This was Avery’s first time to Mexico, but he’d read up on the country during the flight, studying the CIA World Factbook entry and listening to Slayton’s firsthand accounts of the ongoing drug wars being fought here.
Known colloquially as TJ, Tijuana and the surrounding urban area comprise a large modern metropolis seated in rugged mesas and canyons. The largest city on the Baja California Peninsula and economically linked to San Diego, Tijuana is Mexico’s industrial center, especially known for manufacturing most of the medical equipment used in North American hospitals. Many American companies have factories here, taking advantage of Mexicans who are happy to work overtime under poor conditions for $8 a day. Despite the city’s importance to the Mexican and American economies, poverty was still widespread, with most people living in slums.
After a 2007–2010 high of gang violence between the Tijuana cartel and its Sinaloa rival, rife with chainsaw massacres and gun battles in the streets, Americans were slowly starting to visit the city again. Tijuana’s beaches and its small downtown strip are popular tourist destinations, and the low drinking age attracts droves of California kids on the weekends.
Over the past decade, Mexico has become the new frontline of the drug wars. Throughout the nineties, rampant poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and government corruption and failure brought about the rise of the cartels. The current conflict started in 2006, when President Calderon launched a massive operation to arrest the heads of the cartels, and deployed the army to the country’s most dangerous areas. Since then, the cartels, with their private armies and death squads, battle each other and the federal government’s security forces on a daily basis, unconcerned about the civilians who get in the way. For many Mexicans, the cartels offered the only source of work and income.
Nearly 100,000 people, many of them civilians, have been killed since 2006. Another 30,000 have disappeared, most of them dead or sold into slavery. Mutilated, dismembered, and burnt bodies of police officers, soldiers, undercover agents, vigilante paramilitaries, and rival gang members, plus their family members, regularly appear in piles on city streets or hanging from lamp posts or on the sides of highways, or turn up buried in mass graves around the country.
Countless more civilians are slaughtered across the United States and Central America as they inadvertently enter the crosshairs of the rival street gangs and paramilitary groups who thrive off trafficking and selling Mexican drugs. From Colombia’s FARC and Peru’s Shining Path, to California and El Salvador’s MS-13, Mexican cartel operations put cash, guns, and drugs in the hands of gangs and terrorist groups across the Western Hemisphere.
Together, the top Mexican drug lords earn up to $50 billion annually. Nearly all South American cocaine in the United States first passes through Mexico, and much of Americans’ recreational marijuana is grown in Mexico. American cities from Los Angeles to Chicago and Indianapolis have seen a steady increase in gang violence as the Mexican cartels expand their operations, buying and arming allies, and eliminating competition in urban turf wars.
Avery personally thought that combating drug cartels was a waste of resources. The drug lords and gangs only profited because of America’s insatiable appetite for narcotics. Half of Americans have used marijuana, a quarter of them have tried cocaine, and most of them weren’t addicts or criminals living in the alleys of inner city ghettos. They were college students, lawyers, artists, doctors, bored suburban dwellers, and yuppies, weak individuals craving stimulation in one form or another, and escape from their insecurities, empty lives, and loneliness; and they were as responsible for the carnage and death in Colombia and Mexico as the cartels and their killers. Washington could pour as much as money as it wanted into counternarcotics operations, but it wouldn’t do much good as long as American citizens demanded cocaine and marijuana.
The small convoy drove south on a two-lane road, the Forerunners packed between the Federal Police Chargers. Avery travelled in the same vehicle as Slayton, Contreras, and Captain Padilla. He looked out his window, watching the flat land, a mix of grass and dirt fields, passing by. Moon and star light shining through Tijuana’s heavy pollution cast an orange glow to the sky, the result of the city’s increasing industrialization. Traffic was light, consisting mostly of eighteen wheelers making their way to or from the border on late night hauls.
Padilla took the opportunity to quickly fill Avery and Slayton in on the Tijuana cartel.
Originally one of the largest, most powerful cartels in the country, after the arrest of its leaders, the TJ cartel is now essentially a loose coalition of smaller gangs operating in the Tijuana cartel’s former territory in northwestern Mexico and southern California. They maintain their influence and power through violence and from the fact that they control a third of key Mexican smuggling routes into the United States. When these gangs aren’t fighting the police or the Sinaloa cartel, they’re fighting each other.
“Did you receive the briefing packet I forwarded to your office earlier?” Slayton asked Contreras.
“Sure did. I knew there was more to what went down in Buenaventura than the official story and the bullshit in the media. We also received the alert earlier this week from CIA and Homeland Security that the Viper — cute name, by the way — is looking to get into the States to cause some havoc. She’s been our top priority the past five days, putting nearly everything else on hold.”
Contreras didn’t sound happy about this, but the fact that the Viper was already responsible for the deaths of several DEA agents made him more willing and cooperative than he otherwise would be putting his agents and informants to work for CIA.
“Well for once Homeland Security’s not overreacting,” Slayton said. “I’ve been on this from the beginning, and Moreno’s as dangerous as they come. This is our last chance to interdict her and the missiles before they enter the US.”
“I’ll tell you right now, I’ll do everything I can to help,” Contreras said. “I knew two of those guys we lost in Buenaventura two days ago. Came up through the Academy with them, and I worked with Foster in Honduras. They were good agents. They had families, kids. They deserved a hell of a lot better.”
Slayton nodded his agreement, feeling partly responsible for what happened in Buenaventura.
“Anyway,” Contreras said. “I think we may already have a lead.”
Slayton smiled, a look of relief on his face, and eagerness to move away from the topic of Buenaventura, and he said to a stoic Avery, “I told you this guy gets shit done.”
“Let’s not get too excited yet,” Contreras said. “It’s just coincidence really, and it might be nothing. We caught wind of something just before you landed. We’d investigate it either way, but after the news about the Viper, well, maybe there’s a connection.”
“What is it?”
“One of our local informants alerted us to a meeting tomorrow with Arturo Silva. For those of you who don’t know, Silva is Tijuana’s logistics coordinator with Colombia’s North Valley Cartel, which, as I’m sure you already know, is allied with FARC. Silva’s in charge of moving Colombian cocaine up north, and he’s real tight with Los Zetas, making him no small player around here. We’ve been after him for a while.”
“Who is he meeting?” Slayton asked.
“We haven’t identified the contact yet, but we know he, or maybe she, is a foreigner and was due to arrive from Colombia earlier this afternoon. Doesn’t seem like a coincidence to me that our investigations are intersecting here.”