Morelos: Two Families Attacked on Separate Occasions, 5 Dead

By: Jaime Luis Brito | Translated by Valor for Borderland Beat

Cuernavaca, Morelos. — Two families were shot in the municipalities of Cuernavaca and Jiutepec, leaving five people dead.

 In the first instance, three members of a family, among them a 10 year old girl, were killed by gunfire this past Sunday (Feb. 19) morning in the neighborhood Lomas de Ahuatlán, located north of Cuernavaca.

Two of the victims, a woman and a ten year old girl, were found aboard a gray Nissan Tsuru, with plates from Mexico City.  While the third victim, a man, was lying outside the vehicle, on the street, Santa Ana de Amanalco.

Police forces belonging to the State Commission of Security, Attorney General of Justice, and other organizations arrived at the scene in order to carry out investigations and to remove the bodies.

At about the same time, a group of armed men attacked several people in a cemetery located in the Jardín Juárez neighborhood in Jiutepec, where at least two of them died: a man at the scene and a woman on the way to the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) hospital.

According to the police reports, a man, a 9 and a 10 year old minor, and two women, were outside a cemetery on Jesús Achavitia Street when a white Suburban attacked them.

The man, who was in a metropolitan taxi, died at the scene.  Meanwhile, the other victims were transferred to the clinic #1 of the IMSS, located on Plan de Ayala Avenue in Cuernavaca.  One of the wounded women died along the way to the clinic.

On February 6, in the neighborhood Lauro Ortega in the municipality of Temixco, a family of five was attacked.  All were wounded, while three died: two men and an eight month old girl.

This past weekend, other violent acts occurred:

The New Era of Cartels

The capture and abatement of drug cartel leaders has led to the fragmentation of groups and the emergence of criminal cells throughout the country.  U.S. authorities and the PGR identify the current leadership

By: Doris Gómora, Dennis A. García y Marcos Muédano | Translated by Valor for Borderland Beat

With the capture and abatement of drug cartel leaders in recent years, the structures of the drug cartels in Mexico has fragmented, giving way to a new map of organized crime with the formation of criminal cells that operate in a territorial way; but with the influence that they had in the large organizations, new groups also rose up like the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) who managed to consolidate and expand their power to challenge the territories that are key to the business of the multinational drug trade.

This in-depth analysis of drug trafficking in the country is based on reports from the PGR, the United States Department of Justice and the U.S. Treasury, as well as interviews with experts.

With the arrests of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, leader of the Sinaloa Cartel; Servando Gómez “La Tuta”, leader of Los Caballeros Templarios; Vicente Carrillo Fuentes “El Viceroy”, leader of the Juárez Cartel; Miguel and Omar Treviño Morales, leaders of Los Zetas; and the abatement of Nazario Moreno “El Chayo”, who commanded La Familia Michoacana; as well as Ignacio Nacho Coronel and Arturo Beltrán Leyva “El Barbas”, a struggle for the territories worsened with the criminal cells who were operating as their armed wings.

Self-Defense Groups Claim That They Disarmed the Knights Templar Cartel In Michoacán

By: Rubén Mosso

The relatives of the 34 people who were detained by the Mexican army for allegedly being linked to organized crime by acting as community guards for the community Felipe Carrillo Puerto (La Ruana), in Michoacán, requested for the intervention of President Enrique Peña Nieto to release the detainees, because they say that they are innocent. 

Farmers who demonstrated outside the Assistant Attorney General's Office for Special Investigations on Organized Crime (SIEDO) reported that the firearms that their relatives had were seized from the Knights Templar Cartel, who live within the community and have also committed a series of abuses against the community.

 The wives, mothers, sisters, and other relatives warned that in case they don’t receive support from the president, they will take matters into their own hands by arming themselves in order to defend their community from various criminal groups operating in the area of Michoacán.

“Release the guys that you brought, they’re innocent, they are people like us, lemon harvesters, who left their family, wives to their children.   They seized the weapons in order to defend us from the Knights Templar Cartel, simply because it was too much what they were doing,” said one woman.

--What were they doing?

