The whole truth about life in drug cartel-controlled Mexico is told by a citizen who fled the daily shootings to Canada.
The drug trade is a quirky culture.
Drug dealers here are not afraid to say they are drug dealers. Each cartel has its own emblem. You join any of them and receive a “branded” large bag, only it will not have the Adibas logo, but the cartel logo.
People actually brag about their cartel membership on Facebook. Cartels post photos of murdered bloggers and anti-drug activists as if they were pictures of kittens. This is called drug culture, and it is what happens to you when you deal with various gangs for long enough. It's becoming a fan club of sorts. football club, only with a taste of cocaine and marijuana.
The drug culture has its own patron saint - Malverde. Mexicans call him the "guardian angel of the poor" or the "generous bandit," and all smugglers pray to him before setting off with a shipment to America or before raiding another cartel's hideout. If everything goes well, Saint Melverde receives a new thanksgiving candle.
The drug culture also has its own multi-million dollar musical style, beloved by all the poor youth of Mexico. They dream of wealth and power, and only the drug trade can help them achieve this. This style is called "narcocorridos", and many have heard at least one song without even knowing it.
And if it seems cool and cool to you, then...
This is a real war.
Here's a little story. The cartels started having problems during Prohibition in the United States. It all started with small family-owned beer cartels that smuggled their product into the United States. When America repealed Prohibition, bootleggers were confused... but then the United States banned marijuana. This was an opportunity for drug manufacturers and murderers. The players have changed, but the meaning remains the same. America bans something, and in Mexico people start shooting at each other for a piece of the pie called the black market, estimated at tens of billions of dollars.
But in 2006 everything changed. It was then that Mexican President Felipe Calderon decided to turn the “war on drugs” into a real war. He invaded the drug world with the help of the army and a real bloody war began. While everyone agrees that the cartels will never go away as long as there is still easy money to be made, at least 80,000 people have died, making the Mexican drug war a bloodier affair than the American war was in Vietnam.
The drug war affects every aspect of life in northern cities Mexico and in cities that are dominated by cartels. In cities where gangs still compete with each other, shootings are perceived as bad weather and traffic jams. Murders have become commonplace in the endless cartel wars. The cartels even issue warnings so ordinary people know not to leave the house after 7:00 pm or 8:00 pm, or whenever the gangs decide it's time to kill. Yes, this can be called caring for ordinary citizens, but everything would be much better if they did not kill ordinary road workers in order to warn the cartel in the area.
Ordinary citizens began to form groups called "autodefensas". They also have guns because they take them from killed cartel members. They've cleared out about 5 percent of Mexico within a year, but it's clear the government doesn't approve of a vigilante army operating outside the law. It doesn't help that the cartels have money and influence - they control most of Mexico's government and police, even in a time when the president has been harshly critical of the situation.
What's even more incredible is that the government is attacking the vigilante groups with tanks and helicopters to "disarm" them. And then the cartels tap their badge-wearing buddies on the back and prove that mass murder, like riding a bike, is a skill you'll never forget, no matter what uniform you wear.
The cartels have an advanced PR campaign.
When I got into [a city that they refused to name for fear of being executed], I saw a billboard: "Mexican soldier! You only get $800 a month. You eat unhealthy food. Join us and you will earn at least $1000-2000 a month. And at the same time you will get more free time!" Similar cartel advertisements offering cash to soldiers for their weapons or loyalty can be seen in various parts of the country.
They also have their own news form. Distributed primarily through Facebook, the cartel's news contains less information for people and more intimidating slogans and photos and videos of gruesome executions. And of course selfies, because even brutal killers feel the need to snap their face whenever possible.
But no good PR campaign is limited to the Internet. The cartels also make every effort to spread propaganda to people who live near where they operate. If a hurricane, flood or other disaster strikes, you can be sure that the cartel trucks will be the first to help. They will instantly fill the affected area, and the cartel’s “ministers” will painstakingly film it all for YouTube. And all because a few trucks filled with food and water at the right moment completely erase all memories of the murders.
For many Mexicans, the cartels are the government.
Successful cartels control Mexican society through more than just fear. The cartels give out gifts at Christmas like Santa Claus with a beard full of cocaine. In addition, they allocate money. Yes, they just give money.
Since the Mexican government simply does not have any leverage in some parts of the country, the cartels have taken on the mission of building schools and hospitals. But it is not out of the goodness of their hearts that they recruit their members from these institutions. We are talking about poor children in rural areas of Mexico where there are no other opportunities. Imagine, your dad worked all week seven days a week for $20, and then a kid at school with an iPad and designer jeans starts saying, “You know, you can make $800 or $900 a month, and I can introduce you to people who will tell you how..."
They will begin to listen carefully to such a child and will begin to consider him a true “friend.” It's not even a question of money; most of us would do exactly the same if we were faced with a choice between “wages and starvation” and “fast, illegal, but huge money.” It's the same with the police; You can earn as little as $11,000 a year as a city police chief, but if you're flexible enough, you can earn three times that amount or more. Integrity disappears pretty quickly when it stands between you and things like antibiotics for your children or just money for booze.
And for those who don't join...
This is worse than dictatorship.
The cartels have their own checkpoints, just like the government. While government checkpoints are looking for drugs and weapons, cartel checkpoints are looking for anyone who may be working for a rival cartel.
For example, a guy born near the Bay Area decided to drive across the country towards Pacific Ocean. Real police officers won't worry because it's completely normal. But the cartels may suspect that he is working for their enemies from the other coast, and therefore this guy simply will not make it to the opposite coast. There is no need to prove anything, no trial or investigation. If they suspect something, they will simply kill you.
Living under cartel surveillance changes everything you can talk about with friends. With a dictatorship, as long as you stay out of politics, you are safe. But in a cartel-run area, if a drug dealer likes your girlfriend, he will kill you. You have no right to exist. If you are a woman and he wants to "date" you, you have no right to refuse. Complained about a cartel on a blog? You will be lucky if you live to see your next birthday.
Two people I know were in a restaurant (in another city that I won't name) when two thugs entered the premises. They grabbed the guy in front of his family and dragged him outside. Another bandit told the other customers: "Be quiet or we will kill you all." The guy they took was never found and most likely never will be found.
If you're asking yourself why all this is happening in Mexico, there's one thing to keep in mind...
Money and weapons come from America.
I'm irritated by the way Americans don't take cocaine seriously, like in American movies like The Wolves of Wall Street, because 90 percent of the coke Americans buy goes through Mexico on its way to the American nose. Cartels make up to $64 billion a year selling drugs in the United States. Marijuana legalization in Colorado and Washington may have cut their revenues by as much as $3 billion, but coke and meth remain a lucrative business, and no one in the US is going to legalize them.
