ZeroZeroZero

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It’s not heroin, which turns you into a zombie. And it’s not pot, which mellows you and makes your eyes bloodshot. Coke is a performance-enhancing drug. On coke you can do anything. Before it explodes your heart and turns your brain to mush, before your dick goes soft forever and your stomach starts oozing pus — before all this happens, you’ll work more, fuck more, play more. Coke is the comprehensive answer to the most pressing concern of our day: the absence of limits. On coke, you’ll live more. You’ll network more — the first commandment of modern life. And the more you network, the happier you’ll be, the more fun you’ll have, the more emotions you’ll experience, the more you’ll sell. Whatever it is you sell, you’ll sell more of it. More. Always more. But our bodies don’t run on “more.” At a certain point the excitement has to die down, our bodies have to return to a state of calm. Which is precisely where coke intervenes. It’s very exacting, because it has to make its way to the synaptic juncture — to the exact point where individual cells divide — and inhibit a fundamental mechanism. It’s like when you’re playing tennis and you’ve just hit a winner straight down the line: Time stands still and everything is perfect, peace and strength are perfectly balanced inside you. That sensation of well-being is triggered by a microscopic drop of a neurotransmitter, which lands right in the synaptic juncture of a cell and stimulates it. That cell then infects the one next to it, and so on and so on, until millions of cells are stimulated, an almost instantaneous swarm. Life lights up. You move back to the baseline, and so does your opponent; you’re ready to play the next point, and that feeling of a second ago is now just a distant echo. The neurotransmitter has been reabsorbed, the impulses between one cell and the next have been blocked. This is where coke comes in. It inhibits the reabsorption of neurotransmitters, so your cells are always turned on; it’s like Christmas all year long, lights twinkling 365 days a year. The neurotransmitters coke is most crazy about, the ones it never wants to do without, are dopamine and norepinephrine. The first allows you to be the center of the party, because everything is so much easier now. Easier to talk, to flirt, to be nice, to feel you’re liked. The second, norepinephrine, is sneakier. It amplifies everything around you. A glass breaks? You hear it before everyone else. A window slams? You’re the first to realize it. Someone calls you? You turn even before they’ve finished saying your name. That’s how norepinephrine works. It raises your state of alertness; the world around you fills with threats and dangers, turns hostile; you’re always expecting to be harmed or attacked. Your fear-alarm responses speed up, your reactions become immediate, no filters. This is paranoia; the door is wide open. Cocaine is the body’s fuel. It is life cubed. That is, before it consumes you, destroys you. The extra life that coke seems to have given you, you’ll pay for later, at loan-shark interest rates. But later doesn’t count. It’s all here and now.

3. THE WAR OVER WHITE PETROL

Mexico is the origin of everything. If you disregard Mexico, you’ll never understand the destiny of democracies transformed by drug traffic. If you disregard Mexico, you’ll never find the route that follows the smell of money, you won’t realize how the odor of criminal money becomes a winning smell that has very little to do with the stench of death, poverty, barbarity, and corruption.

In order to understand cocaine, you have to understand Mexico. Those nostalgic revolutionaries who have taken refuge elsewhere in Latin America or grown old in Europe look upon this land like it’s a former lover who has found herself a rich man yet still seems unhappy, whereas you remember how, when she was young and poor, she would offer herself with a passion that the rich man who has bought her with marriage will never know. On the surface Mexico can seem a place of unending and incomprehensible violence, a land that never stops bleeding. But it also retells a familiar story, a story of rampant civil war, because the warlords are powerful and the forces that should check them are corrupt or weak. As in feudal times, as in the Japan of the samurai and shogun or the tragedies of William Shakespeare. But Mexico is not some distant land that has caved in on itself. It is not some new Middle Ages. Mexico is now, here, and the warlords in question are masters of the most sought after goods in the world, the white powder that brings in more money than the oil wells.

The white petrol wells are in the state of Sinaloa, on the coast. Sinaloa, with rivers flowing down from the Sierra Madre to the Pacific, is so spectacular you can’t believe there’s anything else here but blinding sunlight and bare feet on the sand. That’s how a student would like to answer his geography teacher when asked about the area’s natural resources. But he should say, “Opium and marijuana, ma’am.” If his school has walls, it’s because Sinaloa’s grandfathers cultivated marijuana and opium. Today, thanks to cocaine, Sinaloa’s sons have universities and jobs. But if the student were to answer that way he would get a slap in the face and a black star next to his name. Better to repeat what it says in the textbooks: The region’s riches are fish, meat, and organic produce. Yet Chinese merchants brought opium to Sinaloa back in the 1800s. Black poison, they called it. And since then, Sinaloa has been full of opium. You can grow opium poppies just about anywhere; they grow wherever grain grows. All they need is the right climate: not too dry, not too humid, no frost, no hail. The climate’s good in Sinaloa; it almost never hails, and it’s close to the sea.

The Sinaloa cartel is hegemonic. In Sinaloa, drugs provide jobs for everyone. Entire generations have fed themselves thanks to drugs. From peasants to politicians, police officers to slackers, the young and the old. Drugs need to be grown, stocked, transported, protected. In Sinaloa, all who are able are enlisted. The cartel operates in the Golden Triangle, and with over 160 million acres under its control, it’s the biggest cartel in all of Mexico. It manages a significant slice of U.S. cocaine traffic and distribution. Sinaloa narcos are present in more than eighty American cities, with cells primarily in Arizona, California, Texas, Chicago, and New York. They distribute Colombian cocaine on the American market. According to the Office of the United States Attorney General, between 1990 and 2008 the Sinaloa cartel was responsible for the importation and distribution of at least two hundred tons of cocaine, as well as vast quantities of heroin, into the United States.

Until El Chapo’s arrest in 2014, Sinaloa was his realm and he was viewed in the United States as having a significance akin to a head of state. Coke, marijuana, amphetamines: Most of the substances that Americans smoke, snort, or swallow have passed through his men’s hands. From 1995 to 2014 he was the big boss of the faction that emerged from the ashes of the Guadalajara clan after the Big Bang in 1989. El Chapo, aka Shorty, five feet five inches of sheer determination. El Chapo didn’t lord it over his men, didn’t dominate them physically; he earned their trust. His real name is Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, born on April 4, 1957, in La Tuna de Badiraguato, a small village with a few hundred inhabitants in the Sierra Madre mountains in Sinaloa. Like every other man in La Tuna, Joaquín’s father was a rancher and farmer, who raised his son on beatings and farmwork. These were the years of opium. El Chapo’s entire family was involved: a small army devoted to the cultivation of opium poppies, from dawn to dusk. El Chapo started at the bottom: Before he was allowed to follow the men along impassable roads to the poppy fields he had to stay at his mother’s side and bring his older brothers their lunch. One kilo of opium gum brought in eight thousand pesos for the family, the equivalent of seven hundred dollars today. The head of the family had to get the gum into the next step of the chain. And that step meant a city, maybe even Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa. No easy feat if you’re merely a farmer, but easier if the farmer in question, El Chapo’s father, is related to Pedro Avilés Pérez — a big-shot drug lord. The young El Chapo, having reached the age of twenty, began to see a way out of the poverty that had marked the lives of his ancestors. At that time it was El Padrino, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, who ruled in Sinaloa: Together with his partners, Ernesto “Don Neto” Fonseca Carrillo and Rafael Caro Quintero, he controlled the coming and going of every drug shipment in Mexico. Joining the organization was a natural step for the young El Chapo, as was accepting his first real challenge: handling the drugs from the fields to the border. If you want to get to the top, you can’t take pity if someone makes a mistake, you can’t back down when underlings make excuses for not keeping to the schedule. If there was a problem, El Chapo eliminated it. If a peasant was enticed by someone with a fatter wallet, El Chapo eliminated him. If a driver with a truckload of drugs got drunk and didn’t deliver his shipment the next morning, El Chapo eliminated him. Simple and effective.

