the kingpins, por william finnegan

7/31/2019 The Kingpins, por William Finnegan

1/15

Letter from Mexico

The Kingpins

The fight for Guadalajara.

by William Finnegan

July 2, 2012

Tlajomulco, where the Army mounted a highly publicized drug raid; the car of a murdered official. Photograph byEunice Adorno.

At the Guadalajara International Book Fair, Enrique Pea Nieto, who is forty-five, boyishly

handsome, and generally expected to be the next President of Mexico, was asked to name three

books that had influenced him. He mentioned the Bible, or, at least, some parts (unspecified), and

The Eagles Throne, a Carlos Fuentes novel (though he named the historian Enrique Krauze asthe author). And, for a few excruciating minutes, that was all he could come up with. The crowd

laughed wickedly. Pea Nietos wife, a former soap-opera star, squirmed in the front row. His teen-

age daughter didnt help matters when, in a tweet, she scorned all of the idiots who form part of

the proletariat and only criticize those they envy.

That debacle was in December. It did nothing to slow Pea Nietos well-financed march toward the

election, which will take place on July 1st, but it did provide a welcome distraction for

Guadalajarans, who are justly proud of their annual book fair. It is the second largest in Latin

America, drawing more than half a million visitors, nearly two thousand publishers, and hundreds

of authors, including, over the years, Nadine Gordimer, William Styron, and Toni Morrison.

Guadalajarans sometimes offer it up as Exhibit A for the case that the city is a civilized place where

life goes on unmarked by the violence that disfigures large parts of Mexico.

By late 2011, that argument was hard to make. Two days before the fair opened, twenty-six corpses

were dumped under the Millennium Arches, a downtown landmark. Near the bodies, which bore

signs of torture, was a messagewhat is known as a narcomantasigned by the Zetas, the most

feared organized-crime group in Mexico. The message taunted the Sinaloa cartel, the countrys

biggest crime group, and its leader, Joaqun Guzmn Loera, known as El Chapo (Shorty). Sinaloa

has controlled Guadalajara, which is the capital of the western state of Jalisco, for decades. Were

in Jalisco and we are not leaving, the Zetas announced. This is proof that we are deep inside the

kitchen. Most narcomantas (which appear virtually every day somewhere in Mexico) are

disinformation, their assertions dubious, their true authorship unknowable. But the Zetas have been

pushing westward from their strongholds on the Gulf Coast, and they had already taken theneighboring state of Zacatecas, so there was no reason to doubt that they coveted Jalisco, a rich

prize, or that this was indeed their atrocity and their message to Guadalajara.


2/15

In Mexico, it is often impossible to know who is behind somethinga massacre, a candidacy, an

assassination, the capture of a crime boss, a discovery of high-level corruption. Either the truth is

too fluid and complex to define or it remains opaque to anyone not directly involved in

manipulating events. This may help to explain how a city widely understood to be under the control

of a leading international crime groupthe U.S. Treasury Department recently labelled Guzmn,

who is fifty-five, the worlds most powerful drug traffickercan regard itself as a jacaranda-

shaded refuge of high culture and legitimate commercial vitality. Both descriptions are true, andboth realities are under siege. When Mexicans discuss the news, they talk often aboutpantallas

screens, illusions, behind which are more screens, all created to obscure the facts. Pea Nieto is

depicted, in cartoons, as a carnival mask behind which laughs Carlos Salinas de Gortari, a former

President, who is still regarded as enormously powerful. I cant count the number of times I have

asked someone about a news story and been told, Pantalla.

This is a problem for journalism. You fish for facts and instead pull up boatloads of speculation,

some of it well informed, much of it trailing tangled agendas. You end up reporting not so much

what happened as what people think or imagine or say happened. Then there is the entirely justified

fear of speaking to the press, particularly to foreign journalists. I have had to offer anonymity,

pseudonyms, and extraordinary assurances to many sources for this account. The reprisals thatpeople are trying to avoid would come not only from crime groups but, in many cases, from

factions within the Mexican government.

The six-year Presidency of Felipe Caldern is coming to an end, and this election can fairly be seen

as a referendum on his military-led offensive against drug traffickers, which has cost some fifty

thousand lives and left the country psychologically battered. Calderns National Action Party

(PAN) is far behind in the polls. Its Presidential candidate, Josefina Vzquez Mota, campaigns under

the slogan Josefina diferente, hoping to distance herself from Caldern, but she served in his

Cabinet, and her proposals for restoring security are not notably different from current policies.

Pea Nietos security platform is nothing special, either. He might eventually return the Army to its

barracks and, like virtually every recent President, revamp the federal police. His slogan is T me

conocesYou know mewhich many people find amusing, since they dont know him at all.He was the governor of Mexico State, a populous but small horseshoe around Mexico City, and his

time as a national politician has been short and heavily stage-managed, with limited press access

(and no more literacy tests). Mexicans do know his party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party

(PRI), which ruled the country from 1929 until 2000. Throwing out the corrupt, authoritarian PRI, in

2000, was a great moment for democracy in Latin America. Now it seems that Mexican voters are

poised to bring the Party back.

The PAN is often described as center-right, the PRI as center-left, and the countrys third party, the

Party of the Democratic Revolution (P.R.D.), as left-wing. But these labels carry little weight in

Mexico today. The parties have no ideology, a magazine editor in Mexico City told me. That

aspect is meaningless. Power here is about money. The P.R.D. candidate, Andrs Manuel LpezObrador, a popular former mayor of Mexico City, who nearly won the Presidency in 2006, has

moved toward the center this year, dropping his confrontational rhetoric. Indeed, in 2010 the P.R.D.

and the purportedly rightist PAN combined forces successfully, backing the same candidates for

governor in three state elections. The PAN and the PRI are both avidly pro-business. But it was the

PRI that presided over the privatization of more than a thousand state companies during the

nineteen-eighties and nineties. Carlos Salinas, during hissexenio, privatized hundreds of

companies, as well as Mexicos banking system, turning a lucky circle of his friends into

billionaires. This creation of a new economic lite, with effective monopolies in fields such as

transportation, mining, and telecommunications, resembles the creation, around the same time, of

the new crony-capitalist oligarchy in Russia. And in Mexico nearly all its beneficiaries owe their

fortunes to the PRI, not the PAN.