All of these drug profits do not stay in Mexico. The money flows back across the border to the 6,700 American firearms dealers who operate near the border. Nearly half of all gun dealers in the United States depend on arms trade with Mexican cartels. You'll never hear about this in an NRA (National Rifle Association) ad, and when you hear people complaining that they need big walls along the border to keep drugs and immigrants out, they forget about the flow of deadly weapons going the other way . Rather, it is precisely because of this that the United States is not seeking to strengthen control on the border of the two countries.
Gun trafficking is illegal in Mexico. There is only one legal gun store in all of Mexico City, and you can only buy guns with permission armed forces countries. So while the US fights armed attacks, weapons of all kinds are flowing into Mexico and killing people. And no one in the US, when talking about a gun ban, will think of Mexico, because who cares about the suffering of others, right?
In US political circles, there has recently been discussion of the ATF program or the program of "selling weapons directly to the cartels to see what happens." Isn't this wild? The issue was quickly hushed up when a US border patrol member was shot and killed with weapons smuggled from the US. And no one counts the people who died from the same weapons in Mexico itself. Maybe their names are too complicated for dumb Americans to spell?
And can you imagine the anger of American politicians if, say, seven people in southern Arizona were killed in an ambush by a Mexican drug cartel? But if you go about a mile south, you will find yourself in Mexico, and even the shooting of 100 people will not be noticed. This is the magic of the US-Mexico border and it is this amazing quality that allows everyone to believe that what happens on the other side will never be their problem.
Don't bring evil into someone else's house and you won't get it back.
Material prepared by GusenaLapchataya
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In December 2006, Mexico's newly elected Felipe Calderon declared war on the drug cartels, thereby ending the state's passivity in this matter. Since then, some progress has been made, but at a high cost. Shootings, murders, kidnappings, conflicts between rival cartels, punitive measures. About 9,500 people have been killed in anti-drug efforts since December 2006, and more than 5,300 last year alone.
Ammunition seized from members of the Pacifico drug cartel at Mexico City airport. March 12, 2009. (REUTERS/Jorge Dan Lopez)
An American police officer in a captured greenhouse in the basement of a ranch in Tecate, Mexico. March 12, 2009. (REUTERS/Jorge Duenes)
A policeman walks among bags of cocaine in the city of Buenaventura, Colombia's main port on the Pacific coast. Monday, March 23, 2009. Colombian police confiscated 3.5 tons of cocaine that they were trying to smuggle into Mexico in a container of vegetable oil. (AP Photo/Fernando Vergara)
Yanet Daynara Garcia (center) and Zigifrido Najera (2nd from left), members of the Cardenas Guillen drug cartel, attend a press presentation at the Defense Minister's headquarters in Mexico City. March 20, 2009. (LUIS ACOSTA/AFP/Getty Images)
Mexican drug trafficker Vicente Zambada Niebla meets with the media in Mexico City on March 19, 2009. Zambada was arrested along with five other suspects, police said. The arrested were found to have money and weapons. (REUTERS/Daniel Aguilar)
Soldiers guard a police station in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Monday, March 16, 2009. Since this city of 1.3 million people is largely policed by the military, a retired officer was appointed head of the police as an accomplice after the previous head of the police department resigned from this post after succumbing to threats drug dealers. (AP Photo)
Federal police officers aboard a plane during a flight to the border city of Ciudad Juarez in Mexico. Monday, March 2, 2009. The deployment is part of a plan to increase the law enforcement presence in Ciudad Juarez by 5,000 as the city suffers from an infestation of organized crime. (AP Photo/Miguel Tovar)
A soldier oversees the burning of fourteen tons of drugs in the city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. December 2, 2008. (J. Guadalupe PEREZ/AFP/Getty Images)
Police drive past a burning patrol car in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. Wednesday, February 25, 2009. Earlier in this resort town In Zihuatanejo, which is located on the Pacific coast, gunmen opened fire and threw grenades at a patrol car, killing four police officers. (AP Photo/Felipe Salinas)
Mexican police stand near a car containing two people killed in a shooting. Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. November 25, 2008. (J. Guadalupe PEREZ/AFP/Getty Images)
A corpse on a table in the morgue before an autopsy. Tijuana, Mexico. Monday, January 19, 2009. (AP Photo/Guillermo Arias)
Federal police patrol the city of Ciudad Juarez. March 2, 2009. Hundreds of military personnel in full gear and police convoys patrolled Ciudad Juarez in an attempt to restore order in one of the most violent city. (REUTERS/Tomas Bravo)
Mexican soldiers check documents during a drug and weapons search in Reynosa, on Mexico's northeastern border with the United States, March 17, 2009. (AP Photo/Alexandre Meneghini)
A tourist leaves the hotel. A policeman is standing guard nearby - one of the participants in the operation to defuse a bomb in a departmental institution in the border city of Ciudad Juarez. A report that a bomb had been planted in the building prompted local police and federal forces to launch the operation, local media reported. (REUTERS/Tomas Bravo)
Mexican soldiers inspect vehicles and carry out customs clearance at customs checkpoints near the town of Miguel Aleman, on Mexico's northeastern border with the United States. March 18, 2009. (AP Photo/Alexandre Meneghini)
A Mexican soldier stands on the Mexico-US border in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. March 6, 2009. (AP Photo/Miguel Tovar)
Soldiers patrol near the town of Miguel Aleman, on Mexico's northeastern border with the United States, March 19, 2009. (AP Photo/Alexandre Meneghini)
Shoes used for marijuana smuggling are seen at the Drug Museum at the headquarters of the Ministry of Defense in Mexico City, March 9, 2009. The museum displays many exhibits: sniper rifles, mobile and cordless phones encrusted with gold and diamonds, clandestine drug laboratories and many other items. that once belonged to drug traffickers. (REUTERS/Jorge Dan Lopez)
President of Texas Armoring Corp. Trent Kimball inspects his company's bulletproof glass, which was left with bullet holes from the previous day's shooting. San Antonio, February 26, 2009. Due to an increase in the number of clashes with drug traffickers in the northern regions of Mexico, American companies are increasingly ordering armored lining, bulletproof glass along with armored lining, bulletproof glass and such security gadgets as electronic door handles and alarms. pressing smoke screens. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
Dawn over a canal near El Centro, California. March 12, 2009. El Centro recorded the most high level US unemployment: 22.6%. This is the same high rate, was recorded during the Great Depression. It’s especially hard for Latinos now. People living in the Imperial Valley, a desert north of the US-Mexico border and east of San Diego, are now suffering not only from the effects of the global financial crisis, but also from drought. (David McNew/Getty Images)
Central American migrants released by the military were held hostage by Mexican gang members in Reynosa, Mexico on March 17, 2009. More than 50 migrants are currently being held captive by the gang, which is involved in kidnapping for ransom, according to the Mexican army. (AP Photo/Alejandro Meneghini)
