Zeta terror

Kidnapped and tortured, cartel lawyer fears for life

By TODD BENSMAN
SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS
Published: Sunday, June 7, 2009 12:20 AM CDT

(Editor's note: This is the first in a two-part series.)

MATAMOROS, Mexico - Blindfolded and bound, Ernesto Gutierrez Martinez felt the guards guide him from his cell to an outdoor area.

He caught a whiff of fuel in the air and heard a man crying.

The armed men at his sides, who had so often beaten him unconscious, were laughing with sadistic glee.

"This is how we prepare a soup," one of them cackled.

His blindfold torn away, Gutierrez saw he was in a small courtyard.

Another bound prisoner of the Gulf Cartel stood in a metal barrel, blubbering prayers.

Someone was spraying him with a flammable liquid. Someone else flicked a lighter.

Gutierrez's own scream of horror could not escape the rag stuffed in his mouth.

He thrust his head to one side to avert the sight of the screaming mass of flesh and stench.

The guard grabbed a fistful of Gutierrez's hair and yanked his head back up.

Later, back in his cell awaiting his own promised execution by fire, some of the same tormentors started up a friendly banter.

The killers wondered why Gutierrez - an urbane attorney - had come be to a prisoner in this house of torture and murder.

"They said I was not the type of person they normally have there," he recalled.

"They were asking me why I was there. That I must have done something very bad."

Gutierrez had no sure answer but knew he could end up just like the other captives.

One day, almost as abruptly as they grabbed him from his law office, the cartel enforcers let Gutierrez go.

Three weeks of beatings and little food left him dizzy, petrified and filthy, but he knew what he had to do.

Now, 20 months later, Gutierrez and his family live in hiding somewhere in the United States.

The sleeves of his shirt barely cover the handcuff gouges in his wrists - a reminder that if he ever returned to Mexico, the cartel's Los Zetas paramilitary enforcers would readily make good on their death threats.

If returning to Mexico is risky, then staying in America is perilous in another way.

Gutierrez is making a long-shot attempt to gain political asylum in the U.S., joining a growing number of Mexican police officers, journalists and businessmen seeking protection from the cartels.

But the U.S. government is generally opposed to their asylum claims because, experts say, the law doesn't squarely apply to them.

Immigration judges have sent some of them back to Mexico.

"The government is fighting these cases like crazy, any excuse to deny these claims," said Eduardo Beckett, managing attorney of the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center in El Paso, which has lost a number of the cases but does not represent the Gutierrez family.

"They don't want to open up the floodgates."

Gutierrez may face an added hurdle. He was not just any lawyer.

Among the clients in his civil law practice was the family of Osiel Cardenas Guillen, the top boss of the Gulf Cartel.

Cardenas was Mexico's most wanted fugitive and one of America's when Mexican troops captured him in a 2003 Matamoros shootout.

After the capture, Gutierrez worked for four years with the legal team that failed to block Cardenas' January 2007 extradition to Houston.

In considering asylum, the government will want to know whether Gutierrez ever went beyond mere legal work for Cardenas - and got burned for playing with fire - as have other Mexican attorneys.

Gutierrez insists he was only made to pay, in pain and blood, for losing the extradition battle that all but ended Cardenas' continued power over the cartel.

The extradition set up Cardenas for a trial this September in Houston on some two-dozen organized crime charges that could put him away for life in the U.S. prison system.

The extradition also ended any hope that Cardenas might buy an escape like the one last month where 53 cartel operatives walked out of a Mexican prison.

Through his current Houston defense lawyers, Cardenas denies having anything to do with the lawyer's abduction, or the bad luck of some of his other attorneys in Mexico.

At least three who worked for Cardenas ended up dead, full of bullets.

"Mr. Cardenas never ordered, directed, nor even implied that the Zetas kidnap or harm Mr. Gutierrez," said Chip Lewis, who is part of the current Cardenas defense team.

"He had no problems with Mr. Gutierrez. Whatever the Zetas did or did not do was not at his direction."

Gutierrez agreed to share his story and nonpublic asylum claim files with the San Antonio Express-News in hopes that scrutiny might aid his chancy asylum bid.

He agreed to meet only in public places.

He requested that no photographs of him be published in case cartel operatives recognize him.

Gutierrez is so afraid of falling back into their hands that he has abandoned or is selling everything: his successful law practice, two homes in Mexico, a $210,000 house in Brownsville, a South Padre Island condo, sports cars.