--“They increased the price of tortillas and meat.  They were charging us for each box of lemons that we packed, they would take a portion.  We would work three days a week, with those three days, do you think that we were going to be able to support our children and apart from that they would take away our money.”

The complaint mentioned that the owners of the trucks that would transport the lemons had to pay “Los Templarios” 200 pesos per car, a situation for those who would harvest lemons, their payments would go down, plus they also had to pay to work.

--Who gave the weapons to the guys?

--“They took them from “Los Caballeros”.  In La Ruana, we caught “Caballeros”, when we started to rise up in arms we were all saying: there lives a guy; he’s a “Caballero”.  We would all go and take their weapons away.”

They commented that the municipal and state police in those zones are “leaders” of the Knight Templar Cartel, so they decided to go and also take their weapons, bullet-proof vests, and trucks away.

--“The weapons that the guys had belong to the Knights Templar Cartel.”

The complainants say that their families do not have a lawyer, or even a public defender.  They were informed that they would be transferred to jails in Matamoros, Veracruz, and the state of Mexico.

Last week at a press conference, both officials from the Secretariat of Governance (SEGOB) and the PGR said that the detainees were armed by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación), a group linked to the drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

Family members have not determined whether they will be staying at the outskirts of the SIEDO, but they do ensure that they will insist federal agencies for the release of those detained, as they called it an outrage.

Source:  Milenio - Rubén Mosso

The Hundred-Year Ghost

by Inside the Border/Gary Moore


Mystical calendar cycles are all the rage here in the weary, wary end-days of 2011.

And it’s not just That Maya Calendar Thing. Hollywood has joined the calendar fad, loudly, by promoting a new action movie as premiering on 11-11-11 (November 11, 2011)–though few ticket-buyers will recall the bigger 11-11-11 of yesteryear, when the official end of World War I in 1918 was intentionally set at 11:00 a.m. on the 11th day of the 11th month (November), with the armistice signed in a soon-famous train car.

MEXICO, seeming at first glance so far from all this (“so far from God,” as the 1910 dictator probably never really said), manages nonetheless to come full circle into the middle of the tea leaves. This is because of global excitement (at least in some circles) over That Maya Calendar Thing. Enthusiasts can tell you that the ancient Maya civilization of southern Mexico, peaking before the Aztecs, had evolved a pictographic calendar which, the interpretations say, accurately looked all the way forward to the year 2012. But there (cue the Dragnet music: dum-duh-DUM-dum), the Maya calendar ominously stops.

In a world nervous about techno-speed and banking disasters, the Maya end-point has become a rallying cry, oddly melding fundamentalist rapture and New-Age chic. It’s the big warning: The Old Global Order is going to come crashing down, right in the End Year, 2012. This is a lot to lay on the unsuspecting ancient Mayas–Nostradamus meets the Celestine Prophecies under jungle palms.

But Mexico invites such mystical musings, some not so ancient. The violence of its presentday drug war has become a symbol of the ways that seemingly impossible social breakdown can burst from what seems a clear blue sky.

And again, there’s a Cycle Ap for that. The application of mystic numbers works even on the drug war–with a little hocus-pocus math, and a few more facts than Maya Envy.

In short, Mexico has endured particular chaos once every hundred years. And such chaos, symmetrically, tends to last about a decade.

The first glimpse (leaving aside older precedents for the moment) was the Mexican Independence War, looming suddenly in 1810, then devastating a new-born nation until 1821. At the time, the decade of chaos could scarcely be viewed as part of a cycle–because the other shoe hadn’t yet dropped. Another hundred years would have to pass before the next great explosion began to suggest a pattern.

Then came 1910, a round century after 1810. Mexico was witnessing festive parades and monumental statues to commemorate the anniversary of the long-ago Independence War–when suddenly the old ghost rose. As if the monumental parade images were coming to life, 1910 brought the Mexican Revolution, which would rage for a disastrous decade, until 1920–as the recorded national population fell by a million.

Then another century passed. Understandably, the combined memories–the 1810 war and the 1910 war–would stir comment in a much more modern Mexico as it passed into a new millennium. In 1999, millennial imaginings were everywhere. Up north, the United States was alive with fears of the supposed Y-2K Bug in computer networks, or possible Times Square bombings on New Year’s 2000. But there was a time lag. This millenniun wouldn’t produce its American nightmare for another year, not until 9/11.

