Chapo Guzman{intelligent} Soldier Kingpin
How Chapo Guzman and the Sinaloa Cartel fooled the DEA into working for them.
There are usually just three ways for a trafficker to leave a Mexican drug cartel: go to prison, get killed, or become a government informant.
Two weeks ago, I had dinner at an expensive restaurant near the Mexican border with a man who got out by the third route. He was, until recently, an important figure in the Sinaloa cartel’s drug-running operations, working indirectly for the boss, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. Casually dressed, he used a small fork to scrape the marrow from the shank bone on his platter of osso buco. He joked that he wished he had a soft tortilla on which to spread the marrow, the old Mexican way, the way his family did it with a butchered animal.
The informant, who did not want to be named for fear of reprisals, rattled off prices for the drugs he used to transport. They are surprisingly cheap in large volumes: $6,000 per kilo of cocaine in Ciudad Juárez; $1,000 more to deliver the drugs to an El Paso stash house just across the border. Tack on another $1,000 to truck it onward—to New York, Baltimore, Chicago, or Atlanta, where it sells wholesale for around $30,000.
Most criminals who become informants do so because they’ve been arrested and squeezed, encouraged to betray their criminal employers in exchange for leniency. But this man had an unusual story to tell about his first encounter with U.S. federal agents. It was his boss, a top manager at the Sinaloa cartel, who encouraged him to help the Americans. Meet with the U.S. investigators, he was told. See how we can help them with information.
At the time, Guzmán’s huge Sinaloa organization was in the middle of a savage war, trying to crush the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes cartel, known as the VCF. And the Sinaloa cartel wanted to pass along information about its enemies to American agents.
The drug dealer told me how, acting with the full approval of his cartel, he strolled into the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office for an appointment with federal investigators. He walked through a metal detector and past the portrait of the American president on the wall, then into a room with a one-way mirror. The agents he met were very polite. He was surprised by what they had to say. “One of the ICE agents said they were here to help [the Sinaloa cartel]. And to fuck the Vicente Carrillo cartel. Sorry for the language. That’s exactly what they said.”
So began another small chapter in one of the most secretive aspects of the drug war: an extensive operation by Chapo Guzmán’s forces to manipulate American law enforcement to their own benefit.
Chapo—who acquired his nickname, which is Spanish for Shorty, because of his 5-foot-6 stature—is a 54-year-old fugitive who has made it to the Forbes billionaires’ list for three years running. He’s an antihero whose feats of criminality are as astonishing as they are brutal. Ten years after his escape from a Mexican prison, it’s widely believed by both Mexican and American law enforcement that he lives in Sinaloa, not far from where he was born. Each year, Guzmán has grown increasingly rich, and the cartel he runs has tightened its grip on the worldwide narcotics trade. A month ago the U.S. Treasury Department labeled him the “world’s most powerful drug trafficker.”
Guzmán’s broad strategy has been to knock off rivals and build his own cartel into the dominant criminal force south of the border. One of his tactics for achieving that has been to place his drug-dealing lieutenants as informants for the DEA and ICE. According to sources and court records, he has been carefully feeding intelligence to the Americans. Now, Newsweek has learned, there is a federal investigation into how ICE agents handled some Sinaloa informants near the border.
The implications are sobering: the Sinoloa cartel “is duping U.S. agencies into fighting its enemies,” says Prof. Tony Payan of the University of Texas at El Paso, who studies the cartel wars in Juárez. “Typical counterintelligence stuff. It’s smart. It’s so smart.”
Humberto Loya- Castro, a charming and erudite Mexican lawyer who served as Guzmán’s adviser, may have been his most intriguing agent. He became a key informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration during the last decade. A former DEA official describes Loya-Castro as “astute, witty. He was extremely charismatic.” His tips led to arrests, seizures, and headlines. Many of those law-enforcement victories, though, were also triumphs for the Sinaloa cartel.
Loya-Castro was indicted by the United States in 1995, along with Guzmán. Back then, the lawyer was known by the alias “Licenciado Perez”—Lawyer Perez. The charges say he “protected the drugs and money of the Guzmán organization in Mexico by paying money to Mexican authorities” and “ensured that if key members of the Guzmán organization were arrested they did not remain in custody.”
At the time of the indictment, Chapo Guzmán ran his Sinaloa operation from a Mexican prison. Being behind bars didn’t hamper the drug lord, who treated the jail as a private castle where prison guards scurried around like servants.
Five years after the indictment, while Guzmán was still locked up, Loya-Castro first approached American officials, offering to feed them information. To appreciate his potential value, imagine if the leader of North Korea or Iran had a lawyer who offered to become an undercover U.S. operative. As a compadre of the Sinaloa boss, Loya-Castro had information that most investigators could only fantasize about.
After Guzmán escaped from prison in 2001, Loya-Castro continued to feed U.S. agents information. In 2005 he made it formal, signing paperwork that made him an official confidential informant for the DEA. Because he was a fugitive from justice, facing an outstanding warrant, a special DEA committee had to sign off on the whole operation.
He was a productive spy, handing over what seemed like ever more vital information, mostly about the Sinaloa cartel’s enemies. The DEA agent assigned to handle him was a relatively new investigator named Manuel Castanon. He had spent five years working for the Border Patrol, then joined the DEA in 1999. He was assigned to a special task force based out of San Diego—a unit that wasn’t focused on the Sinaloa cartel. Rather, Castanon and his group were tasked with fighting one of Guzmán’s closest rivals, the Tijuana cartel, headed by the notoriously brutal Arellano Félix brothers.?
The Tijuana cartel was small, but it was important because it controlled the vital smuggling routes through Baja California and San Diego. Both the DEA and Chapo Guzmán had an interest in its demise.
