Betrayal on the Mexican Border

Former Army Commandos Joined Drug Dealers to Form Violent Zetas Gang

MATAMOROS, Mexico -- Luis Alberto Guerrero was no ordinary outlaw. He wore a grenade around his neck.

When his body was found last month in this border town across from Brownsville, Tex., state police said his signature grenade was still dangling over his bloody chest. A bomb squad spent hours extracting it, as well as another grenade, its pin half removed, in the clutched hand of Guerrero's dead bodyguard.

The unknown assailants who fired more than 100 bullets into Guerrero's silver Jeep on May 10 outside the popular Wild West dance hall also killed three teenage girls, leaving five corpses and two live explosives a mile from the U.S. border and shining a new spotlight on Mexico's most unusual criminal organization, known as the Zetas.

The Zetas are former Mexican army commandos who were trained to capture drug traffickers but joined them instead, around the end of the 1990s. Armed with AR-15 and AK-47 assault rifles, the 15 or so Zetas currently at large are considered the number one security threat on this busy stretch of the border.

The Zetas are accused by federal prosecutors of a wide range of crimes, from killing an estimated 100 people over the last five years and escorting millions of dollars worth of cocaine, to extorting money from small border businesses, from car junkyards to beauty parlors.

"They're more violent and have greater capacity to liquidate people," said Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, the nation's top organized crime prosecutor. In an interview, Vasconcelos offered new details of this increasingly high-profile group which, he said, has expanded beyond its initial drug trafficking work: "They have started to kidnap people or extort money from them. They say, 'If you don't pay, I'll burn your business,' or 'If you don't pay, I'll kill you.' That's what they're doing now."

Apart from being from the same army battalion -- an airborne mobile unit trained in communications to track drug traffickers -- most of the Zetas were born in central Mexico; at least one is a pilot, and the oldest are in their thirties. "They're young, very young," Vasconcelos said. He said the Zetas named themselves, settling on the Greek letter zeta, which can also be Z, or "the last ones."

"They are not like other gunmen. They are well-trained and have discipline," said Jorge Chabat, an academic researcher and an expert on organized crime. Chabat said the Zetas have one other advantage: They were trained by their pursuers, the Mexican army, which is Mexico's main anti-narcotics force. While many soldiers have been accused of protecting drug cartels over the years, the Zetas appear to be the first sizable group to defect and form their own trafficking organization.

Originally there were 31 deserters, according to the Mexican attorney general's office, which has issued a special "wanted" poster for the Zetas. It bears mug shots of 31 men, many with cropped hair, who it says are dangerous and wanted for drug trafficking, homicide, kidnapping and auto theft.

Individual Zetas, like most Mexican criminals, are best known by their nicknames, which also appear on the poster. Oscar Guerrero Silva, known as "Winnie the Pooh," was found dead by federal agents in February. Another, Gustavo Gonzalez Castro, known as "El Erotica," is still being sought.

Recruited by Osiel Cardenas Guillen, whose Gulf cartel is the major operator here at the eastern end of the border, the Zetas started out as his escorts and assassins, Vasconcelos said. Cardenas himself was a former police officer who turned to the other side of the law. Despite the growing folklore around the group, including the vast sums of money the members earned from Cardenas, Vasconcelos said the former soldiers were "contaminated" by "very little money."

Shaking his head, Vasconcelos said they betrayed the army "for nothing. It's stupid. Very stupid."

What has set the Zetas apart, in addition to their superior handling of weapons and radio equipment to monitor law enforcement and rivals' activity, is their cohesion.

For instance, when the army captured Cardenas last year in a Matamoros shootout involving scores of soldiers and cartel gunmen, several Zetas with him were injured and one was believed killed. But Vasconcelos said that could not be confirmed because other Zetas risked their lives to rescue the injured. "They don't leave their wounded or their dead behind," he said.