Los Zetas

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Los Zetas took its name from a radio call sign. Z1 belonged to Arturo Guzmán Decena, the group's first commander, who had carried that code in the Federal Judicial Police, where it was given to high-ranking officers. In Spanish the name simply means The Zs. From that single letter grew a Mexican criminal syndicate now officially designated a terrorist organization. It is also now a fractured remnant of what it once was. How did a handful of soldiers who walked away from the army become hired guns for a drug cartel? Why did their methods spread to the very enemies they terrorized? And what brought down a group that, at its peak, held more ground than any other cartel in the country? The answers begin in the borderlands of Tamaulipas, directly across from Laredo, Texas.

  4125342230

• 2. The Group of Fourteen

  ›

  Rolando Lopez Salinas was the rival who set everything in motion. Osiel Cárdenas Guillén had taken control of the Gulf Cartel in 1997, and he was soon fighting a violent turf war. He asked Arturo Guzmán Decena to recruit twenty men to kill that rival. Decena had deserted the Mexican Army in 1997 and began working for Cárdenas in 1999. Together with Heriberto Lazcano, he eventually persuaded 34 operators from the Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales, known as GAFE, to leave the army. GAFE was an elite special forces unit. The first 14 recruits became known as the Group of 14, or Los 14. Some of these men reportedly received commando and urban warfare training from Israeli and American special forces.

  The roster read like a cross-section of the army. It included a member of an armored unit, a communications officer, a logistics officer and a soldier from the Presidential Guard. Once Cárdenas had secured his power, he widened their duties. They organized kidnappings, ran protection rackets and extorted businesses. They also secured cocaine supply and the trafficking routes called plazas, and they executed the cartel's enemies. The Sinaloa Cartel answered by creating its own enforcer group, Los Negros. It was similar in design but less complex and less successful.

  The ranks soon grew beyond deserters. Members came to include corrupt federal, state and local police, former US Army personnel, and ex-Kaibiles, the special forces of the Guatemalan military. In September 2005, Defense Secretary Clemente Vega told the Mexican Congress that the Zetas had hired at least 30 former Kaibiles to train recruits. Fewer ex-Mexican special forces men remained in the ranks. Their training camps were reported to resemble GAFE facilities, and some members carried a Los Zetas Commando Medallion for service. A female unit called the Panteras, or panthers, used seduction to negotiate with military, police and political figures. Its first leader, Ashly Narro López, known as La Comandante Bombón, was captured in 2009 in connection with the murder of General Tello Quiñones.

  The founders did not last. Decena was killed in a military action at a restaurant in Matamoros in November 2002, and Lazcano, known as Z3, took over. Cárdenas was arrested in March 2003 and extradited in 2007, and with him gone the enforcers stepped into leadership.

  4125344867

• 3. Terror as Strategy

  ›

  Flaying, castration and the public display of bodies were practices that spread through Mexican organized crime after the Zetas arrived. The group did not rely on buying alliances the way older cartels did. It was new, and it competed with established rivals by using cruelty as psychological warfare. Victims were tortured, bodies were strung up in public, and killing was often indiscriminate.

  The Zetas also preferred to seize territory the way an army would. They held ground by force and exploited every criminal opportunity it offered, from drug routes to extortion. Their military discipline faded as the original members were killed or arrested and younger men replaced them. The brutality, however, did not fade.

  Other groups watched and adapted. Cartels struggling against the Zetas began adopting some of the same tactics to survive. The result was that violence in Mexico rose to higher levels and took new forms. The same enforcers who had been built to serve the Gulf Cartel were about to outgrow their employer.

  2225174139

• 4. Break With the Gulf

  ›

  By 2010, the Zetas outnumbered and outclassed the Gulf Cartel in revenue, membership and influence. The cartel tried to rein in its own enforcers, and that attempt ended in civil war. Banners appeared in Matamoros and Reynosa accusing the Zetas of murder, theft, extortion and kidnapping. The Zetas hung their own banners across Tamaulipas. They said they had carried out executions and kidnappings on the cartel's orders, and that they had been created for exactly that purpose. They also charged that the cartel was blaming them for the deaths of innocent civilians.