Caldern began his military assault on the cartels immediately after he took office, in December,

2006. He had narrowly won that years election. Lpez Obrador, in a rancorous aftermath, had


3/15

refused to concede, and many people believed that Caldern started his war in order to change the

subjectto try to consolidate his legitimacy in office. A careerPAN functionary (his father co-

founded the Party), Caldern is not a particularly colorful or forceful character, and his sudden

assumption of the role of wartime leader was also seen by critics as overcompensation. Once

engaged, he found himself regularly accused of going easy on the Sinaloa cartel. A zero-sum

analysis of an anti-crime strategy is, understandably, the default view in Mexico: any government

assault on one cartel must be at the behest of its rivals. And Sinaloa did seem underrepresentedamong the casualties and captured narcos as those numbers spiralled up. Reasons advanced for this

alleged softness included Chapo Guzmns web of informers inside the government and a secret

Caldern strategy to weaken Sinaloas rivals in order to produce a single, credible interlocutor for

organized crime with whom the government could strike deals.

In yet more overcompensation, Caldern has seemed to be pounding extra hard on Sinaloa in recent

times. His Hail Mary pass to keep his party in power has been a highly publicized effort to capture

or kill Guzmn. In February, federal police missed getting him, they claimed, by a matter of minutes

at a rented beachfront mansion in Cabo San Lucas. Afterward, in Mexico City, Janet Napolitano, the

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, predicted that Guzmn would be caught, citing the successful

manhunt for Osama bin Laden. But bin Laden didnt have the Pentagon on his payroll; Guzmnsbribe network inside Mexicos security forces is formidable.

Caldern has pursued a kingpin strategy, like the deck of cards that the United States used in

post-Saddam Iraq. In 2009, Mexican authorities listed the thirty-seven drug capos they most

wanted. They have so far caught or killed twenty-two, and some cartels seem to have withered after

losing their leaders. But organized crime controls more resources today, and sows more terror, than

ever. The most common fallout from the kingpin strategy has been the fragmentation of narco-

trafficking into smaller, warring, ultraviolent factions. This cops-and-robbers version of the drug

war cannot, in any case, be taken at face value. The idea of a unified state that is furiously pursuing

bad guys is purepantalla. The low-grade civil war in Mexico takes place on the ground, among

factions with shifting loyalties, in cities and villages with tangled histories. The government has

innumerable facesit has more than two thousand police agencies, for a startand its corruptioncontrols are too weak to counter the power of narco billions. Every local commander, every official,

and every community must work out an accommodation with organized crime.

Metropolitan Guadalajara, population four and a half million, sprawls across a sunny, mile-high

plateau. Its been the administrative center of western Mexico since the sixteenth centurythe older

parts of town are filled with imposing churches, plazas, and public buildingsand its still a

financial, industrial, and educational hub. Electronics and software are booming fieldspeople call

it the Silicon Valley of Mexico. The University of Guadalajara has more than two hundred thousand

students. The city has good restaurants and music, great old neighborhoods, shiny new malls, and a

flourishing methamphetamine trade.

The Mexican meth trade got a big boost in the nineteen-nineties, when American law enforcement

started to crack down on U.S. meth labs and production moved south. For the Mexican cartels, meth

has many advantages. With cocaine, they are middlemen, dependent on producers in South America

and obliged to move the product, first, across Central America. Marijuana and heroin require

cropland, rainfall, harvesting, and, in the case of heroin, processing. Meth, like other synthetic

drugs, is produced indoors. It has, by some estimates, the highest profit margin of all the major

illegal drugs. Whether smoked, snorted, injected, or swallowed as a pill, it is extremely addictive.

Worldwide consumption has been rising for decades. According to a recent United Nations report,

amphetamines have passed cocaine and opiates to become the second most used illegal type of

drug, after marijuana. In 2010, a hundred and sixty-six meth labs were busted in Iran; the Czech

Republic shuts down some four hundred labs a year. Mexico, with the U.S. market next door, isbelieved to have become the worlds largest meth producer. The cartels, particularly Sinaloa, cook

meth on an industrial scale that would not be possible in the U.S.


4/15

In a 2008 report (later WikiLeaked), titled Chemical City, the U.S. consulate in Guadalajara listed

the factors that made Jalisco a major center of crystal-meth production: geography, availability of

materials, adequate infrastructure, and brain power. The Sinaloa cartel, which got its start growing

and smuggling marijuana and heroin, and then became extremely rich transshipping cocaine from

Colombia to the United States, branched into the meth business sometime in the nineteen-nineties.

Its Guadalajara chieftain, Ignacio (Nacho) Coronel Villarreal, became known as the King of Crystal.

He lived in the citys wealthiest neighborhood but ran his operations without flamboyance. Theprofits were apparently fabulous. Then, in July, 2010, Coronel was killed in an Army raid on his

home. Speculation was rife. Armchair warriors wondered if El Chapo had set up his old friend

Nacho, out of concern that his Jalisco kingdom was becoming too independently powerful. In any

event, everyone said that taking Coronel alive was out of the question. The gentleman narco, as I

heard him called in Guadalajara, knew who in the Army was on whose payroll. That was why the

Army sent a hundred soldiers to attack the house where he had lived, more or less openly, for many

years.

That was when things changed in Jalisco, a bookstore clerk on Avenida Chapultepec told me.

That was the end of the peace. The Zetas, who reportedly know nothing about cooking meth but

are old hands at the hostile takeover of going concerns, started making more aggressive allianceswith disaffected local gangsters.

Heating up the plaza is the term of art for whats happening in Guadalajara, mainly in the poor

barrios and in the badlands on the outskirts, the places absorbing the citys wild recent growth.

Tlajomulco de Zuiga, a big, shapeless municipio (the rough equivalent of a county) on the citys

southern edge, has seen its population quadruple in a decade, to almost half a million. The PRIs

candidate for governor recently described the area as a dumping ground for corpses. Bad guys

dropped their victims in local ditches. The Army conducted raids on local meth labs. In February,

the Army announced that it had seized, in a historic bust, in Tlajomulco, fifteen tons of

methamphetamine. The street value of that much meth was, by the Armys figuring, some four

billion dollars. If true, that would indeed make it the largest meth bust in history. But was it true?Vctor Hugo Ornelas is never without his camera. Its a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT, which he

carries on a shoulder strap and swings silently into focus on garbage piles, flooded roads, bad

potholes. Hes a tireless blogger (he is also a stringer forMilenio, a national daily), and these shots

go up with notas (short articles) about derelictions, hazards, and other small outrages around

Tlajomulco. Most will make it intoLa Verdad(The Truth), a weekly paper for which he covers

politics, writes a column, and does investigations. He photographs corpses, too, and writes those

notas. Unlike many papers,La Verdaddoesnt publish blood and gore, but Hugos laptop contains a

stomach-turning archive of headless torsos, hacked-off limbs, heads on poles with narcomantas

attached.

