THE NEW YORKER

Letter from Mexico
Days of the Dead
The new narcocultura.
by Alma Guillermoprieto November 10, 2008

[PHOTO]
Osiel Cárdenas, who is now awaiting trial in the United States; the Holy Death cult
draws devotees from the drug trade.


Last May, an exhibit sponsored by the government of the Mexican state of Sinaloa
compelled civic leaders in Culiacán, the capital, to denounce the artist Rosa María
Robles and demand that the show be closed down. Comments left in the visitors’
book weren’t as harsh. After wandering aghast through installations that featured
bloodied toilets and suspended children’s outfits pierced by dried cow tongues or
long, knobby rubber penises, viewers wrote things like “It gave me nausea, but it
made me think” and “This was very hard; it made me want to cry.” A few even
thanked Robles for the exhibit.

Sometimes a black boot was displayed in the act of shattering an ostrich egg. Not
every viewer may have understood that this was the artist’s way of critiquing the
macho narcotraficante culture of her native state, which has brought with it
uncounted acts of violence, including hundreds of murders each year. But many did
understand: people in Sinaloa know that los narcos actually wear those absurd
boots—most fashionably made of ostrich leather—and in these hard times every day
brings news of more lives they have shattered. And even a clueless outsider could
grasp the meaning of the exhibit’s most controversial and memorable installation,
referred to in the catalogue as “Red Carpet.” It was pieced together from the heavy
woollen blankets typical of the Sinaloa mountain region, which, in the exhibit, were
stiff with dried blood. Everyone in Sinaloa knows by now that in the wave of drug-
related murders some of the most notorious victims have been the levantados, or
pickups: cops or police chiefs or traffickers who are kidnapped, and whose mutilated
corpses, wrapped in blankets, appear later. Rosa María Robles had somehow
managed to obtain some of the blood-soaked blankets that had been used in such
murders, but after the show opened state investigative police confiscated the
blankets, on the ground that they are legal evidence.

Robles, a tiny, wiry, loquacious woman who wears tight jeans and clingy tops, has
spent most of her life in Culiacán. In the mid-nineties, she earned a respectable
reputation crafting enormous, menhir-like monuments from tree trunks that fetched
up on the banks of a river that runs through the city. Her artistic concerns at the
time, she told me, were mainly ecological. In 2006, her work took a different turn
when, in a sort of trance, she began assembling the exhibit she called “Navajas”
(“Razors”). The various installation pieces came together quickly “and without
stumbling,” she said one afternoon in her home, a sparsely furnished rented house in
a dusty neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.

“They ask me why I want to give this negative image of Sinaloa,” she said. “But I
don’t. The image is already there. ‘Razors’ is about violence, but it calls for a
reflection about the signs of decadence that surround us.”

“Razors” is both raw and stagy, and overwhelming in a way that does not really play
fair with the viewer. Indeed, Robles could be accused of trafficking in the same kind
of bloody one-upmanship that the drug trade is currently engaged in. (When the
authorities confiscated the bloody blankets, she cut one of her veins, collected the
blood in a chamber pot, and painted a new set of blankets with it.) But, in her messy
response to the mayhem around her, Robles, like many Mexicans who watched
indifferently as the drug terror developed over the decades, is only just learning how
to react to it.

Sinaloa lies on the Pacific Ocean, six hundred and fifty miles south of the United
States border. There is a significant fishing industry, some tourism along the coast, a
fertile valley around Culiacán (in which a good portion of all the tomatoes, eggplants,
and melons consumed in the United States is grown), and, east of this, a scraggly,
steep, and serrated mountain range. This is the Sierra Madre Occidental; few paved
roads wind along these mountains. Cannabis grows widely in the region. During the
dry season, the sierra is parched; when the rains come, it bursts into life long
enough for a poppy crop to bloom, leaving behind fields of round green pods heavy
with narcotic milk. Spraying crops that grow at such a steep incline is difficult;
persuading smallholders to eradicate a crop that offers prosperity and has been a
way of life for decades is almost always impossible. Given the conditions, there is
nothing surprising about the persistence of a clandestine drug trade in the region.
What is unusual, perhaps, is how wrong things had to go before anyone paid
attention.

