Guns, Drugs & Roman weapons of terror
Whistling a merry tune of death
How do you like the esoteric headline. Did it make you want to open and read on? You’re reading, so maybe it worked.
This is the 8th general newsletter. I hope you’re enjoying them. Today’s is a little different. I’m actually providing some meat that you can get your teeth into with Part 1 of an article I wrote that’s been in the bottle drawer for a while, waiting for an opportunity to publish. And here we are, opportunity knocking. I hope you enjoy it and look for Part 2 coming soon.
Whistling Roman lead shot, Caesar’s terror weapon
Uncovered recently in an archaeological dig in Scotland were hundreds of lead and also stone pellets each with a hole drilled through into it, dating back to around 1800BCE. Why the hole? Tests revealed that it makes the pellet “whistle” as it flies through the air. So, if you could imagine a hail of these things flying toward you and sounding like a collective scream, you would have the ancient Roman equivalent of the aircraft that struck so much fear into the hearts of the enemies of the Third Reich — the “Stuka” that screamed in it its dive before delivering death from the sky.
The other interesting fact about these sling pellets is that the hole made them compress on impact, making them the ancient equivalent of hollow-point rounds, expanding on impact and inflicting significantly more damage than would a solid pellet.
So apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? Now there’s something new we can add to the list — terror weapons.
What’s behind the books?
Just around the corner, I’ll post the first “Ask Me Anything” newsletter. I’ve had some pretty interesting questions and I’m looking forward to blushing as I write some of the answers.
One question I consistently get, which I’ll deal with here, is about research. How much do I do for each book? A lot, is the short answer. As I’ve said before, there is a ton of desk research, but I do also mostly get out from behind the desk, go outside the wire and “walk the weeds”, as they say in the Australian Army (and probably the US Army also).
As an example, take STANDOFF. If you can’t quite recall this book’s central theme, it goes something like this:
A brutal massacre. A terrifying madman.
OSI Special Agent Vin Cooper is brought to the scene of an airport massacre in El Paso, Texas, to investigate the death of a USAF airman, AWOL from a nearby Air Force base. When a survivor of the chilling massacre crawls out of the desert, Cooper comes to the obvious conclusion - with major cartels just across the border in Juarez, this has to be about drugs. As he begins to piece together the case, Cooper is drawn into a world of violence and treachery. Soon he finds himself on the run, framed for murders he didn't commit. But being a fugitive just happens to be the perfect cover for his most dangerous mission yet - crossing the border and infiltrating the cartel. Coming face-to-face with a terrifying madman, Cooper soon realizes that the airport massacre was just a dress rehearsal for something even worse...
The book was published in December 2013, which meant 2011-12 was taken up with researching and writing. Probably the idea for the book occurred to me in 2010 (which seems like yesterday, even though it was 11 years ago - Gawd!). It’s hard to believe now, but back then large swaths of the US population were completely unaware that the War on Drugs down on the border with Mexico was in fact almost a war, not just a slogan.
But of course, since then, there has been a focus on the border, most notably by President Trump. There have also been innumerable films about the ultra-violence of the cartels. So the situation down there is no longer “newsy”, let alone surprising. Back then, however, I decided that I had to see for myself what was going on. My plan was to follow the drugs trail from Colombia to Panama and hence to El Paso where I would connect with local law enforcement and get their take on dealing with the cross-border flow of drugs and money. It was an interesting trip (they’re all interesting trips — travel being the best fun you can have with your pants on). On returning to Australia, I decided to write a short piece about this trip and sell it to a magazine. The short piece turned into a long piece and no magazine published in Australia would take it without a savage edit, which I preciously wasn’t inclined to do. And so the article was never published. Until now. It’s still long. And I’m still precious about it, so I’m giving it to you in two parts.
