NUEVO LAREDO: THE BORDER TOWN ON THE FRONTLINE OF THE DRUGS TRADE

The US-Mexico border runs for nearly 2,000 miles.

Last year Observer writer Ed Vulliamy travelled its entire length.

In this extract from his new book, Amexica, he tells the incredible
story of the town that doubles as the world's largest transport hub
for narcotics

laredo Freight trucks queue up to enter Laredo, Texas. Much of the
USA's trade with Mexico passes through the town. Photograph: Eric Gay/AP

For decades as a traveller, and 10 years as a reporter, I have been
repelled and compelled by the charisma of the US-Mexican border - its
seduction and its horrors, its firelight sun and occult shadows - to
the point at which I had to write a book and give it the name that
should, really, be that of the place: Amexica. That land of paradox
and dichotomy astride a frontier that is a land unto itself, both
porous and harsh, belonging to both the United States and Mexico, and
neither: a place of opportunity and poverty, promise and despair,
love and violence, wonder and fear, sex and church, family and hard grind.

A border along which the US now builds a stockade against migration
and violence - yet which is also the busiest commercial border in the
world, across which a million people travel every day to shop, go to
school, do business or visit relatives.

And a place, above all, of boundless beauty and infinite sky.

A savage but strange war now rages along the border, and throughout
Mexico: on the surface of things, a fight to the death between
narco-trafficking cartels that has claimed 28,000 lives since
December 2006. The carnage called me back, to write not so much about
the war as a place in time of war. And to find that the war was in
part rooted in the border's daily life of exploitation in sweatshop
factories and battles for domestic drug-dealing turf, and also in
general themes of globalised markets and trade, hyper-materialism and
consumerism that hallmark any post-industrial, post-moral society in collapse.

Last year, to write the book, I travelled the length of the border
for only the second time, from its western end where the sun sets
into the Pacific between Tijuana and San Diego, to the Rio Grande
delta between deep south Texas and tropical Tamaulipas, Mexican
fortress of the terrifying paramilitary Zetas cartel.

A journey through acute fear and laughter-until-tears, ready smiles
and cowed silence - and resilience, both in acts of courage and of normality.

The length of the border is 1,970 miles, but the journey was nearer 11,000.

The first story I ever wrote about the border was in 2001 - not about
cartels, but trade over the busiest border crossing in the world:
between Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. It concerned a
quickly abandoned proposal by President George W Bush to allow
Mexican truckers to drive across the line and all over the United
States. Four years after the scheme was scrapped, the present war
began in Nuevo Laredo, for criminal control of the truckers'
corridor, because where the global economy moves, so do the drugs and
contraband - along with tens of thousands of illegal migrants, mostly
aboard the railcars. 'I was not an executioner. I was an assassin'
The headlights aimed along Highway 85 coming in from Monterrey throw
bedazzling beams through the dust kicked up around truck stop
Veintiseis - 26 - so that the encampment of drivers, roadside cafes
and police officers at their checkpoint is coated in a thick,
illuminated mist of powdery dirt. Although the trucks are parked up
like a military column, many of their drivers have kept the engines
running so the dust is also heavy with noise and fumes, chugging
Volvo and belched Pemex diesel. There is no daytime or night in the
truckers' world, only daylight and darkness; there is no clock apart
from that which measures pick-up and delivery times, delays.

North of the border, the commandment is set in stone and monitored by
tachometer, an accord between the teamsters' union and haulage
companies: after 10 hours' driving, you rest 10 hours. But this side,
in Mexico, things are more flexible.

Or maybe not so flexible, there's just a different kind of rule: you
drive all the hours God gives, pep yourself up with chemical
cocktails to do so and make as much money - that is, drive as many
kilometres - as you are physically capable of, devil take the
consequences. But even a Mexican trucker must eat, sleep a little and
do other things while off the road.

