CHAPTER 1

This book is about the move from the Cold War to a chain of crime wars
soaking Latin America and the Caribbean in blood. But it starts in the
United States. Specifically, in a Barnes and Noble book­shop in a mall in El
Paso, Texas.
I am sitting in the book­shop café, nursing my third cup of coffee and
flick­ing through a pile of new books. As you do with new books, I am
eyeing the photos, skim­ming the intros, and just feeling and smelling the
paper. I am also waiting for a drug traf ­fi cker who has spent four decades
deliv­er­ing the products of Mexican gang­sters to all corners of the United
States.
The man I am waiting for is no crim­inal warlord controlling a fiefdom
in Latin America. He’s a white New Yorker with a univer­sity educa­tion.
That is why I want to start the book here. Latin American journ­al­ists
complain the U.S. side of the equa­tion is never examined. Who are the
part­ners of the cartels wreak­ing havoc south of the Rio Grande, they ask.
Where is the American narco? Here, I found one.
A curious twist of fate led me to this meeting. A fellow Brit was cycling
through the south­w­est United States on an exten­ded holiday. Texas was
nice, but he fancied some­thing edgier, so he slipped over the border to
Chihuahua, Mexico. Unwittingly, he entered one of the most violent
spheres in the Mexican drug war, ventur­ing into small towns to the west of
Ciudad Juárez, at the time the world’s most murder­ous city. He didn’t do
too badly, hanging out in canti­nas and raising glasses with shady locals.
Until gang­sters held him in a house, threatened to cut his head off, and got
him to call his wife in England and plead for a ransom payment.
Attacks on wealthy foreign­ers in Mexico are actu­ally very rare, but
there have been sporadic cases, some of them deadly. In this case, the

9781620403792_GangsterWarlords_3rdPass.indb 3 05/10/2015 10:39

 4 Gang ster Wa rl ord s

thugs had jumped at an oppor­tun­ity that fell in their lap. Thankfully, they
released the Brit on receipt of the cash, and he made it home unscathed.
He kept in contact with one of the people he had met on the border, an
older man called Robert. While Robert knew the kidnap­pers, he appar­
ently wasn’t involved. He is the man I am going to meet now, one of the
gang­sters’ U.S. connec­tions.
The British cyclist had put us in touch, and I talked to Robert over
e-mail and then phone to arrange the get-together. He lives on the
Mexican side of the border in one of the Chihuahuan towns. But I told
him I didn’t want to go there after the kidnap­ping and sugges­ted we meet
in El Paso, a stone’s throw from Juárez but one of the safest cities in the
United States. In a Barnes and Noble book­shop. Who would hold you up
in a Barnes and Noble?
As I finish my bever­age, I spy Robert strolling toward me. He prob­ably
spotted me first. He is in his sixties, in jeans and a base­ball cap, with sun-
worn skin and a raspy voice. I get yet more coffee, and we chat. He’s good
company. Soon we decide we want some­thing stronger and move on to
a cowboy-themed bar in the mall where they serve local brews in
ridiculous-size glasses. I hear Robert’s tale as we sip from the flagons.
It goes back to 1968, when the United States was in the midst of the
hippie move­ment and fight­ing its hottest Cold War battle in Vietnam;
when dictat­or­ships ruled most of Latin America, and a recently martyred
Che Guevara inspired guer­ril­las across the contin­ent. Robert is from
upstate New York, but in 1968 he went to univer­sity in New Mexico. Here
he had the fate of landing a room­mate from El Paso who had a cousin in
Ciudad Juárez. His room­mate told him he could buy marijuana for forty
dollars a kilo from his cousin. This lit a fuse in Robert’s mind; he knew
that back home in New York, this amount sold for three hundred dollars.
The basic busi­ness of import­ing is buying for a dollar and selling for
two. But with drugs, Robert real­ized, he could buy for a dollar and sell for
more than seven. And he didn’t even need to advert­ise. This was after the
summer of love, and American young­sters were desper­ate for ganja from
wherever they could get it, feeding a mush­room­ing industry south of the
border.
“I was young, I was broke, and I was hungry,” Robert says. “Then
marijuana came like a bless­ing . . . We scraped our money together for the
first load. When it came through, we bought another. Then another.”
It is hard for most of us to fathom a business with a markup of
650 percent. You put in fifteen hundred bucks and you get back more