One day Loya-Castro called Castanon to set up an urgent meeting. At a briefing with DEA officials, Loya-Castro warned them of a grave threat to their agents coming from one of Chapo’s enemies. He explained he had been dining with a former Mexican official when the official’s Nextel radio beeped. The caller was a member of the embattled Tijuana cartel who proceeded to outline a series of illegal plans. Loya-Castro could hear the whole conversation as if it were on a speakerphone. The Tijuana cartel was hiring a trained sniper nicknamed “the Monster,” Loya-Castro said, to shoot DEA agents and frighten them into leaving Tijuana. (A WikiLeaks cable describes the incident, and while Loya-Castro is not named in it, Newsweek has learned that he was the confidential source called “CS-01-013562.”)
The intended effect of such a tip was almost surely to focus the DEA on Guzmán’s rivals. It apparently worked: the Tijuana cartel has been mostly dismantled, and Chapo Guzmán has taken over lucrative territory.
All along, Loya-Castro apparently insisted to his handlers that he had Guzmán wrapped around his finger. Guzmán, he said, was gulled into thinking that Loya-Castro was loyal to him. “His point to us,” says David Gaddis, a former top DEA official who oversaw operations in Mexico, Central America, and Canada, “was that ‘because of my position, Chapo has absolute, unfettered confidence in who I am and what I’m doing.’”
“I do think he was telling Chapo, ‘Hey, I’m meeting these guys,’” Gaddis tells Newsweek, “and Chapo allowed him to do it.”
Loya-Castro’s material was so rich—so helpful in various cases—that in 2008 the U.S. attorney’s office in San Diego had the indictment against him thrown out. And the intelligence kept coming. In December 2009, in an operation trumpeted around the world, Mexican Marines encircled and killed Arturo Beltrán Leyva, a leading drug lord who had splintered away from the Sinaloa group. In Chapo territory in Nogales, Sonora, residents fired pistols in the air to celebrate, according to Malcolm Beith’s book on Guzmán, The Last Narco.
It’s been reported that the Americans provided intelligence that led to Beltrán’s death. They even coordinated the signal intercepts that allowed the Mexican Marines to move in, according to a source who was involved. A source close to the cartel leadership says intelligence for the operation also came from Loya-Castro. In essence, it seems he had helped the Americans put a feather in their cap, while killing off one of his master’s worst enemies.
By this time, some people in DEA management were beginning to ask questions. The top target for the DEA was supposed to be Chapo Guzmán, and Loya-Castro wasn’t doing anything at all on that front. Gaddis, who left the agency in 2011, says he spoke to the agents who handled Loya-Castro and pushed them to get information that would lead to Guzmán. The conversations went like this, Gaddis recalls: “I want you guys to turn up the heat and start having him work more and more effectively against the No. 1 guy.” But according to Gaddis, “that never came to fruition.”
Double- and triple-dealing is a danger in any spy operation, something to be guarded against. “You should not allow the informant to control you,” says John Fernandes, a 27-year veteran of the DEA whose last job was running the San Diego division. “That doesn’t mean they won’t try. Manipulation is part of life.” Still, Fernandes maintains, in general “the DEA does an outstanding job of applying stringent standards.”
Gaddis says Loya-Castro did occasionally provide intelligence about the Sinaloa cartel, but not about its top rungs. And at least one internal DEA exchange cited in court documents indicates he was chiefly providing intelligence about the Sinaloa’s opposition. Gaddis, who now runs a security company called G-Global Protection Solutions, says he had believed Loya-Castro was a “double agent” the DEA used against Guzmán, but he’s now convinced he was more like a “triple agent.”
In January, I rode in the back seat of a Policía Municipal de Ciudad Juárez truck, a twin-cab Ford F-150, to see how police patrol one of the most dangerous cities in the world. The drug business, like real estate, is all about location, and Ciudad Juárez is the drug trade’s Park Avenue. It is the gateway from which marijuana, cocaine, and industrial-grade meth move across the border and get loaded onto trucks that travel west or east along I-10, or north along I-85. The scale of the brutality in Ciudad Juárez has been obscene: beheadings, massacres, bodies left in oil drums. But now the city is quieter. During the police patrol, only a few people were out and about. Prostitutes posed in doorways along empty sidewalks, their heads turning to follow the police truck as we passed, red and blue lights flashing.
Chapo Guzmán made his move to wrest control of Ciudad Juárez from the local cartel roughly six years ago, and he did so with help. He eventually hired local police captain Manuel Fierro Méndez, who has since been sentenced to 27 years in a U.S. prison. Fierro Méndez was also one of the informants Guzmán planted in U.S. law enforcement. We know this because Fierro Méndez would later testify in U.S. federal court, as a prosecution witness, that he was sent by the cartel to the ICE office in El Paso to give up specific intelligence about the men Guzmán was trying to eliminate.
“You were on a mission from Chapo to come provide information, correct?” he was asked in court in 2010. “Yes,” he replied. Fierro Méndez said he was like a “spokesperson,” passing information to ICE from Chapo, “information we would, obviously, get from the levels high up.”
“Was the Sinaloa cartel trying to use ICE to eliminate its rivals in La Linea?” a prosecutor asked. “That’s right,” Fierro Méndez replied. “And was Chapo Guzmán aware?” came the question. “That’s right,” said the former police officer.
He made it plain that that the cartel strictly forbade him to give up anything about the Sinaloa cartel, however. “Were you allowed to give information about Chapo?” “It wasn’t allowed,” the dirty cop said, “and it wasn’t asked of me.” In other words, he testified, the ICE agents he spoke to never required him to provide intelligence about the boss of his own criminal organization.
Such information did lead to significant drug busts, which helps explain why American agents were so eager to play along. The costs, however, are clear. “Now the Sinaloa cartel understands how you work, who your agents are, and what you want,” says the University of Texas’s Payan. “They are using you, and in the end that particular cartel is going to come out of it strong. The Sinaloa cartel is not only virtually untouched but it is magnified ... They don’t have any Mexican competition. At home, they are king.”