Veintiseis is the name given to the truckers' republic that has
sprung up around the customs post and police checkpoint 26km south of
Nuevo Laredo, the city that, with its twin on the US side, Laredo,
makes up the gateway to the last, industrial, leg of the border journey.

The bridge between the two downtown areas of each city is called the
"Gateway to the Americas", because this is the border's commercial
fulcrum, at which you arrive either by freeway up from Monterrey in
the south or down Interstate 13 from Dallas to the north.

Or, of course, as I did: along the flat border road from Eagle Pass,
Texas. The railway bridge and three other road bridges between these
cities form the umbilical cord of trade connecting Mexican and Latin
American freight, and Chinese exports, with North America. Some 40%
of all trade between the US and Mexico - totalling $367.4bn in 2008 -
crosses the Rio Grande here every day, loaded onto thousands of rail
cars and 10,000 trucks crossing daily in both directions, converging
from all over the US and Mexico to transfer their payloads to
shuttle-trucks at vast freight-forwarding yards on either side of the border.

More than a million barrels of crude oil a day cross the line here,
along with 432 tonnes of jalapeno peppers, 16,000 television sets -
all this and more through a town that on the Mexican side didn't
light the streets until recently and on the US side was a sleepy
cowboy town famous for the song "The Streets of Laredo". Now, neither
side can mix concrete fast enough. Los Dos Laredos, as the twin
cities are called, form a commercial demilitarised zone full of
freight containers as far as the eye can see. Along with goods come
the people: the deserts of Arizona and the trade corridor between Los
Dos Laredos are the two main routes taken by desperate refugees from
poverty across Mexico and Central America, bound for what they
believe to be the promised land of plenty.

Many of those who cross into Laredo do so by riding or "surfing" the
freight wagons that rattle and thunder their way into the US across
the so-called "Puente Negro" railway bridge from southern Mexico,
from the capital or the port of Lazaro Cardenas.

Laredo, Texas, is the fourth biggest port in the US, by value of
trade, after New York, Los Angeles and Detroit. Some 5,000 trucks a
day cross north, and 5,000 south, over the busiest bridges in the world.

But here's the rub: an estimated 3% of the transported goods are
contraband - invariably drugs northbound, guns and cash southbound -
making this the principal crossing point for narco-cartel exports.

And these drivers are their witting or unwitting transporters. The
cartels' war - which began here in earnest in 2005 - was for the
prize corridor, the most important plaza (turf) of all. The
authorities' war is against a simple logic: the more trade that comes
through Veintiseis and across the border, the more drugs come with it.

Behind the rays of the headlamps at Veintiseis are other lights, the
pale yellow or bright fluorescent lanterns of the comedores, places
to eat, each marked with a hand-crafted sign. Approaching night, the
place is all bustle and hustle, exhausts farting, brakes screeching,
reverse gears grinding and the drivers checking out the deals in the
comedores. In the Comedor Johanna, Juan Gabriel Morales from Tabasco
comes in and orders coffee.

He has seen the highways change, he says, especially of late, since
the drug war began. "The timing is stressful.

You have your load, your deadline and delivery date. If you fuck it
up, you don't get paid. After five years, I think I know every trick,
and suddenly: new checkpoints, new hassle.

And it gets scary," though Juan Gabriel seems ashamed to admit it,
for Mexican truckers are supposed to be unacquainted with fear.
"You're coming out of San Luis Potosi towards Saltillo and there's a
checkpoint that wasn't there before.

You've no idea who it is. If it's the army, you can usually talk your
way out of it, even if you have to pay. But what if it's the police?

Or the police working for the bad guys from here who are big in that
area? You just have to get the papers out and give them what they
want - you can try, but the company won't pay it back."

We walk back to the parking area, past the police checkpoint, behind
a very different eating joint that amalgamates Church's Chicken,
Subway and Daily Roast. Along the way, an entire village has been
built up around the Veintiseis, with houses where comedor owners,
cooks, dishwashers, waiters and waitresses, used-clothing dealers,
prostitutes, engine repair mechanics and their children live, and
yards where rangy dogs, cats, cows, goats, pigs and rats cohabit with
them. The Comedor La Guera - the blonde - also operates a full
service market for detergents, shaving gear, batteries, penknives and
knock-off audio and video equipment, while the Restaurante
Jalisciense is attached to a garage fixing up cars and exhausted engines.