The bodies are messages, he told me. If its missing a finger, it means you pointed to somebody.Missing legs means you changed groups. Missing the tongue means you said something you

shouldnt have. A hand cut off means it was a thief.

We were driving around western Tlajomulco, a sunbaked miscellany of ranches, factories,

subdivisions, and rough hills. I parked in a patch of shade. Hugo wanted to check out a scruffy

warehouse that had caught his eye. This was on the main highway running south from Guadalajara.

An old couple appeared. They lived next to the warehouse, and told us that stinking water ran out of

the building. They didnt know the name of the company that used it, but they thought it produced

condiments. They burn their trash, and we breathe the nasty smoke, the woman said. It was hard

to hear her over the roar of trucks. Hugo leaned in, took notes. He wore a dress shirt, jeans, and

boots. He had beaded leather bracelets on both wrists. He is slender, thirty, with a severe facehigh

cheekbones, wide-set eyes. We watched him hobble off to snap pictures of the warehouse. He has

used a cane since February, when he suffered a severe fracture of his left leg playing league soccer.

They pasted me, he said.


5/15

Many people would like to paste Hugo. He was once studying a strange-looking house, figuring that

it was a meth lab, when a pickup truck suddenly wheeled out of the driveway and blocked his path.

Four armed men jumped out. They threw him and a female companion on the ground. With a boot

on his neck and a gun at his head, Hugo played the fool. He babbled about how he admired the

federal agents known as AFIs (the Federal Investigation Agency was a squad created to fight

corruption and organized crime), pretending that he thought the narcos were AFIs. The ruse seemed

to confuse the gunmen. Hugo allowed himself a faint smile when he told me this story. The narcosdid not spot his camera, which he had quickly hidden in the car. That, he thought, probably saved

their lives.

But I fear the government more, he said. He meant officials, police, and soldiersthose he

usually offended with his investigations. Yet, he said, You have to confront them, or they will just

come more and more. I wrote a nota about corruption in the municipal police. They were taking

wrecked cars and selling off the good parts. I named names, gave a lot of details. One of the cops

came to my office, armed, in uniform. I told him that City Hall was down the street, if he wanted to

make a complaint. I told him he shouldnt come threatening me, and I picked up my camera. He

turned and ran. I got a good picture of him running.

Most confrontations dont end so merrily. Anyway, if someone wants to do you real harm, he canjust hire asicarioan assassin. Its only a thousand pesos, Hugo told meless than eighty

dollars. And thats not just in Tlajomulco. Its everywhere. The day before his leg was broken in

the soccer game, two men accosted him. They were waiting outside his house, in the rain. They

were very aggressive. One guy asked me, How low do your balls hang? Thats a rude question. I

was sarcastic. I asked them if that was supposed to scare me. I still dont know who sent them.

Was there a connection to his soccer injury?

Hugo looked at his cane. They werent going for the ball, he said. He was blindsided, and never

knew who hit him. The game was stopped. Nobody from the other team spoke to him. His

teammates, perhaps doing him a favor, said they did not see who had pasted him. He kept writing

notas from his hospital bed. I had noticed, on his Twitter page, a photograph of him out cold,awaiting surgery. It was probably best to stay in the public eyeto try to seem cheerful,

unintimidated. Hugo heard that a young man who worked at City Hall said that they should have

broken both his legs.

Hugo likes to go undercover. He recently posed as a building inspector, to get a look at the

paperwork for a new banquet hall. The permits were bogus, as he suspected. Developers normally

get their way in Tlajomulco. They have thrown up a large number of spectacularly shabby

subdivisions, not bothering with even basic services. Some of these places have now been without

water for years. Five thousand houses in the new subdivisions are already abandoned. The owner of

the illegal banquet hall went ballistic over Hugos article. He cornered him in a parking lot, letting

him know that he had crossed the wrong guy. Unfortunately, that could be true.Could the police be of any help?

The corruption is so deep, Hugo said. No.

The Army?

The soldiers here dont speak. They dont investigate. They dont know who anyone is. They wear

masks. They just follow orders and attack. Then they go back to their bases.

Some cops I trust, Hugo went on. I even help them with things. They call me to help them find a

certain place. They dont know all thefraccionamientosthe dirt-poor new tracts. We were

passing through one, called Santa Fe. The tiny row houses, the gray cinder-block walls, seemed to

stretch for miles. Gang graffiti and newly painted PRI propaganda competed for wall space. Wecrossed a culvert. They have dumped bodies there, Hugo said. He directed me to a modest police

substation, where there was an officer who might speak to me.


6/15

Call me Jos, the officer said. It was clearly not his name.

Jos said that there were two hundred and forty thousand residents in his sector, and a total of ninety

cops. The worst problems were gang violence and robbery. The Army blew through occasionally

but did not communicate with police. There was little point in arresting people, because there were

so few prosecutions. A local capo, known as El Puerco (the Hog), who worked for a cartel called La

Resistencia, which had thrown in its lot with the Zetas, had been arrested, Jos said, for drug

dealing, robbery, and multiple homicides. Three days later, Jos said, he was released. The Sinaloacartel kept a lower profile. Its local affiliate was called the Jalisco Cartel New Generation. Meth

addiction was one of the ways the cartels recruited. Kids got into drugs and gangs and, if they

survived, were allowed to join the cartel.

Joss men kept strolling into the room where we talked, checking me out. They wore bulletproof

vests and carried assault rifles. I knew that Jos would not have agreed to talk to me if I had not

arrived with Hugo. This is not the U.S., he said. But things have to change, or well go the way

of Afghanistan. The next President has an obligation to change things.

Local security had deteriorated since the arrival of the Zetas: Now you dont know who is

connected with whom, or where the threats are coming from.

Two years before, Jos had been ambushed. I was on patrol, he said. He pulled his shirt up to

reveal huge, frightening scars. They never caught the shooter.

Hugo later said, Hes a good guy. I trust him. But hes been scared since he got shot.

There are reportedly three capture/kill squads working full time for Felipe Calderns government

on Chapo Guzmn. The Drug Enforcement Administration and other U.S. security agencies are said

to feed the Mexican military intelligence information on Guzmns movements, and are frustrated

by the Mexicans failure to kill or capture him. After the near-miss in February, an American official

told ABC News, Every time he gets away, they tell us, He got out the back door. The Americans

had started joking that there is no word for surround in Spanish. Press reports put Guzmn in

Argentina, Guatemala, England, Honduras, or, most often, simply back home in the state of Sinaloa,in the rugged Sierra Madre range where he grew up.

