This is an old story, but it seems to me important to emphasize to the majority, for whom the U.S./Mexico border seems so very far away, the extent of the violence that is occuring daily in that formerly peaceful country, and how rapidly it is steadily moving north.

Monday, Jun. 28, 2010
Mexico's Meth Warriors
By Tim Padgett / Apatzingan; Ioan Grillo / Apatzingan

The city of Zitácuaro sits on the edge of Mexico's Tierra Caliente, an oven-like expanse of lime orchards and agave spikes beneath the sierras in western Michoacán state. The hellish setting seems apt for the violence raging across the region. The latest spasm grabbed headlines worldwide: on June 14, two dozen gunmen ambushed a convoy ferrying 40 federal police officers on the highway outside Zitácuaro. The firefight lasted half an hour and left 12 federales dead and 15 wounded; some of the attackers were also killed, their bodies whisked away by comrades. Even in a country where drug gangs routinely massacre policemen and soldiers, the assault was brazen.

Few in Mexico doubt who was responsible: a bizarre gang of Christian-fundamentalist narcotraffickers known as La Familia Michoacana, which is busting out of its Tierra Caliente base. Its leader, Nazario Moreno — a.k.a. El Más Loco (the Craziest One) — has written a bible, and his 1,500 minions hold prayer meetings before going to work. Their grisly calling card is the severed head of an enemy. There have been at least 20 decapitations this year in their stronghold of Apatzingán, a colonial city of 100,000 inhabitants who live in perpetual fear of the gang. Recently, four severed, blindfolded heads — one belonging to a federal cop — were left on its main monument with a sign warning folks to "take a good look" at what happens to those who cross the Michoacán mob. "It's gotten to the point," says Andrés Larios, a local Roman Catholic priest, "that we've had to consult our bishop about whether there's a proper way to say funeral Masses for heads without bodies." (See pictures of meth gang wars.)

La Familia poses more than theological problems for Mexican President Felipe Calderón, a Michoacán native. Calderón's 3½-year-long offensive against drug traffickers, a period that has seen 23,000 gangland-style murders in Mexico, looks increasingly on the ropes. The meteoric rise of La Familia, which specializes in the production and trafficking of methamphetamine, reflects an alarming proliferation of Mexican drug cartels. Five years ago, there were a few major narco-groups, and La Familia was just a minor gang for hire; today there are seven strong cartels, one of them La Familia, making a combined $40 billion a year or thereabouts as they compete for turf.

And El Más Loco is no longer just a local lunatic: Moreno's handiwork has put him on Washington's radar. President Obama last year designated La Familia a "significant foreign narcotics trafficker," and Attorney General Eric Holder calls its violent "depravity" among the worst of Mexico's gangs. Last October, an operation led by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) collared more than 300 Familia operatives in U.S. cities. A new Justice Department report notes that Mexican cartels have "increased the [annual] flow of methamphetamine into the U.S." to about 200 tons, worth $20 billion on the street. La Familia accounts for half that volume. (See pictures of Mexico City's police fighting crime.)

Power and Influence

Ironically, La Familia was formed in the 1980s as an anticrime vigilante group. But its early leaders soon got sucked into drug trafficking. They became proficient at making meth thanks largely to the massive loads of illicit pseudoephedrine, meth's main ingredient, smuggled into the Michoacán port of Lázaro Cárdenas from Asia. Shortly after 2000, they allied with the Zetas, another bloodthirsty drug gang; the two groups have since fallen out.

La Familia's rise was propelled by the U.S. appetite for meth, which has a street value of $100 a gram and is the most popular illicit drug in the American Midwest and West, according to the DEA. The gang also benefited from U.S. law. In 2005, Congress curbed over-the-counter sales of pseudoephedrine, and the number of clandestine meth labs in the U.S. plummeted. La Familia, which by then controlled smuggling at Lázaro Cárdenas, moved quickly to resupply American users, creating some 1,000 meth-manufacturing labs in Michoacán. Its members not only revived the U.S. meth market; "they elevated it," says Rodney Benson, who heads the DEA in Atlanta. La Familia, he says, produces "the clearest crystals I have ever seen."

Back in Michoacán, the drug money is used to buy power. Mexican investigators estimate the cartel wields enormous influence over the governments of 83 of Michoacán's 113 municipalities. Last year, federal agents arrested 12 Michoacán mayors for their alleged ties to Moreno's organization. (A federal judge has since released nine for lack of evidence, including Apatzingán Mayor Genaro GuÃ*zar.) Congressman-elect Julio César Godoy, brother of Michoacán's governor, is a fugitive accused of aiding the cartel, though he issued a statement while in hiding last year, denying the allegation.