Forensic investigators remove one of nine bodies found near the border city of Ciudad Juarez on March 14, 2009. An anonymous caller called police to report that at least nine bodies were found in a shallow grave, local media reported. (REUTERS/Alejandro Bringas)
A man arrested by the military at a house where a gang was holding Central American migrants hostage. Reynosa, Mexico, March 17, 2009. (AP Photo/Alexandre Meneghini)
A forensic investigator examines the vertebra and other bone fragments. This is all that remains of a human body that was burned in a barrel of acid. The murder matches the signature of "El Teo", one of Tijuana's most wanted drug lords. (Los Angeles Times photo by Don Bartletti)
A border patrol vehicle smoothes the sand so that the tracks of potential border violators are visible. New prefabricated stair railings have been installed along the Mexican border between Yuma, Arizona and Calexico, California. March 14, 2009. (David McNew/Getty Images)
Newly built fence on the US-Mexico border. Photo taken at dawn on March 14, 2009, between Yuma, Arizona and Calexico, California. The new 15-foot-tall (4.5-meter) barrier is installed on top of the sand dunes so it can be lifted and repositioned when migrating dunes begin to cover it. Almost seven miles (11 km) of such fencing were installed at a cost of $6 million per mile. (David McNew/Getty Images)
Numbered boxes containing evidence collected from multiple autopsies. Mortuary in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. February 18, 2009. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)
Corpses in a mortuary refrigerator in the border city of Ciudad Juarez. Mexico, February 18, 2009. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)
In the foreground is a .50 caliber rifle. In the background is a meeting on issues on the Mexican border. The meeting is attended by representatives of the US Department of Homeland Security and the Subcommittee on Foreign Affairs. Thursday, March 12, 2009, Capitol Hill, Washington, DC. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
Soldiers escort drug lord Hector Huerta-Rios to an air force base in Salinas Victoria, on the outskirts of Monterrey, northern Mexico. March 24, 2009: Hector, head of the Beltran Leyva drug cartel, was captured by the military on Tuesday. He is accused of murdering the head of the Monterrey police. Huerta Rios was captured along with five of his associates. The arrested were found to have money and weapons. (REUTERS/Tomas Bravo)
Shot in the head by unknown assailants in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, March 11, 2009. (AP Photo/Miguel Tovar)
A policeman searches a field after a shootout looking for weapons. Tijuana, Mexico. Monday, March 9, 2009. (AP Photo/Guillermo Arias)
The drug mafia in Mexico is becoming more powerful. Although the overall murder rate in the country has been steadily declining over the past two decades, drug dealers are committing heinous crimes. They have undermined legal norms so much that ordinary Mexicans now and then publicly wonder: did the mafias actually win the war against the state?
The history of modern Mexican drug traffickers dates back to the 1940s, when farmers from the mountain villages of the Mexican state of Sinaloa began to grow marijuana. The first Mexican drug traffickers were a group of villagers connected by family ties. They were mostly from the small northern Mexican state of Sinaloa. This poor agricultural state, sandwiched between the Gulf of California and the Sierra Madre Mountains, about five hundred kilometers from the US border, has become an ideal location for smuggling. At first, marijuana was grown here or bought from other “gardeners” on the Pacific coast, and then the drug was transported to the United States. For decades it remained a stable and not too risky small business, and the violence did not spill out beyond the narrow world of drug traffickers. Later, cocaine was added to the smuggling of marijuana, which became fashionable in the 60s. However, for a long time, the Mexicans were just “donkeys” serving one of the channels for supplying Colombian cocaine to North America. And they didn’t even dare to compete with the powerful Colombians.
The rise of Mexican drug gangs began after the defeat of the Colombian drug cartels of Cali and Medellin by the US and Colombian governments. One after another, El Mehicano and Pablo Emilio Escabar were killed, brothers Ochoa and Carlos Leder (El Aleman) from the Medellin cartel were sent to Colombian and US prisons. Following them, came the turn of the Cali cartel, led by the Orihuela brothers.
Also, after the Americans closed the Colombian drug supply channel through Florida, the Mexican delivery route became virtually no alternative. The weakened Colombians could no longer dictate their will to the Mexicans and now only sell them large quantities of drugs at wholesale prices.
As a result, Mexican gangs gained control over the entire drug trade chain - from raw material plantations in the Andes region to points of sale on American streets. They managed to significantly expand the scale of their business: from 2000 to 2005, the supply of cocaine from South America to Mexico more than doubled, and the volume of amphetamine intercepted at the US-Mexico border fivefold.
The United States, largely due to the entrepreneurial spirit of the Mexican drug cartels, ranks first in the world in terms of cocaine and marijuana consumption. And the drug cartels themselves began to earn from 25 to 40 billion dollars a year on the American market. In general, Mexico produces about 10 thousand tons of marijuana and 8 thousand tons of heroin annually. Almost 30% of the country's cultivable farmland is planted with marijuana. In addition, almost 90% of the cocaine consumed in the States comes through Mexico. Mexican laboratories produce the majority of the methamphetamine consumed in the States (although a lot of meth used to be produced - four times more pseudoephedrine was imported into the country than was required for the pharmaceutical industry, and now the focus is on marijuana, which provides almost 70% of the cartels' income). All this is sold through controlled distribution points that Mexican drug cartels have in at least 230 major American cities.
However, this expansion of business also affected the relations between the leading Mexican cartels. The multiple increase in the possibility of supplying cocaine and marijuana with a fixed number of plazas (transshipment points on the border) and the number of drug addicts in the States led to a sharp increase in inter-cartel competition for the American market. It's time for big money. And big money, as we know, brings big problems. This is how drug wars began in Mexico, because “if in legal business there are standard legal methods of competition, then in illegal business, the most effective way to get around a competitor is to kill him.”
At first, families who had fled Sinaloa began vying for control of the main border transit points. Accordingly, the structure of the cartels itself has undergone changes. If in the old days, a drug mafioso was a guy with a gold tooth and a Colt 45 caliber, now everything is completely different. Now there are entire groups of militants trained in a military manner. To fight each other, cartels began to create private armies consisting of mercenaries - sicarios. These mercenaries are armed with the latest technology and often surpass even parts of the Mexican army in technical equipment and level of training. The most famous and violent of these groups, Los Zetas. Its core is former Mexican special forces from the GAFE (Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales) unit. In the model and likeness of Los Zetas, their competitor, the Sinaloa cartel, created its own army called Los Negros. There was no shortage of recruits: the cartels openly posted advertisements in towns bordering the United States, inviting former and current military personnel to join their organizations. Cartel vacancies became one of the reasons for mass desertion and dismissals from the Mexican army (from 2000 to 2006 - 100 thousand people).
