The Cartel (Power of the Dog #2)

by Don Winslow

La paleta is a Zeta specialty they taught at the training camp. You take a piece of board and hit someone in the lower back. Slowly, rhythmically, again and again. The victim wants to die a long time before he does. Sometimes they stop before they kill him, and then the man is a cripple, barely able to walk, groaning every time he takes a piss. Chuy had seen those guys and laughed at them. Now Esteban steps behind him. Chuy breaks down sobbing. “Bitch,” Esteban says. “You’re nothing but a little bitch after all.” “Bitch,” Gabe chimes in. “Fag.” “You think about it,” Esteban says. “You think about what’s going to happen to you, perrita.” He unties the rope and Chuy falls to the floor. “Forty wants to do it himself,” Esteban says.

Chuy don’t like the idea of working for Forty again, even indirectly, and he tells Hugo that the Zetas are evil. “In an evil world,” Hugo tells him, “you have to do evil to do good. The drugs we send to America pay for the food for orphans, the water for the villagers. Do you understand?” “Yes.” “God needs warriors in this world,” Hugo says. “You’ve read the Bible.”

Eddie sees the story about the Sol y Sombre nightclub on the news. “Nice,” he says to the flunkie playing Madden with him. “Beheadings? Like…beheadings? I thought that was Muslim shit. Al Qaeda.” A few days later Eddie hears that the beheadings might have been carried out by the same guy who attacked his nightclub. “Jesus the Kid.” The boy changed jerseys, I guess, Eddie thinks. A midseason trade. And some of the narcos are saying that the kid is really a kid, eleven, twelve years old. Junior varsity. Suddenly, Eddie feels old.

And he really is a kid. An actual kid. “I should be really pissed at you,” Eddie says. “That stunt in Acapulco—very bad shit.” Feels like he should put him in “time out.” Chuy doesn’t respond. Eddie looks into his eyes and sees nothing there—it’s like staring at a snake. This kid, he has to remember, this freaking junior varsity water boy, cut the heads off five men and rolled them across a disco floor like he was duckpin bowling. Guilty feet ain’t got no rhythm, Eddie thinks. But Diego said to work with these born-again Bible-thumpers, so— “Hey, ‘Texas forever,’ right?” Eddie says. “We pochos have to stick together. Now let’s you and me go bag ourselves some Zeta assholes.” “I kill for the Lord.” “Okay, then,” Eddie says. In the next ninety days, over four hundred narcos will be killed in Uruapan, Apatzingán, Morelia, and Lázaro Cárdenas. The new tag team of Crazy Eddie and Jesus the Kid account for more than a few of them.

Marisol is a political animal, Keller has discovered, a passionate leftist. She wept during Pan’s Labyrinth, first from anger at the Spanish Fascists and afterward with pride that such a beautiful film had been made by a Mexican director, Guillermo del Toro. As the election neared, her conversation became more and more obsessed with politics, to the point where she would apologize, change the subject, and then get back to politics a few minutes later. Keller didn’t mind—he liked her passion, and the truth was that he couldn’t help but compare her to Althea, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal for whom Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were demonic figures. “You don’t know what poverty is in the U.S.,” Marisol said to him one night over dinner at an Argentine place. “Have you seen the South Bronx?”

Everyone knows it’s going to be close, so the air is electric as they wait for the results of a peculiar Mexican procedure known as the Cuenta Rápida—the “Quick Count.” The election commission takes a sampling of votes from some seven thousand districts when the polls close at 10:00 p.m. If the margin for one candidate is greater than .06 percent, a winner would be predicted; if less, the election would be determined “too close to call” until a complete counting of the votes. At 11:00 that night, the election commissioner goes on television to announce that the Quick Count showed that the results are “too close to call,” but he refuses to give the actual numbers. “We’re being robbed,” Marisol says as they make the slow walk through the crowd from the Zócalo. “Everyone knows that the people want the PRD. They’re going to cook the books.” “You don’t know that,” Keller answers, although he’s worried. Worried for her, that she’ll be hurt and disappointed; worried for himself, that PAN will take the election—fairly or unfairly—and that it will be business as usual for the Tapia money network.

