To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War (6 page)

One of the most immediately recognizable icons of Mexican popular art is the skeleton. The engraver Jose Guadalupe Posada (1852–1913) used skulls and skeletons both to mock the Mexican elite during the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship and to celebrate popular traditions like the fandango. Posada influenced Mexico’s famed muralists Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, who also deployed skeletons in their otherwise social realist murals. In Posada’s work, like the Day of the Dead sugar skulls, images of death are at times festive, at times ironic, but never gruesome.

Mexico’s most celebrated novel, Juan Rulfo’s
Pedro Páramo
, takes place in a village of the dead. The protagonist, Juan Preciado, promises his dying mother that he will seek out his father, Pedro Páramo, in Comala. His father has been dead for years, murdered by an unrecognized son to whom he had refused to give money to pay for the burial of the son’s dead wife. Preciado himself dies as he grasps the truth of Comala: everyone there, all the people he has met and spoken with, those from whom he has learned the story of his father’s life and death, everyone there is dead.

Thousands of people across Mexico worship,
La Santa Muerte
, Holy Death. Some pray that she take care of relatives making the trek across the Arizona desert to look for work or return to jobs they’ve held for years. Some pray that she protect relatives in prison. Some pray that she ward off violence. Some pray that she help them on college entrance exams. Some pray for jobs, luck, or love. Many tattoo her image on their chests, shoulders, or backs. The tall, gaunt skeleton, robed in black or white or red, holds the world, or a scythe, or a scale, or some combination of them in her hands.

And while La Santa Muerte is famed as the patron saint of killers, drug lords, and thieves, a visit to one of her main altars in Mexico gives a different impression. One July day in 2010, I spoke with Enriqueta Romero Romero, who tends La Santa Muerte’s altar in the Mexico City tough, working class barrio of Tepito. Romero speaks of death and La Santa Muerte with reverence and tenderness. “Death has always existed,” she said, “it is something beautiful about life, that we are born and we die.” She calls La Santa Muerte
mi doña flaquita
(roughly, “my dear skinny lady”) and smiles wide when her visitors use the same name. While we were talking one of her daughters dropped by with her newborn, and Romero whisked the little baby into her arms and held her up, kissing her and holding her up again, saying, “my little princess, precious little thing.” The feeling at Romero’s altar to La Santa Muerte in Tepito was one of sweetness.

When Emily Rodríguez, a 28-year-old public servant in Mexico City’s district attorney’s office, came up to buy a Santa Muerte candle, she was wearing blue jeans and a black
SANTA MUERTE
T-shirt. She visits every year on Day of the Dead and leaves a bottle of brandy for La Santa Muerte. She also has a small altar at home where she prays daily. I asked her why she believes in La Santa Muerte. “When you look in her eyes, well, she doesn’t exactly have eyes, but if you look in her cavities, she inspires trust,” Emily said. “In our pre-Hispanic culture we had our gods of death. We feel like death is a part of life, there is no reason to satanize it.” I asked her about the culture of drug gangs and gunmen who proclaim belief in La Santa Muerte. “If you use
La Santísima Muerte
[Most Holy Death] for bad things, they’ll come back to haunt you,” she said. For her, La Santa Muerte embodies trust, not murder. “She inspires trust in me and that’s why I believe in La Santísima Muerte. I personally don’t believe in people who become saints; I don’t believe in that. But death is certain.”

A visit to the altar of La Santa Muerte offers some insight into particularly Mexican feelings about death, but nothing here could help one explain the wicked cruelty of drug war murder.

“During Mexico’s twentieth century,” anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz writes in his book
Death and the Idea of Mexico
, “a gay familiarity with death became a cornerstone of national identity.”

“The nationalization of an ironic intimacy with death is a singularly Mexican strategy,” Lomnitz notes, and its roots in Mexican social history are deep: “The cult of death could be thought of as the oldest, seminal, and most authentic element of Mexico’s popular culture.”

Mexican death symbolism, Lomnitz argues, reflects differences between strong and weak states, imperial and post-colonial states, and that Mexico’s place in that difference is unique: “As the largest and richest of Spain’s New World colonies, Mexico at independence had real imperial aspirations. As the United States’ next-door neighbor, it was the first to become the booty of that republic.”

Lomnitz continues: “If death has become a looming presence in Mexican political discourse, it is because the political control over dying, the dead, and representations of the dead and the afterlife has been key to the formation of the modern state, images of popular culture, and a properly national modernity.”

If “the political control over dying . . . has been key to the formation of the modern state,” what does the explosion of vicious, uncontrolled murder say about the contemporary Mexican state? What does the state’s unofficial authorship of so much of that murder say? If it says that the state is somehow weak, where does the fracture lie? Or, we might ask, what is the nature of the injury or ailment that causes this weakness?