El Chapo soon proved himself trustworthy, and in a few years’ time he was one of the men closest to El Padrino. He learned many things from El Padrino, including the most important one: how to stay alive as a drug trafficker. Just like Félix Gallardo, in fact, El Chapo lived a quiet life, not too ostentatious, not too many frills. El Chapo married four times and fathered nine children, but he never surrounded himself with hordes of women.

When El Padrino was arrested and the race to find an heir began, El Chapo decided to remain loyal to his mentor. He was methodical, and didn’t flaunt his power. He wanted to keep his family beside him, wanted his blood bonds to be his armor. He moved from Sinaloa to Guadalajara, the last place El Padrino lived before his arrest, while he based his organization in Agua Prieta, a town in the state of Sonora, convenient because it borders the United States. El Chapo remained in the shadows, and from there he governed his rapidly growing empire. Whenever he traveled, he did so incognito. People would say they’d spotted him, but it was true only one time out of a hundred. El Chapo and his men used every form of transport available to get drugs into the United States. Planes, trucks, railcars, tankers, cars. In 1993 an underground tunnel was discovered, nearly fifteen hundred feet long, sixty-five feet belowground. Still incomplete, it was going to connect Tijuana to San Diego.

These were years of settling scores against rivals, of escapes and murders. On May 24, 1993, Sinaloa’s rival cartel, Tijuana, recruited some trustworthy killers to strike at the heart of the Sinaloa cartel. Two important travelers were expected at the Guadalajara airport that day: El Chapo Guzmán and Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, who, as archbishop of the city, had railed constantly against the drug lords’ power. The killers knew that El Chapo was traveling in a white Mercury Grand Marquis, a must for drug barons. The cardinal was in a white Mercury Grand Marquis as well. The Tijuana hit men started shooting at what they believed to be the boss of Sinaloa’s car, and others — El Chapo’s bodyguards, maybe — returned fire. The airport parking lot suddenly became hell. The shoot-out left seven men dead, among them Cardinal Posadas Ocampo, while El Chapo managed to escape, unscathed. For years people wondered if the killers really wanted to eliminate the inconvenient cardinal, or if chance had merely played a bad joke on Posadas Ocampo that morning. It was only recently that the FBI declared the killing a tragic case of mistaken identity.

El Chapo was arrested on June 9, 1993. He continued to manage his affairs from prison with scarcely a hitch. The maximum security prison Puente Grande, where he was transferred in 1995, became his new base of operations. After eight years, however, El Chapo could no longer afford to remain behind bars: The Supreme Court had approved a law making it much easier to extradite narcos to the United States. American incarceration would mean the end of everything. So El Chapo chose the evening of January 19, 2001. The guards were bribed handsomely. One of them — Francisco Camberos Rivera, known as El Chito, or the Silent One — opened the door to El Chapo’s cell and helped him climb into a cart of dirty laundry. They headed down unguarded hallways and through wide-open electronic doors to the inner parking lot, where only one guard was on duty. El Chapo jumped out of the cart and leaped into the trunk of a Chevrolet Monte Carlo. El Chito started it up and drove him to freedom.

El Chapo became everybody’s hero, a legend. He kept on running his cartel with the help of his closest collaborators: Ismael Zambada García, known as El Mayo; Ignacio Coronel Villarreal, known as Nacho, who was killed on July 29, 2010, during a raid by the Mexican military; and his adviser, Juan José Esparragoza Moreno, who was known as El Azul, or Blue, because of his dark complexion. These men were the undisputed princes of Mexican drug trafficking for about a decade after the Sinaloa cartel was founded in 1989.

For years El Chapo also allied himself with the Beltrán Leyva family — a criminal gang led by four brothers skilled at intimidation and kickbacks, and especially good at infiltrating the political and judicial systems and the Mexican police force. They even had connections in INTERPOL offices in the U.S. embassy and at the Mexico City airport. The Beltrán Leyvas were a small, family-run army, and El Chapo trusted them. They’d always stuck with him, even when his authority was threatened. In 2003, for example, two years after his escape from prison, when there was a power vacuum in the state of Tamaulipas, in particular around Nuevo Laredo, a strategically essential corridor that leads to Texas, right to the famous Interstate 35, the road on which 40 percent of drugs coming from Mexico travel. But power vacuums don’t exist for drug lords. And if they do, they’re very short-lived. The first rule is to occupy a territory, so the pretenders rush in when a boss falls. The area became a ferocious battleground. El Chapo entrusted the job of taking possession of northeastern Mexico before anyone else could to one of the four Beltrán Leyva brothers: Arturo, who founded the armed wing Los Negros and identified the right man to run it.

Edgar Valdez Villarreal is called “La Barbie”—the nickname this big kid with blond hair and blue eyes was saddled with when he joined his high school football team in Laredo, Texas. “You look like Ken,” the coach declared, “but I’m going to call you Barbie.” Barbie’s American dream wasn’t a college degree or a nicer house than the one his immigrant father had. His dream was a sea of money, which could be had across the border in Nuevo Laredo. His American passport added to his appeal. Barbie liked women, and women liked him. He loved Versace clothes and fancy cars. He couldn’t have been more different from El Chapo, but El Chapo knew how to get past a first impression. He smelled the blood that was soaking the Nuevo Laredo plaza, and the newcomer’s longing for affirmation. Los Negros was going to have to fight Los Zetas, the bloodthirsty armed wing of the Gulf cartel with a bent for macabre spectacle that was surging into the power vacuum in northeastern Mexico as well. Barbie accepted enthusiastically and decided to use the same weapons as his adversaries: a film clip on YouTube of men kneeling, some bare chested, all of them clearly beaten. Zetas condemned to death. If Los Zetas were going to use the Internet to broadcast its ferocity, Los Negros would too. The horror escalated, feeding on itself, an endless loop from the streets to the web and back.

• • •

Fear and respect go hand in hand, they’re two sides of the same coin: power. The coin of power has a shiny, bright side and a worn, opaque one. Bloodthirstiness strikes fear in one’s rivals, but not respect, that luminescent patina that allows you to open every door without having to break it down. It’s all a question of attitude: To be number one you have to know how to act like you’re number one. El Chapo was never satisfied, never rested on his laurels. After throwing himself into the capture of Nuevo Laredo he decided he wanted the plaza of Ciudad Juárez too, that other outpost on the U.S. border, traditionally controlled by the Carrillo Fuentes family.

Los Negros made the first move. On September 11, 2004, Rodolfo Carrillo Fuentes — he and his brother Vicente ruled the Juárez cartel — was killed in the parking lot outside a multiplex cinema in Culiacán, in the heart of Sinaloa territory. He was with his wife. Their bodyguard was helpless against El Chapo’s hit men, who fired from all directions, riddling the couple’s bodies with bullets. The message was clear: Sinaloa once respected the boss of the Juárez cartel, Amado Carrillo Fuentes — the eldest of the Carrillo Fuentes brothers — but it no longer respected his family. The road to open war was short, and the Juárez cartel’s revenge didn’t take long. Vicente ordered one of El Chapo’s brothers killed: Arturo, El Pollo, or Chicken, was murdered in the maximum security prison of Almoloya de Juárez on December 31. It was a tough blow for El Chapo, but it didn’t make him back down. For years the border city of Juárez was transformed into a war zone — no holds barred — between El Chapo and the Carrillo Fuentes men. But in the end El Chapo got the upper hand, undermining the foundations of his enemies in Juárez.

