It has been widely assumed that President Felipe Calderón was determined to escalate his government’s anti-cartel drive in the remaining months of his tenure, so as to be able to step down with his policy vindicated. Since the 1 July elections he has deployed more troops and federal police to drug-war hotspots, and there have been a number of high-profile captures, but none as impressive as the string carried out in September, which netted much of the top leadership of the Cártel del Golfo (CDG) gang. Just how this, and the reported rifts within Los Zetas, will affect the course of the inter-gang wars, has yet to be seen.
The arrests of leading CDG bosses in September took place in Tamaulipas, long a stronghold of that organisation. Most of the arrests were carried out by the Mexican navy, who has built up a reputation for being far more efficient than the army:
-On 2 September police arrested Comandante Diablo’(David Rosales Guzmán), believed to have been the leading CDG figure in Monterrey and the man leading the fight against Los Zetas in the whole of Nuevo León state.
-On 3 September a navy unit captured ‘El Gordo’ or ‘M1’ (Mario Cárdenas Guillén), brother of two successive CDG heads, Osiel and the late ‘Tony Tormenta’ (Antonio Ezequiel), believed to have been one of the heads of the Rojos CDG faction, which was engaged in a struggle with the Metros faction led by ‘El Coss’ (Jorge Eduardo Costilla Sánchez).
-On 12 September a navy unit captured ‘El Coss’. That same day another navy unit captured the reputed leading CDG figure in the south of Tamaulipas, ‘Sierra’ (Gabriel Montes Sermeño).
The CDG, once the most powerful drug-trafficking organisation in Mexico, had been greatly weakened by the defection of Los Zetas, originally hired as a team of ‘enforcers’ who in 2010 set themselves up as an independent organisation, engaging the CDG in a bloody turf war. Several analysts reacted to the recent string of arrests predicting that they would trigger a wave of factional in-fighting, leading to the disappearance of the CDG.
Similar predictions were made in the past about the Tijuana and Juárez gangs, which, though diminished have managed to stay in business. Since its creation in the 1970s the CDG has lost five leaders: its founder Juan García Ábrego, arrested in 1996; Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, arrested in 2003 and extradited to the US in 2007; Tony Tormenta’, killed in 2010; the recently arrested ‘El Gordo and ‘El Coss’. Up to the time of writing there had been no indication of who might succeed the last two.
What has gained currency, though, is the news that the CDG has struck an alliance with Los Caballeros Templarios (LCT, which splintered from La Familia Michoacana) against Los Zetas. Moreover, on 24 September banners in several cities proclaimed that they had been joined by the reputed Zetas boss in Nuevo Laredo, ‘El Talibán’ or ‘Z-50’ (Iván Velázquez Caballero), who had recently fallen out with number-two Zetas leader ‘Z-40’(Miguel Ángel Treviño).
Velázquez Caballero had publicly accused Treviño of betraying a number of leading Zetas recently arrested by the authorities in much the same language as earlier banners and videos which had been construed as signalling a rift between Treviño and top Zetas leader ‘El Lazca’ or ‘Z-3’ (Heriberto Lazcano) [SSR-12-08]. A late-September banner purportedly signed by Treviño protests his continuing loyalty to Lazcano and derides both the Caballeros Templarios and their LFM enemies, hinting that he is aware that a new anti-Zetas alliance has been formed.
On 27 September a navy unit captured ‘El Talibán’ in San Luis Potosí. Upon his arrest navy sources said he had been the leading Zetas figure in Aguascalientes, Coahuila, Zacatecas and parts of Guanajuato. Given the success the navy has recently had in locating and capturing top gang leaders, this intelligence is worth taking seriously.
Snitching
That a drug-gang boss should be accused of betraying their rivals to the authorities is not a new phenomenon. It has been practiced most assiduously by those organisations that managed to infiltrate the law-enforcement establishment (the defunct Beltrán Leyva gang being the most notorious in this respect). Indeed, much of the intelligence that has led to the capture of prominent members of trafficking organisations has come from anonymous tips presumed to come mainly from rivals, or from confessions of captured narcos seeking leniency. It is hardly surprising that this should be considered heinous behaviour by the drug gangs, and it has often been invoked as the motive for ‘executions’.
A case in point is the exchange of accusations between two gangs that were formed by a split that in 2011 marked the end of the Milenio/Los Valencia: the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) led by ‘el Mencho’ (Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes) and La Resistencia, led by ‘El Molca’ (Ramiro Pozos González). The former became associated with the Sinaloa gang, the latter with LFM and the CDG.
In late 2011 the CJNG struck an alliance with Los Zetas to jointly fight against La Resistencia — a turf war responsible for much of the violence recorded in Jalisco. Pozos González publicly accused the CJNG of acting in collusion with state and municipal police, but on 6 September, acting on “information received”, a combined army-police unit located and arrested ‘R-1’ (Ramón Álvarez Ayala), reputed second-in-command of the CJNG, and his brother and lieutenant‘R-2’ (Rafael). Six days later the federal police located and arrested Pozos González.
Setback in Piedras Negras
One of the weaknesses in the Calderón administration’s anti-gang drive is the failure to curb the virtual takeover of prisons by inmates convicted of federal offences (chiefly drug-trafficking and organised crime), with the tolerance and sometimes connivance of wardens and guards. On 17 September there was a massive jailbreak from the prison in Piedras Negras, Coahuila (just across the border from Eagle Pass, Texas): 131 inmates fled some through a deep, 7-metre-long tunnel others reportedly through the main gate. Of these, 86 had been convicted of federal offences.
The warden, watch officer and chief of guards have been remanded in custody and are being investigated to determine if they had any involvement in the escape. Jorge Luis Morán, Coahuila’s public security secretary, has said that Los Zetas are believed to have organised the prison break.
This was the second-biggest jailbreak during Calderón’s term of office. The first, was from the prison in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, in which 141 inmates escaped.
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