SAN FERNANDO: THE MATRIX OF MASS MURDER IN TAMAULIPAS

Members of the Central American Mothers Caravan with photos of their missing relatives, Guadalajara, Mexico, December 2013. The group was petitioning the Mexican government to release DNA information about victims of cartel violence in San Fernando.

By Claudio Lomnitz

New York Times Book Review

In April 2011 Mexican soldiers discovered mass graves in San Fernando, a city of some 30,000 people in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas. One hundred and ninety-three corpses were exhumed and moved to the border city of Matamoros. Soon the local morgue was swamped with people trying to discover whether their disappeared family members were among the bodies.

To cover the story, the news magazine Proceso sent a journalist named Marcela Turati. She was shaken not only by the crowd of families seeking information about their relatives but also by the behavior of the local, state, and federal governments, all scrambling to avoid any bad publicity that might dissuade tourists from visiting Matamoros over the approaching Easter vacation. 

To reduce media attention, forensic services moved the bodies again, this time to faraway Mexico City, permanently dispersing the mobs of desperate family members, most of whom could not afford an extended stay in the capital. No government body conducted a serious criminological investigation or made an effective attempt to bring the mass murderers to justice.

Turati, however, launched a twelve-year investigation that took her to villages in Michoacán and Guanajuato and as far as Guatemala and El Salvador in search of the victims’ families. It also led her into San Fernando itself, a town so deeply mired in cartel violence that she only dared visit it for the first time five years after the massacres, and even then at considerable risk. 

Her devastating account of the case, San Fernando, Última Parada, does what the country’s criminal justice system failed to do: explain how and why hundreds of young men traveling north by bus to the border cities of Reynosa and Matamoros were abducted and murdered.

The book is made up of interview upon interview, deftly collated and divided thematically into sections preceded by Turati’s brief, expert comments. It becomes a collage of the voices of witnesses: policemen, store owners, the victims’ family members, local and national politicians, journalists, doctors, forensic specialists, funeral-home owners, women and men, young and old. With this chorus Turati has given us arguably the most thorough and absorbing piece of investigative journalism yet produced about Mexico’s brutal political economy.

Today Mexico’s illicit economies involve the violent regulation of a wide range of markets, from gasoline theft, human trafficking, agribusiness, and real estate to illegal logging, fishing, and mining. But it was in the drug economy that entrepreneurs first developed the forms of social organization necessary to deploy such violence. In Mexico the term narco has therefore come to stand for any mafia, including organizations with only a secondary involvement in drugs.

In the mid-1980s, when the crack epidemic was a major public concern in the United States, Washington hardened its policy toward Colombian cocaine trafficking, shutting down the cartels’ smuggling routes. Soon Mexican drug trafficking organizations began moving cocaine into the US instead, and Colombian words such as cartel and sicario came into use in Mexican Spanish. Involvement in the cocaine trade transformed the social organization of trafficking, since it required vastly more complex operations. Having previously peddled only local marijuana and heroin, cartels now imported cocaine from Colombia (and later Asia) and developed distribution networks within the US.

As they scrambled to control ports of entry—not just along the US–Mexico border but also on Mexico’s coasts, on its southern borders, and at its airports—they started engaging in bloody confrontations. 

At first, beginning in the 1990s, these took the form of gangland killings. Then, in 2003, an outright battle erupted between the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels for control over Nuevo Laredo. Not long after, the Zetas and La Familia Michoacana began fighting for control over Michoacán and its port of Lázaro Cárdenas.

In 2006, in accordance with a US-promoted strategy that prioritized capturing high-level “kingpins,” President Felipe Calderón declared a “war on drugs” that involved deploying troops en masse, federalizing various drug-related crimes, militarizing the federal and state police forces, and trying to wrench policing functions away from local governments. Rather than reduce armed violence, these policies accelerated competition and fragmentation among the cartels. The most brutal confrontations arose when cartels broke apart, because any faction knew the methods of any other perfectly well.

The country’s weak judiciary and unprofessional police were incapable of handling a conflict on this scale, and no president has been willing or able to confront this grievous shortcoming. Calderón’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, thought he could solve the problem simply by downplaying cartel brutality, but reducing police communiqués to the media failed to stop the tide of homicides and disappearances. 

Mexico’s outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, bragged that he would resolve the “insecurity issue” with social programs—a platform to which he gave the catchy slogan “Abrazos, no balazos” (hugs, not bullets). But he seemed to have no sense of the size and shape of the economies that he was trying to replace, no formula for how to integrate or dissolve cartels or street gangs, and no viable plan for transitional justice. Homicides climbed during his tenure.

Each of these presidents’ reactive and ill-conceived security policies has involved increasing the military budget, and Mexico’s armed forces have grown exponentially. But its violent informal economies have expanded along with them: according to a recent estimate, Mexico’s cartels currently have around 175,000 people on the payroll, making them one of the country’s largest employers.