And all along the way, the ground is littered with discarded little
aluminium packages that once contained pills, the overnight dosage of
downers to sleep and amphetamines to get you going again.

There are hundreds of them strewn across the dust, but they are only
the slightest micro-shaving off the great block of narcotics pulling
up at Veintiseis and moving on through.

The drugs are aboard the trucks, in bulk, heading straight into the
United States of America. There is no reason why, if 40% of
cross-border trade moves through here, 40% of the drugs shouldn't
either, if not more. That is why the drug war began in Nuevo Laredo,
and that is why the Gulf cartel and Zetas made sure to win it.

The battle for Nuevo Laredo was the beginning of the current phase of
Mexico's agony.

It announced a new level and a new kind of violence: some 2,000 were
killed in 2005 across the country.

The Sinaloa cartel sent a lieutenant, born in Texas, called Edgar
Valdez Villarreal, aka La Barbie, to lead its siege of the Laredo trade route.

He used the internet to show videos of four Gulf cartel killers being
beaten, ending with one being shot in the head. After one firefight
late in 2006, the dead "lay in pools of blood flowing into the Rio
Grande", after which men with assault rifles picked up the bodies of
the victims, threw them in the back of pickup trucks and headed out
of downtown.

In June 2005, President Vicente Fox sent in a token military force,
which he called Operation Secure Mexico, but as a commander of the
police department, Enrique Sanchez, said when asked by journalists
where the soldiers were during the fighting: "That's a good question.

Where are they?" It was a barbed remark, with Mexican federal
officials at the time briefing that the Nuevo Laredo's police
department was at the disposal of the jailed Osiel Cardenas, leader
of the Gulf cartel and founder of the Zetas. At the same time,
Alejandro Dominguez Coello, a former federal law-enforcement official
and president of the chamber of commerce, became chief of police in
Nuevo Laredo. He was honest, unaffiliated to the cartel - and
assassinated seven hours after taking office. Within days of the
police chief's murder, the US government closed its consulate,
comparing Nuevo Laredo to Baghdad. It was a city of "bazookas,
grenades and machine guns", said a businessman after watching a
20-minute battle.

Throughout, the cartel hung their narcomensaje banners, one reading:
"What else could you want? The state of Tamaulipas, Mexico, the
United States, the whole world - territory of the Gulf cartel."

But the war has now abated.

Nuevo Laredo is calm, or has the appearance of calm that could blow
at any moment.

When human rights campaigner Raymundo Ramos Vazquez shows off a narco
villa in the exclusive Madero neighbourhood whose owner switched
loyalty to the Sinaloa cartel five years ago - attacked with
bazookas, incinerated and still empty - he does so as though it were
both a cautionary tale and a tourist attraction. But Nuevo Laredo
lives the peace of the tomb, or what in Italy would be called Pax
Mafiosa. "There has been a truce," says Ramos. "I don't know the
details, and I don't want to know, but the Gulf cartel has won, the
Sinaloa cartel has lost, and they have reached an accord.

I can only guess that Joaquin Guzman [head of the Sinaloa cartel]
pays some kind of tax to use the corridor, if he uses it at all. The
Gulf cartel controls the corridor again, and the federal army patrols
every block of the city, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This has
had the effect of stopping the war."

It has also had the effect of producing a society in which no one
dares speak the word Zeta. In every town under their control, the
Zetas have another name in everyday parlance, a codeword used as a
vain insurance policy by the few who dare speak of this subject; here
it seems to be el piramide, or just the generic "bad guys", as
everywhere else. It is an absurd charade - anyone who talks about the
Zetas is at risk whatever they call them - but the shying away from
the word is fundamentally important. It shows that the faux-mystique
of the Zetas works and intimidates; that their name has become an
evil talisman, and to avoid uttering it is a primal act of
superstition. To speak it, on the other hand, feels like
self-condemnation. Ramos talks about the Gulf cartel, but never uses
the Z-word.

