How the U.S. Triggered a Massacre in Mexico:
Posted by DD Republished from ProPublica
DD: Borderland Beat has published many articles about what has become known as the Allende Massacre, probably more articles than any other publication. One of the reasons for that deafening silence that came out of Allende and surrounding area for several years after the Allende Massacre was the fear the residents felt 24/7 of the cartel known as the Zetas. The Zeta’s held an iron fist over the local media in controlling what it published or broadcast; either through owning it, intimidating the owners/reporters or just out right bribery. In fact they pretty much controlled the state from the top down.
Fortunately for BB we had (and still do have) 2 reporters with close ties to Coahuila because of Chivis having her offices here and only about 70 miles from Allende, and DD making his home about 40 miles from Allende. In the last couple of years more and more answers as to “who and how many were killed”, who were the killers, why they were killed have come forth and more facts will be known shortly because of the attention Allende Massacre is now finally getting. Read Chivis’ story posted yesterday on BB about the criminal complaint filed against Coahuila public officials (both present and past) in the International Criminal Court (ICC).
This story by Ginger Thompson and ProPublica is a long story that is the result of a year long investigation interviewing the people involved in the Allende Massacre and letting them tell the story in their own words; In effect giving an oral history from surviving family members, from criminal perpetrators, from law enforcement on both sides of the Rio Grand, and the reasons for the inaction and silence of the elected officials. This story answers a lot of questions and will be used as evidence if the criminal complaint presented last last week to the ICC goes to trial.
by Ginger Thompson, ProPublica Senior Reporter
Photographs by Kirsten Luce (except as shown)
Photo from Borderland Beat Archives |
José Juan Morales
Investigative Director for the Disappeared in the Coahuila State Prosecutor’s Office
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The Massacre As sundown approached on Friday, March 18, 2011, gunmen from the Zetas cartel began pouring into Allende.
The red circles represent homes or businesses that were destroyed. Graphic provided by DAMIEN SAUNDER, NGM STAFF |
Guadalupe García Retired government worker
“We were eating at Los Compadres, and two guys came in. We could tell they weren’t from here. They looked different. They were kids — 18 to 20 years old. They ordered 50 hamburgers to go. That’s when we figured something was going on, and we decided we’d better get home.”
Martín Márquez Hot dog vendor
“Things began happening in the evening. Armed men began arriving. They were going house to house, looking for the people who had done them wrong. At 11 at night there was no traffic on the streets. There was no movement of any kind.”
The atmosphere felt tense. It was nine at night, which was not very late, not on a Friday. The town was completely deserted.”
Sarah Angelita Lira Pharmacist and wife of victim Rodolfo Garza, Jr.
‘Don’t leave the house,’ he told me. ‘There’s something going on. I don’t know what it is. But don’t leave the house. I’ll be back.’
After a while, Rodolfo called me. ‘Get out of the house,’ he said. ‘And don’t go in our truck.’ He told me to ask my cousin to take our daughter, Sofía, and me to my mother’s house.
His uncle Luis’s ranch was on fire. And there were a lot of armed men standing outside the gate. His sister wasn’t answering her phone. His father wasn’t answering either. He sent one of his workers, Pilo, to the gate to see what was going on. Pilo had been in the military. The gunmen opened the gate. Pilo went in. But he never came out.
Rodolfo was inconsolable. He couldn’t find his parents. He couldn’t find his sister. And now his best worker was gone. He told me he was going to try to sneak onto the ranch through the back.
A few minutes later, he called again. He was speaking so softly I could barely hear him. He told me to get out of Allende. ‘Tell your cousin to take you to Eagle Pass. Don’t pack. Just go.”’
Claudia Sánchez Cultural affairs director and mother of victim Gerardo Heath
“I was packing because we were leaving for San Antonio at 5 the next morning to go to a football game. Gerardo was playing, so we needed to be there early. Gerardo and his sister were horsing around outside. I looked out the window and saw two of Gerardo’s friends drive up. They were our neighbors.
