Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs (24 page)

On the night I met Juan, after a summer storm, he was about to go to stand by another roadside at midnight to hold up his signs. He invited me to come along. Two young girls perched behind him, holding on to his wings so the wind wouldn’t blow him backward. People in the cars that hurried past looked astonished, and bewildered, and frightened.

“I am not afraid. If I get killed, or whatever happens to me, it’s because I’m doing something good for the city,” Juan tells me. “I tell my mother to be proud of me if something happens.” He and his friends have been betrayed by the generation leading the drug war, he believes: “We want to show them, by example, that we want a better society.”
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Most people in Juárez are amazed the angels have not been shot. They will tell you, wearily, that it is only a matter of time.

Arnold Rothstein dreamed of a New York City where the rule of law had been hollowed out and the only true rulers were criminals like him. He wanted to establish power by force, and buy the remaining broken slivers of the state piece by piece until he could use them, too, as weapons. He never got to realize his dream. His bullet hit too soon. But his dream did come to pass.

I wanted to know what this meant, for real people, in their real lives. This is the part of the drug war most remote from my world, back in the stability of London. Yet I was beginning to feel we were all enmeshed together—the subjects of the drug war, and its logic—in a long, densely connected global chain. The impulse to repress, I suspected, had given birth to all this, but I wanted to see how.

I met many people in northern Mexico who shared their stories with me, but in the end, I came to understand what has happened there best through the tale of three teenagers. They were an angel, a killer, and a girl in love.

Just as Chino had explained to me what life is like inside a street gang, I wanted to understand what life is like inside a cartel, but I kept being told this was impossible. The cartels kill anyone who talks to outsiders. These are the most paranoid and secretive people in the world. And then, one day, I learned about one person—the only one to ever make it out and keep talking.

I wrote to the Texas Prison Service. After a long wait, I was told I had half an hour. Once I arrived in the middle of Tyler County in rural Texas—a huge mess of concrete and barbed wire—a guard smiled at me. I like your accent, she said, in deep Texan—you can have as much time as you want. I was guided through the prison by another guard until I was in a wide gray room and there was only glass in front of me. On the other side of the glass were tiny white cells.

The guard said: “I’m going to be around here in the area, because I can’t leave you by yourself,” and then she left.
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At the back of one of the cells, a door opened, and he walked in, small and lithe. He looked like a nerd who should be presenting his science project to me. The only thing undermining this look was his eye tattoo—a bright-colored flame, dominating his face.

“So what’s going on?” he said, looking me up and down. Before I could say anything, he said: “First of all—what do you know about me? . . . That’s what I want to know.”

He had a low voice. I said—I know you are here because, from the age of thirteen, you were a member of the Zetas. He nodded.

I asked Rosalio if I could put a little recorder between us. There was a hole in the glass, and the recorder sat there, with its red light on. He began to talk. After each piece of information he gave me, he asked nervously what I thought of him, and whether I would make him sound good. He was almost pleading. He had been alone for a very long time, in solitary confinement. We talked for over four hours. This is his story as I can patch it together from what he told me and from the other evidence of his crimes in the public record.

In 2005, Rosalio Reta was at summer camp,
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like all the other American teenagers his age—a short Texan fifteen-year-old with spiky hair, nicknamed “Bart” because he looked like a less yellow Bart Simpson and loved to skateboard. He was also into the Power Rangers, alternative pop, and Nintendo 64, especially The Mask of Zelda and Donkey Kong. At camp in that particular year, he was learning useful skills, ones he would remember for the rest of his life. Except at this camp, you don’t learn how to canoe, or sing in a chorus, or make a log fire.

He remembered the techniques
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he learned there well. Take beheading, for example. “There’s times I’ve seen it they’ve done it with a saw,” he told me through the prison glass. “Blood everywhere. When they start going they hit the jugular and—” he snaps his fingers—“[it’s] everywhere . . . They put the head right there. The head still moves, makes faces and everything. I think the nerves, you can see inside, the bone, everything’s moving. It’s like they’ve got worms. I’ve seen it move, when it’s on the ground. If he’s making a screaming face, it stays like that sometimes. Sometimes it slacks off.”

This camp was deep in the mountains of Mexico, and Rosalio was there for six months, slowly being turned into a human weapon. “They just teach you everything. Everything you learn at a military camp,” he says. “How to shoot, how to coordinate . . . All kinds of explosives, handguns, rifles, hand-to-hand combat.” The camp’s slogan is “If I retreat,
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kill me.” He used these skills to murder more people than he can count. He committed industrial killings,
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threw hand grenades into crowded nightclubs, and shot a man in front of his toddler son and pregnant wife.

A few years before his trip to camp, the United States government—determined to achieve Harry Anslinger’s mission of spreading the drug war to every country on earth—had decided to train an elite force within Mexico to win the war on drugs. The United States brought them to Fort Bragg
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to provide the best training, intelligence, and military equipment from America’s 7th Special Forces Group. Their motto was “Not even death
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will stop us.” Once it was over and they had learned all they could and received all the weapons they wanted, these expensively trained men went home and defected, en masse,
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to work for the Gulf Cartel. These breakaways
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called themselves the Zetas. It would be as if the Navy Seals defected from the U.S. Army to help the Crips take over Los Angeles—and succeeded.

