Mexico Under Siege

IN SINALOA, THE DRUG TRADE HAS INFILTRATED 'EVERY CORNER OF LIFE'

'Narcos' Have Made Their Way into Government, Business and Culture in
This Pacific State, Where Kids Want to Grow Up to Be Traffickers.

Yudit del Rincon, a 44-year-old lawmaker, went before the state
legislature this year with a proposition: Let's require lawmakers to
take drug tests to prove they are clean.

Her colleagues greeted the idea with applause. Then she sprang a
surprise on them: Two lab technicians waited in the audience to
administer drug tests to every state lawmaker. We should set the
example, she said.

They nearly trampled one another in the stampede to the door, Del
Rincon recalled.

Del Rincon wasn't all that shocked. She was born and bred here in the
Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa, home of the drug racket's top
leaders, its most talented impresarios and some of its dirtiest
government and police officials.

Swaths of Sinaloa periodically become no-go zones for outsiders; the
central government abdicated control long ago. By one estimate, 32
towns are run by gangsters.

In Culiacan, the capital, casinos outnumber libraries, and
dealerships for yachts and Hummers cater to the inexplicably wealthy.

This is where narco folklore started, with songs and icons that pay
homage to gangsters, and where children want to grow up to be
traffickers. How Sinaloa confronts its own divided soul offers
insight on where the drug war may be going for Mexico, where more
than 5,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence this year.

"The monster has lost all proportion," said Del Rincon, who is a
member of the conservative National Action Party.

A spunky woman with large eyes and hands that seem to be in constant
motion, Del Rincon scans other tables at cafes where she meets
people, making sure she knows who is within earshot; she lowers her
voice when she names names. Her husband and closest confidant keeps
tabs on her whereabouts throughout each day.

Such are the risks of speaking out.

"The narcos have networks meshed into the fabric of business,
culture, politics -- every corner of life."

Drug Crops

Poppies and marijuana have been cultivated in the mountains of
Sinaloa since the late 19th century. For decades, Mexican farmers
harvested the crops, and entire dynasties of families dedicated
themselves to the trade.

Except for one brutal crackdown in the 1970s, successive governments
accommodated the drug trade, even as Mexico became a staging ground
for Colombian cocaine headed to its biggest market, the United States.

Back then, one party ruled Mexico. The Institutional Revolutionary
Party, or PRI, controlled everything from the smallest of peasant
groups to the presidency.

"The state was the referee, and it imposed the rules of the game on
the traffickers," Sinaloa-born historian Luis Astorga said. "The
world of the politicians and the world of the traffickers contained
and protected each other simultaneously."

Slowly, the monopoly started to crack. Parties other than the PRI
began to win elections, here and across the nation. Different faces
joined regional legislatures, while the PRI struggled to hold on. Del
Rincon's PAN won the mayoralty of Culiacan and other posts across Sinaloa.

Finally, the PRI lost the presidency in 2000.

Political pluralism in Mexico may have made room for more firebrands
like Del Rincon, but it also fed a free-for-all among trafficking
gangs, which began to splinter and compete.

"The state was no longer the referee, and so the traffickers had to
referee among themselves," Astorga said. And that was not going to be
a well-mannered process.

Gradually, law-abiding people learned a new code of conduct: Keep
your head down, don't ask too many questions, keep away from the
restaurants and luxury boutiques where gangsters hang out. Family
gatherings end early; everyone wants to get home soon after sunset.

"Mexico was a time bomb for a long time, and now it is finally out of
control -- more guns, more money, more internal fights," said Marco
Antonio Castrejon, a dentist whose grandparents came down from the
hills and settled in Culiacan about 60 years ago. Castrejon and his
seven siblings worked hard, earned degrees and established legitimate
professions, even as the men with guns and menacing swaggers took the streets.

About eight years ago, Castrejon kept his oldest boy from leaving
Culiacan. Generations of the family had stuck together here. It was
important to stay, he advised.

But this year, when his youngest turned 17 and wanted to leave, the
door was open.

"I used to be afraid to have my children away from us," said
Castrejon, 48. "Now the greater fear is that they stay."

Police at Risk

Pedro Rodriguez, 41, has been a police officer for half his life in
one of the deadliest places on the planet for cops. He got into law
enforcement straight out of the army. He thought the discipline he
admired in the military would continue in the Sinaloa police force.
And he liked the authority that a policeman's uniform gave him.

It all changed several years ago, he said.

"It used to be, as a uniformed police officer, I could raise my hand
in the road and stop an 18-wheeler," Rodriguez said. "Today the truck
would run right over me."

More than 100 police officers have been killed in Sinaloa this year,
most of them gunned down. Countless others have fled, or taken bribes
and changed sides. As much as 70% of the local police force has come
under the sway of traffickers, by some estimates.

It is widely believed here that many legislators and other
politicians are elected with the help of narcotics money. The
exchange: veto power over the naming of top police commanders.

Rodriguez knows he can be betrayed by a corrupt fellow officer. So,
he says a prayer every day before he leaves the modest home where he
lives with his wife and four children. He works in a city that can
seem normal on the surface, its streets clogged with traffic, office
workers going to lunch.