Last October, President Caldern suggested, bizarrely, that Guzmn was living in the United States.

He seemed to be referring to the news that Guzmns wife, Emma Coronel, had recently travelled to

California, where, in August, she gave birth to twins in a hospital in Los Angeles County. But

Coronel had returned to Mexico. U.S. law enforcement had tracked her back as far as the border.

The fact that Guzmns freedom has been embarrassing the Mexican President for years reflects a

fundamental power shift between the Mexican state under the PAN and Mexican organized crime.

Before 2000, under the PRI, crime groups prospered, but the national government ultimately called

the shots. There were well-understood lines that the cartels could not cross. One of those was

crossed in 1993, when the Archbishop of Guadalajara was gunned down at the Guadalajara airport.This was unacceptable. The circumstances of the murder were murky, but someone had to pay, and

Chapo Guzmn was arrested sixteen days laterin Guatemala, despite, according to Malcolm

Beiths book The Last Narco, having paid a local military commander more than a million dollars

for protection. Guzmn did not deny having been at the airport when the archbishop was killed, but

he claimed that he was the intended victim: the assassins, rival narcos, had fired into the wrong car.

This became the governments theory of the casethere are many othersand the homicide charge

was eventually dropped. He was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to twenty years.


7/15

In 2001, just after Vicente Fox became the PANs first President, and just before Guzmn was

expected to be extradited to the United States, he escaped from a maximum-security prison. He is

said to have rolled out in the bottom of a laundry cart, his exit smoothed by bribes. Other versions

have him coming and going freely for years, and finally leaving for good dressed as a guard. Under

the PAN, Guzmn has reportedly become a billionaire, making theForbes list of the worlds most

powerful people in each of the past two years.

No one believes that the government is calling the shots today in Mexico. It isnt even clear thatcapturing or killing Guzmn would bring the Caldern administration a popularity windfall, let

alone help the PAN make up the ground it needs in order to win the now imminent Presidential

election. In Guadalajara, there was a large-scale Army raid, with helicopters, near the city center in

March. The military tried to seal off the target neighborhood. The narcos responded by hijacking

twenty-five trucks and municipal buses, setting them on fire, and blocking the citys main roads.

The Army, ever-secretive and rightly mistrustful of other government agencies, had not informed

the governor, the mayor, the state police, the municipal police, or the federal police of its plans, so

Guadalajarans huddled in their homes and workplaces, phoning and e-mailing one another, waiting

in vain for advisories or information from the government as the sky filled with black smoke and

the city rang with sirens. A young man I met spent the afternoon of the narcobloqueo watching TVnews with a local family. One of their great fears that day, he said, was that the Army might be

killing or capturing Chapo Guzmn. These were middle-class Guadalajarans, painfully aware of

what organized crime is doing to Mexiconot fans of El Chapo by any stretchbut they feared

that, if Guzmn were no longer running the Sinaloa cartel, all hell would break loose in

Guadalajara. This is a widespread view, based on hard national experience of the fallout from

Calderns kingpin strategy.

The Army captured a lesser capo that day, one Erick Valencia Salazar, a.k.a. El 85, whom

authorities described as the leader of the Jalisco Cartel New Generation (C.J.N.G.). A more

important leader, according to security experts, and the real target of the raida gangster known as

El Menchohad eluded troops. The C.J.N.G. plastered the city with narcomantas apologizing to

the public for the narcobloqueo. It had been an emotional outburst, the mantas said, in reaction tothe loss of El 85. The narcos were sorry about the days events (which included the death of a bus

driver who was inadvertently burned alive), and would now return to their main mission, which was

keeping Guadalajara safe from the Zetas. Some amateur scholars of the drug trade speculated that

Chapo Guzmn might have tried to set up El Mencho, whose ambitions were said to be trumping

his loyalty to Sinaloa. The experts I interviewed all said that the narcobloqueo had actually been a

tactical maneuver, meant to distract the Army and law enforcement, so that narcos more important

than Valencia could leave the city undetected. Inevitably, Chapo Guzmn was rumored to have been

among them.

How can Guadalajarans continue to see their town as a haven? The most tenacious local myth is

that powerful narcos want it peaceful because their families live there. This idea may once have hadvalidity. A crackdown in the late seventies on traffickers in Sinaloa, fuelled largely by U.S.

demands, drove many narcos from that state, and some of the top dogs did settle in Guadalajara.

The money laundering was excellent, and they bought hotels, restaurants, night clubs. They married

into some of the best old families, sent their children to good schools. Their wealth drove a local

mini-boom.

Chapo Guzmn, too, lived in Guadalajara, rising within an organization disrupted by U.S.-driven

arrests to form the Sinaloa cartel. Although he had only a third-grade education, his aptitude for

international smuggling was high. He cultivated cocaine sources in South America, secured routes

through Central America and western Mexico, and built elaborate tunnels under the U.S. border. He

could be ruthless. The story was that he built his tunnels with slave labor and, in the interests ofsecrecy, killed the workers when they were finished. He gave no quarter in battles over plazas that

he considered valuable. At the same time, he gained a reputation as a reasonable business partner,

and built alliances across the globe. This was particularly important in the meth trade, where


8/15

production relies on chemicals manufactured primarily in Asia. In Mexico, it is estimated that

Guzmn employs, directly or indirectly, a hundred and fifty thousand people. His influence, even

his popularity, runs especially deep in Sinaloa. Local joke: How can you tell when times are tough

in Sinaloa? El Chapo had to lay off ten judges.

The prison that he escaped from, known as Puente Grande, is on the outskirts of Guadalajara. His

elusiveness, at least some of which must be put down to luck, only burnishes his legend. He is the

subject of many narcocorridos, the popular ballads that celebrate outlaw exploits. Emma Coronel ishis fourth wife. She caught his eye while Guzmn was hiding out in her village, in Durango. He

helped see that she won a local beauty contest, where she was named Miss Coffee and Guava. Their

wedding, on her eighteenth birthday, in 2007, was, from all reports, a great blowout. The Army

showed up a day late. Emma Coronel is the niece of Nacho Coronel. Frequent reports that Guzmn

travels with a uniformed, heavily armed security detail of up to three hundred men were belied by

the governments version of the bungled raid in Cabo San Lucas in February. Guzmn appeared to

be staying in the rented mansion with a retinue of four, one of them a local prostitute, whom the

police interrogated extensively.

