“I wonder,” Orduña says, “who would want to be the head of, say, the Sinaloa cartel, if his two predecessors were both killed. The message is, ‘Go ahead and make your billions, but you won’t live to spend them.’ That’s what we want to do, abandon counterinsurgency and adopt antiterrorism.”
“You’re talking about a program of targeted assassinations,” Keller says.
“Arrest them if we have to,” Orduña says, “kill them when we can.”
Keller smirks.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Orduña says. “You’ve heard it before, and every piece of intelligence you gave Vera went straight to the Sinaloa cartel. The AFI was bought and paid for, but not my unit.”
“That’s what Vera said.”
“Not in my unit,” Orduña repeats. His men can’t apply for the unit, he explains, they have to be selected, talent-spotted, picked from the chorus.
Then they’re trained.
First at a secret camp in the mountains of Huasteca Veracruzana for a year and a half learning weapons, tactics—ambush and counterambush—evasive driving, surveillance, rappelling, explosives, survival.
If they make it through that session, they’re sent to another secret camp in Colombia for specific anti–drug trafficking training. How to infiltrate the cartels’ private armies, identify a drug lab, find stash houses, jump from helicopters, fight in jungles and mountains.
The men who pass that course then go on to a third school, on antiterrorism, in Arizona, on the “neutralization and destruction” of terrorist threats, where they’re taught intelligence, counterintelligence, surviving capture and interrogation. They’re put under intense physical and psychological pressure, and if they survive that, they’re taught how to inflict it—“soft” and “hard” interrogation techniques.
Then they come back to Mexico where their salary is 30,000 pesos a month, plus a 20,000 bonus for every risky operation, which makes them far less likely to take bribes from the narcos.
Another incentive is, to be blunt, looting.
The FES marines get to keep a portion of what they capture—watches, jewelry, cash. Cops have done it forever, of course; Orduña’s genius is to make it legal and actually encourage it.
His men aren’t going to take bribes, they’re just going to take.
“Any man of mine who takes a bribe,” Orduña says, “knows that he won’t be arrested, tried, and sent to jail. He’ll just disappear out in the desert.”
Orduña has created a dirty unit designed to fight a dirty war, Keller thinks. Whether he realizes it or not, he’s formed his own version of the Zetas.
“We have a list of thirty-seven targets,” Orduña says.
“Is Barrera on it?”
“Number two.”
“Who’s number one?”
“Diego Tapia. I’m sure you understand that the public, knowing nothing about the ‘Izta cartel’ scandal, expects it. Our honor demands it. But I swear to you, if you work with me, I will help you kill Adán Barrera.” Orduña smiles and adds, “Hopefully before he succeeds in killing you.”
“The operation is a cut-out,” Taylor said. “No connection to normal DEA activities. Those will go on as usual, in cooperation, such as it is, with the Mexican government. This new unit will work out of here and only with the Mexican marines. The money has been siphoned off from Mérida, so there’s no budget line item, no oversight committee. No State, no Justice—only the White House, which will deny its existence.”
“Where would I fit in?” Keller asks.
“You’d run the American end of things,” Taylor says. “You’ll base yourself here and at EPIC. Only military flights back and forth. FES plainclothes security. Top-level clearance, top-level access.”
“I get a free hand,” Keller says. “I work alone. No handlers, no office spies.”
“You get only the logistical support you request,” Taylor says.
“And if this program comes to light, I get crucified.”
“I have the nails in my mouth.”
Jesus, Keller thinks, he’s offering me a job as the head of an assassination program.
Just like the old days in Vietnam.
Operation Phoenix.
Except this time I’m in charge.
“Why me?” Keller asks. “You’re not exactly the president of my fan club.”
“You’re a lonely, bitter man, Art,” Taylor says. “The only guy I have driven, angry, and good enough to do this.”
It’s honest, Keller thinks.
And Taylor’s right.
He takes the job.
Remembering what he once heard a priest say:
Satan can only tempt you with what you already have.
4 The Valley
Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall no more be called Tophet, nor the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of slaughter.
—Jeremiah 7:32
The Juárez Valley
Spring 2009
They drive east out of Juárez on Carretera Federal 2.
The two-lane highway parallels I-10, just a few miles away across the American border.
Ana insisted on driving her Toyota, not trusting Pablo behind the wheel (certainly of his old heap), and to allow Giorgio to snap all the pictures he wants. Oscar has sent them out into the Juárez Valley to get the story of the increasing violence.
Two months ago, Calderón sent the army out there, a column of troops with armored vehicles and helicopters, to try to quell the fighting between the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels that has made the rural valley a battleground.
Pablo looks out the window at the green belt that flanks the Río Bravo. This used to be mostly cotton fields—cotton with some wheat—but the maquiladoras lured most of the labor away and the cotton plants have long since withered.
This is bandit country and always has been, Pablo thinks, looking past the green strip to the brown sierra to the south. Long controlled by the Escajeda family who migrated down when Texas gained its independence, most of the old families in the valley were refugees, fleeing the encroaching United States.
The Escajedas did what so many border families did—they raised and rustled cattle, participating in the time-honored tradition of two-way cross-border raiding, they fought off first the Comanches and later the Apaches, then turned to cotton when the end of slavery up north created opportunity.
They smuggled marijuana and opium at the turn of the century, then whiskey and rum during Prohibition. The Escajedas grew rich from the bootleg trade, but far richer when Nixon’s War on Drugs made la pista secreta so profitable. You can drive or even walk to Texas from the little towns in the valley, and while the majority of drug trafficking still goes through Juárez, the value of this smuggling territory isn’t to be sneezed at.
Until recently, two Escajeda brothers, José “El Rikin” and Oscar “La Gata,” controlled the drug trade out here and maintained a fragile peace between Sinaloa and Juárez, allowing both cartels use of the plaza for a price.
So there was “peace in the valley,” as it were, even while Juárez tore itself apart, until two months ago, when the army arrested La Gata, and the Sinaloa cartel took it as a signal to move in. The Sinaloan invasion forced El Rikin to choose sides, and he picked his local team, the Juárez cartel.
Now it’s a war zone.
“I didn’t sign up to be a war correspondent,” Pablo says. “We should get extra pay.”
Giorgio, of course, is thrilled with it. He would love to have been a war photographer, and looks like one, in a green shirt, khaki cargo pants, and a khaki vest. He quickly snaps an army convoy of three armored cars as it comes in the opposite direction.
Pablo sees Ana’s hand gripped on the steering wheel. She’s tense, sharing the road with farm trucks and military convoys, and you never knew when a vehicle could be filled with sicarios from one side or the other and when you might drive into a full-fledged firefight, maybe a three-sided one.