Rosalio’s hometown, the dusty desert of Laredo in Texas, is right across the border from Nuevo Laredo in Mexico. He tells me: “Every cartel wants that route. It’s one of the biggest places of crossing from country to country . . . It’s a big commercial place. So everybody wants it . . . That’s what everybody’s fighting for: that I-35.” If your cartel controls that interstate highway, you control the flow of billions of dollars. If your enemies control it, they can strip you of your livelihood. That is a recipe for a war.

There are two different stories of how Rosalio became a Zeta. There is the story he told when he first talked to the police when he was sixteen, and then there is the story he told me when he was twenty-three. I have no way of knowing which of these is more accurate—so I have laid them out here, for you to judge.

We know this much for sure: He grew up
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in a house made of wood that was propped up on cinder blocks. His mother was a hairdresser. His father was an undocumented immigrant who worked on construction sites. They had ten children. Laredo is one of the poorest parts of the United States—a border town where, as he has said, “if you’re not a cop,
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you’re a drug dealer. If you’re not a drug dealer, you work for a cartel. That’s all there is down there.” He said another time: “A lot of people here [in the United States] want to be an attorney, a lawyer, a judge, a firefighter, a policeman. Over there [on the U.S.-Mexico border] they worship the Zetas. The little kids [say] ‘I want to be a Zeta when I grow up.’ ”

But he insists: “I wasn’t, like, poor poor poor. My mom and dad both worked, we had stuff to eat every day. We were normal. We were a family.” He had two best friends he spent all his time with: Jesse and Gabriel. They played football, hung out by the lake, played video games. All through his childhood, he skipped back and forth over the border. Sodas and candies are cheaper in Nuevo Laredo, so he would often head there with his friends. And as an adolescent, there are nightclubs there that will let you in as young as thirteen, so he and Jesse and Gabriel spent more time there. Here’s where the story splits, for a moment.

When Rosalio was first questioned by the police, he had spent three years immersed in Zeta life, a world where the culture of terror has been taken to its most extreme variant yet. In the tapes he looks hyped with this hatred, smirking and strutting and half-expecting the cops to be impressed by his boasts of mass murder. He tells them that at thirteen, he started hanging out at a nightclub in Nuevo Laredo and heard whispers of a man who had it all: Miguel Treviño. He came from nothing to be number two in the Zetas. Like Arnold Rothstein, he was an unassuming, almost anonymous-looking man: five feet eight, a teetotaler, drug-free, dressed in blue jeans and Walmart T-shirts. But he was the king of the town—he controlled the drug trade, the military, the police, everything. Rosalio wanted what he had. He met him and offered to prove his loyalty. Whatever it took.

Then there’s a different story about how it all started. He told me his friend had an older brother who worked for the cartels, and one day they went to eat in Nuevo Laredo. The brother received a call and said he had to go to deal with some business—so Rosalio hid himself in the back of his truck. He was curious. He wanted to know what it looked like. When they arrived, he discovered he was at one of the ranches used by Miguel Treviño to carry out his business—and he saw too much.

Here’s where the stories converge again. In both versions, the ranch was a typical Zeta workspace. There were about thirty people tied up. On one side, “they put them in an oil drum and they just burn them burn them burn them and there’s just ashes left.” On the other side, they were being “cut to pieces.” The Zetas usually torture members of other gangs, or anyone who irks them, to find out “safe houses, routes, who they work for . . . About what they do, who they working for, what is he doing?” before the killing starts. After they are dead, “they burn the bodies by [making]
guiso
[the Spanish word for stew]—throw ’em in there . . . and poke at the body until it dissolves.”

This is where Rosalio carried out his first killing. “I didn’t look at him in the face,” he says. “He was tied up . . . He was kneeling down, tied up behind his back and his feet . . . They were all crying, begging, saying don’t kill me. Everybody. Some of them weren’t even saying anything. They knew they were going to get killed. Everyone was there to be killed.”

He took the gun and shot the man in the head. He would never find out who he was.

The first Rosalio, emerging blinking from the Zeta light, told the cops he loved this experience: “I thought I was Superman.
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I loved doing it, killing that first person. They tried to take the gun away, but it was like taking candy from a kid.” He said from then on, “there were others to do it, but I would volunteer. It was like a James Bond game . . . Anyone can do it, but not everyone wants to. Some are weak in the mind and cannot carry it in their conscience. Others sleep as peacefully
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as fish.” He added: “I like what I do. I don’t deny it.”

The second Rosalio, in the monochrome of the Texas prison system, says this was crazed babble, offered up in a moment of mania “because after a long while, I was safe. I was alive. I actually made it from Mexico alive. And the majority of everybody around me is dead. Everybody I really cared for, that I grew up with, is dead already. I was alive. I made it alive. After having been this close to being killed . . .”