The Executioner's Men

Los Zetas, Rogue Soldiers, Criminal Entrepreneurs, and the Shadow State They Created

George W. Grayson, Clyde N. Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412846172
• eBook ISBN: 9781351296021
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Los Zetas represent a new generation of ruthless, sadistic pragmatists in Mexico and Central America who are impelling a tectonic shift among drug trafficking organizations in the Americas. Mexico's marines have taken down the cartel's top leaders; nevertheless, these capos and their desperados have forever altered how criminal business is conducted in the Western Hemisphere. This narrative brings an unprecedented level of detail in describing how Los Zetas became Mexico's most diabolical criminal organization before suffering severe losses.

In their heyday, Los Zetas controlled networks of American police, politicians, judges, and businessmen. The Mexican government is losing its "war on drugs," despite the military, technical, and intelligence resources provided by its northern neighbor. Subcontracted street gangs operate in hundreds of US cities, purchasing weapons, delivering product, executing targeted foes, and bribing the US Border Patrol. Despite crippling losses Los Zetas still dominate Nuevo Laredo, the major portal for legal and illegal bilateral commerce. They also work hand-in-glove with the underworld in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, as well as with gangs like the Maras Salvatruchas.

1

Origins and Establishment of Los Zetas

In mid-1999, Osiel Cárdenas Guillén gave a hearty abrazo to the coleader of their Gulf Cartel, Salvador “El Chava” Gómez Herrera, whom he cordially welcomed into the passenger side of his shiny Dodge Durango. They bantered for a few minutes, exchanging laughs and quips. Gómez Herrera was in an expansive mood, having just organized and served as godfather at the baptism of Osiel’s daughter, a service the capo had not attended.¹ Arturo Guzmán Decena, who was riding in the backseat, suddenly and coldly fired a bullet point blank into El Chava’s head, splattering brains, blood, and tissue across the leather dashboard. Investigators later found the victim’s decaying body, partially eaten by scavengers, in the brush near Matamoros.²

Osiel earned the nickname “El Mata Amigos” or “The Friend Killer” for ordering this and other executions. The treacherous act vaulted him into the leadership of the Gulf Cartel, which would become one of Mexico’s most powerful and vicious organizations, inferior only to the Sinaloa Federation headed by the infamous Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, Carrillo Fuentes’ Juárez Cartel, and the Tijuana Cartel, also known as the Arellano Félix Organization (AFO) because it was once dominated by the Arellano Félix brothers.

Since childhood, Osiel had harbored profound insecurities to the point of paranoia. Fathered by an uncle, he was born on May 18, 1967, on the impoverished “Caracol” ranch forty-five miles from the sweltering city of Matamoros. He suffered bouts of depression, obsessed over his lack of a real father, rebelled against his family, and left home at age twelve to live in Matamoros with his sister Lilia. He worked as a dishwasher, waiter, and messenger before beginning to climb the criminal ladder. Young Osiel loathed school, but demonstrated “street smarts” and a determination to become someone important.

Serving a brief stint in Great Plains prison in Arizona for drug running in 1992 only hardened Osiel as a criminal. One of the by-products of NAFTA was the transfer of Mexican inmates to Mexican prisons. On January 2, 1994, Osiel entered the Santa Adelaida penitentiary in Matamoros. The warden knew his brother, Mario “El Gordo” Cárdenas Guillén,³ and the penal facility became an ideal venue for The Friend Killer to hone his skills in exporting narcotics. On April 13, 1995, he left prison as a businessman, vicious as ever.⁴

While behind bars, he had become enamored of the wife of Rolando Gómez Garza, the prison warden. When Gómez Garza learned of the affair, he beat his wife, which prompted Osiel to have the man executed.

His brother Mario helped Osiel set up a repair shop, from which the ex-convict peddled small amounts of drugs and functioned as an informant for the Federal Judicial Police (PJF), who, with crooked local cops, protected him. He stole luxury cars, counterfeited auto registrations, inflicted grotesque torture on his rivals, and concentrated on selling drugs in Miguel Alemán, a municipality of twenty-five thousand inhabitants in northeast Tamaulipas across the Rio Grande from Roma, Texas, a two-hour drive from Matamoros. Osiel eventually supplanted Gilberto “El June” García Mena, a devotee of Santa Muerte or Saint of Death, who is discussed later, as the top dog in the Miguel Alemán area.