In all, at least five important figures in the Sinaloa car-tel traipsed into the ICE offices in El Paso to relay infor-mation about the Juárez cartel. They provided tips about warehouses, drug routes, murders. They gave up information on who their enemies bribed and what their organizational charts were. And now, as Payan says, “the Juárez cartel is practically down to ashes, and to a large extent it was done with intelligence passed on by the Sinaloa cartel.”
A federal prosecutor based in San Antonio who has tried cases against some Sinaloa-cartel members, including those who helped ICE, concurs on that point. I asked him if the information campaign by Chapo Guzmán helped the Sinaloa cartel take over Juárez. “It did,” he said. “That’s what this was all about: because of the intensity of the struggle, they were trying to exploit every possible thing they could to get the upper hand.”
In a case ongoing in federal court in Chicago, lawyers for a top Sinaloa-cartel figure maintain that the DEA’s relationship with Guzmán’s lawyer was a virtual conspiracy to allow the Sinaloa cartel free rein. Arguing in front of the judge, one lawyer insisted that “this fellow Loya is not a normal informant. He’s an agent. He’s an agent for the Sinaloa cartel.”
Reached by phone, DEA agent Castanon declined to discuss the Loya-Castro case. DEA headquarters also said it could not comment. David Gaddis, the DEA official who oversaw Mexico operations, doesn’t dispute that the Sinaloa cartel may have been playing the DEA, but he says there was never any deal to cooperate: “I will categorically deny that at any point DEA was protecting the behavior of Chapo Guzmán.” With an investigation underway by ICE into the behavior of its agents in Ciudad Juárez, more details may soon emerge.
No spy story is simple. Nor are the Mexican cartel wars. Though unfathomable violence still flares up in much of Mexico, Ciudad Juárez is somewhat calm. So did a brutal Sinaloa victory over its rivals—achieved, it seems, with the unwitting help of U.S. agents—bring about a lull in the violence in this terrorized border town? If so, few believe it will last.
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Aram Roston is a senior correspondent at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, based in Washington, D.C.
For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.
Source-Newsweek Magazine.com
An X-Ray of Mexican Organized Crime
David C. Martínez-Amador, is a college professor and former Fulbright-Laspau recipient.
He teaches the history of the mafia in different universities in Central America. He has travelled extensively throughout Mexico, Guatemala and Costa Rica identifying the characteristics of the ritualistic violence produced by Mexican organized crime organizations.
D. Martínez-Amador |
Not all organised crime is mafia
Not long ago, the Obama administration decided to introduce several criminal organizations into the category of international cartels. Foremost among these were: Los Zetas, the Yakuza and the Neapolitan Camorra. However, these three organisations are also known as mafias.
While the term mafia refers to a certain kind of organisational structure, which is very hierarchical and usually linked to certain ethical norms, "cartel" describes drug trafficker's networks that form part of organised crime. Some mafias – as for instance the Zetas – are hugely involved in drug trafficking and therefore also figure among the category of cartels. Of course, both mafias and cartels are sociologically valid structures in the world of organized crime – as according to the so-called Bruccett principle "all mafia is organized crime but not all organized crime is mafia".[1]
This seems like a lot of theoretical pettiness, but the terminology has indeed concrete political implications. Up to date, there is no empirical evidence that any type of ethnic mafia has ever been destroyed in history. By not using the mafia nomenclature and favouring the broader "cartel" terminology, the US government has created a scenario in which the military option seems to have some form of justification. Let's shed some light on the origins of mafia structures and their evolution in the Mexican war on drugs.
What is mafia?
John Dickie, author of the book "Cosa Nostra", explains how the mafia nomenclature should be used: it only applies to organizations originating in the region of Italy because of the context in which they developed – as forms of parallel government who defend an alternative identity. The expression "Morte Alla Francia, Italia Anela" (MAFIA) evolved in the period when the mafia was nothing more than a popular form of defence against Napoleonic troops on the southern Italian battlefield.
Yet there are other criminal organizations which, even if they are not Italian, have the following mafia-like characteristics:
1) Group cohesion
2) Symbolism and code of ethics based on the idea of "honour"
3) Rituals of initiation or distinctions drawn between members and non-members
4) Criminal and group identity associated with a geographic location
5) The business mentality is very much superior to the logic of the criminal mind
6) Entry into pacts with local politicians, respect for entrepreneurs who are considered equals
7) See themselves as an alternative system or parallel government
So even if, according to Dickie, criminal associations can at most resemble the Italian structures, we have to admit that some of the Latin American ones manage to emulate the structure of the Italian organizations pretty well. The original "narco-structure" – which refers to Latin American drug traffickers' organizations – was founded by Amado Carillo Fuentes and Félix Gallardo. Among farmers and cowmen from the Mexican Sinaloa area, they developed a local culture based on the concept of honour and disloyalty towards the authorities. Local people could no longer survive in the realm of legitimacy. The culture of illegality became – as for the Sicilians before them – the only way to live in the archaic, agricultural society of Sinaloa. Yet even though the organisation was illegal, strong rules and clear ethical codes were introduced into this new subculture. As with any type of classical mafia, it was supposed to function ¨from the shadows and never against its own people¨. To date the Sinaloa cartel is one of the most powerful drug cartels in the world.
Mafias are traditionally born in rural societies. Yet at some point in their structural evolution, they jump from rural to urban surroundings – as is the case of Monterrey and the deadly Zetas. Their main goal is to conquer the urban underworld at any cost. The Zetas have reached an even higher grade of mafia-like evolution than the Sinaloa cartel: Their sense of belonging, use of uniforms and gold medals to recognize one another, symbolic tattoos and even the existence of folkloric songs in exaltation of their organization show us that we are dealing with a hierarchical organization with a strong sense of group cohesion, loyalty and honour.
