Mexico: Anatomy of a Mass Murder

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.¹

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.² 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.³ 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.

As the fighting grew more intense, the bodies of Gulf and Zeta soldiers began to pile up. According to one of Turati’s informants, as many as two hundred were killed in one major battle. The mode and targets of violence were also changing. “They initially respected children and women,” another source told Turati, “but then they stopped. They started capturing each other’s wives.”

On March 31, 2010, the Zetas staged a final assault on San Fernando, attacking the Gulf-controlled police headquarters. The police fled, the Gulf cartel was ousted, and the entire municipality fell into their hands: the Zetas created a new municipal police force under their direct control, and the military checkpoints on Highway 180 never challenged them. Neither, for that matter, do they seem to have met with any resistance from San Fernando’s municipal president or any other official from the state capital.

The victors celebrated by looting the boutique of a Gulf cartel boss. They kidnapped a woman who had been a lover of one of the Gulf members in front of her children and later decapitated her. They looted a stationery store and raffled off its merchandise. They dragged a woman off by the hair for being a Gulf informer; she was never heard from again. They burned down a restaurant with its owner, her son, and an employee locked inside because they had refused to pay for protection during the war.

The entire municipality—almost 60,000 people—was subjected to military discipline. A curfew was set for 6:00 PM. All local businesses, no matter how small or large, had to pay tribute. The Zetas abducted people to serve as workers, including a woman whose street food they liked, along with her husband and child. Practically anyone thought to have any connections to the Gulf cartel was disappeared. A visiting reporter recalled that a body was rotting in the street outside a local cybercafe where he was working. No one was allowed to bury it. An owner of a funeral home told Turati that “there were decapitations and dismembered bodies strewn about. At first it was horrifying, but you get used to it, as if they were dead animals.”

Local girls became the new overlords’ girlfriends. They could report on you to the Zetas if they didn’t like you. Many of those girls, too, ended up dead. On a popular Facebook page, Frontera al Rojo Vivo, people informed on one another or asked the Zetas outright to get rid of their rivals. People whose names appeared there usually fled; when they did, their houses were sacked.

The Zetas forced eleven- and twelve-year-old boys to watch while they butchered people. If they withstood the experience, they were recruited.⁴ “Many boys wanted to have guns, to have girlfriends, to be like ‘them,’” a San Fernando parent told Turati. “Schoolchildren sometimes threatened to disappear their teachers if they flunked them.” Another resident remembered that “many families that had money” were ruined: “In one case that I know, the mother is now a servant; others have had to prostitute themselves.” The town was teeming with orphaned children. Even its complicit and indolent municipal president complained to state authorities about that.

To understand the Zetas’ local governance strategies, Turati also interviewed people who supported them. One resident of La Ribereña, a low-income neighborhood, told her: “They wouldn’t hurt us…. In fact, they pampered us. They paid for our Children’s Day and Mothers’ Day festivities, and brought Triple A Federation Wrestling matches to La Ribereña.” When the Zetas killed a truck driver from the SuKarne meat company, “they distributed meat in the whole town,” the same source said. “You had to take that meat, and if you didn’t, you fell from their graces.” They organized bingo nights at which local attendants won loot taken from victims’ homes. After a few months the city settled into a stable dictatorship. By then, a local official told Turati, around 30 percent of the town had left.

All of this happened with no intervention from the federal or state government. No prosecutor was investigating active case files, the military was never sent in to pacify the town, and on the whole the media was silent. Then in 2010 an Ecuadorian migrant managed to reach a military checkpoint near the border and reported a massacre in the El Huizache ranch in the city of San Fernando. Investigating authorities found seventy-two Central American migrants murdered there, and San Fernando became infamous.

