“Christmas is coming,” Adán says.

“Such as it is”—she sighs—“in this place.”

“We’ll make the most of it,” he promises.

If we live long enough.

Matamoros

Tamaulipas, Mexico

November 2004

Heriberto Ochoa watches from a pew in the third row of the church as Salvador Herrera holds the baby girl over the baptismal and the priest says the words. As is tradition, both infant and godfather wear white, and Herrera’s squat form reminds Ochoa of an old refrigerator.

The church is packed, as befits the bautizo of a powerful narco’s daughter. Osiel Contreras stands to the side of the font and beams in paternal pride.

Ochoa remembers the first time he met Osiel Contreras, over a year ago now. A soldier then, Ochoa was a lieutenant in Mexico’s elite Airborne Special Forces Group, and Contreras had just risen to the leadership of the Gulf cartel after Garza’s arrest and extradition.

They met at a barbecue on a ranch south of the city, and Contreras mentioned that he needed protection.

“What kind of men do you need?” Ochoa asked. He sipped his beer. It was cold and crisp.

“The best,” Contreras answered. “Only the best.”

“The best men,” Ochoa said, “are only in the army.”

It wasn’t bragging, it was a simple matter of fact. If you want gangbangers, drug addicts, thugs, and malandros—useless layabouts—on your payroll, you can pick them up on any corner. If you want elite men, you have to go to an elite force. Ochoa was elite—he’d taken counterinsurgency training from the American special forces and the Israelis.

The best of the best.

“What do you make a year?” Contreras asked. When Ochoa told him, Contreras shook his head and said, “I feed my chickens better.”

“And do they protect you?”

Contreras laughed.

Ochoa deserted the army and went to work for the Gulf cartel. His first task was to recruit others like him.

The Mexican army was rife with desertion anyway. Armed with cañonazos de dólares—cannonballs of money—Ochoa easily seduced thirty of his comrades away from their long hours, shabby barracks, and lousy pay. Within weeks he’d brought over four other lieutenants, five sergeants, five corporals, and twenty privates. They brought with them valuable merchandise—AR-15 rifles, grenade launchers, and state-of-the-art surveillance equipment.

Contreras’s terms were generous.

In addition to a salary, he gave each recruit a bonus of $3,000 U.S. to put in the bank, invest el norte, or buy drugs.

Ochoa bought eighteen kilos of cocaine.

Now he was well on his way to becoming a rich man.

The work itself was relatively easy—guard Contreras and enforce the piso. Most paid willingly, the recalcitrant were taken to the Hotel Nieto in Matamoros and persuaded, often with a pistol barrel shoved down their throats.

Just a few months into the job, Contreras ordered him to eliminate a rival trafficker. Ochoa took twenty men and besieged the man’s compound. The occupants of the fortified house, maybe a dozen of them, returned fire and held Ochoa’s men off until he dashed to the back of the compound, found the propane tank, and blew it up, immolating everyone inside.

Mission accomplished.

The resultant bonus from a grateful Contreras bought more cocaine, and the story gained them useful notoriety.

And now they have become far more than just bodyguards. The original thirty are now over four hundred, and Ochoa has begun to worry a little bit about the dilution of quality. To counter that, he’s set up three training bases on cartel-owned ranches out in the countryside, where the new recruits sharpen their skills on tactics, weapons, and intelligence gathering, and are indoctrinated into the group culture.

The culture is that of an elite force.

On missions, they blacken their faces and wear black clothing and hoods. Military protocol is strictly observed, with ranks, salutes, and chain of command. So is loyalty and camaraderie—the ethic of “no man left behind.” A comrade is to be brought off the field of battle, dead or alive. If wounded, he gets the best treatment by the best doctors; if killed, his family is taken care of and his death avenged.

Without exception.

As their numbers grew, their role expanded. While mission one is and always will be the protection of Osiel Contreras and his narco-turf, Ochoa’s force has gotten into lucrative side markets. With the boss’s approval—and why not, he gets thick envelopes of cash—the men have moved into kidnapping and extortion.

Shopkeepers, bar owners, and club proprietors in Matamoros and other towns now pay Ochoa’s men for “protection,” otherwise their businesses might be robbed or burned to the ground, their customers beaten up. Gambling dens, brothels, tienditas—the little stores that sell small amounts of dope to junkies—pay off.

They’re scared not to.

Ochoa’s men have a well-earned reputation for brutality. People whisper about la paleta, said to be a favored technique of Ochoa, in which the victim in stripped naked and then beaten to death with a two-by-four.

But to be truly famous, a group needs a name.

In the army, Ochoa’s radio call signal was “Zeta One,” so they went with that and called themselves the Zetas.

As the original Zeta, Ochoa became known as “Z-1.”

The original other thirty took their nicknames from the order in which they came over—Z-2, Z-3, and so on. It became a hierarchy of seniority.

Z-1 is tall, handsome, with a thick head of black hair, a hawklike face, and a muscular build. Today he wears a khaki suit with a deep blue shirt—his army-issued FN Five-seven pistol tucked into a shoulder holster under his left arm. He sits in the crowded church and tries to stay awake as the priest drones on.

But that’s what priests do—they drone.

Finally, the service comes to an end and the participants start to file out of the church.

“Let’s go for a ride,” Contreras says.

A fiend for intelligence, Ochoa knows his boss’s history. Born dirt poor and fatherless on a shitty ranch in rural Tamaulipas, Osiel Contreras was raised by an uncle who resented the additional mouth to feed. The young Osiel worked as a dishwasher before running off to Arizona to deal marijuana, only to end up in a yanqui prison. When NAFTA came along, Contreras, with scores of others, was transferred to a prison back in Mexico. The legend goes that he had an affair with the warden’s wife, and when the warden found out and beat her, Contreras had him killed.

When he got out of jail, Herrera ostensibly got him a job in an auto body shop but really as a trafficker for Garza. The two men earned their way to the top. It was often said that they sat at the feet of God—Herrera on the right, Contreras on the left.

“Herrera is coming with us,” Contreras says now.

Lately, Contreras has become more and more annoyed with his old friend. Ochoa can’t blame him—Herrera had always been high-handed, all the more so since assuming the head chair, and he’s started to treat Contreras more as a subordinate than a partner, interrupting him at meetings, dismissing his opinions.

Still, the two men are friends.

They washed dishes together, served time together, came up the hard way under Garza, a hard man.

The three of them get into Contreras’s new troca del año, a Dodge Durango. “You can take the boy out of the country,” Ochoa muses as he squeezes his long legs into the pickup’s narrow rear compartment. Contreras gets behind the wheel—he loves to drive a truck.

In the rural shitholes they grew up in, you were lucky to have a pair of shoes. Even a baica was a dream. You’d stand there in the dust and watch the grandes speed by in their new pickups and think, one day that’s going to be me.