♪ ♪
(gunshots)
(rapid gunfire)
♪ ♪
MAN (over TV): Shake this square world and blast off for Kicksville.
NIXON (over TV): Public enemy number one is drug abuse.
NANCY (over TV): Just say, "No."
REAGAN (over TV): Solving the drug problem in America
is like carrying water in a sieve.
BUSH (over TV): Take my word for it,
this scourge will stop.
WOMAN: There's now an understanding that the war on
drugs was an abject failure.
MAN: You have to stop and ask yourself,
'How did we get here?'
TRUMP (over TV): We will build a wall.
♪ ♪
MAN (over TV): Mexico's drug cartels have turned roads into
the US into super‐highways for their narcotics.
MAN (over TV): It occurred last month in downtown
Matamoros, Mexico.
An FBI and a DEA Agent were riding with an informant when
they noticed they were being followed.
After a pickup truck blocked their path,
15 armed men emerged and ordered the agents and
informant out of the car.
As one of the gunmen leveled an AK‐47,
the Agents flashed their badges and pleaded for their lives.
DANIEL: My name is Daniel Fuentes,
and I was that FBI Agent.
♪ ♪
In 1999, this individual assisting us there in Matamoros,
he was showing us some residences that were
associated with members of the Gulf Cartel,
including the house of Osiel Cárdenas Guillén.
Osiel Cárdenas Guillén started off his career,
believe it or not, helping out a local law enforcement
agency in Matamoros.
He rose to sole leader of the Gulf Cartel right around July 3rd of 1999,
when it is said that he murdered his partner,
Chava Gómez.
As we're driving through these neighborhoods,
my partner thinks that we may be followed by a dark colored pickup.
We're seeing multiple cars joining.
One particular vehicle, there's an AK‐47 weapon
sitting on the bench of his truck right next to him.
We're realizing that, that things are about to start going bad.
I start collecting all of my ammunition,
and the informant told us, you know, "Here comes Osiel."
He recognized his vehicle.
We're boxed in, we're completely surrounded,
and that's when we were forced off the road.
They start exiting their vehicles.
They're completely in uniform, in tactical gear,
like soldiers.
They're all heavily armed with high‐caliber weapons.
Osiel comes over to my window.
And he proceeds to point his gold‐plated AK‐47,
cussing up a storm, demanding who it is that we are.
So, I show him my Diplomatic Passport saying we're
diplomats from the US Consulate in Monterrey.
You know, 'Who are you?'
And I could see Osiel kinda grinning.
He said, "I don't give a (bleep) who you are.
You're gonna die. I'm gonna kill you."
He sticks his head into the car,
and he looks to the backseat, and he says,
"Ah, so it's you. You're with the FBI, huh?"
The guns go up, total chaos.
He wants this guy really badly.
He says, "You give him to me, and I'll let you go."
And we said, "No, no‐one's getting out of the car."
We were literally in a Mexican standoff.
If I fire a shot, we're all dead,
because everyone's gonna start shooting,
and so Osiel continues to point his AK‐47 in my head.
I start getting what's referred to as "tunnel vision."
I can't see beyond this hole that's in front of me.
Everything else is black.
Although you resign yourself to the fact that you're going to die,
your training kicks in.
My partner tells him,
"You better think about what you're doing here,
because if you kill us,
you're gonna have 30,000 enemies from the US that
are coming out here looking for you.
They're gonna hunt you down like a dog."
And it seems like something clicked in his mind,
and he realized,
"They're gonna find me,
and it's going to affect my operation here."
So, Osiel says, "I'm gonna let you go.
And you in the backseat, I'm gonna deal with you later,
and I don't want you guys to ever come back here,
cause if you do come back, I'm gonna kill you."
We later learned that amongst those individuals were some
former Special Forces Mexican soldiers.
♪ ♪
IOAN: The Zetas were created by the Gulf Cartel
in a corner of northeast Mexico on the border with Texas.
