The Taken Read online

  A book in the Latin American and Caribbean Arts and Culture initiative.

  Latin American and Caribbean Arts and Culture is supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

  The Taken

  TRUE STORIES OF THE SINALOA DRUG WAR

  By JAVIER VALDEZ CÁRDENAS

  Translated and with an introduction by Everard Meade

  University of Oklahoma Press

  Norman

  2800 Venture Drive

  Norman, Oklahoma 73069

  www.oupress.com

  Copyright © 2017 by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University. Manufactured in the U.S.A.

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  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, University of Oklahoma Press, 2800 Venture Drive, Norman, Oklahoma 73069 or email [email protected].

  ISBN 978-0-8061-5576-0 (paperback alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-8061-5885-3 (ebook : mobipocket)

  ISBN 978-0-8061-5886-0 (ebook : epub)

  This eBook was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [email protected].

  Contents

  Introduction, by Everard Meade

  1. With Hell inside You

  2. Assassins with Uniforms

  3. In the Assassin’s Shoes

  4. Dying for Good, Forgetting

  5. I Am Here, Sister

  Notes

  Index

  Introduction

  EVERARD MEADE

  For two years, Sandra Luz Hernández skirted an abyss of violence and impunity that threatened to swallow her up at every turn. But she refused to back down. “I’m going to be a rock in his shoe,” she declared of the prosecutor in charge of investigating the forced disappearance of her son, Édgar. On February 12, 2012, a group of armed, masked men stormed into his house in Culiacán, Sinaloa, and carried him away. He was never seen again.

  It was a typical levantón—literally a “taking,” where unknown men forcibly carry someone off, usually to a safe house or some remote location, sometimes for torture and interrogation, sometimes for ransom, sometimes for execution, and often for some combination of these and other torments. The perpetrators include organized crime, the police, and the military, often cooperating with one another. The victims are sometimes set free and sometimes killed, sometimes celebrated and sometimes denied, sometimes dumped in public places and sometimes forcibly disappeared. The constant is an armed commando taking and holding a person or group of people against their will, exercising near-complete power over their bodies for a period of time, and then leaving them and their family and friends with very little means of explaining what happened, why, or who is responsible. Terrified survivors often avoid public space, civic engagement, or encounters with the authorities. Solitude and self-doubt strike even the most courageous and outspoken, but not because they think some big brother, panoptic state is watching them or because they’ve internalized its propaganda. Taken by an amorphous combination of armed men—a thundering but spectral force almost impossible to identify or thwart—they fear that no one is watching, that no one else is capable of bearing witness to their suffering, of giving it meaning or common cause.

  The levantón has become an everyday modus operandi of the current drug war in Mexico. Its particular brand of intimate yet anonymous, patterned yet unpredictable violence is the ultimate expression of the nature of power in a place where the dismantling of the one-party state spurred a democratic efflorescence but also a power vacuum filled by gangsters and pistoleros; where free trade has opened up new markets and created massive wealth but done little to address crushing poverty and inequality; and where globalization has created new networks of solidarity and resistance in the face of mass violence but also provided nineteenth-century-style warlords with access to twenty-first century weapons, communications, and supply chains. Like the forms of power it represents, the word levantón is relatively new—it was rarely used before 2003 or so, and it is not included in the classic dictionaries of Mexican criminal slang.1

  Mexico is living through a decade-long drug war that has produced casualties and atrocities on par with the dirty-war dictatorships of the late 1970s in Chile and Argentina and the civil wars of the 1980s in Central America. Since the intensification of the present drug war in 2006, more than 100,000 people have been killed, 30,000 have been forcibly disappeared, and at least 250,000 have been forced from their homes.2 The use of rape, torture, and mutilation as weapons of war is widespread and well publicized. Mexico ranks in the bottom 11 percent of the Global Peace Index, next to Lebanon and just above Yemen and Libya.3