When I return to see Raymundo Ramos a year later, in 2009, the
"peace" is one year older, the town almost buzzing, such is the
facade of the Pax Mafiosa and the determination of these people to
live as best they can. Raymundo and I convene in the front room of
the house of a friend of his. He is an intriguing man - secretive
about his life, but boldly forthright in his utterances and analysis.

He runs the beleaguered Nuevo Laredo Committee for Human Rights, but
his casework mainly involves complaints against the army - he stays
well clear of problems caused by the Zetas.

"The difference between here and [Ciudad] Juarez," he begins, "is
that there, the plaza is still contested - a battle between gangs,
cartels and the army. Here, we don't have that problem.

The plaza is tranquil, it's peaceful now compared to three years ago.
Here, there's one cartel and the army. But the volume of traffic
going through Nuevo Laredo doesn't change.

All it means is that the accord between narcos at the highest level
must be holding." But, he warns: "Laredo is the main crossing point
for trafficking throughout all the USA, we're right in the middle of
the distribution network here, and no one wants to give it up entirely.

The Gulf cartel and Zetas hold the terrain, and anyone else must pay
a tax. The army is here, but that doesn't affect the traffic either:
you notice that President Calderon is fighting a war against the
narco traffickers, but not the narco traffic!

It's a strategy to control the traffic, not to eradicate it.

"But things have changed.

Before the war, the narco was granted impunity, so he thought he was
the boss, but actually the politicians and the police were the bosses
of the narco.

Now, after the war, the cartel in this state has become a parallel
structure; they are not subject to the political parties, they are a
parallel government. Before, the policeman and politician were the
bosses of the narco.

Now, the narco is the boss of the policeman and politician, and does
what he wants."

Ramos was once a journalist for the local paper, El Manana, with a
reputation for fearless reporting on the narcos.

But, he says: "I just couldn't carry on. It became too dangerous to
be a reporter here. What would be the point risking it? The papers
can't publish the news - it's too dangerous for them to do so." In
imploding Juarez, people bandied around the words "Linea" (a branch
of the Juarez cartel) and "Guzman" with relative ease in public, for
all the raging violence.

Here, barely anyone speaks and in the local press, nothing.

As any visiting reporter trying to cover Nuevo Laredo - and all Zeta
or Gulf cartel territory - knows, this terrain is harder and more
frightening than Juarez. Juarez has a functioning, albeit assaulted,
mass media; a visiting journalist has reason to be there.

In Juarez, there are press conferences, interviews and articles about
the violence.

The tabloid arm of the Diario newspaper, PM, made a point of getting
to the latest atrocity first, for a gory front-page photo - until
last week that is. Last Sunday, the quality El Diario - one of the
last dailies on the border to rigorously report the carnage in its
city of Juarez - published an extraordinary editorial following a
machine-gun attack three days earlier on 21-year-old photojournalist
Luis Carlos Santiago, who was shot dead, and an intern who was
wounded as they left the office for lunch.

Headlined: "What do you want from us?", it was directly addressed by
the paper to the "leaders of the different organisations that are
fighting for control of Ciudad Juarez", and petitioned them: "We ask
you to explain what you want from us, what we should try to publish
or not publish, so we know what to expect." The attack followed the
murder of El Diario's leading crime reporter, Armando Rodriguez, shot
in November 2008 while warming up his car to take his daughter,
sitting in the back seat, to school.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 30
Mexican journalists have been killed or have disappeared over the
past four years.