He also left behind his extended family members, whom he can't contact out of fear of exposing them to cartel interrogation.

Gutierrez lives in an anxious, stateless limbo, burning through his savings.

"In Mexico, there's no hiding," he said.

"There's no safe place. I can't go back. Not ever again."


Sucked in


Gutierrez traces all of his troubles to Jan. 29, 2004.

That was the day when Celia Salinas Aguilar de Cardenas, wife of Osiel Cardenas, walked into his law offices.

The government had seized her house, she said.

Would Gutierrez help her get it back?

By then, the 1985 University of Tamaulipas law school graduate didn't need the money.

Hailing from a family of Matamoros lawyers and doctors, he'd built a prosperous civil litigation practice of contract law, divorce and - significantly - cases involving government property seizures.

Gutierrez insists he'd never before done criminal defense work, nor hired out to anyone involved with the cartels.

Still, Gutierrez admits he was a bit intrigued by such an infamous client.

The Zetas had a fearsome reputation of not taking no for an answer, but in the end Gutierrez rationalized, "Everyone knew me in Matamoros; I wasn't scared."

Those sentiments would change as the Cardenas family pulled him in deeper.

First, Celia's sister came to him with a house seizure case, followed by Osiel Cardenas' father, who also had one, Gutierrez's law files show.

Then, in February 2004, Cardenas summoned him to the La Palma prison in Toluca to discuss the property cases.

Cardenas asked Gutierrez to join a team of 20 other lawyers gearing up to fight a U.S. extradition effort.

Gutierrez wasn't enthused by the nine-hour drive to Toluca and time away from family but he agreed to only a part-time advisory role that would require twice-monthly visits with Cardenas and some special projects for the team.

The deaths of some of his teammates demolished any pretense that his prominence offered any immunity from such treatment.

In January and March 2005, the bodies of two Cardenas lawyers Gutierrez knew were found riddled with bullets not far from the La Palma prison gates.

The assassinations were reminiscent of a 2002 attack by soldiers on a parked carload of Cardenas lawyers in front of the La Palma prison that left one of the attorneys dead.

"I was scared. I didn't want to go anymore, but after what happened, what can you do? Not go?" Gutierrez said.

Pressed in interviews with the Express-News, Gutierrez distances himself from Mexican press accounts implicating other lawyers in helping Cardenas run the Gulf Cartel from Toluca.

They allegedly acted as messengers, paymasters and strategists.

One account had an attorney smuggling in a television equipped with a hidden cell phone.

The Mexican government even sent troops and tanks to La Palma once to stop what it said was a helicopter escape plot orchestrated by the attorneys.

All of Cardenas' lawyers were banned from the prison for a time.

Involvement could end Gutierrez's political asylum dream because judges weigh "moral character" in their decisions.

Gutierrez insists that as an outsider based in distant Matamoros he never strayed from legal work and had no direct knowledge of these shenanigans.

The Express-News could neither corroborate nor refute this claim.

But no mention of Gutierrez is found in press reports about corrupted lawyers.

"There were some lawyers doing that," he admitted after a long pause.

"But I was never present when they would talk to Osiel.

When I would go we would only talk about that case.

There was no trust to talk about anything else."


The price of losing


Two days before an aircraft flew him to Houston, an unusually agitated Cardenas summoned Gutierrez for a last meeting.

"I had never seen him like that. His eyes were weird.

You could see anger in his face," Gutierrez recalled.

Cardenas queried him - hard - about a missed deadline to file a motion.

He said the lawyers had "screwed up."

Gutierrez said he reminded Cardenas of his distant advisory role. Gutierrez wished Cardenas well and went home to rebuild his neglected practice.

A week later, several Zetas barged into his office carrying a Nextel radio phone.

On it, they said, was acting cartel chief Jorge Eduardo Castilla Sanchez.

The voice warned the cartel was investigating legal mistakes. Gutierrez would be killed if faulted.

Five months later, at about 3 p.m. on Aug. 17, 2007, a team of 10 armed Zetas stormed up to his second floor office, said an affidavit from a client who was there.

The gunmen hammered Gutierrez with gun butts to the face and head, starting streams of blood.

They handcuffed, blindfolded him, then hauled him outside to a waiting sport utility vehicle.

Some 20 minutes later, the vehicle stopped at what Gutierrez guessed was a detention center.