Few seem to believe that Guzmns capture or demise would put a noticeable dent in the Mexican

drug trade. A succession plan is undoubtedly in place. Some analysts think that Guzmn is not eventhe chief executive in the Sinaloa cartel. Chapo is a brand, a Guadalajara academic told me. He

does not make major decisions. His fate will be decided for him, just as his escape from Puente

Grande was the result of a deal. Intellectuals who discount Guzmns agency in the multi-decade

telenovela of his life see him as a mere manager of narco-trafficking, a distraction from Mexicos

problems of corruption, poverty, impunity, and bad government. For both Caldern and the country,

chasing him is avoiding the hard work of building a more transparent, modern democracy.

But the power of organized crime in Mexico now holds hostage large areas of the country, including

major cities, such as Monterrey, and terrorizes the rest with performances of stupefying violence.

Calderns deployment of the Army, first justified by the militarys relatively clean reputation, has

only besmirched that reputation, as soldiers commit a rising number of crimes against civilians, andfail to resist financial temptation. Four senior commanders, including three generals, one of them

Calderns former No. 2 at the defense ministry, were arrested in May on suspicion of working for

organized crime. (No formal charges have been filed.) More than fifty-six thousand troops have

deserted under Caldern.

Some Guadalajarans find cold comfort by looking north, to Monterrey, where security has been in

free fall for the past two years. It is Mexicos third-largest city, and its wealthiest. But the police

have lost control of the streets. Kidnapping, extortion, robbery, and murder are commonplace. The

number of killings there tripled between 2009 and 2010, then nearly doubled again in 2011. Army

checkpoints now lace the city. Guadalajara has experienced nothing close to Monterreys nightmare.

What happened there? The Zetas and the Gulf cartel started a war. The local police reportedly went

to work en masse for the cartels. Now the Zetas are pillaging the city.

The Zetas are unlike other Mexican crime groups. Their founders were deserters from the Mexican

militarys lite special forces, recruited in the late nineteen-nineties as bodyguards and enforcers for

the leader of the then formidable Gulf cartel. The cartel paid many times what the military did. The

Zetas numbers grew. Trained as paratroopers and intelligence operatives, they introduced a

paramilitary element to narco-trafficking, outgunning police units. They ambushed the Army. They

seized plazas and drug routes from other cartels, with an efficiency and a brutality not seen before.

Beheadings became their signature, along with castrations with genitals stuffed in mouths and

corpses with a Z carved into the flesh. Their ranks swelled with infusions from a notorious

Guatemalan counter-insurgency unit, the Kaibiles.

Traditional crime groups like Sinaloa were family-based, often deeply tied to a region. The Zetas

were military. Their mission was to kill and destroy. When they outgrew their role as enforcers, they

turned on their employers. They beat the Gulf cartel down to insignificance. Their only real rival


9/15

now is Sinaloa. The Zetas, who are estimated to have more than ten thousand fighters, control

virtually the entire east coast of Mexico, and have laid claim to several of the busiest cargo crossing

points on the U.S. border, including Matamoros, Reynosa, and Nuevo Laredo. It is believed that

they are pushing west because they want to open a corridor to a major Pacific port, such as

Manzanillo, just south of Guadalajara.

The Zetas approach a town, a city, or a state as a shakedown opportunity. They fight for the right to

terrorize a community, and bleed it dry. They also threaten the central government. One of theirmantas, hung from a bridge in Monterrey in February, said, The government must make a pact

with us because if not we will have to overthrow it and take power by force. A recent government

study found that the Zetas are now active in seventeen of Mexicos thirty-two states. (The same

study found that Sinaloa is active in sixteen.) They have even moved into the state of Sinaloa,

where they are reportedly fighting ferociously, village by village, for control of Chapo Guzmns

home turf.

The Zetas traffic drugs, but their specialties are kidnapping, extortion, murder, robbery, human

smuggling, and product piracy. Their punishments for failure to pay protection money are

extravagant and meant to be cautionary. Last August, they firebombed a casino in Monterrey whose

owner had not paid, killing at least fifty-two customers. They kidnap migrant workers, mainly fromCentral America, and demand ransom from their impoverished families. Some of their massacres

make no obvious sense. In 2010, seventy-two migrants were found dead at a ranch near the U.S.

border. In 2011, a mass grave with the remains of a hundred and ninety-three people, presumably

migrants, was discovered in the desert in Tamaulipas. Migrants are now crossing further west, in

Sonora, hoping to avoid the Zetas. Mexicos state-owned oil company, Pemex, says that the Zetas

have begun tapping its pipelines, stealing millions of barrels of crude oil a year.

The Zetas esprit is remarkable. When Zetas are captured, other Zetas break them out of prison.

There have been dozens of attacks, riots, escapes. In December, 2010, a hundred and fifty-one Zetas

broke out of jail in Nuevo Laredo. This February, twenty-nine escaped from a prison in Monterrey,

but not before stabbing and bludgeoning to death forty-four incarcerated members of the Gulfcartel. Given the groups reputation for steely invincibility, it is not surprising that gangbangers

across Mexico want to be Zetas. Simply dropping the name does wonders, reportedly, for the

success rate of extortion schemes. But fake Zetas risk retribution from real Zetas. And the Zetas

torture methods, including decapitation, are always available for review on the Internet.

Rival cartels have often been just as bad. La Familia Michoacana nearly matched the Zetas

beheading for beheading during a struggle for supremacy in the west-coast state of Michoacn, a

struggle that La Familia won. (Afterward, La Familia splintered.) And, when the Zetas began to

threaten Jalisco, the Jalisco Cartel New Generation formed a squad called the Mata Zetas (Zeta

Killers)said to be led by El 85, and subsidized by Chapo Guzmnwhich carried the fight into

the Zetas heartland. The Mata Zetas released a strikingly composed, politically tinged video

announcing their plans to annihilate their degenerate foes, and in September, 2011, the Jalisco group

dumped thirty-five bodies on a busy avenue in Veracruz at rush hour. Two weeks later, thirty-two

more bodies were found in three safe houses around the city. Veracruz is Zetas territory. It is also

the main seaport on the east coast of Mexico, and therefore interesting to Chapo Guzmnuseful,

clearly, for cocaine moving northward, and for meth chemicals arriving from overseas. More

immediately, though, the Mata Zetas plan was simply to open a rearguard path to try to slow the

Zetas advance on Jalisco. The corpses thrown under the Millennium Arches in November were a

retaliation.