Years earlier Amado Carrillo Fuentes had transformed the Juárez cartel from a group of bandits into a clan of well-groomed businessmen who favored Brioni and Versace suits. Appearance above all, even when you’re wearing handcuffs: Let the media crowding outside your villa immortalize you in a white Abercrombie tracksuit with “NY” on your chest, as Amado’s son Vicente Carrillo Leyva did in 2009. Amado had grown up in close contact with the cartels. His uncle was Ernesto “Don Neto” Fonseca Carrillo, boss of the Guadalajara organization and El Padrino’s partner. Violence was Amado’s daily bread, but money can sometimes prove more effective than violence, and the respect that Amado had managed to earn for himself over time was in part the fruit of the big tips he lavished on his men, the sports cars he gave to powerful people, his generous donations to build churches, like the one it is said he had built in his native village of Guamuchilito.

Amado had inherited the cartel that Rafael Aguilar Guajardo had founded in the 1970s. A rival of the Tijuana and Gulf cartels from the outset, this cartel had taken advantage of its strategic position across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas, to build a powerful base, which needed to be defended. Amado was just the man. Prudent, patient, clever, he moved his pawns without getting his own hands dirty. He made shrewd investments, including an entire fleet of Boeing 727s, which he used to transport cocaine from Colombia to Mexico. But Boeings weren’t suitable to cover the last leg — from Mexico to the United States. He needed smaller, more agile means, such as Cessnas; the air taxi company Taxceno (Taxi Aéreo del Centro Norte) used them and Amado became a major shareholder of it. People started calling him El Señor de los Cielos, the Lord of the Skies.

The coke war was fought with money. The most sizable expenditure—$5 million a month — was for kickbacks to officials, police, and the military all over Mexico, for stipends and gifts. Another sizable budget item was for entertainment, such as the so-called Palace of the Thousand and One Nights, which Amado bought in Hermosillo, in the state of Sonora. Situated provocatively a few hundred yards from the governor’s residence, the Palace of the Thousand and One Nights is a garish place whose onion domes recall Russian Orthodox churches and the Kremlin, and whose white walls, now hidden under thick graffiti, recall the palaces of the maharaja.

No one knew Amado’s whereabouts. He moved around constantly among the many residences he had scattered throughout the country. Eccentricity and ostentation, compensated for with shrewd financial decisions and an obsession with security, made him the iconic drug lord. Handsome and fierce, intelligent and cocky, courageous and tenderhearted. A hero for his time. He established ties with some Guadalajara bosses, got control of airports and clandestine runways, and bribed José de Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, head of the National Institute to Combat Drugs, who with his men became Amado’s armed wing, using the institute’s rich network of information to wipe out Amado’s enemies and competitors, in exchange for enormous kickbacks. He even planned on striking an agreement with the federal government: Mexico would get 50 percent of his property; his collaboration in reducing violence among cartels; and his guarantee that drugs would not infest Mexico but only the United States and Europe. In exchange Amado would get peace and tranquillity to do his business.

But it wasn’t to be. On November 2, 1997, along the Autopista del Sol — the Sun Highway — that runs from Mexico City to Acapulco, the police made a gruesome discovery: three cadavers in barrels filled with cement, bodies of three renowned plastic surgeons who had disappeared a few weeks earlier. Freed from the cement, their bodies bore witness to the tortures they endured before being killed: gouged-out eyes and broken bones. They’d been beaten so badly that one of the bodies had to be tied together to keep it from falling to pieces. Two of them had died of asphyxia, strangled with cables, the third of a bullet to the back of his neck. Their crime? Having the courage to operate on Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who, like many drug lords, wanted a total makeover. Four months earlier, on July 4, 1997, the Lord of the Skies had died in room 407 of the Santa Monica Hospital in Mexico City, after undergoing plastic surgery and liposuction under a false name. An overdose of Dormicum, a powerful sedative used during postop, had proved fatal. His heart, already weakened by cocaine, had given out. It’s still unclear whether anyone was at fault, whether his death was accidental or intentional. Such a bizarre end for a sovereign generates legends of immortality as well as endless, malicious gossip. Some say his own vanity killed him, but it’s more likely that he wanted to alter his appearance in order to escape the police and his enemies.

Amado’s death created a huge power vacuum. His brother Vicente took over the cartel, but relations between Carrillo Fuentes and rival groups became increasingly precarious. In 2001, after El Chapo Guzmán escaped from prison, many Juárez cartel members decided to follow him and to join the Sinaloa cartel. On April 9, 2010, the Associated Press announced that the Sinaloa cartel had finally won the battle against the Juárez men. But the media epitaph did not prevent the Juárez cartel from continuing to wage war. A war that made Ciudad Juárez the most dangerous and violent city in the world, with nearly two thousand homicides a year.

In July 2010, on a street in the center of the city, a car bomb set off by a cell phone killed a federal police agent, a doctor, and a musician who lived in the area. These last two had heard gunshots and gone out into the street in order to help a man in a police uniform lying wounded on the ground. But as the narcos revealed after their arrest, he was merely the bait to attract the attention of the feds. A message spray-painted in black was found on a wall near the attack: “What happened on Calle 16 septiembre will happen to all the authorities who continue to back El Chapo. Cordially, the Juárez cartel. And anyway, we have other car bombs.”

“Carne asada! Grilled meat!” It’s a cry you hear every day as you wander the crowded streets of Ciudad Juárez. If it weren’t for the agitated tone and the adrenaline in their voices it would sound like two Mexicans organizing a Sunday cookout. Instead, it’s the code narcos use to say that someone’s been killed. The killings continue undisturbed. Mutilated, decapitated bodies. Bodies exposed in public for the sole purpose of guaranteeing the status quo of fear. Bodies like that of the lawyer Fernando Reyes, suffocated with a plastic bag, wacked several times in the head with a shovel, thrown in a ditch, and covered first with quicklime and then with dirt.

In order to try to stop the Juárez cartel, the Mexican authorities offered a reward of 30 million pesos, and the U.S. government up to $5 million, for information leading to the arrest of Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, known as the Viceroy but actually the real king of the organization since his brother Amado’s death. On October 9, 2014, Vicente was captured in Torreón, Coahuila, during a federal police operation that concluded without any shots fired. When stopped at a checkpoint he showed a fake driver’s license registered to a Jorge Sánchez Mejía, but the federal forces, who had been after him for several months, were not fooled: He was the chief of one of the most violent drug cartels Mexico had ever known. Along with the Viceroy, they arrested his ever-present bodyguard, a figure without whom the narcos never leave their hideouts.

Vicente’s arrest could lead to a loss of power of the Juárez cartel, as the Mexican authorities hope, but just as happened in the past, it could also create a power vacuum to be filled with violence and terror.

“Carne asada! Carne asada!”

• • •

El Chapo didn’t believe in showing his rage. He saw no point. He punished those who deserved it with death, but even when applying this definitive sentence, he didn’t allow any emotion to shine through. El Chapo was rational in his bloodthirstiness. Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, the Beltrán Leyva brother known as El Mochomo — as the red desert ants that eat anything and survive everything are called in Sinaloa — was the complete opposite: instinctive, hot-tempered, aggressive. He loved the good life and wanted a steady stream of people coming to see him, especially women. El Mochomo was the Beltrán Leyva brother entrusted with the most public role. But El Chapo realized that Alfredo was dangerous. Being showy doesn’t fit well with being a fugitive; you’re too easy a target. The state of alert increased significantly when El Chapo found out that the Beltrán Leyvas were negotiating with Los Zetas. A scission was inevitable. Which meant blood.

Alfredo Beltrán Leyva was arrested in Culiacán in January 2008, together with three members of his security corps. He was found in possession of almost a million dollars, luxury watches, and a small arsenal, including frag grenades. A tough blow for Sinaloa, because Alfredo supervised drug trafficking on a large scale, handled the organization’s money laundering, and bribed the police. He was the cartel’s foreign minister. But as the Beltrán Leyva brothers saw it, El Chapo was behind Alfredo’s arrest. They had to respond in kind, and it was easy to decide where to strike.