Meanwhile in Mexico, the delay switch on millennium fear ran even longer. The natural moment of reckoning would be 2010, because of 1810 and 1910. Could it possibly happen a third time?

In 2000 the idea seemed laughable. Political change was coming peacefully. Mexico's presidential election in 2000 proved that reform was possible; democracy was robust. But the reformers, once in power, started to meet some old ghosts–who at first seemed barely noticeable. These were the gang fights and drug-smuggling conflicts that Mexico had always known. By about 2004 they were mushrooming. By late 2006 there was official declaration. The government declared an unprecedented military crusade against organized crime: the “drug war.”

By 2008 the nation was shocked by growing combat–though this was still barely a blip compared to what was coming. As 2008 kicked off, the Sinaloa Cartel was making a full-court press along a great swath of the border, just south of the United States, attacking rivals in a thousand-mile span from Tijuana, bordering California, to Ciudad Juarez bordering El Paso, Texas. On the other half of the border’s 2,000 miles, the eastern half, epidemics of cartel extortion and mass killing had at least cooled a bit after 2007, but would have stunning renewal–in 2010.

It was 2007, in one of the most remote and peaceful-looking border towns, when I first heard the Hundred-Year Theory and its omens for 2010. The small city of Piedras Negras, opposite Eagle Pass, Texas, is so deep in the inland brush country, and so far from the big border cities, that in 2007 it seemed a sleepy, friendly sanctuary. But then a midnight cab driver loomed into my experience, like the Ghost of Christmas Past, saying suddenly into the rearview mirror: “Mexico no tiene pena que dura cien años” (roughly: “Mexico never lets a problem last more than a hundred years.”) I had to ask him to repeat. What did he mean by this riddle?

He sighed. The corruption builds up, said the philosopher taxista, until the volcano has to blow. And like Old Faithful, its steam erupts on a schedule. In the darkness of the cab, on silent streets where nothing moved but your shadow, it was a long way to 2010. By that time, peaceful Piedras Negras would be rocked by so much combat that U.S. advisories said don’t go there.

In both 1910 and 1810 the steam had began building in the summer, so naturally the summer of 2010 invited scrutiny. Would there be signs of a big breakpoint? Well, yes and no. By July 2010 the eastern borderlands of Mexico had descended into the “New Federation” war, with formalized combat a bit different from anything before. But the death toll per incident still stayed at old levels, no more than about 20 dead even in the worst clashes. The record in outright massacres in the Mexican violence still seemed to be held by La Marquesa near Mexico City, when 24 men were mowed down–way back in 2008. The summer of 2010 brought ragged fits and starts, scant confirmation of any kind of eerie patterning, and no great burst to mirror 1810 or 1910.

Then it came. On August 24, 2010, the Mexican military issued an obscure announcement. In a single humble sentence, it admitted that an enormity had been discovered. The San Fernando Massacre soon shocked the world, fantastically upping the ante on Mexican violence. Cartel gunmen had killed 72 people–non-combatant immigrants, including 14 women–in a single, war-sized orgy.

It proved not to be an isolated exception. The same town would produce another frenzy a half-year later, massacring so many victims–surprised bus passengers, this time–that to this day many of the details are suppressed by the Mexican government. There were more: the 200 occupants of mass graves on the other side of Mexico, in Durango; the 55 terrified civilians killed in the casino hit at Monterrey.

It could be interpreted many ways. Our wisdom deals poorly with rhythms that lead beyond our knowledge. The response is either tidy, mystical prophecy, or head-in-the-sand denials, scoffing that the earth can’t move (Galileo probably never really said those famous words–“E pur si muove”–”It does TOO move”–when the Inquisition told him that God’s world couldn’t move in cycles).

In Mexico the questions go back farther than 1810 (to segue back to That Maya Thing). It was 1519 when Hernan Cortes (or Hernando Cortez) sailed to the coast of Mexico on some very unlikely winds of doom, which seemed to come out of a clear blue sky. His arrival would destroy Meso-American civilization too completely for much thinking about future cycles (though the grandfathered myths about the bearded Quetzalcoatl and the eagle-eating-the-serpent might be viewed as shell-shocked Aztec versions of Celestine closure-seeking).