Mexican narco-terrorism
According to my own historiography of the Mexican "narcos" (drug traffickers), though, most of the old values of the mafias have been replaced. The new generation of capos (godfathers) has had to adapt, as they have experienced the military response of the Mexican state – a state that had always been the favourite partner of organized crime.
In the past, the mafia had a strong ethos. There were rules and regulations, such as on how and when to kill, or that women, children and civilians should never be touched. The goal of every action was making money. The infiltrated state often acted as a partner to organised crime and thus violence was kept to a limit. But because of the violent war on drugs in Mexico, the state has become an enemy. Furthermore, historical leaders were killed or extradited to the US, so that organisations grew more fragmented, less pyramidal and developed new codes. New and ever more violent groups appeared.
We are thus witnessing a guided evolution from the historical concept of mafia towards the concept of narco-terrorism. The historically well governed organized crime structures – including the Sinaloa, Pacífico, Juárez and Gulf cartels, and even the Zetas – which, in the past had clear rules like never touch innocents or the families of its members, have generated a structural output that is extremely violent. Therefore the Mexican population is today experiencing a sort of "narco-horror" – huge narco violence aggravated by the horror stories appearing in the mass media.
The terrible mutation of Mexico's war on drugs
In general, the mafias themselves are not the sickness – they are rather the symptom of a greater disease: a weak state. The so-called Mexican "war on drugs" has experienced a terrible rise in violence with the tragic figure of 51,000 people killed in only 6 years. This tragedia Mexicana (Mexican tragedy) is, basically, the sad record of a president who lacks legitimacy. President Calderón's new administration thought that by attacking the "common enemy" it would transform itself to the "president of all". However, the administration has not succeeded in cleaning up every single public prosecutor's office, or breaking the historical pacts between the Mexican municipal governments and the mafia, or even increasing the level of social welfare to reduce the incentives for young Mexicans to join the cartels. The Calderón administration thought that once the army was placed on the playing field, the narcos would run for their lives.
The result is not only that Mexican organized crime structures have defeated the army. They have also ¨exported¨ their symbolic violence to most Central American countries, including even Costa Rica. Furthermore, as criminal organizations grow more fragmented, today the satellite cells produce collateral violence that the parent organizations cannot control at all. It seems as if there will be no end to this war.
U.S. interference
Another important actor in the Mexican war on drugs is the U.S. government. It is an open secret that many of the recent arrests of major drug lords, the Boss of Bosses, Arturo Beltrán-Leyva (head of the Beltran-Leyva Clan) and the Barbie, Eduardo Valdés-Villareal, were made possible by U.S. intelligence. It is known that the U.S. uses unmanned drones for territorial reconnaissance, but information gathered this way could not be as detailed as that presented in the reports. Detailed information on the typologies of the behavioural characteristics of the mafia requires short and medium term stays on the ground where the deeds take place in order to measure reconfigurations within criminal subcultures
Furthermore, in the reports from STRATFOR consultancy and many American think-tanks, claims about the operational size of the cartels, new routes, modes of attack, or the fragmentation of organizations have appeared recently. Such information, if it is to be considered valid, must be collected by a presence on the ground or the extraction of information through informants. And since participant observation in the Malinowsky style would be a little difficult among mafiosi, the diligent reader can't fail to ask two questions: Does the U.S. have embedded agents on Mexican soil to collect this volume of information? Or are there Mexican intelligence leaks that fall into foreign hands first? One thing is sure, though: the more the violence increases, the more American interference into Mexican public policy and Mexican territory rises.
How to stop the spiral of war?
We can argue that trying to put every single drug-related problem in the same basket is a terrible mistake: Either you decide to fight corruption, drug consumption, drug trafficking or drug violence. But you cannot fix them all together. Reducing the collateral damage would be the highest priority. But it might not be possible to sign a pax mafiosa, since we lack gentlemen of the old school. Today, we have warlords devoted to drugs trafficking, weapons trafficking and human trafficking.
From my perspective, as someone involved in the ethnography of the mafia phenomenon, the only way to reduce the collateral damage in this war is to return to a point, where the organizations acknowledge that they have lost too much money. In every criminal organization entrepreneurial interest will prevail, since to them gold weighs more than blood. There are several empirical corroborations from the history of the mafia, each in its cultural and geographical context, where conflict ended at exactly that point: the Sicilian intra-mafiosi wars (the Corleonissi against the Palermitan Cupola in Italy in 1980), the gangs of the Hells Angels against the Campires bikers in Sweden in 1990, and the Colombo family against the four remaining families – Gambino, Bonnano, Luchese, Genovese – in New York in 1980.
David C. Martínez-Amador, is a college professor and former Fulbright-Laspau recipient.
He teaches the history of the mafia in different universities in Central America. He has travelled extensively throughout Mexico, Guatemala and Costa Rica identifying the characteristics of the ritualistic violence produced by Mexican organized crime organizations.
D. Martínez-Amador |
Not all organised crime is mafia
Not long ago, the Obama administration decided to introduce several criminal organizations into the category of international cartels. Foremost among these were: Los Zetas, the Yakuza and the Neapolitan Camorra. However, these three organisations are also known as mafias.
While the term mafia refers to a certain kind of organisational structure, which is very hierarchical and usually linked to certain ethical norms, "cartel" describes drug trafficker's networks that form part of organised crime. Some mafias – as for instance the Zetas – are hugely involved in drug trafficking and therefore also figure among the category of cartels. Of course, both mafias and cartels are sociologically valid structures in the world of organized crime – as according to the so-called Bruccett principle "all mafia is organized crime but not all organized crime is mafia".[1]
This seems like a lot of theoretical pettiness, but the terminology has indeed concrete political implications. Up to date, there is no empirical evidence that any type of ethnic mafia has ever been destroyed in history. By not using the mafia nomenclature and favouring the broader "cartel" terminology, the US government has created a scenario in which the military option seems to have some form of justification. Let's shed some light on the origins of mafia structures and their evolution in the Mexican war on drugs.