In Sinaloa, Javier Valdez Cárdenas, a reporter, columnist, and editor for the scrappy
local newspaper Río Doce, is an exception to the general indifference. Having for
years made it his business to know a great deal about drug issues, he is a mandatory
stop for Mexican and foreign journalists trying to figure out the Culiacán drug scene.
Valdez is about forty, stocky, swarthy, and graying, but there is something of the
cocky teen-ager in his manner. We had lunch on a scorching Culiacán afternoon, and
he recited with studied weariness the stages of his home state’s emergence as the
crucible of Mexico’s drug crisis. It was in the late nineteenth century, he said, that
the opium harvest first became visible, encouraged by the arrival of Chinese
immigrants who had come to build a railroad. There was, he added, the long-
standing local use of marijuana, particularly by Mexican soldiers, who got through the
useless hours of patrol and guard duty with the help of a spliff or two. There was the
almost certainly apocryphal—but nevertheless widely believed—story that during the
Second World War the United States urged Sinaloa to boost its (illegal) production of
opium in order to meet the medical needs of G.I.s wounded in combat. There was,
for real, the gigantic marijuana boom in the nineteen-sixties, fuelled by demand in
the United States. And, Valdez noted, there was the notable decline in illegal crop
harvests in the late seventies, as the result of a series of violent and ambitious
assaults on growers carried out by the Mexican federal police with the support of the
Mexican Army, and with the energetic encouragement of the United States Drug
Enforcement Administration.

“That was when the drug trade really began to expand,” Valdez said. “Because the
few traffickers who remained here were killed, but all the rest of them emigrated.
Now they’re all over the country.”

Forty years after Operación Intercepción—which was followed by Operación
Cooperación, Operación Cóndor, and other drug-war initiatives—as much as thirty
per cent of Mexico’s arable land is suspected of being under cultivation for
clandestine crops, drug violence in Sinaloa has taken a quantitatively different turn,
and the Sinaloa traffickers have generated entire dynasties of criminals who are at
war in nearly every one of Mexico’s thirty-one states, as well as Mexico City.

The exiles who left Sinaloa for Tijuana, Guadalajara, and Ciudad Juárez in the
nineteen-seventies included members of the Arellano Félix family; a bold operator
called Joaquín Guzmán; and a schemer with a talent for international relations,
Amado Carrillo. They and their elders spent the next two decades collaborating with
Colombia’s drug kings on clandestine routes for delivering cocaine and marijuana to
the United States. Beginning in the mid-nineties, after Pablo Escobar was killed and
his main rivals were arrested, the Mexican associates assumed their rightful position
in the global drug economy. The main access points to what is by far the largest
market for drugs in the world are, after all, in Mexico. By the turn of the millennium,
Mexico was exporting heroin and marijuana, transporting the majority of Colombian
cocaine, and collaborating with Chinese traders in the production and export of
methamphetamines. The Sinaloa traffickers, who had not necessarily remained
friends, controlled access to all the major border points, with the exception of the
ones in the Gulf Coast state of Tamaulipas. Those, the government believes, were the
domain of Osiel Cárdenas, a particularly violent local trafficker.

With its key border cities of Nuevo Laredo (on the other side of the Rio Grande from
Laredo) and Matamoros (across from Brownsville), the state of Tamaulipas is a
coveted prize that Osiel Cárdenas’s former associates now control. They are, for the
most part, ex-members of an élite Army anti-narcotics unit, operating under the code
name los Zetas, and they have drastically upped the ante on all forms of violence;
the practice of beheading their victims is one of their signal contributions to the drug
trade.