Édgar Guzmán López was only twenty-two, but he had a brilliant career ahead of him because he was El Chapo’s son. In May 2008, he went for a stroll with some friends in a shopping center in Culiacán. To check out the shop windows and the chicas. A peaceful day. On their way back to their car, which they left in the parking lot, they saw fifteen men approaching, in uniforms and blue bulletproof vests. The men moved in unison, like soldiers, and the boys were petrified, immobile. Before the men opened fire, the boys managed to read what was on their bulletproof vests: FEDA, which stood for Fuerzas Especiales de Arturo, or Arturo’s Special Forces. These were the men of Arturo Beltrán Leyva, the brother known as El Barbas. To prepare for the break with the Sinaloa cartel he’d created a unit with the same structure and discipline as the army and special police corps. They used heavy weapons, including the lethal P90 personal defense weapon, and were charged with protecting the bosses and eliminating hit men of rival cartels. Now, in 2008, baptized in the blood of El Chapo’s son, the Beltrán Leyva cartel was born. The brothers handled cocaine, marijuana, and heroin, thanks in part to their complete control of the principal airports in the states of México, Guerrero, Quintana Roo, and Nuevo León. Other activities included human trafficking; prostitution; money laundering, through hotels, restaurants, and resorts; extortion; abduction; and arms trafficking. From South to North America, they managed corridors that moved tons of drugs. It was a new, small cartel, but one determined to carve out a sizable slice of power. But the Mexican authorities were eager to put the family out of business right away, so when Arturo threw a party in the winter of 2009, they didn’t let the opportunity pass.

For El Barbas, a Christmas party is not a Christmas party if there’s no entertainment. Money was no object, so he invited artists such as Los Cadetes de Linares and Ramón Ayala, winner of two Grammy Awards and two Latin Grammys with over a hundred albums, to play at his house in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods of Cuernavaca. Plus twenty or so call girls. The Mexican navy’s special forces surrounded the building. The shoot-out left several bodies on the ground, but not Arturo’s; he managed to escape. The Mexican navy was on his trail, though, and they found him less than a week later, in another residential neighborhood. Determined not to let Arturo escape again, the navy decided to do things big: two hundred marines, two helicopters, and two small army tanks. The battle lasted nearly two hours, and when it was finished, Arturo and four of his men were dead. The photo of his corpse made the rounds on the Internet: His pants lowered to show his underwear and his T-shirt rolled up to show his naked chest covered in lucky charms and bills, dollars as well as pesos. One last humiliation for the enemy. The army denied it had touched his body, but there was a strong suspicion that the humiliation techniques so dear to new cartels such as Los Zetas and Beltrán Leyvas themselves were contaminating the very men paid to eliminate them. The army and the narcos were becoming more and more alike.

Vengeance came immediately after Arturo Beltrán Leyva’s death: Four relatives of one of the soldiers who lost his life in the operation were killed. Meanwhile, a decapitated head was left in front of Arturo’s tomb, in the Jardines del Humaya cemetery in Culiacán. Arturo’s brother Carlos Beltrán Leyva was arrested about ten days later by the Mexican federal police in Culiacán: He had shown a fake driver’s license when the police stopped him. Some people held that it was El Chapo again who provided the police with information that led to Carlos’s arrest.

After Arturo’s death, a civil war over leadership broke out within the cartel: On one side were lieutenants Edgar “La Barbie” Valdez Villarreal and Gerardo “El Indio” Álvarez Vázquez; on the other, Héctor Beltrán Leyva, El H, and his right-hand man, Sergio Villarreal Barragán, a former Mexican federal police agent, known as El Grande or King Kong, because he was over six feet five. All but Héctor were arrested in 2010; El H took the reins of what remained of the cartel. The United States had put a price on his head of $5 million, and the Mexican government was offering 30 million pesos. Héctor was a sort of financial genius; after years of anonymity he succeeded in controlling the group, thanks to his business talent and his ability to maintain good relations with his new allies, Los Zetas.

But the race was soon over for him too. On October 1, 2014, Héctor was arrested in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato. He was enjoying dinner at a seafood restaurant together with the financial operator of his cartel when the special forces of the Mexican army swooped in. Though he initially passed himself off as a refined businessman and artwork trader, he and his tablemate were carrying pistols exclusively issued to the military. But confirming his proverbial elegance, he let them handcuff him without resisting.

Héctor was the last of the Beltrán Leyva brothers still at large. After his arrest the Mexican authorities believe the cartel will lose most of its influence on the country. But thrones do not remain empty for long in the narco-trafficking world. The real question is: Who will be the new leader?

The war between the Beltrán Leyvas and their old Sinaloa partners not only devastated Culiacán and Sinaloa, it has made its way to the United States, to Chicago, where the twins Margarito and Pedro Flores, two Americans with Mexican roots, operated. Their fleet of trucks connected Los Angeles to cities in the Midwest twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. They were serious, efficient distributors. They guaranteed their customers two tons of coke and heroin a month, from the border all the way to the shores of Lake Michigan. But they were greedy: They worked with the Sinaloa cartel, but they didn’t disdain working with the Beltrán Leyvas either. When El Chapo found out, he sent some men to Chicago to keep his distribution monopoly from being put at risk by rival cartels. At the same time that the Flores twins were receiving threats from Sinaloa, the DEA set its sights on them. They were arrested in 2009. In part thanks to the testimonies of Margarito and Pedro, who turned informers, the Americans were able to add a few more pieces to the complex puzzle of El Chapo’s and the Beltrán Leyvas’ movements.

A few months earlier the U.S. government had delivered another blow to the king of Sinaloa by arresting 750 members of his cartel in the United States. An army. American presidents don’t talk much about it, but there are entire legions of narcos within their borders. During the twenty-one months of the operation, more than $59 million in cash, more than 12,000 kilos of cocaine, more than 7,000 kilos of marijuana, more than 500 kilos of methamphetamine, about 1.3 million ecstasy pills, more than 8 kilos of heroin, 169 weapons, 149 vehicles, 3 airplanes, and 3 boats were seized in various states, from the East to the West coasts. An enormous success but a worrisome one, for its very scale was alarming. The American authorities looked the Sinaloa cartel in the eye, and what they saw was a multinational corporation with connections and branches all over the world, on whose boards sat supermanagers handling relations in every corner of the planet. Narco executives on Sinaloa salaries acted as contact points in numerous South American countries. And El Chapo was well along in conquering western Africa and making inroads in Spain.

For El Chapo, total domination over the 370 or so miles of border between Mexico and Arizona was the flywheel of his personal economy. He followed the market: When the demand for hielo—crystal meth — surged, he was there. A terrible drug — it costs less than coke and eats you up sooner. When you overdo it you start feeling the parasite effect: worms crawling under your skin. So you scratch yourself raw trying to cut open your flesh to get rid of them. It’s the side effect of a drug that otherwise has the same effect as coke, only bigger and worse. Request for it was on the rise, but there was no boss, no one who knew how to transform an opportunity into a river of money. El Chapo saw the opportunity; the Sinaloa cartel was ready. And he had the right man to manage the new business: Ignacio Coronel Villarreal, who became the King of Crystal. All you need to produce methamphetamine are clandestine labs and the right chemical substances. If you have good contacts on the Pacific coast, it’s not hard to get precursor shipments from China, Thailand, and Vietnam. And it’s very profitable: For every dollar you invest in raw materials, you’ll earn ten on the street.

That is Sinaloa’s great gift: the speed with which it sniffs out every new business opportunity. Sinaloa colonizes. Sinaloa wants to rule. Only Sinaloa.