  Reports disagree about who caused the formal split. One account says that a brother of Cárdenas, identified as Guillén, was addicted to gambling, sex and drugs, and the Zetas saw his leadership as a threat. Another points to a dispute over who would run the cartel after the extradition of Cárdenas. The cartel's candidates were Guillén and Jorge Eduardo Costilla Sánchez, while the Zetas wanted their own leader, Lazcano. The cartel was also reportedly seeking a truce with the Sinaloa Cartel, which the Zetas refused to recognize. A killing in Reynosa sharpened the quarrel. Samuel Flores Borrego, a cartel lieutenant, shot Sergio Peña Mendoza, a Zetas lieutenant known as El Concorde 3, over a drug corridor both men protected. The Zetas demanded the killer, and the cartel refused.

  The Gulf Cartel then joined forces with its old rivals, the Sinaloa Cartel and La Familia Michoacana. The Zetas allied with the Beltrán-Leyva Cartel, the Juárez Cartel and the Tijuana Cartel. Signs of the break had appeared in September 2009. On the 24th of February 2010, gunmen in hundreds of trucks marked with the cartel's insignia clashed with Zetas gunmen in northern Tamaulipas. The fighting started in Reynosa, then reached Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros, and spread through eleven municipalities, nine of them on the Texas border. On the 5th of October 2010, rival hitmen even killed two Zetas members in Brownsville, Texas. Witnesses called some towns war zones, with homes and businesses burned down.

  The Zetas had a second front inside their own ranks. In early 2010, Miguel Treviño Morales, the former second-in-command, reportedly displaced Lazcano. Lazcano had given him too much power and underestimated how violent he was. Many Zetas stopped paying their tributes to Lazcano.

  6259656670

• 5. Massacres

  ›

  On the 24th of August 2010-72 migrants were found dead in San Fernando, Tamaulipas. Another San Fernando massacre followed in 2011, from the 6th of April to the 7th of June, in which 193 people were killed. In Guatemala, 27 farmers were found killed, a discovery made on the 15th of May 2011. On the 25th of August 2011, an attack on a casino in Monterrey killed 52 people.

  The prisons became battlefields too. On the 4th of January 2012-31 Gulf Cartel inmates were killed in a brawl at the Altamira prison. On the 19th of February 2012-44 Gulf Cartel inmates died in a riot at the Apodaca prison, and 37 Zetas escaped.

  Other deaths are only suspected to be their work. The Zetas may be responsible for an oil pipeline explosion in Puebla in 2010, which killed 28 people, injured 52 and damaged more than 115 homes. They may also be behind a massacre in Allende, Coahuila, in 2011, where an estimated 300-500 civilians were killed after the Zetas accused two local men of betraying the organization.

  The violence reached tourists as well. On the 16th of January 2017, gunfire at the Blue Parrot nightclub in Playa del Carmen, during the BPM Festival, killed five people and injured 15. The dead included two Mexicans, an American, a Canadian and an Italian. A large hand-painted sign hung in town referred to the festival and its co-founder. It was signed El Fayo Z.

  8081828391

• 6. Tamaulipas Under Siege

  ›

  On the 17th of December 2010, 141 inmates escaped from a federal prison in Nuevo Laredo. It was one of several mass escapes in Tamaulipas that year. On the 25th of March, forty inmates left a federal prison in Matamoros. On the 5th of April, a convoy of ten trucks carrying gunmen entered a Reynosa prison without resistance and freed thirteen inmates described as extremely dangerous. Six months later, 85 inmates escaped from the same prison. Reports say that more than 400 inmates fled Tamaulipas prisons between January 2010 and March 2011 because of corruption. Even after the federal government sent in the army and federal police, a clash at a Nuevo Laredo prison on the 15th of July 2011 left 7 inmates dead and 59 escaped. Far from Tamaulipas, on the 17th of September 2012, more than 130 Zetas inmates walked from the front gate of a prison in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, to waiting trucks in broad daylight.

  Police were poorly placed to resist. Tamaulipas had the worst-paid police in Mexico, and officers in Aguascalientes earned five times as much. On the 7th of November 2011, 650 policemen were removed from duty because they had failed or refused corruption control tests. On the 9th of May 2011, federal police and the army disarmed every police force in the state, starting with Matamoros and Reynosa.

  Politics had its own history here. Before the Institutional Revolutionary Party lost the presidency in 2000, after 71 years in power, the government made customary arrests and let cartel business carry on as long as there was no open violence. Once the National Action Party won, the unwritten deals and the pax mafiosa disappeared. Santiago Creel, a politician from that party, said the old ruling party in Tamaulipas had protected the Gulf-Zeta organization for years. Three former governors, Manuel Cavazos Lerma, Tomás Yarrington and Eugenio Hernández Flores, faced formal charges of close ties to it. The assassination of gubernatorial candidate Rodolfo Torre Cantú added to the alarm. In 2011, some analysts concluded that neither the state nor the federal government controlled the territory of Tamaulipas.