And yet for all the cultural depth and uniqueness in attitudes, representations, and rituals of death in Mexico, it would be a mistake to look exclusively into Mexican history and culture to explain the particularly cruel and gruesome character or the increasing prevalence of drugland executions in Mexico.

“Any attempt to view it all with uniquely Mexican roots, rather than as part of something horizontal, global, is in error,” Claudio Lomnitz told me one afternoon in Mexico City. “In analyzing the forms of narco violence, Mexican history is not irrelevant, but it is necessary to know where it is relevant. Narco violence is related to other forms of violence and also influences them; the narcos import, but they also export. There is a dimension that is in dialogue with a globalized culture.”

The Zetas, widely considered the most spectacular, brazen, and heinous of all the hit men working in the narcotics marketplace, serve as a perfect example of Lomnitz’s point. The Zeta assassins first studied counterinsurgency strategies in the United States and Israel as part of the Mexican Special Forces. They also hired Guatemalan Special Forces soldiers known as Kaibiles—an institution that received decades of training in counterinsurgency tactics from the United States army—to serve in their ranks. The Zetas adopted Al Qaeda’s practice of video recording beheadings and posting the footage on YouTube. Other cartel assassins across Mexico soon followed their example.

It is an error to think that Mexico is either the principal location of or an isolated battlefield in the fiercely competitive global marketplace for illegal narcotics. Just like the trafficking of the drugs themselves and the prohibition policies against them, the drug market is transnational. Mexico’s current position in the so-called drug war can only be understood in a global context, taken together with the countries from which certain drugs originate and those where most drugs get sold to users and consumed, namely Colombia and Peru on the one hand, and the United States on the other, but also countries as far from Mexico as Argentina and Australia. Wherever drugs are banned by law and also grown, shipped, sold, smoked, swallowed, snorted, or injected the drug war zone extends its reach.
1

In the logic of the drug war, to die in Mexico is to be guilty of your own death. But, the bare facts—when they can be rescued from oblivion—shatter the sordid drug war myths of cops and robbers, of Robin Hood drug lords, of an honest United States of America and a corrupt Mexico. Through the stories of the dead and those who resist the laws of silence, we may begin to approach an understanding of the killings and look for a way out.

Let the atrocious images haunt us. Even if they are only tokens and cannot possibly encompass most of the reality to which they refer; they still perform a vital function. The images say: This is what human beings are capable of doing—may volunteer to do, enthusiastically, self-righteously. Don’t forget.

—Susan Sontag

ERNESTO
MARTÍNEZ, KNOWN AS
PEPIS
(pronounced
PAY
-peace) is a tall, lanky, wisecracking 40-year-old who has been working the
nota roja
for thirteen years. He has seen more death than most morticians.

Primera Hora
is a daily blood news tabloid based in Culiacán, Sinaloa, and published by the newspaper
Noroeste
, Culiacán’s main broadsheet daily. The
Primera Hora
newsroom is a small windowless box with five computers, a few filing cabinets, and a powerful air conditioner. To get here you must go around to the back of the
Noroeste
building, pass through a security checkpoint, and walk down a long hall in what appears to be a desolate storage basement. When I arrive at five in the afternoon, Pepis, a staff photographer and writer says, “Welcome to the bunker.”

Pepis introduces me to the afternoon shift at
Primera Hora
: Marco Santos, the editor, and Juan Carlos Cruz, a staff writer and sometimes photographer. They all wear white button-down shirts with the
Primera Hora
logo stitched across the chest. Pepis then tells me that about an hour earlier there was a
levantón
, or “a pick-up,” that special type of kidnapping in Mexico that leads inevitably to execution. Several reporters and local police arrived on the scene soon after. As they did, however, the gunmen came back to grab someone else. They walked up to the reporters, aimed their assault rifles in their faces, and said, “Don’t take any pictures, and be very careful not to publish anything.” The police of course did nothing, and the gunmen apparently did not even feel the need to warn them against pursuing them. Pepis sympathizes with the local cop’s plight in such situations: “The police only had pistols, and the gunmen all carried AK-47s.”

As we talk, representatives of the United Nations and the Organization of American States are getting ready to meet with a group of invited journalists to inquire about press freedom in Culiacán. I ask if any
Primera Hora
reporters will attend the meeting and Marco tells me that no one from the crime beat press corps was invited and he wouldn’t want to go anyway. “Those meetings don’t do anything, never lead to anything concrete,” he says.

The censorship power of the cartels is inviolable, they tell me. At
Primera Hora
, they try to avoid attracting cartel wrath altogether. Their job is now to count bodies and photograph and describe death scenes. On particularly bloody days the front page will include an “executometer,” or
ejecutómetro
, showing the grim total.

“Investigative journalism is extinct here,” Pepis says.

