Bones: A Story of Brothers, a Champion Horse and the Race to Stop America’s Most Brutal Cartel. Joe Tone
was a hunting guide on the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo, and Miguel spent many mornings hunting whitetail deer. But he was always working. On one hunting trip, he befriended a visitor from Dallas, offering him shooting tips and inviting him out to meals. Soon Miguel was plying the young man with thirty-five kilos of Gulf Cartel coke a week, to be smuggled into Texas.
They found other recruits in the clubs clustered near the border. Señor Frog’s was the more tourist-friendly chain bar, with a dress code management said kept the “riffraff” away. The gangsters preferred a club called 57th Street, which blasted hip-hop and was considered a safer place to conduct business. And there was always Boys Town, the walled-off strip of cantinas and brothels where young prostitutes offered cheap fucks on creaky mattresses.
These were the places frequented by the boys Miguel and Talibán hoped to recruit. Boys like them—young Mexicans and Tejanos who might exist on both sides of the border but didn’t feel wanted or needed on either. Teenagers who’d dropped out or been kicked out of school. Guys who needed jobs and weren’t troubled when the job description included a possible prison sentence or death.
Miguel and Talibán also made sure the local cops and journalists fell in line. They made the traditional offer, ¿Plata o plomo? (“Silver or lead?”): You take the bribe or you take the bullet. The prices across Tamaulipas ranged from a few hundred bucks a week for a street cop or reporter to a couple grand for a local police chief.
Many took the bribe, but the town didn’t fall easily to Miguel and Los Zetas. Not all of Nuevo Laredo’s independent smugglers were on board with the hostile takeover; nor did every cop, civic leader, and businessman accept their bribes. A turf war broke out, and violence rocked Nuevo Laredo. Bodies were discovered buried in backyards and on ranches. A state police commander and his lieutenant were gunned down in broad daylight.
Mexico fought back, too. In 2000, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was vanquished from the presidency after seventy years of rule. The election of Vicente Fox, a Coca-Cola executive and member of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), led Mexico into a new era. It also undercut the government’s existing relationship with the cartels, with whom they could occasionally forge compromises and understandings. Without one-party rule, cooperation fizzled. Fox flooded the disputed territories with troops, aiming to take down top drug bosses.
In 2003, troops swooped into Gulf Cartel territory and captured the Zetas’ founder, Osiel Cárdenas, leaving Nuevo Laredo up for grabs. To the west and east, every other key city—the “plazas,” as the cartels called their crucial smuggling outposts—was controlled by Mexico’s most powerful criminal gangs. Now those gangs saw a chance to take Nuevo Laredo. None more so than El Chapo’s Sinaloa gang.
In the weeks after Cárdenas was captured, El Chapo called a summit with a loose network of gangsters who controlled smuggling from Juárez to Tijuana. These were generational smugglers playing under the old rules, which respected history and geography and traditional power. They divided up territories, leaving the Juárez natives to control Juárez, the Baja families to run Tijuana, and so on. They honored whoever was next in line, paid off whoever needed paying off, and killed only when necessary, though “necessary” was loosely defined.
To take on the Zetas, El Chapo dispatched his own native of Los Dos Laredos, a former Texas high-school football player named Edgar Valdez Villarreal. His nickname, “La Barbie,” had been coined by a Texas football coach enamored of his light-blue eyes and pale skin. But La Barbie had fallen into Laredo’s street gangs and fled across the river when American law enforcement caught on, and he’d been a faithful drug warrior ever since. He’d earned his stripes as a cartel assassin, and now he was expected to build an army of sicarios to take on the Zetas.
A war broke out. Miguel and La Barbie were its colonels, two formerly impoverished street kids fighting for control of their hometowns. La Barbie recruited gang members from El Salvador’s powerful criminal gang, MS-13, and showed up in Nuevo Laredo with a message for the Zetas: Retreat or face the wrath of Los Negros, which is what Barbie had dubbed his own mercenary unit. The name translated to “the Black Ones.”
