RIVERSIDE,
Calif. — Maybe the child would be hers one day, so Saira Khan began
preparing the house for her niece’s next visit. She sanitized the baby
toys and double-checked the child safety locks. She cleaned the …
begin quote from:
TIJUANA,
Mexico — Across the border from Texas in the state of Coahuila, in the
Five Springs or Cinco Manantiales region, hundreds of townspeople were
abducted and brutally massacred in the spring of 2011. That year in mid …
Daniel Becerril / Reuters
CARTEL WATCH
How DEA Informers Sparked a Massacre in Mexico
As the Zetas hunted for witnesses, they slaughtered anyone who had the wrong last name.
11.25.16 10:00 PM ET
TIJUANA, Mexico — Across the border from Texas in the state of Coahuila, in the Five Springs or Cinco Manantiales region, hundreds of townspeople were abducted and brutally massacred in the spring of 2011.
That
year in mid-March, heavily armed commandos burst into these towns with a
long list of targets, leaving destroyed homes and businesses in their
wake as evidence of their crimes. First, though, they let at least one
mayor know what was about to happen.
For
years, the massacre went uninvestigated and officially unconfirmed, but
the locals who remained behind guarded the memory of their
missing-and-presumed-dead by fearfully whispering their versions of
events among each other. Survivors shared stories of the explosions they
heard that week in mid-March, and the destruction they witnessed. But
piles of rubble sat unprodded by authorities.
Many
of the roughly 300 victims—more than 80 separate families—did not know
each other, but most had something in common, beyond calling the same
region home. They shared a combination of the same common last names:
Garza, Gaytán, Moreno, and Villanueva.
Over the course of three days, the Zetas cartel,
one of Mexico’s most powerful crime syndicates allied with corrupted
authorities, terrorized the region, sweeping up anyone who shared the
ill-fated names, and anyone who worked for them or with them, abducting
dozens of families while looting and destroying their homes.
Others among the missing were
people who did not bear those family names, but who rented properties
with these surnames quaintly featured by their door frames. Family
employees—maids, cooks, landscapers, and those tending to the ranches’
animals—were not spared. Nor were mere bystanders.
The missing became the
massacred, but the Zetas did not find the two men they were looking for:
José Luis Garza Gaytán and Héctor Moreno Villanueva.
Those
two Zeta underlings, whom the Zetas accused of stealing millions, had
doomed hundreds who shared their last names to death, while retreating
into the protective arms of the U.S. government as informants for the
Drug Enforcement Agency of the United States, the DEA.
Moreno
Villanueva, testifying at the 2013 Texas trial of José Treviño Morales,
the brother of fearsome Zeta cartel leader Miguel Angel Treviño
Morales, aka Z-40, said that he fled after catching word of the
impending killing spree and Miguel Angel’s thirst for his blood. But
prior to the manhunt, he’d been trafficking 800 kilos of cocaine a month
for the cartel, sending back $4 million in payment every 10 days—money
that was partially laundered in an elaborate bi-national horse breeding,
training, and racing scheme.
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Moreno
Villanueva, who cut a deal with prosecutors, was set to be sentenced
this October, but sentencing has been postponed until next year.
***
The
details of what happened to the townspeople in Coahuila state remained
shrouded in secrecy until the government sent a bevy of more than 100
officials in early 2014 looking to follow the fading trail of cold
evidence in the mass disappearance and subsequent massacre. The
investigators came ludicrously late, but — even years later — proof of
the horrific crimes was everywhere.
Investigative
journalist Diego Enrique Osorno travelled to Coahuila in 2014, trailing
the officials who worked on behalf of a special sub-prosecutor tasked
with searching for missing persons, to witness the authorities’ first
attempt at investigating the gruesome 2011 killing spree.
The
officials inspected dozens of properties in late January of that year.
As Osorno wrote, they were armed to the teeth yet still timid, familiar
as they were with the ferocity of the powerful Zetas. They were, after
all, on their turf, and, like the townspeople, vulnerable to the cartel’s whims.
The
journalist made his way through the town of Allende reviewing evidence
of the crimes he had heard about years before under the semblance of
some, albeit meek, official protection. Even years later, in 2014,
Osorno said, “the brunt of the crime remained visible in the plain sight
of everyone.”
“At
the Allende plaza there was a mansion that had been demolished [by the
cartel] that was just meters away from the municipal palace,” he noted,
referring to the former mayor’s office.
Another
of the destroyed properties was across from the mayor’s residence.
Scattered across the towns there were signs of the destruction, but
still, the massacre was an open secret—the details of what occurred
during the three day killing spree remained shrouded in secrecy.
Since
that trip, Osorno has been following the case more closely than
probably any other journalist or, unfortunately, any authority. The
official body count remains tallied at less than 30 and only a few dozen
have been counted among the missing, but journalists, politicians, and
witnesses know that figure is ludicrously low.
Based
on the dozens of interviews he has conducted with townspeople,
surviving family members, officials, and witnesses, and based on numbers
given to him anonymously by high-up authorities, Osorno—and by proxy
the rest of the country—now knows an approximation of the real figure,
which is on the order of 300.
