Tamaulipas the invisible war front on the border of Mexico and United States

Translated by Otis B Fly-Wheel from a ValorporTamaulipas article

Subject Matter: Mexican Army, Tamaulipas
Recommendation: No prior subject matter knowledge required

Tamaulipas, on the border between the United States and Mexico that runs along the Rio Grande, the rivalry between drug gangs and the clashes with the Army turn this State into a war zone that traps the population and the thousands of immigrants who try to cross to the north. This is the day to day story of a patrol of Mexican military in the invisible trenches that cross this area of ​​the country.

Suddenly, silence. You can not hear screams anymore, or the sound of dozens of boots against the road, just the river water, the wind whistling through the leaves of the trees. Lieutenant Casas approaches and rehearses a sort of relieved, ironic smile, a winner's smile, from someone who believes he controls the situation: "My blood went cold, brother," he says, referring to what has just happened. the seconds of uncertainty after the bullets. "I saw the leaky glass and then the two women and the girl, and I said 'we went to hell.'

A few meters away, the two women and the girl wait to leave, or to go to prison, or who knows what. One of the soldiers presses them: "Do you want me to help you? Where you come from? How much did the polleros charge you? " And so the minutes go by.

It's been a while since dark. Some soldiers smoke, trying to contain their nerves. Others spin around, rifle in hand. Others register the van in which the women were traveling and question the pollero, which is, in the border slang, the name given to people who help others to cross to the other side of the river. They are also called coyotes.

An aura of unreality permeates the environment. To the point that it is risky to assure that five minutes ago, 15 soldiers were pointing their rifles at a truck, there, on a dirt road next to the river; that the possibility of a shootout seemed real, very real. And yet now all that is so distant.

It is the border of Tamaulipas with Texas, in northern Mexico, in the southern United States. A convoy of Mexican soldiers has gone out to patrol the banks of the Rio Grande. They arrived in the afternoon, shortly before nightfall. Lieutenant Casas says that "they", the drug traffickers, like to traffic on Fridays and Saturdays at night, as if talking about a group of friends going out to party. In 10 years of war on drug trafficking, soldiers and traffickers have not hit another part of Mexico as much as here. That's why, there are incidents like tonight's. A confusion. They were migrants, but they could have been hit men.

Lieutenant Casas says that a few days ago there were party people with new cars and expensive whiskey. On the right, a patrol officer. All of them wear a  helmet, waistcoat and a 5.56 mm caliber FX rifle.

Everything has been very fast. The polleros were looking for one of the river's beaches to cross. Seeing them coming, Casas and his men have thought that they were probably drug lords and could come armed. So they have spread out on both sides of the road, some lying down, their chest on the ground, others barricaded behind trees and bushes. They have made ready and waited. Two minutes later, with the car level with him, Casas has taken two jumps and is in the middle of the road with a flashlight, demanding the driver to stop.

The truck has stopped, although not quite, and the co-pilot has opened the door to run away, and in one of those, without knowing who they were, or what they intended, prisoners of total darkness, one of the soldiers has fired. The copilot has fled and everyone has started screaming to turn off the lights, because the spotlights of the truck dazzled them. In the end there are no narcos, no assassins, no weapons, only two women, a girl and two polleros. When Casas has approached and seen the windscreen shattered, the worst was feared. "We opened up on them." But luckily it has not been like that, the glass was broken from before and the bullets, he deduces, have been lost in the dark.

The moon looks huge tonight on the banks of the Rio Grande. It seems wrapped in a scarlet, clayey haze. In a little while, the soldiers will lie down on the ground to rest and they will take photos with their mobile phones. Some will put military marches on YouTube, videos of soldiers making maneuvers with the sound of the background horns. Others will light more cigarettes. But at the moment they are still there, with their right forefinger stroking the trigger of their FX 5.56 caliber rifle, a caliber that, they say, does not even put down the hit men. Or as sergeant Ermitaño will later say: "Opens a wound but does not knock them down".

Events like this are relatively common in this part of the border. The military calls them that, events, example of a vocabulary subscribed to the euphemism. When they participate in a confrontation, they "repel aggression"; when they give two blows to a pollero to give information, they squeeze him; when Lieutenant Casas theorizes about the causes that have motivated the unnecessary shooting of his soldiers - stress, nervousness, inexperience -, he concludes: "This is the frontier".

It is common the movement of migrants along the river and also the shootings, confrontations with the assassins, kind ways to describe chases to shots between armored trucks that turn entire cities upside down. Or in other words, the clash with the migrants and their coyotes is an anecdote, a joke, compared to what they have to deal with.

