On the Plain of Snakes Read online

  One Zeta atrocity I knew nothing about took place in 2010, in the small town of San Fernando, south of Reynosa. A roaming band of Zetas stopped two buses of migrants—men, women, and children from Central and South America, who were fleeing the violence in their countries. The Zetas demanded money. The migrants had no money. The Zetas demanded that the migrants work for them, as assassins or operatives or drug mules. The migrants refused. So they were taken to a building in the village of El Huizachal, blindfolded, their hands and legs bound, and each one was shot in the head. Seventy-two of them died. One man (from Ecuador) played dead, escaped, and raised the alarm.

  The gory details of this massacre became known when one of the perpetrators was arrested, Édgar Huerta Montiel, an army deserter known as El Wache, or Fat Ass. He admitted killing eleven of the migrants personally, in the belief (so he said) that they were working for a gang hostile to his own. A year later, near the same town, police found 47 mass graves containing 193 corpses—mostly migrants or passengers in buses hijacked and robbed while passing through this area of Tamaulipas state, about eighty miles south of the US border.

  Looking for money, menials, or women to traffic across the border, the Zetas and other gangs routinely hijacked buses and vans and kidnapped travelers—migrants, laborers, commuters, and wanderers like me, the sort of cartel abduction known as levantón, a lifting. Attracted by the low wages in Reynosa (most employees start at $10 a day), hundreds of American and European factories operate there, and as many as 100,000 workers live in colonias (communities) around the town.

  “There was a gringo here, a plant manager,” a man told me in McAllen, which is fifteen minutes from Reynosa. “He used to cross the border every morning, wearing a suit and tie, in a big SUV. Then one day he was caught in a levantón, and the company had to pay a big ransom. So they changed their vehicles. Now the plant managers go over in old clothes, in beat-up pickup trucks.”

  This man, a Mexican immigrant, originally from Monterrey, living at the edge of the Mexican border, told me he had not crossed it for more than twenty years.

  “I’m happy here in Texas. And I don’t want trouble,” he said. “We are just a mile from the middle of Reynosa, and you know what? We never hear news from there. It is never in the papers. All I know is what people whisper about—just the local talk. Rumors, gossip. Nothing official.”

  But that was much later in my trip.

  Another schism happened in El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel when its band of gunmen formed a new gang, the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación—the Jalisco New Generation—notorious for their violent massacres and killings of police, including the first instance of the use of rocket-propelled grenades in shooting down military helicopters. This cartel was one of the most feared criminal gangs, headed by a psychopath, Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho, a former avocado seller and policeman. El Mencho’s ambition to dominate the drug trade and sideline the Sinaloa cartel had resulted in a vastly increased murder rate. In Tijuana, for example, the number of homicides reported in 2017—1,781—was greater than in any other year. Most of them were cartel killings by the Tijuana cartel, a niche gang of drug and human traffickers allied with the Sinaloa cartel, which was protecting its turf against the Jalisco New Generation. A clearly written note, an ominous message known as a narcomensaje (narco message), was pinned to the bullet-riddled bodies of a man and woman found in a Tijuana neighborhood in January 2018. It read, Welcome to 2018—the plaza is not Sinaloa’s, it belongs to Nueva Generación. A year later, cartel violence in Tijuana exceeded all other years, nearing 2,000 murders.

  Another horror: in March 2018, three film school students from Guadalajara took a trip to Tonalá, in Jalisco, where they were planning to make a movie. Picturesque Tonalá is noted for its ceramics, its colorful shops, and its colonial churches. Having little money, the students stayed with one of their grandmothers, but in walking around the town scouting locations, they were mistaken for members of a rival bunch called the Nueva Plaza Gang. They were abducted, tortured, and murdered, their bodies handed over to a fairly well-known Mexican rapper, Christian Omar Palma Gutiérrez (“QBA,” his rap moniker), who, with some others in the pay of the Jalisco New Generation, admitted dissolving their bodies in vats of acid. The same year, three Italian men who were selling Chinese merchandise to hawkers in provincial markets disappeared in the town of Tecalitlán, Jalisco. They were abducted at a gas station by a band of local policemen on motorcycles and sold for $53 to a gang who eventually killed them and burned their bodies.

