Bloody Drug Cartel Wreaks Mayhem In Mexico

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MICHEL MARTIN, host:

This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm Michel Martin.

Coming up in our International Briefing, we'll speak with a Ghanaian journalist to whom President Obama gave a shout out on a recent trip to that country. That journalist's intrepid reporting has help break up three different sex trafficking rings and put dozens of people behind bars. That conversation in just a few minutes. But first, to Mexico, where more than 3,700 people have been killed this year alone in Mexico's war between state forces and competing drug runners.

One of the drug syndicates, though, stands out, not just for its mix of grotesque violence and cultic loyalty, but also for a new level of brazenness, even by the over-the-top standards of the Mexican drug cartels. The group is called La Familia, and they reportedly control the drug trade Michoacan, the home state of Mexican President Felipe Calderon.

And last week, Servando Gomez, one of the leaders of La Familia, called into a public affairs television program in Mexico and, in essence, offered to negotiate with the Mexican government.

Mr. SERVANDO GOMEZ (Leader, La Familia Drug Cartel, Mexico): (Through Translator) The only thing we want is peace and tranquility. We know this is a necessary evil. But if weren't here, understand, please, they're never going to get rid of us. The day that I die, they're going to put someone else in my place, and that's how it's going to go. This is never going to end. We want to reach a consensus. We want to reach a national agreement.

MARTIN: To better understand La Familia and the state of the drug war, we've called Time Magazine's Mexico City correspondent Ioan Grillo. He's been writing about La Familia, and he joins us from his home office. Thanks so much for joining us.

Mr. IOAN GRILLO (Mexico City Correspondent, Time Magazine): Hey, how are you doing?

MARTIN: Can you just tell me a little bit about how La Familia got started? I mean, it sounds like some weird mash-up of "Scarface," magical realism and Pablo Escobar in his Colombian heyday. How did this all start?

Mr. GRILLO: The information that we have is La Familia started about three years ago in the State of Michoacan. And it was started off by different gangs from Northern Mexico called Los Zetas, a very violent gang of former soldiers. And they started to expand around the country and ally with local traffickers to try and challenge the power of another gang in Sinaloa, which is - Sinaloa is like the kind of Sicily is to Italian organized crime, Sinaloa is to Mexican organized crime.

So they start up in Michoacan setting up these local gangsters who became La Familia. And La Familia very quickly became known for extreme violence. One of their first incidents was when they chopped the heads of five rival drug traffickers and rolled those heads into a disco dance floor while there was people there, the message saying we're in control here.

And La Familia since then broke up by themselves and became a very, very powerful trafficking organization, particularly moving crystal meth, or methamphetamines, to the United States.

MARTIN: Hmm. And speaking of the level of violence, we actually have some audio of gunfire between an attack by La Familia exchanging gunfire with the military. And we want to play it just to give listeners a sense of the kind of machinery that they have to work with.

(Soundbite of gunshots)

MARTIN: Which is in a city, by the way, just to give people a sense of what that must be like. So I wanted to ask if this group's reach extends throughout the country. Or is it limited to this particular region?

Mr. GRILLO: Well, La Familia have their real core base in Michoacan. But they've also spread quite extensively to some neighboring states. They've gone quite heavily into the States of Guerrero, the State of Mexico, Hidalgo, Morelos and some states in the center. But they also have people scattered around the country, even as far as Monterrey, have people in the United States.

And one way, in fact, they're moving around is through their whole, funny enough, a religious organization. La Familia have kind of created themselves not only as a cartel, but as a kind of strange, quasi-evangelist religious organization. And they've been using these links to try and spread their tentacles around the country.

MARTIN: Well, tell me more about that, if you would. You write about that in Time. Is it that - do they use this kind of religious imagery to recruit, or do they use it as a kind of a supernatural protection for themselves? Or - I mean, they claim to be devout Christians.

Mr. GRILLO: That's correct. It's very curious. And we're learning more about their whole religious organization through the more arrests of their members. But the Mexican drug cartels have been kind of playing with religion for sometime. And, you know, going back, there's a kind of saint in the State of Sinaloa called Jesus Malverde, who was a bandit in the 19th century or early 20th century. And he's become a kind of patron saint to drug traffickers, almost.

Major traffickers will always look for him to help them guide their loads across. And as well as that, there always been another kind of religious factor which has been very strong in the drug world called La Santa Muerte, the holy death. It's a strange kind of cult around this death, grim ripple-like figure who, you know, many criminals ask for for protection, feeling she will protect them from bullets, protect them from death.

So that's kind of following the same thing, but it's become more sophisticated in La Familia. And they've even got their own Bible, written by the spiritual leader of La Familia, who's known as El Mas Loco, or the maddest one. He even wrote his own Bible. I think as well as feeling this protects them, like you said, protects them from violence and death or arrest, I think it also helps have a coherence within the organization and helps disciplined the troops. And maybe, you know, these leaders really believe this religion themselves. Maybe they're real believers in it.

MARTIN: Well, let's go back to that clip that we played from Servando Gomez. What are they asking for? I mean, do they really think that the Mexican government is just going to allow them to export narcotics without interference?

Mr. GRILLO: Well, really, when you go back in the history of this drug trafficking in Mexico, for many years, there was quite official corruption. You know, Mexico was controlled throughout the 20th century by one party. And many decades through that time, the drug trade was controlled by quite high levels of that government. Since then, you've had a changing government that has been going after the cartels, but there's still levels of official corruption. So you're still seeing very high level government officials who are corrupt.

And there are people in the government who don't want to say this openly, but they do say it sometimes in more closed conversations, and one of these conversations was actually recorded recently by a journalist in Monterrey who was a local political candidate for the ruling party. He was saying we have to live with these drug traffickers. Some are worse than others. We have to get on with them and let them do certain business, as long as they don't kidnap and carry out extreme violence. So I think perhaps it's not as unrealistic as it might sound to somebody outside of Mexico, this idea of negotiation. And some critics have said this conflict is in some ways like the Iraq war was to the Bush administration. It's a conflict that's very hard to win, and it's very hard to get out of.

MARTIN: That's Time Magazine's Ioan Grillo. He joined us from his home office in Mexico City. Ioan, thank you so much for speaking with us.

Mr. GRILLO: Thank you.

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