But the power of organized crime in Mexico now holds hostage large areas of the country, including major cities, such as Monterrey, and terrorizes the rest with performances of stupefying violence. Calderón’s deployment of the Army, first justified by the military’s relatively clean reputation, has only besmirched that reputation, as soldiers commit a rising number of crimes against civilians, and fail to resist financial temptation. Four senior commanders, including three generals, one of them Calderón’s former No. 2 at the defense ministry, were arrested in May on suspicion of working for organized crime. (No formal charges have been filed.) More than fifty-six thousand troops have deserted under Calderón.

Some Guadalajarans find cold comfort by looking north, to Monterrey, where security has been in free fall for the past two years. It is Mexico’s third-largest city, and its wealthiest. But the police have lost control of the streets. Kidnapping, extortion, robbery, and murder are commonplace. The number of killings there tripled between 2009 and 2010, then nearly doubled again in 2011. Army checkpoints now lace the city. Guadalajara has experienced nothing close to Monterrey’s nightmare. What happened there? The Zetas and the Gulf cartel started a war. The local police reportedly went to work en masse for the cartels. Now the Zetas are pillaging the city.

A police substation in Santa Fe. “You don’t know who is connected with whom, or where the threats are coming from,” an officer said.

The Zetas are unlike other Mexican crime groups. Their founders were deserters from the Mexican military’s élite special forces, recruited in the late nineteen-nineties as bodyguards and enforcers for the leader of the then formidable Gulf cartel. The cartel paid many times what the military did. The Zetas’ numbers grew. Trained as paratroopers and intelligence operatives, they introduced a paramilitary element to narco-trafficking, outgunning police units. They ambushed the Army. They seized plazas and drug routes from other cartels, with an efficiency and a brutality not seen before. Beheadings became their signature, along with castrations with genitals stuffed in mouths and corpses with a “Z” carved into the flesh. Their ranks swelled with infusions from a notorious Guatemalan counter-insurgency unit, the Kaibiles.

Traditional crime groups like Sinaloa were family-based, often deeply tied to a region. The Zetas were military. Their mission was to kill and destroy. When they outgrew their role as enforcers, they turned on their employers. They beat the Gulf cartel down to insignificance. Their only real rival now is Sinaloa. The Zetas, who are estimated to have more than ten thousand fighters, control virtually the entire east coast of Mexico, and have laid claim to several of the busiest cargo crossing points on the U.S. border, including Matamoros, Reynosa, and Nuevo Laredo. It is believed that they are pushing west because they want to open a corridor to a major Pacific port, such as Manzanillo, just south of Guadalajara.

The Zetas approach a town, a city, or a state as a shakedown opportunity. They fight for the right to terrorize a community, and bleed it dry. They also threaten the central government. One of their mantas, hung from a bridge in Monterrey in February, said, “The government must make a pact with us because if not we will have to overthrow it and take power by force.” A recent government study found that the Zetas are now active in seventeen of Mexico’s thirty-two states. (The same study found that Sinaloa is active in sixteen.) They have even moved into the state of Sinaloa, where they are reportedly fighting ferociously, village by village, for control of Chapo Guzmán’s home turf.

The Zetas traffic drugs, but their specialties are kidnapping, extortion, murder, robbery, human smuggling, and product piracy. Their punishments for failure to pay protection money are extravagant and meant to be cautionary. Last August, they firebombed a casino in Monterrey whose owner had not paid, killing at least fifty-two customers. They kidnap migrant workers, mainly from Central America, and demand ransom from their impoverished families. Some of their massacres make no obvious sense. In 2010, seventy-two migrants were found dead at a ranch near the U.S. border. In 2011, a mass grave with the remains of a hundred and ninety-three people, presumably migrants, was discovered in the desert in Tamaulipas. Migrants are now crossing further west, in Sonora, hoping to avoid the Zetas. Mexico’s state-owned oil company, Pemex, says that the Zetas have begun tapping its pipelines, stealing millions of barrels of crude oil a year.

The Zetas’ esprit is remarkable. When Zetas are captured, other Zetas break them out of prison. There have been dozens of attacks, riots, escapes. In December, 2010, a hundred and fifty-one Zetas broke out of jail in Nuevo Laredo. This February, twenty-nine escaped from a prison in Monterrey, but not before stabbing and bludgeoning to death forty-four incarcerated members of the Gulf cartel. Given the group’s reputation for steely invincibility, it is not surprising that gangbangers across Mexico want to be Zetas. Simply dropping the name does wonders, reportedly, for the success rate of extortion schemes. But fake Zetas risk retribution from real Zetas. And the Zetas’ torture methods, including decapitation, are always available for review on the Internet.

