By Damon Tabor
On September 16, 2008, Carl Pike,
the deputy head of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Special Operations
Division, watched live video feeds from a command center outside Washington,
D.C., as federal agents fanned out across dozens of U.S. cities. In Dallas, a
team in SWAT gear tossed a flash-bang grenade into a suburban home and, once
inside, discovered six pounds of cocaine behind a stove, and a stockpile of
guns. At a used-car dealer’s house in Carmel, Indiana, agents pulled bricks of
cocaine from a secret compartment in his Audi sedan, while state troopers
dragged a stove-size safe onto the lawn and went at it with a sledgehammer.
In the coming weeks, the net
widened to include caches of assault rifles, a Mexico-bound 18-wheeler with
drug money hidden in fresh produce, and a crooked Texas sheriff who helped
traffic narcotics through his county. In Mexico City, a financier was arrested
for laundering drug money through a minor-league soccer team named the Raccoons
(and an avocado farm). After one especially large bust, when it came time for a
“dope on the table” photo, there was in fact no table big enough to support the
thousands of tightly bundled kilos of confiscated cocaine. They had to be
stacked in the back parking lot of a police station.
The raids and arrests were the
final stage of a DEA-led investigation called Project Reckoning—18 months, 64
cities, 200 agencies—intended to cripple Mexico’s Gulf Cartel. Over the past
two decades, the organization had built a drug empire that spanned across
Mexico and into the U.S. It had become pervasive, hyper-violent, brazen. Cartel
operatives had smuggled billions of dollars’ worth of narcotics into the U.S.
They had assassinated Mexican
politicians and corrupted entire police departments. One of the organization’s
leaders had famously brandished a gold-plated .45 at two agents from the DEA
and FBI traveling through northeastern Mexico. The cartel had even formed its
own paramilitary unit, a band of former Mexican police and special-forces
soldiers called the Zetas, to seize territory and dispatch rivals. The
notorious syndicate became known as La Compañia, or The Company. (click to enlarge 'Inside Zetas Network side bar below)
Project Reckoning, authorities
proclaimed, had dealt La Compañia’s business a “substantial blow.” The DEA’s
Pike likened it to taking out 64 cartel-owned Walmarts. And once all the doors
had been kicked in, the haul was indeed staggering: $90 million in cash, 61
tons of narcotics, and enough weapons to equip an insurgency. Among the 900
people rounded up across the U.S. and Mexico, the Justice Department indicted
dealers, transporters, money counters, teen gangsters, and even the owner of a
Quiznos franchise. One of those swept up in the net was a 37-year-old resident
of McAllen, Texas, named Jose Luis Del Toro Estrada.
He seemed, at first, not
particularly significant—a luckless guppy caught swimming with sharks. His
arrest barely warranted mention in the local paper. His house, a well-maintained
white-brick rancher with an arbor of pink flowers over the front door,
contained no cocaine or caches of AK-47s. He lacked an extensive rap sheet and
in fact seemed to have no criminal record at all. On the outskirts of McAllen,
he ran a small, nondescript shop that installed car alarms and sold two-way
radios. (for best viewing, enlarge to full size Del Toro's Plea Agreement-then adjust size to preference)
In the weeks that followed, a
different picture began to emerge. Del Toro Estrada was neither capo nor
killer, but he played a critical role in The Company. According to federal
prosecutors, the shop owner—who went by the alias Tecnico—had served as The
Company’s communications expert. He was the cartel’s in-house geek, the head of
IT, and he had used his expertise to help engineer its brutal rise to power.
Del Toro Estrada had not only set up secret camera networks to spy on Mexican
officials and surveil drug stash houses, but he also built from the ground up
an elaborate, covert communications network that covered much of the country.
This system enabled the cartel to
smuggle narcotics by the ton into the U.S., as well as billions of dollars in
drug money back into Mexico. Most remarkably, it had provided The Company with
a Gorgon-like omniscience or, according to Pike, the ability to track
everything related to its narcotics distribution: drug loads but also Mexican
police, military, even U.S. border-patrol agents. That a cartel had begun
employing communications experts was likely news to most of law enforcement.
That it had pulled off a massive engineering project spanning most of Mexico—and
done so largely in secret—was unparalleled in the annals of criminal
enterprise.
The godfather of the Gulf Cartel
was not a drug kingpin but a contrabandista named Juan Guerra who began
smuggling bootleg whiskey into Texas during Prohibition. In the decades that
followed, Guerra expanded into prostitution and gambling along the Rio Grande,
building out a small but profitable criminal enterprise. The business
eventually passed to Guerra’s nephew, Juan Garcia Abrego, who in the mid-1980s
identified an opportunity. Several years before, American drug agents had
started to crack down on cocaine-supply lines from Colombia into Florida.