Mexican election campaigns are shortninety days for the Presidential contest, and usually less for

state and local contests. Enrique Pea Nieto bravely launched his campaign in Guadalajara,

historically a PAN stronghold. By mid-April, the city was saturated with political advertising. Everytaxi was festooned, every wall and billboard. Television and radio often seemed like a solid wave of

slogans, jingles, appeals, attacks. By far the most numerous spots were the PRIs. The PRI


10/15

candidate for the governorship of Jalisco, Aristteles Sandoval Daz, is the current mayor of

Guadalajara. He looks like a provincial version of Pea Nietoyoung,guapo, prone to platitudes.

Sandoval began the year by declaring that he would armor his campaign against infiltration by

organized crime. In his previous campaigns, he reportedly received financial backing from several

Sinaloa cartel mobsters, among them Ignacio Loya Alatorre, identified by federal prosecutors as

Nacho Coronels money manager, who was assassinated in 2005, and Tony Duarte, who was a car

thief before he became a prominent Guadalajara businessman and alleged Sinaloa bagman (he wasassassinated, in Puerto Vallarta, in 2011). Sandovals declaration may have been reassuring to

voters: he is far ahead in the polls.

Does organized crime favor one party? Or do particular cartels back particular parties? Not notably.

Each of the major parties has had corruption scandals. The PRIs pre-2000 dominance meant that

most, if not all, of the agreements, known as acuerdos, between organized crime and officialdom

during that period involved the PRI. But that was when the PRI was the only game in town. Even

Lpez Obrador, the P.R.D. candidate, originally made his name as a PRI leader. With the rise of

other parties, new acuerdos were made. The narcos are most concerned with local politicians and

police and military units. They want to be able to land this load at this airfield. Theiracuerdos tend

to be with individuals. If they prefer to work with one candidate for mayor, or governor, they mayintimidate or, in the case of the Zetas, even kill his opponent. But the party affiliation of politicians,

let alone Army or police commanders, is irrelevant.

Joanna Jablonska Bayro is a sociology student. For her doctoral dissertation, she has been

interviewing twenty Guadalajarans about how they perceive their city and their securitywhere

and why they feel unsafe, how they protect themselves from risks.

People fight hard to maintain the fantasy that Guadalajara is an oasis of tranquillity, she told me.

With the corpse dumping at the Millennium Arches, there was a lot of effort by the authorities to

show that the dead were all narcos. Then the news came out that the victims were ordinary people.

Thats when people here panicked. Then, about a month later, the authorities announced that they

had caught the killers, and that, no, the victims were all narcos. They were trying to restablishsome equilibrium, some sense of safety in the city. But who knows whats true?

Nobody, rich or poor, in Jablonskas study feels completely confident that the government will tell

them the truth. And everyone is mortally afraid of the Zetas. After this recent narcobloqueo, all the

mantas that went up were about protecting the people from the Zetas. The Zetas are the incarnation

of the threat.

Attitudes toward the security forces break down along class lines. The upper and middle classes are

still enthusiastic about the Army, the poor far less so. As for the local police, people with more

resources regard their corruption as only a nuisance, while the poor find them dangerous: Theyll

put drugs on me, and cause me a lot of problems. Everyone in Jablonskas study feels that Mexican

social and political institutions, including the state itself, are weakening. Some of this institutionalweakness comes from the post-PRI fragmentation of power, Jablonska said. Everyone has lost

confidence in the rule of law. Nearly anyone who can afford it, including the lower middle class,

now lives in a gated community, with private security. People in more precarious neighborhoods

must build their own networks of protection. They rely on pit bulls, family networks, and, of course,

organized crime. They never call the police.

Ninety-eight per cent of serious crimes in Mexico go unpunished, according to a recent report by

the Monterrey Institute of Technology. For kidnapping, which is rarely reported, the figure might be

even higher. Kidnapping is the horror lapping at the edge of nearly everyones mind, and its known

that kidnapping is one of the Zetas favorite crimes. Corrupt police are often involvedone of the

reasons its rarely reported. Private security companies seek to capitalize on the publics panic.

When you read a crime story online, the advertisement blinking alongside the text is often an offer

of private protection for you and your family againstsecuestrokidnapping. If someone disappears

and no ransom call comes, should it even be called kidnapping? Human-rights groups estimate that


11/15

more than five thousand people have disappeared in Mexico in the past five years.

Mexican TV provides a P.R. forum for the police and the military. People love these big drug

busts, these acts of bravery, Jablonska said. They have real value. The police and the Army play

to that taste, with a constant stream of handcuffed ruffians presented to TV cameras. Behind the

captured narcos stand black military helicopters. Drugs and cash and weapons, some gold-plated,

are laid out on banquet tables. The government even produces YouTube-ready videos with dramatic

musical intros, graphics, and sleek institutional logos. (And now: the Confession of La Barbie!)

Weary ofpantallas, I tried to get to the bottom of a single bustthe historic meth-lab raid in

Tlajomulco that confiscated some four billion dollars worth of drugs. Were the drugs seized really

worth that much? Well, no. The more experts I consulted, the lower the number sank. Maybe it was

a billion, if the meth was pure. Then was it really fifteen tons of pure meth, as widely reported?

Well, no. There had been some confusion. There were precursor chemicals. A lot of equipmentgas

tanks, reactors. Maybe it was eleven pounds of pure meth. Eleven pounds? Nobody wanted to speak

on the record, but the spokesman for the federal prosecutors office in Guadalajara, a young man

named Ulises Enrquez Camacho, finally said, Yes, five kilos. Eleven pounds. The fifteen tons

had been methamphetamine ready for packing, according to the Army. But it was not a finished

product, and there had been only five kilos of crystal. In the U.S., where meth is often sold by thegram, that amount might be worth five hundred thousand dollars. So the reported value had been

inflated by a factor of eight thousand?

I wanted to get the Armys side of the story, so I went to the headquarters of the Fifteenth Military

Zone, whose troops had carried out the raid. The base is in Zapopan, northwest of Guadalajara. The

chief of staff, General Gerardo Wolburg Redondo, said he would need permission to speak to me.

He later phoned. Permission denied, he said, by Mexico City, because of Article 41, a provision of

the Mexican constitution that forbids the diffusion of government propaganda during an election-

campaign period.

Article 41 had suddenly become a popular law in government offices, I found. Sorry, love to chat,

butArticle 41. People were happy to talk off the record, however, about the Armys operations inJalisco. It had been raiding meth labs at a torrid ratesixty-three in the past year, by the Armys

count, with many of those in Tlajomulco. Arrests almost never happened, though. Why not? Ulises

Enrquez explained that it was difficult for troops to arrive at a meth-lab site without neighbors

seeing them approach and warning the narcos to flee. Why, I asked, would the neighbors do that?