The first major war between rival drug cartels began with the arrest in 1989 of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, the founding father of the cocaine business in Mexico, a friend of Jose Rodriguez Gacha (El Mexicano). This contributed to the fragmentation of his group and the founding of the first two major drug cartels - Sinaloa and Tijuana. Then the unexpected appearance of a group with no connection to Sinaloa added fuel to the fire. They were drug traffickers calling themselves the Cartel del Golfo, from the Gulf Coast state of Tamaulipas. People from Sinaloa were divided: some were for the new players, some were against. When the cartel formation in Mexico was completed, they split into two parts: one group consists of the Juárez Cartel, Los Zetas, Tijuana Cartel and Beltrán Leyva Cartel, and the second group from the Cartel del Golfol, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Cartel La Familial. . Later, two more were formed - the Oaxaca Cartel and Los Negros.
And ordinary Mexicans were clearly shown a new way of waging drug wars when a group of men in black walked into a roadside disco in the state of Michoacán and shook out the contents of a garbage bag - five severed heads. A new era of Mexican drug trafficking has begun, when violence has become the means of communication. Today, members of the drug mafia monstrously disfigure the bodies of their victims and put them on public display - so that everyone realizes the power of the drug lords and fears them. The You Tube site has become a propaganda platform for the drug war, where anonymous companies upload videos and drug ballads praising the advantages of one cartel leader over another.
The United States, as you know, is not only the main drug market, but also a source of weapons used in drug cartel fights in Mexico. Almost anyone with a driver's license and no criminal record can buy a weapon here. 110 thousand sellers have sales licenses, 6600 of which are located between Texas and San Diego. Therefore, for the purchase itself, Mexicans usually use fake Americans - “straw people” (mostly single mothers who do not arouse suspicion), who receive $50–100 for the service. These fake people buy guns individually either from stores or at “gun shows” that are held every weekend in Arizona, Texas or California. Then the barrels are handed over to dealers, who, collecting a batch of several dozen, transport it across the border. And they make good money from it. For example, a used AK-47 can be bought in the States for $400, but south of the Rio Grande it will cost $1,500. Armed in this way, drug cartel armies have mortars, heavy machine guns, anti-tank missiles, grenade launchers, and fragmentation grenades.
Mexican border guards themselves cannot stop weapons traffic. Or rather, they don’t want to. Mexicans are not particularly active in searching cars entering their territory from the north, this passivity is explained by the fact that border guards are faced with the choice of “plata o plomo” (silver or lead). Many people prefer to take bribes and turn a blind eye to smuggling. Those who refuse "silver" usually do not live long. For example, in February 2007, an honest Mexican border guard detained a truck full of weapons. As a result, the Gulf Cartel was missing 18 rifles, 17 pistols, 17 grenades, and more than 8 thousand rounds of ammunition. The next day the border guard was shot dead.
Until 2006, periodic mafia clashes had virtually no effect on ordinary Mexicans. The cartels were big business, and big business requires a quiet environment. Drug gangs have even become an everyday part of citizens' lives. Ordinary people, seeing the success of drug dealers (especially against the backdrop of total poverty in the country), began to compose “drug ballads” about them. Since Mexico is a very religious country, the cartels even have their own “drug saint” - Jesus Malverde, whose central temple is installed in the capital of the state of Sinaloa, the city of Cualican, and the “drug saint” - Doña Santa Muerte.
There was no large-scale violence in the country. The cartels interacted with Mexican President Vicente Fox according to the formula “Live yourself and don’t interfere with others’ lives.” Everyone controlled their own territory and did not interfere with others. Everything changed with the victory of Felipe Calderon in the 2006 presidential elections. Immediately after his election, the new head of state declared war on the drug cartels. The president took such a radical step for two reasons. First, he needed to launch some kind of popular campaign to strengthen his position after the controversial election results (Calderon's lead over his closest rival, Andreas Manuel Lopez Obrador, was less than 0.6%). Of the two potential popular directions - the war on crime and the beginning of deep economic reforms - he chose the first as, in his opinion, the easiest. Secondly, new president realized the danger of coexistence of cartels and the state. Calderon realized that continued “See No, Hear No” tactics against drug cartels would inevitably lead to a weakening of the government. Every year the bandits penetrated deeper into government institutions, primarily the police.
By the time Calderon arrived, the entire police force in the northern states of Mexico had been bought by the cartels. At the same time, law enforcement officers did not fear for their future if their connections with bandits were revealed. If a local policeman is fired for corruption, he simply goes across the street and is hired to serve by the cartel (for example, in Rio Bravo, the Los Zetas recruiting office was located directly across from the police station). Former police officers know the principles of police work from the inside, and they were gladly hired. That is why the authority of the police in the country was very low.
As a result of an active campaign, Calderon managed to inflict some damage on the drug mafia. During 2007–2008, 70 tons of cocaine, 370 tons of marijuana, 28 thousand guns, 2000 grenades, 3 million cartridges and $304 million were seized from the cartels. In the USA, this resulted in its own indicators: cocaine prices soared by one and a half times, while the average purity decreased from 67.8 to 56.7%, and the cost of amphetamine on American streets increased by 73%.
After the new president violated the unspoken truce, the drug cartels declared a vendetta on the government and security forces and are waging it with their characteristic cruelty and intransigence (for this reason, two sworn enemies, the Gulf and Sinaloa Cartels, even reconciled for some time). Those who did not run away and sell out are mercilessly shot. Briefly, the chronicle of the most significant victories and losses looks like this:
In January 2008, in the city of Culiacan, one of the leaders of the cartel of the same name, Alfredo Beltran Leyva (nickname El Mochomo), was arrested. His brothers, in revenge for his arrest, organized the murder of Federal Police Commissioner Edgar Eusebio Millano Gomez and other high-ranking officials in the Mexican capital itself.
Also in January, members of the Juarez cartel pinned to the door of Juarez City Hall a list of 17 police officers who had been sentenced to death. By September, ten of them were killed.
On October 25, in the prestigious Fracionamiento Pedregal district of Tijuana, troops and police stormed a villa located here, arresting the leader of the Tijuana cartel, Eduardo Arellano Felix (nickname “Doctor”), after which leadership of the cartel passed to his nephew, Luis Fernando Sánchez Arellano.
However, after the arrest of Eduardo Arellano Felix, one of the leaders of the drug cartel, Teodoro Garcia Simental (nickname “El Teo”) left the group and started a war against its new leader, as a result of which Tijuana was swept by a wave of violence that, according to various sources, killed from 300 to almost 700 people . Within a year, rivals fought for control of the road running through Nogales, Sonora, and the number of murders in that city tripled.
In November, under strange circumstances, the plane of Juan Camilo Mourino, the presidential national security adviser, crashed.
