Organized crime depends on extensive public-sector corruption, and, with its wealth, insures it. The only anti-crime measures known to be effective attack both that wealth and that corruption. Mexico has not made a serious start on either front, according to Buscaglia. Prosecutors lack nearly everything—resources, laws, training, financial intelligence, judicial independence—that they need to begin. “To declare war on organized crime” in Mexico’s situation, Buscaglia says, “you need to declare war on your own society.” A frontal military assault on organized crime, unsupported by a financial strategy and an assault against political corruption, never succeeds, according to Buscaglia, because of what he calls “the paradox of expected punishment.” Organized-crime groups under such assault simply devote more of their resources to arms, violence, and the expansion of their defensive ring of public corruption. Jailed or slain leaders are quickly replaced, usually after a sanguinary round of jockeying among the second tier. Replacing jailed or slain street soldiers is never a problem in a country like Mexico, where an estimated seven million young people, known as Los Ni Ni—because they don’t go to school or have jobs (ni estudia ni trabaja)—are considered ripe for recruitment into the lower ranks. Indeed, the outlaw appeal of defiant narcos among young people generally cannot be discounted, given the long-term popularity of narcocorridos—danceable pop songs glorifying the exploits of Mexico’s “Most Wanted.”

The lineup of Mexican cartels is fluid. Sinaloa, with its base in the eponymous Pacific Coast state and operations throughout Mexico and beyond, is the largest and probably the most stable. It is always looking to expand its territory—the phenomenal level of recent violence in Juárez is largely attributable to a Sinaloa takeover attempt, but drug lords have been operating out of Sinaloa for generations. On Mexico’s east coast, the Gulf cartel has ruled for nearly as long. Two powerful groups, based in Tijuana and Juárez, dominate the two busiest border-crossing regions in the north. Then, there is the Beltrán Leyva group, which has a sprawling, non-contiguous territory. Its longtime leader, Arturo Beltrán Leyva, was killed by the military in December, and other groups are now trying to grab some of the “plazas” that Beltrán Leyva has traditionally controlled. La Familia, for instance, appears to be making a move on Acapulco.

The Zetas are a special case. They started out as high-end bodyguards—U.S.-trained Special Forces commandos enticed to desert in the late nineties by Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, who was then the leader of the Gulf cartel. (He is now in a U.S. prison.) The Zetas brought military expertise to narco-trafficking. They earned a reputation for savage violence and efficiency, and their early recruitment was boldly public, with banners hung over highways, complete with a number to call, urging soldiers to defect and receive “a good salary, food, and medical care for your families.” They offered loans and life insurance, and an end to mistreatment and rations of ramen. Those who joined were paid on a scale unimaginable in their previous lives. The Zetas eventually outgrew their role as the Gulf cartel’s armed wing. They went to work with other groups, as trainers or freelance mercenaries, and then for themselves. They are now a major criminal group, at war with various old allies, including La Familia and the Gulf cartel. They are also working closely with the ’Ndrangheta, Italy’s formidable Mafia, according to “Contacto en Italia,” a recent best-seller by Cynthia Rodríguez.

In Michoacán, at the end of the PRI era, organized crime was dominated by a midsized group known as El Milenio, which was allied with Sinaloa, and did extremely well in the early methamphetamine period. The Gulf cartel, leading with its spearpoint, the Zetas, invaded Michoacán around 2001. In one version, the Gulf leadership had been approached by restive ex-Milenio lieutenants, including future La Familia leaders like El Chayo, who invited the Gulf group to Michoacán to help them overthrow their former leaders. In another version, it was a Gulf-cartel initiative, a westward business expansion merely abetted by the restless lieutenants in Michoacán. In any event, El Milenio was defeated by the Zetas, who began running Michoacán, in their brutal way, on the Gulf cartel’s behalf.

La Familia arose from various sources. The main element was the ex-Milenio group, which had been schooled by its allies, the Zetas, in unconventional warfare, and later turned against them. There were also home-guard units and local vigilantes—farmers and workers in Tierra Caliente—who resented the oppressive reign of the Zetas. A rising tide of cristal addiction, as the Zetas cultivated an internal market for their most profitable product, increased their local unpopularity. La Familia stepped from the shadows in 2006, declared war on outsiders, and by 2008 had driven the Zetas from most of the valuable plazas in Michoacán. The group’s broadsides even denounced Chapo Guzmán and Sinaloa, whose leaders answered with threats to annihilate the upstart La Familia.