DRUGS, GUNS & ILLEGALS
Part 1
There’s a war smoldering on the United States’ southern border. It’s not a war about ideologies or religion. Or even, for once, oil. It is, however, like all wars, fundamentally about economics and markets and over the last six years, more than 60,000 people have lost their lives on its battlefronts, a body count that exceeds the US’s losses in Vietnam. The market is, of course, America’s insatiable appetite for cocaine. And while the combatants in this war are largely the soldiers employed by Mexico's enormously wealthy, hugely powerful, and grotesquely bloodthirsty cartels, there has been considerable collateral loss of life. Nowhere is the reality of this war more keenly felt on the US side of the conflict than in El Paso, the Texas city on the Mexican border just across the Rio Grande from the current runner-up for murder capital of the world and epicenter of cartel activity – Juarez.
While researching my next book, STANDOFF, which is set against the backdrop of this war, I had the opportunity to spend some time with law enforcement from the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office (EPCSO) and one very disillusioned rancher. This is that account.
***
In Spanish, El Paso means the pass. It got its name because the city lies at the base of the pass through the Franklin Mountains. Back in the mid-to-late 19th century, El Paso was the classic Wild West town: gunfights at high noon, saloon bars, and high plains drifters. Today’s El Paso, though, is a very different place: modern and brash with only a handful of buildings remaining from those early days. Like all towns with a future, progress has been insatiable here and the city feels new and clean. It’s a hive of industry and feels like a port city, only there’s no harbor.
A quick check on the crime statistics for El Paso reveals that, after being #2 for some time in the ‘Safest City in America’ stakes, this desert hub is now #1 (Honolulu, Hawaii, is now #2). Murder rates are way down, as are assaults and robberies. This is surprising when you consider that Juarez really is just a stone’s throw across the Rio Grande. Surprising because Juarez, hanging off El Paso’s vital organs like a malevolent
conjoined twin, is currently #2 among the World’s Most Dangerous Cities. (With 148 assassinations per 100,000 inhabitants, it’s a mere 11 murders behind the leader, San Pedro Sula, Honduras.) Based on the murder rates, Juarez is currently a far riskier place than either Baghdad or Kandahar. El Paso and Juarez. Yin and Yang. Good and evil.
Juarez, formerly known as Paso del Norde, once marked the northern-most extent of Mexican expansion. Apache Indians held the arid territory to the north of the Rio Grande (known by the Mexicans as the Rio Bravo del Norde) and often raided south murdering, raping, and hostage-taking. But then the railroads pushed west, getting even with a little substantial killing of their own, and ultimately supplanted the native population with European settlers.
With the influence of the railroad, El Paso established itself on the northern bank of the Rio Grande, servicing the trade moving to points north and south of the pass as well as to the east and west coasts. During the Mexican Wars of the mid-1800s, when the United States annexed Texas, El Paso’s population and wealth swelled enormously when the US Army came to town. (It has stayed there in strength more or less since and today, Fort Bliss, El Paso, is the US Army’s largest installation. Stationed there currently is a full armored cavalry division with well over 40,000 troops.)
With the Mexican state of Texas now part of the United States, the Rio Grande became the nominated border between the countries, effectively cutting El Paso and Paso Del Norde in two and forcing a kind of separate development on the twin townships.
The next big boost to El Paso’s economy came during the Prohibition era of the 1920s with the town becoming a major entry point for booze smuggled into the US from Mexico (a sign of things to come). But while El Paso grew in prosperity Juarez, as Paso Del North was renamed, remained more or less a labor pool for the smaller, richer American city just across the river.
The final blow to Juarez’s potential for legal prosperity came in 1964 when the “Bracero Program”, which allowed Mexican workers to work in the US, ended.
But then, during the 90s, hundreds of tons of Colombian cocaine began arriving in Mexico on its way north to America and criminal elements within Juarez suddenly found themselves sitting on a billion-dollar opportunity. They of course grasped this with both hands, forming a cartel to monopolize the national drugs trade routes passing through El Paso. The Juarez cartel, however, was by no means a solo performance, and other cartels formed throughout Mexico to handle the booming illicit trade.