Gerardo came inside and asked if he could go out with his friends. I said, ‘No, Gerardo. We’ve got to pack.’ Next thing I knew, Gerardo had on the clothes we had bought him for his birthday. He had just turned 15. The shirt was blue, and it matched his eyes. He told me, ‘Come on, Mom. I won’t be late.’
I said, ‘Fine, Gerardo, don’t be late.’At around 10 that night, my husband called Gerardo’s cellphone to see what time he’d be coming home. Gerardo didn’t answer. My husband called again. No answer.
A while later someone knocked on our door. It was a couple of friends of Gerardo’s from school. They looked terrified. I asked them, ‘What’s the matter? Where’s Gerardo?’
The boys said, ‘They took him.’I asked, ‘What are you talking about? Who took him?’The boys said they saw Gerardo and our neighbors in front of the neighbors’ house. A truck came, carrying a lot of men with guns. The men forced the neighbors and Gerardo into the truck and drove away. The boys told me they didn’t recognize the men. And since they had weapons, the boys didn’t dare say anything.
Within minutes, we called the mayor of Piedras Negras. He was at a wedding. He said that he felt terrible about what had happened to us, but there wasn’t anything he could do. Not a single police car came.”
María Eugenia Vela Lawyer and wife of victim Edgar Ávila
“I was at work, waiting for the judge to sign off on two sentencing reports I had written, when Edgar called to say his friend Toño had invited him over to watch a soccer match. I was pregnant, and by the time I got home, I was super tired. Edgar had fed our daughter and given her a bath. I asked him to pick up some empanadas for me before he went out. He brought them to me and gave me a kiss.
It wasn’t until I woke up at two in the morning that I noticed Edgar wasn’t home. None of my calls went through. I said to myself, ‘How strange that he hasn’t called.’ Edgar always called.
I sat in an armchair the rest of the night and waited for him until about 6:30 a.m. Then I called my sister. I told her he hadn’t come home. So she came over, and wearing my pajamas, I went with her and my brother-in-law to Toño’s house. There was no one there, but there were signs of a struggle. Everything had been thrown around.”
Rodríguez Victim’s wife
“Saturday is when everything began. Houses began exploding. People began breaking in and looting, and all I could think about was where Everardo might be. All day Saturday I spent searching and calling people to ask, ‘What have you heard?’
“The last phone call with Rodolfo was at a quarter to noon. He sounded exhausted. He still hadn’t heard anything from his parents. I told him he had done everything he could for them, and now it was time to think about Sofía and me. I begged him to come meet us in Eagle Pass. He said, ‘OK. I’m on my way.’
I never heard from him again.”
“There’s no playbook to tell you what to do when someone steals your child. There is no first step. You go crazy. You want to run, but you don’t know where. You want to scream, but you don’t know whether anyone is listening. One of my cousins suggested I put it on Facebook. So I wrote, ‘Give me back my son. If anyone knows where he is, bring him back to me.”’
“How can I explain how I felt? It was as if they had kidnapped me that day too. In some ways I died. They killed the future we had, the plans, the dreams, the illusions, the peace, everything. At that time I had lived longer with Edgar than I had lived without him. Just think about that. On top of that I was pregnant, so I couldn’t even think of taking any kind of sedative. I had to try to stay composed, very calm, but I’d come home and feel like the house was caving in on me. I couldn’t find a place to sit down without feeling like the walls were falling. I couldn’t make sense of this. Despite being a lawyer, I couldn’t make sense of what had happened.”
My wife calls me at like 6 o’clock in the morning. She tells me, ‘Hey, the house is surrounded.’
At the beginning all we wanted was for Jose to turn himself in and cooperate, so that he could tell us the structure of the Zetas organization. I think that would have appeased us at that point because we really didn’t know how close — how near — he was to Miguel and Omar. We didn’t know — until he started saying who he was talking to, who he was seeing — what they were doing. That’s when our perspective of what we could do, and how, began to change. We started to try to come up with ideas about how to capture them. When Jose didn’t turn himself in, and we saw that he was willing to sacrifice his wife, we knew we needed to turn the screws even harder, or put more leverage on him. Vasquez Convicted Zetas operative;
I said, ‘What do you mean, it’s surrounded?’
