Cadereyta Massacre: When Los Zetas Dumped 49 Bodies on the Highway

Daniel de Jesús started working for Los Zetas in 2008 in Tampico. He says he was encouraged to join because they promised him there would be no risks: at that time, they were working with the Gulf Cartel, and the person who invited him was an old childhood friend who promised him 10,000 pesos a week. The position they gave him was “H,” the code name for lookouts.

A month later, he recalls, he was promoted to hitman and sent to work in Nuevo León, where he acted as a lookout and escorted the local bosses. He did this for two years until everything exploded in 2010.

A war began in Nuevo León, in which Los Zetas stopped operating as associates of the Gulf Cartel and became an independent organization that challenged them for control of drug trafficking routes. “And when the war started, I stayed with the Zetas,” he said. In that context of daily clashes and the deaths of leaders, the ringleaders – the Treviño brothers, Z40 and Z42 – began to appoint any hitman with a few months of experience as plaza bosses who could replace those who were killed.

In 2011, Daniel de Jesús Elizondo Ramírez, alias “El Loco,” was appointed plaza boss of Nuevo León, where he commanded approximately 80 people, pickup trucks, and armored 3.5-ton trucks. But Los Zetas brought everything crashing down when, on August 23, 2011, they set fire to the Casino Royale in Monterrey, killing 52 people. Regarding these events, El Loco would later say:

“The day before, two armored trucks had been left in the casino parking lot, intended for the Nuevo León commanders. The casino owner contacted the mayor, and they were taken. For this reason, orders were given to speak with the owner to intimidate him and tell him not to overstep his bounds,” he revealed.

After that incident, the Treviño family knew that things were about to get heated and that the army would likely lay siege to the entire state. So they took urgent measures: El Loco and 15 others were sent to a survival workshop with an Army general, who gave them military training in Chinese stick fighting, using rocket launchers, swimming with gear in rivers, running at night in the jungle, and how to use grenades. “There were only children seven, eight, and nine years old,” he said.

While El Loco had seen a lot, what he would witness later, on the night of May 12 and the early morning of May 13, 2012, would surpass the levels of cruelty he was used to: that day he saw dozens of torsos, arms, and hands of people. It would later be learned that they were 49 migrants who had been decapitated and mutilated by members of the Los Zetas cartel.

These are the testimonies from a legal appeal in the case, which would become one of the most brutal massacres committed during Felipe Calderón’s presidency. This is a collaboration between ARCHIVERO and DOMINGA, revealing that in Mexico, the official truth is always a work in progress.

The call for a job from Los Zetas

It was 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, May 13, 2012. At that hour, the highways of northeastern Nuevo León belong to others. The phone rang when a man told El Loco he had a delivery for him. First, he said he’d meet him at the Los Herrera intersection, but minutes later he called again to say it would be better to meet him at the San Juan intersection, on Federal Highway 40.

Finally, El Loco arrived at the location and found a convoy: two white pickup trucks, a three-and-a-half-ton truck with a red-painted bed, and another car leading the way. That night, he met with José Ricardo Barajas López, alias El Bocinas, who revealed that the delivery was destined for the main plaza of Cadereyta Jiménez. But Daniel de Jesus replied that no, no one had told him anything about that. “No, you’ll stir things up,” he said. So, he started calling the Treviño brothers’ people directly to verify the information. No one answered the phone, so he dialed again. Still no answer.

El Bocinas insisted that the order was to leave them in the main square. When he refused, he said he didn’t know whose bodies they were, but they were there to follow orders. There was no further discussion. From a dump truck, along with other men, they began unloading them with shovels right there on the side of the road, in the darkness of the highway. They were already dismembered. They weren’t whole bodies. They were remnants of what had once been bodies. They finished by leaving a message on a narco-banner. They got into the vehicles. They headed towards Cadereyta Jiménez.