Classified Mexican government documents obtained by TIME suggest that La Familia has Michoacán officials not just in its pocket; it has them on its duty roster. In one affidavit, a former cartel member tells federal agents how he gave a mayoral candidate $167,000 to fund his campaign (he won), then describes the new mayor's jobs: guarding drug shipments, reporting army and police movements to La Familia and ordering the arrest of Familia rivals and handing them over for execution. "Other cartels just pay off the political structure in order to be able do their business," says a top Michoacán investigator, who asked not to be identified. "La Familia is making itself the political structure." Little wonder, then, that Calderón's efforts to smash the gang — Michoacán was the first place he sent the military to battle the cartels after he took office in late 2006 — have so far failed.

See more pictures of Mexico's drug wars.

See pictures of Culiacán, the home of Mexico's drug-trafficking industry.

Calderón's government is offering a $2.5 million reward for the capture of Moreno, 40. The son of a poor Tierra Caliente rancher, he started as a small-time marijuana dealer and narco-hitman with a flair for disguises. (He once posed as a supermarket bag boy and carried his intended victim's groceries to the parking lot. That way, he could get close enough to shoot him in the head.) In the 1990s, Moreno ferried cocaine to the U.S., where he became a fan of Latino Evangelicals, the masculine religiosity of Christian author John Eldredge and the romanticization of the Mafia in the Godfather films. Investigators say the head injuries he suffered in a 1998 car accident (he has a plate in his skull) made him even more "loco." But to many of Michoacán's poorest residents, the mustached Moreno is a Robin Hood, lavishing food and money on Tierra Caliente barrios. On Apatzingán's torrid central plaza, you can buy CDs full of narcocorridos, or drug ballads, praising La Familia's exploits.

Judging by his bible, titled Pensamientos (Thoughts), Moreno sees himself as an Old Testament warrior on a narco-mission from God: heading a criminal group of "valiant men" to "protect our land, Michoacán." Not for him such Christian notions as turning the other cheek. In the fall of 2006, La Familia announced itself as a player alongside major drug groups by lopping off the heads of five Zeta operatives and rolling them onto the dance floor of a crowded disco. The audacity didn't end there. Last summer, after the arrest of one of Moreno's top lieutenants, La Familia tortured and murdered a dozen federal police officers, dumping their bodies in a pile beside a Michoacán highway. (See the top 10 crime stories of 2009.)

The group's internal discipline is just as cruel. La Familia insists it doesn't sell meth to fellow Michoacanos and requires members to be drug-free. Gang members know the penalties for drug taking and other rule violations: the first screwup is punished by being tied up for 15 days in dark seclusion, a second merits severe beatings for 12 days, and the third results in execution, carried out by the very person who recruited you to the gang. Outsiders inquiring into the gang's workings often come to a sticky end. Four journalists reporting on drug violence have disappeared in Michoacán since 2006; another was abducted and murdered in April.

Brutality is good for business. Officials say La Familia controls as much as 30% of the state's formal commerce and usually owns the businesses — from gas stations to cattle ranches — where it launders its billions of dollars. What it doesn't own, it threatens. Gangsters recently went to an Apatzingán hotel owned by José Infante and ordered him not to let federales stay there. "Now if federal police call," says Infante, "we say we are full."

Fighting the Family

How do you deal with a problem like El Más Loco? After the June 14 massacre, Calderón will come under increased pressure to hit back at La Familia, perhaps with a troop surge. But rather than rely on military force, many law-enforcement experts say the best way to deal with the cartels is to weaken their finances with more intelligence-driven investigative work. The campaign against La Familia should be "less focused on military shock and awe and more on judicial and police professionalization," says Eric Olson, a senior adviser at the Woodrow Wilson Center's Mexico Institute in Washington.

But reforming the Mexican police, who are all too often in league with drug traffickers, is a task that eluded Calderón's predecessors. Local officials say they're doing what they can. "Seventy percent of my force don't even have high school diplomas," Michoacán's security director, Minerva Bautista, told TIME in April, a day after announcing stricter recruiting guidelines. A week later, her SUV was attacked by gunmen with assault rifles and grenades. Two bodyguards were killed. (See pictures of the fence between the United States and Mexico.)

If La Familia has an Achilles' heel, say officials, it's the group's desire to rule, not just bribe those who do. As it expands into neighboring states and nearby Mexico City, as well as border cities like Juárez, its "obsession with power for its own sake could be its downfall," says the Michoacán investigator. It's one thing to run a district of Michoacán and quite another to try to govern the nation's capital. It's also unclear if the group, already locked in a war with the Zetas, has the muscle to take on larger cartels like that in Sinaloa.

Calderón, who in Washington last month implored the U.S. to deliver $1.5 billion in promised antidrug aid for Mexico, is being urged by Mexicans and the U.S. alike to step up social reforms in order to give poorer Mexicans opportunities other than simply joining drug gangs. On a visit to Mexico in March, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged that U.S. drug consumption and gun smuggling into Mexico contribute greatly to the narcoviolence; she pledged more Washington policy emphasis in those areas.

But many in Apatzingán are pessimistic about any campaign against La Familia: El Más Loco and his family, they fear, are already too deeply entrenched in Michoacán. Hotelier Infante recently watched his little girl and her friends kicking around a coconut, pretending it was a human head. "People here," he says, "are getting very dehumanized."

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