  At the same time, Mexico is a prosperous and cosmopolitan place that attracts more than twenty million foreign tourists and nearly $20 billion in foreign investment each year and recently displaced Spain as the largest economy in the Hispanic world. Mexico is a vibrant center of art, culture, and intellectual life, and on the whole suffers less violent crime than most of the rest of Latin America and many large North American cities. Its GDP has grown by 25 percent since 2009; women hold more than 35 percent of elected positions nationally; and civil society is booming like never before, despite media monopolies and the persistence of political corruption.4

  Compared to other societies wracked by chronic violence, Mexico’s relative prosperity and functionality are stunning. Things just seem to work in Mexico in a way that they don’t in Honduras, Egypt, or Venezuela. And it’s not just for foreign tourists or traveling businesspeople. Mexico City—Mexico’s financial, artistic, intellectual, demographic, and administrative capital—has been relatively unscathed, even as the states that surround it have descended into garish violence and gangsterism. There’s also the general vibe of renaissance that one finds at a TEDx event in Tijuana; the booming wineries of the Valle de Guadalupe; a national cinema that went from producing fewer than twenty-five to more than one hundred films per year and claiming nearly every international prize over the last decade; and the explosion of vibrant online magazines and blogs.

  Considerable signs of progress and peace can make it exceedingly difficult for the victims of violence to stand out, to represent a larger phenomenon worthy of solidarity or demanding of collective action. In the best-case scenario, they come off as tragic but idiosyncratic victims of pathological individuals or groups. In the worst-case scenario, they are assumed to be complicit in their own victimization—they must have done something to have deserved or at least provoked it. This is the environment in which levantones thrive.

  Nowhere is this reality more important than in Culiacán, Sinaloa, the birthplace of modern drug trafficking in Mexico and the epicenter of the current drug war. In this book, veteran local journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas presents thirty-three firsthand accounts of levantones from a wide variety of perspectives. Following a rich tradition of testimonial literature from Latin America, these stories provide a vivid human perspective on what it is like to live in a situation of chronic violence, how this experience fits into a broader and incomplete democratic transition, and what lasting legacies it will leave behind.

  Rather than gangsters with private jets, generals with piles of cash and hidden torture chambers, or exotic “murder cities” along the border, these stories offer the perspective of migrant workers, schoolteachers, single moms, small busin
essmen, bored teenagers, petty criminals, aspiring assassins, municipal officials, and local journalists. These are the kinds of stories that are often missing from press coverage of the drug war, particularly in the United States. The extreme danger for journalists, the contraction of newsrooms and foreign bureaus, and the myopic focus on border security and drug enforcement in the policy community have made it increasingly difficult for even the most diligent of journalists to invest the time and energy necessary to cultivate these kinds of deeply personal, local stories. This is precisely where we need to hear from seasoned local reporters like Valdez Cárdenas, writing about the place where he lives and where he’s built a network of trusted sources over the past twenty years.

  In addition to the methodology of the levantón and the spectrum of suffering it inflicts, the common thread in these stories is the nebulous and volatile nature of power that the levantón represents. The use of terror and intimidation tactics by a broad mix of government and criminal actors, the uncertainty about who wields the power to carry out these acts and to what ends, and the failure of the formal apparatus of the state to protect people from the harm they cause (or even to acknowledge it) threaten more than just the bodily integrity of ordinary citizens. Their feeling of moral agency and the coherence of their communities are at stake. Levantones make people question whether their lives really matter, and to whom. The repression that Sandra Luz Hernández faced while she searched for her disappeared son relied as much on systemic doubt and uncertainty as it did on government goons or assassins’ bullets. Hers is the most infamous of recent efforts to uncover the truth about a levantón in Culiacán. It shows just how deeply this particular method of violence is interwoven into a broader web of crime, politics, and business, and just how high the stakes of exposing these connections can be.