Marisol is devastated. “They stole the election,” she tells Keller, citing the various allegations of fraud, voter intimidation, miscounts, and no-counts. “They stole it.” The confirmation of the election results is also the confirmation of everything she’s feared about her country, that it’s hopelessly corrupt, that power will always protect power. The rain keeps coming down. Marisol becomes depressed, morose. Keller sees a person he didn’t know was in there—quiet, uncommunicative, remote. Her disappointment turns to bitterness, her bitterness to anger, and with no legitimate outlet to turn it on, she turns it on him. She’s sure “his” government is pleased with the results, maybe even complicit. “His” politics are a little further to the right than hers, aren’t they? He’s a man (Keller pleads guilty), and no man can really be a feminist, can he? Does he have to hang his shirt on the bathroom hook, does he have to read her the headlines from the paper (she can read herself, can’t she?), can a North American man really understand a Mexican woman? “My mother was Mexican,” Keller reminds her.

“Let me teach you what my mother taught me,” Diego says to him. “If you keep your mouth shut, no one can stick his dick into it.” “Your mom didn’t teach you that, Diego,” Eddie says.

Adán notices that Ochoa has said nothing. The former soldier is sitting back, letting Gordo go through the preliminary nonsense. As Tío taught me, Adán thinks—Él que menos habla es el más chingón. He who speaks least has the most power.

Before Marisol he was never lonely, in fact he reveled in his solitude. After she first left, they spoke over the phone every few days. She had set up her clinic—the only full-time doctor for twenty thousand people in the valley—and was happily busy. They talked about getting together—she coming to Mexico City for a weekend, he going to Valverde—but something always came up for her, and he didn’t feel right about exposing her to the risk of being with him. The phone calls started to fade to once a week, then once every ten days, and then once a month or so.

Then there are the meetings. Holy fuck, the meetings. Everyone has to sit down, everyone has to be given coffee or a beer, everyone has to be fed. Then everyone has to talk about their families, their kids, their kids’ kids, their prostate problems…then they finally get to the tedious details. They want a lower piso, they want someone to pay them a higher piso, so-and-so is overpaying the truck drivers and fucking up the market for everyone else, some chemist in Apatzingán is fucking with the meth recipe… It goes on and on until Sal wants to swallow his gun.

He scans the crowd and then sees this babe sitting at a table, sipping on some fruity drink. She’s with two guys. No problem—the guys look like jerks, cheaply dressed, no style at all. And neither of them is Salvador Barrera. “I’m going in,” he says to César. “She’s with somebody.” “She’s with nobodies,” Sal answers. He pours a glass of champagne from the complimentary bar, descends to the floor, and walks up to the girl’s table.

Eddie thinks he recognizes Adán’s sister, Elena—Elena la Reina—the former patrona of Tijuana. Then there’s the nephew, Sal, a real hard-on, and his mom, who looks like she’s been sucking on lemons. Then you got some second-tier narcos, Eddie thinks, like me, and then there are the politicians. The head of PAN in the state. A PAN senator. The mayor of the local town. At the wedding of the most wanted man in Mexico, a man the U.S. and Mexican governments swear that they just can’t find. It’s funny, Eddie thinks—these guys are afraid to be seen at Adán Barrera’s wedding, but more afraid not to be seen.

Salvador Barrera has kept a low profile throughout the wedding. After the unfortunate incident in Zapopan, Adán called him back to Sinaloa and put him on double secret probation. “If you were not my blood,” Adán said when he sat Sal down in his office, “you would be dead.” “I know.” “No,” Adán said, his face tightening. “You will never know—and I mean you will never know—what your freedom has cost me.” “Thank you, Tío. I’m so sorry.” Then he had to sit and let Adán lecture him for twenty minutes about respecting women and innocent people. This from the same man who’s invited his whore to his own wedding? Who had a woman’s head cut off and sent to her husband like a muffin basket? The guy that once threw two little kids off a bridge? I mean, come on. This guy’s going to lecture me on family values?

She doesn’t know, Eddie thought as he watched her accept Adán’s condolences and cash. No stripper is that good an actress. The family hadn’t told her that the man handing her the envelope sold her husband out. At least Barrera didn’t stick the envelope into her panties.