It is still not clear whether this mass atrocity was carried out as part of the Zetas’ murderous competition with the Gulf cartel or to terrorize the US-based families of Central American migrants in the hope of increasing revenue from human trafficking. The one surviving witness said that the Zetas had forced their captives to fight and kill one another, gladiator-style. That claim was generally kept quiet and circulated principally as rumor, though the practice has since been documented in other cases, including as recently as last August, in Lagos de Moreno, where the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel filmed such an event and posted the footage online.⁵

The torture and murder of so many foreign nationals created an international scandal. The case put the spotlight on the cartels’ turn toward extorting migrants passing through Mexico.⁶ It also contributed to diplomatic tension between Mexico and Central America over migrant protection. But the Zetas held their grip on San Fernando. To prove they could still intimidate law enforcement officials, they murdered the local prosecutor and chief of public security. A car bomb went off outside the local offices of Televisa at Ciudad Victoria, the state capital, because they had aired a story on the migrants, but a reporter who covered the assassination of the two local officials told Turati that Zeta operatives had, in that case, ordered the press to take photos of the corpses:

The guy who called us was a policeman, and his instructions were clear: “All reporters should go and take pictures of the son of a whore prosecutor and Public Security Chief, because we’ve disemboweled them. And if there’s one reporter who doesn’t go, I want to know about it.”

Then came “San Fernando 2.” By the start of 2011 the war between the two cartels was creating shortages of soldiers, to which the warring parties would respond by increasing recruitment, importing gang members from abroad, or accepting soldiers from allied cartels. To curb the meteoric rise of the Zetas, both the Sinaloa and the Familia Michoacana cartels supported the Gulf cartel with soldiers. Heriberto Lazcano, the Zetas’ supreme leader, decided to take advantage of his organization’s choke hold on San Fernando to stop these reinforcements from reaching their allies in Reynosa and Matamoros. He ordered his men to round up all the working-class men passing through San Fernando on the northbound bus route and treat them as enemy combatants.

While the Zetas had carried out the previous massacre in a single day, this second mass killing was drawn out over a series of murders in February and March. The crimes followed a general pattern. Long-distance buses traveling toward the border from the south were systematically stopped in San Fernando, either by local police or directly by the Zetas. The young men riding on those buses were told to get off, loaded onto pickup trucks, taken to a ranch outside San Fernando called La Joya, and killed. Here, too, the executions were carried out with extreme cruelty. One Zeta commander known as El Kilo was a street-fighting aficionado. “He’d give each [captive] a sledgehammer,” a former Zeta told Turati, “and say: ‘You want freedom? Whoever survives this fight will work for us.’” When Turati inspected photographs of the corpses taken to the morgue in Matamoros, 120 had had their heads bashed in.

Around 94 percent of all major crimes in Mexico go unreported, and those investigations that do take place tend to be perfunctory. Even so, at least some paperwork is inevitably shuffled between various government offices. In the process, sometimes deliberately and sometimes due to incompetence or insufficient resources, murder victims who might conceivably have been identified and returned to their families often end up buried anonymously in potters’ graves without forensic identification—an alarmingly frequent practice known as administrative disappearance. Many Mexican states have just one or two state morgues, and most homicide victims are handled by private funeral homes, which are said to often have deals with the state attorney general’s office. Collusion between the cartels and state forensic services has enabled administrative disappearances, as have governmental efforts to diffuse public scandal.⁷

Turati offers numerous examples of such cases. When a media scandal started unfolding outside the Matamoros morgue, for instance, the government simply stopped digging up more bodies in San Fernando. “During the time of the scandal,” Turati tells us,

forty-seven mass graves were opened [at La Joya] and 193 bodies were dug out. But subsequent news stories and the versions of people from San Fernando estimate that there were over five hundred bodies buried there.

She offers testimonies to this effect. “I don’t know why they didn’t reveal the real number [of the dead],” one witness of local interments said:

I deduce that it was to diminish terror. It’s not the same when you say “this week they found fifteen bodies” than when you say “they found seventy-five bodies,” and then again to say next week that they found “another seventy-five.” Imagine. My sense is that they [didn’t publicize the findings] in order to calm things down but, yes, many more were killed.