  Decapitation and mutilation became something new in Mexican gang warfare. “The machete is the most convincing form of argument,” Charles Macomb Flandrau wrote in his Viva Mexico! (1908). The cartels had favored bullets, significantly placed, the tiro de gracia—a shot in the back of the head meaning the victim was a traitor, a shot through the temple indicating a rival gang member. But in the early 2000s headless bodies began to appear, tossed by the roadside, while human heads were displayed in public, at intersections, and randomly on the roofs of cars. This butchery was believed to be inspired by a tactic of the Guatemalan military’s elite commandos, known as Kaibiles.

  A man I was to meet in Matamoros, on my traverse of the border, explained how the Kaibiles were toughened by their officers. The officers encouraged recruits to raise a dog from a puppy, then, at a certain point in their training, the recruit was ordered to kill the dog and eat it. From what I heard of them, the Kaibiles deserved that rare classification of “apex predator,” the fearsome creature in the animal world at the top of the food chain (tiger, grizzly bear, lion) that has no natural predators, dominating all others. When the Kaibiles became mercenaries in the Mexican cartels, the first beheadings occurred, the earliest known taking place in 2006: a gang in Michoacán kicked open the doors of a bar and tossed five human heads on the dance floor. Decapitations are now, according to one authority on the business, “a staple in the lexicon of violence” for Mexican cartels.

  Instead of hiding bodies in mass graves, corpses were triumphantly displayed, as when the Jalisco New Generation (while still part of El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel) dumped the thirty-five bodies on an avenue in Veracruz in September 2011. In reply, the Zetas scattered twenty-six corpses in Jalisco and a dozen in Sinaloa. On closer inspection, the bodies were those of ordinary citizens, not criminals: they were workers and students who had been abducted and murdered and displayed in order to strike fear in the heart of anyone who doubted the murderous resolve of the Zetas.

  There are killings contrived with such diabolical cunning they seem unimaginable. In To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War, John Gibler writes about a related series of bizarre and violent episodes that took place in Torreón, in Coahuila state, bordering Texas: “Who would believe, for example, that the warden of a state prison would let convicted killers out at night and loan them official vehicles, automatic assault rifles, and bulletproof vests, so that they could gun down scores of innocent people in a neighboring state and then quickly hop back over the state line and into prison, behind bars, a perfect alibi? Who would believe that a paramilitary drug-trafficking organization formed by ex−Special Forces of the Mexican Army would kidnap a local cop and torture him into confessing all of the above details about the prisoners’ death squad, videotape the confession, execute the cop on camera with a shot to the heart, and then post the video on YouTube? Who could fathom that the federal attorney general would, within hours of the video-taped confession and execution being posted online, arrest the warden, and then a few days later hold a press conference fully acknowledging that the prisoners’ death squad had operated for months, killing ten people in a bar in January 2010, eight people in a bar in May 2010, and seventeen people at a birthday party in July?” Yet all of this actually happened.

  I was often encouraged to cross the border at Laredo, into Nuevo Laredo. During April 2012, when El Chapo was at war with the Zetas, fourteen torsos—armless and legless bodies—were found
in a car by the side of the road in Nuevo Laredo. Dead Zetas. Some of the torsos were in the trunk, for which there is a specific narco term: encajuelado (“trunked”; therefore, trunks trunked). A month later, nine bodies were found hanging from a bridge across Federal Highway 85 in the middle of Nuevo Laredo, a narcomensaje banner near them, identifying them as members of the Gulf cartel, killed by Zetas. The next day, some ice coolers were found in front of Nuevo Laredo’s elegant town hall (Palacio Municipal), and in the coolers were fourteen headless bodies—more Zetas, but this time with a note from El Chapo, claiming it was the work of his cartel, as a way of insisting that the plaza of Nuevo Laredo belonged to him.