Business for these cartels was reasonably uncomplicated in the days prior to 2006, but events took a dramatic and unexpected turn for the worse when Felipe Calderón, Mexico’s new president, announced that his administration would wage war on the cartels and put an end to the cross-border cocaine trade once and for all. He immediately dispatched Mexican Army troops and Federales (federal police) into the areas controlled by the cartels and began shooting and/or arresting the leaders and extraditing them to the United States. But the cartels fought back and, six years later, the effort required to wipe out this cancer has almost killed the patient because large tracts of Mexico (mostly in the north of the country) are now wild, lawless places where the police are either dead or on the take and beheadings, torture, dismemberments, kidnappings, and extortion are commonplace. It's cartel vs cartel as the criminal organizations battle government forces and each other to either protect their interests or snatch them from weakened competitors. And with the latticework of highways and railways of El Paso the major prize, Juarez has become a major epicenter of this violence.
***
With innumerable agencies diving turf and responsibilities, law enforcement in America is a little more complicated than it is in Australia. Whereas Australia has state police forces and a single federal police force, generally speaking, each American city has a police department handling law enforcement within the city’s limits. Beyond it in the outlying suburbs and counties, responsibility for law enforcement falls to the sheriff’s office. In Texas, there are also State Troopers with a state-wide responsibility (handling mainly highway patrol duties) and above them are the elite of the elite – Texas Rangers, 144 of them (the maximum number mandated by state law). Then, of course, there’s also a litany of Federal bureaus - the FBI, Alcohol Tobacco Firearms (ATF), the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE, part of the Department of Homeland Security or DHS), and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), all of which have a presence in this part of the world.
The man I’m to be spending the best part of the day with, though, is El Paso Sheriff’s Deputy Manuel ‘Manny’ Marquez. Marquez, as his name implies, is of Mexican descent, which is not at all uncommon in El Paso. He’s a fit, compact, 53-year-old law enforcement veteran who has spent thirty years on the streets. A young man, Deputy Marquez was a member of the EPCSO’s elite SWAT outfit. These days, though, he’s working intelligence and highway interdiction. With all that experience under his belt, it’s fair to say there’s not much that escapes Deputy Marquez’s attention.
I join the Deputy for a ‘ridealong’ on a crisp morning in early spring, the sky a cloudless powder blue that seems to go on forever. The Deputy and I walk through the parking lot, doing small talk, discussing the weather mostly, eventually arriving at a massive black and white Ford F-150 pickup with oversize wheels and tires. The vehicle has 'authority' written all over it.
My first questions concern the Deputy’s weapons loadout. He runs me through it: a baton, a Taser, two cans of pepper stray, one Smith & Wesson 9mm semi-automatic pistol (which he purchased for himself) with two additional magazines and an AR-15 (the semi-automatic civilian version of the military M-16 rifle) mounted on the gun rack in the Ford’s interior. Deputy Marquez also sometimes brings along a pump-action Remington 870 for extra company, but today he has left it behind.
We climb up into the vehicle, the driver's seat restricted by various computer information systems angled in on it and that AR-15 up behind Manny’s head. He logs into the computer after starting the engine and we’re ready to roll. He asks me where I want to go and I tell him Horizon Airport. This is a privately run public airstrip on the edge of the EPCSO’s area of responsibility, out to the east mid-way between El Paso and Horizon City. The Deputy doesn’t ask but he has to be curious, right? I mean, of all places why there? Sensing this, I launch into a précis of STANDOFF, the book I’m researching. ‘So anyway, it starts with 27 people being slaughtered at the Horizon airport just before dawn. A couple of King Airs (medium-size twin-engine aircraft) fly in from Mexico, land a troop of ex-military killers who then move through the airport murdering everyone they can find. The reason for this is, of course, that they don’t want any witnesses.’
I feel a little self-conscious going through this because it’s fiction and the Deputy deals with reality. But I can’t help myself and ask, ‘So is that completely outrageous? Could something like that happen?’ Manny’s wearing wraparound sunglasses so I can’t see his eyes.
He indicates and pulls into traffic without any kind of a reaction, but then says, ‘That’s possible.’
Is he just being polite? Maybe.