Aware that he’s wallowing in self-pity, Keller microwaves a Swanson “Hungry Man” turkey dinner with its little tub of cranberry sauce in a parody of Christmas dinner. Balancing the meal on his lap and washing it down with scotch, he watches Mexican television and remembers other Christmases in better times, when the kids were young, the family together and never thinking that they’d ever be apart. He almost calls them but then thinks better of it, not wanting to tinge their day with his melancholy. Maybe they’re with their mom, maybe they’re with friends. Maybe Althea took them somewhere special—Utah to ski, Hawaii to lie in the sun. Maybe they’re with Althie’s family in California. And I’m here, Keller thinks—Don Quixote tilting at windmills, Ahab chasing the great white whale—alone with my obsession. As hooked as any junkie in a shooting gallery, any crack whore on the stroll. My personal war on drugs, my own addiction.

Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground. And for what? So North Americans can get high.

Keller had a professor in college who said that civilization was a matter of plumbing. That basically, the infrastructure for moving clean water in and filthy water out is what allowed people to congregate in large populations in permanent dwellings and create cities and cultures. Otherwise, people had to be nomads to literally escape their own shit.

Ester started to run, but Chido grabbed her and pushed her back against the wall. Then he saw the bottle at their feet. A green bottle that had once been full of cheap wine. He smashed it against the wall and held the jagged neck to her face. “I told you,” he said, “that you saw nothing.” “I didn’t.” “Lying bitch,” Chido said. “Now you won’t see anything.” He dragged the glass across her dark eyes and held his other hand over her mouth as she screamed and screamed. When he let her go she slid down the wall and collapsed, pressed her hands against her eyes and felt nothing but blood. Then she heard Chido say, “She can’t identify what she can’t see. It’s cool.” She heard them walk away. They must have called a squad car, because a few minutes later two cops arrived, picked her up, put her in the backseat, and drove her to the hospital. The doctors did the best they could, but she would never see again, and she became the blind whore of La Polvarilla. As her mother said, you don’t need to see a man’s hard dick to put it inside you, and men came for the cheap thrill of getting done by a girl who couldn’t see them, and when she went to the trucks to get water, some people, boys mostly, were mean and tripped her so the water spilled, but most people were kind and helped her. She never heard from Chido Palacios again. But that, she tells Keller, was when she was young and not a whore.

Keller gets up. “I came to you first because you can trade up, for Vera. I’m going to go to him in exactly twenty-four hours, unless I hear from you first.” He lays a slip of paper with a phone number on the table. “Beautiful day for scoping the women, isn’t it?” Keller asks. “By the way, Ester Almanza sends her regards, you piece of shit.”

Then Aguilar and Keller went into his study to discuss business, and now Keller sits there with the cell phone in his pocket, urging it to ring. He’d bought it only for Palacios’s call, and now it sits in his pocket like a time bomb you want to go off. Every second it doesn’t increases the possibility that Palacios has gone to Vera, or, maybe worse, to the Tapias.

Other than her, Adán really has no friends. Nacho is an adviser, but also a father-in-law and a partner as well as a potential rival. Adán isn’t afraid that Nacho would try to kill his own son-in-law, but Nacho definitely has his own agenda. Adán can’t relax with him, ever really let his guard down. Only with Magda can he do that, and the truth is now that he’d rather talk to her than fuck her, not that he can’t do both. He used to scoff at the old cliché about “the loneliness of command.” He doesn’t scoff now—he feels its truth. No one who doesn’t have to make the decisions that he has to make can understand. To order the deaths of scores of people. The fight for Juárez has been far bloodier than he expected.

Then they come back to Mexico where their salary is 30,000 pesos a month, plus a 20,000 bonus for every risky operation, which makes them far less likely to take bribes from the narcos. Another incentive is, to be blunt, looting. The FES marines get to keep a portion of what they capture—watches, jewelry, cash. Cops have done it forever, of course; Orduña’s genius is to make it legal and actually encourage it. His men aren’t going to take bribes, they’re just going to take. “Any man of mine who takes a bribe,” Orduña says, “knows that he won’t be arrested, tried, and sent to jail. He’ll just disappear out in the desert.” Orduña has created a dirty unit designed to fight a dirty war, Keller thinks. Whether he realizes it or not, he’s formed his own version of the Zetas.

Certainly, Keller thought, my war on drugs has changed over the years. It used to be all about busts and seizures, the perpetual cat-and-mouse game of getting the shit off the street, but now I barely think about the drugs themselves. The actual trafficking is almost irrelevant. I’m not a drug agent anymore, he reflected, I’m a hunter.