It didn’t take a decade for Cortez’s entrepreurial genius to destroy Mexico that first time. The years 1519-1521 weren’t a precise calendar parallel to 1810-1821 or 1910-1920. But not so far off. Like the War to End All Wars delaying the real dawn of the 20th century until 1914, and the Y2K disaster getting predicted a year too early, the calendar of communal nightmares doesn’t always cooperate precisely.
The remnants of the Aztec empire, reduced to a smidgeon by European diseases, could still transmit worlds of experience in the misty realm of symbol, on an unbroken stream from the old monumental rites and sacrifices (which had made the Aztecs themselves look rather nightmare-ridden, long before Cortez). There was the mystical closure offered by the Virgin of Guadalupe (Did she really appear, a decade after conquest, to an humble, shell-shocked Aztec who had been renamed Juan Diego, with her supernatural proof left in the form of a puzzlingly ordinary oil painting?)

Meanwhile, Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli were poured into venerated saints. To watch some of the folklore dances that would cross the generations is to marvel at how much symbolism never gets put into words: the rigidly erect, heel-pounding male dancers encircled by the swirling petticoats that nobody is so crude as to call anatomically-correct symbols like the can-can. There is a power in pre-literate symbol (to borrow a bit from Octavio Paz), and it isn’t reduced by a crushing history of endurance and pain.

So who’s to say, at last, that such power can’t set a deadline on what it has to endure–by tapping into that ordinary, everyday mystery called hope–while the volcanic cycles seem to come out of nowhere, and wipe the books clean?




____________________________________________________________

Can There Be Spillover Hunger?

By Inside the Border/Gary Moore

Spillover violence is one of the tricksters in Mexico’s organized-crime emergency. How much is the violence in Mexico spilling into the United States? The answer is complicated by a long tradition of peering south at Mexico’s struggles, and seeing demons.

As the map above shows, some border areas in the United States are, without doubt, suffering direct echo effects from the Mexican crisis, with known gunmen and drug bosses coming north across the border, igniting fatal bursts of crime.

But alarms over spillover violence hide two key truths: a) similar kinds of violence have ALWAYS spilled across the border, without the world coming to an end; and b) the real need for vigilance now, in case of any future increase, doesn’t mean that a wave of U.S.-side chaos coming from Mexico is a presentday reality (if it ever develops at all).

The spillover violence alarms–so confusing to news consumers–show hallmark symptoms of what sociology calls a moral panic. This is an exaggerated call to arms against an evil which, at some level, may be quite real, but its reality is cheapened by the exaggerations. It is inflated into a massive, demonic threat to society. Thus, alarmists can posture as heroic warriors saving civilization–for whatever political, economic or mysterious emotional gains they might get, while squandering (somebody else’s) blood and treasure on a witch hunt.

The emotional force behind spillover alarms can be seen in examples, which suggest a hunger for dark times that give heroic opportunity:

1) The Laredo, Texas, ranch taken over by Mexican Zetas became an indignant cause celebre as far away as California–though it never existed. The story was a baseless rumor. Enthusiasts kept insisting that documentation proved the Laredo invasion, never looking closely enough to see that nothing was there.

2) The three Texas pipeline workers kidnapped and butchered by Mexican invaders–they never existed either, except in mysteriously delighted rumors.

3) The Arizona shooting of heroic Deputy Louis Puroll on April 30, 2010, by a horde of drug-smuggling gunmen in the desert. Nope, never existed either. Well, in Puroll’s case there really was a gunshot wound, and a mammoth crowd of lawmen searching for the attackers–who had somehow vanished. It took a half year, while much of Arizona and activists nationwide reveled in the illusion, to drive home the evidence that the small flesh wound on Puroll’s backside had been self-inflicted, as he faked an ambush and excitedly called for backup. Such, apparently, was the hunger to be the lonely hero on the battlements. Eventually, the dramatist was unmasked and fired from his local deputy’s job, with the emotional questions unanswered.

