Midnight in Mexico by Alfredo Corchado

Author:Alfredo Corchado
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2017-04-24T15:06:47+00:00

THIRTEEN

U.S. Highway 83 in Texas is a lonely, curving corridor dotted with abandoned villages and fast-food joints. One of the main arteries of Los Caminos del Río—the River Roads—it cuts alongside the Rio Grande and through the city of Laredo. Founded in 1755, Laredo once served as a capital of the independent Republic of the Rio Grande, which was set up briefly in opposition to General Santa Anna.

In 1848, Laredo residents faced a decision. Following the U.S.-Mexico War, the United States gave residents in Laredo the choice either to stay on what was now U.S. territory, the north side of the Río Bravo, or to move south of the river to Mexican territory. Some stayed north, not so much out of loyalty to the United States but because they felt attached to the land. Many headed south to start fresh. They brought their belongings, their horses and cows; some even went to the cemetery, dug up the remains of their loved ones and brought them along to be reburied in Mexico in “Nuevo” Laredo. The region became known as Los Dos Laredos.

In the spring of 2005, I went to Laredo often to file dispatches of Americans kidnapped in Nuevo Laredo. I would usually avoid Nuevo Laredo, even as I tried to dig up information about how the Zetas were changing the trafficking business model. I was foolish to think that the danger would keep to the south side of the border.

The economy in Los Dos Laredos depends on trade. It is the largest inland port on the U.S.-Mexico border, with four international bridges and one railway. The border faces the entrance of Interstate 35, “NAFTA Highway,” and the giant U.S. market. Everything—from fruits, vegetables, TVs and blow-dryers to stoves, refrigerators, vehicles and drugs—makes its way from Mexico to the United States at this crossing point.

The two Laredos quickly became a hot spot for Mexico’s cartels—especially the Zetas, which, in the fifth year of Fox’s term, began consolidating their power in the region.

The Zetas began as an elite security detail for the leader of the Gulf cartel, Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, and as a paramilitary force to protect the cartel’s business interests. Cárdenas Guillén, a former federal policeman, took over the legendary cartel after the U.S. government locked up his predecessor, Juan García Ábrego. Cárdenas Guillén didn’t want to take any chances and assigned his trusted deputy, Arturo Guzmán Decena, the task of organizing a highly trained group of elite bodyguards to protect him and expand the Gulf cartel’s reach beyond the state of Tamaulipas, which borders south Texas. Along the way he rid himself of smaller rivals across the region and declared war on the Sinaloa cartel, which had been expanding its distribution route in the Nuevo Laredo area.

Guzmán Decena was a Mexican army special forces soldier who defected to the cartels in 1997. He turned first to former soldiers, some of them from the Mexican special forces unit known as the Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFE). The training the

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