It came over a late-night drinking session after a long day of unsuccessfully tracking Diego Tapia. Single-malt scotch, very expensive, lowered inhibitions and provoked revelations. Keller learned that Orduña came from an immensely wealthy family (“The reason I’m impervious to bribery”), and that they have something in common. A grudge. Felipa Muñoz. Nineteen, a model, and a cheerleader for the local Tijuana fútbol team, Felipa was apparently friendly with a young man who was somehow associated with the Tapias. Her decapitated body was found dumped on the soccer field—the trunk in two black plastic bags, the head in another. Her feet had been smashed in and her fingers cut off—the usual torture for a dedo, a snitch—although the clumsy nature of the wounds indicated that it was done by amateurs, not professionals. The two men who did it—Felipa’s twenty-two-year-old “friend” and a forty-nine-year old associate—were arrested for speeding and the police found a video of the torture on their cell phone. They’d apparently heard that she was passing information along to a policeman and thought they’d kill her to garner favor with the bosses. Felipa Muñoz was Orduña’s goddaughter.

At nine that night, when it’s relatively quiet, Orduña gives the order to finish it. A small C-4 charge blows the apartment door off. Three FES go through the door, M-16s at their shoulders. Each kills a sicario with a two-shot burst to the chest. Keller sees another one of Diego’s men put his pistol in his mouth and pull the trigger. The last jumps out the window, a burst of fire from a rooftop sniper catches him in midair, and he’s dead before he somersaults onto the concrete courtyard.

The two FES inside fire bursts of 5.56 hollow-points into Diego’s chest. He staggers backward into the apartment and falls to the floor. But still breathing, still alive. Orduña comes in from the hallway. He stands over Diego and then looks at Keller. Keller turns his back, then hears two shots. When he turns back again there are two neat bullet holes in Diego’s forehead. El Jefe de los Jefes, La Barba, is dead.

“You have a chip with me,” Keller says. “Why don’t you cash it in now? I can bring you in safe.” “ ‘Let that pickup man haul in’?” “I don’t know what that means.” “Old song about rodeo,” Eddie says. “No, I ain’t done with my ride yet.” “You’re on the list, Eddie.” Actually, he just moved up one slot. “Right,” Eddie says. “Because that’s what you guys do now, isn’t it? You just kill people.” “Doesn’t have to end that way,” Keller says. “The Zetas,” Eddie says, “that’s who you should be going after. They’re pure evil, man.” “Thanks for the advice.” “Fuck you.” Eddie looks around the Zócalo for a second and then says, “You know? Someone’s always going to be selling this shit. It might as well be someone who doesn’t kill women and kids. If someone’s going to do it, you guys might as well let someone like me do it.” Keller lets him walk away. Could have taken him right there, but that wasn’t part of their deal.

Looking at the photos of Diego’s body, Heriberto Ochoa, the head of the Zetas, is furious. And concerned. The government has finally figured out that to fight special forces you need special forces. No one saw it coming, and no one—not Diego or Martín, not even Barrera, managed to find out about this new unit, much less infiltrate or suborn it. And this FES is very, very good. A direct challenge to the Zetas. As a special-ops vet, Ochoa recognizes the Lomas de Selva raid for what it was—not a law enforcement operation, but an execution. Well done.

Erika glances up. “I’m here to apply for the job.” “What job?” Marisol asks. “Police chief.” Keller is appalled. Marisol smiles. “How old are you, Erika?” “Nineteen.” “Education?” “I went to ITCJ for a semester,” Erika says, naming the local community college. “Did you study law enforcement?” Marisol asks. Erika shakes her head. “Computer programming.” Now Keller shakes his head. A nineteen-year-old girl with no training and a semester or two of community college computer science wants to be the town’s only police officer. It’s cloud cuckoo land.

Keller takes a seat and pours himself a scotch. As the plane takes off, Orduña hands him Forbes magazine and says, “You’re going to like this.” Keller gives Orduña a questioning look. “Page eight,” Orduña says. Keller turns to the page and sees it. Adán Barrera is listed as number sixty-seven on the Forbes annual list of the world’s most powerful people.

