Zeta and El Narco (Part 1)
When I first arrived in Mexico in 2000, I worked in the shabby offices of the Mexico City News, an English-language daily run out of the capital's historic center. For a handsome salary of $600 a month, other hungry journalists and I hammered out stories for the declining readership on old, coffee-stained computers using telephone lines that beeped loudly every three seconds. It was the best job I had had in my life. I got to cover the Mexico City crime beat, which involved chasing a plump female crack dealer nicknamed Ma Barker and sitting through a weeklong court-martial of corrupt generals.
I soon found myself reading Blancornelas and called him for advice on stories. The veteran journalist was incredibly patient with a green British reporter asking dumb questions. He always took weekly calls, despite his harassing deadlines, and would clarify all issues I battled to understand. When I phoned to ask about a particular trafficker, he would answer with his usual sport metaphors. "Grillo, if that trafficker you are writing about were playing baseball, he would be in the minor leagues." "What about this guy Ismael Zambada?" I asked dimly. "Now Zambada," he replied, "would be playing for the New York Yankees."
Such metaphors were natural to Blancornelas, as he spent years covering sports before he wrote about gangsters. After graduating college, he became sports editor of a local rag in his native state of San Luis Potosi in central Mexico before moving more than a thousand miles to the budding town of Tijuana. People can reinvent themselves on the border, and Blancornelas was one of many who found a new life in the city that Californians call TJ. In 1980, at forty-four years old, Blancornelas partnered with two other journalists to found the first Mexican newsmagazine to specialize in coverage of El Narco. They baptized it Zeta-- the Mexican spelling of the letter Z (and nothing to do with the Zetas gang).
The first blood was spilled at Zeta in 1988. It was about power, rather than drugs. Coeditor Héctor Félix wrote columns criticizing Tijuana entrepreneur Jorge Hank, son of one of Mexico's most powerful politicians. Jorge Hank owned a popular racetrack and Félix wrote that hank had fixed races and rigged bets. Hank's bodyguard and racetrack employees followed Félix from work on a rainy afternoon. One vehicle blocked Félix in and another pulled up beside him. Blancornelas wrote what happened next:
"From the Toyota pickup, Hank's bodyguard shot. Once, twice. Extremely accurate. Once near the neck, and once in the ribs...
"This is not a soap opera line: his heart was completely destroyed.
"His gray Members Only jacket was shredded, smelling of gunpowder, soaked in blood and flesh."
Blancornelas and his team uncovered the killers and got them arrested and jailed. but the journalist wanted Hank himself to go on trial. Prosecutors wouldn't touch the son of such a powerful politico, so Zeta printed a weekly letter on a black page demanding justice. "Jorge Hank. Why did your bodyguard kill me?" the letter starts, under Félix's name. Zeta still prints it today. Jorge Hank has since served a term as Tijuana mayor. He denies anything to do with the murder.
The year Félix was killed, Mexico elected a new president. As the big day approached it looked like the unthinkable could happen -- leftist contender Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas could actually oust the PRI. Cárdenas wasn't really a revolutionary. His dad had been the iconic PRI president Lázaro Cárdenas in the 1930s, and he himself had been in the ruling party for many years. But feeling that the government had lost touch with the people, he had broken away and was now challenging the PRI in the first genuine two-horse race since 1929.
On election day, Mexicans couldn't believe their eyes; Cárdenas was ahead on the vote count. It seemed the election had not been rigged. It was too good to be true. Votes piled up in favor of Cárdenas. And then, crash. There was a sudden computer failure. It had really been too good to be true. A month later it was declared that the PRI candidate Carlos Salinas had won. Nothing had changed. Cárdenas told his supporters to stay off the streets. He didn't want bloodshed, and he didn't really want a revolution. There was bloodshed anyway, as gunmen killed dozens of leftist militants who supported Cárdenas. Within two years, they had murdered hundreds.