***
The mayor of Allende in the Cinco Manantiales
region of Coahuila said at the time of the slaughter that he was
helpless to prevent the massacre. He said his hands were tied, so he
stepped aside and let the Zetas and those they had corrupted do their
bidding.
When Osorno attempted
to interview the now-former mayor, years ago, the city father refused to
speak and hung up the phone. Osorno went looking for the mayor, visited
his home, but again he refused to speak.
***
On
Thursday of last week, November 17, former mayor Sergio Lozano
Rodríguez, who did nothing to warn the people of what was coming,
finally was arrested at home. He is accused of allowing the incursion as
well as ordering the police to stand down during the massacre.
In the spirit of never letting a
good crisis go to waste, the former mayor’s opposing political party,
the ruling PRI or Institutional Revolutionary Party, applauded his
arrest in a statement calling him a key piece of the puzzle of what
happened that spring.
But
Lozano’s party, the PAN or National Action Party, called the former
mayor “a scapegoat,” adding that Lozano had attempted to warn
authorities of what was occurring in Allende but was ignored.
Osorno, the journalist, says he knows without a shadow of a doubt that authorities in the towns that comprise Cinco Manantiales were “active, not passive participants” in the killing spree.
“It
wasn’t just a simple omission. They did so much more than just allow it
or fail to deter it,” Osorno said in an interview with The Daily Beast.
“And the government has not yet taken action against the rest of the
authorities who were involved at all levels.”
Osorno
called the mayor’s arrest “a good start” but said that this is barely
scratching the surface. Authorities have yet to act on more than a dozen
arrest warrants that have been issued, and most questions remain
unanswered. To this day, there is no complete list of the hundreds who
disappeared.
***
I first met Osorno in 2014, when I was asked to write the English version of his first account of the massacre after he returned from his evidentiary tour with the investigating team of officials.
Then, amidst the destruction, he had come upon discarded clothing and even an ID card belonging to a victim bearing the accursed Garza Garza last name—in this case, just one of the doubly damned victims born to two parents named Garza.
Since writing that initial account, Osorno has returned to the towns of Cinco Manantiales—comprised
of Allende, Morelos, Nava, Villa Unión and Zaragoza—and the nearby
affected towns of Piedras Negras and Acuña on multiple occasions to ask
questions that may never produce answers.
This
stronghold for the Zetas cartel has since seen its grip somewhat
loosened, but it remains a region steeped in fear. The journalist’s
extensive investigation will be published in upcoming months, but it is
unlikely the story will be over.
The
mayor of Allende, who refused to answer Osorno’s questions over the
years, will now have to answer to the Mexican justice system—an oxymoron
if there ever was one—but at least, unlike the massacred townspeople,
he will not be answering to the Zeta cartel.
In
just one example of the Zetas’ savagery and reign of terror, both
before and after the massacre, at the July trial in San Antonio, Texas,
for just one of the many cartel members who participated in the
massacre, Marciano Millan Vasquez, United States Attorney Richard L.
Durbin said that “without mercy or compunction he brutally murdered
anyone and everyone as it suited him and his cartel, at times inflicting
the cruelest of pain.”
This
statement was made after it was revealed that among Millan Vasquez’s
many crimes, he used an axe to dismember a young girl in 2013 before
incinerating her body parts in front of her parents. He then did the
same to the girl’s mother, while her husband watched.
According to the DEA, this Zeta laughed as he butchered the man’s family then ordered the man killed as well.
Those murdered in Allende and the neighboring towns did not meet an end any less gruesome.
***
The
charred rubble of dozens of homes and businesses which the Zetas had
brought down using sledgehammers, grenades, heavy machinery, and in at
least one case a missile of some sort, led the authorities and Osorno to
blackened oil drums, and piles of tires, and empty diesel cans.
If
you are wondering how one goes about disappearing hundreds of people so
they will never be found, these are the deadly ingredients the cartels
use for their gruesome brew.
The
improvised “kitchens,” as the clandestine death sites that dot northern
border states and the country at large are known, are cheap, portable,
and easily set up.
One method employed by the Zetas involves dumping fuel into large, perforated metal vats of body parts, and setting them on fire, carefully replenishing the fuel until the body has been completely reduced. The smell, one cartel member testified, is “just like roasted chicken.” Or so he claimed.
One method employed by the Zetas involves dumping fuel into large, perforated metal vats of body parts, and setting them on fire, carefully replenishing the fuel until the body has been completely reduced. The smell, one cartel member testified, is “just like roasted chicken.” Or so he claimed.
The more
effective and common method uses the same ingredients to light a fire
under the industrial drums, which are then filled with bodies in
combination with a caustic soda solution—made with inexpensive lye,
readily available at any hardware store for a few pesos a kilo—used to
dissolve the victims.
This concoction, after a few hours, becomes what is referred to as human pozole, resembling in a nauseating way the traditional Mexican pork and hominy stew.
This was the fate of hundreds of coahuilenses that spring, and thousands elsewhere in the country who have since fallen prey to the Zetas’ not so tender mercies.
Meanwhile,
across the border in San Antonio, Texas, the two Zetas turned
informants, who doomed hundreds of their neighbors to the most gruesome
death, enjoy the comfort of the warm southern weather, and the promise
of eventual freedom for telling their stories to the DEA.
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