  Officials were slow to admit it. In mid-2010, Hernández Flores and the mayor of Reynosa, Óscar Luebbert Gutiérrez, both of the old ruling party, called talk of armed confrontations only a rumor. Months later, the governor admitted that parts of the state were being overrun.

  8684856398

• 7. Far Reach

  ›

  At the start of the 2010s, analysts counted the Zetas as the largest criminal group in Mexico by geographic presence. They were based around Nuevo Laredo and Coahuila, with hundreds more members elsewhere. Their lookouts watched airports, bus stations and main roads. They worked along the Gulf of Mexico, in the southern states of Tabasco, Yucatán, Quintana Roo and Chiapas, and on the Pacific coast in Guerrero, Oaxaca and Michoacán, as well as in Mexico City. By 2012 they controlled territory in 11 states, while the Sinaloa Cartel had fallen from 23 states to 16.

  The network crossed borders. Operations in Guatemala were reported as early as 2008. The Zetas were also reported to be active in Italy alongside the 'Ndrangheta. In early 2012 they were said to be working with a Colombian group called Los Rastrojos on the border between Venezuela and Colombia. There the partners controlled routes through La Guajira in Colombia and the Venezuelan state of Zulia, which served as the main port route toward the United States and Europe. On the 13th of February 2017, the US Treasury sanctioned Venezuelan vice president Tareck El Aissami under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act, with officials alleging that he had trafficked drugs to the Zetas.

  In the United States, a 2010 report found that Sureño street gangs in California and South Carolina kept ties with the Zetas. Other gangs named as connected include MS-13, the Mexican Mafia and the Latin Kings. The Zetas used social media to communicate across the border and to recruit young people who admired the cartel. Drugs moved along the I-10, I-40 and I-35 highways to cities including Chicago and Houston.

  Their reach even touched the internet. A hacktivist campaign by Anonymous, called Operation Cartel, began after an Anonymous member was kidnapped in Veracruz during a separate operation. The New York Times noted that the Zetas had infiltrated Mexican law enforcement and could access sophisticated tracking software. The hostage was released, but the Zetas threatened massacres if Anonymous leaked anything more.

  9697101626

• 8. The Long Fall

  ›

  A raid under the name Operation Black Jack produced the largest weapons seizure in Mexican history. The ATF, DEA, ICE and FBI investigated, and Mexican forces then raided three Zetas safe houses. They freed more than 40 kidnapped people and seized 540 rifles, 288 of them assault rifles, along with 287 hand grenades, 500,000 rounds of ammunition and 14 sticks of dynamite.

  American officials took the group's threats seriously. In October 2008, the FBI warned that a Zetas cell in Texas would answer police with a full tactical response. Its leader, Jaime González Durán, known as The Hummer, was arrested in Reynosa on the 7th of November 2008. In February 2009, Texas governor Rick Perry announced Operation Border Star Contingency Plan, which included tanks, airplanes and the National Guard. In 2012, the Obama administration sanctioned the Zetas as one of four key transnational criminal groups, alongside Russia's Brothers' Circle, Japan's Yamaguchi-gumi and Italy's Camorra. The United States offered a reward of $5,000,000 for Miguel Treviño Morales, known as Z-40.

  Mexico escalated its own campaign in early 2012 by announcing five new military bases in the group's main areas. On the 9th of October 2012, the Navy confirmed that Heriberto Lazcano had been killed in a firefight with marines. Treviño Morales was captured on the 14th of July 2013 in Anáhuac, Nuevo León. His brother Omar, known as Z-42, was reported to have succeeded him and was arrested on the 3rd of March 2015. José María Guízar Valencia, known as Z-43, was arrested in Mexico City on the 9th of February 2018, with a reward of $5 million on offer. By 2011, only 10 of the original 34 Zetas remained fugitives.

  In May 2013, researcher Daniel Haering told the International Crisis Group, "The old networks were disrupted by the Zetas, and now the Zetas have disintegrated into Zetillas. They are splinter groups ('grupúsculos'), not big operators." By March 2016, factions called Grupo Bravo, Los Talibanes and Zetas Vieja Escuela had allied with the Gulf Cartel against the Cártel del Noreste. The arrests continued into 2019 and 2020, among them José Roberto Stolberg Becerra, known as La Barbie, in April 2019. As of 2025, the US State Department lists Tamaulipas among six Mexican states under a Level 4: Do Not Travel advisory.

  9376793133