Still, Osiel was a minor player compared with Juan García Abrego, who headed the Gulf Cartel until early 1996. Friends with Raúl, the so-called inconvenient brother of President Carlos Salinas (1988–94), the puffy-faced García Abrego became the first Mexican to appear on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, largely owing to his pathbreaking accord with Colombian cartels in the early 1990s. In lieu of receiving cash, the Colombians gave half of their shipments to the Gulf Cartel, which incurred the risk of marketing the cocaine in return for pocketing the profits derived from sales. The formula soon became the model for all major Mexican syndicates. “This deal was a major turning point in the fortunes of the Mexican cartels. With this new business arrangement, the power and wealth of the Mexican drug cartels exploded.”⁵ By renegotiating this pact with Colombia’s Cali Cartel, García Abrego was able to derive 50 percent of a shipment from Colombia as payment for delivery, instead of the $1,500 per kilogram previously received. The new business model came with a price: the Mexicans would have to guarantee that Colombian exports reached their destinations. This deal, while risky, was a driving force behind exponential growth as kilos became tons, and thousands of dollars became millions in profits.

In the wake of this arrangement, García Abrego accumulated large quantities of cocaine along Mexico’s northern frontier. At the same time, the agreement enabled him to design his own distribution network and with newfound profits, expand his political influence. By the end of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, it was estimated that García Abrego smuggled more than three hundred metric tons per year across the US–Mexico border. The Mexican Attorney General’s Office (PGR) claimed that his organization was generating $500 to $800 million in gross profits by the early 1990s.⁶

Collaboration with Guillermo González Calderoni, a commander in the PJF who had won fame for killing drug honcho Pablo Acosta,⁷ vouchsafed the organization’s success and shielded its leaders from arrest. The devious cop never needed to prove his loyalty to the organization; he had grown up in Reynosa and was a boyhood friend of García Abrego’s elder brother Mario. In a world where trust is worth more than life, he drew upon their shared history, transcended only by blood relations.

The Mexicans established distribution centers in Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, New York, and Los Angeles. The Colombians agreed to the arrangement as long as the Mexicans left them alone in Miami and selected East Coast markets. The windfall allowed García Abrego to make additional investments to insulate his organization from law enforcement. In the early and mid-1990s, he loosed a cataract of millions of dollars on police officials, the army, and politicians.

He even stretched his corruptive influence across the Gulf of Mexico to Quintana Roo, where he and Governor Mario Villanueva Madrid facilitated the flow of drugs from the Yucatán Peninsula through Campeche, Tabasco, Veracruz, Tamaulipas, and ultimately to Nuevo León, paving the initial route where his organization would exercise significant territorial control and political pressure.⁸ However, President Salinas’ successor, Ernesto Zedillo, brought a swift end to the trafficking enterprise of García Abrego, who was taken into custody in early 1996. Mexican authorities immediately delivered him to the FBI in Texas.

At his October trial in a Houston Federal Court, the prosecution revealed that the Gulf Cartel had smuggled more than fifteen tons of cocaine and forty-six thousand pounds of marijuana into the United States and laundered approximately $10.5 million. His cousin testified that García Abrego routinely spent up to $80,000 on pricey watches and expensive suits for Mexican police and prosecutors during frequent shopping trips in Texas. A government witness alleged that the defendant paid $1.5 million a month to Javier Coello Trejo, the assistant attorney general in charge of combating narcotics—an accusation that Coello Trejo denied. García Abrego fought back tears as the jury, eager to make him the poster boy in the drug war, sentenced him to eleven life sentences and decreed the seizure of up to $350 million of his assets—$75 million more than the prosecution requested. Meanwhile, the PJF commander who made the arrest is believed to have received a bulletproof Mercury Grand Marquis and $500,000 from a competing cartel for accomplishing the takedown.⁹

Once García Abrego landed behind bars, Salvador Gómez Herrera, a squat, trigger-happy underling of the formidable drug lord, sought to seize Gulf Cartel operations. The proliferation of dangerous competitors for the top spot prompted El Chava to invite Osiel to assume joint dominance of Tamaulipas, which had become a key Gulf Cartel plaza or area for the importation, production, storing, and shipping of narcotics.

The men functioned well together, at first. They muzzled the press, bought off police, liquidated rivals, and forged alliances with law-enforcement officers, politicians, and army personnel. In addition, they acquired drugs from Guatemala through the southern state of Chiapas. At other times, they smuggled shipments through the port of Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, from where the cocaine was trucked to Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros before entering the United States.

