Mexican soldiers with five alleged members of the Zetas drug gang during their presentation to the press in Mexico City, June 9, 2011. Alexandre Meneghini/AP

InSight Crime: The Zetas organization was founded by a group of deserters from the special forces of the Mexican Army. Why did they defect to form a crime group?

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera: To understand the Zetas it’s important first to understand the Gulf Cartel. The Gulf Cartel started smuggling alcohol in the 1930s during prohibition in the United States. But the capacity of this group to build, network and develop connections with the government at all levels, specifically in Tamaulipas, gave them the ability to expand in a way that not many groups had.

When cocaine routes changed from the Caribbean to land routes in Mexico in the late 1990s, the Gulf Cartel transformed into a drug trafficking organization by utilizing the networks they had created earlier. They were now dedicated to drug trafficking at a time when cocaine was a very lucrative business. The Gulf Cartel was allegedly protected by authorities and there were even allegations that the Mexican government had connections to the cartel and provided protection to its leader Juan Garcia Ábrego. But after Garcia Ábrego was extradited to the United States in 1996, there was a fight for control and the winner happened to be Osiel Cárdenas Guillén.

The origins of the Zetas are in the special forces of the Mexican Army that were trained in the counterinsurgency against the Zapatistas [leftist militant group] in southern Mexico. But these forces were not used at that time and were instead sent to northern Mexico to conduct operations against drug trafficking when the Mexican government started to work more closely with the United States to fight the so-called war on drugs.



Soon after Cárdenas Guillén took control of the Gulf Cartel in the late 1990s, he met a group of 31 special forces members from the Mexican Army led by Lieutenant Arturo Guzmán Decenas, alias “Z1.” This group would eventually form the armed wing of the Gulf Cartel before later becoming the Zetas. This special forces group stopped being a part of law enforcement and became the enforcement wing of the Gulf Cartel to help protect Nuevo Laredo, the most important city for the cartel.

Nuevo Laredo is a very important passageway in the state of Tamaulipas for drugs heading to the United States because of its connection to routes leading to northeastern US cities, and also because of the fact that US customs does not have the capacity to verify every shipping container that passes through. This is why the Zetas started to assist the operations of the Gulf Cartel in Nuevo Laredo. The Zetas helped the Gulf Cartel consolidate control of the main trafficking plaza.