In reality, all the main crime groups had to share the booming Michoacán container-port city of Lázaro Cárdenas, a plaza too valuable for any one group to hold exclusively. La Familia, despite its nativist, puro michoacano self-defense rhetoric, had vast amounts of drugs it needed to move to the U.S., which meant negotiating passage rights through the territories of groups to the north. Seizing plazas from the Zetas was such a success, moreover, that stopping at the Michoacán border proved impossible. La Familia moved into the nearby states of Guerrero, Morelos, Guanajuato, Colima, Querétaro, Jalisco, and Mexico, evicting other crime groups, and established a presence in Mexico City, which no single syndicate can control but where every self-respecting cartel must be represented.

La Familia’s evangelical fervor, weird self-righteous piety, and penchant for insane violence turned out to be a potent combination far beyond its provincial base. In May, 2009, the Mexican attorney general called the group the most dangerous cartel in the country, citing its exceptional cruelty, its success at corrupting officials, and its leading role in the production of synthetic drugs. La Familia was by then in business with Chapo Guzmán in areas of shared interest. Ramón Pequeño García, the anti-drug chief of the federal police, told me that La Familia has developed profitable contacts in China, India, Bulgaria, and Holland for both methamphetamine production and distribution. President Obama has named La Familia a significant foreign narcotics trafficker, which makes it illegal for American citizens to have any contact with the group, and in February, 2010, the Treasury Department formally identified seven La Familia leaders, including El Chayo, as drug kingpins, increasing the criminal penalties for Americans caught associating with them.

Although still derided in some circles as hicks (“the hillbilly-hero moonshiners of Mexico’s Appalachia,” as one senior American diplomat in Mexico put it to me), La Familia and its exploits—hanging anti-Zetas banners over the roads in eighteen cities in four states in one night; running a nationwide new-car theft ring that hijacks whole bulk shipments—seemed to be front-page news nearly every day after I arrived in Mexico City, in January. But Pequeño García, of the federal police, told me that La Familia was actually getting desperate, that the cartel was losing the war on the ground in Michoacán. He recited a long list of capos who had been arrested, including El Chayo’s first cousin. “The police presence there has drastically restricted their freedom of movement,” he said. “It’s much more difficult for them to move drugs on the highways now or to travel in armed convoys.”

The Bush Administration warmly supported the Calderón government’s Army-first approach to confronting narco power, and President Obama’s policy has essentially been the same. (Obama has hailed Calderón as a “hero” for his anti-drug efforts.) The United States has an obvious, first-order interest in the stability of Mexico, and in the struggle there against narco-trafficking. Ninety per cent of the cocaine sold in the U.S. comes through Mexico. Tens of billions of dollars in drug money is believed to cross the border heading south each year, much of it in bulk cash shipments. More than eighty per cent of the weapons that have been seized in Mexico and that could be traced originated in the U.S. The outrage of many Mexicans over this avalanche of military-grade firearms is matched only by their impotent anger over the bottomless U.S. demand for illegal drugs. Our appetites, our wealth, our laws seem to be conspiring to destroy their country.

Mexico was traditionally never a major recipient of U.S. foreign aid, but that changed in 2008, with the passage of the Mérida Initiative, a multiyear $1.4-billion program to help Mexico and some of its neighbors fight transnational crime. Under Mérida, the U.S. is sending equipment, including Black Hawk helicopters and high-tech border-inspection gear, to Mexico and, in a broad effort to help modernize and professionalize Mexican law enforcement, providing training to thousands of police officers, customs officials, prosecutors, judges, prison guards, and other public-security personnel.

Extraditions of criminals to the U.S., once a politically sensitive subject in Mexico, have been rising fast. In 2009, there were a hundred and seven. The real test of trust and coöperation between the two countries’ security institutions, though, is intelligence-sharing. Many American officials are wary of it. Some have been burned in the past. For all the American security agencies working in Mexico today—besides the D.E.A., the F.B.I., and the C.I.A., the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives is now fully engaged, trying to teach modern gun-tracing—no American officer has arrest power in Mexico, and direct military assistance remains unthinkable. As the crisis deepens, though, so does U.S. involvement.