So anyway, I’m curious to see this airport, the one that features in my story. We take the highway, the I-10. The small talk continues, having moved on from the weather to the Deputy's long service with the Sheriff's Office. As we near the airport, I experience a powerful feeling of having been here before. Not quite déjà vu, but almost. I’ve traveled down this road many times on Google Earth, driven past the airport’s entrance gates, gazed digitally out across this flat landscape of brown dust with its desiccated plant life… Hang on a sec, there’s something odd here, something out of place. Yeah, it’s a horseracing track where there wasn’t one on Google Earth – red fences, red gates, big signs. It’s hard to miss.
‘That’s new,’ I say.
‘Yeah,’ Manny agrees. ‘We think it’s part-owned by the Sinaloa Cartel.’
What? I’m not sure what startles me the most, the statement of fact or the casual way it’s delivered, like he’s telling me he takes two lumps in his coffee.
‘It went up pretty quick,’ he continues. ‘They race quarter horses there.’
‘Horseracing is a good place to launder money,’ I volunteer.
The deputy nods. ‘Yep.’
‘Hang on - you know it’s got Sinaloa Cartel involvement, but you can’t do anything about it?’
‘Every other business in El Paso has Sinaloa Cartel involvement,’ he says.
If it was me driving, by now I’d have jammed on the brakes and pulled to the road’s shoulder. Every other business in El Paso has Sinaloa Cartel involvement… That’s a pretty unequivocal statement of fact and, frankly, it takes me by surprise. But it’s not me driving and the black and white rolls on towards the airport at the end of the road. Manny pulls into the parking lot, a dust-blown square of baked asphalt, and rolls to a stop.
This is my cue to get out and take pictures. I put my surprise about the cartel involvement in El Paso on hold and take in the layout of the airport. I’ve gotten it pretty much right it seems, and I won’t have to do too much rewriting. Satisfied about this, I now want to get back on the road and delve into the bombshell dropped by the Deputy. So when we get underway again, I prompt him. ‘You were saying every other business in El Paso has Sinaloa Cartel involvement…’
I detect a nod.
‘And yet El Paso is America’s safest city.’
No reply.
The question I want to ask goes like this: Is El Paso the safest city in America in spite of all the cartel involvement in the place, or because of it? More bluntly, does the Sinaloa Cartel want El Paso nice and law-abiding because anything else would be bad for business? I decide to put this one on ice for a while, a least until I’ve known the Deputy for more than half an hour.
‘Where to now?’ he asks.
I’m unsure.
‘You want to have a look at the fence?’
‘Sure,’ I reply. ‘The fence’: the barrier built between the US and Mexico, the Department of Homeland Security’s answer to stopping the influx of drugs and illegals.
‘I’ll take you over to San Elizario.’
San Elizario turns out to be a poor satellite suburb of El Paso, the population mostly of Mexican origin. Along the way, I ask the deputy what the average day holds for him.
‘It’s always different,’ he says. ‘Burglaries, traffic fatalities and accidents, domestic violence, kidnapping and killing, which is almost always cartel-related.’ He gestures down a narrow street. ‘Over there is the fence.’
I catch a glimpse of it, a rust-red wall around six meters tall sitting on a raised section of earth. If I hadn’t been told what it was I’d have mistaken it for an old freight train parked on a siding.
From prior research, I know that this ‘train’ has a combined length of over 3,141 kilometers and is built in sections through areas where illegal crossings and smuggling are highest*. El Paso, Texas, is one such hotspot. The cost to US taxpayers for every 1.6 kilometers built is said to be around $4 million.
‘Before the fence, people just used to walk back and forth between Mexico and the States,’ the Manny says. ‘Come to work in the morning, go home at night.’
The fence has obviously put an end to that.
I ask him if he believes it has been an effective anti-drug measure. He shrugs. ‘They cut holes in the mesh with oxy torches then hide the break. They sometimes hinge the door so they can use it later. They also make rope ladders, throw ‘em over. We used to know where the drug couriers came across. Now,’ he shrugs, ‘they come through wherever.’