They were paid lookouts, he said. How did the Army know where the labs were? Different

neighbors, made suspicious by high traffic or strong chemical odors, calledor, more often, e-

mailedthe police or the Army. Anonymous denunciations.

This scenario was derided by most of the people I consulted, in law enforcement and elsewhere.

Narcos ratted out rival narcosthat was normally how the authorities learned things. Or the narcos

and certain authorities came to an agreement. What civilian would drop a dime on a cartel? Thatcould be suicidal. There was no way to know who would be on the other end of that call or e-mail.

Anyway, labs that were up to date on their protection payments usually had nothing to fear. Meth

labs operated in networks, moving materials and personnel between facilities to maximize

production and minimize risk. Losses from seizures were a cost of doing business, and rarely

catastrophic. The networks in Jalisco were very big now. Sinaloa had recently ramped up

production. The remnants of La Familia Michoacana had moved labs here, getting them out of

strife-torn southern Michoacn. But the commander of the Fifth Military Region, General Fausto

Lozano Espinosa, was on a rampage. He wanted meth labs. The Army had almost no field

intelligence, but the government needed dramatic busts, headlines, and so an acuerdo had

seemingly been reached. The locations of some labs would be disclosed, and they would be busted,

but there would be no one thereno guards, and certainly no chemists or cooks, who were highlyvalued employees.

The Armys version of the great February bust was doubted by U.S. officials, too. One told me that


12/15

it had actually happened two weeks before the announcement claimed. The press release went out to

the wider world before the drugs were properly tested, along with photographs of masked soldiers

standing among blue barrels filled with yellow powder. According to this official, the Army often

told no one, certainly not the police, and sometimes not even the federal prosecutors office, about

its raidsnot even afterwarduntil it had a reason, usually political, to do so. It was all about the

credit. Evidence collection and preservation were not part of the Armys missionthat was the

federal prosecutors job. No one seemed to be in a position to question the wisdom of smashing upplaces, learning nothing, carrying off drugs, and calling it a blow against organized crime.

The great bust took place near a village called Buena Vista, at a ranch called Rancho Villarreal.

Although the Army had closed its investigation almost immediately, Ulises Enrquez said that the

federal prosecutor still had an investigation open. So I asked him who owned Rancho Villarreal. He

said that it was difficult to determine. It was a party venue, really, with a swimming pool, a bar,

cabanas. It was for weddings, quinceaeras, company picnics. But the owner of a property couldnt

be held responsible for everything that tenants did there. When I asked around about the disposition

of the drugs seized at Rancho Villarreal, someone close to the case told me that he believed the

product had been quietly returned to its owners, for an unknown price.

Vctor Hugo Ornelas and I went to Buena Vista. I had been there a couple of times before, checkingout Rancho Villarreal, but the villagers had been reluctant to talk. They claimed not to remember

the Army raid, let alone the narcolaboratorio. I believed I was endangering them just by lingering.

Hugo, however, knew people there. A young guy Ill call Ramn took us out on the back roads of

Buena Vista in his 4 x 4. Some of the kids around here really look up to the narcos, Ramn said.

The girls, especially. Its too bad. They go to their parties, enjoy the narcocorridos, get pregnant.

One pregnant girls boyfriend disappeared. We assume hes dead. But the other pregnant girls are

still happy. They want the babies. The guys are from Sinaloa and Michoacn. Some from Jalisco.

They all have money, nice trucks, nice ranchos.

The priest likes having the narcos here, Ramn went on. Some are quite religious. They fixed up

his church. They get their kids baptized there.We were bumping down a deeply rutted road. It was rough, open countryplenty of room for

clandestinity. Those ranchos with the big walls, the heavy gates? Ramn said, pointing out

homesteads visible here and there. Those are all narquitos. They have watchdogs, fighting cocks.

You can tell. Palm trees.

Yeah, palm trees, Hugo said. What is it with narcos and palm trees?

I dont know. They just have to have them. They laughed.

We stopped and gazed down a very long driveway at a huge new house. The driveway looked

practically impassable, even for a 4 x 4. They can afford to improve the roads, Ramn said. But

sometimes they prefer an ugly road. It lets them see their enemies coming.Were the cartels fighting?

No. Not right now. It seems like La Familia Michoacana is dominant around here at the moment.

But most of the labs belong to the Jalisco cartel. They employ a lot of lookouts.

We passed a small airstrip. Thats for model planes, Ramn said. Hobbyists. Soldiers.

He and Hugo exchanged a look. Incredible, Hugo said.

We regained the paved road where we had left my car. Two sedans with big, brightly painted,

carefully hand-built model airplanes lashed to their roofs were turning off the road onto the dirt

track.

Hugo and I went to Rancho Villarreal. It was at the end of a long, twisting, unpaved road. The brick

outer walls were ten feet high. The gate was padlocked, with a warning posted that the property had

been sealed by the federal prosecutor. Who would want to have a wedding out here? Hugo said.


13/15

These places are for money laundering. He poked in the grass with his cane, spearing a cardboard

box, which he lifted for inspection. The box had contained a RespiratorFull Facepiece, made

by 3M. Respirators were essential meth-lab gear. Hugo stabbed in the grass again. Military, he

said, lifting a pair of wool khaki gloves with no fingertips. He turned and walked into a log-walled

guard hut that I had not noticed before. Family, he said, from inside. Womanhe lifted, from

the trash-strewn floor, a sanitary napkin on the tip of his cane. Childhe lifted a tiny pink childs

backpack. Manhe lifted a work boot. He bent and picked up a golf ball, and pointed to a set ofnumbers stamped on it. We could find out who bought this, possibly, and where, he said, dropping

the ball in his bag.

Back outside, Hugo stared at the high walls of Rancho Villarreal. Palm trees rose against the sky

from inside the compound. At the far end of the front wall, also inside the compound, was a narrow,

two-story outbuilding. Thats a watchtower, Hugo said. He pointed to a pile of bricks and tile in a

corner where two high walls met. That pile was for jumping over, he said. For getting away

fast.

While driving back toward the village, Hugo asked me to stop the car. We parked next to a white-

walled farm of some kind, surrounded by fields. Hugo hiked down to look at a pair of hoses. They

came out of the farm, passed under the road, and emptied into a field. He smelled the hoses. Heshook his head. He pointed to a set of pipes and wires running through the bottom of the white

walls. Those, yes, he said quietly. He looked down at the hoses. These, no. That was when I

noticed that this place, too, had a tall, narrow outbuilding in the corner of the compound, affording a

view over the high walls. Watchtower, Hugo said. Palm trees. Not a farm. He got back in the

car. But he did not touch his camera.