Drug careers tend not to last very long: Osiel Cárdenas has been awaiting trial in the
United States for nearly two years, since pleading innocent in February, 2007. Three
of the Arellano Félix brothers, who operated out of Tijuana, are dead or in jail, and
one was arrested last week. The most skillful trafficker of them all, Amado Carrillo,
who once had a fleet of jets to ferry his goods from his base in Ciudad Juárez, and
who liked to be called the Lord of the Skies, is also gone. In 1997, having decided to
move his business to South America and set up housekeeping in Buenos Aires, he
went to Mexico City for radical liposuction and facial renovation. He died in the
recovery room, from a fatal mix of anesthetics and sleeping potion, according to
newspapers at the time. (His attending physicians died as well, discovered months
later encased in cement.)

The most visible member of the exile generation of drug traffickers still at large is
Joaquín Guzmán, commonly known as El Chapo (a Sinaloan term for men who are
short and built like refrigerators). It is said by people in Sinaloa that, seven years
after El Chapo escaped from prison in a laundry cart and rose to the top of law
enforcers’ most-wanted lists (and an unspecified amount of time since he acquired a
jet plane that, according to some reports, was once used by the C.I.A. for rendition
flights), he still throws parties at his ranch in the Sinaloa hill country. It is said that he
recently closed down a restaurant in Culiacán, confiscating the other diners’ cell
phones until he and his friends had finished their meal (and paid handsomely for the
meals of his hostages as well), and that, at a wake in Culiacán in May, some of El
Chapo’s men showed up to ask if the bereaved family would move, at no further cost,
to a more elegant parlor at another location. When the family complied, the body of
Joaquín Guzmán’s hulking son, Edgar, who had been shot down outside a shopping
mall, was brought in. And it is said that the street was then closed off so that El
Chapo could weep over his murdered child in privacy.

Those are the stories. What is certain is that the campaign that has filled Mexican life
with daily news of vicious crime—torture, kidnappings, beheadings—is being fought
by Chapo Guzmán against his former allies. These include, first of all, the Beltrán
Leyva family, which allegedly ordered the murder of Edgar and which, it was
reported last week, may have infiltrated the U.S. Embassy in Mexico. But Guzmán is
also locked in combat with the remaining members of the Arellano Félix drug clan, in
Tijuana; with the brother of the plastic-surgery victim Amado Carrillo; and, above all,
with the heirs of the Gulf Coast empire created by the extradited Osiel Cárdenas. The
fight is over drug routes, particularly those that end in Tamaulipas and serve as
access points to the United States, and over profitable illicit local businesses like
prostitution and the smuggling of illegal immigrants. Included in the territorial bounty
is the right to control an unknown number of the police and the military—cops and
commanders both—who moonlight as the traffickers’ henchmen.

Since Edgar’s murder, there has been a surge in drug-related killings throughout the
country. Nearly four thousand people have died so far this year. Sometimes the
corpses are wrapped in the kinds of woollen blankets that Robles used for her “Red
Carpet.” Sometimes the victims are beheaded. The bodies often show signs of
torture. Javier Valdez, the journalist who monitors these matters, notes that the
murder of Guzmán’s son signalled the beginning of a new type of war. “Before that
death, they hadn’t messed with each other’s families,” and killings were highly
targeted, he said. “Ahora va a estar más cabrón” (“Now the shit is going to hit the
fan”). He suggested that I visit one of Culiacán’s newest cemeteries.