Rival cartels have often been just as bad. La Familia Michoacana nearly matched the Zetas beheading for beheading during a struggle for supremacy in the west-coast state of Michoacán, a struggle that La Familia won. (Afterward, La Familia splintered.) And, when the Zetas began to threaten Jalisco, the Jalisco Cartel New Generation formed a squad called the Mata Zetas (Zeta Killers)—said to be led by El 85, and subsidized by Chapo Guzmán—which carried the fight into the Zetas’ heartland. The Mata Zetas released a strikingly composed, politically tinged video announcing their plans to annihilate their degenerate foes, and in September, 2011, the Jalisco group dumped thirty-five bodies on a busy avenue in Veracruz at rush hour. Two weeks later, thirty-two more bodies were found in three safe houses around the city. Veracruz is Zetas territory. It is also the main seaport on the east coast of Mexico, and therefore interesting to Chapo Guzmán—useful, clearly, for cocaine moving northward, and for meth chemicals arriving from overseas. More immediately, though, the Mata Zetas’ plan was simply to open a rearguard path to try to slow the Zetas’ advance on Jalisco. The corpses thrown under the Millennium Arches in November were a retaliation.

Mexican election campaigns are short—ninety days for the Presidential contest, and usually less for state and local contests. Enrique Peña Nieto bravely launched his campaign in Guadalajara, historically a PAN stronghold. By mid-April, the city was saturated with political advertising. Every taxi was festooned, every wall and billboard. Television and radio often seemed like a solid wave of slogans, jingles, appeals, attacks. By far the most numerous “spots” were the PRI’s. The PRI candidate for the governorship of Jalisco, Aristóteles Sandoval Díaz, is the current mayor of Guadalajara. He looks like a provincial version of Peña Nieto—young, guapo, prone to platitudes. Sandoval began the year by declaring that he would “armor” his campaign against infiltration by organized crime. In his previous campaigns, he reportedly received financial backing from several Sinaloa cartel mobsters, among them Ignacio Loya Alatorre, identified by federal prosecutors as Nacho Coronel’s money manager, who was assassinated in 2005, and Tony Duarte, who was a car thief before he became a prominent Guadalajara businessman and alleged Sinaloa bagman (he was assassinated, in Puerto Vallarta, in 2011). Sandoval’s declaration may have been reassuring to voters: he is far ahead in the polls.

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Does organized crime favor one party? Or do particular cartels back particular parties? Not notably. Each of the major parties has had corruption scandals. The PRI’s pre-2000 dominance meant that most, if not all, of the agreements, known as acuerdos, between organized crime and officialdom during that period involved the PRI. But that was when the PRI was the only game in town. Even López Obrador, the P.R.D. candidate, originally made his name as a PRI leader. With the rise of other parties, new acuerdos were made. The narcos are most concerned with local politicians and police and military units. They want to be able to land this load at this airfield. Their acuerdos tend to be with individuals. If they prefer to work with one candidate for mayor, or governor, they may intimidate or, in the case of the Zetas, even kill his opponent. But the party affiliation of politicians, let alone Army or police commanders, is irrelevant.

Joanna Jablonska Bayro is a sociology student. For her doctoral dissertation, she has been interviewing twenty Guadalajarans about how they perceive their city and their security—where and why they feel unsafe, how they protect themselves from risks.

“People fight hard to maintain the fantasy that Guadalajara is an oasis of tranquillity,” she told me. “With the corpse dumping at the Millennium Arches, there was a lot of effort by the authorities to show that the dead were all narcos. Then the news came out that the victims were ordinary people. That’s when people here panicked. Then, about a month later, the authorities announced that they had caught the killers, and that, no, the victims were all narcos. They were trying to reëstablish some equilibrium, some sense of safety in the city. But who knows what’s true?”

Nobody, rich or poor, in Jablonska’s study feels completely confident that the government will tell them the truth. And everyone is mortally afraid of the Zetas. “After this recent narcobloqueo, all the mantas that went up were about protecting the people from the Zetas. The Zetas are the incarnation of the threat.”

Attitudes toward the security forces break down along class lines. The upper and middle classes are still enthusiastic about the Army, the poor far less so. As for the local police, people with more resources regard their corruption as only a nuisance, while the poor find them dangerous: “They’ll put drugs on me, and cause me a lot of problems.” Everyone in Jablonska’s study feels that Mexican social and political institutions, including the state itself, are weakening. “Some of this institutional weakness comes from the post-PRI fragmentation of power,” Jablonska said. Everyone has lost confidence in the rule of law. Nearly anyone who can afford it, including the lower middle class, now lives in a gated community, with private security. “People in more precarious neighborhoods must build their own networks of protection. They rely on pit bulls, family networks, and, of course, organized crime. They never call the police.”