We turn down another street where dead vehicles litter the dusty front yards of small, exhausted homes, and drive towards the fence. Manny pulls up where the road turns into sand and we go on foot to take a closer look at the billion-dollar smuggling deterrent. The first thing you notice is that it’s high and formidably strong, with deep concrete footings to discourage tunneling. It’s also supremely ugly and stretches rust red to the horizon in both directions, vanishing somewhere in infinity. I can’t get my fingers into holes in the steel mesh. That, of course, is intentional. They don’t want people climbing it. You can see through the mesh when you’re perpendicular to it, but from an angle, the mesh becomes a solid wall of red. According to the Deputy, illegals use this fact to hide from the border patrols.
A little further along there’s an ultra-strong double gate set in the fence – it’s hard to miss. It reminds me of the gates in Jurassic Park, the ones that keep out Tyrannosaurus Rex. ‘What are the gates for?’ I ask. At that moment, a US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) vehicle on the far side of the fence happens to drive past, on patrol.
The Deputy nods at it. ‘So our people have got something they can withdraw through when the shooting starts on the other side.’
‘That happen often?’ I ask.
The Deputy shrugs ambiguously.
‘Twenty years ago,’ he says when we climb back in the Ford, ‘this whole area was cotton fields. But then they offered the land at $5 down and $5 per month and this is what we got. There are stash houses all over the place.’
‘What are they stashing?’ I can guess, but I want the Deputy to tell me.
‘Cocaine, guns, cash. Lots and lots of cash… Not many people put their drugs on Mastercard.’
Last year, the cartels earned around $20 billion a year from the sale of cocaine in the US. As he says, that’s a lot of cash. Somehow, they got most of it across the border.
‘How do you know when a home is being used as a stash house?’ I ask.
'There are ways. We've got specialists who hunt for them — it's all they do. Sometimes you get people who are just plain stupid. They’ll park their welfare caddie out front of their trailer. That’s a giveaway.’
‘Welfare Caddie?’
‘A Cadillac Escalade.’
Around this time, I realize that the streets are totally empty. I haven’t seen a single person walking around. ‘So where is everyone?’
‘They’re around.’
‘They know we’re here, though’
‘Yeah, there’ll be people calling ahead. It’s not as bad as it is over in Juarez where the cartels give the kids some money and a cell phone. Their job is to call in anything of interest. The cartels’ real-time intelligence is first-class — unbeatable. They call these kids halcones — falcons.’
I tell him that I was thinking about going across to Juarez.
The deputy looks at me, the question ‘why’ on his face.
"Thought I might have a look around, then maybe drive down the Carreras 45 (the main highway south) a hundred klicks or so, then drive back.’
"You'll last half an hour, maybe less. You’ll be kidnapped, ransomed, and probably killed. The halcones hang around the entry points. You in your cherry red Jeep Patriot with Hawaiian tags…" He shakes his head, smiles. "might as well have a sign on it says, 'Come get me."
"Okay,' I tell him. It's an okay that also says, "Maybe I'll reconsider my plans."
He nods, the subtext being, "Good idea."
"How do the cartels get the drugs across now with the fence here?" I ask, getting back on message.
"Any way they can – drive it across, couriers…"
"Couriers?"
"A courier can carry a hundred pounds or more of cocaine in a backpack. They pay the couriers maybe fifty bucks a load and send 'em across in groups of up to ten. A thousand pounds of pure cocaine is worth a lot of money."
"Not a lot of money for a lot of risk," I say.
"Fifty dollars is a lot of money for some of these people. There’s the risk of capture so they come across where the terrain is difficult. In the winter, it’s near freezing at night. In the summer, the desert is an oven. You can die of exposure out there. And then there are the snakes."
"Snakes…?"
"Rattlers.
We Australians know all about snakes, but rattlers have a certain je ne sais quois. "Who are the couriers? Where do they come from?"
"The cartels subcontract the movement of the drugs, guns, and cash to DTOs – drug transfer organizations. They're separate businesses. The DTOs take the risk. The individual couriers start out as people who just want to put food on the table. After they’ve done it a few times and if they don’t get caught — like anything they get good at it."
We drive to another suburb, Fabens, which Manny tells me is also full of stash houses, couriers, and cartel stooges.
