The early-morning perp walk in mid-January marked an inglorious end for “Pepito Sarabia,” considered one of Mexico’s most ruthless gang leaders and allegedly responsible for an attack on two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, at least 20 kidnappings and more than 50 murders.
Such was his taste for violence that authorities say his superiors in Los Zetas tapped him to help fight a turf war in northeastern Mexico against their former partners, the Gulf Cartel.
The violence, spectacular attacks and local thuggery associated with Sarabia are the calling cards of Los Zetas, perhaps the most feared — and imitated — criminal organization in a drug war that has claimed more than 47,000 lives over the past five years.
The organization’s reach extends across the eastern half of Mexico and into Central America, which the cartels are using as a staging area for running drugs between Colombia and the United States. The Office of Special Investigations on Organized Crime, part of the Mexican Attorney General’s Office, says the cartel controls more territory than any other criminal group.
The cartel has a long reach — but its grasp and staying power are less certain.
Its tactics depart from the usual self-preservation practices of Mexican drug cartels. For example, Los Zetas lacks the social bases enjoyed by other Mexican cartels, which act as benefactors in downtrodden pueblos and receive safe haven in exchange.
Los Zetas had grown in strength and scope when the break with its former partners came in 2010, triggering a massive turf war. Its members preyed on local populations rather than wooing them with jobs, charity and public services — tactics used by rivals such as the Sinaloa Cartel and La Familia Michoacana.
It also recruits foot soldiers, even teenage girls, at ever younger ages and sometimes by force — a practice, security analysts say, necessitated by this very lack of a social base.
And Los Zetas members began moonlighting in non-drug activities such as kidnapping, extortion, piracy and the siphoning from oil pipelines.
Some security analysts suspect Los Zetas runs franchises in some states where loosely controlled underlings commit crimes and remit royalty payments to a small, but disciplined central leadership.
“The money flows up, not down,” and the cells become “self-sustaining,” said security analyst Alejandro Hope of the Mexican Centre for Competitiveness.
Los Zetas’s penchant for violence has become notorious. Its atrocities include torching a Monterrey casino last August that left 52 dead, massacring 72 undocumented migrants on a ranch near the Texas border, and pulling passengers off buses at gunpoint — and burying victims in mass graves.
“It’s the most bloodthirsty and most critical group for the internal security of Mexico,” says Pedro Isnardo de la Cruz, security expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
The bloodthirsty tactics trigger fear — and invite impostors. Criminals with no connection to the cartel invoke the name to hasten ransom and extortion payments. Schoolchildren in Tamaulipas — ground zero of the Gulf Cartel-Los Zetas turf war — refuse to say the letter “Z” (zeta in Spanish) and instead call them “the naughty ones,” the newspaper Milenio reports.
News coverage in Zeta-infested areas is scant. A survey on insecurity released in November by Mexicans United Against Crime found 80 per cent of respondents frightened of a terror attack by the cartels — not unlike the 2008 tossing of grenades at Independence festivities in Morelia, which killed eight revellers and wounded an estimated 100 right after the usual celebratory shout, “Viva Mexico.”
The federal government insists it is fighting all cartels with equal vigour, but security analyst Eduardo Guerrero says Los Zetas has become a priority. “It’s become a systemic target of the federal government,” said Guerrero, director of Lantia Consultores, a Mexico City risk consultancy.
The exact number of Los Zetas gunmen is difficult to gauge. Hope puts the number at no more than 2,000.
Los Zetas’s control of non-drug enterprises extends into some unusual places — even prison. Rev. Robert Coogan, the Catholic chaplain in the Saltillo jail, sees Los Zetas running protection rackets, opening stores with inflated prices and even operating a strip club that serves Zeta brand whisky behind bars.
“There can’t be much money (here) but they get all of it,” Coogan said.
The thousands of undocumented Central American migrants transiting Mexico bring little money, but Los Zetas moved in on them too. The National Human Rights Commission estimated 11,333 undocumented migrants were kidnapped over six months in 2010 — often by Los Zetas and with the collusion of crooked public officials.
The kidnappings have diminished in recent months, however, says Alberto Xicotencatl, director of the Saltillo migrant shelter. The migrants being kidnapped — and surviving — are telling him that Los Zetas demanded they join its ranks.
News of a chapel built just north of Mexico City with a plaque crediting the generosity of Los Zetas founder Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano generated scandalous headlines, but strangely enough it also revealed the cartel’s lack of social stature.
“Someone who already has respect doesn’t need to lay claim to something like (a church),” says Malcolm Beith, author of The Last Narco, a book on Mexico’s drug war.
The captured hitman Pepito Sarabia probably lacked some sort of social protection — the army said he was captured without incident.