To the women and the girl, the bullets have left them speechless, especially the first two, who have handed over their documentation to the soldiers and wait until they finish registering the truck. One of them comes from El Salvador. The other from Guatemala, with the little girl, who plays around in the dark. They have spent their savings and traveled as they could - on the roof of a train, walking, crowded in vans - to the last border, where they have been mistaken for hit men. And they have been lucky: at least they have come this far. The attacks and abuses against immigrants by the mafias are constant. Here in Tamaulipas, eight years ago, authorities found the bodies of 72 migrants lying on a ranch, 150 kilometers from the border. Los Zetas drug dealers killed them.

For the military, the worst is not situations like tonight's. The worst thing is when they run into trucks full of armed people, the stakes. Lieutenant Casas and his three sergeants say that when there is an event there are always bullets. Of the 15 soldiers who patrol the border tonight, most have been shot at by narco at least once. Lieutenant Casas says more than thirty.

THE MEXICAN ARMY has been since 2006 the spearhead of the Mexican war against drug trafficking. In December of that year, President Felipe Calderón inaugurated his mandate ordering the deployment of thousands of soldiers throughout the country, replacing police corroded corps by drug cartels. The new president assumed that the only way to face the Knights Templar, the Zetas or the Sinaloa cartel was the jurisdiction of the Armed Forces. The State of Michoacán, in the west of the country, was Calderón's first major operation. Over the months, the northeastern city of Tamaulipas arrived. The change of Government in 2012, with the arrival of President Enrique Peña Nieto, has not meant modification of this security strategy.

The offensive against drug trafficking shook the structures of organized crime, which began to fragment. The Zetas were strengthened and organizations such as La Familia Michoacana appeared, which raised the level of cruelty to levels never seen before. In addition, they changed the business. The transnational traffic in narcotics ceased to be its only activity. Extortion, kidnapping and drug retail turned whole regions of the country into huge trenches of a war for control of the territory. The dead already exceed 200,000.

If this war has a clear front it is about this, the hundreds of kilometers of river that Mexico and the United States share, Tamaulipas and the State of Texas. The streets of cities like Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, Matamoros and smaller municipalities, such as Ciudad Mier, Ciudad Alemán or San Fernando. The hundreds of dirt roads that truffle their surroundings, the famous gaps, trails that end up in the river, dusty highways at the service of the mafias that carry drugs, weapons and people from one side of the border to the other. If Donald Trump were given the task of describing the biggest of his nightmares, the result would probably look like this.

Between January 1, 2007 and December 1, 2016, soldiers and ships faced gunshots across the country in 3,919 occasions, according to data from the Ministry of Defense. Almost half, 1,706, occurred in Tamaulipas, a state whose population, just over three million people, is only a third of that of Mexico City.

In the cities of the border of Tamaulipas there are clashes with bullets all the time. Between January 23 and 24, for example, at least 12 people died in Reynosa as a result of shootings between opposing criminal organizations and of these with military convoys. Shooting in the middle of the city. One soldier died and another was left quadriplegic. The next day, his companions stationed in Ciudad Mier, halfway between Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo, killed six alleged assassins in another of these topones. In August of last year, in just one day, a group of soldiers killed 18 alleged criminals in Nuevo León and Tamaulipas, the majority between Matamoros, Reynosa and Río Bravo. In front they had an armed band almost like another army: the authorities seized 28 firearms, 58 hand grenades, 10 rifle grenades,

And in the middle, the people who have become accustomed to living like this, pending Twitter accounts that report on shootings in real time, about blockades of avenues and bodies that break down. A somewhat macabre service page that serves, for example, to choose the best way to school, the supermarket or the shopping center. People who have adopted the jargon that the military uses to refer to the narcos and vice versa, as if they were the alignments of football teams -sicario, hawk (a vigilante of narcos to see if the police come), security house (zulo) - and that they know that there is no other option but to wait for this to happen, which is almost commonplace, words that have lost their meaning.

The worst thing is that all this is known and not known. It is known why one types Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, Ciudad Mier or Matamoros in a search engine and videos of shootings, notes about the finding of corpses and bullet chases in commercial boulevards appear. It is not known because what happens is not explained. It is hardly collected.

  "The local press is almost forbidden to talk about all this. The narco acts as chief editor of most of the regional media." 

The requirement goes beyond the information approach. Many times, their spokespersons ask directly that something does not come out, a confrontation between them, several dead, things like that.

On the border another euphemism is handled: line up. It is used in the underworld to indicate who obeys the criminal group that commands or wants to control and who does not. And that goes for everyone: their rivals, local authorities, the press. In The War of the Zetas (Debate), an exhaustive investigative work by Mexican reporter Diego Osorno, the author profiles one of the most bloodthirsty Cartels that Mexico has seen and suffered. Osorno refers to freedom of the press in the region: "In this situation (...) feigning ignorance is a way to survive. And in this war, the warring parties demand silence in their favor. "

The last victim of the state of censorship and lead that reigns in the region is Carlos Dominguez, journalist murdered in Nuevo Laredo last January. And as often happens, it is not known what exactly happened. Two assassins stabbed him to death.