On the way, they crossed paths with four “pandas”—federal highway patrol officers in their Chargers—and two “ratas”—federal police in pickup trucks. They passed them and continued on. No one stopped. No one saw anything.

A man known as El Comandante, who was close to the Treviño brothers, returned the call the next day. El Loco told him about the bodies. There was a silence, and then the commander said, “Really? Seriously?” He then accused him of not controlling the territory, of being a slacker.

“They didn’t have legs, arms, or heads.”

His identity has been withheld from the case file. What is known about him is his own testimony: he had only been working as a lookout for the cartel for two months. His job consisted of monitoring the movements of the police and their rivals. He says that since he started in this line of work, he had been staying in a house in the Hacienda Real neighborhood, in the same municipality of Juárez, part of the Monterrey metropolitan area. He had an assigned spot. A routine. A life that, for the past two months, had ceased to be his own.

On Saturday, May 12, 2012, in the afternoon, he arrived at his lookout point where another member of the Zetas told him to get in his vehicle, that they had to go out and do something. The plaza boss had ordered them to head towards Cadereyta Jiménez. He didn’t explain anything else. It was already early morning on Sunday, May 13, when they arrived at the San Juan intersection, where there is an archway. There, in the darkness, the plaza boss and several other men were already waiting, some known only by their nicknames. Then he saw some pickup trucks arrive, and two men were already unloading bodies. Their description is gruesome: they had no legs, arms, or heads.

The plaza boss ordered him to help. He put on latex gloves and plastic bags and started unloading them. He threw them to the ground. That’s what he said: threw them. On the plaza boss’s orders, he piled them up on the side of the road. At some point, someone spread a white tarp on the ground next to the remains.

When they finished, he got into the same vehicle he had arrived in, with the same Zetas member who had picked him up hours earlier. They returned to the house where he lived. The night continued. The city of Cadereyta still didn’t know what it would discover with the daylight.

The investigation by federal agents

On Monday, May 14, Gustavo Illescas Fabila and Ismael Herrera Mondragón, agents of the Federal Ministerial Police, signed the report that would officially confirm what half of Nuevo León already knew through the news. They traveled to the Monterrey-Reynosa highway, at the entrance to a rural community in Cadereyta Jiménez.

There they were: 49 human torsos. Six female, 43 male. Abandoned on the roadside, next to the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development office. When Illescas Fabila and Herrera Mondragón arrived, there was already a deployment at the scene: members of the National Defense Secretariat, the Federal Police, and the state Attorney General’s Office. The state prosecutor told them that the remains had been found around 2:00 a.m.

Next to them lay a piece of cardboard with a message attributed to the Los Zetas criminal group: “THIS IS FOR ALL THE GULF OPERATIVES, CHAPOS, MARINA, HUACHOS AND THE ENTIRE GOVERNMENT. NO ONE WILL BE ABLE TO DO ANYTHING TO US. YOU’LL ALL BE SORRY. ATT: EL LOCO Z40 AND COMMANDER LAZCANO (sic).”

On one of the columns at the entrance to San Juan, someone had spray-painted the letter Z in black. Around the torsos, 35 pieces of evidence were marked: material that appeared to have been used to wrap the bodies during transport.

The agents went to the nearest ranch. They knocked on the door. No one answered. They moved to the neighboring community and interviewed the residents. They all said the same thing: that they didn’t know anyone involved with criminal groups, that they hadn’t noticed who left the bodies at the entrance to their community. No one saw. No one heard. Illescas Fabila and Herrera Mondragón continued searching different sections of the Monterrey-Reynosa highway. They found no one committing any crimes. Nothing. Afterward, they went to the Forensic Medical Service.

The 49 victims who have no name or voice

On Tuesday, May 15, two days after the massacre, a lookout was on duty. A store parking lot at an intersection in Juárez, Nuevo León. His job: to watch. That’s what he was doing when a gray pickup truck pulled up.