In Nuevo Laredo, the opposite prevails - the press has been
bludgeoned into silence by the Zetas. Nuevo Laredo is one of those
towns in which the local paper is a local institution. The executive
editor of the paper is Ramon Cantu, an impressive man, something of a
good-living rake, charming, clever, forceful and unreliable in his
appointments. But the doors of his newspaper are protected by a
bullet-proof, bomb-proof screen, atop which is an understated
memorial plaque commemorating an attack on the paper by the Zetas
with grenades and guns in February 2006, targeting and injuring a
veteran journalist investigating narco smuggling and conditions in
the maquiladoras (factories), Jaime Oscar Tey. Two years previously,
in March 2004, the editor, Roberto Javier Mora Garcia, was stabbed to
death in his SUV, outside his apartment.

Ramon Cantu defends his ground with estimable tenacity, though takes
care to do so on the US side of the border, on the public occasion of
a "war on drugs" conference in El Paso. In private, he confides: "I'm
sick of the whole thing.

I want to talk about something else, about the future of this place,
trucks and trade." But on the conference podium he bites the bullet:
it was made clear, he says, "that we should not use the word 'Zetas'.
And I took the view that the lives of our staff are more important.

This war is not going to be won by a newspaper or magazine. We have
to be aware of our safety as well as benefit the community. We spend
a lot of time looking out for our own safety so as to avoid more
complicated situations. We're censoring the... newspaper, because we
have to get our children to school.

If we get some anonymous tip or call, we have to decide what's
correct and what's incorrect. These people," he reminds his audience
in case it urges him to brandish the sword of truth at all costs, as
many do, "they just kill you. They don't make up a slander that
you're having an affair, or taking money from the mafia.

If they don't like you, they kill you. We have to be very calm. Yes,
I've received complaints: 'Why don't you publish this or that?' And I
try to explain that I feel bad that we're not doing our job, and then
a lady calls, and we must report something.

Next day, they call and tell me that two of my reporters have been
kidnapped, and advise me to keep silent.

I'd like to say I had a bit of courage, but these are innocent
reporters covering social affairs - what am I going to do?"

Other journalists in Nuevo Laredo do speak what they cannot write -
off the record.

One editor says of the crossings into the United States: "The Mexican
government can put all the money it wants into the customs and
inspections posts, it's all useless.

A customs officer is as afraid of organised crime as anyone else.
What are they to do when a convoy of 15 SUVs pulls up at the
forwarding yard or even at the bridge?

And men get out wearing paramilitary uniform and ski masks, carrying
AK-47s. If it's a forwarding yard, they're told to open the truck.

If it's on the bridge, they're told just to let a truck through
across the river. They're not asked, they're told. What do they do?
They move to one side. They open the door. They let the truck cross,
they don't ask or say anything. They just look the other way. Who
wouldn't? This is a military unit; they wear hand grenades in their vests.

They don't need to ask people to co-operate. This is what happens
here, this is how it's done."

He balances his weight in the shade of a walnut tree, through which
dappled sunshine falls. "Oliver" is a big man. He moves slowly, and
wears a yellow T-shirt and grey tracksuit trousers.

One would like to be able to say that he had the keen, darting eyes
of an executioner, but he hasn't. Like him, they are slow but not
languid, they are considered. They do, however, have a certain
extinguishment in them. He was, so his employer had said, a member of
a gang affiliated to the Gulf cartel, and a sicario - an executioner
- - though Oliver doesn't like the word. He prefers asesino.

For all its importance and size, Nuevo Laredo lies in a far
north-west corner of the state of Tamaulipas, the Zetas' home
territory, but it is not their bastion - that lies further downriver.

And it was in Nuevo Laredo that the war showed how little sense of
brotherhood there really is within the cartels, happy to kill out of
factional greed within the same organisation. Guzman's attack on
Nuevo Laredo in 2005 was an opportunist push several years after the
arrest and extradition of Osiel Cardenas, but the arrest led also to
an internal struggle within the Gulf cartel.

Cardenas's power base was Matamoros and his soldiers were the Zetas
he founded, with Nuevo Laredo far away and run by an old guard in the
Gulf cartel, some of them loyal to Chava Gomez, whom Cardenas killed
to assume supremacy.