But despite a rigged election, PRI winner Salinas got good press in the United States. A short man with a trademark bald head, big ears, and straight-line mustache, President Salinas wooed American politicians with his perfect English and Ph.D. from Harvard. This was a new kind of PRI and a new Mexico. This PRI embraced free trade and modern capitalism even if it did carry out the odd electoral shenanigan to keep the communists out. Companies and assets long owned by the Mexican state were sold at bargain prices -- telephone lines, railways, a TV network.
Suddenly, a new class of Mexican tycoons buzzed around in private jets. In 1987, when Forbes began its billionaire list, one Mexican was on it. In 1994, when Salinas left office, there were twenty-four Forbes billionaires. Where had this money come from? Salinas also negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement with Bill Clinton, which produced some equally dramatic results. In 1989, cross-border trade between the United States and Mexico was at $49 billion; in 2000, it was at $247 billion! Mexicans flocked from country shacks to work in assembly plants along the border. Throughout the nineties, Tijuana and Juárez grew by a block a day, with new slums spreading over surrounding hills -- slums that would later be the center of the drug war.
Salinas also went about reorganizing the narcotics trade. When he came into office, the undisputed godfather of Mexico was Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, the Sinaloan who partnered with Matta Ballesteros to traffic cocaine. In 1989, under orders from Salinas, police commander Guillermo Gonz&aaute;lez Calderoni nabbed the forty-three-year-old kingpin Félix Gallardo sitting quietly in a Guadalajara restaurant. Not a shot was fired.
Félix Gallardo later wrote in his prison diary how he had met with the commander Calderoni five times leading up to the arrest, and the officer had even given him some rare guacamaya birds as a present. On the day of his detention, Félix Gallardo wrote, he actually went to the restaurant to meet Calderoni to talk business.
Whether or not the capo's account is true, that the Mexican government could take down the biggest gangster in the country without firing a shot was telling. In 1989, mobsters still relied on the police to operate, and these officers could take out narcos when they needed to. The detention of the head honcho reminded traffickers who was boss.
Following the arrest, Mexican capos held a gangster summit in the resort of Acapulco. It sounds like a scene from The Godfather. But the narco conferences really do happen. Journalist Blancornelas broke the news about the meeting, and it was later confirmed by a number of sources. Blancornelas said head honcho Félix Gallardo organized it from behind bars. However, Félix Gallardo wrote that police commander Calderoni set up the cozy get-together. Maybe it was both. Blancornelas describes the scene:
"They rented a chalet in Las Brisas. From it, you could see the beautiful Acapulco bay in cinemascope and bright colors, away from the relentless traffic of the seafront. No hawkers came up to the chalets, which were away from the annoyance of the blear of discos and the glare of the police. they managed to get the house sometimes used by the Shah if Iran. Who knows how they did that?"
During a week's summit, the holidaying capos discussed the future of the Mexican underworld. Almost all guests were from the old Sinaloan narco tribe, a sprawl of families intertwined by marriages, friendships, and drug deals. At the meeting were several players who would be crucial in shaping trafficking over the next two decades. Among them was the Sierra Madre villain Joaquin "Chapo" Guzmán and his older friend Ismael "the Mayo" Zambada. Each capo was awarded a plaza where he could move his own drugs and tax any other smugglers on his turf.
It all sounded like a good idea. But the cozy arrangement didn't play out. Without the leadership of the imprisoned godfather, Félix Gallardo, the capos plotted and backstabbed to get a bigger piece of the pie. As Blancornelas wrote:
"Never in the history of Mexican drug trafficking could someone like Félix Gallardo operate again. He was a man of his word, of deals before shots, of convincing arguments before executions...
"If the capos had followed his instructions then the most powerful cartel in the world would exist now. But the absence of a leader and the presence of several bosses, all feeling more superior than the next, caused a disorganized mess."