And in early February 2009, one of the most popular Mexican military officers, retired General Mauro Enrique Tello Quinones, was kidnapped, tortured and killed. Less than 24 hours before his kidnapping, he took over as security advisor to the Cancun City Hall - resort town, one of the drug lords' recreation centers.
On December 16 of the same year, in a shootout with soldiers of the Mexican Navy, one of the leaders of the Beltran Leyva drug cartel, Arturo Beltran Leyva, died, and on December 30, in the city of Culiacan, law enforcement agencies detained his brother and one of the leaders of the drug cartel, Carlos Beltran Leyva.
On January 12, 2010, one of the most wanted Mexican drug lords and leaders of the Tijuana drug cartel, Teodoro Garcia Simental (nickname “El Teo”), was caught in the state of Baja California.
In February, the Los Zetas cartel and its ally the Beltran Leyva cartel began a war against the Golfo cartel in the border city of Reynosa, turning some border towns into ghost towns. It was reported that a member of the Golfo cartel killed the Zetas' top lieutenant, Victor Mendoza. The group demanded that the cartel find the killer, but he refused. Thus, a new war broke out between the 2 gangs.
On June 14, members of the rival Zetas and Sinaloa cartels carried out a massacre in a prison in the city of Mazatlan. A group of prisoners, having seized the guards' pistols and assault rifles through deception, broke into a nearby prison block, committing reprisals against members of a rival cartel. During this and at the same time, in other parts of the prison, 29 people died from riots.
On June 19, in the city of Ciudad Juarez, the mayor of the city of Guadalupe Distros Bravos, Manuel Lara Rodriguez, who was hiding there after receiving threats against himself, was shot dead, and ten days later, the criminals killed the candidate for governor of the northwestern state of Tamaulipas, Rodolfo Torre Cantu.
On July 29, the military discovered in the suburbs of Guadalajara the location of one of the leaders of the Sinaloa drug cartel, Ignacio Coronel, and during the ensuing shootout he died. That same month, in the municipal area of Tamaulipas, the military raided a ranch where suspected drug cartel members were located and four people were killed in a shootout. While searching the area around the ranch, the Mexican military discovered a mass grave (the bodies of 72 people, including 14 women).
On August 30, the authorities managed to arrest the influential drug lord Edgar Valdez (nicknames Barbie, Comandante and Guero), and in early September, following operational intelligence information, a special unit naval forces, in Pueblo, one of the leaders of the Beltran Leyva drug cartel, Sergio Villarreal (nickname “El Grande”), was arrested.
The next major success of Mexican law enforcement agencies was the arrest of the head of the Los Zetas drug cartel, Jose Angel Fernandez, at the Cancun resort.
A few days earlier, on November 6, during a shootout with the military in the city of Matamoros, one of the leaders of the Gulf Cartel, Ezequiel Gardenas Guillen (nickname of Tony Tormenta), was killed.
On December 7, they managed to detain one of the high-ranking members of the La Familia drug cartel, Jose Antonio Arcos. And the next day, hundreds of police and military personnel entered the city of Apatzingan, where La Familia is based. And with the support of helicopters, for two days they fought with armed members of the drug cartel, during which several people died (civilians, militants and police), including the head of the La Familia drug cartel, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez (nickname “Mad”).
On December 28, in the city of Guadalupe Distrito Bravos, unknown persons kidnapped the last policeman remaining here, after which the city was left without police, and in order to ensure law and order, the authorities sent troops to the city.
On January 18, 2011, near the city of Oaxaca, one of the founders of the Los Zetas cartel, Flavio Mendez Santiago (nickname Yellow), was arrested.
On June 21, during a raid near the city of Aguascalientes, in the state of the same name in central Mexico, police detained the drug lord of the La Familia drug cartel, Jose de Jesus Mendez Vargas. The following month, in the state of Mexico, police arrested another of the founders of the Los Zetas cartel, Jesus Enrique Rejon Aguilar.
In total, since 2006, 26 thousand people have become victims of this conflict. For comparison, the number of Soviet military deaths during the 10 years of the war in Afghanistan was 13,833. Twice smaller!!!
Currently, there are nine main drug cartels operating in Mexico: the Sinaloa Cartel, the Tijuana Cartel, the Juarez Cartel, the Golfo Cartel, the La Familia Cartel or La Familia Michiocana, the Beltran Leyva Cartel, the Los Zetas Cartel, the Los Negros Cartel and the Oaxaca Cartel. You can read more about each of them by clicking on the links with the names of the cartels.
And a little about Russians, in this interesting topic:
Mexican drug cartels use members of Russian organized crime groups, as well as former KGB officers, to smuggle drugs into the United States and also to increase their influence in the region.
Luis Vasconcelos, head of the Mexican Attorney General's Office of Organized Crime, claims that "the Russians are highly professional and extremely dangerous."
Russian mafiosi help Mexican drug traffickers launder money. This was stated by the head of the intelligence department of the American Federal Drug Enforcement Administration, Stephen Casteel. For their services, the Russians take 30% of the money laundered.
Casteel argues that the rise of Russians in Mexico is linked to the globalization of organized crime. For the first time, fighters from Russian “brigades” appeared in Colombia and Mexico in the early 90s, but their finest hour came a little later. After the arrest of the head of one of the largest drug cartels in Mexico, Benjamin Arellano Felix, as well as several dozen of his assistants, the cartel began to rapidly disintegrate. University of Miami specialist Bruce Beigley claims that it was then that Russian mafiosi gradually began to infiltrate the fragments of the once powerful organization.
"Russian militants are much cooler than the Mexicans. They are much more brutal. They do their job silently and try not to show off unnecessarily. They don't wear gold chains, don't cut people with chainsaws and don't throw them into rivers," says Bagley. "Don't underestimate them. These guys are the cruelest people you can imagine."
Bagley claims that the latest Mexican police operations, which have effectively "decapitated the Mexican drug cartels," provide the Russian mafia with a "golden opportunity to operate in Mexico." A large cartel is breaking up into small armed groups that operate at the state and city level in Mexico. There they are more difficult to identify, and it is easier for drug traffickers to bribe local officials. Small groups of Mexican drug traffickers welcome the Russians with open arms.
The Russians carry out most of their money laundering operations in various offshore zones - in Haiti, Cuba, Dominican Republic And Puerto Rico. The Russians escort large cargoes of drugs that are transported to the United States. In April 2001, American coastal police seized a ship with a cargo of 13 tons of cocaine and a mixed Russian-Ukrainian crew.
The drug mafia in Mexico is becoming more powerful. Although the overall murder rate in the country has been steadily declining over the past two decades, drug dealers are committing heinous crimes. They have undermined legal norms so much that ordinary Mexicans now and then publicly wonder: did the mafias actually win the war against the state?
