The Former Police Officer Who Buried Peace In Celaya With “A Zeta Manual”

"Sol Prendido" for Borderland Beat

After learning techniques from the most bloodthirsty individuals around, 'El Güerazo' returned to his homeland to replicate the model of intimidating police, intimidating businessmen and silencing candidates, a military report reveals.

David Rogel Figueroa, a Guanajuato native, son of farmers, who wanted to escape poverty by joining the Chiapas police.

The collapse of public security in Celaya has a beginning marked in documents from the Mexican Army: 2014, the year in which a commander of Los Zetas returned to the state where he was born to amass a fortune that he failed to reap in the south of the country. With his return, the history of violence began in the municipality where Gisela Gaytán, Morena's candidate for mayor, was murdered on Monday.

A dossier prepared during the last six years in the XII Military Region of the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena) based in Irapuato, to which MILENIO had access, tells the story of David Rogel Figueroa, a man from Guanajuato, son of legume farmers, who wanted to flee poverty in his state by joining the state police of Chiapas, where he had friends who worked as human smugglers taking advantage of a rise in undocumented migration to the United States.

As soon as he arrived in Chiapas, Rogel Figueroa, born in 1980, began to climb the organizational chart of the State Police. He soon earned the rank of commander which allowed him to expand beyond the border with Guatemala and travel towards the border with Tabasco, where he met Mauricio Guízar Cárdenas, nicknamed 'El Amarillo'.

This man was one of the closest collaborators of Omar Treviño González, the fearsome 'Z-42' and founder of Los Zetas, who had ordered the conquest of southern Mexico. 'El Amarillo' was his right-hand man and had, among other tasks, the job of identifying police officers to join the criminal organization.

Rogel Figueroa didn’t resist. The Mexican Army identifies that at some point, between 2012 and 2013, he became an ally of Los Zetas and even earned a nickname for his pinkish skin tone: 'El Güero' or 'El Güerazo'.

In addition to his expected collaboration in warning of military, federal or state operations in Chiapas, El Güero had to supervise the coyotes that crossed migrants to demand quotas, facilitate the transfer of drugs and weapons and – most importantly for this story – the extraction of gasoline of Pemex pipelines located between San Cristóbal de las Casas and Comitán de Domínguez.

“It is presumed that the posts located on the ground in the San Cristóbal de las Casas and Comitán de Domínguez section sell illegally extracted gasoline against the Mexican State due to its low price, its unofficial packaging and the shelter of armed people who allegedly respond to a male nicknamed 'El Güero' who is identified as a member of the State Police," the document reads.

The business had been promised to be thriving. He would be a millionaire, they told him, from one month to the next. If marijuana made good profits, oil multiplied them. But the expectations were very high for the salary that Rogel Figueroa received from Los Zetas – about 8 thousand pesos a week, according to the calculation of those years – and the commander decided to take all the knowledge that El Amarillo gave him, turn his back on him and return to Guanajuato to found his own criminal group.

His return would be so with a manual under his arm whose authors were the first Zetas in the country: how to subdue an entire state with a handful of criminals.

The copied strategy

Thus, his return occurred at the beginning of 2014, according to the calendar of the XII Military Region. Its new center of operations was enviable: the heart of the Red Triangle, a polygon inspired by the Golden Triangle of northwest Mexico, where marijuana and poppies grow wild, but now in the center of the country and on a skein of Pemex pipelines without supervision that they could puncture to extract the gasoline and resell it.

The collapse of public security in Celaya has a beginning marked in documents from the Mexican Army. 

El Güero chose three strategic municipalities to settle in: Irapuato, Celaya and Juventino Rosas, due to their proximity to the fuel pipelines. And using his expired police badge he began to execute the manual that had originally been designed to dominate the Tamaulipas and Coahuila territory.

First, he recruited his own troops: kidnappers, drug dealers, extortioners, thieves of cargo vehicles on the highways. They were all good to go, if they were not afraid of death or prison.

That platoon was made up of just hundreds of people in a city like Celaya with half a million inhabitants, but it was enough to apply the silver or lead method tested in the north of the country. Thus they co-opted police officers, enlisted the military, bought businessmen and silenced the press.

El Güero implemented two strategies copied from Amarillo, which in turn copied them from Los Zetas and that continue to this day in Guanajuato: using municipal police officers – or the so-called 'Fedepales' – to arrest people suspected of being opponents and hand them over. to organized crime so that they are disappeared, as well as sending death threats – sometimes carried out – to candidates who promised a new model of public security that didn’t suit the huachicoleros.

Years later, this manual in the center of the country would be carried out by its executors: the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel was born.

A Los Zetas commander returned to the state where he was born to amass a fortune that he didn’t obtain in the south of the country.

Money for war

The military archives are dubious regarding the date, but accurate in an important fact for Guanajuato: at some point in 2016, El Güero fell off the radar of criminal intelligence and the Mexican State considered him dead of natural causes, murdered by rivals. or imprisoned under another identity.

Shortly after, his successor arrived: José Antonio Yépez Ortiz, El Marro, a drug dealer and tractor trailer thief, who had a large criminal family and claimed his indisputable leadership in a 2017 video on social networks.

A file prepared during the last six-year term in the XII Military Region of Sedena tells the story of David Rogel Figueroa. 

Dressed in a military uniform, the new head of the Guanajuato huachicol named the two most important sides of the war in the state: on the one hand there were the locals, those from Santa Rosa de Lima, and on the other the visitors, those from the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, who also wanted to get into the stolen gasoline business.

“Long live Guanajuato, you sons of fucking bitches!” El Marro chanted, following to the letter another chapter of the Zeta manual: the cradle defends itself with life. If Tamaulipas could only belong to Los Zetas, then Guanajuato would only belong to the Santa Rosa de Lima cartel.

To fight that battle, El Marro understood that he needed money. A lot. So the cartel expanded its businesses: extortion, kidnapping, drug dealing – mainly the sale of glass – and the theft of vehicles, which they used to set fires and block roads when the Army approached them. If he had to compete against the resources of the criminal enterprise of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes from Jalisco, El Mencho, the money had to arrive in cash and in abundance.

Although El Güero vanished and El Marro was arrested on August 2, 2020, the criminal legacy of both remains alive: Guanajuato occupies first place nationwide in homicide of police officers, murder and disappearance of search mothers, attacks on candidates and attacks on the press.

It is the result of the implementation of former Commander Güero's manual applied viciously in Celaya: silver or lead against those who represent justice, victims, politicians and the media.

Milenio