What is mafia?
John Dickie, author of the book "Cosa Nostra", explains how the mafia nomenclature should be used: it only applies to organizations originating in the region of Italy because of the context in which they developed – as forms of parallel government who defend an alternative identity. The expression "Morte Alla Francia, Italia Anela" (MAFIA) evolved in the period when the mafia was nothing more than a popular form of defence against Napoleonic troops on the southern Italian battlefield.
Yet there are other criminal organizations which, even if they are not Italian, have the following mafia-like characteristics:
1) Group cohesion
2) Symbolism and code of ethics based on the idea of "honour"
3) Rituals of initiation or distinctions drawn between members and non-members
4) Criminal and group identity associated with a geographic location
5) The business mentality is very much superior to the logic of the criminal mind
6) Entry into pacts with local politicians, respect for entrepreneurs who are considered equals
7) See themselves as an alternative system or parallel government
So even if, according to Dickie, criminal associations can at most resemble the Italian structures, we have to admit that some of the Latin American ones manage to emulate the structure of the Italian organizations pretty well. The original "narco-structure" – which refers to Latin American drug traffickers' organizations – was founded by Amado Carillo Fuentes and Félix Gallardo. Among farmers and cowmen from the Mexican Sinaloa area, they developed a local culture based on the concept of honour and disloyalty towards the authorities. Local people could no longer survive in the realm of legitimacy. The culture of illegality became – as for the Sicilians before them – the only way to live in the archaic, agricultural society of Sinaloa. Yet even though the organisation was illegal, strong rules and clear ethical codes were introduced into this new subculture. As with any type of classical mafia, it was supposed to function ¨from the shadows and never against its own people¨. To date the Sinaloa cartel is one of the most powerful drug cartels in the world.
Mafias are traditionally born in rural societies. Yet at some point in their structural evolution, they jump from rural to urban surroundings – as is the case of Monterrey and the deadly Zetas. Their main goal is to conquer the urban underworld at any cost. The Zetas have reached an even higher grade of mafia-like evolution than the Sinaloa cartel: Their sense of belonging, use of uniforms and gold medals to recognize one another, symbolic tattoos and even the existence of folkloric songs in exaltation of their organization show us that we are dealing with a hierarchical organization with a strong sense of group cohesion, loyalty and honour.
Mexican narco-terrorism
According to my own historiography of the Mexican "narcos" (drug traffickers), though, most of the old values of the mafias have been replaced. The new generation of capos (godfathers) has had to adapt, as they have experienced the military response of the Mexican state – a state that had always been the favourite partner of organized crime.
In the past, the mafia had a strong ethos. There were rules and regulations, such as on how and when to kill, or that women, children and civilians should never be touched. The goal of every action was making money. The infiltrated state often acted as a partner to organised crime and thus violence was kept to a limit. But because of the violent war on drugs in Mexico, the state has become an enemy. Furthermore, historical leaders were killed or extradited to the US, so that organisations grew more fragmented, less pyramidal and developed new codes. New and ever more violent groups appeared.
We are thus witnessing a guided evolution from the historical concept of mafia towards the concept of narco-terrorism. The historically well governed organized crime structures – including the Sinaloa, Pacífico, Juárez and Gulf cartels, and even the Zetas – which, in the past had clear rules like never touch innocents or the families of its members, have generated a structural output that is extremely violent. Therefore the Mexican population is today experiencing a sort of "narco-horror" – huge narco violence aggravated by the horror stories appearing in the mass media.
The terrible mutation of Mexico's war on drugs
In general, the mafias themselves are not the sickness – they are rather the symptom of a greater disease: a weak state. The so-called Mexican "war on drugs" has experienced a terrible rise in violence with the tragic figure of 51,000 people killed in only 6 years. This tragedia Mexicana (Mexican tragedy) is, basically, the sad record of a president who lacks legitimacy. President Calderón's new administration thought that by attacking the "common enemy" it would transform itself to the "president of all". However, the administration has not succeeded in cleaning up every single public prosecutor's office, or breaking the historical pacts between the Mexican municipal governments and the mafia, or even increasing the level of social welfare to reduce the incentives for young Mexicans to join the cartels. The Calderón administration thought that once the army was placed on the playing field, the narcos would run for their lives.
The result is not only that Mexican organized crime structures have defeated the army. They have also ¨exported¨ their symbolic violence to most Central American countries, including even Costa Rica. Furthermore, as criminal organizations grow more fragmented, today the satellite cells produce collateral violence that the parent organizations cannot control at all. It seems as if there will be no end to this war.
U.S. interference
Another important actor in the Mexican war on drugs is the U.S. government. It is an open secret that many of the recent arrests of major drug lords, the Boss of Bosses, Arturo Beltrán-Leyva (head of the Beltran-Leyva Clan) and the Barbie, Eduardo Valdés-Villareal, were made possible by U.S. intelligence. It is known that the U.S. uses unmanned drones for territorial reconnaissance, but information gathered this way could not be as detailed as that presented in the reports. Detailed information on the typologies of the behavioural characteristics of the mafia requires short and medium term stays on the ground where the deeds take place in order to measure reconfigurations within criminal subcultures
Furthermore, in the reports from STRATFOR consultancy and many American think-tanks, claims about the operational size of the cartels, new routes, modes of attack, or the fragmentation of organizations have appeared recently. Such information, if it is to be considered valid, must be collected by a presence on the ground or the extraction of information through informants. And since participant observation in the Malinowsky style would be a little difficult among mafiosi, the diligent reader can't fail to ask two questions: Does the U.S. have embedded agents on Mexican soil to collect this volume of information? Or are there Mexican intelligence leaks that fall into foreign hands first? One thing is sure, though: the more the violence increases, the more American interference into Mexican public policy and Mexican territory rises.
How to stop the spiral of war?