They had their own deals with the local police and, crucially, with
the haulage industry, and needed subjugation by the Zetas from down the valley.

Oliver's gang served a network that the Zetas from Matamoros needed
to bring to heel, but his faction fought its ground. (There are
reports that a sudden burst of violence across Tamaulipas in early
2010 was a resurgence of this internecine battle between the Zetas
and the Gulf cartel's old guard.)

Oliver won't say for whom he worked, only that he was one of Los
Tejas, which he sometimes calls Tejanos - Texas and Texans. It was,
he says, "a gang" ("pandilla", he calls it). Oliver had been a truck
driver in the US, and a drug addict - he is now a born-again
Christian. "I looked up the Tejas guys there in San Antonio while I
was trucking over there," he says. "I was taking some heavy stuff,
and suffered mental problems.

I got deported." Back in his home town of Nuevo Laredo, in need of
work, Oliver hooked up with the gang again, by now formally
affiliated to the Gulf cartel.

The "truck driving", it seems, had involved distribution of drugs.
"We were in the colonia [neighbourhood]; we were safe in the colonia,
but only in the colonia.

Outside of that, you don't know who you're dealing with. You don't
know who's armed and who isn't. So you work for the organisation and
they work for you. First, they get you dealing. Then they get you
dealing a little more. But if you're good, the real money is in
killing." How much? Silence. Oliver stares back, waiting for another question.

He could just get up and go, but he doesn't, he just sits and waits.

There are other people around; his boss isn't far away. It's not easy
to talk - Oliver is on probation for promotion at work - back to a
post he held, but lost. He wants it back a lot more than he wants to
talk to me.

How did it start? "It started with fights against the gangs from
other colonias. They were creating problems.

We got told they were shaving the product, or going over to the guys
from Matamoros who were coming in [the Zetas]. I killed one guy in a
parking lot. I shot him." And? "And he died."

Until 1994, says Oliver, "the organisation was straightforward. I
wasn't involved in smuggling.

Most of the drugs were going through the POEs [ports of entry], and
they were taking care of that, but some of the gang would organise
for distribution with people we knew on the other side in San
Antonio. What they needed to make things run smoothly was
enforcement." What's enforcement? "Enforcement is getting problems
off the cartel's back." There's another silence, which Oliver finally
fills of his own accord, heaving his huge frame from one side to the
other and rolling his eyes. "I killed a guy on orders - he was
drogado." Here the slang kicks in: in border street talk, drogado can
mean "in debt" as well as "drugged". "He hadn't paid, he was moving
stuff and he wouldn't pay back what he'd sold. He died." Where? "In
his house." Why? "For the money he owed the cartel." That is all.

The reason I am at this place, a medical institution, is not to talk
to Oliver, but to his employer about the wonderful work he does with
drug addicts. Oliver was doing well, and about to become one of the
manager's top assistants, but went back to his friends in the gang,
and to drugs again. Then he returned, like the prodigal son,
desperate to get back to where he was, said the employer. "But it had
to be on my terms. 'I'll take you back,' I told him, 'but you'll have
to start at the beginning.'" "It's hard," Oliver says softening,
almost confiding, "always that temptation. I never tortured anyone,
like they do now."

Oliver speaks in short phrases; his breaths do not accord with the
beginning or the end of a sentence.

As he speaks, he rolls his heavy head back. "I ran a guy down with my
truck," he says. "I made a big mess." There is no point fishing for
details. 'This'll only stop when people stop taking drugs," says
Oliver. The body language is a strange mixture of sloth and strength,
like a drowsy animal that can become dangerous in the blink of an
eye. "I was never part of the people who were cartel and police," he
goes on, at last exhibiting some pride in himself. Oliver says he
played no part in the war between the Zetas and Guzman between 2005
and 2007; he had begun his road to recovery from drugs by then. But
memories are long and the danger remains, says his employer. "He's a
threat to us all. He was a sicario, he was one of the gang affiliated
to the Nuevo Laredo faction, and the Zetas could come for him any
time. Which is dangerous for all of us." "I was not a sicario,"
insists Oliver. "I was an asesino.