  Édgar García Hernández, twenty-five, worked as a messenger for the public prosecutor’s office in Culiacán, and he was assigned to District Attorney Marco Antonio Higuera López. The connection was not lost on his mother. From the moment Édgar disappeared, Sandra Luz demanded that Higuera investigate the case and staked out his office. When the authorities dragged their feet, she cultivated her own sources, visited gravesites and other places where people were rumored to have disappeared, and led bloodhounds scouring the hillsides in rural areas across the state. Sandra Luz quickly became a leading voice for the family members of the other fifteen hundred disappeared in Sinaloa, particularly the mothers. Forceful, but never shrill, the former saleswoman of cosmetics and cell phone plans pressured the authorities to find her son and injected the cause of the disappeared with newfound hope and energy. Governor Mario López Valdez promised to get involved in the case, and the State Human Rights Commission opened its own investigation. From her insistent, methodical tone to her neat, short haircut, hip purple eyeglasses, and carefully selected accessories, Sandra Luz cut a modern professional figure—not a wealthy or entitled fresa (bourgeois) from the power-lunch set, but one of those strong, matter-of-fact, urban, middle-class women who head households all over Mexico. Most important, she never lost her composure in front of the camera or the microphone, despite the obvious pain in her voice. She was just plain compelling.

  On May 12, 2014, immediately after a morning meeting with Higuera and other officials, Sandra Luz received a call on her cell phone from someone promising information about the whereabouts of her son. The caller made an appointment to meet with her later that afternoon in Colonia Benito Juárez, about twelve blocks from the prosecutor’s office in the historic center of Culiacán. On her way to the meeting, while she was walking across 30 de Septiembre Street, a man jumped out of a car, aimed an automatic pistol at her head, and shot her fifteen times. Motionless on the gray concrete, with yellow evidence tags radiating out from her head like a surrealist crown splashed by a narrow stream of red blood, surrounded by lab coats and photographers, Sandra Luz appeared in the national and international media. Here was another activist killed for speaking truth to power in Mexico, another assassination victim among tens of thousands in the “drug war,” and another martyr for the missing in a country where 30,000 have disappeared over the past decade.

  In the aftermath of the murder, Higuera revealed a new theory of the case: Édgar had been taken because he was part of a criminal gang responsible for the kidnapping, robbery, and murder of Manuel Alonso Ruiz Haro on January 29, 2012 (two weeks before he was taken). In a national radio interview, Higuera claimed that this alleged connection, which he had never mentioned before, was the key to Sandra Luz’s murder. One of the other members of the supposed gang, Antonio Benítez, had turned up dead the previous April, shortly after Sandra Luz had gone to him and another of Édgar’s friends, seeking information about his whereabouts. Three weeks after Sandra Luz’s murder, the police arrested the other “friend,” Jesús Valenzuela, as the triggerman. Sandra Luz had repeatedly accused his brothers, Joel and Gabriel Valenzuela, in the disappearance of her son. All three brothers shared a house in the town of Paredones, in the hills just north of Culiacán. While the authorities publicly denied that they were suspects, sources within the prosecutor’s office told a different story to local journalists. Facing fifty years in prison for feminicide, Jesús Valenzuela confessed that he had killed Sandra Luz when he saw her coming down the street, because he feared that she would kill him first. He claimed that Édgar had been taken so that he wouldn’t betray the other members of the gang, and his mother was taking revenge, man by man. Valenzuela denied setting a trap—he’d gone out for tacos and run into Sandra Luz by chance. To most observers, the theory that the unarmed activist and mother of five could order assassinations or strike fear in the heart of a seasoned criminal like Valenzuela was plainly absurd, as was the “random” killing of a prominent activist by alleged criminals whom she had named to the police.5

  Adding insult to injury, ten months later Valenzuela was released from jail without charge, for a lack of evidence. Apparently, about a month after his arrest, he had ditched the public defender assigned to his case, taken on a “miracle-worker” private attorney, and retracted his confession. A criminal court judge had granted a motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that the confession was coerced and the government had presented very little evidence implicating Valenzuela in the murder. Governor López and prosecutor Higuera accused the judiciary of favoritism; Valenzuela’s lawyer is the son-in-law of a powerful superior court judge, and he has a reputation for making charges against his more infamous clients disappear. The prosecutor and the governor condemned the court’s decision and claimed that they would continue to fight to bring Valenzuela to justice.6 A year later, at this writing, nothing has changed.