The Gulf Cartel controlled key towns from the Gulf of Mexico
right up to the city of Nuevo Laredo,
and the hub of their operations is the border
crossing between Nuevo Laredo and Mexico, and Laredo, Texas.
♪ ♪
ARTURO: My name is Art, Arturo Fontes.
I was an FBI Agent for approximately 28 years.
People laugh at me because I left sunny San Diego,
with beaches and everything, and nice big house,
to be in a small town in Laredo.
They call it the "armpit of Texas."
(laughing)
♪ ♪
It takes you all the way to Dallas,
and it even goes all the way to the north in the US.
IOAN: Now, this is an area where there was the biggest
number of trucks crossing the whole border.
It was a very important route.
The Gulf Cartel was shifting marijuana, cocaine,
and heroin through Texas to across the United States.
The Gulf Cartel was on to a good thing,
but it was about to get a whole lot better with the
North American Free Trade Agreement.
CLINTON (over TV): After we tear down trade barriers between our three nations,
it will create the world's largest trade zone.
Today we have the chance to do what our parents did before us.
We have the opportunity to remake the world.
(applause)
♪ ♪
ARTURO: Nuevo Laredo is more important than
almost any other area in Mexico,
and that's why it's a battle ground.
It's the crown jewel for drug trafficking.
Everybody wants that.
♪ ♪
MIKE: Osiel was a genius at being able to read people and
manipulate them.
He was brilliant at influencing people to do
things that they shouldn't be doing.
IOAN: In the Special Forces, they had radio code with the
"Z" letter, so they would have, like...
(speaking native language)
Would be, like, you know, "Zed Two, I'm on alert."
They quickly became called the "Zetas,"
or the "Zeds" after that radio code.
MIKE: Osiel saw in them a discipline that your regular
trafficker did not have, and that was a militarized discipline.
A respect for chain of command, loyalty,
the willing to attack the hill when told,
regardless of the outcome.
(sirens)
We saw that the Zetas were becoming a threat.
There was definitely a foreboding of things to come
as the Zetas began to grow and become stronger,
and they were learning the drug trade from the Gulf Cartel.
♪ ♪
DANIEL: Osiel is definitely in the crosshairs
of, of the FBI and DEA.
He is public enemy number one.
(speaking native language)
DANIEL: The arrest was like a scene out of Afghanistan, Iraq.
(speaking native language)
(gunshots)
DANIEL: The Mexican military, I believe,
may have lost one or two soldiers during the course of
that gun battle.
(speaking native language)
(gunshots)
DANIEL: Osiel survived.
He was apprehended, but it was quite the shootout.
♪ ♪
MIKE: After Osiel was out of the picture,
what we didn't anticipate was how strong the Zetas
were going to become.
(speaking native language)
MIKE: They were outta control.
(speaking native language)
(gunshots)
MIKE: They turned Mexico into one giant war zone.
(speaking native language)
♪ ♪
MAN (over TV): Good evening!
Suddenly guns are back in the middle of the Presidential campaign,
triggered by what happened today,
a ten‐year ban on 19 kinds of military assault weapons ran out.
MAN (over TV): Gun manufacturers are already
preparing for what some predict will be a gun buying frenzy.
♪ ♪
IOAN: You have the Sinaloa Cartel going in to try
and take the city of Nuevo Laredo from the Zetas.
But they did not understand the Zetas.
They underestimated the Zetas.
ARTURO: Nuevo Laredo was on fire.
There were shootouts in the streets,
grenades being launched in the house.
It was just extremely violent.
They had commando hit squads operating.
It was brutal.
(gunshots)
The Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, they have the help of fire
power to actually counter any threat, and they did.
They kicked ass.
IOAN: This was the beginning of the Mexican drug war
as we know it.
(gunshots)
When you talk to people who live this,
who fight in this conflict, and who do see themselves as
being soldiers and, you know, like,
they might not live till they're 25.
(speaking native language)
♪ ♪
IOAN: Now, the Zetas became so powerful the Gulf Cartel
could not contain them.