  The Zetas were not intimidated. On May 9, 2012, they left the hacked-apart bodies of eighteen men inside two vehicles (some of them encajuelado) in Chapala, Jalisco, all of them headless, though the severed heads had also been stacked in the cars. Soon after, in Michoacán state, the Zetas met their match in the person of Nazario Moreno (called El Más Loco, the Craziest One), leader of the ruthless Templarios, the Knights Templar cartel, whose recruits were required to eat human flesh—their victims’—as part of their initiation rites. When Moreno was gunned down by the Mexican army in 2014, the Zetas flourished, and remain dominant. But there was a posthumous bonus for the Craziest One: he was promoted to sainthood. In and around his birthplace in Apatzingán, shrines and altars were erected to Saint Nazario, the dead capo represented as a holy figure in robes, venerated by credulous Michoacanos.

  The massacre that was on many people’s minds—and which I knew a little about, because as a gratuitous outrage it had received extensive publicity—occurred in 2014, in Guerrero state, when forty-three students from a school in Ayotzinapa were abducted from buses and murdered. Only one of the bodies had been found. A vigorous campaign had been mounted on behalf of the bereaved parents, but the crime remained unsolved. The state prosecutor in that case said that the students had been handed over by corrupt local police to a criminal gang, which killed them and burned their bodies. This assertion was disproved in a comprehensive oral history of the massacre by John Gibler, I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us, in which he quotes a woman reflecting on the corrupt relationship between drug gangs and police in her murder-plagued state of Veracruz. She said, “Es que ya sin terror no hay negocio.” (There is no business anymore without terror.) This harsh summary expresses one of the dominant themes in the mayhem of Mexican life.

  In the course of my Mexican travels I spent some pleasant weeks in Baja, one of the areas of Mexico that had remained peaceful, frequented for its beaches and sportfishing, its salubrious resorts and hotels. But a few months after I left (and still praising the hospitality and the great food), in December 2017, six bodies were found hanging from bridges in Los Cabos: two near the international airport at Las Veredas, two on the bridge over the highway that connects Cabo San Lucas with San José del Cabo, and two on a third bridge near the airport, the work of drug gangs claiming Los Cabos—on its way to becoming a profitable tourist destination and a market for drugs—as their turf.

  Mayhem and uncertainty in Mexico caused the US State Department to devise, in 2018, a new, four-tier advisory system for travelers to the country, to replace the previous system of unspecific travel warnings and travel alerts: Level 1, Exercise Normal Precautions (much of Mexico); Level 2, Exercise Increased Caution (Cancún, Cozumel, Mexico City); Level 3, Reconsider Travel (Guadalajara, Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco); and Level 4, Do Not Travel (Acapulco, Zihuatanejo, Taxco). I knew nothing about this until after I returned from my trip, though I was warned repeatedly to avoid driving in Guerrero state and not to visit Acapulco—warnings I heeded.

  Barrancas del Cobre, Copper Canyon, in Chihuahua state, lies in the Exercise Normal Precautions zone and is visited by tourists and hikers. After I finished my Mexican journey, I read of a young American teacher, Patrick Braxton-Andrew, backpacking in Mexico, who left his hotel on October 28, 2018, wearing sandals for a short, predinner stroll just outside the Copper Canyon town of Urique. He was killed that same day by a member of the Sinaloa cartel, a man identified as El Chueco (the Crooked One), who remained on the loose.

  In many killings and abductions the Mexican police or the Mexican army had been involved as abettors or perpetrators. A 2018 Human Rights Watch document on Mexico reported that in August 2017, the Mexican government admitted that the whereabouts of more than 32,000 people who had gone missing since 2006 remained unknown. And in August 2016, the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) concluded that federal police arbitrarily executed 22 of the 42 civilians who died in a confrontation in 2015 in Tanhuato, Michoacán. Tanhuato, famous for its fiestas, is also an important depot on the northbound drug trafficking route.

  “Police fatally shot at least 13 people in the back,” the CNDH report stated, “tortured two detainees, and burned a man alive, then altered the crime scene by moving bodies and planting guns to justify the illegal killings. Nobody had been charged with the crimes, and a federal investigation into the Tanhuato killings remained open.”

  The Mexican army and police also routinely tortured suspects. The CNDH had received almost 10,000 complaints of abuse by the army since 2000. Mexico’s own national statistics office, the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, reported that in a 2016 survey of more than 64,000 people incarcerated in 370 Mexican prisons, more than half of the prison population had suffered some type of physical violence at the time of their arrest: “19 percent reported receiving electrical shocks; 36 percent being choked, held underwater, or smothered; and 59 percent being hit or kicked. In addition, 28 percent reported that they were threatened that their family would be harmed.”