• • •

El Chapo has a clear vision of today’s world: The West is in trouble; its ideals are in conflict with the market’s iron logic, so it needs lands without laws, lands without rights. Mexico has cocaine and the United States has cocaine users. Mexico has the cheap labor the United States needs. Mexico has soldiers and the United States has weapons. The world’s drowning in unhappiness? Mexico has the solution: cocaine. El Chapo grasped all this. He became the king of the narcos, the Steve Jobs of cocaine, with the mystical authority of the pope. Which is why February 22, 2014, will go down in history, for Mexico and the entire world. On that day, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, El Chapo, the most wanted narco on the planet, was arrested. At 6:40 A.M. in a hotel in the center of Mazatlán, in Sinaloa state. A maxi operation by Mexican marines and in collaboration with the DEA: two helicopters and six land artillery units. But not a single shot was fired. The most dangerous fugitive in Mexico, with a price of $5 million on his head, was hiding out in Sinaloa. Maybe that’s where he’d been for the past thirteen years, hiding in the region that made him what he was, that offered him protection.

The military operation had been launched about ten days before: Law enforcement officers had managed to identify several residences in Culiacán, El Chapo’s stronghold, where he usually stayed. The man who had been a master at digging tunnels to get drugs into the United States relied on them for his own getaways too: Several of his residences were connected by underground passageways. The military nearly caught him more than once, but he always managed to escape. Several members of the Sinaloa cartel had been arrested, though; El Chapo’s inner circle was shrinking. Earlier that week a raid of his ex-wife Griselda López’s house turned up some weapons and a tunnel that fed to the sewers. Mexico’s drug lord would clamber through the sewers to get from one hiding place to another.

What’s most extraordinary is that El Chapo was caught by surprise in Mazatlán, a tourist town. He wasn’t hiding up in the Sierra mountains, as most people thought. And his hotel in Mazatlán was nothing fancy: an ordinary building, with a nondescript lobby and a simple room. The way he’d always lived.

In Mexico his arrest was followed with the same anxiety as the World Cup finals, with more interest than a presidential election. Rumors of his arrest or murder had circulated for years. Which is why, on February 22, no one could believe it had actually happened. Thousands of tweets: “Is it really him? Where’s the proof?” “I won’t believe it till I see the photo of El Chapo in handcuffs.” “El Chapo is still El Chapo, they don’t have him!” Many tweeters did not hide their disappointment; many expressed their solidarity with the boss; many wrote in English. A hashtag was even created: #FreeChapo. These tweets say more about the world today than most articles and political powwows.

Verifying El Chapo’s capture proved to be as agonizing as the arrest itself. At first there were just unconfirmed reports: The Associated Press gave out the news at 9:54 A.M., after receiving a tip-off from an anonymous American official. The Mexican authorities did not confirm it, however. Meanwhile, word of his arrest started spreading all over the Internet. The Mexican authorities called a press conference for 11:30, but the secretary of state canceled it, leading people to think it wasn’t him. But the photo of a bare-chested man with a mustache, arrested by a soldier in camouflage, started to circulate. It sure looked like him, but thirteen years had passed since the last official photos; it could just be a close resemblance. Everyone waited with bated breath. At 12:08 the secretary of the interior, Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, called a new press conference, this time for 1:00 P.M. Would the rumors be denied or confirmed? Doubts were quelled at 12:33; the Mexican authorities confirmed the arrest on CNN. But still no official announcement. El Chapo’s fans were hoping it was all a terrible mistake. At 1:20 El Chapo’s photo disappeared from the DEA’s most wanted list. That’s how the Americans confirmed the news. They beat out the Mexican confirmation, which came a few minutes later, in the form of a tweet by President Enrique Peña Nieto, expressing his gratitude for the work of the security forces. In truth, he was patting himself on the back for the most important arrest since he’d taken office. At 2:04 a federal police helicopter landed in front of the group of reporters gathered in a navy hangar. During the press conference they confirmed what everyone already knew: El Chapo had been arrested. They filled in some details, about where and when. The attorney general of Mexico read the list of people arrested and goods seized: thirteen men, ninety-seven large guns, thirty-six handguns, two grenade launchers, forty-three vehicles, sixteen houses, and four farms. Only one thing was missing: the man himself. El Chapo made his entrance at 2:11, captured by photographers as he was escorted across the square to the police helicopter: black jeans and white shirt, neat hair and mustache. Looking a little tired and not in the least cocky as Mexican marines in camouflage hold him by the arms and make him lower his head. No presentation to the media, just these few photos to confirm his arrest. At 3:00 P.M., word was given that El Chapo was behind bars at the Penal del Altiplano, the prison in Almoloya de Juárez, in México state.

A few years earlier El Chapo had formed a new tie with the United States. In August 2011, his young wife Emma, an American citizen, tranquilly gave birth to twin girls in a clinic in Lancaster, near Los Angeles. The DEA knew but couldn’t do anything, because Emma, twenty-two at the time, had a clean record. El Chapo’s men had accompanied her to Lancaster, but she did take one precaution: Emma left the father’s name blank on the twins’ birth certificates. But everyone knows who the father is. The Mexican and American authorities exulted after El Chapo’s arrest, but alongside their messages on social networks were others, posted by regular people who considered El Chapo a hero, a benefactor, a Mexican god. The most widespread reaction was disbelief: “El Chapo is too clever to let himself be caught”; “El Chapo is too smart to let himself be framed”; “impossible that they nabbed him two feet from his stronghold.” As if El Chapo had orchestrated it all, as if he had decided that the moment for his arrest had come. There are all sorts of theories: Maybe he sensed that he was becoming too big a story politically, and the only way his cartel could keep doing business would be if he was arrested. Or maybe he knew a big feud was about to erupt, so he took himself out of the equation to avoid being killed by a new generation of Sinaloa narcos eager to take his place. Some have even quietly insinuated that his fedelissimo, El Mayo, also in hiding and fearing his own arrest or murder, sold his boss’s head. In fact, the press had been expecting El Mayo’s arrest for days, but to their surprise, El Chapo was arrested instead. The only certainty is ambiguity. At any rate, it’s hard to believe that it was purely a police action, because, as everyone knows, nothing in Sinaloa happens without El Chapo’s blessing. The king is dead, long live the king.

4. FRIEND KILLER

Matamoros, in the state of Tamaulipas in northeastern Mexico, rises on the southern bank of the Rio Bravo and is connected to the Texas city of Brownsville by four bridges. Those four bridges are like four pipelines through which white petrol is pumped into the United States. Here it’s the Gulf cartel that rules. In 1999 it was bringing up to fifty tons of cocaine into the United States every month, and its power had spread from the Gulf of Mexico to parts of the Pacific, areas conquered with violence, corruption, and agreements with other narco groups. The Gulf cartel was number one. And its number one was Osiel Cárdenas Guillén.

Osiel had heard the story a million times. El Padrino arrived last, took a seat, and toasted the new territory bosses. Sure, the details changed from one teller to the next, as unsteady as April showers, but the gist was always the same: The new world had been created at that meeting.

“If you can have the whole world, why be satisfied with just a piece?” This was said to be his retort to an impudent interlocutor who’d annoyed him for the umpteenth time with the story of El Padrino and the division of the kingdom. Osiel was born angry. Quarrelsome as a boy, tough as a teenager, violent as a young man. A blind, senseless rage that he nourished and nursed constantly, and that his lively intelligence made sadistic and demonic. He was born to parents who, indifferent to the poverty in which they lived, continued unperturbed to churn out babies whom they then left to crawl around in the dirt with the scrawny chickens; Osiel invented his own world, as far away as possible from the chaos that surrounded him. By age fourteen he was working as a mechanic’s assistant in the morning, and at a maquiladora, or factory, in the afternoon, where he, along with two hundred other people, assembled vacuum cleaners that some Yankee housewife would use a few miles to the north.