So, you had the Zetas breaking away from the Gulf Cartel.
♪ ♪
So, suddenly it wasn't only northeast Mexico.
They started spreading all the way down the Gulf of Mexico.
And then across, penetrating into these States on the west coast, as well.
They were going to new towns and villages and start
recruiting or saying, you know, to local criminals,
"You either work for us or we're gonna kill you."
The Zetas were really starting to pioneer these tactics,
controlling a territory through fear.
The Zetas started hanging bodies up.
It wasn't enough just to kill somebody.
You wanna hang their body up.
So suddenly you start to see bodies hanging from bridges,
so people, kids, families who are there,
see hung up bodies when they wake up in the morning,
when they're going to school, and they put messages,
big banners saying,
"If you inform on us, this is gonna happen to you."
And this propaganda of fear,
propaganda of terror, started to spread around Mexico.
So, as violence increased in Mexico,
the United States didn't know how to react,
and didn't even know what to call this thing that was happening.
JOEL: The Zetas changed the entire game in the drug world.
My name's Joel Saldaña.
I'm a retired DEA Agent.
I was assigned to Monterrey, Mexico, from 2003 to 2009.
In October of 2008, Zeta members threw a hand grenade
and an M67 grenade at the US Consulate.
They had gotten approval from El Treviño.
And I'm, like, 'I think we should retaliate.
We need to hit 'em back and show 'em that we're not weak.'
(sirens)
JOEL: We decide to go with an operation.
We have this warehouse we wanna hit,
so that night we found 18 tons of marijuana,
we found a room full of ammo, five gallon buckets of
.40 caliber, 9mm, .223.
We also found 26 grenades, and of those grenades,
two or three of 'em had the same lot number of the one
that had been thrown at the US Consulate.
We arrested one guy at the place, and he told us,
he said, "Hey, they just left, like, ten, 15 minutes ago.
If you're still here, they're gonna show up in ten,
15, 20 vehicles, .50 calibers used.
They're gonna kill all you guys. It's gonna get messy."
We're, like, "We need to call the military."
So, it's three in the morning, so I called the General up.
(phone ringing)
His aide answers.
I tell the aide, I said, "I need to speak to the General."
He says, "Well, the General's asleep."
I said,
"Look, I'm a DEA Agent and we're in a world of (bleep).
If you don't wanna spend the rest of your career washing cars,
you better wake him up now."
(phone ringing)
General answers the phone.
I said, "Look, General, this is what we got."
He says, "What do you need from me?"
I said, "I need manpower."
(phone ringing)
Within ten minutes, Lieutenant Colonel calls me to say,
"We're mobilizing 100 troops."
So, they showed up.
As soon as they arrive, they get into a big
shootout with the Zetas.
(gunshots)
(speaking native language)
JOEL: They start taking heavy fire.
(speaking native language)
JOEL: Two soldiers were wounded and one of our FEDA guys,
a Mexican Federal Agent, was also shot.
(speaking native language)
(gunshots)
JOEL: They end up getting away.
(speaking native language)
JOEL: It was a long night. It was a long night.
The Zeta started putting surveillance at the military camp
and what they would do, they'd pick up soldiers,
kidnap 'em, torture 'em and then kill 'em.
So, within eight days they killed nine soldiers because
of, of this little operation.
They were between 18 and 20.
I think the outcome has always weighed heavy on me,
knowing uh, what happened to those soldiers.
The retaliation for this operation.
I guess hindsight, if I would've know this would've happened,
I prob, probably would've never have gone through with it,
since I kinda feel spearheaded it.
HILLARY (over TV): Drug cartels are now taking on the attributes of a
lot of the insurgent and terrorist groups that we see
elsewhere around the world.
You see them being much more organized in a kind of
paramilitary way.
In fact, one of the most violent of the drug gangs are former
Special Forces members from the Mexican Army who went over
to the dark side.