In Juárez, where the violence keeps hitting new peaks, the latest plan is to embed American intelligence agents in Mexican federal police units. This would have seemed too dangerous to try until recently, but the massacre of fifteen people, including ten teen-agers, at a birthday party in late January, and then the murder of three people connected to the U.S. Consulate there in March, got the attention of top officials in both countries. President Obama expressed outrage at the killings. President Calderón made several trips to Juárez, promising new forms of aid. And ten days after the Consulate killings, Hillary Clinton led a delegation to Mexico City that included Robert Gates, the Defense Secretary; Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security; Dennis Blair, the director of National Intelligence; and Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They met with Calderón and promised more aid.

Calderón, on a visit to Juárez the previous week, had been confronted by demonstrators. In a city where more than twenty-six hundred people were killed in drug-related violence last year, and where more than nine hundred have already died this year, the demonstrators were not protesting against the cartels and their ubiquitous hit men. They were demanding the withdrawal of the Army.

To check out La Familia’s claim to be driving cristal addiction from Michoacán, I went to Zamora, a midsized city in the northwestern corner of the state. La Familia was doing some vivid social messaging there. Two days before my arrival, and some weeks earlier, groups of flagellants had appeared on the roads around Zamora—men with their shirts pulled up or off and their backs whipped raw. The men chanted and carried placards denouncing themselves as thieves and rapists. Some of the placards were signed “La Familia.” In the past, the corpses of methamphetamine dealers had been left around Zamora with signs condemning the cristal trade and invoking “divine justice.”

I found a drug-rehabilitation center in a scruffy neighborhood. My appearance caused a stir in the street, partly because I arrived in a police cruiser. I had gone to the city police after failing to find a rehab clinic through other sources, including local journalists, and although the cops seemed astonished when I walked into their station, they had agreed to help me. The sergeant who was acting as my guide studied the crowd outside the clinic, frowned, and said that they could not leave me in this barrio. They would wait.

The clinic was like a cut-rate private jail. It was one big gloomy locked room, with maybe a hundred beds and extremely stale air. I got a tour from a trusty, Raymond Ramírez. He had a shaved head heavily tattooed with gang signs that I recognized from California. He had lived, he told me, in the Salinas Valley for sixteen years. “There’s a lot of gang-related around Zamora,” he said, in English. Ramírez, who said he was an addict himself, had been delivered to the clinic by his aunt, which was typical—families checked in their addicted members, who were forbidden to leave the locked room for a minimum of three months. I could see, in the shadows, desperate-looking men, some of whom were watching me closely. I asked Ramírez about his habit.

“I was smoking weed,” he said. “Sometimes I used to fuck with crack. The most popular drugs here are coke and crack.”

I asked about cristal.

“They took away the meth,” he said. “Couple years ago.”

“Who did? The police?”

Ramírez shook his head, looking half amused. “No,” he said. “Not the police.”

(The clinic’s director disagrees. He says there is still a meth problem.)

I asked my police escort to take me to a nearby town, Jacona, where I had heard there was another clinic. It was a low-roofed place on a hillside. Inside, I found a beefy, watchful, fair-haired man, who said his name was Armando. He was the clinic director. He took me into a tiny office. There was a small black-and-white monitor in one corner showing a large, noisy meeting in progress. It was the patients, Armando said, having one of their three mandatory daily meetings. I could hear shouting, both from somewhere down the hill and, more tinnily, from the monitor, which Armando kept an eye on.

“We work with tolerance,” he told me. “Not with beatings or mistreatment. We don’t destroy their personalities.”

I hadn’t asked about mistreatment. But I had heard that there were very tough rehab centers in Michoacán, including some run by La Familia, which specialized in destroying personalities and then in recruiting obedient, religious, fiercely sober gang soldiers from among them.

“We can’t solve problems alone,” Armando said. “We need help from God. The patients have a three-day encounter with God. We use a twelve-step program. It’s the fourth and fifth step.”