Since it has no way of substituting alternative economic resources for illicit economies, the army often seeks to regulate rather than extirpate cartels, frequently by siding with whichever organization in a given region provides officers with the most lucrative and stable conditions.

Warring cartels therefore sometimes seek to keep the military and police neutral, emphasizing that their violence is directed not against the government but against their rivals.

The violent economies have also spread geographically. The southern state of Chiapas, for instance, is undergoing a siege of such proportions that Rodrigo Aguilar Martínez, bishop of the town of San Cristóbal, declared it a failed state: “We are suffering murders, kidnappings, disappearances, threats, harassment, natural resource extraction, persecution, and the confiscation of property.” 

The López Obrador government’s signature public works megaprojects—notably the Interoceanic Railway in the Tehuantepec Isthmus and a train circling the Yucatán Peninsula—have only intensified cartel expansion into those regions, because they require changes in land use and development that cartels can exploit for their own benefit. The rapid investment in such projects also gives cartels the opportunity to expand protection rackets and markets for illegal resource extraction, human trafficking, and drug retail. As a result, indigenous communities are facing assaults on their resources at a scale with no recent precedent.

Ahead of the national elections this past June, López Obrador started turning against prominent human rights activists in his own government, forcing out the special prosecutor he had appointed to investigate the emblematic case of the forty-three students kidnapped from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in 2014. But even a president as popular as López Obrador loses his power to persuade in the face of intractable violence.

The events Turati narrates took place in 2010 and 2011, but they remain entirely relevant today. The Mexican state is still unable to prevent homicides, disappearances, and extortion rackets. Its officials no longer understand their own government, and its justice apparatus has become a disjointed assemblage of local, state, and federal institutions unable to act as one and reclaim a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Having shed the smooth outlines of a leviathan, the state has turned into some other, untamable monster: an oversize insect, perhaps, like Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis, with too many uncoordinated extremities to count. It cannot look in the mirror without recoiling in horror and lapsing into denial.

San Fernando is a sparsely populated municipality spread over 2,671 square miles. Crisscrossed by a vast network of secondary and tertiary roads, it contains hundreds of ranches as well as several coastal villages on the Gulf of Mexico. By the start of 2011 it was already a war zone. The previous August the Zetas cartel had wantonly murdered seventy-two Central American migrants there. Mexico’s investigative police came to refer to the slaughter simply as “San Fernando 1” when the even larger massacre at the center of Turati’s book was discovered mere months later. Shamelessly, they call the latter “San Fernando 2.”

The municipality had been living under the rule of the Gulf cartel for a little more than a decade. Turati interviewed a Zeta operative who explained that in August 2001 the cartel’s leader, Osiel Cárdenas, asked his nephew, a federal policeman named Rafael Cárdenas Vela, “to establish a stronghold (sentar plaza) in San Fernando, because in those days no one controlled that area.” Cárdenas Vela obeyed, distributing bribes to local and state police and military personnel. Local press and radio stations were also put on the payroll. “But we didn’t have to pay the mayor money,” the former operative explained, “because we’d already financed his electoral campaign.”

When a town or a state is under the thumb of a single criminal organization the status quo is sometimes called a pax narca—“narco peace”—because the reigning cartel and government usually commit fewer homicides and disappearances than several cartels competing for local control. For years a “peace” of this kind held in San Fernando. Then a fratricidal war broke out among the Gulf cartel’s ranks.

In 1997 Osiel Cárdenas formed Los Zetas as his private guard. Six years later he was imprisoned and deported to the United States. When the cartel’s Sinaloa-based competitors took advantage of his absence to try to conquer some of the border towns then under Gulf control, especially Nuevo Laredo, the upper echelons of Los Zetas—composed of former special-ops military recruits—proved to be indispensable for the Gulf cartel’s survival. As their clout increased, they came into conflict with their erstwhile employers, leading eventually to an all-out war.

As a territory, San Fernando has strategic importance. You need to cross it to reach the border cities of Matamoros and Reynosa from the south—which makes it a common transit point for migrants—and a vital gas pipeline runs through the vast but largely unpopulated municipality. The fishing villages on its coast are useful for running drugs, and a network of dirt tracks offers alternative transportation routes from the US border to the city of Monterrey. If the Zetas managed to capture San Fernando, they would effectively contain their Gulf rivals to a fringe along Mexico’s easternmost border with Texas, between Reynosa and Matamoros.

Once the conflict erupted, San Fernando was caught between warring sectors. Both cartels already had people stationed there, but because the Gulf initially had fewer fighters, they imported gang members (maras) from the US and Central America and set up camps to train them. The Zetas followed suit, and soon San Fernando was filled with marauding gang members with no prior connection to the town’s society. Because the Zetas initially had fewer business connections in the international drug market than their former partners, they had to squeeze the local population to pay for their war effort. 

Then the Gulf cartel started doing the same. Soon every local business paid taxes to one cartel or the other.

Next: Part 2 of Mexico: Anatomy of Mass Murder