  Journalists were targeted by both the cartels and the police on whom they reported. From 2000 through October 2017, 104 journalists were killed and 25 disappeared, according to the Mexican attorney general’s office, and between January and July 2017, 8 journalists were murdered and 1 abducted. All of them had published stories about cartel crime and police corruption, and the more vindictive Mexicans claimed the journalists had gotten what they deserved, quoting President Donald Trump’s assertion, “The press is the enemy of the people.” The International Press Institute, in its report in December 2017, stated that Mexico is “the deadliest country for journalists, edging out Iraq and Syria.”

  This, then, was the recent history of mayhem and the general situation in Mexico when I drove toward the border, unaware of it and smiling into the sunshine, squinting at the open road and blessing my luck, thinking, The coachwhip snake is not poisonous! And I was to find that no one in Mexico ever used the word “cartel” or spoke the name of a gang—“Zeta” or “Golfo” or any other. You could be killed for uttering these forbidden words. What I heard, when I asked, was always a hot whisper, no louder than a shallow breath, and the whisper was “mafia,” with a widening of the eyes as a warning. I also found that the common fear of the so-called mafia—the drug gangs and traffickers—had unified good people and created watchful communities.

  The nearer the border, the shriller the warning, until, on the border itself, the US immigration officer answered one of my questions by saying, “I have no idea. I don’t have a clue. I have never been there”—and raised his blue arm and the yellow nail of his hairy finger to point across fifty feet of sunny road to Mexico.

  To TJ: “Aquí Empieza la Patria” (The Fatherland Begins Here)

  Wishing to have a notion of the whole border—because the border was on everyone’s mind—instead of crossing from McAllen to Reynosa, I decided to drive straight to Tijuana to make a slow, uninterrupted traverse of the entire frontera, a road trip from west to east, San Ysidro, California, to Brownsville, Texas, which was also Tijuana to Matamoros, zigzagging from the United States to Mexico and back, from one border town to the other. And then on the eastern end of the line I would head seriously south from Reynosa.

  The Texas town of McAllen and its surrounding towns, Hidalgo, Mission, Progreso, Pha
rr, and some others, are where many Mexicans who live near the border do their shopping. And many Mexican laborers with visas crowd the bridges each morning from the states of Nuevo León and Tamaulipas, returning in the evening when the workday is done. Like most other large US border towns, these places are bilingual and buoyant, their prosperity based on the spending of Mexican visitors and the tenacity of Mexican farm workers, without whom little would be plucked from the fields at harvest time. Texans don’t go to McAllen for a good time, but many Mexicans do.

  I should add that McAllen and the nearby towns are also beset by incursions of migrants from deeper in Mexico, the poorer states of Oaxaca and Michoacán, who have been spirited across the Rio Grande from Reynosa by traffickers, known variously as coyotes or polleros (a word for chicken farmers). On occasion, migrants run through suburban yards pursued by the Border Patrol, or huddle, thirty at a time, in “drop houses” in middle-class neighborhoods until the cartels and traffickers can move them farther north, eluding US checkpoints. Often the traffickers hold them hostage in the drop houses, forcing them to call their relatives in Mexico to send ransom money.

  I spent the night in McAllen and set off in the morning, heading west along Route 83, which follows the border—the Rio Grande here—past Roma (where I could wave to picnickers on the other side, at Ciudad Miguel Alemán) and, at Zapata’s watery edge, Falcon Lake, two miles wide, swelled by Falcon Dam at its southeast end. At Laredo, the road took me inland to the farming towns of south Texas and then eastward through the pale clay cliffs and deep ravines of Box Canyon and the twenty-mile-long Amistad Reservoir, which straddles the border and is surrounded not by forest but by a greeny-blue sea of head-high junipers and stunted oaks. Farther on, real wilderness, not the Texas of desert stereotype but a low forest of mesquite and cedar that seems dense and impassable, and uninhabited except for the migrant-spotters in vehicles on the service roads and the occasional checkpoint, with sniffer dogs and Border Patrol officers and their blunt greeting at the stop sign: “Are you an American citizen?”