He’s just out of the shower when his phone rings. “Don’t hang up,” Minimum Ben Tompkins says. “What do you want?” “Someone wants you to know that it wasn’t his people who attacked your friend,” Ben says. “Tell that someone I’m going to kill him.” “Think about it,” Tompkins says. “He already has everything he wants there. Why would he risk that by killing a bunch of women?” He makes a point, Keller thinks. Barrera has already won in Juárez and basically taken the valley. But he says, “Marisol Cisneros challenged him on television.” “She challenged the Zetas, too,” Tompkins says. “Our friend says to tell you that nothing has changed between the two of you, but that he didn’t go after your woman.” Tompkins clicks off.

There is a small blast, the door swings open, and Don Pedro fires both rifles, hitting both men in the stomach and gutting them. They writhe on the front porch, screaming in agony, bleeding all over the wood, which is going to have to be sand-stoned now, which will annoy lazy Esteban to no end and require supervision.

The final tally of drug-related deaths in Mexico in 2010 came to 15,273. That’s what we count now, Pablo thinks, instead of counting down to midnight. We count deaths.

Eddie’s tired. Tired of moving, tired of running, tired of fighting. The fact that he’s winning almost doesn’t matter. Like, winning what? The right to move, run, and fight more? I’m a multimillionaire, he thinks as he settles into yet another safe house, this one in Acapulco, and I live like a bum. A homeless man with twenty luxury houses.

Eddie loves the movies. The Godfather, of course, and Goodfellas, but also the drug movies. Scarface, Miami Vice…he’d like to make a contribution to the genre. His own story—the realistic, down-and-dirty tale of a real-life drug lord. The way it really is. No one’s ever seen that shit before. They’re thinking of calling it Narco Polo, and, get this, the main character, the drug lord, actually plays polo. Eddie’s putting up $100K of his own money and hoping the script will attract investors. If he ever gets a script from this guy. Writers. “Did you like the outline?” Julio asks. “I did,” Eddie says. “I think there are some good things in there, some really good things. But you can’t have me getting married twice without getting divorced. It makes me look like a dick.” “I think it makes you interesting.” “Yeah,” Eddie says. “Priscilla would think it was a little too interesting. You know pregnant women, hormones and shit. And the scene where I escape from the marine raid…I think I leave too early. I think I should shoot my way out. You know…‘meet my little friend.’ ”

“And the ending,” Eddie says. “I get killed.” “It’s a convention of the genre,” Julio says. Julio wears tight black jeans and black leather shoes even on a sunny day in Acapulco. Eddie thinks this is because he went to film school, which is why Eddie hired him and because he says things like “convention of the genre.” “Pacino didn’t get killed,” Eddie says. “He did in Three.” “Three doesn’t count,” Eddie says. “Liotta didn’t get killed in Goodfellas, De Niro didn’t get killed in Casino…” “But they couldn’t end happily. They had to be punished.” “What are you saying?” Eddie asks. “I have to be punished?” Julio turns even paler, if that’s possible, and mumbles, “For your crimes.”

The Acapulco police find Yvette Tapia in a vacant lot, bound hand and foot, blindfolded and gagged, dirty, but otherwise fine. A cardboard sign is draped around her neck with the message THIS IS TO TEACH YOU TO BE MEN AND TO RESPECT FAMILIES. I’M GIVING YOU BACK YOUR WIFE, SAFE AND SOUND. I DO NOT KILL WOMEN OR CHILDREN. EDUARDO RUIZ—NARCO POLO. Crazy Eddie is gone.

The woman who was sitting next to him screams as a Zeta puts his hand over her mouth and drags her away from her little boy. Chuy knows that she’ll be raped, and, if lucky, survive to be put out on the streets. Other Zetas take the older or homelier women off the bus and put them into another truck. Chuy knows their fate, too. Now Forty stands in front of the rest and asks, “Okay, who wants to live?” A teenage boy pisses himself. Forty sees the stain spread across the front of the boy’s faded jeans, walks up to him, pulls his pistol, and shoots him in the head. “Okay, I’ll ask again! Who here wants to live? Raise your hands!”

Alvarado starts in. “You North Americans are clean because you can be. That has never been a choice for us, either as individuals or as a nation. You’re experienced enough to know that we’re not offered a choice of taking the money or not, we are given the choice of taking the money or dying. We’ve been forced to choose sides, so we choose the best side we can and get on with it. What would you have us do? The country was falling apart, violence getting worse every day. The only way to end the chaos was to pick the most likely winner and help him win. And you North Americans despise us for it at the same time you send the billions of dollars and the weapons that fuel the violence. You blame us for selling the product that you buy. It’s absurd.”