The cemetery has grown at a staid pace during the past forty years, but it seemed to
me that now it could hardly keep up with demand. By eight o’clock that morning,
earthmovers were digging up new sections. Some workers were laying in a
honeycomb of new graves; others labored over an enormous new mausoleum. A
man who has known the cemetery over a long period of time, and proved to be
gregarious and helpful in the local way, provided a statistic: thirty per cent of the
graveyard’s permanent residents had met a violent end. By and large, he said, they
were up-country farmers, who got rich very quickly and died suddenly. The new
mausoleums reflected the tension between the relatives’ need to mourn and their
Sinaloan impulse to show off. No excess was too excessive, no preconceived notion of
what a burying ground might contain stood in the way of creativity. Next to a massive
black marble monument, with carved-stone columns and a chapel large enough to
accommodate several rows of plastic chairs, one might turn to face an orange two-
story affair with a cupola, a bell tower, balconies, and aluminum-frame windows that
handsomely achieved a Fiesta Inn effect. Banners with portraits of the jowly,
shirtsleeved deceased hung from the crenellated wall of another. A child’s shrine was
covered with a mural of SpongeBob SquarePants. A modernist structure was
crowned with a Pei-like crystal pyramid, encasing for all eternity a silver heart-shaped
helium balloon.

“What the families want,” the man said, “is for their mausoleum to demonstrate the
power they have over things.” Photographs of the departed showed bullish, thick-
necked men in their mid-twenties or thirties, looking bored and dangerous, wearing
bluejeans and extravagantly pointy ostrich-skin boots. In this boastful arena, the
pictures had also been carefully chosen to show the dead man at his best. He
frequently appeared on a chapel’s altar, unsmiling and surrounded by many bottles
of whiskey, or perhaps even more bottles of beer; the implicit epitaph of the
deceased was this: he could drink anybody under the table.

Felipe Calderón, a member by family tradition of the conservative Partido Acción
Nacional (PAN), took over as his party’s second President of the current era in
December of 2006, following seventy years of uncontested rule by the Partido
Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI. Calderón’s election was contested, and he was
perceived by much of the electorate as a weak leader. The need to overcome this
impression may have been a factor in his decision, almost immediately upon taking
office, to involve the military in renewed combat against the drug trade—a fight that
his predecessor, Vicente Fox, had less visibly pursued. The sight of troops patrolling
the major arteries of cities like Ciudad Juárez and Morelia in armored cars has
generated enormous local resentment, and offers vast opportunities for corruption in
a military that, compared with the security forces, is not loathed, and remains—if only
in the most relative terms—uncorrupt. (Among the many exceptions is an Army
general who was removed as drug czar some years ago, when it was discovered that
he was actually working for the Juárez drug trade.) Regardless, troops are now
deployed across the country, resulting in mounting tension between the local security
forces and the federal troops. Quite a few high-level arrests have been made, but
drug crimes have increased wherever the troops patrol, a consequence of what
several people I talked to described as “stirring up the chicken coop.” A certain
nostalgia for the days when the PRI was in charge and the drug traffickers knew
their place would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago, but it has
encouraged old PRIistas to believe that the party can return to power in the 2012
elections.

In large part, though, it was the PRI’s defeat—or, rather, the long-withheld
recognition of its defeat—and the dawn of real electoral politics that led to what
appears to be the drug trade’s thorough infiltration of the political parties. This last
according to a PRIista whom I shall call Héctor, who enjoyed a long and successful
national career before retiring to his home state. In the old days, much of the money
for what was essentially a ceremonial presentation of the candidate to his subjects
came from the vast coffers of the one-party state. Modern media campaigns put an
end to all that. “Thanks to the television stations, our campaign needs multiplied,”
Héctor explained. “A congressman’s electoral campaign can now run to sixteen,
seventeen million dollars.” Where is such money to come from? Informed opinion has
it that each of the major drug groups now has ties to significant numbers of
politicians in its party of choice, if not to the party itself. As for the current military
offensive, Héctor gave a little snort of disgust. “When you see what amounts to a
military parade in these towns, in which the Army is trooping along on the main
avenue while on the side streets people are killing each other . . . when I see how
these people”—the traffickers—“are climbing up right into the very beard of the
state, I think, Holy fuck! This country could really collapse!”

