Los Zetas - Part I: The Formation

“HEARST” for Borderland Beat

The following is Part I of a brief overview of Los Zetas history, a story requested by readers.  

The origin of Los Zetas is more in dispute than it may appear on the surface. Two of the main authors on the subject present differing accounts of what occurred.

The discrepancies mainly surround who initiated and first poached the Army officer named Arturo Guzmán Decena, who would later go on to become “Z-1”, the first Zeta member. 

Grillo’s Version

According to the author Ioan Grillo in his book El Narco, Z-1 had worked with the leader of the Gulf Cartel, Osiel Cárdenas Guillen, prior to Z-1 ever defecting. 

Grillo says Osiel wanted to create a team of hitmen who would specifically be used to kill rival cartel leadership figures. Osiel focused on recruiting men from the special forces battalions of the Army, called Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFE), the Mexican equivalent of the US’s Army Rangers.  (El Narco pages 97-98, Buggs 2009) 

During this period, soldiers stationed in Tamaulipas would often take bribes from Gulf Cartel figures to look the other way when their drug smuggling loads were discovered. Grillo alleges that Z-1 and Osiel first began working together due to one of these off-the-record arrangements, while Z-1 was still in the Army. 

Even though Army soldiers were willing to take bribes from narcos, Grillo alleges that it was relatively unheard of for a soldier to fully defect to work under a narco at this time.

However, the thrust of Osiel’s pitch to entice soldiers to defect was simple: he was offering a significantly higher pay. And it worked. 

That being said some writers, such as Grillo, allege that GAFE soldiers could already live quite comfortably on their military salary. They argue that the risk inherent in becoming a fugitive was far too great for the pay to have been the only factor in the defector’s decisions. (Buggs 2009, El Narco pages 97-98)

Grillo alleges that a larger societal push towards holding the military accountable for human rights violations and corruption that was going on at the time played a significant role in the decision of this early group of defectors. 

It is generally believed that Z-1 was finally convinced  by Osiel at some point in 1997. The military record of Z-1 shows that he was recognized as having gone AWOL on September 27, 1997 and three days later he was officially discharged following a military tribunal.  (Mexican Cartels: An Encyclopedia, page 148) 

An informant later attested that Osiel asked Z-1 to create a group of the best men possible, which led to Z-1 slowly poaching military soldiers from multiple different units over the course of multiple months until he had a group of 38 defectors working under him. At this point, Z-1 anointed himself with the alias “Z1” and those under him received similar Z aliases. (El Narco pages 97-98)

Marley’s Version – Z1’s Defection and First Job for Osiel

The account presented in David Marley’s book Mexican Cartels: An Encyclopedia of Mexico’s Crime and Drug Wars paints a somewhat different story. 

Marley notes that the young Z-1 was “loaned out” to the PGR anti-narcotics branch and was tasked by the military (along with nearly 350 others) to act as a convert infiltrator on the Tamaulipas drug smuggling scene. He says this assignment was how Z-1 first made contact with the narcos in the area and that Z-1 quickly began working for the narcos in earnest, rather than just playing the role of informant. 

He writes that Z-1 began doing jobs on the side for the Gulf Cartel by the age of just 22 years old and cites as evidence the first-hand account written by a fellow soldier who worked with Z-1. This differs significantly from Grillo’s version where Z-1 only took bribes to look the other way until the moment of his defection. 

Z-1 then defected in September 1997, and, according to Marley, Army high command received reports that Z-1 had been seen working as a personal bodyguard for CDG regional boss Gilberto Garcia Mena, alias “El June”, just months after his military discharge. In Marley’s version of events, El June was Z-1’s boss in the years after his defection and Osiel doesn’t enter into the equation until later. 

As a side note, contributor MX has written previously (both on Borderland Beat and as a Wikipedia editor) that a man named Zeferino Peña Cuéllar, who worked under El June, was actually one who recruit Z-1 into the CDG. 

According to Marley, Z-1 did not actively recruit soldiers from the army, but rather, the soldiers sought him out, wanting to know more about how much he was getting paid and what work for the CDG entailed. 

One of these men was 24-year-old Heriberto Lazcano, who decided to defect and work alongside Z-1 during the summer of 1998. The pair performed a number of hits for El June and gained a reputation within the CDG. 

In Marley’s version, it wasn’t until February 1999 that Osiel ever made a request of Z-1, when he asked Z-1 and Lazcano to perform a hit on a rival named Rolando Lopez Salinas, alias “El Rolys” (sometimes spelled Rolis). This hit reportedly failed and both men were forced to flee but they had shown their skill in a gunfight so contracts continued to come their way. 

The Execution of El Chava 

In June 1999, Osiel enacted a plot to kill one of the other leaders of the Gulf Cartel, a man named Ángel Salvador Gómez Herrera, alias “El Chava”. Chava was largely unsuspecting of this plot because Osiel had recently named him as the godfather to his newborn daughter that he had recently had with his current mistress, Lilianna Davila Gonzalez.

Osiel and Chava met each other in June 1999 at the port city of El Mezquital, Tamaulipas. Chava had just arrived by sea, traveling to the area in a motorboat, and Osiel offered to drive him to where they would be staying. The two men boarded Osiel’s black Dodge Durango SUV, sitting in the front seats, while one of Osiel’s gunmen sat in the backseat and Chava’s bodyguards stood outside. 

After speaking to each other for a few minutes, Osiel made a signal to the gunman in the backseat who took out his pistol and shot Chava in the back of the head, killing him, while simultaneously Chava’s bodyguards were shot by Osiel’s other gunmen. According to both Grillo and Marley the man in the backseat who pulled the trigger on Chava was Z-1. 

Chava’s body was dumped in a remote area outside of Matamoros and not discovered until several days later, in a severe state of decay due to the hot summer sun. 

This execution famously led to Osiel becoming known as the Mata Amigos or “Friend Killer”. Marley specifies that Osiel earned this title mainly because Chava’s body was so heavily disfigured by the time it was discovered and open casket funerals were considered the norm, so the hit was seen as unnecessarily cruel. 

Marley’s Version – Osiel’s Request 

With Chava eliminated, Rolys was one of the only people standing in the way of Osiel having total control of the Gulf Cartel, so he ordered a second hit on Rolys in September 2000. The hit failed, but in the resulting fallout it was discovered that Rolys had been hiring hitmen out of Culiacan. This led Osiel to conclude what he had long suspected, that Rolys was working with Joaquin Guzman, El Chapo, from the Sinaloa Cartel in order to contest Osiel’s power. 

According to Marley, it is at this point, when  a CDS alliance was discovered,  that Osiel first approached Z-1 and requested that he form a hit-squad for him of “the best men”. Z-1 told Osiel that those men could only be found in the Army, so Osiel gave him the approval to recruit directly from their ranks. 

First he worked on recruiting men from the army garrison at Reynosa, then men from units he had previously worked in at Hidalgo,  and finally he pulled men from companies in his home state of Puebla. Z-1 was reportedly very charming during his recruiting efforts but he struggled with organizational and managerial skills so Osiel assigned three ex-Army officers to manage the new recruits. 

And thus, the Zetas were formed. The Z designation given as aliases to the members reportedly stemmed from Z-1’s final assignment in the military, drawing from  the PGR’s method for naming and identifying the military men they were loaned and used to help infiltrate the cartel groups.

Sources: Ioan Grillo’s book El Narco, David Marley’s book Mexican Cartels: An Encyclopedia, Research by Borderland Beat Contributor MX, Borderland Beat Archives