Osiel met a girl at the maquiladora—smart, with pearls for eyes — but Osiel was ashamed whenever he asked her out, because he couldn’t afford a car to go pick her up, or dinner in even a modest restaurant. He started dealing. Quick, profitable, risky enough to provide an adrenaline high. For pushers just starting out, whoever is the most unscrupulous usually takes the lead. Cruelty is essential; without it you might appear weak, and your adversaries will take advantage of you. It’s like with dogs: Whichever one growls the loudest becomes the head of the pack.

He was arrested for the first time in 1989, when he was twenty-one, for homicide, but the charge didn’t stick. When he was twenty-five he was arrested in Brownsville, Texas, and accused of drug trafficking; he was in possession of 2 kilos of cocaine. Sentenced to five years in prison, he got lucky again; thanks to a prisoner exchange between Mexico and the United States, he was sent back to his own country. In 1995, after just one year behind bars, Osiel was free again.

Great criminal leaders often have in common the desire to create an aura for themselves, the desire to enchant, seduce. It matters little whether the objective is a woman to bed or a rival dealer to eliminate by convincing your accomplices that the bastard has it coming to him. Once you find the right opening, the way to a person’s will, you’ve won. Osiel knew he could cut off hands, threaten family members, or burn down warehouses, but he also knew that the fastest way to get what he wanted was to touch the right chord. Those who didn’t fear him adored him. Acting as a madrina, or informer, Osiel infiltrated the Federal Judicial Police, gradually acquiring the protection that allowed him to move about freely. Now he could control both fronts and network with the Gulf cartel men in the meantime. He knew Salvador Gómez Herrera, alias El Chava, who became the Gulf cartel leader after Juan García Ábrego was arrested. El Chava too told Osiel the story of El Padrino raising his glass to toast Ábrego’s receiving the Matamoros corridor.

In the second half of the 1990s the Gulf cartel faced a war of succession. Plenty of people were ready to write off the organization that only a few years earlier — after El Padrino’s arrest and after the Golden Age of García Ábrego as leader — had been one of Mexico’s most powerful cartels. But now it had the police on its back, as well as the FBI and rival cartels. Founded in the 1970s by a man with the high-sounding name of Juan Nepomuceno Guerra, who had smuggled alcohol into the United States during Prohibition, the cartel’s days now seemed numbered. The new leaders fell one by one. García Ábrego fell, arrested by the Mexican authorities and then extradited to the United States, where he is serving eleven life sentences. García Ábrego’s brother Humberto failed: too weak. Sergio “El Checo” Gómez fell, betrayed by a conspiracy orchestrated by his partners and his bodyguards. Óscar Malherbe de León fell, arrested immediately after he took command. Hugo Baldomero Medina Garza, the Lord of the Trailers, fell too: His arrest put a stop to the tons of cocaine he’d been shipping to the United States every month, hidden in crates of vegetables or bags of seafood. The police celebrated, but in the meantime, El Chava and Osiel became friends and accomplices. They seemed inseparable, helped each other out, and amassed power and money. Not enough, though, at least for Osiel. You can’t wield power as part of a pair, as he’d always say to whoever insisted on pulling out that El Padrino story: “If you can have the whole world, why be satisfied with just a piece?” And so, after they were arrested together, and after they bribed the prison guards to escape, Osiel killed El Chava. On that day in 1998 he obtained two things: absolute control of the Gulf cartel and a nickname, El Mata Amigos, or Friend Killer.

You’re someone who kills your friends. If you don’t have any ties, what is there to fear? If you’re bright, you have a radiant future ahead of you. El Mata Amigos restructured the organization and brought it into the twenty-first century. Protection was guaranteed through bribes. Even the Twenty-first Motorized Cavalry Regiment of Nuevo Laredo was in his pay. It was good theater: The authorities would receive a report that a shipment of cocaine was hidden in the warehouses of an abandoned factory on the edge of the desert. They’d rush to the site in force, followed by a host of obliging journalists: a rapid, bloodless raid, no one there, just some white powder. But never an arrest. Photos, handshakes, smiles. A good, clean job.

Meanwhile, the frontier between Mexico and the United States was being violated day after day, hour after hour. But other organizations also wanted the sinuous tongue of Tamaulipas, which licks America’s ass it is said, and they declared war on the Gulf cartel. The Valencia brothers, together with the Tijuana cartel, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes’s Juárez cartel, and even Los Negros, the death squad in the service of Sinaloa — they all challenged the Gulf cartel. A real war. Cities such as Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, and Matamoros became battlegrounds. There wasn’t an hour day or night when executions and kidnappings weren’t taking place; it wasn’t unusual to find bodies on the street, hacked to pieces and stuffed into plastic bags.

The escalation of violence and deaths increased national and international pressure for the capture of Osiel Cárdenas Guillén. He was finally arrested and four years later was extradited to the United States. The cartel subsequently decentralized, with two drug lords sharing control: Osiel’s brother Antonio Ezequiel Cárdenas Guillén, alias Tony Tormenta (killed by the Mexican army in Matamoros on November 5, 2010), and Jorge Eduardo Costilla Sánchez, alias El Coss (arrested by the Mexican navy in Tampico on September 12, 2012), leaders who proved unable to put an end to the internal feuds devouring the cartel. And soon enough, once their suns had set, it was Mario Armando Ramírez Treviño’s turn. But Mario, known as El Pelón, Baldy, or X20, was arrested in Reynosa on August 17, 2013. So now who? The DEA bet on one of three men: Luis Alberto Trinidad Cerón, known as El Guicho, Juan Francisco Carrizales, known as El 98, and Juan Alberto de la Cruz Álvarez, known as El Juanillo. But there would also be room for another of Osiel’s brothers, Homero Cárdenas Guillén, known as El Majadero, or Stupid. Some say he sits atop the Gulf command structure; others say he died of a heart attack in March 2014.

Today the Gulf cartel continues to take advantage of its proximity to the U.S. border. It is an efficient money-making machine, using an unbelievable variety of means to transport cocaine north, including underground tunnels, which are also used for human trafficking. These humans are the new drug mailmen: In exchange for the mirage of a new life beyond the border, they carry up to half a million dollars of drugs on them. Or they use the buses on I-35, which goes from the border city of Laredo, Texas, all the way to Minnesota, or I-25, which you can pick up twenty-five miles from El Paso, Texas, and take all the way to Wyoming. Buses are the perfect mode of transport for narcos, because they’re not usually X-rayed. But the Gulf cartel doesn’t disdain more creative options either, such as trains or submarines: fast, safe, and capable of carrying astronomical quantities of cocaine.

• • •

“In the heart of every man is a desperate desire for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue.” Nazario Moreno González, one of the most powerful bosses of The Michoacán Family, often quoted these words, by writer and Christian activist John Eldredge. Moreno González preached the divine right to eliminate his enemies and was never without his “bible” of teachings. “It is better to die fighting face to face than to live your whole life humiliated and on your knees,” Moreno wrote, taking his cue from the sayings of the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.

For some he was El Chayo, for others El Más Loco, the Craziest One. But everyone remembers him as the Mexican boss who died twice. In December 2010, the Mexican authorities declared that the boss of The Michoacán Family had been killed by the Federal Police of Apatzingán. Even the then president, Felipe Calderón, went out of his way to explain that the forces of order had surprised Nazario Moreno González during a party organized by some La Familia members, and that he had been killed during the ensuing shoot-out. His body was never found, but no one doubted the official version: It had been taken away by La Familia members. Not until October 2011, that is, almost a year later, when Mario Buenrostro Quiroz, the leader of Los Aboytes, a group of kidnappers with ties to The Michoacán Family, was arrested. Under interrogation Buenrostro revealed that El Chayo was alive and had become the head of the Knights Templar cartel, which had broken away from The Michoacán Family. Rumors started flying. Confirmation came on March 9, 2014, when marine and army special forces killed a man who had forcefully resisted arrest during a shootout in Tumbiscatío, Michoacán. Fingerprints and a DNA test left no room for doubt this time: It was Nazario Moreno González, who had officially been dead for more than three years. During those dead years he’d been able to command undisturbed from his stronghold in Michoacán, without even having to worry about being arrested: No one hunts down a dead man.

