The Drug Wars Are Not What They Used To Be.

I remember the day they shot Cuco Reyes Pruneda. Or at least I remember the headlines that Sunday morning. I was on my way to buy Sunday morning barbacoa at a place around the corner from our house in downtown Nuevo Laredo; I must have been ten or eleven years old, plotting in my head how I would manage to scrounge the ojo, my favorite part, from everyone else at the table. The headline was atop a stack of still bundled newspapers -el Correo, el Diario, el Ciuidadano, el Mañana-I don’t remember which. “El Cuco Acribillado,” it read in bold, red letters. There was no need for more description, everyone in town knew who el Cuco was. His family, the Reyes-Martinez clan, was waging a war, defending their “plaza” over control of the drug smuggling routes against a Texan named Fred Gomez Carrazco. This was a bold hit and even a 10 year old understood the ramifications. Those were different times, though. The city wasn’t under siege. The criminals killed each other, but they had the decency to have their shootouts in some remote part of the rural edges of the city. Town folk were only witness to headlines and very graphic pictures of the aftermath. Cuco was killed by cops avenging the death of two of their own, it’s said that American agents helped spring the trap that killed him. Things are much different now in my childhood home. The drug war has spread into the streets and into people’s homes. I have family and friends who have fled across the border, into Laredo, Texas, for safety and I haven’t been to visit my old haunts in years. It’s gotten that bad.

I marvel at many of my cousins and old buddies, now professionals and business men and women, who brave the danger and are resolute against giving up their way of life to the drug marauders who seem to have no respect for anything that’s decent. All this came to mind last week with the shooting death of Jaime Zapata, a US Immigration agent, in Mexico. He was traveling between Mexico City and Monterrey when the shooting occurred – details are trickling in and a suspect who goes by the nickname “el piolín” has been arrested and paraded before the press.  There is understandable outrage and it seems as if everyone along the border is holding their breath. Will the US unleash its vengeful wrath against the mythical Zetas,  the paramilitary henchmen who are at the heart (although not alone) of Mexico’s drug war fear and mayhem? Probably not in the way we think. Let’s take one thing into account. According to the Wall Street Journal

87 members of the Mexican military and 867 law- enforcement officers were killed by drug gangs (since) December 2006.

And that doesn’t take into account the civilians killed – that number is in the tens of thousands. What the Jaime Zapata killing has done is make the drug war in Mexico new to us. These guys are no longer killing each other on foreign soil, they’re now killing our government agents. We can’t ignore that. The popular US knee-jerk  reaction is to go over there and give them a taste of our holy hell, a la Black Jack Pershing. And we all know how that ended. But whatever the US reaction may be I doubt it will address the US drug consumption and gun laws that fuel the war that killed Zapata.

Back when I was a kid drug consumption in the US was not a multi-billion dollar industry, and southbound gun smuggling was a thing relegated to back alley deals. The Reyes-Carrasco war was quaint compared to what’s going on now. I don’t remember ever feeling fear.

This is a very different gang war with very different rules – or no rules at all. Here in the US we’ve been talking about it at arms-length, as something that’s happening “over there.” My point is we can’t continue to think of it that way and maybe the shooting death of an American immigration agent will change that.

That Sunday, way back when, I bought the paper and ran home with the package of barbacoa under one arm and a picture of a bullet riddled Cuco Reyes-Pruneda under the other. By the time I got home I had read the story so the news was a perfect distraction at the breakfast table. Everyone was intent on the news, and I was scooping the ojo into a folded tortilla in the palm of my hand.

If you’re interested you can listen to a corrido about Cuco’s death HERE. It’ll make you want to dance, or at the very least chug a beer.