The rumors of the Texas Zeta ranch and the murdered pipeline workers reached only the level of abstract excitement, but in Puroll’s case there was action (at a charged moment when economically depressed Arizona was excitedly passing SB-1070, its extreme new immigration law).

For U.S. policy makers and law enforcement officers dealing with the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, the forces of moral panic and politicized alarm are particularly dicey–because they complicate the real need to calibrate readiness for border crises. Passing the symbolic 50,000-deaths milestone this year, Mexico’s organized-crime violence is certainly real. And there is nothing to say it couldn’t leap to a new level of spillover.

But to point out this nuanced urgency is to invite the exaggerations. In the Brownsville, Texas, map above, spillover violence came in the form of targeted hits by and against figures linked to organized crime, either in the gang war between the Zetas Group and the Gulf Cartel or within the Gulf Cartel, as it broke down into factions called the R’s and the M’s. These South Texas killings were not terrorist strikes against civilians, as are now sometimes happening inside Mexico itself.

And yet the history whispers: Inside Mexico, the violence has snowballed from a past level of controlled hits within organized crime, to finally bring such warfare that civilians have lost their refuge. Could this, too, move north?

For law enforcement to deny the question would be negligence. And yet to ask it is poisonous–because of the mysterious hunger that gives too loud a reply.
______________________________________

“We haven’t seen what I would define as spillover violence.”
—U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, Dec. 12, 2009

“The data on spillover crimes and violence is deceiving and underreported. Our state and local law enforcement on the front lines need help. Their firsthand accounts tell the real story of how we are outmanned, overpowered, and in danger of losing control of our own communities to narco-terrorists.”
–Congressman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, in hearing May 31, 2011

“We have not seen a significant spike in crime on the U.S. side of the Southwest border.”
–Amy Pope, Deputy Chief of Staff, U.S. Department of Justice, in hearing May 11, 2011

“Our Secretary of Homeland Security said, ‘The border is better now than it ever has been.’ Many officials who are directly in the line of fire…disagree with the Secretary. Of course there is violence along the border—spillover of criminal organizations and spillover crime and intimidation.”
–Congressman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, in hearing May 31, 2011

“Mr. Speaker… Mexican criminals think they can come over here and do as they please and nobody’s going to really do anything about it. And they’re right…Americans [are] being killed all the time in America by illegals from Mexico.”
–Congressman Ted Poe, R-Texas, June 14, 2010

“My city is a border city…a better, safer and less crime-ridden city. I would say that such is the case for all of Texas’ border cities.”
–Police Chief Victor Rodriguez, McAllen, Texas

“A recent USA Today analysis of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California found that crime within 100 miles of the border is below both the national average and the average for each of those states—and has been declining for years. Several other independent researchers have come to the same conclusion.”
—New York Times, Nov. 1, 2011

“In what officials caution is now a dangerous and even deadly crime wave, Phoenix, Arizona, has become the kidnapping capital of America, with more incidents than any other city in the world outside of Mexico City, and over 370 cases last year alone. But local authorities say Washington, D.C., is too obsessed with al Qaeda terrorists to care about what is happening in their own backyard right now.”
—ABC Nightline, Feb. 11, 2009. (However, in 2011 it was acknowledged, rather explosively, that the Phoenix Police Department statistics used to develop the Kidnapping Capital image had been manipulated–or faked–to seek federal grant money, while the problem of immigrant drop-house kidnappings, though tragically real, was far smaller than the image had made it seem).

“Living and conducting business in a Texas border county is tantamount to living in a war zone in which civil authorities, law enforcement agencies as well as citizens are under attack around the clock.”
—report Oct. 2011, “Texas Border Security: A Strategic Military Assessment,” commissioned by Texas Commissioner of Agriculture Todd Staples

“The people that go about their business and lead a regular life really have nothing to fear from this. If you are not involved in illegal trade or organized crime, this won’t affect you.”
–Police Chief Carlos Garcia of Brownsville, Texas, on 2011 killings in Brownsville by Mexican organized crime groups (without explaining that this argument was also common in Mexico three years ago, but is now largely abandoned there).