They boosted earnings in the lucrative zone by strong-arming smalltime hoodlums into paying a derecho de piso or transit fee to transport drugs across their turf. El Chava’s goons hustled those who failed to fork over the danegeld into the shabby Hotel Nieto in Matamoros. Passersby heard bloodcurdling screams and fervent cries for God and mercy, as captives were tortured, often choked by a gun barrel jammed down their throats, until they anted up the money.¹⁰

Although supposedly an equal to Osiel, El Chava acted as if he wielded the whip. Especially vexing to The Friend Killer was his continual request for loans from his “partner,” who treated him as a subordinate or bootlicker. Such behavior offended the pride of a neurotic Osiel, who had assembled his own entourage. His confidants included Eduardo “El Coss” Costilla Sánchez, Víctor Manuel “El Memeloco” Vázquez Mireles, and Arturo “Z-1” Guzmán Decena, who would play a pivotal role in Osiel’s ascent to power.

Hooked on cocaine, the thirty-one-year-old Friend Killer’s internal demons convinced him that assassins plotted his demise. Osiel yearned to rise from a criminal honcho to a feared capo. His rise to the top of the Gulf Cartel brought with it enemies—gangs and individuals who had suffered apace with his success—and accentuated his fear of violent death. Often on a whim, he ordered triggermen to hunt down real and imagined foes. His obsession with death at the hands of a traitor often “paralyzed” him, according to an astute biographer.¹¹ Burdened by the weight of his delusions, Osiel had earlier approached local military personnel seeking their protection. One of his first contacts was with Lt. Antonio Javier Quevedo Guerrero, a former member of the Twenty-First Cavalry Regiment in Nuevo León. After Quevedo’s capture on March 29, 2001, Osiel increasingly relied on Guzmán Decena, who had acquired skills in explosives, counterinsurgency, and tracking down and apprehending enemies during his military career.

Growing distrust of the crude, impetuous, and imperious Gómez Herrera drove Osiel to mastermind the murder of his supposed confrere in crime. Guzmán Decena, an Osiel confidant who had delivered the coup de grâce to El Chava, devised a safety plan for his jittery, disturbed employer. Born in Puebla in 1976, Guzmán Decena had distinguished himself in the army and ascended through the ranks to become a lieutenant in the Airborne Special Forces Group (GAFES), an elite combat unit modeled on the US Special Forces.¹² After deserting the military, he became Cárdenas Guillén’s protector. “In contrast to the timid, sometimes cowardly Osiel, [Guzmán Decena] exuded daring, a detail that was not lost on the almost absolute chief of the cartel, who saw in him a well-prepared man and began to encourage the creation of a security group that over the years became the most formidable of any Latin American cartel, including the Colombians.”¹³

Osiel emphasized that he “wanted the best men possible” to protect him. The deserter replied, “They are only in the army.” As a result, Guzmán Decena helped lure disaffected GAFES and other malcontents into the “Army of Narcos” to protect Osiel and his entourage.¹⁴ Military personnel were vulnerable to this siren song. Soldiers endured measly pay, long hours, deplorable food and housing, harsh and arbitrary discipline, and low morale. Meanwhile, rank-and-file fighting men watched as many senior officers used their positions to steal from the government and ingratiate themselves with crime chiefs.

Ironically, a top military anticartel fighter would later become defenders of a different sort of organization, the Gulf Cartel. In late 1996, President Zedillo named Major General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo director of the National Institute to Combat Drugs (INCD). The bulldog-faced forty-two-year veteran had previously served as a member of the prestigious Presidential Guard and commanded the Fifth Military Region, which embraced several west-central states, including the drug trafficking emporium of Guadalajara in Jalisco state. The enigmatic officer—initially reputed to be a rugged leader brimming with personal integrity—had extensive experience in running army operations against drug traffickers. Among trophy capos whom he had captured were Guadalajara Cartel big shot Héctor Luis “El Güero” Palma Salazar and miscreants in the Tijuana-based AFO. Mexico’s top-ranking drug interdiction chief won an encomium...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the Paperback Edition
• Introduction
• 1 Origins and Establishment of Los Zetas
• 2 Leadership, Organization, and Training
• 3 Resources
• 4 A “Shadow Government”: Dual Sovereignty
• 5 Esprit de Corps
• 6 Los Zetas and La Familia Michoacana
• 7 “Zetanization” of Mexico
• 8 Psychological Operations
• 9 Zetas in Central America
• 10 Zetas in the United States
• 11 War in the North
• 12 Conclusions
• Appendix 1 Original Zetas, Their Specialities, and Status
• Appendix 2 Suspected Zeta Recruits
• Glossary of Key Terms
• Selected Bibliography
• Index