Ninety-eight per cent of serious crimes in Mexico go unpunished, according to a recent report by the Monterrey Institute of Technology. For kidnapping, which is rarely reported, the figure might be even higher. Kidnapping is the horror lapping at the edge of nearly everyone’s mind, and it’s known that kidnapping is one of the Zetas’ favorite crimes. Corrupt police are often involved—one of the reasons it’s rarely reported. Private security companies seek to capitalize on the public’s panic. When you read a crime story online, the advertisement blinking alongside the text is often an offer of private protection for you and your family against secuestro—kidnapping. If someone disappears and no ransom call comes, should it even be called kidnapping? Human-rights groups estimate that more than five thousand people have disappeared in Mexico in the past five years.

Mexican TV provides a P.R. forum for the police and the military. “People love these big drug busts, these acts of bravery,” Jablonska said. “They have real value.” The police and the Army play to that taste, with a constant stream of handcuffed ruffians presented to TV cameras. Behind the captured narcos stand black military helicopters. Drugs and cash and weapons, some gold-plated, are laid out on banquet tables. The government even produces YouTube-ready videos with dramatic musical intros, graphics, and sleek institutional logos. (And now: the Confession of La Barbie!)

Weary of pantallas, I tried to get to the bottom of a single bust—the “historic” meth-lab raid in Tlajomulco that confiscated some four billion dollars’ worth of drugs. Were the drugs seized really worth that much? Well, no. The more experts I consulted, the lower the number sank. Maybe it was a billion, if the meth was pure. Then was it really fifteen tons of “pure meth,” as widely reported? Well, no. There had been some confusion. There were precursor chemicals. A lot of equipment—gas tanks, reactors. Maybe it was eleven pounds of pure meth. Eleven pounds? Nobody wanted to speak on the record, but the spokesman for the federal prosecutor’s office in Guadalajara, a young man named Ulises Enríquez Camacho, finally said, “Yes, five kilos.” Eleven pounds. The fifteen tons had been methamphetamine ready for packing, according to the Army. But it was not “a finished product,” and there had been only five kilos of crystal. In the U.S., where meth is often sold by the gram, that amount might be worth five hundred thousand dollars. So the reported value had been inflated by a factor of eight thousand?

I wanted to get the Army’s side of the story, so I went to the headquarters of the Fifteenth Military Zone, whose troops had carried out the raid. The base is in Zapopan, northwest of Guadalajara. The chief of staff, General Gerardo Wolburg Redondo, said he would need permission to speak to me. He later phoned. Permission denied, he said, by Mexico City, because of Article 41, a provision of the Mexican constitution that forbids the diffusion of government propaganda during an election-campaign period.

Article 41 had suddenly become a popular law in government offices, I found. Sorry, love to chat, but—Article 41. People were happy to talk off the record, however, about the Army’s operations in Jalisco. It had been raiding meth labs at a torrid rate—sixty-three in the past year, by the Army’s count, with many of those in Tlajomulco. Arrests almost never happened, though. Why not? Ulises Enríquez explained that it was difficult for troops to arrive at a meth-lab site without neighbors seeing them approach and warning the narcos to flee. Why, I asked, would the neighbors do that? They were paid lookouts, he said. How did the Army know where the labs were? Different neighbors, made suspicious by high traffic or strong chemical odors, called—or, more often, e-mailed—the police or the Army. Anonymous denunciations.

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This scenario was derided by most of the people I consulted, in law enforcement and elsewhere. Narcos ratted out rival narcos—that was normally how the authorities learned things. Or the narcos and certain authorities came to an agreement. What civilian would drop a dime on a cartel? That could be suicidal. There was no way to know who would be on the other end of that call or e-mail. Anyway, labs that were up to date on their protection payments usually had nothing to fear. Meth labs operated in networks, moving materials and personnel between facilities to maximize production and minimize risk. Losses from seizures were a cost of doing business, and rarely catastrophic. The networks in Jalisco were very big now. Sinaloa had recently ramped up production. The remnants of La Familia Michoacana had moved labs here, getting them out of strife-torn southern Michoacán. But the commander of the Fifth Military Region, General Fausto Lozano Espinosa, was on a rampage. He wanted meth labs. The Army had almost no field intelligence, but the government needed dramatic busts, headlines, and so an acuerdo had seemingly been reached. The locations of some labs would be disclosed, and they would be busted, but there would be no one there—no guards, and certainly no chemists or cooks, who were highly valued employees.