“The violence in Mexico from the drug cartels continues to spill over the border and deep into the heart of Arizona. The drug and human smugglers continue to control this area of America…”
–Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County, Arizona, June 14, 2010, as he continued saying that his deputy, Louis Puroll, had bravely fought off desert traffickers, though later, as evidence mounted that the ambush had been faked, Babeu said quietly that Puroll was inclined to tell tales, and the deputy was let go.

“The perception is: the border is dangerous. The reality is that it is not.”
–Mayor John Cook of El Paso, Texas

“It’s a war on the border…To suggest the southwest border is secure is ridiculous.”
–Capt. Stacy Holland, Texas Department of Public Safety, on Fox News, Nov. 18, 2010

“I think the border-influenced violence is getting worse… But is it a spillover of Mexican cartel members? No, I don’t buy that.”
—Police Chief Roberto Villasenor, Tucson, Arizona

“The sky is not falling…What’s happened now is we’ve got rhetoric that’s driving the policy.”
—Police Chief Victor Rodriguez, McAllen, Texas

“As far as the Texas border is concerned, to my knowledge, we have not had spillover violence, per se.”
—Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, March 17, 2010

“The spillover violence in Texas is real and it is escalating.”
—Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, March 17, 2010

“Currently, U.S. federal officials deny that the recent increase in drug trafficking-related violence in Mexico has resulted in a spillover into the United States, but they acknowledge that the prospect is a serious concern.”—Congressional Research Service, Feb. 16, 2010

Unraveling Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel

By Richard Marosi
Los Angeles Times
Staff Writer — July 24, 2011

Reporting from Calexico, Calif.—
Never loose track of the load.

As drug smugglers from the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico sent a never-ending stream of cocaine across the border and into a vast U.S. distribution web in Los Angeles, DEA agents were watching and listening. It was drilled into everybody who worked for Carlos “Charlie” Cuevas. His drivers, lookouts, stash house operators, dispatchers—they all knew. When a shipment was on the move, a pair of eyes had to move with it.

Cuevas had just sent a crew of seven men to the border crossing at Calexico, Calif. The load they were tracking was cocaine, concealed in a custom-made compartment inside a blue 2003 Honda Accord.

The car was still on the Mexican side in a 10-lane crush of vehicles inching toward the U.S. Customs and Border Protection inspection station. Amputee beggars worked the queue, along with men in broad-brimmed hats peddling trinkets, tamales and churros.

A lookout watching from a car in a nearby lane reported on the load's progress. Cuevas, juggling cellphones, demanded constant updates. If something went wrong, his boss in Sinaloa, Mexico would want answers.

The Accord reached the line of inspection booths, and a lookout on the U.S. side picked up the surveillance. He was Roberto Daniel Lopez, an Iraq-War veteran, standing near the “Welcome to Calexico” sign.

It was the usual plan: After clearing customs, the driver would head for Los Angeles, shadowed by a third lookout waiting in a car on South Imperial Avenue.

But on this hot summer evening, things were not going according to plan. Lopez called his supervisor to report a complication: The Accord was being directed to a secondary inspection area for a closer look. Drug-sniffing dogs were circling.

Cuevas rarely talked directly to his lookouts or drivers. But after being briefed by the supervisor, he made an exception. He called Lopez.

“What's happening?” he asked. “The dogs are going crazy,” Lopez replied.

Dots on a map

Cuevas worked for the Sinaloa cartel, Mexico's most powerful organized crime group. He was in the transportation side of the business. Drugs were brought from Sinaloa state to Mexicali, Mexico, in bus tires. Cuevas' job was to move the goods across the border and deliver them to distributors in the Los Angeles area, about 200 miles away.

The flow was unceasing, and he employed about 40 drivers, lookouts and coordinators to keep pace.

The canines circling the load car that evening in August 2006 were the least of his problems. Eight agents from a Drug Enforcement Administration task force had converged on the border. Not even U.S. customs inspectors knew they were there. The agents had been following Cuevas and tapping his phones for months.

Because he was a key link between U.S. and Mexican drug distributors, his phone chatter was an intelligence gusher. Each call exposed another contact, whose phone was then tapped as well. The new contacts called other associates, leading to more taps. Soon the agents had sketched a vast, connect-the-dots map of the distribution network.