The bodies of fourteen Zetas, skinned, lie in the backs of garbage trucks. The symbolism, Keller thinks, is deft. Keller looks at the flayed corpses—Adán Barrera’s announcement that he’s back in Nuevo Laredo—and thinks that he should be feeling more than he is. Years ago he’d looked at nineteen bodies and his heart had broken, but now he feels nothing. Years ago the machine-gunning of nineteen men, women, and children was the worst atrocity he ever thought he’d see. Now he knows better.

A Zeta cell in the city tried to extort a casino known for laundering narco money through its accounts. The casino owners refused to pay. Keller has seen the videotapes of two pickup trucks pulling up to a Pemex station and filling plastic barrels full of gasoline. Other security cameras caught the trucks pulling up to the Casino Royale on a Saturday afternoon at about two o’clock in the afternoon. Seven gunmen get out of the trucks. They walk into the casino lobby and start to shoot. They come out, and the other Zetas roll the barrels into the casino and set them on fire. The emergency exits were padlocked and chained. Fifty-three people died of flame, smoke, and toxins. Five of the attackers arrested later in the week said that they didn’t mean to kill anyone, that they were just trying to scare the owners into paying the 130,000 pesos a week.

The Zetas strike back less than two weeks later, killing twenty-three of Barrera’s people. Fourteen of them are decapitated and nine hang from a bridge next to a banner reading FUCKING BARRERA WHORES, THIS IS HOW I’M GOING TO FINISH OFF EVERY FUCKER YOU SEND TO HEAT UP THE PLAZA. THESE GUYS CRIED AND BEGGED FOR MERCY. THE REST GOT AWAY BUT I’LL GET THEM SOONER OR LATER. SEE YOU AROUND, FUCKERS.—THE Z COMPANY. The Nuevo Laredo police quickly come out and deny that the Sinaloa cartel is in the city, prompting Barrera’s people to leave six severed heads in ice chests outside the Nuevo Laredo police station with the message YOU WANT CREDIBILITY THAT I’M IN NL? WHAT WILL IT TAKE, THE HEADS OF THE ZETA LEADERS? KEEP IT UP AND I ASSURE YOU THAT HEADS WILL KEEP ROLLING. I DON’T KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE LIKE YOU DO, FORTY, ALL THE DEAD ARE PURE SCUM—IN OTHER WORDS—PURE ZETAS. SINCERELY, YOUR FATHER, ADÁN. Once again, the grisly images appear on Esta Vida.

The government can’t find Ochoa, and he shoves the fact in their faces. Just three hundred yards from an army base in the 18th Military Zone, he endowed a church, where a plaque reads CENTER OF EVANGELIZATION AND CATECHISM. DONATED BY HERIBERTO OCHOA. He uses a Nextel phone once, and then throws it away. Like Barrera, Z-1 eschews the showy persona of other narcos. He doesn’t frequent clubs and restaurants, doesn’t show off his wealth. He just kills.

He’s praying that Rolando is going to Italy as the Zetas’ ambassador to ’Ndrangheta. The wealthiest criminal organization in the world. ’Ndrangheta is based in Calabria, in southern Italy at the toe of the boot, and it makes the older, more famous Sicilian Mafia look like a poor country cousin. Eighty percent of the cocaine that flows into Europe comes through ’Ndrangheta at its port of Gioia Tauro. The organization’s income from drug trafficking is estimated at $50 billion annually, a whopping 3.5 percent of Italy’s gross domestic product. They’re untouchable.

There are seven thousand arms dealers within a few hours’ drive of the Mexican border. That’s three a mile. Most of those guns aren’t going to shoot deer in Minnesota. Now Keller sits across the street from one of them, in Scottsdale, Arizona, and watches the straw purchaser go in. The Mexican government claims that 90 percent of the weapons used by the cartels come from the United States, but Keller knows that isn’t true. Most of the weapons the cartels use are looted from the armories of Central American military, but the gun stores that line the border are there for a reason, just like the narcos on the other side are there for a reason.

Nacho is right—we have billions of dollars but live like refugees. We have to hide, look behind our backs, always have to wonder if this day is our last. It’s not the life you want for these boys in their cribs. You could be El Patrón again, if you win. But you could also do what no patrón has ever done. Walk away.