On May 9th, Guadalajarans woke up to a new Zetas atrocityeighteen headless, dismembered

bodies left in two vehicles parked near a popular restaurant out past the airport. Then the police

found some more body parts in a safe house in Chapala, a lakeside community that is popular with

retired Americans and Canadians, about an hour south of the city. Half of the dead were soon

identified. They were local people who had recently gone missing. Ordinary citizens, not narcos,kidnapped and murdered. Four were said to have been students at the University of Guadalajara.

That turned out to be only part of the story. It seemed that the Zetas had planned to kidnap and kill

fifty people, and to distribute the dismembered corpses around Guadalajara on Mothers Day. The

details of this plan emerged after a kidnapper on guard duty, Laura Rosales Snchez, fell asleep and

a dozen victims, seizing their chance, escaped. It was too late to save the eighteenand two boys

under Laura Rosaless guard who failed to flee were also killedbut the police managed to arrest

four of the kidnappers, who, under interrogation, revealed the grand plan to kill fifty. The

kidnappings, their leader confirmed, had been done at random. They just grabbed whomever they

couldwaiters, a construction worker, a dance teacher in a primary school.

The purpose behind all this carnage? To cause terror, the arrested leader, who is twenty-seven,said. He seemed vaguely bored at his perp-show press event, where he nonetheless tried to answer

every reporters question. He was just following orders, he said, from a Zeta named Fernando, who

remained at large. Laura Rosales, who is twenty-five, said that she had been mainly helping her

brother, Angel, who also remained at large, and that the Zetas were responding, with this massacre,

to the killing, up north, of twenty-three Zetas by Chapo Guzmns forces.

After the Mothers Day massacre, thirty thousand people, led by University of Guadalajara students

and dressed in white, marched silently through the city, protesting the ever-rising tide of violence

and the governments apparent helplessness before it.

Around the same time, tens of thousands of students marched in Mexico City in a sudden revolt,

launched just weeks before the election, against the constantly reported inevitability of a Pea Nietovictory.Acuerdos between the PRI and the countrys biggest broadcasters, including alleged payoffs

exposed by the Guardian, were making this a self-fulfilling prophecy, according to the protesters.


14/15

There were more marches in June, but the student movement seemed unlikely to stop the return of

the PRI.

The federal prosecutors office announced that it had incinerated the entire haul of drugs from the

super-lab in Buena Vista within ten days of the seizure. I asked Ulises Enrquez where this massive

chemical fire had taken place. At the Club Canada shooting range in Tonal, he said, out toward

Puente Grande. They burned narcotics there each month. In the open air? Of course. His office

oversaw the destruction.

I went to the shooting range for the next bonfire. There was a compact-car-size mound of drugs

already piled beyond the first target berm. It contained, I was told, just under a ton of marijuana, six

hundred grams of cocaine, forty grams of ephedrine, just over a thousand tabs of synthetic drugs

(Ecstasy, meth), and slightly more than thirty pounds of crystal. Six men from the Tonal fire

department torched the hillock of dope, and the heat got worse. A federal narcotics agent Ill call

Rodrguez was in charge.

Rodrguez was dressed in baggy shorts, boots, a gray T-shirt, and a little blue cowboy hat. He had a

Beretta 9-mm. pistol in his waistband, and he seemed to be enjoying himself. He accused the

firefighters of deliberately staying downwind of the fire, from which pungent black smoke

billowed. Look at those crazy firemen, he called. Watch, theyll start dancing. In fact, the

firefighters were staggering around in heavy protective gear, including masks and helmets. There

were a dozen workers from the federal prosecutors office in attendance, but they stayed back in the

shooters pavilion, far from the fire, drinking Coke. The handful of us out in the field retreated to a

patch of shade, where Rodrguez regaled us with tales of street drug seizures.

I like to come up to thepinche dealers like Im dying for a fix, he said. He was startlingly good in

the role of a desperate addict. Then he was just as good playing a gruff, paranoid dealerfunny,

convincing. Then he whirled from a dope-snorting crouch, whipping out his pistol, knocking the

dealer to the ground, cackling triumphantly as himself, the undercover cop. And now,pendejo?

He had his boot on the dealers neck. The dealer was crying for his wife. Rodrguez, grinning

wildly, was, for a moment, God. Should he arrest the guy? Rip him off? Beat him up? All of theabove?

I asked Rodrguez whom he worked for. AFIs, he said, straightening up, sticking his gun back in

his shorts. (The AFIs had actually been disbanded, but everybody still calls their replacement, the

Federal Ministerial Police, by that name.) They commissioned me from the municipal police.

Rodrguez struck me as a man living at the coal face of Mexican life, right where legality and

illegality clash and overlap. As other people drifted away, he told me that he had made twelve

hundred arrests, maybe more. He had been a cop for twenty-two years. He was forty-four. Before

that, he worked in Alabama, planting trees. That was great moneythree hundred dollars a week.

He demonstrated his tree-planting technique, making it look quick, precise, gruelling, and comical.

How did he get to Alabama?

I was wet, he saidillegal.

Rodrguez turned and shouted at the firefighters. They werent stoking the blaze correctly. He ran

out, grabbed a pitchfork, and started throwing flaming bales of pot in the air, until the fire was

roaring again. His energy was maniacal. He was also weirdly loose-limbed. When my cell phone

rang, he started dancing to the ringtone.

How was his pay as a cop?

Bad, he said. The AFIs picked up some of his expenses, but he had to work a second full-time job, as

a stonemason.


15/15

He changed the subject, to politics. If the PRI wins, everythings going to change, he said.

Everybody will start getting paid again. They know how to do it. He pantomimed a paymaster,

counting out cash to a circle of people. The media, too, he said, mock paying me.

It was true: the PRI, when in power, paid some journalists extravagantly, and supported many

newspapers and other media in return for coverage that suited its purposes.

There will be just one big group, Rodrguez said. Maybe it will be El Chapo. But there will bepeace.

PHOTOGRAPH: Right: Roman Ortega

To get more ofThe New Yorker's signature mix of politics, culture and the arts: Subscribe Now
https://w1.buysub.com/loc/NYR/ATGFailsafehttps://w1.buysub.com/loc/NYR/ATGFailsafe

the kingpins, por william finnegan

Documents