Its branches spanned the U.S. and were believed to lead back to Mexico's drug-trafficking heartland, to Victor Emilio Cazares, said to be a top lieutenant of Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman, the most wanted trafficker in the world. From his mansion outside Culiacan, Cazares allegedly oversaw the network of smugglers, distributors, truckers, pilots and stash house operators.

Other DEA investigations had targeted Mexican cartels, but this one, dubbed Operation Imperial Emperor, was providing the most complete picture of how drugs moved from Sinaloa to U.S. streets.

DEA officials were in no hurry to wrap it up. In fact, they were holding off on arrests so they could continue to study the supply chain and identify new suspects.

Imperial Emperor would eventually result in hundreds of arrests, the seizure of tens of millions of dollars in drugs and money, and the indictment of Cazares.

It would also reveal a disheartening truth: The cartel's U.S. distribution system was bigger and more resilient than anyone had imagined, a spider web connecting dozens of cities, constantly regenerating and expanding.

The guy next door

As a U.S. Marine in Fallouja, Iraq, Lopez had dodged mortar fire, navigated roads mined with explosives and received a commendation for leadership. Back home in El Centro, he couldn't even get work reading meters for the local irrigation district.

But Lopez, who had two children to support, knew another industry was always hiring.

One of the Sinaloa cartel's main pipelines runs through the antiquated U.S. port of entry at Calexico, a favorite of smugglers. The inspection station sits almost directly on the border, without the usual buffer zone of several hundred feet, so inspectors have difficulty examining cars in the approach lanes. Drug-sniffing dogs wilt in summer heat that can reach 115 degrees.

California's southeastern corner, a region of desert dunes and agricultural fields with the highest unemployment rate in the state, offered fertile ground for cartel recruiting. Smugglers were your next-door neighbor, the guy ringing you up at Wal-Mart, the big tipper at Applebee's, the old friend at your high school reunion.

Lopez was friends with a man named Sergio Kaiser, who had married into his family. Kaiser said he owned a body shop, but his tastes seemed too flamboyant for that. He was building a house with a grand staircase modeled on the mansion in the movie “Scarface.”

In reality, Kaiser was Cuevas' top lieutenant, and he told Lopez he could help him with his money troubles. There were several possibilities.

For a night's work driving a load car from Mexicali to Los Angeles, a driver shared $5,000 with his recruiter and got to keep the car.

Another entry-level position was as a lookout. One kind of lookout followed the load car from the stash house in Mexicali to the border. Another stood watch at the port of entry and reported when the car had cleared customs. Yet another tailed the load car up the freeway to Los Angeles.

Lopez accepted Kaiser's offer. Being a lookout was harmless, he figured: Just stand there and watch a car cross the border. “[He] didn't say it involved drugs, but I knew,” Lopez said. “I thought, 'What's the big deal?'“

Tricks of the trade

Cuevas owned a large tract home in Calexico and drove a late-model BMW 323. A gold chain dangled from his thick neck. Married with two children, he enjoyed the cliched perks of a smuggler's life. He went through several mistresses, treating them to breast-enhancement surgeries and trips to Disneyland and San Francisco.

He would ride his pricey sand rail in the Baja California dunes, and he always picked up the tab at restaurants or on wild weekends across the border in Mexicali.

At Emmanuel's barber shop, Cuevas would jump the line to get his “fade” haircut, then pay for everybody else's trim. He took care of friends' hospital bills and lent people money, no strings attached.

“When you think of drug cartels, you think violence, guns, killing,” Lopez said in an interview. “This guy was nothing like that.”

He didn't carry weapons or surround himself with enforcers. Constantly juggling phones and buying packaging materials from Costco, he seemed more stressed out than intimidating. Cuevas had a stutter, and it worsened when his boss Cazares called from Sinaloa. He took antacids to calm an anxious stomach.

To get drugs across the border, he deployed a fleet of SUVs and cars with custom-made hidden compartments. He favored Volkswagen Jettas and Chevrolet Avalanches. Both were manufactured in Mexico, and the DEA believes cartel operatives were able to study the designs to identify voids where drugs could be concealed.