As the Zetas battled Los Negros, Miguel revealed himself to be a charismatic leader but also happy—desperate even—to mix it up in firefights. The specific roots of Miguel’s bloodlust are hard to pinpoint. People who have fought and done business alongside him take it for granted now, as if his thirst for violence is among his immutable traits, like his chocolate skin or night-sky hair. But there was no known violence in his childhood; his de facto patriarch, Kiko, wasn’t believed to spill any blood during his short-lived criminal career.
It appeared that Miguel was driven by a combustible combination of resentment, ambition, and cynicism, a man seizing at power that was once, and would soon be, laughably out of grasp. He didn’t expect to live into his forties, and he behaved that way as he and the Zetas seized Nuevo Laredo. He and the Zetas murdered four cops associated with El Chacho, then killed El Chacho, dumping his body in the town square clad in women’s underwear. Later, he ordered the Nuevo Laredo police, whom the Zetas now basically controlled, to round up any smuggler who had resisted the Gulf’s takeover. There were thirty-four such holdouts crammed into the house by the time Miguel arrived dressed in black fatigue pants and black boots, a makeshift uniform designed to evoke the power of a Special Forces unit. He picked one out and brought him forward, then asked the assembled men whether anyone knew the location of the heart. No one answered, so Miguel offered a visual anatomy lesson, plunging his knife into the man’s chest and watching him die.
As the battle for Nuevo Laredo raged, the Zetas continued recruiting ex-soldiers, growing in power as the arm of the Gulf Cartel. Each was assigned a call number based on seniority: the first to defect was Z-1; the second, Z-2; and so on. Technically, only soldiers could be Zetas. But Miguel exhibited such savagery that he was bequeathed a call number, despite never having served a day in the military. By then he was the fortieth so-called Zeta, Z-40, but everyone just called him Cuarenta. “Forty.”
Throughout the 2000s, Forty accumulated enough power within the Zetas, and enough enemies outside of it, that he could have gotten away with hiding out on his ranches all day while his killers fought his war. But he remained a grunt. He dressed modestly and ready for battle, in fatigues and T-shirts, with knives, assault rifles, and grenades on his hips. He was still among the first out of the truck when the bullets started flying.
He continued roaming the streets of Nuevo Laredo, enticing poor teenagers to join up. But there was a problem: they couldn’t fight. Though the Zetas now included hundreds of members, most had no military training at all. So Forty improvised.
He traveled to Guatemala to recruit former Special Forces, known as Kaibiles, to train his young recruits. He shipped them to a camp in the mountains near Ciudad Victoria, the state capital, where they slept side by side on cots. In grueling training sessions, former Special Forces from Mexico and the Kaibiles taught them to wage war. They crawled and breached and ran, stripped guns and shot all manner of weapons. They learned the art of urban warfare, practicing bursting through doors and clearing houses.
Forty himself taught them to kill. He tied up some enemy he’d captured and offered his recruit the choice of a sledgehammer or a machete. The ones who didn’t start swinging were relegated to duty as halcones—“hawks,” or lookouts. The ones who did became Forty’s sicarios, and they helped the Zetas grow their brand, which was defined by headline-grabbing violence. From decapitations to swinging corpses to bodies burned in oil drums, Zeta-style killings would come to define Mexico’s drug war.
It was a blood binge fueled by several factors, starting with the Zetas’ background as paramilitary soldiers. Smuggling had long been a family business in Mexico, governed by unwritten rules like the ones that governed the American mob wars. But the Zetas weren’t a party to that social contract. They were mercenaries, with all the training of an elite killing squad but none of the duty to protect.
There were other factors at play, too. Scholars believe the Zetas’ penchant for beheadings was influenced by the Kaibiles, who favored the practice. It’s believed the Zetas’ desire to videotape the beheadings, and to use social media to disseminate them, was inspired by Al-Qaeda.
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