I asked about the most common addictions.

“Alcohol,” he said. “I’m an alcoholic. Drugs. Rock. Glue-sniffing. Meth.”

Was methamphetamine, then, a problem?

“No. Not now. The meth problem has disappeared. Los narcos won’t allow it.”

I was distracted by a gaudy crucifix he was wearing. I had been told that one way to recognize La Familia members was by their self-ornamentation. Their standard gear included such a crucifix and a bracelet made from a rosary. I glanced at Armando’s wrist. There was the rosary bracelet. He denied any connection with La Familia.

Before I got to Zitácuaro, I had a certain idea of how organized crime took over towns, provided me by Lázaro Cárdenas Batel, who was governor of Michoacán from 2002 to 2008—the period when La Familia rose to dominance. I met him in Washington, D.C., where he now lives. “There were these incredible scenes in small towns all over Michoacán,” he said. “I would get a call afterward from the mayor. Ten pickup trucks full of armed men had arrived at the municipality. The local police could do nothing. They were outgunned. But the criminals were very respectful. They would tell the mayor, ‘We want to work here. There will be no trouble, no crime, no drunkenness, nothing.’ Then they would take over the town, and enforce their rules. If a boy hit his mother, they would punish him and dump him in the plaza for people to see. If he did it again, they would kill him. It was a strategy to gain popular sympathy, and it worked.” Mayors are typically paid for their hospitality. It is plata o plomo—silver or lead. You take the money or we shoot you and your family.

This composite sketch described a very small town, though, and it left out a lot. In Zitácuaro, a municipality of a hundred and forty thousand, there are many more moving parts than a mayor, some frightened cops, and a band of outlaws rolling up in Chevrolet Suburbans. There is a substantial business class, a banking sector, old money, new money—all there to be milked, but each in its own way. Loan-sharking was widespread in Zitácuaro. La Familia promised to put a stop to that, and did. Forestry is a regional industry, poorly regulated. La Familia confronted loggers, legal and illegal, and “fined” them for deforestation. The mobsters were suddenly environmentalists. “La Familia is very adept at collecting taxes,” one of the former governor’s advisers told me. “Much better than the Treasury is.”

But the first thing to do was impress the right locals that La Familia was serious. There was a prominent family, the Orihuelas, active in business and politics in Zitácuaro. Juan Antonio Ixtláhuac Orihuela, a boyish prodigy known simply as Tonio, was elected mayor of Zitácuaro at twenty-seven. One of Tonio’s uncles is said to have employed a young man named Noé Ayala García. He was from a poor family. He was bright and ambitious, and, some say, involved in illegal activity. La Familia cut off his head. The head was placed, along with the head of another young man, in front of Tonio’s uncle’s car dealership. The message to the Orihuelas was clear.

Last year, Tonio was arrested, on suspicion that he worked for La Familia. But he was released in March, after ten months in prison and a successful appeal, and he is now back in office as mayor.

For straight extortion, the best targets were the town’s nouveau riche. People called them los fresas, the strawberries. There were enough of them in Zitácuaro to constitute a new class, la fresada. They drove new cars, wore flashy clothes, did elaborate home renovations. They were easy to kidnap, and usually able to pay well to get their sons and brothers back alive. They learned eventually to keep their Mercedeses out of sight. But if they had successful businesses there was really nowhere to hide. The family who owned the main local camera shop and film-developing franchise—known behind their backs as los Kodak—were hit hard, I was told. It was impossible to know for sure, however, since nobody who had been kidnapped and had survived would talk to me. And almost nobody, it seemed, ever went to the police. In Mexico, ninety-six per cent of kidnappings are never reported, according to a recent study by a risk-consulting firm. It is a matter, people believe, best handled privately, as the kidnappers prefer. The police might be involved on the other side.

Everyone I talked to in Zitácuaro seemed to know someone who had been kidnapped. I interviewed two teachers, at different schools. Both had had family members kidnapped. The pattern, in Zitácuaro, seems to be that, once a ransom demand is met, the victim is released, more or less unharmed. “But first, before they let you go, they might ask you for another name,” one of the teachers said, his face pinched with disgust. “Somebody you know whose family has some money, who would be good to kidnap.”