He recognized them immediately. They worked for the same group. There were three of them: a tall, dark-skinned, thin man with a cholo-style haircut and a scarred face; another shorter man, also thin, with a large head; and a woman of medium build with short, black hair. They weren’t looking for him. They were coming to eat tacos at a stand on the same avenue. The lookout approached to greet them and then he overheard them. They were talking loudly, without lowering their voices, like someone recounting a weekend exploit. They were saying they had gone to wreak havoc in a community in Cadereyta Jiménez. That they had dumped the bodies of a large crowd of people from a dump truck. There were more than 40 of them. They had done it on the orders of someone they referred to by a nickname. There had been several of them. It was early Saturday morning.

The lookout didn’t need any further explanation. On Sunday morning, he had seen the news: 49 torsos at the entrance to a rural community, beside the Monterrey-Reynosa highway. What those three were recounting between bites of tacos was exactly that.

The case file doesn’t reveal much more about who the 49 people were who ended up on that highway. The victims have no voice in the official documents. They only appear in the margins, in the testimonies of those who searched for them. One father testified that someone claiming to be from the Zetas called him to say they had his son, that he was missing. They demanded a ransom of one million pesos. He told them he didn’t have that amount.

Other relatives later learned that their son had also been kidnapped. Someone told him: Look, we’re going to let you go. We’ll pretend nothing happened. You don’t know anything, but you run and you’re gone. I’m going to let you go. I owe a lot, it doesn’t matter if they kill me. They say his son ran away and the other hitmen saw him. They cut off one of his feet for running. Then a hand. Finally, his head. The family said they took DNA samples from their father and were one hundred percent sure it was him, so they took him to Tamaulipas to bury him.

Another family, originally from La Paz, Honduras, said their son called twice. The last time was from Tamaulipas, on May 8, five days before they were found. He called to ask for money. A sister answered. He told them he needed the money to pay Los Zetas because they were demanding it. That they were going to be transferred from a place called Tío Beto on Sunday. The sister sent him $650. That was the last time they heard from him.

Anonymous death in a mass grave

What followed the massacre was, in many ways, a second execution. The governor of Nuevo León, Rodrigo Medina de la Cruz, said it would be impossible to identify the remains.

Hours after the discovery, the events were described as a “settling of scores” between criminal groups. The initial official version criminalized the victims. As would later be demonstrated thanks to the identification of very few bodies, the victims were migrants who had disappeared in Tamaulipas.

In terms of reparations, the families of the victims already identified in Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Mexico have reported that, 13 years later, they are still waiting for answers and reparations.

In 2020, both the Committee of Families of Missing Migrants of Central Honduras (Cofamicenh) and the Foundation for Justice and the Democratic Rule of Law (FJEDD) revealed that in 2018, the Nuevo León Attorney General’s Office sent the original case file to the Attorney General’s Office of the Republic via courier. The Redpack company destroyed the case file and the evidence. The Nuevo León Attorney General’s Office did not report this situation until a year and two months later. Among the destroyed evidence was the banner that Los Zetas left next to the bodies that morning. The only object that bore witness to the massacre was lost in a cardboard box at a shipping warehouse.

Since the Cadereyta massacre, only 19 of the 49 victims have been identified: 12 Hondurans, one Guatemalan, four Mexicans, and two Nicaraguans. None of the six women have been identified. There is no sentence or clarification of how the events unfolded, from the victims’ disappearance to the discovery of their remains in Nuevo León.

Currently, only Daniel de Jesús Elizondo Ramírez, Asunción Hernández López, José Ricardo Barajas López, and four other low-ranking hitmen have been arrested: Alberto Daniel Silva, alias El Chaparro or El Tikitiki, 22 years old; Juan José Escobedo Morales, 18, Javier Andrade Tavera, 24, and Asunción Hernández López, alias El Veracruz, 23, all claimed they were only following orders from Los Zetas.

Source: Milenio