Pubdate: Mon, 18 Apr 2005
Source: Time Magazine (Canada)
Copyright: 2005, Canoe Limited Partnership.
Contact:  http://www.timecanada.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1115
Author: Tim Padgett

THE KILLERS GROW BOLD

Brutal New Drug Gangs Are Terrorizing The U.S.-Mexico Border

Violent urban legend has always swirled around Mexican drug
traffickers, but few of them have ever set out to build a reputation
as vicious as that of Heriberto Lazcano, 28. As leader of the Zetas, a
new and ruthless drug gang situated along the U.S. border, Lazcano has
perpetrated crimes that range from the brutal to the bizarre.

In one instance last summer, Mexican officials say, Lazcano murdered a
prominent Tijuana publisher in his car in broad daylight as his two
young children watched horrified from the backseat. In January the
Zetas attempted a raid on a federal prison in Matamoros, Mexico,
during which they allegedly blindfolded, handcuffed and shot six
prison employees in the head. Lazcano's men--many of them former
commandos in the Mexican military--have launched rocket-propelled
grenades at police, and Lazcano is purported to have fed human victims
to lions and tigers that he keeps on his ranches.

It's little surprise that Lazcano is known as "El Verdugo"--the
Executioner.

While savagery like El Verdugo's might evoke a Hollywood gangster
movie, it has become a grim reality of life in some Mexican border
towns.

Upstart groups like the Zetas have emerged largely as a result of the
Mexican government's recent crackdown on the big cartels that have
long monopolized the country's $25 billion-a-year drug trade.

Experts call the phenomenon "atomization": as the large Mafias
decompose, more reckless "microcartels" spin off or move in. In their
heyday in the 1980s and '90s, Mexico's biggest kingpins ran networks
that employed thousands of people; now gangs like the Zetas, whose
members number at most in the low hundreds, are waging vicious battles
against one another--and against remnants of cartels like the Sinaloa
Mafia--to gain a foothold in the trade.

Officials in the U.S. and Mexico believe those turf fights are behind
a surge in murders, kidnappings and criminal extortion in several
towns along the U.S.-Mexico border. The border city of Nuevo Laredo,
Mexico, never known for drug violence until the Zetas moved there a
few years ago, saw more than 60 gangland-style killings in 2004, and
they have continued at the same bloody pace this year.

That is causing alarm among U.S. officials, who see signs that the
violence is spilling across the border.

About 30 U.S. citizens have been kidnapped or killed in Nuevo Laredo
since last summer.

A clash there between local police and gang members last month
culminated in a shoot-out on the Gateway to the Americas Bridge, which
spans the Rio Grande and connects the town to Laredo, Texas. U.S.
officials fear that recent drug slayings as far north as Dallas have
involved Zeta triggermen. Last September the Zetas allegedly kidnapped
Yvette Martinez, 28, a Laredo woman, along with a friend; the women
are still missing. "These criminal organizations used to have rules
about women and children," says Martinez's stepfather William
Slemaker. "Now they're out of control."

No one is more vexed than Mexican President Vicente Fox, who is under
pressure from the Bush Administration to crack down on the flow of
drugs and illegal migrants across the Mexican border, amid fears that
terrorists might exploit the lawlessness to sneak into the U.S. Mexico
was infuriated by a recent U.S. alert about security dangers on the
Mexican border and by a State Department report last month claiming
that 90% of the cocaine hitting U.S. streets comes via Mexico, much
higher than prior estimates of less than 75%. Mexico disputes the
report, especially since it has made strides in breaking up the large
cartels. "Nobody has given us credit," Fox complained at a press
conference before a meeting with Bush last month.

It's harder for Fox to trumpet his accomplishments when criminals like
El Verdugo are on the loose.

According to Mexican officials, Lazcano was a clean-cut Mexican army
recruit from the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz when he was picked a
decade ago to be part of the highly trained Airborne Special Forces
Group. The unit was sent to the eastern border to battle drug
trafficking. But in the late 1990s, Lazcano and more than 30 other
members of the special forces began working for drug lord Osiel
Cardenas, head of the Matamoros-based Gulf cartel, which at the time
controlled almost one-third of the Mexican drug trade.

As Cardenas' enforcers, protecting drug shipments and rubbing out
foes, the gang members--who dubbed themselves Zetas after the radio
call name of their original leader, who was killed in 2002--were paid
as much as $15,000 a month, compared with their $700 army salary.

Zeta bosses like Lazcano wore Rolex watches and ostrich-skin boots and
imitated other famous drug lords by raising exotic animals on their
ranches.

Michael Shelby, the U.S. Attorney in Houston, says the Zetas' military
discipline, arsenal and wiretap capability make them more dangerous
than other drug groups.

Adds Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, Mexico's deputy attorney general
for organized crime: "You had soldiers from an elite force
transferring all the heavy military mystique--the honor, valor,
loyalty--to a drug trafficker." After the government captured Cardenas
in 2003, the Zetas had to strike out more on their own. They launched
a lethal campaign against Mexican authorities and rival traffickers
gunning for control over Cardenas' former trafficking routes.

Mexican officials insist that half the original Zetas have been
arrested or killed, but because of intense recruitment and training of
hundreds of Zetitas (Little Zetas), the gang has cells scattered
around Mexico. They engage in ransom kidnappings and the extortion of
businesses, from convenience stores to car dealerships. "The Zetas now
victimize the general population," says Art Fontes, an FBI agent in
Laredo. "Honest businesspeople are coming here from Nuevo Laredo out
of fear."

Fox recently sent more than 700 soldiers and federal agents to patrol
Nuevo Laredo's streets.

Still, a local journalist was shot nine times last week (she lived),
as she reported on an attorney's slaying--and the Zetas are top
suspects in both cases.

Some U.S. officials privately complain that many Mexican police aid
the Zetas. And other potential microcartels are proliferating on the
U.S.'s doorstep: in the Tijuana--San Diego corridor, police are
dealing with a gang known as Narco-Juniors, a group of affluent
juvenile delinquents recruited as hit men in the 1990s by the Tijuana
drug cartel.

Authorities in the Juarez--El Paso corridor, meanwhile, report a
growing presence of the Mara Salvatrucha, a machete-wielding gang that
has terrified Central America in recent years.

The threat from groups like the Zetas may persist for years. "This is
like any instance of monopoly busting," says Jorge Chabat, a professor
of international relations at the Center for Economic Research and
Teaching in Mexico City. "Once the little guys are let into the
business, it's hard to push them out again."
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