The history of modern Mexican drug traffickers dates back to the 1940s, when farmers from the mountain villages of the Mexican state of Sinaloa began to grow marijuana. The first Mexican drug traffickers were a group of villagers connected by family ties. They were mostly from the small northern Mexican state of Sinaloa. This poor agricultural state, sandwiched between the Gulf of California and the Sierra Madre Mountains, about five hundred kilometers from the US border, has become an ideal location for smuggling. At first, marijuana was grown here or bought from other “gardeners” on the Pacific coast, and then the drug was transported to the United States. For decades it remained a stable and not too risky small business, and the violence did not spill out beyond the narrow world of drug traffickers. Later, cocaine was added to the smuggling of marijuana, which became fashionable in the 60s. However, for a long time, the Mexicans were just “donkeys” serving one of the channels for supplying Colombian cocaine to North America. And they didn’t even dare to compete with the powerful Colombians.
The rise of Mexican drug gangs began after the defeat of the Colombian drug cartels of Cali and Medellin by the US and Colombian governments. One after another, El Mehicano and Pablo Emilio Escabar were killed, and brothers Ochoa and Carlos Leder (El Aleman) from the Medellin cartel were imprisoned in Colombian and US prisons. Following them, came the turn of the Cali cartel, led by the Orihuela brothers.
Also, after the Americans closed the Colombian drug supply channel through Florida, the Mexican delivery route became virtually no alternative. The weakened Colombians could no longer dictate their will to the Mexicans and now only sell them large quantities of drugs at wholesale prices.
As a result, Mexican gangs gained control over the entire drug trade chain - from raw material plantations in the Andes region to points of sale on American streets. They managed to significantly expand the scale of their business: from 2000 to 2005, the supply of cocaine from South America to Mexico more than doubled, and the volume of amphetamine intercepted at the US-Mexico border fivefold.
The United States, largely due to the entrepreneurial spirit of the Mexican drug cartels, ranks first in the world in terms of cocaine and marijuana consumption. And the drug cartels themselves began to earn from 25 to 40 billion dollars a year on the American market. In general, Mexico produces about 10 thousand tons of marijuana and 8 thousand tons of heroin annually. Almost 30% of the country's cultivable farmland is planted with marijuana. In addition, almost 90% of the cocaine consumed in the States comes through Mexico. Mexican laboratories produce the majority of the methamphetamine consumed in the States (although a lot of meth used to be produced - four times more pseudoephedrine was imported into the country than was required for the pharmaceutical industry, and now the focus is on marijuana, which provides almost 70% of the cartels' income). All this is sold through controlled distribution points that Mexican drug cartels have in at least 230 major American cities.
However, this expansion of business also affected the relations between the leading Mexican cartels. The multiple increase in the possibility of supplying cocaine and marijuana with a fixed number of plazas (transshipment points on the border) and the number of drug addicts in the States led to a sharp increase in inter-cartel competition for the American market. It's time for big money. And big money, as we know, brings big problems. This is how drug wars began in Mexico, because “if in legal business there are standard legal methods of competition, then in illegal business, the most effective way to get around a competitor is to kill him.”
At first, families who had fled Sinaloa began vying for control of the main border transit points. Accordingly, the structure of the cartels itself has undergone changes. If in the old days, a drug mafioso was a guy with a gold tooth and a Colt 45 caliber, now everything is completely different. Now there are entire groups of militants trained in a military manner. To fight each other, cartels began to create private armies consisting of mercenaries - sicarios. These mercenaries are armed with the latest technology and often surpass even parts of the Mexican army in technical equipment and level of training. The most famous and violent of these groups, Los Zetas. Its core is former Mexican special forces from the GAFE (Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales) unit. In the model and likeness of Los Zetas, their rival, the Sinaloa Cartel, created its own army called Los Negros. There was no shortage of recruits: the cartels openly posted advertisements in towns bordering the United States, inviting former and current military personnel to join their organizations. Cartel vacancies became one of the reasons for mass desertion and dismissals from the Mexican army (from 2000 to 2006 - 100 thousand people).
The first major war between rival drug cartels began with the arrest in 1989 of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, the founding father of the cocaine business in Mexico, a friend of Jose Rodriguez Gacha (El Mexicano). This contributed to the fragmentation of his group and the founding of the first two large drug cartels - Sinaloa and Tijuana. Then the unexpected appearance of a group with no connection to Sinaloa added fuel to the fire. They were drug traffickers calling themselves the Cartel del Golfo, from the state of Tamaulipas on the Gulf Coast. People from Sinaloa were divided: some were for the new players, some were against. When the cartel formation in Mexico was completed, they split into two parts: one group consists of the Juárez Cartel, Los Zetas, Tijuana Cartel and Beltrán Leyva Cartel, and the second group from the Cartel del Golfol, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Cartel La Familial. . Later, two more were formed - the Oaxaca Cartel and Los Negros.
And ordinary Mexicans were clearly shown a new way of waging drug wars when a group of men in black walked into a roadside disco in the state of Michoacán and shook out the contents of a garbage bag - five severed heads. A new era of Mexican drug trafficking has begun, when violence has become the means of communication. Today, members of the drug mafia monstrously disfigure the bodies of their victims and put them on public display - so that everyone realizes the power of the drug lords and fears them. The You Tube site has become a propaganda platform for the drug war, where anonymous companies upload videos and drug ballads praising the advantages of one cartel leader over another.
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The United States, as you know, is not only the main drug market, but also a source of weapons used in drug cartel fights in Mexico. Almost anyone with a driver's license and no criminal record can buy a weapon here. 110 thousand sellers have sales licenses, 6600 of which are located between Texas and San Diego. Therefore, for the purchase itself, Mexicans usually use fake Americans - “straw people” (mostly single mothers who do not arouse suspicion), who receive $50–100 for the service. These fake people buy guns individually either from stores or at “gun shows” that are held every weekend in Arizona, Texas or California. Then the barrels are handed over to dealers, who, collecting a batch of several dozen, transport it across the border. And they make good money from it. For example, a used AK-47 can be bought in the States for $400, but south of the Rio Grande it will cost $1,500. Armed in this way, drug cartel armies have mortars, heavy machine guns, anti-tank missiles, grenade launchers, and fragmentation grenades.
Mexican border guards themselves cannot stop weapons traffic. Or rather, they don’t want to. Mexicans are not particularly active in searching cars entering their territory from the north, this passivity is explained by the fact that border guards are faced with the choice of “plata o plomo” (silver or lead). Many people prefer to take bribes and turn a blind eye to smuggling. Those who refuse "silver" usually do not live long. For example, in February 2007, an honest Mexican border guard detained a truck full of weapons. As a result, the Gulf Cartel was missing 18 rifles, 17 pistols, 17 grenades, and more than 8 thousand rounds of ammunition. The next day the border guard was shot dead.