We can argue that trying to put every single drug-related problem in the same basket is a terrible mistake: Either you decide to fight corruption, drug consumption, drug trafficking or drug violence. But you cannot fix them all together. Reducing the collateral damage would be the highest priority. But it might not be possible to sign a pax mafiosa, since we lack gentlemen of the old school. Today, we have warlords devoted to drugs trafficking, weapons trafficking and human trafficking.
From my perspective, as someone involved in the ethnography of the mafia phenomenon, the only way to reduce the collateral damage in this war is to return to a point, where the organizations acknowledge that they have lost too much money. In every criminal organization entrepreneurial interest will prevail, since to them gold weighs more than blood. There are several empirical corroborations from the history of the mafia, each in its cultural and geographical context, where conflict ended at exactly that point: the Sicilian intra-mafiosi wars (the Corleonissi against the Palermitan Cupola in Italy in 1980), the gangs of the Hells Angels against the Campires bikers in Sweden in 1990, and the Colombo family against the four remaining families – Gambino, Bonnano, Luchese, Genovese – in New York in 1980.
Source-Insight.com: Zetas moving into Sinaloa territory
Sinaloa state has long been the home turf of Mexico's most established criminal group, but now the Sinaloa Cartel may be facing a challenge in its stronghold from a coalition of enemies led by the Zetas.
A new report by Sinaloa news magazine Riodoce, reprinted by Proceso, says that a recent wave of murders in Culiacan, Sinaloa state capital, is a result of the Zetas' incursion into the state. There, the group has linked up with the Beltran Leyvas, former Sinaloa allies who split with Joaquin Guzman, alias "El Chapo," in 2008; and the organization of Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, alias "El Viceroy," who has been warring with Chapo’s forces in Juarez.
While Sinaloa has long been considered the territory of Guzman and his allies, the reality is a bit more complicated. A large proportion of the nation’s most notorious drug lords use routes in Sinaloa. Aside from being the home of many capos, the state is valued both for its fertile drug-producing in the Sierra Madre mountain range as well as its long coastline and its access to the border cities in Baja California.
The Beltran Leyvas never entirely left the region after their split with Guzman, even as they shifted much of their presence south to cities like Acapulco and Cuernavaca. Now, they have set up strongholds in mid-sized Sinaloa cities like Guasave, where public banners or "narcomantas" taunting Guzman have been appearing for months.
The Zetas, though originally based in the northeast, have expanded aggressively throughout the nation (and even beyond its borders), including regions far from their home turf. The appearance of the Zetas in Sinaloa follows their recent incursion into the Pacific state of Jalisco, which is just a bit south of Sinaloa.
Although Carrillo Fuentes is originally from Sinaloa, his group (known as the Juarez Cartel), which was initially built by his late brother Amado and his partners in the 1990s, has been based in Juarez for close to two decades. However, the declining violence in Juarez after years of battles with Guzman’s forces, and the reduced power of La Linea, the Juarez Cartel’s enforcement arm, are indicative of radical changes in the region. The appearance of his forces in Sinaloa suggests that Carrillo Fuentes has decided not to bet all his chips on Juarez.
What follows is InSight Crime’s translation of selected extracts from the Riodoce article on the recent violence in Sinaloa:
[T]he first week of this month, via military inteligence, reports arrived to the office of Malova [Mario Lopez Valdez, governor of Sinaloa] that criminal groups that hadn’t been strong in the central part of the state had managed to bring several groups of gunmen into the territory controlled by the organization of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman and Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada.
According to the information from the state government, the group is the Zetas, which since midway through the year has been fighting to heat up the region along with the Beltran Leyvas Organization, who have established their operational bases in Ahome and Guasave, and the Carrillo Fuentes organization, which has a limited presence in Navolato, Angostura and Salvador Alvarado.
Some cells of the Zetas, for their part, had taken southern Sinaloa as their center of operations and their apparent presence was speculated upon in July 2, 2011, when the remains of two decapitated people were tossed on the western steps of the governmental palace.
The suspicions of the government regarding the “presence in Culiacan of a large group of Zetas” was confirmed on November 4 when a narco commando unit murdered eight people on a volleyball court in the Colonia Pemex.
Although they don’t specify how many there are nor in what areas of Culiacan they operate, the 9th Military Zone, in coordination with the Elite Group [a specialized unit of the state police] and the Mixed Urban Operation Bases implemented a perimeter around the limits of the state capital towards the beginning of November so as to prevent the entrance of more Zetas. Nevertheless, the gunmen managed to slip through to the capital.
On November 24, reacting to 24 murders ocurred a day earlier, including the 16 burned bodies, the governor confirmed that “we all know that here the Pacific Cartel [an alternative name for the Sinaloa Cartel] operates and that there are other cartels or local cells that are allied with some of the Zetas, the Beltran Levyas, the Carrillos, that are in conflict ... It’s a product of groups, messages that are sent, that no one is strong or protected enough to prevent all incursions,” he said.
[...]
In Culiacan, a city previously not included in public security operations by state and federal police, some 300 soldiers were mobilized. Since the afternoon of November 23 they have patrolled the zones considered the most troubled and installed checkpoints in strategic locations.
In some cases, such as in the boroughs of Angostura, Salvador Alvarado and Guasave, the mayors were “advised” to tell the population to exercise precaution. One of the suggestions was to avoid being out on the streets, highways, or roadways after eight at night.
It was reported that in the community of Palmitas, in the city of Angostura, a commando unit that on Monday in the middle of the night kidnapped three police officers whose burnt bodies appeared in Culiacan on Wednesday morning, left a message threatening the residents that they would have the same luck if they were found outside of their houses at night.
That day's wave of violence shook the Sinaloans. It even the government, and on November 22, after newspaper El Debate reported that a daughter of Gerardo Vargas Landeros, general secretary of the government, had been transported from Culiacan to [the coastal city] Los Mochis in a government helicopter, the government said that organized crime poses a threat to government officials and puts them in a vulnerable position.