Michoacán is on the Pacific coast. This was where the Sinaloa gomeros had moved with their opium poppies, and they were the ones who taught the campesinos how to cultivate them. Michoacán-Sinaloa-United States: For years this was the route.

The Michoacán Family claimed to be born to oppose violence and protect and defend the weak. For several years the Gulf cartel, which was expanding in those areas, relied on La Familia for paramilitary support. But La Familia ultimately became an independent cartel specializing in methamphetamine trafficking, and it became the principal supplier of meth for the United States. This area, with its hills — a natural refuge — and Pacific shoreline — that facilitates transportation — and above all with the vast stretches of fertile terrain in the so-called Tierra Caliente, or Hot Land — perfect for growing marijuana — has attracted traffickers for decades. But today it is dotted with meth labs. According to Michael Braun, former DEA chief of operations, La Familia has specialized laboratories that can produce up to 50 kilos of methamphetamine in eight hours. La Familia also has very strict rules about selling it: never to its own members; never to Mexicans. The cartel hangs banners in its territories: “We are against the use of drugs and we say no to the exploitation of women and children.”

La Familia cartel celebrated its entry into the world of Mexican drug trafficking in high style: On the night of September 6, 2006, twenty men dressed in black, their faces covered with ski masks, burst into the discotheque Sol y Sombra in Uruapan, some sixty miles from Morelia, the capital of Michoacán. Armed to the teeth, they fired into the air and shouted at the public and the girls dancing on cubes to get down on the floor. Amid general panic, they raced up to the second level, opened black plastic trash bags, and rolled five decapitated heads across the dance floor. On their way out the hit men left a note on the floor, next to the severed heads: “La Familia doesn’t kill for money, it doesn’t kill women, it doesn’t kill innocent people. The only ones who die are those who deserve it. Let it be known by all: this is divine justice.” The Michoacán Family had introduced itself to Mexico.

The organization’s members view their territory as sacred and will not tolerate it being sullied by drugs or disease. This makes them quite similar to Italian mafias, which stop and punish whoever deals in their territory. The Michoacán Family has a sui generis welfare system. They fight drug addiction in an unusual, martial fashion: They go to the rehab clinics and encourage the addicts to come clean in every way possible, including through the help of prayer. Then they make them work for the cartel. If they refuse, they are killed. Prayer meetings play an important role in the organization; one’s career depends on them. The cartel lavishes money on peasants, businesses, schools, and churches, and it promotes itself in the local papers in order to gain public support. In an ad in La Voz de Michoacán in November 2006, La Familia announced: “Our strategies may be aggressive at times, but this is the only way to impose order in the state. Some people might not understand our actions right now, but we know that in the hardest hit zones they do, because it is possible to fight these delinquents, who have come here from other states, and we’re not going to let them come to Michoacán and commit crimes.” La Familia is like a parallel state within the state of Michoacán. It finances community projects, controls petty crime, resolves local disputes. And it demands protection money from businesses: a hundred pesos a month for a stall at the local market; thirty thousand for a car dealership. Businesses are often forced to close and turn operations over to the organization, which then uses them for money laundering.

“We want President Felipe Calderón to know that we are not his enemies, that we admire him. We are open to dialogue. We do not want Los Zetas in Michoacán. What we want is peace and tranquillity. We know we are a necessary evil…. We want to reach an agreement, we want to establish a national pact.” This was the voice of Servando Gómez Martínez, alias La Tuta, speaking in a phone call to the show Voz y Solución, hosted by the journalist Marcos Knapp on a local channel of Michoacán CB Televisión. Gómez, a high-ranking member of the cartel and one of Moreno González’s associates, was proposing nothing less than an alliance with President Calderón to eliminate their most feared competitors, but the government refused to negotiate. Nevertheless, La Familia has been one of the fastest-growing cartels during the years of Mexico’s war on drugs. Its power has spread from Michoacán to the neighboring states of Guerrero, Queretaro, and México. And also into the United States: In October 2009, federal authorities released the findings of a four-year investigation — known as Project Coronado — on La Familia’s activities in the United States. It led to one of the biggest operations against Mexican drug cartels operating in U.S. territory. More than three thousand agents took part in just one raid, which lasted two days and involved local, state, and federal authorities: 303 men were arrested in nineteen different U.S. states; 62 kilos of cocaine, 330 kilos of methamphetamine, 440 kilos of marijuana, 144 weapons, 109 vehicles, and 2 drug labs were seized, along with $3.4 million in cash. In November 2010 La Familia proposed another pact: It offered to dismantle its own cartel on the condition that the state, the federal government, and the federal police guarantee Michoacán’s security. The proposal appeared on flyers slipped under the doors of homes and shops, in phone booths, on cartel banners hung across streets, in letters sent to blogs, radio stations, newspapers, and national and international press agencies. It claimed that La Familia was created to make up for the government’s failure to provide for the safety of its citizens, and that it was composed of Michoacán men and women who were prepared to give their lives to defend the state. But once again Felipe Calderón, who was born in Michoacán, refused to negotiate with the cartel.

The conflict between La Familia and Los Zetas reduced Michoacán to a war zone. What is considered to be the first act of narco-terrorism in Mexican history took place in Morelia, Michoacán’s capital city, on September 15, 2008, the eve of Mexico’s Independence Day. Shortly after Governor Leonel Godoy rang the Independence bell and declared three times “¡Viva Mexico!” two frag grenades exploded in the crowded square, killing eight people and wounding over a hundred, all of them innocent civilians. Even the innocent are victims in the narcos’ war. The authorities pointed a finger at La Familia, which in turn hung banners blaming Los Zetas: “‘Coward’ is the correct term for those who undermine the peace and tranquillity of the country. Mexico and Michoacán are not alone. Thank you, Zetas, for your contemptible acts.”

The Morelia attack marked a turning point, a shift from El Chapo’s methods to those of Los Zetas and La Familia. Before there were rules. If you betrayed El Chapo, you were simply put to death, period. No macabre or gruesome scenes. Today ferocity is theatrically displayed. Extreme violence is compounded by public humiliation. El Chapo understood the shift immediately. The day after the attack he sent around a prounouncement via e-mail denying responsibility for this and similar attacks that was signed by El Mayo as well. “We of Sinaloa have always defended the people, we have always respected the families of capos and the crew, we have always respected the government, we have always respected women and children. When the Sinaloa cartel ruled all over Mexico, there were no executions, and do you know why? Because we know how to do our job, and we have feelings. Soon you will see more Sinaloans in Michoacán (we will take back all the territory that was snatched from us and kill all those who have offended the Sinaloa family), and neither the government nor the cartels will be able to stop us.”

The new cartels flaunt their ferocity, which serves as a sort of ambassador. Sinaloa resorts to ferocity only when necessary. It is a confrontation between postmodernism and modernism. Between screams and silence. The rules of the game have changed. The number of players has increased. New cartels spring up quickly, devouring territories and entire regions. It’s crazy making, all these new cartels. More flexible structures, faster responses, familiarity with new technology, ostentatiously lurid killings, and obscure, pseudoreligious philosophies. It is altogether a new level of frenzy.

• • •

A residential neighborhood in Cancún. A small van, left parked for days, started attracting people’s attention, so they called the police: “That van stinks of rotting meat.” When the police opened the door they discovered three bodies, handcuffed, with plastic bags over their heads. A note next to them: “We are the new group Mata Zetas. We are against kidnapping and extortion, and we will fight against them in every state, for a cleaner Mexico.” Signed: “Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (Los Mata Zetas).” It was later discovered that before being killed the three were interrogated by men with ski masks and assault rifles. A video was posted on YouTube. This was how the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación — Los Mata Zetas, the Zetas Killers — introduced itself.