  Whether or not there’s any truth to this theory of the case, it’s difficult not to view the outcome as the ultimate smear. Higuera was able to blame the original victim and his champion for their fates, or at least to plant needling doubts about them that they were not alive to contest. By condemning the legal outcome and blaming judicial favoritism, he and the governor were able to acknowledge a base level of corruption in the case—just enough to make it believable in a place wracked by corruption—while deflecting attention from their own agencies and even claiming to stand for truth and justice. To those most suspicious of their motives, the message was more sinister: whatever really happened, the government could effectively manipulate the truth to suit its own ends. Valdez Cárdenas calls it “the three deaths of Sandra Luz”—her son, herself, and the truth for which she fought.7

  The manipulation of rumor, doubt, and plausible deniability, magnified through carefully controlled media outlets, is a standard tactic of dictatorship. And even the most grandiose dictatorships have used paramilitary forces, vigilantes, or plainclothes agents to carry out their dirty work under an aura of mystery or outright denial. But there is something different about levantones in this regard. While they clearly overlap with the authority of the state, they are also independent of its formal apparatus and hierarchy to a mu
ch greater degree than secret police or death squads working for a military dictatorship. And their purposes are far more diverse and idiosyncratic.

  Witness the forced disappearance of forty-three teachers-in-training from rural Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, on September 26, 2014. The indigenous scholarship students were on their way to Mexico City via bus to protest education reforms initiated by President Enrique Peña Nieto. Ayotzinapa students have a reputation for aggressive but peaceful tactics, including the erection of roadblocks and the commandeering of busses. Acting on orders from Mayor José Luis Abarca, municipal police officers in Iguala, Guerrero, attacked five busses that the students had commandeered, captured the forty-three, and handed them over to members of the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel, who more than likely tortured and murdered them. That specific orders to attack the busses had gone out is substantiated by eyewitness testimony and the fact that the police mistakenly shot up a charter bus carrying a youth soccer team earlier that evening, killing the driver and a fifteen-year-old boy. According to the official federal investigation, Abarca was worried that the disappeared students’ participation in local protests would interrupt a campaign event for his wife, María de los Ángeles Pineda, who was running to succeed him as mayor and whose family is deeply intertwined with the Guerreros Unidos and Beltrán Leyva drug cartels.8

  The federal government’s response was flat-footed and tone deaf. President Enrique Peña Nieto failed to cancel or curtail an Asian tour when news of the massacre broke, and he offered the stalest of platitudes to the parents of the missing. The governor of Guerrero, Ángel Aguirre allowed the mayor and his wife to escape, and they were on the lam for weeks. Aguirre later resigned in disgrace, and the mayor and his wife were arrested hiding out in Mexico City. Over the next few months, each new theory of the crime that federal law enforcement officials floated not only was debunked but also revealed evidence of further crimes—such as the discovery of multiple mass graves, first in Guerrero and then elsewhere. Captured members of Guerreros Unidos confessed a bit too readily, and each time one of them parroted the government’s rendering of events, it magnified official embarrassment when that version was disproved. After a Swiss laboratory confirmed a DNA match for one of the missing students from a bone fragment found in a river where some of the captured Guerreros Unidos members claimed they had dumped bags of their charred remains (after killing them and burning the bodies), the government declared the case closed on January 27, 2015. However, a panel of independent experts convened by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (with the consent of the Mexican government) declared the official explanation of the case “scientifically impossible.” Questions about the participation of the Federal Police and the army in the levantón continue to arise, along with mounting evidence of all sorts of other unsavory connections and conspiracies.9