9781620403792_GangsterWarlords_3rdPass.indb 4 05/10/2015 10:39

 War ? 5

than ten grand. You put in ten and get back seventy-five. And in two
more deals you can be a multimillionaire. Narco finances turn economics
inside out.
As Robert made regular drives back east with his car trunk stuffed
with ganja, he could go through school without even having loans. “I was
living like a rich kid, driving a nice car, living in a big place,” he says.
When he gradu­ated, he had a busi­ness to go into. He traveled to
Chihuahua to buy bulk loads of marijuana and partied in Juárez discos
with rising drug lords. He spread out his commerce to new hori­zons. He
traveled to Mississippi and Alabama, where he sold to the Dixie Mafia, a
network of villains in the Appalachian states. He went to San Francisco to
sell to students on the lawns of Berkeley. He bought houses and nightclubs
with suit­cases of cash.
However, Robert’s drug-dealing dream hit a wall in the late seven­ties
when he got nabbed by agents from the Drug Enforcement Administra­
tion. The DEA did what it calls a “buy and bust.” An under­cover agent
preten­ded to be a dealer and asked for three hundred pounds of grass
from Robert’s partner. After police nabbed the partner in his car, they
stormed Robert’s luxury house, arres­ted him in his swim­ming trunks,
and grabbed sacks of weed from the kitchen and garage.
This is the flip side of narco econom­ics. Robert splurged on lawyers,
got his assets seized, and served close to a decade in federal prison. Yet
after he got out, he went back into the trade, moving ganja and a little
cocaine with a new gener­a­tion of Mexican traf ­fi ck­ers. This time, he kept a
lower profile, shift­ing smaller amounts to stay off the radar. He carried on
past middle age, through marriages and divorces, booms and busts,
through the end of the Cold War and the opening of demo­cracy across
the Americas. By the time he hit his sixties, he suffered from chronic
asthma and heart disease. And he was still smug­gling weed.
When Robert started traf ­fi ck­ing drugs, his Mexican colleagues were a
handful of growers and smug­glers earning chump change. They needed
Americans like him to get into the market. But over the decades, the
narco traf ­fi ck­ing networks grew into an industry that is worth tens of
billions of dollars and stretches from Mexico into the Caribbean to
Colombia to Brazil. Mexican gang­sters trans­formed into cartels and
estab­lished their own people stateside, often their family members. Two
of their biggest distrib­ut­ors were the Chicago-born twin sons of a
Durango heroin king. While Robert had been a big shot back in the day,
he fell to the posi­tion of a small-time smug­gler.

9781620403792_GangsterWarlords_3rdPass.indb 5 05/10/2015 10:39

 6 Gangster Wa rl ord s

South of the border, the cartels spent their billions build­ing armies of
assas­sins who carry out massacres compar­able to those in war zones and
outgun police. They have diver­si­fied from drugs to a port­fo­lio of crimes
includ­ing extor­tion, kidnap­ping, theft of crude oil, and even wildcat
mining. And they have grown to control the govern­ments of entire cities
and states in Latin America.
“Back in the old days, it was nothing like this,” Robert says. “They were
just smug­glers. Now they prey on their communit­ies. They have become
too power­ful. And many of the young guys working for them are crazy
fucking killers who are high on crystal meth. You can’t deal with these
people.”
I ask Robert if he feels guilty about pumping these organ­iz­a­tions with
cash year after year. They could never have gotten so big without working
with Americans.
He looks into his glass for a while and sighs. “It is just busi­ness,” he
says. “They should have legal­ized many of these drugs a long time ago.”
Some months after I inter­view him, Robert is arres­ted again, driving
over the border with a trunk full of ganja. He is sixty-eight. He spends
four months in prison, pleads guilty, and is given super­vised release on
time served and medical grounds. He tells the judge his traf ­fi ck­ing career
is over.

Flip from El Paso over the Rio Grande and four­teen hundred miles south
onto a hill­side in south­ern Mexico. I am in the moun­tains in the state of
Guerrero, close to where traf ­fi ck­ers grow marijuana and produce heroin.
The fate of these hills is locked with that of smug­glers in Texas and drug
users across America by the pretty green and pink plants here. It’s the
domain of a cartel called Guerreros Unidos, or Warriors United, a small
but deadly splinter of an older traf ­fi ck­ing network. The hill is beau­ti­ful,
thick with pine trees and bright orange flowers. Strange crick­ets jump on
the earth, and exquis­ite butter­flies arc through the air.
The smell of death is over­whelm­ing. It’s like walking into a butcher’s
shop stuffed with decay­ing meat; putrid, yet somehow a little sweet. While
I would describe the smell as sick­en­ing, it’s not noxious. It’s a movie cliché
that people throw up when they see or smell corpses. That doesn’t happen
in real life. Corpses don’t make you phys­ic­ally naus­eous. The sick­ness is
deep down, more an emotional repul­sion. It’s the smell and sight of our
own mortal­ity.

9781620403792_GangsterWarlords_3rdPass.indb 6 05/10/2015 10:39