‘See that the building there?’ he says, nodding at a factory with its windows and doors boarded up. "It was the only industry in this place. A clothing factory. But the business went bust and closed. So, the only major business in town closing…? In an area like Fabens, you’d think that’s gonna hit hard. But this place just shrugged it off. Didn’t make any difference at all. And not long after the factory shut its doors, McDonalds came to town."
We drive past it. The parking lot out front is half full and it’s barely 11 am.
"The place is doing great," he says. "It's the drugs."
The Deputy pulls up at a set of lights. Just in front is a new white Hummer with heavily tinted windows and Juarez tags (rego plate). I’ve yet to see a vehicle in El Paso with Juarez plates — until this one. I’m about to make some comment about it when the Deputy picks up his radio mike and calls in a check on those tags. '"Problem?" I ask him when he’s done.
‘I’ve pulled that Hummer over before. Did you see the sticker for the 'El Roxxx' on its back window?"
I tell him that no, I didn’t.
"El Roxxx (real name withheld for legal reasons) is a bar out on the I-10. It has known links to the cartel. They have live bands there who sing praises to the cartel." He shakes his head with a part disgusted, part amused kind of smile.
"What do you know about the driver?" I ask him.
"It's a female. She carries a gun; owns a scrap metal yard. She's worth millions, but I've never seen any metal come in or go out. It's the same piles of rusting scrap — nothing moves. Never does. Scrap is a cash business."
"What do you think a check on the tags will tell you?"
"Don't know," he shrugs. "Maybe something I can pull her over with next time I see her – a terry stop.”
A "terry stop" is a reference to Terry vs Ohio where the US Supreme Court ruled that police have the right to stop a suspect if they reasonably suspect involvement in a crime. It’s like a foot in the door.
The Hummer turns right and we take a left, heading for the I-10, the sun now almost overhead. Three hours have gone by — they shot past in the fast lane. I retrace some steps. "Can I ask why El Paso? What’s so special about the place for the cartels?"
"El Paso is a trans-shipment center. Once they get the cocaine here, they can send it anywhere easily."
El Paso is a major rail junction, there’s the highway heading north to Houston. There’s also the I-10, which links El Paso to Los Angeles in the west, and New Orleans and Jacksonville in the east.
"All the big trucking companies are in El Paso," he says as we pass an eighteen-wheel rig with Walmart written on its flank. "All you need is a bent driver. Just one of those rigs can move over twenty tons."
"You're in highway interdiction now, right?" I ask him. "What do you look for when you pull over a truck?"
"I check their logbook to see how much downtime they've had. Honest truckers don't have much at all because they have to keep the rig moving to make a buck. Drug runners take their time, spend a few days here, a couple of days there..."
I suggest that interdiction could be dangerous and he agrees that it’s potentially lethal work.
"Around here, you never know who you're stopping or what you're stopping," he says. "But most people will give up what they know without any trouble if you speak calmly to them."
I get back to the issue bugging me. "So El Paso is America’s Safest City, and yet the Sinaloa cartel is here in a big way. Is there respect for US law enforcement, or is there an increasing lack of regard or for it from the cartels?"
"They respect it," the Deputy answers.
"Why?"
"A couple of years ago, a known courier, a US citizen, was kidnapped and taken across the border. He lost the money and drugs he was carrying for one of the cartels. His body was found dumped on the Mexican side of the border, tortured, the hands removed and placed on his chest. His shoes were removed and his pants pulled down exposing his genitals. Humiliation in death, all the signs of a cartel/gang-related murder. US law enforcement resented the arrogance of this. The guy was a US citizen and you can’t do that.
"The FBI, the Sheriff’s Office, the El Paso police department, ICE and Homeland Security, Customs and Border Patrol, the DEA, the State Troopers, the Texas Rangers, Alcohol Tobacco Firearms, EPIC (El Paso Intelligence) — we all got behind it, worked together on it. That's a lot of law enforcement. No one known to have cartel or cartel-related gang links on this side of the fence could get any sleep. We were at ‘em day and night, knocking on doors, chasing leads, asking questions. It was relentless, and they broke."
"You found the killers?"