She said, ‘Yeah, there’s a lot of cops outside.’
I said, ‘Well, listen, they’re probably going to arrest you. Let me call [my lawyer]. Just make sure you don’t tell them nothing. Just try to relax. We’ll get you out on bond.’
I told her, ‘Break the phones.’ We had toilets in the house that flush real strong, so she broke them and flushed the phones down the toilet.
Then Richard [Martinez] called me from there. He put me on speakerphone, so my wife could hear.
He told me he was going to arrest her. I thought he was bluffing, so I said, ‘Do what you got to do.’
Richard tells him, ‘Your mom’s going to be charged.’
I told him, ‘Man, listen, man, I’ll go to the border right now, walk over and turn myself in. I won’t fight you for nothing. I’ll sign all your seizure papers. Give me a life sentence. Throw away the key. I don’t care. But leave my wife alone. Leave my mother alone. He’s like, ‘Listen, the only way your wife doesn’t do no jail time or your mom doesn’t do no jail time is if you cooperate with us.’I said, ‘Richard, I don’t want to cooperate, man. There’s going to be a lot of murders that come behind this.’He was like, ‘All I have to tell you is if you don’t cooperate, they’re going to do time with you.’I asked Richard, ‘What do you want?’
Richard Martinez DEA agent
I wanted the numbers. Our hope was to get the Zetas leadership. I figured that those numbers gave us the best chance to get them. I knew Jose was in a position to help us.
When it comes down to it, a lot of these guys flee the United States. But if you grew up here, it’s still America, the best country in the world. You still want to eventually come back to America. If your family is here, you still want to be around them. I thought that once Jose realized that the jig was up, he was going to do whatever he had to do to help us.
I was going to push him to do that while I had the opportunity.
This is kind of getting off subject, but I remember going to Mexico as a kid. My mother is from Mexico — Monterrey. I’ve been to Coahuila. I’ve got family in Coahuila. You can’t go back there right now. It’s sad to say. But you can’t go down these rural roads. I would love for my family to go back there, but they can’t.
I saw these numbers as a key. They’re very significant. I saw it as an opportunity to stop the Miguel and Omar Treviño reign.
Gonzalez Assistant U.S. attorney
“It was something personal, absolutely. It was important because of my background, because of my own personal heritage, and of knowing what [the Zetas] were doing to Mexico.
I spent my summers with my grandparents in Mexico. They had farms and ranches. I enjoyed my youth in Mexico. This organization was destroying all that with their greed and their violence.”
Under pressure to get the phones’ PINs, Vasquez turned to Moreno, using a little leverage of his own. It was Moreno’s brother, Gilberto, who had been caught driving the truck with $802,000 in the gas tank. Facing 20 years in prison, Gilberto had confessed that he was working for the Zetas and that the cash belonged to the Treviño brothers.
Vasquez arranged for his lawyer in Dallas to represent Gilberto and promised not to let anyone else in the cartel know about Gilberto’s incriminating statements. Moreno repaid the favor by agreeing to get Vasquez the numbers. But when the time came, Moreno had second thoughts.
Héctor Moreno Former Zetas operative
The Zetas controlled everything. They did whatever they wanted. When soldiers were going to come to the area, someone from the military would notify us in advance.
Sometimes planeloads of federal police would arrive, with 200 officers. But we’d get a call a week ahead of time: ‘Are you stashing anything in such and such a house?’We’d say, ‘No, there’s nothing there.’They’d say, ‘Good, because there is a search warrant for that location, and agents are going to arrive on Thursday.’
The government told us everything. So I knew that if the government got those numbers, the Zetas would find out.
Vasquez Convicted Zetas operative
“The day Héctor was supposed to give me the numbers, I called him. He said, ‘I got the numbers, but I threw them out.’