Until 2006, periodic mafia clashes had virtually no effect on ordinary Mexicans. The cartels were big business, and big business requires a quiet environment. Drug gangs have even become an everyday part of citizens' lives. Ordinary people, seeing the success of drug dealers (especially against the backdrop of total poverty in the country), began to compose “drug ballads” about them. Since Mexico is a very religious country, the cartels even have their own “narcosaint” - Jesus Malverde, whose central temple is installed in the capital of the state of Sinaloa, the city of Cualican, and the “narcosaint” - Doña Santa Muerte.
There was no large-scale violence in the country. The cartels interacted with Mexican President Vicente Fox according to the formula “Live yourself and don’t interfere with others’ lives.” Everyone controlled their own territory and did not interfere with others. Everything changed with the victory of Felipe Calderon in the 2006 presidential elections. Immediately after his election, the new head of state declared war on the drug cartels. The president took such a radical step for two reasons. First, he needed to launch some kind of popular campaign to strengthen his position after the controversial election results (Calderon's lead over his closest rival, Andreas Manuel Lopez Obrador, was less than 0.6%). Of the two potential popular directions - the war on crime and the beginning of deep economic reforms - he chose the first as, in his opinion, the easiest. Secondly, the new president realized the danger of coexistence between cartels and the state. Calderon realized that continued “See No, Hear No” tactics against drug cartels would inevitably lead to a weakening of the government. Every year the bandits penetrated deeper into government institutions, primarily the police.
By the time Calderon arrived, the entire police force in the northern states of Mexico had been bought by the cartels. At the same time, law enforcement officers did not fear for their future if their connections with bandits were revealed. If a local police officer is fired for corruption, he simply goes across the street and is hired to serve by the cartel (for example, in Rio Bravo, the Los Zetas recruiting office was located directly across from the police station). Former police officers know the principles of police work from the inside, and they were gladly hired. That is why the authority of the police in the country was very low.
As a result of an active campaign, Calderon managed to inflict some damage on the drug mafia. During 2007–2008, 70 tons of cocaine, 370 tons of marijuana, 28 thousand guns, 2000 grenades, 3 million cartridges and $304 million were seized from the cartels. In the USA, this resulted in its own indicators: cocaine prices soared by one and a half times, while the average purity decreased from 67.8 to 56.7%, and the cost of amphetamine on American streets increased by 73%.
After the new president violated the unspoken truce, the drug cartels declared a vendetta on the government and security forces and are waging it with their characteristic cruelty and intransigence (for this reason, two sworn enemies, the Gulf and Sinaloa Cartels, even reconciled for some time). Those who did not run away and sell out are mercilessly shot. Briefly, the chronicle of the most significant victories and losses looks like this:
In January 2008, in the city of Culiacan, one of the leaders of the cartel of the same name, Alfredo Beltran Leyva (nickname El Mochomo), was arrested. His brothers, in revenge for his arrest, organized the murder of Federal Police Commissioner Edgar Eusebio Millano Gomez and other high-ranking officials in the Mexican capital itself.
Also in January, members of the Juarez Cartel pinned to the door of Juarez City Hall a list of 17 police officers who had been sentenced to death. By September, ten of them were killed.
On October 25, in the prestigious Fracionamiento Pedregal district of Tijuana, troops and police stormed a villa located here, arresting the leader of the Tijuana cartel, Eduardo Arellano Felix (nickname “Doctor”), after which leadership of the cartel passed to his nephew, Luis Fernando Sánchez Arellano.
However, after the arrest of Eduardo Arellano Felix, one of the leaders of the drug cartel, Teodoro Garcia Simental (nickname “El Teo”) left the group and started a war against its new leader, as a result of which Tijuana was swept by a wave of violence that, according to various sources, killed from 300 to almost 700 people . Within a year, rivals fought for control of the road running through Nogales, Sonora, and the number of murders in that city tripled.
In November, under strange circumstances, the plane of Juan Camilo Mourino, the presidential national security adviser, crashed.
And in early February 2009, one of the most popular Mexican military officers, retired General Mauro Enrique Tello Quinones, was kidnapped, tortured and killed. Less than 24 hours before his abduction, he took up the post of security adviser to the mayor's office of Cancun, a resort town and one of the drug lords' recreation centers.
On December 16 of the same year, in a shootout with soldiers of the Mexican Navy, one of the leaders of the Beltran Leyva drug cartel, Arturo Beltran Leyva, died, and on December 30, in the city of Culiacan, law enforcement agencies detained his brother and one of the leaders of the drug cartel, Carlos Beltran Leyva.
On January 12, 2010, one of the most wanted Mexican drug lords and leaders of the Tijuana drug cartel, Teodoro Garcia Simental (nickname “El Teo”), was caught in the state of Baja California.
In February, the Los Zetas cartel and its ally the Beltran Leyva cartel began a war against the Golfo cartel in the border city of Reynosa, turning some border towns into ghost towns. It was reported that a member of the Golfo cartel killed the Zetas' top lieutenant, Victor Mendoza. The group demanded that the cartel find the killer, but he refused. Thus, a new war broke out between the 2 gangs.
On June 14, members of the rival Zetas and Sinaloa cartels carried out a massacre in a prison in the city of Mazatlan. A group of prisoners, having seized the guards' pistols and assault rifles through deception, broke into a nearby prison block, committing reprisals against members of a rival cartel. During this and at the same time, in other parts of the prison, 29 people died from riots.
On June 19, in the city of Ciudad Juarez, the mayor of the city of Guadalupe Distros Bravos, Manuel Lara Rodriguez, who was hiding there after receiving threats against himself, was shot dead, and ten days later, the criminals killed the candidate for governor of the northwestern state of Tamaulipas, Rodolfo Torre Cantu.
On July 29, the military discovered in the suburbs of Guadalajara the location of one of the leaders of the Sinaloa drug cartel, Ignacio Coronel, and during the ensuing shootout he died. That same month, in the municipal area of Tamaulipas, the military raided a ranch where suspected drug cartel members were located and four people were killed in a shootout. While searching the area around the ranch, the Mexican military discovered a mass grave (the bodies of 72 people, including 14 women).
On August 30, the authorities managed to arrest the influential drug lord Edgar Valdez (nicknames Barbie, Comandante and Guero), and in early September, following operational intelligence information, a special unit of the naval forces in Pueblo arrested one of the leaders of the drug cartel "Beltran Leyva" Sergio Villarreal (nickname "El Grande").
The next major success of Mexican law enforcement agencies was the arrest of the head of the Los Zetas drug cartel, Jose Angel Fernandez, at the Cancun resort.
A few days earlier, on November 6, during a shootout with the military in the city of Matamoros, one of the leaders of the Gulf Cartel, Ezequiel Gardenas Guillen (nickname of Tony Tormenta), was killed.