"There were four. Two males were arrested in Fabens and two in Tornillo, another suburb of El Paso. All were picked up on Federal warrants (the FBI being chosen as the lead agency to ensure stiffer Federal penalties). Two of the killers each received four consecutive life sentences."
In the US Federal system, a life sentence is literally for life. There’s no chance of parole. You die in jail.
"On the Mexico side of the border, there’s no one to stop the cartels and the gangs. Juarez is completely lawless. It's like Somalia over there. On this side of the border, there’s just too much (law enforcement). The cartels try to keep a low profile because murders, kidnappings and killings are bad for business."
"Do you have the Los Zetas operating in Juarez?" I ask him.
The cartel Los Zetas began when members from Mexico’s Army Special Forces defected to the Gulf Cartel, becoming its private army. Today, many of the Los Zetas’ most recent recruits have been trained by the US Army. They’ve also split from the Gulf cartel, have formed their own cartel, and are currently at war with their old empls. The Los Zeta's modus operandi was, and remains, to murder in the most violent and grotesque ways imaginable.
"They do have people who fly into Juarez to train Sinaloa and Juarez cartel killers insurgency and counter-insurgency techniques, explosives, sniping, intelligence gathering, et cetera."
"Is there a local equivalent of the Zetas?" I ask him.
"That’s the Barrio Aztecas (Aztec neighborhood). Those guys started in an El Paso jail — a Mexican prison gang. They are now primarily the paramilitary enforcement wing of the Juarez cartel. We also have Barrio Aztecas on this side of the border, though they refuse to engage in murder and kidnappings because of the weight of law enforcement here. On the Juarez side, there’s also the MS-13 (or Mara Salvatrucha, the gang widely regarded as the world’s most dangerous, which began on the streets of LA and is now in more than 40 US states as well as Central and South America). The Sinaloa cartel recruits from MS-13. They use them to fight the Los Zetas.’
The I-10 highway stretches away ahead on cookie-colored desert beneath that endless blue sky. There’s nothing much out here on the side of the road – a tire storage yard, a truck stop
‘There’s the El Roxxx,’ the Deputy says, ‘the bar I was telling you about.’
It flashes by on the other side of the road through Manny’s window, a low, single-story building, the color predominately red. There are a couple of large bull motifs above the main door. The place looks innocent enough, like it might be a fun venue on a Saturday night, and no neighbors to complain about the noise. I tell myself I’ll come back later and get a photo of it. And maybe stop for a beer, ‘cos I like beer.
There's a naive question on my mind, but I have to ask it. "What about corruption?" It's a question that has to be asked. "Do you know of anyone who’s been approached by the cartels?"
"Everyone knows someone who has been approached, though few admit to having been approached."
"What's the pattern?"
"It's always the same. The cartels are always on the lookout for people in authority that they can 'turn' on the US side. They isolate people who might be experiencing financial difficulties. They make friends. After a while, you help them out in some way — a tip-off, a blind eye. Do it once and you're theirs for life."
And it’s not just law enforcement being approached. In 2010, El Paso county commissioner Willie Gandara was arrested on drug trafficking and money laundering (another man in San Elizario was also arrested in connection with the same crimes). At the time of his arrest, Gandara was running for a seat in the Texas House of Representatives. He was also the former major of Socorro, a town on the Texas/Mexico border notorious for gang and smuggling activities linked to the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels. Interestingly, one of Gandara’s tasks as county commissioner was to allocate funds to the county sheriff’s office.
Deputy Marquez turns off the I-10 toward the EPCSO compound, a large concrete block sitting on the desert sands. He has to get back to work, and I have an appointment with Crime Scene Investigation (CSI). "What about threats?" I ask him.
"Plenty of officers talk of receiving threats — to their families, their kids. Things like, "We know your son just got a C in his last math exam." There's nothing they can't find out. We study them and they study us. The cartels look for chinks in the armor, and they’ll exploit any opportunity.’
“Do you have family on the other side of the fence?”