I said, ‘What happened? You said you were going to give them to me.’
He told me, ‘These numbers could get us in a lot of trouble, so I threw them out the window.’
I told him, ‘I have these guys waiting for me. I told them I was going to give them the numbers. What about my family?’
After a while, I talked him into driving back to the road where he threw the numbers out. We drove up and down that road for like an hour or two, until we found the slip of paper.
I got all the numbers — for 40, and 42, and all of them. I didn’t know what they were going to do with them. I thought they were going to try to wiretap them or something like that. I never thought they were going to send the numbers back to Mexico. I told them not to do that, because it was going to get a lot of people killed. Not only that, I was still there. I was still hanging around those people. They said they wouldn’t. Richard told me I had to trust him”
The TakeoverLawlessness was not unfamiliar to people in Allende. Because of its proximity to the U.S. border — residents do their weekend shopping in Texas — there had long been families engaged in smuggling who lived quietly within their communities.
Ángel Humberto García Medical doctor and former legislator
One of the most glaring problems, they say, is that Mexico doesn’t allow the DEA to scrutinize the unit’s supervisors in the same way as it does the unit’s members. Two law enforcement officials close to the Zetas case said their own inquiries revealed that a supervisor in the SIU was responsible. Former senior members of the Mexican Federal Police who worked closely with the unit did not respond to multiple requests for interviews.
As for the Zetas, it wasn’t hard for them to identify who within the cartel may have betrayed them since very few people had access to their PIN numbers.
He sent me a photo of himself, with drawings of frogs all over it. At the bottom of the photo he wrote, ‘Look, the damned frogs had me shot.’ ‘Frogs’ is their word for snitches.I called 40 and asked him, ‘Hey, what’s this about?’ He didn’t answer. All he said was, ‘I need to see you. Where are you going to be later?’
I told him I was going to be at the horse track.
But I didn’t go. I called a couple of my guys, and I told them to go see what was going on. After they got there, they called me and said, ‘You’re screwed.’
One of 40’s guys was there, cursing my name because I hadn’t shown up. That’s when I knew I had to leave.I began calling my friends, warning them to get out too. Unfortunately, none of them listened to me. When 40 couldn’t find me, he went after them.
Vasquez Convicted Zetas operative;
“Héctor [Moreno] called me and told me that all hell was breaking loose. He asked me what I had done with the numbers. I told him that I had turned them in to the DEA.
He told me, ‘Well something’s going on. Somehow the Zetas found out.
I called Richard [Martinez] and said, ‘What’d you do with the numbers?’ He said, ‘Man, they went to Mexico.’I said, ‘Man, how did you let that happen? I told you what would happen if those numbers came to Mexico.
’Richard said, ‘Man, it wasn’t me. It wasn’t my call. It was above me. The boss did it. They sent the numbers to Mexico, thinking they had a friend over there they could trust.’”
Gonzalez Assistant U.S. attorney;
“Richard called and said we got the numbers, but they’ve been sent to Mexico. I said, ‘What?’ We hadn’t had a meeting to discuss how to handle them. I got angry. I think Richard was of the same mindset. He didn’t want it done that way either, but it was out of his hands. He said, ‘It’s the bosses. It’s management.’
I knew well that there were issues with secrecy in Mexico. When information was passed on previous occasions, it always seemed that something would happen.
We had been trying forever to find the best way to locate the Treviños. What would be the best mechanism where we could definitively say, ‘This is where they are at this time.’ We knew they moved around a lot. This was one of those opportunities where you could do that. It was something we had struggled for a long time to achieve. We had put pressure on people to cooperate. We had arrested wives and mothers, and had all these great seizures.
It was a great opportunity. But it was squandered because it wasn’t done correctly, and it got compromised.”
Estimates of the number of dead and missing vary wildly between the official count, 28, and the one from victims associations, about 300. ProPublica and National Geographic have identified about 60 people whose deaths or disappearances have been linked by relatives, friends, victims’ support groups, court files or news reports to the Zetas siege that year.
