The Guardian
‘An atmosphere of terror’: the bloody rise of Mexico’s biggest cartel
The violence in the Jalisco cartel has had a terrible impact on the state and experts say it poses a threat to the government of Mexico A soldier guards a crime scene in Guadalajara, September 2020. Photo: Emilio Espejel / The Guardian It was mid-spring when residents of The Desert behind Guadalajara International Airport noticed a dog wandering around their community with a strange object in its mouth: a human forearm. Search teams in La Piedrera’s decrepit neighborhood entered a red-roofed redbrick hut flanked by trees adorned with bright orange mistletoe. Under several layers of dark earth, they made an even more grotesque discovery. “There were 26 of them here. We found them wrapped in plastic sheets, ”said Guadalupe Aguilar, a local human rights activist, next to a shallow grave. “And they threw something at them – acid or something – because it wasn’t that long ago [since their murders] and the bodies were already in a real state of decomposition ”. Aguilar, 63, said there were dozens of clandestine cemeteries across the state of Jalisco, a sunburned slice of western Mexico that is paying an increasingly terrifying price for its central role in America’s multi-billion dollar drug trade. North. “This is all about organized crime,” said Aguilar, who spends his life locating and excavating the 21st century death camps in Mexico in search of the victims. “Why? Because one person couldn’t do it all alone.” Clothes on the floor where 26 bodies were found inside a clandestine cemetery. Photo: Emilio Espejel / Guardian Aguilar, whose activism forces him to travel with armed guards, did not specify the group’s killers responsible for the bloodbath in La Piedrera. A crimson handprint on one of the walls of the hut provided a frightening reminder of the capacity of organized crime to slaughter. a growing portion of the second largest economy in Latin America, is controlled by the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel (New Generation Jalisco Cartel), a crime giant now considered the most indomitable mafia company in Mexico, less internationally famous than the Sinaloa cartel from the now arrested Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the Jalisco organization is famous at home for demonstrations of ultraviolence and military power that, according to experts, rep there is a growing threat to the nationalist president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Map Last June, armed men from Jalisco launched one of the most daring attacks in decades: an early-night attempt to assassinate Mexico City’s security chief who highlighted how López Obrador’s promises to “pacify” Mexico were not fulfilled. Last month, another reminder of the cartel’s coup came: the body of a major deserter, El Cholo, was dumped on a park bench in Tlaquepaque, a tourist town near Guadalajara famous for its pottery and mariachis. A white-handled kitchen knife had been used to place a warning on the black body bag. “El Traicionero,” he said. “The betrayer.” Security expert Eduardo Guerrero said officials in the north and south of the border with the United States now regard the group as a threat to national security. “They have large amounts of money, state-of-the-art weapons, military-style paramilitary groups and vehicles … and represent a very severe challenge for the [Mexican] government – above all in small and medium-sized cities, where a detachment of 50 cartel members can obviously defeat any local police force. ”A police commander speaks to the press about a crime scene. Photo: Emilio Espejel / The Guardian The official account traces the birth of the Jalisco cartel until July 2010, when troops killed Ignacio “Nacho” Colonel – the gangster credited as the founder of Mexico’s methamphetamine trade – in the state capital, Guadalajara. The elimination of Colonel – which the Anti-Drug Agency (DEA) called “a paralyzing blow” to the Sinaloa cartel he represented – caused a local rupture that paved the way for the emergence of a new group that took on the name of the seventh largest state in the world. Mexico. But a story from the underworld suggests that the division really started three years earlier, in 2007, when a narcotic from Guadalajara spilled a glass of hibiscus tea over a rival during a meeting in the east of the city. The seemingly mundane incident led to a bloody and disconcerting sequence of betrayals, shootings and massacres that eventually saw a group prevail. This group was led by Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes – or El Mencho, as most people know him – a former police officer who is now the DEA’s main target in Mexico. For its capture, it offers a record $ 10 million reward. Unlike El Chapo, who sought Sean Penn’s help to turn his criminal life into a Hollywood blockbuster, El Mencho prefers the shadows. There are few pictures of him. His biography, which includes a period of illegal work in the United States in the 1980s, is almost a blur. El Mencho is believed to be hiding in the mountains of southern Jalisco – but when troops tried to capture him there in 2015, it ended badly, with cartel killers shooting down an army helicopter with a rocket launcher. Guadalupe Ayala, local human