From El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency, by Ioan Grillo, © 2011 by Ioan Grillo. Reprinted with permission from the author and Bloomsbury Press. www.bloomsbury.com
Zeta and El Narco (Part 2)
After Salinas left, his economic miracle collapsed like a paper tiger. In 1995, months into the new government of President Ernesto Zedillo, money poured out of the economy and the peso fell like a dead weight, triggering double-digit inflation. Overnight, the number of Mexican billionaires was halved from twenty-four to twelve. Down below, the middle class had their life savings wiped out, while many companies went out of business, costing millions of jobs. Bill Clinton, who had worked closely with Salinas, rushed faithfully to the rescue with a $50 billion bailout package to save Mexico from collapse.
This crisis sparked a surge in crime. Despite the steady rise of drug trafficking, modern Mexico had not been a dangerous country until then. Even in the eighties, mugging and robbery were relatively low, and Mexicans strolled the streets of big cities at all hours. But those good old days came to a rude end. Mugging, carjacking, and the heinous crime of kidnapping shot up, especially in the capital. Suddenly, everyone in Mexico City had a story about a family member getting a gun stuck to his head and turning out his pockets. Police failed to respond to this crime wave, creating an atmosphere of impunity that paved the way for the current criminal insurgency.
One Mexican industry wasn't affected by the peso crisis. Drug trafficking kept bringing in the billions, and as it got paid in dollars, the devaluation of the peso just gave El Narco more power. With an army of unemployed, the cartels could recruit foot soldiers more cheaply than before. El Narco became more deeply entrenched in slums across the country.
Another crucial transformation happened in this time: Mexicans in meaningful numbers started taking hard drugs. Mexicans had long seen cocaine and heroin as a gringo vice. "The Columbians make it, the Mexicans traffic it, and the Americans snort it," observers joked. But by the late nineties, Mexico had to concede it had its own army of heroin junkies and crackheads.
The spread of these drugs was directly linked to traffic. To maximize profits, Mexican capos started paying their lieutenants with bricks of cocaine and bags of heroin as well as cash. Many of these midranking hoods unloaded their products on Mexico's own streets to make a quick peso.
Tijuana developed the highest level of drug use in the country, with Arellano Félix affiliates setting up hundreds of tienditas, or little drug shops, especially in the center and eastside slums, The cartel's mob of hit men protected these drug retailers, adding an extra dimension to Mexican drug violence. Now it wasn't just about moving tons over the border; it was also about slinging crack to addicts.
Fighting over street corners drove violence to new highs with some three hundred homicides a year in Tijuana, and the same number in Juárez towards the end of the nineties. These were rates comparable to those of gang-infested U.S. cities such as Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans. The American media began to pick up on the bloodshed and, for the first time, talk about the danger of "Colombianization," or the prospect of a full-blown narco war exploding on the United States' doorstep. Most dismissed such naysayers as alarmist nut jobs. As it turns out, the alarmist nut jobs were right.
American media also picked up on the bubbly characters of the Arellano Félix brothers and their cocaine binges, disco dancing, and dissolving of victims in acid. Time magazine published a story on them, and the movie Traffic even had character based on them making cocaine deals with Catherine Zeta-Jones. Accompanying the media attention were a series of indictments and rewards in the United States. And anytime that anyone mentioned the Arellano Félix brothers, the name of journalist Blancornelas flashed up. He really pissed them off.
Blancornelas thinks the last straw for Ramón Arellano Félix wasn't even a story he wrote but a letter he printed. One day, a distraught woman came into the Zeta office and asked to publish an ad. When she was told how much it wold cost, she said softly that she didn't have enough money. The curious Zeta worker asked to see what she wanted on display, and when he saw it, he immediately called Blancornelas. The journalist read the letter and was so moved he agreed to run it for free.
The woman had written a letter addressed directly to Ramón Arellano Félix, who'd ordered the murder of her two sons. The young men had been caught up in some street beef with one of Ramón's lieutenants. The mother wrote fearlessly out of love for her lost children:
"My beloved sons were the victims of the envy and cowardice of you, the Arellanos...You don't deserve to die yet. Death should not be your price or your punishment. I hope you live for many years and know the pain of losing children."
