Mario Ramos thought it was a bad joke when he received an anonymous email at the start of this year demanding $15,000 a month to keep his industrial tubing business operating in Monterrey, Mexico’s richest city and a symbol of progress in Latin America.
Sitting in his air-conditioned office looking across at sparkling office blocks dotting the mountains on that morning in January, he casually deleted the email as spam.
Six days later, the phone rang and a thickset voice demanded the money. Ramos panicked, hung up and drove to his in-laws’ house. It was already late and he had little idea what to do. Then, just after midnight, masked gunmen burst onto his premises, set fire to one of his trucks, shot up his office windows and sprayed a nearby wall with the letter “Z” in black paint, the calling card of Mexico’s feared Zetas drug cartel.
“They were asking for money I could never afford,” said Ramos by telephone from San Antonio, Texas, where he fled with his family the next day. “I should have taken the threat more seriously, but it was such a shock. I couldn’t quite believe this could happen in Monterrey.”
In just four years, Monterrey, a manufacturing city of 4 million people 225 kilometres from the Texan border, has gone from being a model for developing economies to a symbol of Mexico’s drug war chaos, sucked down into a dark spiral of gangland killings, violent crime and growing lawlessness.
Since President Felipe Calderon launched an army-led war on the cartels in late 2006, grenade attacks, beheadings, firefights and drive-by killings have surged.
That has shattered this city’s international image as a boom town where captains of industry built steel, cement and beer giants in the desert in less than a century – Mexico’s version of Dallas or Houston.
By engulfing Monterrey, home to some of Latin America’s biggest companies and where annual income per capita is double the Mexican average at $17,000, the violence shows just how serious the security crisis has become in Mexico, the world’s seventh-largest oil exporter and a major U.S. trade partner.
Almost 40,000 people have died across the country since late 2006, and in Monterrey, the violence has escalated to a level that questions the government’s ability to maintain order and ensure the viability of a region that is at the heart of Mexico’s ambitions to become a leading world economy.
CAUTIONARY TALE
Already drug killings have spread to Mexico’s second city, Guadalajara, and while Mexico City has so far escaped serious drug violence, the capital does have a large illegal narcotics market. If the cartels were to declare war on its streets, Monterrey’s experience shows that Mexico’s long-neglected police and judiciary are not equipped to handle it.
“If we can’t deal with the problem in Monterrey, with all the resources and the people we have here, then that is a serious concern for the rest of Mexico,” said Javier Astaburuaga, chief financial officer at top Latin American drinks maker FEMSA, which helped to spark the city’s industrialization in the early 1900s.
Lorenzo Zambrano, the chief executive of one of the world’s largest cement companies Cemex, is equally concerned. “The trend is worrying,” said Zambrano, whose grandfather helped found the Monterrey-based company that has become of a symbol of Mexico’s global ambitions.
“But we won’t let Monterrey fall.”
That is what residents want to hear. Calderon has made two high-profile visits since September, swooping in by helicopter to offer his support and sending in more federal police to the city.
But the day-to-day reality is a violence that is out of control. Just over 600 people have died in drug war killings in and around Monterrey so far this year, a sharp escalation from the 620 drug war murders in all of 2010.
The dead include local mayors and an undetermined number of innocent civilians, including a housewife caught in crossfire while driving through the city, a just-married systems engineer shot dead by soldiers on his way to work and a young design student shot by a gunman in the middle of the afternoon on one of Monterrey’s busiest shopping streets.
Almost every resident has a story of someone they know who spent a horrifying evening face-down on a bedroom floor while gunmen fought battles in the streets outside.
More than a thousand people have disappeared across Nuevo Leon state, of which Monterrey is the capital, since 2007, according to the U.N.-backed human rights group CADHAC, which says they were forcibly recruited by the Gulf and Zetas gangs.
Human Rights Watch has documented more than a dozen forced disappearances over the period that it says were carried out by soldiers, marines and police working for the cartels.
On the surface, Monterrey, which generates eight per cent of gross domestic product with four per cent of Mexico’s population, is still a city featured in shiny business magazines.
Executives can still touch down at its marble and glass airport terminals and take its sleek highways to posh hotels and business conferences, admiring the impressive vista of Saddle Mountain that dominates the skyline to the south of the city. On Sundays, barbecue smoke and brassy Norteno music emanates from houses across the city.
Known for its private universities, large middle class, modern subway network and 1,800 foreign-run factories, Monterrey was even chosen to host a United Nations conference on development in 2002, attended by about 50 world leaders.
Like the Catalans of Spain, Monterrey residents liked to think of themselves as apart from the rest of their country – efficient, reliable and led by decent political leaders.
TEQUILA FOR THE NERVES
But turn on the television news, flick through the local newspapers or chance to hear the intermittent sound of gunfire in the city’s streets and it quickly becomes clear that there’s a battle being waged for Monterrey between the powerful Gulf cartel and its former enforcers, the Zetas. And they know no bounds.
On New Year’s Eve, gunmen hanged a woman from a road bridge. They’ve dumped severed heads outside kindergartens and killed traffic police as they helped children cross the road. In a matter of minutes, they can shut down large parts of the city by hijacking vehicles at gunpoint to block highways with trucks and buses to allow hitmen to escape the army. Police, once considered Mexico’s best, have been infiltrated by both gangs.
On two consecutive days in April, a record 30 people were killed in shootouts, mainly hitmen and police, but also a student who was run down by a fatally wounded police officer trying to escape gunmen.
Jaime Rodriguez, the mayor of Garcia municipality in the Monterrey area, survived two attempts on his life in March, saved only by his armoured vehicle. “I couldn’t stop shaking,” said Rodriguez, speaking days after the second attack and with soldiers as his bodyguards. “After they tried to kill me the first time, I got home and downed half a bottle of tequila. After the second, I finished it.”
Some of the city’s jobless have joined the chaos after seeing the impunity that drug gangs enjoy. They are trying their luck at all types of crime, robbing drivers at gunpoint at traffic lights, bursting into restaurants to steal clients’ cash and holding up car dealerships, banks and even the offices of a local zoo for as little as $500 a time.
Gunmen stole a record 4,607 vehicles in Nuevo Leon in the first four months of this year, almost double the number stolen in all of 2004 and more than in Mexico City, which has five times the population, the Mexican Insurers Association says.
Kidnapping, almost unheard of before 2007, is now more of a concern to business people in Monterrey than it is in Mexico City, where kidnap-for-ransom has long been a scourge, according to a recent study by consultancy KPMG.
Both the Gulf gang and the Zetas, led by a former elite Mexican soldier who calls himself “The Executioner,” want not just the smuggling routes to the United States, but control of Monterrey as a place to live, launder money and prey on private companies for extortion, U.S. and Mexican experts say.
“Monterrey is a strategic point in Mexico for trafficking. It’s a kind a crossroads on the northeastern corridor and it is very lucrative territory,” said a U.S. official at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Mexico City.
The cartels are ferociously well-armed, mainly with weapons from the United States. But, more alarmingly, since late 2009 just prior to the Zetas’ breakaway from the Gulf gang, Zeta henchmen have been bringing in weapons – fully automatic M-16s and military explosives – from Central America, the ATF says.
“These were legitimate military sales to foreign governments during the 1980s and ’90s, and those guns are walking out the back door and finding their way to northern Mexico,” the official said. “Not only the guns, but military grade explosives: Claymore mines, C-4 (plastic explosives) as well as grenades.”
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