rights activist Guadalupe Aguilar and a bodyguard while searching a clandestine cemetery. Photo: Emilio Espejel / The Guardian “Would I recognize you at a restaurant? No, I don’t think so, ”said an underworld observer who asked not to be identified. “El Mencho’s leadership is indisputable [but] he is discreet. It has its control bastion in southern Jalisco. Nobody touches him. Nobody messes with him. He’s happy. “The source said that El Mencho, considered in his fifties, was known for being friendly and having a good repertoire of jokes.” But also very explosive, “they added.” Very explosive. “Few understand the powers of the cartel better than the residents of the Sierra de Ahuisculco, a mountain range west of Guadalajara where it runs paramilitary-style training camps and secret laboratories that produce large quantities of synthetic drugs to traffic north to the US. to two Pacific ports, Manzanillo and Lázaro Cárdenas – through which precursor chemicals are smuggled from China – made it a strategic location. of the group stamped on their bulletproof vests often swept their streets in state-of-the-art 4x4s, some with machine guns mounted. r at night. You are afraid to go out with your children ”, complained the resident, who asked not to be identified. A woman holds a portrait of a missing relative. Photography: Emilio Espejel / The Guardian Guadalajara has long been one of the most important addresses in Mexican drug trafficking. The infamous cocaine and marijuana barons lived here during the 1980s. In 2008, American officials considered the capital of Jalisco to be a center for methamphetamines that they called the “Chemical City”. Sierra de Ahuisculco has also been a stronghold of drug lords, whose high-level political connections allow them to avoid capture and prosper. But in the past six years, residents said the violence had become unbearable. “I have never lived through a civil war – but I think this is what it must be like to live a war,” said one of them. “You live in fear. You live in uncertainty. I know three or four people who have disappeared. Everyone here has lost someone. ”In 2019, 138 bags full of remains were dumped in a nearby forest. “We see it and we do nothing because we know exactly what will happen if we do it,” said another local. The cartel’s violence and struggles with rivals have also badly affected the capital of Jalisco. Celebrated as one of the most dynamic and culturally rich cities in Mexico, Guadalajara has simultaneously become a place of cruelty and sadness that is almost incomprehensible. Portraits of missing persons are displayed on a table outside the Forensic Medical Service in Guadalajara, Jalisco. Photo: Emilio Espejel / The Guardian “We are going through difficult times because criminal groups have been trying to destabilize our state and create an atmosphere of terror,” said Enrique Alfaro, the governor of Jalisco, last month when hundreds of soldiers arrived, supposedly to combat violence. A few weeks earlier, his 46-year-old predecessor, Aristotle Sandoval, had been shot dead in a restaurant bathroom in a meticulously planned attack that many suspected was the work of Jalisco’s assassins. Every Wednesday, desperate mothers, wives, sisters and daughters gather in front of the city’s forensic institute in search of news from their loved ones. “It’s the brotherhood of pain,” said the group’s leader, Martha Leticia García, 50, as they waited to examine images of body parts discovered in an ever-growing network of mass graves. García, whose son César Ulises disappeared in 2017 and was not found, described the macabre routine of these relatives as they combed through the remains excavated by those they loved and lost. “You see these things on the screen and say to yourself, ‘This arm looks kind of familiar, this head.’ It is so terrible – the evil we are seeing in this state, ”she said. Nearby was Cecilia Flores, 54, whose 28-year-old son, Wilians, was taken in 2019. Four months later, authorities told her that some body parts were recovered in a famous torture house called El Mirador. “They found a hand, its torso and forearm. I’m still without my other hand and legs, ”she said. Guadalupe Ayala embraces her daughter-in-law Carla Flores Salazar during a protest in Guadalajara. Photo: Emilio Espejel / The Guardian The following afternoon, mourning mothers gathered at the foot of a monument to the six teenage soldiers who died defending the capital of Mexico from US troops in the mid-19th century. The group marched around the memorial to mourn the most recently lost souls, and María Guadalupe Ayala, 47, described the disappearance of her 25-year-old son, Alfredo, in September 2019. Five months later, parts of her body were found in the El Mirador too. “Why is it so bad in the world?” Ayala wept as she remembered her difficulty in breaking the news to her three-year-old grandson who thought he had been abandoned by his father. Vast illicit fortunes were made with the drug conflict that separated Jalisco and Mexico. But for the Ayalas, and thousands of families like them, the consequences were cataclysmic. “Every night I can’t sleep, thinking about what they did to him,” she sobbed. “I go to sleep and wake up asking myself the same question: ‘How much did you suffer?'”