Beheader takes over drug cartel from executioner

New York: Not even Latin America’s most fanciful television soap operas could have come up with a twist as farcical — or as sinister — as the dramatic Mexican military assault last week that killed one of the country’s most ruthless drug cartel chiefs.

First, a squad of navy commandos failed to realise that it had killed Heriberto Lazcano, a founder of a notorious gang of former military thugs known as the Zetas. Then Lazcano’s henchmen stole their leader’s unguarded corpse. Now an even more treacherous and bloodthirsty character is ready to fill his shoes.

In the savage world of Mexico’s so-called narco wars, Lazcano was known as ‘The Executioner’ for his gruesome record of dispatching men, women and even children by lowering them slowly into vats of boiling oil.

Yet when he died last Sunday after a chance encounter with commandos, experts believe he may already have been sidelined in the ranks of the Zetas by the terrifying rise of Miguel Angel Trevino Morales, a Zetas enforcer whose northern border home town of Nuevo Laredo is a gateway for money, drugs and weapons flowing into and out of America.

Border fortune

Nuevo Laredo, which is across the Rio Grande from the Texas city of Laredo, has made the Zetas rich. It has also become the focus of a blood-spattered turf war between the Zetas and the rival Sinaloa cartel led by Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, who has long had his eye on the border fortune controlled by Trevino Morales.

The Zetas sprang from the ranks of deserters from the military who were originally trained to fight the cartels, but who quickly discovered that a lot more money was to be made by going into the drug business themselves.

Lazcano muscled his way to the top of the group with the help of punishments such as “the lollipop”, a wooden paddle that he used to beat his victims senseless. Yet his cruelty has long seemed quaintly old-fashioned compared with the mayhem inflicted by his most callous lieutenant.

Mass beheadings

As one of the original numbered recruits to the Zetas ranks, Trevino Morales is known as “El Cuarenta” — a reference to the Spanish for the number 40 — or more commonly as Z-40. He bears much of the blame for the wave of mass beheadings that has shaken Mexico in recent years. He has also used the threat of unspeakable violence to co-opt officials and even entire police forces.

Earlier this month Trevino Morales was accused of ordering the killing of Jose Eduardo Moreira, the nephew of the governor of the state of Coahuila, as revenge for the shooting of his own nephew by Coahuila state troops. Lucero Davis, Moreira’s distraught widow, was so upset by the apparent nephew-for-nephew retaliation that she blamed the governor for provoking it.

In 2009 Trevino Morales summoned dozens of Nuevo Laredo police officers — all of whom were in his pay — to a meeting where he identified a female officer as an informant, then beat her to death in front of them. Not one of the officers dared to intervene and the federal government was eventually obliged to send in troops to disband the force.

Trevino Morales has also distinguished himself from rival mobsters by his enthusiasm for recruiting women as accountants, negotiators and assassins.

— The Times Newspapers Limited, 2012