The final consequence of the splintering of the Guadalajara cartel was that Félix Gallardo’s nephews, the Arellano Félix brothers, came to lead the Tijuana cartel, sometimes simply termed the Arellano Félix organization. For Tijuana traffickers the Tijuana–San Diego corridor has been critically important to importing drugs into the United States. And for receiving cocaine, the Tijuana cartel has had interests in trafficking all along Mexico’s Pacific coast, including Baja California. In mainland Mexico, Tijuana’s tentacles have extended into Sinaloa and Sonora, and its ambitions have overlapped with those of the Sinaloa cartel, with which it has feuded. Twenty-first-century U.S. and Mexican law-enforcement efforts have diminished Tijuana; one brother (Francisco Rafael) was arrested in 1993, another (Ramón) was killed in 2002, a third (Javier) was arrested in 2006, and a fourth (Eduardo) was apprehended in 2008. Then, after Teodoro García Simental gained control, the Mexican Federal Police promptly captured him. Over the years, however, Tijuana has been quite active in Central America. Its traffickers have run numerous drug transshipments through Costa Rica and Guatemala, for instance, and in recent years have clashed violently with Gulf cartel counterparts in Guatemala.
From the Central American perspective, the Gulf cartel, one of Mexico’s most long-standing, has eclipsed Sonora and Tijuana in importance, while rivaling Juárez and Sinaloa.194 Contraband smuggling along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, dating at least to the 1940s, when it was identified with the border city of Matamoros, first developed smuggling networks, routes, and methods. The Gulf cartel has long specialized in moving drugs, first marijuana, then cocaine as well, especially through the Nuevo Laredo– Laredo, Texas corridor. One of the first Mexican kingpins, Juan Nepomuceno García, initially led the organization, but eventually his nephew Juan García Abrego took over operations, expanding its size, functions, and reach and extending its connections in Mexican politics and in the Colombian cartels. Once closely allied with the Cali cartel, Gulf traffickers have long relied on routes through Central American bridge states, including Belize and the Caribbean side of Costa Rica, and they have diversified from cocaine trafficking into the transshipment of precursor ingredients for methamphetamine.
The Gulf cartel has also been especially important for spawning another significant Mexican drug ring: Los Zetas. In 1996 García Abrego was captured and expelled to the United States, and thereafter the Gulf cartel’s long-standing strategy of corrupting key military, political, and law-enforcement figures faltered. Threatened by rivals and federal authorities and facing internal dissension, the new kingpin Osiel Cárdenas Guillén formed his own special forces, recruited from an elite Mexican Army unit that had received U.S. training. This Los Zetas group acted at first as the Gulf cartel’s enforcers, intimidating potential informants, deserters, and debtors, while clashing with other cartels and Mexican law enforcement alike. In the twenty-first century the upper echelons of the Gulf cartel came under pressure with the arrest of José Albino Quintero Meraz in 2002 and Cárdenas Guillén in 2003. Although for some years Cárdenas continued to run many Gulf operations from his cell, he was extradited to the United States in 2007, and shortly thereafter Los Zetas branched off on its own.195
Headquartered first in central and eastern Mexico—Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, and Zacatecas—Los Zetas had fought its way into the front ranks of Mexican drug organizations by 2009, employing extreme cruelty to intimidate rivals and the public. At first, it lacked the connections to thrive on its own, so for a short period Los Zetas allied with the Salvadoran Mara Salvatrucha gang, more expert in certain aspects of moving and distributing drugs. With time, however, Los Zetas gained such a reputation for violence and such a capacity to traffic drugs effectively that it has threatened other Mexican cartels. It has also become deeply involved in drug transportation via northern Central America with extraordinary influence in Guatemala, where it has recruited former Guatemalan soldiers, the elite kaibiles, established training camps, and fought local authorities, Mexican rivals, and Guatemalan associates alike.
For its part, La Familia, headquartered in Michoacán, has shunned the term cartel, preferring to project an image of being God-fearing, community-spirited, Michoacán locals, employing the poor and the dispossessed and awakening them to fundamentalist evangelical Protestantism.196 In truth, while sometimes blaming others for crimes its people have perpetrated, La Familia has engaged in terrorism, launching the 2008 grenade attack on Independence Day in Morelia that killed 8 and injured 110, and it has viciously attacked rival traffickers, torturing and murdering them, sometimes with dismemberment or decapitation. Before his killing in a two-day shoot-out in late 2010, Nazario Moreno González led La Familia, alongside José de Jesús Méndez Vargas. Under their tutelage the organization came to dominate the import of drugs, including large quantities of cocaine, through the major Pacific port of Lázaro Cárdenas. One specialty has been in trafficking methamphetamines: importing pseudoephedrine and exporting and distributing meth. In 2009 La Familia reportedly helped the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels against Los Zetas, dispatching lieutenants and hit men in coordinated attacks in Veracruz and elsewhere. As part of this arrangement, La Familia has apparently advised Sinaloa on producing meth, while Sinaloan traffickers have permitted La Familia to transport cocaine along its routes, including via Guatemala, without paying them a transit fee.197
While these principal Mexican drug organizations have been vitally important to bridge-state trafficking, an array of other Mexican criminal groups has been at work in Central America as well. In 2001, while identifying the Juárez, Gulf, and Tijuana cartels as predominant, the DEA reported that of the fifteen to twenty leading drug organizations, nine were Mexican. In 2003 DEA statistics suggested that Mexican cartels were responsible for 77 percent of the cocaine entering the United States, a figure that jumped to 92 percent by the following year. In 2004, at a time when illegal drug sales were grossing $65 billion, regional DEA director Larry Holyfield declared, “The largest groups of narcotics traffickers are in Mexico. They are the most dangerous, the strongest, and they have incredible trafficking networks.”198
As was the case with the Cali and Medellín cartels, law-enforcement authorities have been able to kill or arrest numerous kingpins. And some high-level Mexican traffickers have been arrested in Central America, further disrupting operations. However, again, new leaders have sometimes taken charge and fragments of once-dominant syndicates have grown to prominence themselves. Instability has encouraged both entrepreneurs and extreme violence, as contenders have tried to grasp control and gain market share. In 2001 antidrug officials noted that some major arrests had stimulated the rise of sixty new trafficking groups, some paying fees to larger organizations to gain access to the U.S. drug market.199 In 2007 the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that Mexican traffickers, including The Federation, were at work across the United States, amassing $23 billion in drug profits.200 During a forty-four-month law-enforcement operation against La Familia that concluded in 2009, U.S. authori-ties seized 12 tons of drugs and $32.8 million and arrested more than 1,200 associates, while discovering that the Mexican organization had cells in nearly every U.S. state. In 2010 U.S. officials ended another two-year operation, in which they seized $154 million, 2.5 tons of cocaine, 69 tons of marijuana, and more than 630 kilos of heroin, while arresting 2,200.201
The rise to dominance of Mexican traffickers has been especially significant for the Central American bridge states, which were ideally situated for the scores of transshipment schemes aimed at transferring drugs from South America to Mexico. There, Mexican cartels could take charge of transport into the United States, relying on their own methods and secure routes within Mexico proper and along the U.S. border.202 All of the Central American bridge states, and especially neighboring Belize and Guatemala, have had the experience, connections, and location needed