Then those same streets turn into a shooting gallery. Gunmen in
dark-windowed SUVs open fire on rivals or cops, day or night. Five
federal and state policemen were killed in a hail of bullets on
Culiacan's prominent Emiliano Zapata Boulevard one recent night. The
truck with their bloodied corpses came to rest outside a busy casino
under blue and purple neon lights and fake palm trees. It was the
third time in recent weeks that an entire squad of agents was wiped
out in an ambush. No one is ever arrested; shootings, even of cops,
are hardly investigated.

"Twenty years ago we knew of the handful of big mafia dons, but they
were discreet," Rodriguez said. "Today we are dealing with the
apprentices, who want to get rich very fast, who commit enormous
excesses, who want to be noticed."

That chaos might make some nostalgic for the old days, when a few
Sinaloa dynasties dominated the drug trade, as they had for
generations. Amado Carrillo Fuentes branched out from Sinaloa into
Chihuahua in the 1980s and '90s and ran the Juarez drug network that
made him one of the richest men on the planet, owner of a fleet of
jets and vast real estate holdings the world over.

As the centralized system broke down, the Sinaloans met a new
challenge: the Gulf cartel.

Based in the state of Tamaulipas, the Gulf gang was reputed to have
ties with, and the protection of, Raul Salinas de Gortari, the
brother of former Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. After
the arrest of its leader, Osiel Cardenas, the Gulf cartel became the
first of the drug mafias to introduce a paramilitary army.

The narcotics ring recruited from Mexican and Guatemalan army special
forces and formed the Zetas, ruthless hit men. The Zetas left one of
their earliest calling cards in the town of Uruapan in Michoacan
state in September 2006, when they tossed five severed heads onto the
floor of a dance hall.

The Sinaloans in turn beefed up their security, and the Zetas on the
other side trained additional recruits. Now several hundred, most
between 17 and 35 years old, operate as mercenaries, investigators say.

"Each cartel needs its enforcement, its protection, its muscle, and
that dynamic has been increasing exponentially in the last two
years," a senior U.S. law enforcement official said. "And now one
side has to outdo the other."

Crackdown

When Felipe Calderon took office two years ago, violence had already
begun to surge. Calderon deployed the army days after his
inauguration. The president, according to aides, was genuinely
alarmed by the waves if killings sweeping the nation and the ability
of traffickers to infiltrate politics and possibly even seek elected posts.

Even among Calderon's supporters, however, there are complaints that
the president underestimated the scope of the problem, dispatched an
inadequately prepared army and is not fighting on the political and
economic fronts. Consequently, the backlash has been bloodier than anticipated.

With plenty of money, the traffickers continue to protect themselves
and buy their way into governments, says Edgardo Buscaglia, an expert
on organized crime who advises Mexico's Congress.

In the latest and potentially most explosive scandal, Sinaloan
traffickers allegedly bought off senior antidrug officials in far-off
Mexico City, acquiring inside information on Calderon's ground war
against smugglers.

Buscaglia warns against the "Afghanistan-ization" of Mexico, in which
rival kingpins gradually take over different states.

"If one criminal organization takes over one state, and another
criminal organization takes another, then you have the ingredients of
civil war," Buscaglia said. Mexico is not there yet, Buscaglia said,
but that breakdown looms as a real danger.

Buscaglia believes traffickers already control 8% of Mexico's
municipalities, or about 200 cities and towns, based on his analysis
of data such as arrest warrants issued for police, army detentions of
elected officials, and the presence of sanctioned criminal activity
such as drug sales and prostitution.

Leading the pack was the state of Sinaloa, with 32.

Jesus Vizcarra Calderon, the mayor of Culiacan, felt compelled late
last year to deny rumors that his considerable fortune came from
Sinaloan traffickers. Vizcarra has been tapped by the governor of
Sinaloa to be the PRI's candidate in next year's gubernatorial elections.

Sinaloa state legislator Oscar Felix Ochoa also denied criminal
activity after his three brothers were arrested in June, allegedly
holding nearly 40 pounds of cocaine, weapons and cash. At the same
time, the army discovered a safe house harboring gunmen implicated in
the slaying of federal police, with more than $5 million stashed in a
strongbox. The house had belonged to Felix Ochoa, the army said.

Del Rincon, the crusading legislator, used to lead the charge against
Felix Ochoa. One day, someone sent a funeral wreath to her home with
her name on it.

She is more careful these days about attacking individuals, but she
is more determined than ever to challenge a doped-up status quo.

"All society is contaminated," she said. "We are being held hostage.
. . . If we remain silent, where will we end up?"

After a lifetime struggling to keep her family safe from traffickers,
Del Rincon was dismayed when her son started dressing like the
buchones -- the young wannabes who emulate traffickers.

"If we don't dress like this, the girls won't even look at us," she
recalled her son saying.

"It is fashionable to be a narco," Del Rincon said, shaking her head.
"It's status."

In the cemeteries of Sinaloa, many members of the new generation
rest, having met premature death. Families spend hundreds of
thousands of dollars to erect mausoleums that adulate the life that
put their kin in their graves. The crypts are built with imported
Italian marble, mosaics, crystal chandeliers, Corinthian columns and
French doors.

In one, "Lupito" rests in peace with his AK-47; "Beta," "Payan" and
dozens more take their journey to the afterlife amid statues of the
Virgin Mary, and accompanied by bottles of tequila, cans of Tecate
beer and packs of Marlboros.

The average age of these men, all buried in the last few months, is
less than 25 years.