Relatives were left on their own to try to piece together what had happened and to rebuild their lives.
In May 2011 Héctor Reynaldo Pérez filed a missing person report with state authorities. His sister, who had married a Garza, had disappeared along with her entire family. Less than a year later, Pérez himself disappeared. A report by independent human rights investigators at the Colegio de México found evidence that Pérez was last seen in the custody of Allende police officers.
After that, few victims’ relatives dared to turn to authorities for help, much less talk publicly about their ordeal. Several moved to the United States.
No family lost more members than the Garzas. Nearly 20 are believed dead, including 81-year-old Olivia Martínez de la Torre and her 7-month-old great-grandson, Mauricio Espinoza.
The baby’s siblings, Andrea and Arturo Espinoza, 5 and 3 at the time, turned up at a Piedras Negras orphanage after their parents had been killed.
Their paternal grandmother, Elvira Espinoza, a hotel housekeeper in San Antonio, went with her husband to fetch them.
’
Lira Victim’s wife:
“I never asked the government for anything again.”
********************************************
Three years after the Zetas’ rampage, Coahuila’s governor, Rubén Moreira, announced that state officials would investigate what happened in Allende. With great fanfare, officials launched a “mega-operation” to collect evidence and find the truth.
Victims’ families and Allende residents say it has been little more than a publicity stunt. The inquiry has produced no conclusive DNA results, nor a final tally of the dead and missing.
Fewer than a dozen suspects have been arrested — most of them former local police and cartel grunts who followed orders. No one has been charged with murder.
They handed out death certificates, despite having no bodies, that listed such causes of death as “neurogenic shock” and “total combustion due to direct exposure to fire.
”When they gave me the news, my body went limp. They told me Gerardo had been taken to a ranch and killed. Something inside told me that it was true. But I asked, ‘Are you sure it was him?’
They told me that the witnesses had said that among the victims there was a family with three boys, and that one of the boys was my son. They said he had started to cry. It was stressing them out, so they killed him. That’s when I lost it. How could anyone kill a 15-year-old boy who’s afraid, and crying?
The officials asked me what I wanted. I told them I wanted his remains. They said that would be difficult, since my son was incinerated along with a lot of other people. Instead they brought me ashes and dirt from the place where he died. I asked them if I could go there. They told me it wasn’t safe. I told them I wanted to go anyway. So they escorted us in a caravan.
I was struck by how close it was. I thought to myself, Gerardo was so strong that if only he could have gotten away and made it to the highway, he would have easily managed to make it
They told us they were going to hand out death certificates, with information based on the statements that had come from the people who had been arrested. And they had small boxes of dirt for any relatives who wanted them. That was it.
I told them, ‘Hold on. I didn’t wait here for six hours to have you come and offer me a death certificate and this box. We’re human. How can you possibly think this is the right way to help bring us closure? I want to know what you learned and where you learned it. Where is the person who killed [my husband]? How did they kill him?’
They said that the answers might be hard to hear. They didn’t want to be cruel. I told them nothing could be worse than the 20,000 things I had already imagined on my own.
How would the suspects know my husband’s name, if they weren’t from here? We had believed all this time that the people who did this had been brought from another state.
In the end we learned they were people from here. The monsters we thought had come from who knows where were monsters who had lived among us, and who were supposed to protect us.”
Vela Victim’s wife;
“They gave me a death certificate dated the 19th of March 2011 — the day after he disappeared. The only thing I asked them was whether they were certain they were right.
They told me that the forensic specialists had not been able to test the fragments that had been recovered, so they couldn’t be 100 percent sure. But they told me they were confident that Edgar was there at the time of the massacre. I think it’s because they had witness statements.
I still don’t know what to believe. I hadn’t heard anything from them in five years; then, out of nowhere, they ask me to believe the case is solved.
I bet that if you were able to get a look at my husband’s case file, you’d see it’s empty.