Of the corpses that were disinterred, the majority were sent to a morgue in Mexico City. A great many were tagged as “Identity Unknown” and buried in common graves, leaving the victims’ families to search for them indefinitely. Many of the young men who were abducted from the buses had left luggage behind, but for four years, Turati writes, it was “abandoned in boxes and stacked in a warehouse.” When she was at last “allowed to inspect the photos of the objects that were in the suitcases” in 2022, she came across “clues that would have allowed for the identification of some of the unidentified bodies. In several cases I, and the Attorney General’s office before me, knew exactly who those individuals were.”

It was a testament both to the state’s criminal negligence and to a society’s indifference to the suffering of the victims’ families. Turati resolved to seek out as many of those families as she could, visiting some in their native states of Michoacán and Guanajuato and others in Central America. In some cases she was the first to confirm for a family that their relative had been killed in San Fernando years earlier, ending their long night of uncertainty and making it possible for them to mourn their loss.

After 2011 federal forces drastically increased their presence in San Fernando and built a new military barracks outside the city. The army successfully hunted down a few crucial Zeta bosses and reduced the cartel’s presence, even as the Gulf cartel worked stealthily to recover lost ground. These forces have managed to bring a modicum of peace but not to fully remove the cartels from local economic life. During the pandemic cartels monopolized the sale of beer and cigarettes; gasoline theft continues unabated.

There are rumors of occasional armed confrontations (encontronazos) between competing cartels—which now include organizations like the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel and competing fragments of the Zetas—over control of villages along the Gulf Coast or access to the municipality’s gasoline pipelines. The army even failed to permanently stop criminal groups from kidnapping migrants from buses: in March 2019 gunmen forced forty migrants off two buses on the San Fernando highway that leads to Reynosa. Last December another thirty-one were kidnapped from another bus passing through the area (they were later released). There is, in short, a kind of new normal, more peaceful but with no lasting guarantee of calm.

The persistence of the old political class is a symptom of the shallowness of the current peace. Tomás Gloria Requena, San Fernando’s municipal president at the time of the atrocities, has spent the past decade hopping from one political party to another, climbing the bureaucratic ladder rung by rung. From the Industrial Revolutionary Party (PRI) he moved first to Mexico’s notoriously corrupt Green Party, then to the current governing party, Morena. He is now undersecretary of government for the state of Tamaulipas.

At one point Turati asks Gloria Requena whether he had been aware of the atrocities unfolding while he was in office. He responds that everyone knew about them, but as the municipal authority he was tasked with prosecuting the cases that were brought to him, and no cases had been put forward. Turati then points out that San Fernando’s municipal police force took an active part in kidnapping busloads of passengers every day for two months at a bus station just a few blocks away from the municipal building. Seventeen of his thirty-six policemen had been arrested after the discovery of the mass graves, Gloria Requena tells her, but they were later acquitted, and it was not his job, after all, to second-guess the judge’s work. Finally Turati asked Gloria Requena whether he didn’t feel guilty for not having done more to intervene as the butchery unfolded. “I informed my superiors at the proper time and through the proper channels,” he answers.

Meanwhile, back in San Fernando, many unidentified bodies were left to be buried locally, a task that fell to San Fernando’s eighty-four-year-old gravedigger, nicknamed Capullo (“Bud” or “Button”), who has gone out to the cemetery daily for decades in the company of his dog. (Two dogs were shot dead, he laconically remarks to Turati.) He explains how he arranged the bodies of the unidentified victims in neat rows, insisting that each grave be marked with a cross to provide each person with at least divine recognition. For the government, on the other hand, it is secrecy that is sacred:

More than a hundred bodies were buried here in a common grave. I can’t tell you whether they were men, women or children. Their families were looking for them, but the bodies were brought to me in tied-up bags, and you can’t open those…. I have a lost son and I couldn’t even see who I was burying.

Capullo kept a register for each burial, but the Zetas compelled him to hand it over to them. With the logbook went the evidence of Capullo’s twenty years of service in the municipal graveyard. Despite their inefficacy, bureaucrats can be punctilious about other people’s records. Without that ledger, Capullo is no longer eligible to collect his pension. Now that the whole of San Fernando is a graveyard, its gravedigger has been condemned to remain on the job for life.