There are unconfirmed rumours that he would eat the hearts of his victims. His method of choice was the guiso (‘stew’), which involved stuffing somebody into an oil drum, dousing them in gasoline, and burning them alive. Anyone who didn’t bow to the wishes of Los Zetas was killed. Treviño Morales was a career criminal who carved his power base out solely through a reputation for unrestrained violence. The man who rose to be the lead enforcer for Los Zetas – and eventually its boss, until his arrest on 15th July this year – did not come from a military background. Los Zetas became the muscle for the Gulf Cartel. The name for this new paramilitary group came from their leader Arturo Guzmán Decena, who (when he was a legitimate soldier) had the Federal Judicial Police radio code “Z1”. He hired a group of deserters from the elite military Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFE), trained in commando and urban warfare. Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, who had just taken over control of the Gulf Cartel, was embroiled in a vicious turf war and decided he needed a cadre of the best bodyguards he could find. Los Zetas first emerged at the turn of the 21st century. And even among such brutally violent company, the US has described Los Zetas as “the most technologically advanced, sophisticated and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico.” This is eight times larger than the number of combatant casualties in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined, and comparable to the casualty count of the first two years of conflict in Syria, the world’s bloodiest ongoing civil war. According to work by Rodrigo Canales, an associate professor of organisational behaviour at the Yale School of Management who has extensively studied the cartels, in the last six years 60,000-100,000 people have died in drug-related violence in Mexico. In a confrontation that had been brewing for years, Treviño Morales and Los Zetas had tangled with the hacktivist collective known as Anonymous and, possibly for the first time in his life, he was about to lose.įew can be unaware that in the past decade Mexico has seen rising rates of drug-related bloodshed, but the sheer scale of the carnage is hard to imagine. If he found the people responsible for the current threats against his organisation, he would kill them in the most brutal manner imaginable. Nobody stood in his way: not politicians, journalists, law enforcement officials nor the long list of rival cartels with whom he battled constantly for territory and respect. A violent career criminal who had risen to the leadership of the Los Zetas drug cartel in Mexico, he was not used to being blackmailed. As the clock ticked down towards midnight on November 4th 2011, Miguel Treviño Morales knew he had a serious problem.
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