The Army’s version of the great February bust was doubted by U.S. officials, too. One told me that it had actually happened two weeks before the announcement claimed. The press release went out to the wider world before the drugs were properly tested, along with photographs of masked soldiers standing among blue barrels filled with yellow powder. According to this official, the Army often told no one, certainly not the police, and sometimes not even the federal prosecutor’s office, about its raids—not even afterward—until it had a reason, usually political, to do so. It was all about the credit. Evidence collection and preservation were not part of the Army’s mission—that was the federal prosecutor’s job. No one seemed to be in a position to question the wisdom of smashing up places, learning nothing, carrying off drugs, and calling it a blow against organized crime.

The great bust took place near a village called Buena Vista, at a “ranch” called Rancho Villarreal. Although the Army had closed its investigation almost immediately, Ulises Enríquez said that the federal prosecutor still had an investigation open. So I asked him who owned Rancho Villarreal. He said that it was difficult to determine. It was a party venue, really, with a swimming pool, a bar, cabanas. It was for weddings, quinceañeras, company picnics. But the owner of a property couldn’t be held responsible for everything that tenants did there. When I asked around about the disposition of the drugs seized at Rancho Villarreal, someone close to the case told me that he believed the product had been quietly returned to its owners, for an unknown price.

Víctor Hugo Ornelas and I went to Buena Vista. I had been there a couple of times before, checking out Rancho Villarreal, but the villagers had been reluctant to talk. They claimed not to remember the Army raid, let alone the narcolaboratorio. I believed I was endangering them just by lingering. Hugo, however, knew people there. A young guy I’ll call Ramón took us out on the back roads of Buena Vista in his 4 x 4. “Some of the kids around here really look up to the narcos,” Ramón said. “The girls, especially. It’s too bad. They go to their parties, enjoy the narcocorridos, get pregnant. One pregnant girl’s boyfriend disappeared. We assume he’s dead. But the other pregnant girls are still happy. They want the babies. The guys are from Sinaloa and Michoacán. Some from Jalisco. They all have money, nice trucks, nice ranchos.

“The priest likes having the narcos here,” Ramón went on. “Some are quite religious. They fixed up his church. They get their kids baptized there.”

We were bumping down a deeply rutted road. It was rough, open country—plenty of room for clandestinity. “Those ranchos with the big walls, the heavy gates?” Ramón said, pointing out homesteads visible here and there. “Those are all narquitos. They have watchdogs, fighting cocks. You can tell. Palm trees.”

“Yeah, palm trees,” Hugo said. “What is it with narcos and palm trees?”

“I don’t know. They just have to have them.” They laughed.

We stopped and gazed down a very long driveway at a huge new house. The driveway looked practically impassable, even for a 4 x 4. “They can afford to improve the roads,” Ramón said. “But sometimes they prefer an ugly road. It lets them see their enemies coming.”

Were the cartels fighting?

“No. Not right now. It seems like La Familia Michoacana is dominant around here at the moment. But most of the labs belong to the Jalisco cartel. They employ a lot of lookouts.”

We passed a small airstrip. “That’s for model planes,” Ramón said. “Hobbyists. Soldiers.”

He and Hugo exchanged a look. “Incredible,” Hugo said.

We regained the paved road where we had left my car. Two sedans with big, brightly painted, carefully hand-built model airplanes lashed to their roofs were turning off the road onto the dirt track.

Hugo and I went to Rancho Villarreal. It was at the end of a long, twisting, unpaved road. The brick outer walls were ten feet high. The gate was padlocked, with a warning posted that the property had been sealed by the federal prosecutor. “Who would want to have a wedding out here?” Hugo said. “These places are for money laundering.” He poked in the grass with his cane, spearing a cardboard box, which he lifted for inspection. The box had contained a “Respirator—Full Facepiece,” made by 3M. Respirators were essential meth-lab gear. Hugo stabbed in the grass again. “Military,” he said, lifting a pair of wool khaki gloves with no fingertips. He turned and walked into a log-walled guard hut that I had not noticed before. “Family,” he said, from inside. “Woman”—he lifted, from the trash-strewn floor, a sanitary napkin on the tip of his cane. “Child”—he lifted a tiny pink child’s backpack. “Man”—he lifted a work boot. He bent and picked up a golf ball, and pointed to a set of numbers stamped on it. “We could find out who bought this, possibly, and where,” he said, dropping the ball in his bag.