For example, if a group of drug assassins leaves a written message at a murder scene,
Primera Hora
will reference that a message was left but not publish in the article or the photograph the text of the message itself. This editorial decision was made by someone within the Sinaloa Cartel.

They tell me that a gunman killed a chef who prepared regional shellfish dishes for the Sinaloa Cartel boss Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, also known as MZ. The killers left a message that read:
THIS WILL HAPPEN TO ALL WHO WORK FOR MZ
.
Primera Hora
published the text of the message in the news article that they posted online and got a call within minutes. The voice on the phone said, “Take that shit down!” Marco called the news director at
Noroeste
to confer. The director concurred: “Take it down and just mention that a message was left.” And hence an editorial policy was born.

Pepis started at
Noroeste
as a member of the predawn crew that assembled the morning paper. After six months he began to work preparing the negatives and slides used in the printing process. At that time
Primera Hora
had a day-shift staff photographer who was famously lazy. Come lunchtime at 2:00 p.m. he would head out, turn off his mobile phone, and disappear until 6:00 p.m., leaving a four-hour chunk of the day uncovered. Several of the crime beat reporters joked with Pepis that he should learn photography so he could cover the languid photographer’s dead time. Pepis liked the idea. With his savings he bought a 1970s Yashica 35mm camera and studied darkroom developing techniques, how to work the camera, and finally the craft of taking pictures. He then apprenticed for a year, unpaid, covering the unofficial 2:00 p.m.–6:00 p.m. “lunch” shift before his night shift at the paper’s printing press. After a year, he started as a crime beat staff photographer for
Primera Hora
.

I ask the
Primera Hora
team to walk me through the background to the current state of war. In 2001, El Chapo busts out of federal, maximum-security prison to reclaim old territories, they tell me. At this time there was a grand alliance between Sinaloan drug cartels called The Federation. This alliance included the Arrellano Félix brothers (from Sinaloa, but in control of the
plaza
in Tijuana), the Carrillo Fuentes family (also from Sinaloa, but in control of the
plaza
in Ciudad Juárez), and El Chapo and El Mayo Zambada (both from Sinaloa and in control of the
plaza
in Sinaloa).

In 2004, assassins working for El Chapo gunned down Rodolfillo Carrillo Fuentes—brother of Amado, “The Lord of the Skies”—and his wife, Giovanna Quevedo Gastélum, in front of a movie theater in Culiacán. The Carrillo Fuentes gang sent a group of killers to murder El Chapo’s brother Pablo. With these murders The Federation dissolved, the alliances crumbled, and the war began. The violence ebbed in 2005 and surged again in 2006. During this time El Chapo made an alliance with the Sinaloan Beltrán Leyva brothers: Arturo, Héctor, Alfredo, Mario, and Carlos. The Beltrán Leyva brothers recruited Edgar “La Barbie” Valdez from the rival Gulf Cartel, and together they became the main armed wing of the Sinaloa Cartel tasked with invading new territories, taking over and opening up new
plazas
. One of the first places they went was Acapulco, Guerrero, where two state police officers were decapitated and their severed heads impaled on a fence one morning in late April 2006.

In 2008, the alliance between El Chapo and El Mayo and the Beltrán Leyva brothers fell apart. El Chapo apparently tipped off federal authorities to the whereabouts of Alfredo “El Mochomo” Beltrán’s safe house in Mexico City—where Alfredo was arrested on January 21, 2008—as a trade to secure the release of one of his sons from maximum-security prison in Mexico State. As a result, El Chapo’s son Archibaldo Guzmán was released a few months later, on April 11. The Beltrán Leyva clan demanded their brother’s release, and it seems that when El Chapo refused to help, they sent a hit squad to kill El Chapo’s other son, Édgar, in the parking lot of a supermarket on May 9. On May 7 and 8, hand-painted narco-banners were hung in Sinaloa with messages like
POLICE-SOLDIERS, SO THAT IT BE CLEAR, EL MOCHOMO STILL CARRIES WEIGHT. SINCERELY, ARTURO BELTRÁ
N
. The war was on again. The Beltrán Leyva gang made alliances with El Chapo’s bitter enemies the Carrillo Fuentes of the Juárez Cartel and the Zetas, then still working for the Gulf Cartel.

When I ask about Calderón and
his
war on drugs, the crime beat reporters urge the following distinction: there is the War on Drugs (
la Guerra del Narco
), and then there is the Drug War (
la Narcoguerra
). In the War on Drugs the federal government sends tens of thousands of soldiers and federal police parading through the streets, then announces the seizures of drugs and weapons and the arrests of alleged drug traffickers. In the Drug War, trafficking organizations—and the various local, state, and federal authorities allied with them—battle in the streets and seek to exterminate each other and establish absolute dominance in a given
plaza
. The two wars sometimes overlap, but they are not identical.