THE MILITARY REST under a tree, next to the dirt road, illuminated only by the screens of their cell phones and the earthy reflection of the moon. Lieutenant Casas has decided that the women, the girl, the van and the polleros are not his problem and he has let them go. "They are not going to denounce [the traffickers]. Why are we going to present them to the Public Ministry if they are going to let them go? ", He explains.

A few meters from Casas, soldier Arturo seems calmer than a few minutes ago. He is the one who has fired before. Asked about the moment of the bullets, he says: "It is that the other time, in the event, it was like that, they opened the passenger door and started to shoot."

It refers to a confrontation two weeks earlier, three kilometers from here, on a dirt road that connects one of the city's avenues with the river. That day, as today, about 15 were between the lieutenant, Sergeant Ermitaño, another sergeant and 10 to 12 soldiers. It was a rainy, foggy afternoon. They were on foot. They were walking towards the river when they saw a stake in the middle of the road, a truck full of armed people. Casas and Arturo tell that the co-pilot opened the door and started firing at  them "with a goat's horn", an AK-47 rifle. Arturo fell to the ground and in seconds was answering with the machine gun, a situation he remembers with an expression of satisfaction in his eyes: the soldier who does his duty.

The passenger door opened and Arturo thought ...

Half an hour later, Casas ordered that the march be resumed. Arturo and the others get up, adjust the bulletproof vest, the helmet, the rifle on the chest. They start to walk. A few meters later the truck of the pollero appears again, without the women. The vehicle approaches. Inside is the trafficker and another person, perhaps his colleague, who has previously fled. They reach their height and the military moves away to make it happen. They both nod at each other. Like nothing.

Already back in the barracks, in the kitchen, Lieutenant Casas and his sergeants, three in total, comment on the events of the afternoon while sharing some tacos. Casas manages a peculiar theory about the violent context that surrounds them: "If you walk like a duck, you hear like a duck and it looks like a duck, what is it? A duck! "He argues, meaning that, normally, a truck, at night, by the river, carries armed assassins. Insurance. Or almost.

The nights in the barracks are similar, boring. Those who are not on duty are thrown on their cots, they sleep, they pretend to sleep or look at their mobile. They take turns for dinner. The unofficial time to go to bed is 1.30. The one to get up, 5.30.

Instead of sleeping four hours from the pull, Sergeant Ermitaño usually gets up in the middle of the night, leaving the cellar as a bedroom and taking a look. He usually approaches the soldiers on duty, asks them how the night is going and most of the time the answer is the same: no news.

Since that time they wounded him, he says, he is always on alert, always suspicious. It was almost three years ago. Four military vehicles patrolled together. The commander then received a radio call, other military needed support in a confrontation with gunmen. They were told to take one of the boulevards of the city to get to them.

Ermitaño was on board a Chevrolet Cheyenne, sitting in the back, next to the one that handled the machine gun. When they were shot, they began to repel. Hermit rose to do the same, but then he realized that one of his companions had been blocked. "I said: 'Hey, what's up? Wake up, they're shooting us! ' And he said: 'I can not move.' Another companion finally managed to sit down and Ermitaño, while firing, directed the bullets of the machine gun. "Then, in one of those moments, I felt the incoming round hit me. I felt a pull and then like water that slipped away. After five minutes it started to hurt. "

Hermit spent a month and a half in the hospital. The projectile had pierced his leg, although he could recover and today walks normally.

The sergeant explains that he never told his wife what had happened. He says he did not want to worry her. Ermitaño lived in the barracks, and his wife, with her children, lived in a house not far away. The day he was wounded, he was taken to a hospital several hours from the base, in another city. Accustomed to using the telephone, when they spoke, he made excuses. He told him they could not see each other because he was patrolling in that place or doing anything else.

But in the end she knew. A comrade from the barracks told his wife, who told another, that he told her, and one day, two weeks later, when they spoke on the phone, she confronted him: "Well, but where are you?"

"It's hard here," he says, "for the family." In addition to handling the constant mistrust and suspicion, the military must deal with fear. For them and their families.

Just for that, out of fear, Ermitaño's family does not live with him anymore. A year ago they returned to the center of Mexico. "It was because of a situation like that. My oldest son came back from school and there was a confrontation and ... Well, they do not respect. You live thinking: 'If we go to that side, there can be shootings; if we go to such another, the same. No, you better not be here anymore. " Ermitaño is silent, as if there is not much more to say.

Silence seizes the barracks at midnight. Only one car is heard from time to time, some distant cry. Casas, Ermitaño and the other sergeants go to their cots. In the bedroom, the soldiers sleep, they pretend to sleep. Nobody talks to anyone. Some face is illuminated by the light of the cell phone. You can see the rifles placed next to each other on the shelf. You feel a fatigue beyond your own fatigue, the fatigue of those who know that tomorrow awaits you like today. Or worse.