There are limits on the way the government can wage its war on drugs. A
government spokesman, Miguel Monterrubio, pointed out recently that when
President Calderón came to office there were ten thousand federal law-enforcement
agents in the entire country. Today, the total has increased to nearly thirty
thousand—still a small number in a country that has a hundred and ten million
people and a raging crime problem. “That’s why the government decided to involve
the Army,” Monterrubio told me over coffee one morning. “If not them, who?”

There remains the problem of corruption. Several new vetting agencies, Monterrubio
said, will conduct ongoing polygraph tests and background checks on all law-
enforcement personnel. In the old days, there was a de-facto agreement between
the government and the traffickers that the traffickers would kill each other among
themselves. “But now,” Monterrubio said, “the traffickers have realized that they can
use the murders to send a message through the media. It’s narco-terror.”

Calderón’s policy, which the Bush Administration is supporting with a 
.4-billion aid
package, to be delivered beginning this year, is heavily weighted on the side of
hardware and training for joint U.S.-Mexican operations along the border. Some
critics would prefer a program that placed more emphasis on treatment for drug
addiction and less on shootouts, but the question of whether a battle against drug
use can be won by deploying military force is not one that government officials are
willing to ask at this juncture. From the public’s point of view, the government’s
crackdown has simply produced more violence.

“In the end, it’s all absurd,” Froylán Enciso, a friend of mine who is a historian
specializing in the drug trade, remarked the other day. “The class solidarity between
the troops and the growers is far greater than the soldiers’ need to obey orders. They
bargain: ‘I need a statistic and you need to survive in this environment, so let’s deal.’
And the government gets its statistic, because every year they have to have a record-
breaking figure for the press conference—more kilos of marijuana confiscated, more
arrests made than ever before. And the cost that doesn’t get factored into the
figures”—how much a kilo of cocaine paste sells for at the point of manufacture
versus its street value—“is the cost of the narcocultura. Because the logistics and the
infrastructure and the narco-helicopters and narco-submarines are only a part of it.
The real value of the drugs is the cost incurred by traffickers, small and large, in
steeling themselves against the risks involved in delivering the drugs to the final
consumer. The narcocultura—the mausoleums and the music and the baseball caps
embroidered with marijuana leaves in Swarovski crystals—is the array of symbols they
surround themselves with in order to ward off that fear.”

On the first day of every month, at the Tepito metro stop in downtown Mexico City, a
new breed of pilgrim can be observed inching his way on his knees out of the stop
and down a filthy market street, and cradling in his arms, babylike, a plastic figure of
Death—or Holy Death, La Santa Muerte, as the pilgrims refer to the robed skeleton,
who carries, variously, a scythe, a sceptre, a set of scales, or a globe in her
(sometimes his) hands. There were dozens of these effigies, borne by crawling men
in their teens or early twenties. Tattooed and gaunt, they were dressed in black T-
shirts with the sleeves ripped off and wore chains around their necks and silver skulls,
like brass knuckles, on their fingers.

Their goal was some four blocks distant, in the heart of Tepito, a legendary
neighborhood that in the centuries since the Spanish Conquest has remained
stubbornly insubordinate. Venders were everywhere along the pilgrims’ path,
hawking T-shirts and baseball caps and medals decorated with the Santa Muerte.

The shrine of the Holy Death is just blocks away from a compound of low-income
housing where, in 2007, Mexico City police conducted a full-scale assault in search of
drugs, weapons, and other illegal goods. Enriqueta Romero Romero, known as
Queta, or Quetita, set up the shrine on this spot seven years ago after one of her
sons, who was himself a devotee of La Santa, made her a gift of the skeleton. The
bewigged saint now stands in a glass case, elaborately robed and veiled according to
Queta’s inspiration—sometimes in rainbow gauze, sometimes in white lace. Queta and
her son also more or less invented the 8 P.M. “Rosary” that is held on the first of
every month, and draws thousands of the faithful, including the skull-ringed young
men who, at a guess, make a paltry living running many kinds of errands for the
lords of Tepito. Queta says the skeleton is feminine—the Niña Blanca, or White Girl-
Child—and that those who say there is such a thing as a He-Death, and that one
should have both on one’s home altar, so the two can meet and marry, are
charlatans. Queta is small, sixtyish, and bustling; she blows kisses at her Niña every
other sentence and has a benevolent smile for everyone. But her gaze can narrow
with suspicion in an alarming fashion, and one has the sense that she can summon
dangerous help to her side very quickly.