Mario Lopez Valdez revealed that his children have left Sinaloa, “they aren’t here, they have been gone a while,” he added. He then said that “there are signals, information, conversations that when someone important is detained, they try to attack the representatives of the executive branch.”
[...]
Despite being the city with the highest crime rates in Sinaloa -- 40 percent of the 1,755 murders registered across the state from January through November 24 were committed here -- the presence of state and federal agents was reduced, in contrast to cities like Mazatlan, Los Mochis and Guasave, which since March 2011 have had the deployment of the Elite Group, the Federal Police, and the army.
According to information from the Department of Public Security that the state government turned over to the local Congress, in Mazatlan, where the Elite Group stood out since their creation, car theft dropped 40 percent between 2010 and 2011, murders decreased by 21 percent, home robberies were reduced by 31 percent and bank robbery dropped 83 percent.
In Ahome, which has also received special attention from Malova’s government, the report of the SSP emphasizes that the criminal index has dropped by 26 percent.
In contrast, in Culiacan, where the Elite Group had not entered until "Black Wednesday," the state agency reported that high-impact crimes had risen by 44 percent, robbery of businesses by 138 percent, and car theft by 38 percent.
Source-IPSnews.com/Cross border Cartels dig in
U.S. Lawmakers to Probe DEA Money Laundering Operation!
Source-FOX NEWS LATINO.com
Published December 07, 2011
EFE
Washington – The chairman of the Oversight Committee of the House of Representatives announced an investigation into a news report that undercover U.S. drug enforcement agents laundered millions of dollars from drug trafficking to investigate how Mexican cartels move and invest their money.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) reported on the probe in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder.
The lawmaker cited a story in The New York Times that reported that the Drug Enforcement Administration used tactics similar to those of "Operation Fast and Furious," a U.S. operation that allowed thousands of firearms to be smuggled into Mexico in an effort to trace the weapons to cartel bosses.
"The existence of such a program again calls your leadership into question," Issa said in the letter. "The managerial structure you have implemented lacks appropriate operational safeguards to prevent the implementation of such dangerous schemes. The consequences have been disastrous."
"It is almost unfathomable to contemplate the degree to which the United States Government has made itself an accomplice to the Mexican drug trade, which has thus far left more than 40,000 people dead in Mexico since December 2006," the lawmaker added.
Issa and Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa since March have headed the congressional investigation into Fast and Furious, in which the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives lost track of roughly 2,000 guns, two of which were found on the American side of the border at the scene where a Border Patrol agent was killed.
Based on the Times' story, Issa said it appears that DEA agents may have laundered "hundreds of millions of dollars."
"These allegations, if true, raise further unsettling questions about a Department of Justice component engaging in a high-risk strategy with scant evidence of success," the congressman said.
Holder has been summoned to a hearing on Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee regarding Fast and Furious, which has caused friction in relations between the United States and Mexico.
Issa asked for the Justice Department to turn over information on the DEA activities to his committee's staff no later than Wednesday.
Mexico and the United States maintain "an intense exchange of information" to detect and break up the money laundering networks and are carrying out joint investigations according to the abilities of each, the Mexican Attorney General's Office said Tuesday.
"Bilateral cooperation is developing strictly within the prevailing legal framework, including that which regulates the activities of foreign authorities on Mexican territory," said the AG's office in a communique.
Read more: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2011/12/07/us-lawmakers-to-probe-alleged-dea-money-laundering/#ixzz1lMS6bmj6
Sinaloa state has long been the home turf of Mexico's most established criminal group, but now the Sinaloa Cartel may be facing a challenge in its stronghold from a coalition of enemies led by the Zetas.
A new report by Sinaloa news magazine Riodoce, reprinted by Proceso, says that a recent wave of murders in Culiacan, Sinaloa state capital, is a result of the Zetas' incursion into the state. There, the group has linked up with the Beltran Leyvas, former Sinaloa allies who split with Joaquin Guzman, alias "El Chapo," in 2008; and the organization of Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, alias "El Viceroy," who has been warring with Chapo’s forces in Juarez.
While Sinaloa has long been considered the territory of Guzman and his allies, the reality is a bit more complicated. A large proportion of the nation’s most notorious drug lords use routes in Sinaloa. Aside from being the home of many capos, the state is valued both for its fertile drug-producing in the Sierra Madre mountain range as well as its long coastline and its access to the border cities in Baja California.
The Beltran Leyvas never entirely left the region after their split with Guzman, even as they shifted much of their presence south to cities like Acapulco and Cuernavaca. Now, they have set up strongholds in mid-sized Sinaloa cities like Guasave, where public banners or "narcomantas" taunting Guzman have been appearing for months.
The Zetas, though originally based in the northeast, have expanded aggressively throughout the nation (and even beyond its borders), including regions far from their home turf. The appearance of the Zetas in Sinaloa follows their recent incursion into the Pacific state of Jalisco, which is just a bit south of Sinaloa.
Although Carrillo Fuentes is originally from Sinaloa, his group (known as the Juarez Cartel), which was initially built by his late brother Amado and his partners in the 1990s, has been based in Juarez for close to two decades. However, the declining violence in Juarez after years of battles with Guzman’s forces, and the reduced power of La Linea, the Juarez Cartel’s enforcement arm, are indicative of radical changes in the region. The appearance of his forces in Sinaloa suggests that Carrillo Fuentes has decided not to bet all his chips on Juarez.
What follows is InSight Crime’s translation of selected extracts from the Riodoce article on the recent violence in Sinaloa:
[T]he first week of this month, via military inteligence, reports arrived to the office of Malova [Mario Lopez Valdez, governor of Sinaloa] that criminal groups that hadn’t been strong in the central part of the state had managed to bring several groups of gunmen into the territory controlled by the organization of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman and Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada.