Cuevas sent the cars to a mechanic in Compton who outfitted the compartments with elaborate trapdoors. The jobs took two weeks and the mechanic charged as much as $6,500, but it was worth it. Only a complicated series of actions could spring the doors open.

One front-bumper nook could be accessed only by connecting a jumper cable from the positive battery post to the front screw of a headlight. The jolt of electricity would cause the license plate to fall off, revealing the trapdoor.

Cuevas picked his drivers with great care, rejecting people with visible tattoos or serious criminal records and sending those he hired on dry runs to test their nerves. He kept the Calexico border crossing under constant watch, focusing on the mobile X-ray machine that could see inside vehicles. It was used sparingly, and the moment inspectors drove it away, his crew went to work.

Over the years, his cars consistently eluded detection.

“I was great at it. I had never lost a car in the border,” Cuevas said. “Dogs never hit it or nothing.” In mid-2006, however, he seemed to lose his touch.

In June, authorities had followed one of his drivers to Cudahy, near Los Angeles, and seized 163 pounds of cocaine from a stash house.

A month later, police outside El Centro stopped his best driver, a hot dog vendor from Mexicali, and found $799,000 in a hidden compartment.

Cuevas had to make the cartel whole, either in cash or by working the debt off by supervising shipments without receiving his cut. Hundreds of pounds of cocaine, meanwhile, continued to pour in every week from Sinaloa, and he was under intense pressure to keep the goods moving.

Now, on this August evening, a customs inspector had pulled his load car, the Accord, into the secondary inspection area.

“Dude, I think your guy got busted,” Lopez told Cuevas over the phone. “They've got him in handcuffs.”

Behind the dashboard and in a rear-quarter panel of the Honda, inspectors found 99 pounds of cocaine. The driver was arrested. Everybody else scattered. Lopez drove home, unconcerned. He had spent only 15 minutes at the border crossing and never got near the drugs.

Cuevas ordered his crew to dump their cellphones, in case anyone had been listening in. At the DEA's bunker-like surveillance post in nearby Imperial, the wiretap chatter went silent.

DEA agents had not expected a bust and were not happy about it. The agents had planned to let the driver cross the border and then follow him to his Los Angeles connection. Now they would have to regroup.

Waiting in the dark

Two days later, the agents sat in a van down the street from Cuevas' two-story home in Calexico, waiting for the lights to dim. Cuevas' neighbors in the subdivision of red-tile-roofed tract homes included firefighters, Dept. of Homeland Security officers and state prison guards.

After months of tailing Cuevas, the agents knew he favored Bud Light beer, burgers at Rally's and tacos at Jack-In-The-Box.

They once pushed the cocaine-filled car of one of his drivers to a gasoline station after the man ran out of fuel on Interstate 5. The driver never suspected that the good Samaritans were helping so they could continue tailing him to his destination.

After midnight outside Cuevas' home, the agents started digging through his garbage cans. They were searching for a notepad, a receipt, a business card, anything with a phone number on it.

There was enough evidence to arrest Cuevas. But the goal was to expand the investigation, and that required resuming the phone surveillance. Agents hoped Cuevas had thrown away the numbers of some—even one—of the 30 new cellphones he had just distributed to his crew.

Sifting through trash was always a filthy chore, especially so in this case. Cuevas was the father of a newborn. The agents were elbow-deep in dirty diapers.

Finally, they pulled something from the muck. It was a piece of spiral notebook paper with numbers scrawled on it. Phone numbers.

To be continued next Tuesday...
richard.marosi@latimes.com

MORE: The players | Evidence, wiretaps and testimony | How the drug pipeline worked

About this story —
For several years, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration put the distribution side of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel under a microscope. This series describes the detailed picture that emerged of how the cartel moves drugs into Southern California and across the United States. Times staff writer Richard Marosi reviewed hundreds of pages of records, including DEA investigative reports, probable-cause affidavits, and transcripts of court testimony and phone surveillance. He also interviewed DEA agents, prosecutors and local law enforcement officers serving on DEA-led task forces, as well as two cartel operatives convicted in the investigation.

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