So, this is a, this is a struggle that has a huge consequence
for the United States.
ERNEST: We had reports that they were killing 150,
200 people in one month.
That they would dismember people,
that they would behead people.
The goal that we had, I believe,
was an admirable goal.
The goal was to try to get these guys captured and
arrested so that the killings would stop.
♪ ♪
There were some individuals that we interviewed who were
the original founding members of the Zeta Cartel,
and even they were amazed at the amount of brutality that
Miguel Treviño had brought to the organization.
There were some that were willing to cooperate because of that,
who wanted out of the organization.
They indicated, "We got into this business to make money.
We didn't get in this business to kill hundreds of people at a time."
I mean, I, I personally felt the impact that these
individuals were having on the innocent people of Mexico.
As a human being, as a prosecutor,
you wanna see justice done.
♪ ♪
ERNEST: Treviño never slept in the same place.
They had hidden tunnels that they would hide from.
They were very shrewd, and they had the structure
where they had evaded capture for a very, very long time.
♪ ♪
ERNEST: Obviously, we could use the information on the
cell phones to track those individuals and find their locations.
♪ ♪
That information is leaked.
The Zetas are tipped off that someone in their organization
has provided us that information,
and that unleashes the furor of Treviño.
♪ ♪
ERNEST: Now we know that it was because of the leak of information.
We know that it was Miguel Treviño trying to get some
retribution for the lack of allegiance from some of their members.
I don't think I've ever seen anything like that,
and I've been investigating or, or prosecuting these types of cases
for 25 years, and this is the worst
of the worst that I've ever seen.
♪ ♪
(gunshots)
(speaking native language)
MIKE: I cannot compare Zetas' violence to anything that had
ever been witnessed in Mexico from any cartel.
Just beyond the imagination of what a human could
do to another human.
The Zetas brought violence to a whole new level.
JOEL: And it's fun for them just killing people.
They have to be deranged.
I, I, I can't see how some of these guys could sleep at night
knowing the crimes, the atrocities they've committed.
I mean, how can you sleep?
IOAN: There's a quote from a Zeta,
"We use drugs to finance the war."
The drugs almost become, like,
"OK, we'll keep on turning that so we can keep on financing,
and buying more guns, and killing more people,
and taking more territory, and then sell some more drugs."
It becomes this circle and what really is the objective?
These attacks really brought the wrath of the United States.
They said, "We have to stop the Zetas.
We have to get the Zetas. This is too bad."
ERNEST: It was a part of the pattern that
Miguel Treviño had somehow developed that they were going
to stay in power, but his thirst for power is going to
cause him to be less careful.
It's gonna cause him to come out into the open.
♪ ♪
ERNEST: I wanted to keep going,
I wanted to, to, to try to achieve the goal that we had set out.
(radio chatter)
ERNEST: We continued to work the case,
we continued to cultivate information from co‐operators and informants.
(radio chatter)
ERNEST: Information has strong value in any kind of investigation,
and especially in this one.
(radio chatter)
♪ ♪
MAN (over TV): This is yet another advance by the people of
Mexico in dismantling organized crime,
so we really commend our Mexican partners in this regard.
♪ ♪
(sobbing)
ARTURO: It takes a toll on you.
It's toxic.
You know, it's not healthy.
Seeing and, and, and hearing and, and talking to the families
and feeling the, feeling the heat and the, and the sorrow and the,
and the, and the hurt, and, it, it really takes a toll on you.
JOEL: It, it's a really tough assignment, it really is.
If someone tells you it isn't, they're, they're lying.
MIKE: DEA, in my personal opinion,
is that we're like gardeners, and we have no choice but to
keep cutting the grass, because if we don't keep
cutting the grass, we're gonna have a jungle of weeds,
and then we won't be able to control it.
ERNEST: Now it's other cartels here, you know, the Sinaloa,
you have Juárez Cartel, you have the Knights Templar.
It's still a country under siege by these cartels because
there's money to be made and there's power to be had.
Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.