According to the information from the state government, the group is the Zetas, which since midway through the year has been fighting to heat up the region along with the Beltran Leyvas Organization, who have established their operational bases in Ahome and Guasave, and the Carrillo Fuentes organization, which has a limited presence in Navolato, Angostura and Salvador Alvarado.
Some cells of the Zetas, for their part, had taken southern Sinaloa as their center of operations and their apparent presence was speculated upon in July 2, 2011, when the remains of two decapitated people were tossed on the western steps of the governmental palace.
The suspicions of the government regarding the “presence in Culiacan of a large group of Zetas” was confirmed on November 4 when a narco commando unit murdered eight people on a volleyball court in the Colonia Pemex.
Although they don’t specify how many there are nor in what areas of Culiacan they operate, the 9th Military Zone, in coordination with the Elite Group [a specialized unit of the state police] and the Mixed Urban Operation Bases implemented a perimeter around the limits of the state capital towards the beginning of November so as to prevent the entrance of more Zetas. Nevertheless, the gunmen managed to slip through to the capital.
On November 24, reacting to 24 murders ocurred a day earlier, including the 16 burned bodies, the governor confirmed that “we all know that here the Pacific Cartel [an alternative name for the Sinaloa Cartel] operates and that there are other cartels or local cells that are allied with some of the Zetas, the Beltran Levyas, the Carrillos, that are in conflict ... It’s a product of groups, messages that are sent, that no one is strong or protected enough to prevent all incursions,” he said.
[...]
In Culiacan, a city previously not included in public security operations by state and federal police, some 300 soldiers were mobilized. Since the afternoon of November 23 they have patrolled the zones considered the most troubled and installed checkpoints in strategic locations.
In some cases, such as in the boroughs of Angostura, Salvador Alvarado and Guasave, the mayors were “advised” to tell the population to exercise precaution. One of the suggestions was to avoid being out on the streets, highways, or roadways after eight at night.
It was reported that in the community of Palmitas, in the city of Angostura, a commando unit that on Monday in the middle of the night kidnapped three police officers whose burnt bodies appeared in Culiacan on Wednesday morning, left a message threatening the residents that they would have the same luck if they were found outside of their houses at night.
That day's wave of violence shook the Sinaloans. It even the government, and on November 22, after newspaper El Debate reported that a daughter of Gerardo Vargas Landeros, general secretary of the government, had been transported from Culiacan to [the coastal city] Los Mochis in a government helicopter, the government said that organized crime poses a threat to government officials and puts them in a vulnerable position.
Mario Lopez Valdez revealed that his children have left Sinaloa, “they aren’t here, they have been gone a while,” he added. He then said that “there are signals, information, conversations that when someone important is detained, they try to attack the representatives of the executive branch.”
[...]
Despite being the city with the highest crime rates in Sinaloa -- 40 percent of the 1,755 murders registered across the state from January through November 24 were committed here -- the presence of state and federal agents was reduced, in contrast to cities like Mazatlan, Los Mochis and Guasave, which since March 2011 have had the deployment of the Elite Group, the Federal Police, and the army.
According to information from the Department of Public Security that the state government turned over to the local Congress, in Mazatlan, where the Elite Group stood out since their creation, car theft dropped 40 percent between 2010 and 2011, murders decreased by 21 percent, home robberies were reduced by 31 percent and bank robbery dropped 83 percent.
In Ahome, which has also received special attention from Malova’s government, the report of the SSP emphasizes that the criminal index has dropped by 26 percent.
In contrast, in Culiacan, where the Elite Group had not entered until "Black Wednesday," the state agency reported that high-impact crimes had risen by 44 percent, robbery of businesses by 138 percent, and car theft by 38 percent.
Source-IPSnews.com/Cross border Cartels dig in
U.S. Lawmakers to Probe DEA Money Laundering Operation!
Source-FOX NEWS LATINO.com
Published December 07, 2011
EFE
Washington – The chairman of the Oversight Committee of the House of Representatives announced an investigation into a news report that undercover U.S. drug enforcement agents laundered millions of dollars from drug trafficking to investigate how Mexican cartels move and invest their money.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) reported on the probe in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder.
The lawmaker cited a story in The New York Times that reported that the Drug Enforcement Administration used tactics similar to those of "Operation Fast and Furious," a U.S. operation that allowed thousands of firearms to be smuggled into Mexico in an effort to trace the weapons to cartel bosses.
"The existence of such a program again calls your leadership into question," Issa said in the letter. "The managerial structure you have implemented lacks appropriate operational safeguards to prevent the implementation of such dangerous schemes. The consequences have been disastrous."
"It is almost unfathomable to contemplate the degree to which the United States Government has made itself an accomplice to the Mexican drug trade, which has thus far left more than 40,000 people dead in Mexico since December 2006," the lawmaker added.
Issa and Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa since March have headed the congressional investigation into Fast and Furious, in which the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives lost track of roughly 2,000 guns, two of which were found on the American side of the border at the scene where a Border Patrol agent was killed.
Based on the Times' story, Issa said it appears that DEA agents may have laundered "hundreds of millions of dollars."
"These allegations, if true, raise further unsettling questions about a Department of Justice component engaging in a high-risk strategy with scant evidence of success," the congressman said.
Holder has been summoned to a hearing on Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee regarding Fast and Furious, which has caused friction in relations between the United States and Mexico.
Issa asked for the Justice Department to turn over information on the DEA activities to his committee's staff no later than Wednesday.
Mexico and the United States maintain "an intense exchange of information" to detect and break up the money laundering networks and are carrying out joint investigations according to the abilities of each, the Mexican Attorney General's Office said Tuesday.
"Bilateral cooperation is developing strictly within the prevailing legal framework, including that which regulates the activities of foreign authorities on Mexican territory," said the AG's office in a communique.
Read more: http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2011/12/07/us-lawmakers-to-probe-alleged-dea-money-laundering/#ixzz1lMS6bmj6
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