Free To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War by John Gibler

the crime beat reporters joked with Pepis that he should learn photography so he could cover the languid photographer’s dead time. Pepis liked the idea. With his savings he bought a 1970s Yashica 35mm camera and studied darkroom developing techniques, how to work the camera, and finally the craft of taking pictures. He then apprenticed for a year, unpaid, covering the unofficial 2:00 p.m.–6:00 p.m. “lunch” shift before his night shift at the paper’s printing press. After a year, he started as a crime beat staff photographer for Primera Hora .
    I ask the Primera Hora team to walk me through the background to the current state of war. In 2001, El Chapo busts out of federal, maximum-security prison to reclaim old territories, they tell me. At this time there was a grand alliance between Sinaloan drug cartels called The Federation. This alliance included the Arrellano Félix brothers (from Sinaloa, but in control of the plaza in Tijuana), the Carrillo Fuentes family (also from Sinaloa, but in control of the plaza in Ciudad Juárez), and El Chapo and El Mayo Zambada (both from Sinaloa and in control of the plaza in Sinaloa).
    In 2004, assassins working for El Chapo gunned down Rodolfillo Carrillo Fuentes—brother of Amado, “The Lord of the Skies”—and his wife, Giovanna Quevedo Gastélum, in front of a movie theater in Culiacán. The Carrillo Fuentes gang sent a group of killers to murder El Chapo’s brother Pablo. With these murders The Federation dissolved, the alliances crumbled, and the war began. The violence ebbed in 2005 and surged again in 2006. During this time El Chapo made an alliance with the Sinaloan Beltrán Leyva brothers: Arturo, Héctor, Alfredo, Mario, and Carlos. The Beltrán Leyva brothers recruited Edgar “La Barbie” Valdez from the rival Gulf Cartel, and together they became the main armed wing of the Sinaloa Cartel tasked with invading new territories, taking over and opening up new plazas . One of the first places they went was Acapulco, Guerrero, where two state police officers were decapitated and their severed heads impaled on a fence one morning in late April 2006.
    In 2008, the alliance between El Chapo and El Mayo and the Beltrán Leyva brothers fell apart. El Chapo apparently tipped off federal authorities to the whereabouts of Alfredo “El Mochomo” Beltrán’s safe house in Mexico City—where Alfredo was arrested on January 21, 2008—as a trade to secure the release of one of his sons from maximum-security prison in Mexico State. As a result, El Chapo’s son Archibaldo Guzmán was released a few months later, on April 11. The Beltrán Leyva clan demanded their brother’s release, and it seems that when El Chapo refused to help, they sent a hit squad to kill El Chapo’s other son, Édgar, in the parking lot of a supermarket on May 9. On May 7 and 8, hand-painted narco-banners were hung in Sinaloa with messages like POLICE-SOLDIERS, SO THAT IT BE CLEAR, EL MOCHOMO STILL CARRIES WEIGHT. SINCERELY, ARTURO BELTRÁ N . The war was on again. The Beltrán Leyva gang made alliances with El Chapo’s bitter enemies the Carrillo Fuentes of the Juárez Cartel and the Zetas, then still working for the Gulf Cartel.
    When I ask about Calderón and his war on drugs, the crime beat reporters urge the following distinction: there is the War on Drugs ( la Guerra del Narco ), and then there is the Drug War ( la Narcoguerra ). In the War on Drugs the federal government sends tens of thousands of soldiers and federal police parading through the streets, then announces the seizures of drugs and weapons and the arrests of alleged drug traffickers. In the Drug War, trafficking organizations—and the various local, state, and federal authorities allied with them—battle in the streets and seek to exterminate each other and establish absolute dominance in a given plaza . The two wars sometimes overlap, but they are not identical.
    Pepis carries a radio similar to those used by the Red Cross and