’s $12 million, he bought the Veracruz governorship, which influenced the granting of oil contracts. Once granted, ADT’s contracts required capital to be serviced. Catorce supplied the overhead, which returned in the form of clean government money.
Miguel returned to Nuevo Laredo, ready to tackle new opportunity. He would recruit soldiers, establish a culture of discipline, and dominate the territory.
BACK IN THE TRAINING CAMPS of Tamaulipas, in the summer of 2004, it was time to put the recruits in simulated raids and rid them of their bad habits. Hundreds of contras—Sinaloan enemies rounded up in raids—had been collected for the purpose.
“Bienvenidos, cabrones,” Meme Flores told the recruits upon arrival at the training camp. “Ésta es La Compañía, la mera paipa de Mexico.” Welcome, brothers. This is the Company, the true shit in Mexico. The approximately seventy young men, ranging in age from fifteen to thirty but dressed identically in jeans and T-shirts, sat on wooden benches and stared into his eyes. They listened. For the Mexican recruits, getting accepted into the Company, making good on promises to family, traveling in Mexico with respected men, returning home to parents and wives as a somebody: Whatever they fantasized about, it all seemed possible on this day.
Known as the adiestramiento, or the ’diestra, the training camp was staffed with Mexicans, Israelis, and Colombians. A week earlier, Gabriel—one of the only Americans at the camp—packed into a caravan of Suburbans heading south through Mexico to the training camp near Monterrey. A month had passed since the meeting with Miguel, when Meme asked Gabriel to come to the camp. Wences hadn’t been invited. In the caravan, Gabriel wore jeans and white T-shirts, as instructed, and left everything else behind, including his cell phone and wallet.
The reclutas, recruits, slept on hard cots, twenty-five to a compound, and were given a loaf of bread and a banana every morning. They swam, and negotiated obstacles: mud, tunnels, ropes, and walls. Twice a week, in the middle of the night, camp leaders roused the recruits to pull weeds for new soccer fields. In the morning run, whoever came in last owed one hundred push-ups. In the afternoon they played soccer, and then everyone took turns boxing. There was no shame in not knowing how to fight. You were there to learn.
They learned about weapons: how to work the double grip of the MP5 submachine gun, made by Heckler & Koch; how to shoot the Glock, the thirty-eight, and the FN Herstal; and how to reload the magazine on an AR-15 assault rifle without losing ground to the enemy. The Colombian mercenaries taught combat skills. How to trap a car in an intersection. How to jump between moving cars. How to shoot through armored vehicles by unloading a clip beneath the door handle. How to walk and shoot accurately at the same time, minimizing your profile. How to shoot a running contra, like leading a wide receiver in a football game. On the basis of these early drills, more than half of the seventy recruits were separated and trained for noncombat jobs, as lookouts and patrols. About twenty recruits remained to be trained as sicarios, assassins.
Having excelled in the “dry drills,” Gabriel was chosen to demonstrate the first live exercise: take an AR-15 assault rifle, run into a house, and kill the contra inside. The other recruits who’d been designated as killers were invited into the house to observe from an adjoining room. Meme told the contra that if he survived, he’d be set free.
Gabriel, outside, breathed deeply, tightened his fists around the rifle, and charged in. When he came through the door, Meme jumped out and slapped the rifle out of his hands, then kicked the weapon toward the contra. Gabriel wrestled the contra for the rifle. Meme separated them and addressed the recruits.
“If you fall down or lose your rifle in a raid, never fight for the weapon. Your main disadvantage in a raid is unfamiliar territory. You don’t know the surroundings. You don’t know the position of the contras in the house. In the moment of entry, all you know is that one guy knocked you out. He might be the only one you need to neutralize. Or there might be others. You don’t know. But that’s okay. Your brothers are charging in behind you.” Meme shouted: “Listen up! Never wrestle for a loose gun. Instead, pull your cuchillo and put the contra out by hand.”
A new contra was brought in, and told that if he could knock Meme off his feet and wrestle Meme successfully for the AR-15, he’d be set free. When the drill began, Meme lost the rifle on purpose and kicked it toward the contra. As the contra scrambled for the gun, Meme unstrapped his cuchillo from his leg and stabbed the contra’s thighs, stomach, and chest until he was dead. Meme stood up and caught his breath while two recruits dragged the dead contra away. Of the twenty or so remaining recruits, several walked out of the house and joined the others for training in noncombat roles.
Of those recruits who proved they could kill, each was assigned a cuas, a partner. Walking, shooting, eating, shitting—you and your cuas, short for cuate, pal, watched over each other at all times. Gabriel’s cuas was a boy named Israel, whom Gabriel remembered from going to church as a child in Nuevo Laredo, when the Cardonas used to come across on weekends to see extended family. The sicarios gathered near the edge of a forest, thirty feet behind a line chalked on the ground. Beyond, in the woods, two contras were tied to each other at the waist and told that if they made it through the first round, successfully outrunning the gunshots, they’d be let go. With his cuas, Gabriel ran up to the line, eyes focused on the scattering targets. They stopped, put their left foot in front, as taught, twisted slightly at the waist, put their left hand on the barrel grip, raised their left elbow to heart level, aimed the AR-15, and released thirty rounds: prrrrrt. They held position, switched the right thumb of their trigger hand to the right side of the grip, pressed the button above the trigger that released the double-sided clip, and simultaneously extended the four other fingers of their right hand to catch the clip as it released. With clip in hand, they turned their palm outward, thumb down, inserted the other side of the clip into the rifle, and released thirty more rounds—prrrrrt—as targets continued to fall, dumping a total of sixty bullets in ten seconds. They fanned out, and the next two partners came in behind them. That, they were told, was how you held down territory and kept the contra at bay. If a recruit dropped a clip, someone yelled “a mamar!”—“suck it!”—and he and his cuas owed the Company one hundred push-ups while their brothers kept at it, contras dying by the dozen.
Meme’s lessons aside, when it came to the torture and murder taught in the training camp, the Company’s instructors led by example more often than they taught. Instructors threw around a phrase: “You see and do.” And this approach fostered competition. As one recruit remembered: “Everybody wants to outdo the next man. They all want to do the best kind.”
Psychology played a role in Company training, just as it had for the GAFE men schooled in Fort Benning and Fort Bragg. In the ’diestra, isolated for a month and trained to kill by cold method, the instructors reminded recruits of their longing for “riches and bitches.” They had no job, no education, no future. By depriving pissed-off recruits of the world outside—of family and friends and girlfriends, of bedding and clothes—the comandantes encased them in psychic solitude; motivation by humiliation. They were forgotten, far from home. But now they were soldiers. And when they arrived at the plaza, they would arrive with a purpose, and release all their rage.
Finally, toward the end of camp, it came time to kill without any of the weapons they’d been trained in: no corta (handgun), larga (rifle), or cuchillo (knife). This was when the Company gauged your strength of mind, saw whether you could “lose your fear,” and separated the fríos—the coldhearted ones—from those who would be put to other uses. Could you do it and still sleep?
The recruit chose among implements: a shovel, a hoe, a sledgehammer, a machete. By way of example, a comandante selected a machete and beheaded a detainee. Did that man ever kick! If done properly, a hoe took one or two hits; a shovel, several. You tried to hit the contra square in the head so he suffered little.
The tools were then put aside and you killed with your bare hands. To feel the body give out for the first time was, in the words of one recruit, “something else for real.”