Still, with the death certificate I began to make the changes that were long overdue. I moved out of our house. I left with only our clothes and [my daughter’s] bedroom furniture. All of Edgar’s clothes are still back there, hanging in the closet, exactly as he left them.
I could finally speak openly with my daughter about what had happened. I hadn’t been able to tell her that her father was dead, because, what if he returned?
I think in some ways she had already figured it out.”
The Treviño brothers were eventually captured, Miguel in 2013 and Omar in 2015, in operations led by Mexican marines. Since then, the cartel’s hold on Coahuila has weakened, and nightlife has returned to Allende, though many residents remain emotionally scarred and leery of strangers. They fixate on reports of drug-related violence, worrying that the Treviños are exerting control over the drug trade from prison.
The DEA takes credit for the captures but won’t say what, if anything, it did to investigate how the information about the PIN numbers wound up in the hands of the Zetas. Terrance Cole, Martinez’s supervisor in Dallas, and Paul Knierim, then a DEA supervisor in Mexico City who served as a liaison with the DEA-trained Mexican federal police unit, declined to be interviewed.
Knierim has since been promoted and is now the agency’s deputy chief of operations in Washington.
But Martinez agreed to speak, briefly choking up when asked about his role in the massacre. Named agent of the year in 2011, he is now battling kidney cancer, and so far aggressive treatment has failed.
Russ Baer, a DEA spokesman, twice flew from Washington, D.C., to Texas to monitor interviews with Martinez and another agent there.
As Martinez spoke, Baer interrupted to stress that the top Zetas were in prison and the agency’s investigation was ultimately a success.
Gonzalez Assistant U.S. attorney:
“Obviously I’m devastated by it. You know that in this line of work, there are going to be consequences. The potential for someone to get killed is always there. But to actually be involved in something like that and not being able to do anything is devastating.
The goal was an honorable goal: to try to get these guys arrested and put in jail so that they would stop killing people. But at that point in the investigation, it had the opposite effect.
I had heard about the brutality of Miguel and Omar Treviño and the senseless violence they had perpetrated in the past, but it didn’t register with me that it could be that way; that anybody that was even remotely linked to you, even if it was outside the drug trade, would be picked up and killed. That just didn’t seem possible. It probably should have. But it didn’t, until it was happening, until it happened.”
Martinez DEA agent;
We all knew the numbers were dangerous. If I just sat on a number — what am I going to do with them here in Dallas?
The wiretap is not as easy as people say it is. I have to have probable cause.
To me, I got the numbers, and I passed them on. That’s my job.
I can’t speak for the agency, other than I just know what I did. I did all I could do.
I gave it a shot. That’s the way I felt. I did the best I could do that day. I had the opportunity to get the intelligence and pass it on. I got it. I can’t very well go into Mexico and try to handle it myself.
As far as what happened in Mexico and the aftermath of the compromise, the DEA’s official position is: That’s squarely on Omar and Miguel Treviño. They were killing people before that happened, and they killed people after the numbers were passed. DEA did our job to target them and to try to focus and dedicate our resources to put them out of business. We were eventually successful in that regard.
Our hearts go out to those families. They’re victims, unfortunately, of the violence perpetrated by the Treviño brothers and the Zetas. But this is not a story where the DEA has blood on its hands.”
ABOUT THIS STORY
ProPublica, an independent, nonprofit, investigative newsroom, and National Geographic teamed up on this story. Ginger Thompson, a ProPublica senior reporter, spent months researching the massacre, interviewing sources on all sides, and writing the article. Kirsten Luce photographed it for National Geographic. Additional reporting was done by Alejandra Xanic, a freelance journalist in Mexico.
Ginger Thompson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, has covered Mexico for years. She was previously Mexico City bureau chief for the New York Times and the Baltimore Sun. Photographer Kirsten Luce has documented life along the U.S.-Mexico border for 10 years.
Source: http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2017/07/how-us-triggered-massacre-in-mexico.html
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