On December 7, they managed to detain one of the high-ranking members of the La Familia drug cartel, Jose Antonio Arcos. And the next day, hundreds of police and military personnel entered the city of Apatzingan, where La Familia is based. And with the support of helicopters, for two days they fought with armed members of the drug cartel, during which several people died (civilians, militants and police), including the head of the La Familia drug cartel, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez (nickname “Mad”).
On December 28, in the city of Guadalupe Distrito Bravos, unknown persons kidnapped the last policeman remaining here, after which the city was left without police, and in order to ensure law and order, the authorities sent troops to the city.
On January 18, 2011, near the city of Oaxaca, one of the founders of the Los Zetas cartel, Flavio Mendez Santiago (nickname Yellow), was arrested, Los Zetas Cartel, Los Negros Cartel and Oaxaca Cartel. You can read more about each of them by clicking on the links with the names of the cartels.
And a little about Russians, in this interesting topic:
Mexican drug cartels use members of Russian organized crime groups, as well as former KGB officers, to smuggle drugs into the United States and also to increase their influence in the region.
Luis Vasconcelos, head of the Mexican Attorney General's Office of Organized Crime, claims that "the Russians are highly professional and extremely dangerous."
Russian mafiosi help Mexican drug traffickers launder money. This was stated by the head of the intelligence department of the American Federal Drug Enforcement Administration, Stephen Casteel. For their services, the Russians take 30% of the money laundered.
Casteel argues that the rise of Russians in Mexico is linked to the globalization of organized crime. For the first time, fighters from Russian “brigades” appeared in Colombia and Mexico in the early 90s, but their finest hour came a little later. After the arrest of the head of one of the largest drug cartels in Mexico, Benjamin Arellano Felix, as well as several dozen of his assistants, the cartel began to rapidly disintegrate. University of Miami specialist Bruce Beigley claims that it was then that Russian mafiosi gradually began to infiltrate the fragments of the once powerful organization.
"Russian militants are much cooler than the Mexicans. They are much more brutal. They do their job silently and try not to show off unnecessarily. They don't wear gold chains, don't cut people with chainsaws and don't throw them into rivers," says Bagley. "Don't underestimate them. These guys are the cruelest people you can imagine."
Bagley claims that the latest Mexican police operations, which have effectively "decapitated the Mexican drug cartels," provide the Russian mafia with a "golden opportunity to operate in Mexico." A large cartel is breaking up into small armed groups that operate at the state and city level in Mexico. There they are more difficult to identify, and it is easier for drug traffickers to bribe local officials. Small groups of Mexican drug traffickers welcome the Russians with open arms.
The Russians carry out most of their money laundering operations in various offshore zones - Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. The Russians escort large cargoes of drugs that are transported to the United States. In April 2001, American coastal police seized a ship with a cargo of 13 tons of cocaine and a mixed Russian-Ukrainian crew.
In September 2006, armed people entered night club"Sol y Sombra" in the city of Urupan, in western Mexico, and threw five human heads onto the dance floor.
Frightened partygoers continued to watch the actions of people who brought a package with creepy contents into the entertainment establishment, and they, in turn, calmly left, leaving a note informing them that a new drug cartel, La Fimilia Michocana, was operating in the city.
For many, this case, which was covered by news agencies, was evidence that the brutality of cartel participants in the Latin American country had reached unprecedented levels.
Francis Castelanos is a correspondent for the popular Michiokan publication Proces. He sees the 2006 beheading incident as a turning point in Mexico's history.
“The five were local dealers in Urupana,” the journalist explained in an email, adding that the note left on the floor of the nightclub spoke of “divine justice.”
“This incident provoked panic and horror,” recalls Castelanos. “Investors were forced to look for safer places.”
Code of Murder
“In the 1990s, cartels did not cut off the heads of their victims,” says Samuel Gonzalez Ruiz, a former UN crime adviser.
“When they killed, they were guided by certain codes agreed upon within the criminal community,” continues González Ruiz.
“Offhand, a bullet in the back of the head meant that the deceased was considered a traitor. A bullet to the temple is a symbol of belonging to a rival gang.”
However, beheading of victims is now quite often practiced by drug organizations in Mexico, and, in particular, by the Los Zetas criminal network, and two other groups at war with the cartel, El Golfo and Sinaloa.
Only radical Islamist groups that killed the American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, or the British engineer Kenneth Bigley in Iraq, are distinguished by such brutal actions.
Death cult
But the Mexican context is different from the situation with Islamic terrorists, according to Gonzalez Ruiz. In his opinion, this practice came from Guatemala: “In 2000, the Zetas attempted to spread their influence in Central America by joining the ranks of the Kaibiles paramilitaries operating in the jungle.
"Kaibiles" beheaded their victims in order to keep the local population in fear during times of civil war in Guatemala (1960-1996).
Some experts associate such cases with a religious cult common among representatives of drug cartels, which is called “La Santa Muerte” or “the holy death.”
Historians, in turn, compare the actions of Mexican criminals with the human sacrifices of the Aztecs and Mayans in pre-Columbian America.
Whatever the origins of the brutal acts, the terms used to describe the horrific massacres are now firmly established in the lexicon of the drug cartels in Mexico.
Over the past month, an unprecedented 81 beheaded bodies have been discovered across the country.
In early May, 14 dead were found in locality Nuevo Laredo, near the Texas border.
Last week, criminals left 18 decapitated bodies in a van near Lake Chapala, an area popular with Mexican tourists.
But the most shocking discovery was found on the road to industrial city Monterrey: plastic bags contained the mutilated bodies and heads of 49 people.
Intimidation of citizens
Perhaps, cartel members, in addition to obvious goals, also have hidden motives? The government sees this as an attempt to intimidate the population.
The purpose of these “reprehensible actions” was to sow fear among local residents and government officials, according to Interior Minister Alejandro Poire, who spoke about the incident the day after the incident in Monterrey.
According to the minister, the incident is a consequence of a dispute between the Zetas and El Golfo cartels. A monetary reward was awarded for assistance in capturing the leaders of drug gangs. But for Gonzalez Ruiz, who previously worked in the organized crime unit, the beheadings also send an unambiguous political message: “We will do everything in our power not to lose control of the territory, and let no one expect mercy.”
"Terrorist Strategy"
According to Minister Piore, timing is also extremely pressing with only six weeks left until the presidential elections.
“In part, this can be interpreted as a message to the presidential candidates, most of whom say they will not negotiate with the cartels.”
González Ruiz uses a term that politicians don't like to use to refer to the violence associated with the country's drug trade: terrorism.
The horrific atrocities that have recently occurred in Mexico are a silent reminder of the extent of the cartels' power in Mexico, and that they will stop at nothing to achieve their goals.