Pepis carries a radio similar to those used by the Red Cross and is able to intercept their communications. He has studied their codes. This is how he learns when and where the bodies fall. He used to tap into the police radio system, but the cops recently shifted to a prohibitively expensive Israeli radio company, and so now he taps into the ambulance radios.

As we are talking in the bunker, he picks up a call and holds the radio close to his ear. He hears, “five bravo fourteen,” grabs his mobile phone and makes several calls to confirm. Five stands for wounded, bravo for bullet wound, and fourteen for dead. So “five bravo fourteen,” translates to “the bullet wound victim died.” That is his cue. Pepis looks up and says that someone has been executed on the outskirts of town. “It appears as if it is the guy they grabbed in front of the reporters an hour or two ago,” he says.

We pile into the white Chevy pickup with the
Primera Hora
logo painted on the sides and head out. It takes us about fifteen minutes to get to the scene.

The pride of the blood photographer used to be arriving on the scene before the cops, paramedics, and most important, other reporters. The photographer could thus work in peace. He or she could walk right up to the body without navigating police lines and have a few minutes to try to get the right angle and capture the light without the image being filled with the clutter of detectives, ambulances, and other photographers. The photographer could fill the frame with death and nothing else, and hope for the front page and good sales. Not anymore. In too many occasions killers return to the scene of an execution to either make sure the victim is in fact dead, or to kill someone else they missed the first time. In such situations the killers will execute anyone in the way of their task. So now reporters, paramedics, and even the police themselves will often wait awhile before getting too close to a dead body on the street.

“Trying to get the exclusive shot is a thing of the past here for us,” Pepis says. “We’ve had to put a stop to that, to self-censor. Now when there is an event, we’ll go, but we try not to get there before the authorities.”

The Culiacán government says that they have an average response time to homicide calls of four to eight minutes. Pepis says it is more like half an hour, and it can sometimes take them up to five hours. He gives an example, “I went to cover a homicide in Navolato once. . . . From the moment I heard the report, I coordinated with my colleagues and lost ten minutes. In the time it took me to drive to Navolato, another twenty-five minutes, so it’s now been thirty-five minutes. I arrive at the scene and see a person’s body discarded there, but there is nobody around. No one is there except the curious locals looking at the body. I asked one guy, ‘Hey, the cops?’ ‘They haven’t come yet,’ he says. I was waiting around for another thirty minutes when we see several trucks with mounted headlights like the drug gunmen use, coming at us from the distance. And the trucks are going full speed, jumping over all the street bumps. The people scream, ‘Here come the killers!’ They dive for cover in the bush and run where they can. And the body is alone again, like a dead animal in the woods. I stayed nearby. The trucks belonged to the state police, arriving as fast as they could, putting on their circus, but over an hour had passed since the report went out.”

We arrive at the scene and park the truck. The body has been discarded on the side of a dirt road a few feet from a barbed wire fence. Everything is green; it is the rainy season. We are at the northern edge of the city, about a hundred yards from the back wall of the last subdivision. Looking across a weed-covered field we can see clearly the second-story windows of at least ten houses. The people who live there must have heard the shots. No one would think of knocking on doors to ask them if they had: not the reporters, not the police. No one does this because the people in the houses would certainly tell you nothing, though there is always the chance that they would report your snooping around to people who drive around in SUVs with assault rifles.

We are the first reporters on the scene. There are two police trucks there already and the police are cordoning off the immediate vicinity around the body with yellow caution tape, tying it to a barbed wire fence, stretching it across the road and tying it to a tree on the other side. We duck under the fence and are able to get within feet of the body on that side. The photographers crouch and get to work.

I begin to write observations in my notebook when a young man walks up to me and asks, “Do you want the name?”

The young man did not ask if I wanted “his name,” but rather “the name.”

I say yes and he tells me: Juan Antonio González Zamorra. I say thank you.

The state forensic team arrives and starts to survey the scene.

Juan Antonio González’s dead body is face down. His T-shirt has been pulled up over his head, tying up both of his arms in the shirt. On his left side where his shirt has been pulled up you can see two small circular wounds. One of the photographers comments, “The orifices are very small, close range, must have been a cop-killer,” a 5.7x28mm-caliber pistol famed for its ability to pierce body armor. The T-shirt covering his head is filled with blood, still wet, seeping slowly through the fabric and into the ground.

I notice a man busily walking around the scene talking on a mobile phone. He is all business. He wears dress slacks and a button-down collared shirt both stitched with the word
EMAUS
. I glance back at the parked vehicles: one is a van with
EMAUS
painted in huge letters on the side.

The police take pictures of Juan Antonio González’s dead body. The forensics team locates the bullet casings, notes the body’s position, and measures the distances between the body and the casings. The news photographers walk the perimeter of the scene taking photographs of the police and forensics team working.