“I had an uncle in Juarez I used to visit. When I was transferred to narcotics and started taking down loads (of drugs), he told me not to visit him again. He was afraid. The day he told me that — it was the last day I saw him. Twenty-five years ago. He’s dead now…”
We pull into the parking lot and I take some photos of the Deputy. Afterward, we shake hands. I thank him for his time and his candor and ask him if he’ll let me know if the check on the white Hummer’s tags turns up anything interesting, to which he agrees. Before we shake and go our separate ways, I say to him, "So this is war."
"Yeah. It's war."
"Can you win it?"
"I don't know."
From the Deputy’s body language I think he does know, but he just doesn’t want to admit defeat, not openly.
*
So there’s Part 1. In Part 2, you’ll meet some interesting civilians with a property down on the border who shoot first and maybe sometimes get around to asking questions if they goddamn feel like it.
As I said in the into, there has been a lot of Rio Grande water under the bridge since 2013. What has amazed me (though why I find it amazing tells you something of my own naivety), is how readily big business and goverements are keen to gorge on the cartel’s drug money. Like the HSBC bank, for example, wantonly laundering $881 million in cartel cash, the money packaged into bricks that perfectly slotted through the company mandated openings in front of its branch tellers. (HSBC was ultimately fined US$1.9bn over this).
What’s happening in BLOOD & EMPIRE (VIIII) that you might have missed
Part 9 delivered on the weekend was, unfortunately for those of you who may have forgotten to subscribe, the first part of the story going out to folks who have subscribed. If you missed it and you didn’t mean to, subscribe now and, BINGO!, access all areas. Not only will you get to continue the saga of Rome’s first contact with China, you’ll be helping to support a worthwhile creative enterprise — me. I’ll keep writing and you’ll keep receiving the many cool incentives I have planned that will make opening your emails in the morning something to wake up for. Okay, maybe a bit of an overpromise, but one has to aim high.
Meanwhile, here’s an elevator executive summary of what you missed:
Dealing with Chanzu Zhizhi’s temper is a whole other ballgame.
Saikan is given a dangerous new mission.
Huhanue receives a token of gratitude from the concubine Wang Zhaojun.
Appias informs Lucia that it may already be too late to save Rufinius from Xiongnu justice.
(It’s a very fast elevator.)
Coming this weekend: the Xiongnu attempt to send Rufinius the “the four corners” (and if you’ve been reading this story, you’ll know what a gruesome prospect that is).
And now for the “chimp moment”
So, you’re watching the evening news at the end of a hard day, and for a good half hour, you’re subjected to stories about terror weapons that sing before they kill, and about the war on drugs and the hopelessness of it all. And just when you think it’s all too depressing, there’s the story at the end, just before the weather, that’s fun and frivolous and makes you smile and reminds you that life is really not all that bad. Sometimes it’s a cute chimp doing something that makes you smile, or it’s a panda, or it’s someone who has parked their car in an impossibly dumb place — like in the bottom of someone else’s suburban backyard pool. Hilarious, right? You know what I’m talking about. Well, you’ve come the chimp moment in this week’s newsletter. And here it is, a few things for those of us still in COVID lockdown:
And, finally, my wife would like you to know that there’s one of these hanging outside my house at the moment:
Well, that’s it for this one, folks.
Stay safe and hydrate with something from a distillery.
Cheers
David
This was really interesting and compelling. And frightening to be honest. Rough for people living in the area. I'll be reading part 2 when I get a moment.
Gave me a new appreciation of El Paso. Living in Southern Arizona used to drive through there a lot on Interstate 10 as it is the major East-West highway through the bottom of the United States. It stretches from California on the Pacific coast to Florida on the Atlantic coast (2400 miles/3800 kilometers). El Paso stretches over 30 miles from East to West and the highways are crowded 24 hours a day. El Paso is right on the New Mexico-Texas border. West of El Paso is probably like the middle of Australia, that is, nothing for hundreds of miles. West Texas is for us, probably one of the most tedious and boring parts of any road we have ever driven. (Apologies to any of your readers from Texas.)
Liked your comment about rattlers. Had never seen one up close and personal until I reached under a desk at the drop zone one day. The rattle is INSTANTLY recognizable. Surprised I didn't have to change my undershorts.