The Santa Muerte had been hanging around the fringes of popular belief in Tepito
and other raffish neighborhoods for decades—Queta says that she learned to pray to
her from her aunt—but thanks to Queta her cult now extends throughout Mexico City
and far beyond. There are, by Queta’s count, two thousand shrines like hers in
Mexico, and who knows if she is including the charlatans in her tally? (The cult is
known for the drug traffickers’ devotion to it, but it certainly embraces a far larger
number of believers.) Hers, at any rate, was the first public shrine, and it holds a
cathedral-like status for worshippers like Felicitas Castillo, a young woman who for the
past five years has travelled once a month from the city of Xalapa, two hundred miles
away, in order to offer the “Utmost Holy Death” roses and a mariachi serenade. On
the day that I visited the shrine, the musicians played ranchera songs that are
normally dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe, and Castillo provided an answer
heard many times when I asked the faithful what they prayed for. “I don’t ask for
much,” Castillo said. “Health for my family, work.” This is an answer recommended
by Queta, who doesn’t think that one should bargain with Death or be greedy. But
the following afternoon, as the time for the Rosary drew near and worshippers
pressed more and more tightly into the narrow street where the shrine is situated,
one crawling young man said that he was praying for his ex-girlfriend, who lived in
another state, to let him see his five-month-old daughter. A woman wanted the holy
figure to help her get over the suicide, last year, of her fourteen-year-old son.

Along the edges of the packed street, young men took quick snorts of glue and
sometimes wept. A thin tattooed and pierced man with terrible skin was the only one
of the many young toughs present who was willing to talk to me, and his amiability
may have had something to do with the fact that he had just absent-mindedly
assembled a joint about the size of a Robusto and was now wreathed in its smoke.
The Holy Death had restored to him the love of the excruciatingly shy woman at his
side, the man said, and he was now Death’s devotee forever. At the front of the
crowd, banks of flowers to rival those laid at Princess Diana’s grave paid tribute to the
skeleton. Half hidden by the flowers was a large, clear plastic death figure, and
behind it was a sound system at which one of Queta’s sons would soon lead the
Rosary. Behind that, Queta cackled in answer to a question. Yes, it was true that the
Catholic Church disapproved of her “Little Skinny One,” she said. “But have you
noticed how empty their churches are?”

Queta’s genius has been to create out of her Catholic faith an inclusive syncretic
ritual: a Rosary, which is recited complete with Hail Marys and the Lord’s Prayer;
special prayers for those in jail; and a culminating, quasi-Pentecostal moment when
the faithful all lift their effigy to Heaven to “charge it with energy.” It is a cult, Queta
says, accurately, that does not discriminate. A Catholic priest might extend grudging
absolution to those who confess that they have just sold several grams of crystal
meth to a bunch of twelve-year-olds, but only at Queta’s Rosary can you be blessed
on a monthly basis without the matter of how you earn a living ever coming up.

Queta, naturally enough, denies that the Santa Muerte is a devotion for drug
traffickers—one more element of the narcocultura. Why, then, I wondered, was it
perceived as such outside Tepito?

“Ha!” she exclaimed. “Because every single time one of them is arrested or killed they
find my Little Skinny One on their altar!” From the storefront next to the shrine,
where she sells candles and other devotional objects for the cult, she blew another
kiss and called out to her patron saint, “Preciosa! ”