The woman disappeared from Tijuana after publishing the letter. Blancornelas believe she ran before the mafia could execute her. The frustrated Ramón Arellano Félix thus turned his wrath on the journalist.
Ten hit men ambushed Blancornelas as he drove with his bodyguard Luis Valero. They sprayed their car with bullets, killing Valero instantly. But Blancornelas was still alive with four caps in him. the chief hit man then strolled up to the car to take the final shot. But as the assassin walked forward, he fired a bullet that ricocheted off the concrete and into his own eye, killing him instantly. The rest of the gang abandoned their chief in a pool of blood. Blancornelas was saved by a miracle.
"Ramón ordered me dead. God didn't want it...but disgracefully they killed my companion and protector Luis Valero."
Images of original Zeta co-directors Jesus Blancornelas and Héctor "Gato" Félix keep their legacies alive at the Zeta offices.
The chief hit man was identified as David Barron, a Chicano gang-banger from San Diego known to work with the Arellano Félixes. Barron had tattoos of fourteen skulls on his midriff and shoulders, reputedly one for each man he had killed. Zeta reporters identified six more of the attackers as fellow thugs of Barron's from the San Diego barrio of Logan Heights. But despite the fact that Zeta handed piles of evidence to Mexican police, the thugs were never indicted and they were seen moving freely in San Diego. Some are still there.
The three border tycoons of the nineties all went down eventually. Juan Garcia Ábrego of the Gulf Cartel was arrested in 1996. He gave himself up without a shot, nabbed in a ranch near Monterrey. As an old-school capo, he was ultimately respectful of the Mexican system, in which the government called the shots. A year later, Amado Carrillo Fuentes died of plastic-surgery complications in a Mexico City hospital. Or did he? A gangster of mythological proportions in life, he went out in his own puff of smoke. It was all a trick, people whisper on the Juárez streets; Amado is really kicking it in the Caribbean sipping margaritas. Or maybe he is working in a gas station in Texas alongside Elvis Presley.
The Arellano Félix brothers survived the longest. Ramón Arellano Félix, the baby-faced psycho who pioneered narco terror in Mexico, lived on until the twenty-first century. Then in 2002, he was shot dead in a traffic stop by a local policeman in the seaside resort of Mazatlán. It was quite an undramatic death for a legendary outlaw. Something had gone seriously wrong with his network of police protection. Blancornelas penned the story about the killing of the man who tried to kill him, noting, "If some of his many victims could speak from the grave, maybe they would say to Ramón, 'As you are now, so once was I. As I am now, so you shall be.'"
A month later army special forces nabbed Benjamin Arellano Félix in a home where he kept his wife and children. The bosses' chief aides apparently failed to smell the trap. The capo is currently in Mexico's top-security prison, fighting extradition to the United States. Robbed of its two leaders, the Arellano Félix clan struggled on with the other brothers and sisters, but was severely weakened.
Blancornelas wasn't long celebrating the demise of his nemesis. In 2004, assassins shot dead Francisco Ortiz, the third founder of Zeta magazine. Ortiz was leaving a downtown clinic with his young son and daughter when gunmen fired four bullets into his neck and head. His two children shouted, "Papi! Papi!" as he died beside them, a witness said. This time, Zeta magazine was not even sure who was behind the hit.
Blancornelas despaired. While his reporting may have helped bring down one set of bad guys, cartels had only got more powerful and more violent. He was one of the few that saw the writing on the wall. As he said in an interview shortly before he died:
"El Narco used to be in certain states. But now it has grown across the whole of the Mexican republic. Soon El Narco will knock on the door of the presidential palace. It will knock on the door of the attorney general's office. And this will present a great danger."
From El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency, by Ioan Grillo, © 2011 by Ioan Grillo. Reprinted with permission from the author and Bloomsbury Press. "www.bloomsbury.com