I didn't kill enough for a sicario, and I didn't get the money a
sicario gets. I did other things. I was an asesino - an assassin, but
not an executioner."

In ancient Mexican lore, there lies behind the sun that shines a
black sun that leaves this world to shed light upon another, beneath.

The Mexica believed the black sun was carried by the god of the
underworld, and was the maleficent herald of death, though not death
as finality. The Mexica lived in a condition of expectation of
calamity and catastrophe, yet their preoccupation with death was a
blend of fear and devotion to the moment of reunion with their
ancestors, in the land upon which the black sun shines.

And behind the sunlight of the deserts of Amexica - which turns to
fire during eventide - there is some maculate, black light that gives
nothing back; unshining behind the eternities of space and sky, or
the bustle and music in all those labyrinthine streets lined with hot
peppers and pistachios tumbling from every open storefront.

And one feels the rays of that dichotomous black sunshine especially
after talking to Dr Hiram Munoz, of the forensic autopsy team back in
Tijuana, where all this began.

Dr Munoz defines his work as: "spending my life trying to
scientifically interrogate people who cannot talk, who have suffered
terrible pain, but now feel nothing.

They can only communicate silently through the terrible things that
have been done to them. I have to look for a cause, not a result.

I have to rewind the movie, work out what was done, and why." Why did
he choose this job? "Because I love medicine, and I love the law. And
because I lost my father when I was eight years old, and in his last
words, he told the doctors: 'Whatever you do, do it freely, but with
exactitude.'"

Munoz is a man of courtesy and exceptionally good humour.

After discussing the various mutilations and their significance, he
says that: "The principal message is to the other cartels.

They want respect, they want to say, 'This is what we do', and
sometimes they say it in written messages, too, perhaps a joke, like
the emergency number to call. There's also a message to their own
people, of course: 'Toe the line, or we will do this to you.'"

Things are different now. "In what I would call normal times, I kill
you and make you disappear.

Now, they are shouting it, turning it into a kind of grotesque
carousel around their territory.

In normal conditions, the torture and killing is private, now it is a
public execution using extreme violence, and this is significant, I think.

We need to say one thing first, however: these people are drama queens.

They think what they do makes them powerful, masters of the universe.

But they're not. Ultimately, what they do is pathetic.

We have to remember that. They keep saying they're poor people -
well, they're poor in culture, that's what they are. They have no culture.

The narcos in the old days had been to school.

They knew that to be kingpins, they had to provide light, hospitals
and schools.

That way, they could keep a low profile, win respect, and protect themselves."

Can one be nostalgic for the golden age of corruption? I ask. Dr
Munoz retorts with another question: "Do you prefer it like it is
now?" Dr Munoz considers what this war means in historical terms I
had not expected this conversation to comprise. "Consider how all the
great civilisations fall, the marks of their last days." He cites
ancient Rome, and "the terrible nature of public execution in its
final phase". Torture and violent public execution had also marked,
he says, "the end of the middle ages and the Spanish Inquisition, as
they gave way to the Renaissance and science.

There are these great moments of civilisation, of science, but they
try to be bigger and better than they are, and when they fall, they
resort to grotesque public execution.

And I think we are now in a moment of crisis, in the culture of
global business.

Look around you: recession, crisis, factories closing.

The narco is in the same position as everyone else, and everyone else
is in the same position as the narco.

You must keep supremacy, you must keep control. The narco-traficante
is the most global of all global businessmen, and now he must make
you loyal or afraid.

And he must do these public executions involving mutilation as a
demonstration of power, as all these cultures do, in their final phases."

This is an edited extract from Amexica by Ed Vulliamy (Bodley Head, UKP20)