In the Shadow of Saint Death: The Gulf Cartel and the Price of America's Drug War in Mexico by Michael Deibert

Author:Michael Deibert
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2014-06-03T07:00:00+00:00

At the end of April 2011, Marco Antonio Gómez Rodríguez, a lawyer who was believed to formalize property deeds that would be handed over to Los Zetas as a form of ransom for those they had kidnapped, was arrested by federal police in the Quintana Roo city of Benito Juárez. Ten more suspected Zetas were killed at the same time by marines during an assault in Veracruz. In Miguel Alemán, a furious battle erupted between the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas early on the morning of April 21. Soldiers were deployed to rein in the fighting, resulting in the death of one gunmen and one soldier. Eleven people were arrested and some twenty assault rifles seized. During the fighting, narcos threw grenades through the city streets with abandon and burned down three car dealerships and several other businesses. In formerly sedate Mexico City, a woman’s torso, legs, and fingers were found scattered along a three-block radius of the tony, tree-lined San Miguel Chapultepec district. No one seemed to know who she was, or if they knew, they weren’t telling. The same day, police in Acapulco found the bodies of four women and a fourteen-year-old girl, and a severed head was discovered in the beach town of Zihuatanejo near the city’s bus terminal. A few days later, five decapitated bodies were found near the capital.

Before the month was out, the military rescued fifty-two more hostages—including twelve Guatemalans, five Salvadorans, thirty-four Hondurans, and one Nicaraguan—held by kidnappers in Reynosa. A group of Central American migrants freed by security forces in Tamaulipas later fingered agents from the government’s Instituto Nacional de Migración (INM) as having pulled them off a bus and handed them over to the Gulf Cartel, a more or less routine occurrence in a body that had become thoroughly penetrated by organized crime. At least half a dozen INM employees were subsequently arrested. In Ciudad Juárez, meanwhile, police raided a home in an upscale section of the city and found three antiaircraft guns, several dozen grenades, a grenade launcher, several AK-47s, and other armaments hidden behind the mirrors of a home gym.

It was the chaos brought to the drug war by groups like Los Zetas that led to the appointment of military men like ex-general Carlos Bibiano Villa to head civilian law enforcement agencies. Bibiano was a descendent of Pancho Villa and bore a striking resemblance to his more-famous relative, with his bushy mustache and intense gaze. He had been appointed to head the police in the city of Torreón in Coahuila in September 2010, and in a drastic action designed to underline his seriousness, upon taking office fired the entire twelve-hundred-man police force of the city. By April 2011, he had been appointed the police chief of Chetumal, the capital of the state of Quintana Roo, the state of which the tourist hub of Cancún is a part and where Los Zetas were particularly strong. He was welcomed by a dismembered body and a warning saying “you’re next” dumped in the tourist mecca.

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