Garcia Abrego approached the
besieged Colombians with an offer: Instead of taking a transporter’s customary
small cash percentage, he would guarantee cocaine deliveries through Mexico
into the U.S. in exchange for 50 percent of each load. It was a riskier but
immensely more profitable arrangement, and it eventually birthed one of
Mexico’s first major narcotics organizations, the Gulf Cartel. In 1995, the FBI
placed Garcia Abrego on its Ten Most Wanted list, the first drug trafficker to
earn the distinction.
Garcia Abrego led the cartel
until 1996, when he was arrested by Mexican police outside the city of
Monterrey. His successor was a jug-eared, mercurial former auto mechanic and
aspiring gangster named Osiel Cardenas Guillen, a.k.a. The Friend Killer. In
the late 1990s, hoping to surround himself with an impenetrable security ring
while also creating a lethal mercenary force, Cardenas Guillen formed a
paramilitary unit composed largely of defectors from the Mexican police and
military.
Some, like Heriberto Lazcano
Lazcano, a.k.a. The Executioner, were commandos from an elite American-trained
airborne special-forces unit. It was an epochal moment in cartel development.
The Zetas—who reportedly took the name from their first commander’s military
radio call sign, Z1—were highly trained and brutally efficient. They built
remote narco-camps to train new recruits in military tactics, weapons, and
communications. They recruited other special-forces soldiers from Guatemala,
known as Kaibiles, a name derived from an indigenous leader who bedeviled
Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century.
They secured new drug routes,
attacked other gangs, and even instituted an accounting system—the Zetas kept
detailed ledgers and employed a dedicated team of number crunchers—that has
since become nearly as legendary as the group’s capacity for bloodletting.
“Before the Zetas, it was basically low-quality foot soldiers and enforcer
types,” says Robert Bunker, a visiting professor at the U.S. Army War College’s
Strategic Studies Institute. “What the Zetas brought to the table was that
[military] operational capability. The other cartels didn’t know anything about
this. It revolutionized the whole landscape.”
It’s impossible to say exactly
why the Zetas chose to build the radio network, but given their military and
law-enforcement background, it seems likely that Z1 and his capos understood
that a widespread communications system would provide a crucial competitive
edge over other cartels. Radio was the clear choice. Unlike cell phones, which
are expensive, traceable, and easily tapped, radio equipment is cheap, easy to
set up, and more secure. Handheld walkie-talkies, antennas, and signal
repeaters to boost transmissions are all available at a good radio shop or from
a Motorola distributor. A radio network could provide communications in many of
the remote areas in Mexico where the cartel operated. And, if they suspected
law enforcement eavesdropping, the cartel’s drug smugglers and gunmen could
easily switch frequencies or use commercially available software to garble
voice transmissions.
How Jose Luis Del Toro Estrada
was tapped to develop the covert radio network also remains a mystery, but as
his system grew, it supplied the Zetas with what’s called a command-and-control
capacity. “It essentially linked all the different members of the cartel—the
people doing the trafficking and the people doing the protection—so there was a
communication between them,” says Pike, the DEA special agent.
Armed with
handheld radios, the cartel’s street-corner halcones, or hawks, could help
commanders avoid arrest by alerting them whenever police set up checkpoints. A midlevel
boss in Nuevo Laredo could monitor a semitruck carrying several tons of cocaine
as it trundled across the border into Texas. Most crucially, Zetas gunmen could
use the system to attack and seize plazas, or smuggling corridors, held by
other drug gangs.
“With a network like this, you
can take what resources you have and maximize them for effectiveness,” says
Bunker. “If [the Zetas] are going into a different cartel’s area, they can
bring resources in,” such as weapons, vehicles, and reinforcements. “It means
for every one enforcer or foot soldier, you get a multiplier effect. From a
command-and-control perspective, it’s phenomenal.”
With the advantage of Del Toro
Estrada’s radio network, The Company grew quickly, dominating rival groups—but
lasting relationships are fleeting in the criminal underworld. In 2010, after
several years of internal friction, the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas severed ties.
(Causes of the split are murky, but many analysts say the breaking point
occurred when the Gulf Cartel kidnapped and killed the Zetas’ chief of finance
after failing to persuade him to switch allegiance.)
In the years that followed, the influence of
the Gulf Cartel, once the most powerful in Mexico, waned dramatically. At the
same time, the influence of the Zetas grew rapidly. Their business portfolio
expanded to include drug running as well as kidnapping, human smuggling,
pirating DVDs, and even selling black-market oil. In some regions, they began
to operate with such impunity that their authority eclipsed that of the Mexican
government itself. The Zetas’ military training and ultraviolent tactics were
crucial for propelling their rise to power, but one other factor was essential:
After splitting from the Gulf Cartel, it was the Zetas who maintained control of
the radio network.