The cartel traces its inception to the death on July 29, 2010, of Ignacio Coronel Villarreal, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel in the state of Jalisco, one of El Chapo’s trusted collaborators, and uncle of Emma Coronel, El Chapo’s current wife. He was killed in a shoot-out with the Mexican army in Zapopan, in the state of Jalisco. His followers suspected he was betrayed by his own cartel, so they decided to break away and form a new one. Among the founders of Jalisco New Generation were Nemesio Oseguera Ramos, alias El Mencho; Erick Valencia; El 85; and Martín Arzola, El 53, all former members of the Millennium cartel, then a branch of Sinaloa. So began a waltz of alliances and ruptures. In early 2011 the Jalisco New Generation cartel decided to take possession of Guadalajara, the capital city of Jalisco. A free-for-all broke out. But only a few months later they allied with Sinaloa again. Since then they have been fighting against Los Zetas for control of Guadalajara and Veracruz, but they are also active in the states of Colima, Guanajuato, Nayarit, and Michoacán.

Los Zetas and Jalisco face off openly. On September 20, 2011, right in the center of Veracruz, thirty-five bodies — twenty-three men and twelve women — were found in two trucks, in plain daylight. The victims showed signs of torture, their hands tied, some with bags over their heads. All were Los Zetas members. A video was posted on the Internet after the massacre: five men with ski masks sitting at a table with a tablecloth, small bottles of water in front of them, just like at a press conference. Which is what it was, a press conference to claim responsibility for the crime: “We want the armed forces to believe us when we say that our only objective is to put an end to Los Zetas. We are anonymous, faceless warriors, but proud to be Mexican.” A few days later the lifeless bodies of thirty-six people were found in three different houses in Boca del Río, also in the state of Veracruz. On November 24, a few days before the inauguration of the International Book Fair in Guadalajara, the police discovered twenty-six bodies inside three vans, dead of asphyxiation and blows to the head. On December 22, in the early hours of the morning, three public buses were attacked by drug traffickers on Highway 105 in Veracruz: sixteen dead, including three U.S. citizens from Texas who were in Mexico for Christmas vacation. The next day, in Tampico Alto, Veracruz, ten bodies were found: tortured, handcuffed, almost all decapitated. On Christmas Day near Tampico, in Tamaulipas on the Veracruz state border, army soldiers performing a routine patrol discovered thirteen cadavers in a trailer truck. They also found drug cartel banners on the scene with messages that referred to feuds among rival groups.

• • •

July 1, 2012. Mexico has just elected a new president, Enrique Peña Nieto. The war on drug trafficking is one of his priorities. Twenty-four hours after his election a group of about forty killers stops four kids between the ages of fifteen and sixteen who are dealing drugs for the Familia Michoacana, at ten in the morning in Zacazonapan in central Mexico. Other Familia members show up. Shooting breaks out. An hour of confusion and terror. Schools suspend classes until the army and police arrive, who confirm the number of dead: at least eight.

The forty killers belong to the Knights Templar cartel, founded just over a year earlier in yet another upheaval in the murderous madness that contemporary Mexico has been condemned to by drug trafficking. The Knights Templar are exiles from La Familia Michoacana, which, they feel, has lost sight of its principles and now regularly practices theft, kidnapping, extortion. The Knights Templar, on the other hand, maintains a very rigid honor code. Its members are required to fight against materialism, injustice, and tyranny. They are waging an ideological war to defend ethical social values. They swear to protect the oppressed, widows, and orphans. It is forbidden to abuse women and minors or to use their power to deceive them. Kidnapping for money is strictly prohibited. Authorization to kill is required, since no one should take a life for money or for the fun of it: You first have to investigate, find out if there is sufficient motive, and only then can you proceed. A Knight Templar must not fall prey to sectarianism or pettiness. He must promote patriotism and show pride in his country. He must be humble and respectable. The use of drugs is forbidden. The Knight Templar must be an example of chivalry for all. And he must always seek the truth, because God is Truth. Whoever betrays or breaks the code of silence will be punished with death, his family will suffer the same fate, and his property will be confiscated.

This clearly insane parody masks a very young, very aggressive group at war with its original cartel — now grown weak — whose territory it intends to seize, perhaps along with some neighboring areas. Its members feel omnipotent enough to declare war on Los Zetas. Like the original Knights Templar — the medieval order of chivalry founded in Jerusalem after the First Crusade to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land — these new knights claim to have been charged with a divine mission. Members are elected by a council of more experienced brothers, and once they join they can never abandon the “cause”; they take a vow that they must honor at the cost of their own lives. They must participate in ceremonies in which they dress like the Templars from whom they take their name: helmets, white tunics, and red crosses on their chests. In the countryside, the cartel distributes a manual outlining its principles, which are all linked to their fundamental aim to “protect the inhabitants of the free, sovereign, and secular state of Michoacán.” The cartel flaunts its purifying intentions while it organizes an army so as to dominate the amphetamine business. The Knights Templar are well equipped and are not afraid of openly challenging the authorities.

Blood calls for blood. It’s not just an expression. The history of Mexican cartels shows that all attempts to fight violence with violence have only led to more killings. Under President Vicente Fox, from 2000 to 2006, no decisive initiatives were taken against drug trafficking. The troops sent to the U.S. border to hinder cartel operations were insufficient and poorly equipped. The turning point came on December 11, 2006. President Felipe Calderón, who had just installed himself in Los Pinos, the Mexican White House, sent 6,500 soldiers to the state of Michoacán. It was a historic date, destined to end up in Mexican schoolbooks: a declaration of war between two opposing states, Mexico and the “narco-state.” The narco-state has an unlimited appetite, and Calderón knew it, which is why he launched the war on drugs. He couldn’t let a parasite state dictate the law. More than 45,000 soldiers have been involved in the war, in addition to the regular local and federal police forces. But blood calls for blood, and the threatened cartels have responded with worsening brutality. To judge from the numbers, Calderón’s war has not been won: The Mexican government’s official drug war bulletin of January 11, 2012, noted 47,515 people killed by violence associated with organized crime between December 11, 2006, and September 30, 2011. What’s worse is that the number of deaths increased exponentially: In 2007 there were 2,826 deaths connected to drug trafficking; in 2008 the number rose to 6,838; in 2009 it reached 9,614; in 2010, 15,273; and by the end of September 2011 it had already reached 12,903, with three months still to go before the end of the year. The new minister of the interior under Peña Nieto, Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, declared in mid-February 2013 that Mexican drug war deaths would reach around 70,000 during Felipe Calderón’s six-year term, adding that it is impossible to provide a precise official figure because “at the end of the previous legislature they stopped keeping official accounts” of drug war victims, just as there is no register of missing persons or unidentified bodies at the morgue. But some hold that the number of deaths in this dirty war is much higher. Death accounting is an imprecise science, and a few canceled lives always slip through the cracks. How many victims were dumped in narcofosas, or mass graves? How many bodies dissolved in acid? How many cadavers burned, and thus missing forever? Politicians at every level — local, regional, and national — are victims: In the first six years of the Mexican drug war, thirty-one Mexican mayors were killed, thirteen of them in 2010 alone. Honest people are now afraid to run for office; they know that sooner or later the cartels will arrive and try to replace them with a more welcome candidate. Amnesty International published a report in May 2014 stating that the number of victims between December 2006 and November 2012 (that is, during Calderon’s six-year term) was 136,100 (and not the 70,000 official Mexican sources say). Associations such as the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, founded by poet and activist Javier Sicilia after his son was killed by narcos, maintain that the total is much higher.

Numbers and figures. All I see is blood and money.