He could tell by the screams and the sounds of beatings, which he would hear from his 6-by-6 foot room day and night.

Too often, he would hear someone scream, "'Oh my God' and then you could hear a shot fired and nothing else."

With each murder, someone would knock on Gutierrez's door and say, "Get ready. You're next!"

Over the next three weeks, he ate nothing.

For bathroom privileges, he had to soil himself.

He was beaten most days, often to unconsciousness, by baseball bat, iron bar, fists and gun butts. Pictures show a festering infection on his broken nose.

A medical report notes a right eye socket partly collapsed and eye damage.

The handcuffs never came off, burrowing into his skin and festering into an oozing infection.

But the psychological abuse was far worse than any of that. Constant threats that his turn to die had arrived were underscored by murders he was forced to witness.

In addition to the prisoner burned to death, he said he was forced to watch them shoot another prisoner in the head.

Morticians were called in to clean up the messes.

On another day, they brought him out to see a man's throat cut so deeply the head almost toppled off. Gutierrez was splattered by blood.

The Zetas then put a knife to Gutierrez's throat and cut, though not quite deeply enough to kill.

They told him they'd instead concoct an especially creative way to torture him to death.

A thin scar runs horizontally across his two jugulars.

Once, the guards sprayed him with a flammable liquid, saying they had finally gotten around to burning him alive.

Then, inexplicably one day, the Zetas said "el jefe," the boss, had ordered him treated, cleaned up and released.

A Nextel radio phone was held to his ear on the drive to his waiting car.

Again, a man identified as Cardenas' top deputy, Castilla, told Gutierrez he was needed to represent a forthcoming list of jailed operatives.

He credits his survival to his victories on the Cardenas land cases.

"I think they needed me. I won many cases for them," he said.

Gutierrez agreed at once, of course, but privately vowed he would never waste this unexpected gift.


Flight to America


He drove straight to the home of his sister, an emergency room doctor, and her surgeon husband.

She recalled answering the doorbell at 2 a.m. to find the dreadful but also wonderful sight of her emaciated, bleeding brother. She began treating his wounds.

"We thought he was dead," she said.

"I know from my work at the hospital that a lot of people go through this and end up dead.

But he was here. He was here! We have him."

After a tearful reunion with Josephina and the children later, the couple turned to the matter at hand.

They were still in danger. It was decided that Gutierrez would flee - for good - to Brownsville the very next morning.

Josephina would stage a more orderly retreat to join him a week or two later.

Two days later, Zetas showed up at the couple's Matamoros home, demanding Gutierrez.

Josephina, hiding her youngest in a back bedroom, swore he was at the doctor's office.

They threatened to kill her and the children if he didn't show up at his office to receive his legal assignments.

After they'd gone, she grabbed toys and clothing, piled the kids into the car and fled to Brownsville.

Fear followed the family, though.

They knew they'd committed the unpardonable sin of defying direct cartel orders.

It didn't help that one of Cardenas' daughters lived in a Brownsville mansion one block away.

The couple turned their house into a bunker of steel storm shutters and a sophisticated surveillance camera system, never turning on an outdoor light after dark.

They emerged only for food and school.

The Express-News confirmed that a neighbor noticed young men cruising the street in brand new SUVs, pausing at the house.

One day, he told the couple how a driver stopped to take pictures.

The same week, Gutierrez's father told the Express-News, a cartel operative contacted him with a warning: Gutierrez had to turn himself in or face abduction and worse from the Brownsville house.

Overnight, the family fled north.

The house, with its odd shutters, is for sale. Records show the Gutierrez family also sold a vacant lot they owned in town.

They said they are living on the proceeds.

Last August, they filed an application for political asylum.

No hearing has been set. But their attorney predicts long odds because victims like Gutierrez don't precisely fit the legal definitions that require judges to grant sanctuary.

Time and money are running out as they wait in hiding for their day in court.

They feel no regret abandoning old lives for the greater privilege of simply living. Gutierrez is studying English, hoping maybe one day he'll try for a U.S. law degree.

Whatever hardships the future holds, they are hell-bent never - ever - to return to Mexico. They'll maybe go to another country if America rejects them.

"They took everything away from us, but we are very grateful toward God because at least he's still alive," said Josephina.

"We'll never be the same people again."

Express-News staffer Javier Barroso and photographer Jerry Lara contributed to this report

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