On the morning of June 7, 2022, an extraordinary event for the Mexico City Metropolitan Area interrupted the news cycle: men in military uniforms, their faces covered, stopped traffic at gunpoint and searched every vehicle. One by one, drivers waited their turn to be inspected at an improvised checkpoint in the center lanes of the Periférico Norte, the most important ring road in the nation’s capital.
“They’re opening trunks […]. I think it’s a kidnapping,” said the woman recording with her cell phone from the passenger seat, just above the dashboard. Her video went viral in minutes, while television channels broadcast the makeshift checkpoint live. “But whose?” replied a man, the driver, who was slowly moving toward the military inspection.
Less than a minute of recording was enough for it to circulate widely on social media. The scene was unusual on the outskirts of Mexico City. A bizarre incident mirrored what has become commonplace in the north of the country: a military operation, in broad daylight, closing streets to arrest a high-ranking drug lord or rescue a politician held captive by organized crime. The viral spread was met with a question: for whom were the Armed Forces mobilizing with such force?
The answer came hours later: it wasn’t a drug trafficker, a government official, or an influencer, but a small business owner who, after arriving at a hotel in Atizapán de Zaragoza, State of Mexico, received a call from a supposed leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel demanding a large sum of money in exchange for not killing her. The condition for her life included that she not answer any calls, except those from her virtual captors, and that she follow precise instructions. A mix of kidnapping and extortion.
When the businesswoman stopped answering her phone, her children became worried. They thought she hadn’t been reached due to an accident, so they called the authorities in the municipality where she was staying. They didn’t know they were communicating with a unique municipal police force in Mexico: it was led by a lieutenant from the Secretariat of the Navy, Fabián Gómez Calcáneo, a man with a reputation for being ruthless.
The search operation was launched. Minutes later, the children contacted the police again: their mother had finally reached out to ask them to gather the ransom money. The municipal police could have abandoned the search and handed it over to federal authorities since it was a kidnapping carried out by organized crime. However, the marines in Atizapán didn’t give up the search. Following the geolocation data from the businesswoman’s phone, they saw that she was heading south on the Periférico ring road toward Mexico City. They decided to act: close the highway and open trunk after trunk until they found her.
“Why did you carry out such a massive operation right on the Periférico Norte?” I asked the lieutenant months later. His face showed a mixture of pride and amusement: the woman had been found and freed unharmed. “Because there was a crime in progress, because you can’t know about a crime and do nothing, because it’s a human life, and because we had to protect her,” he said. Then he leaned back in his reclining chair and declared, “Because that’s how we marines do it. We go hard and fight to the very end for the Mexican people.”
That lieutenant, Fabián Gómez Calcáneo, and his style, “the Atizapán model,” have just been appointed Secretary of Public Security in Colima, one of the most violent states in Mexico.
The Amezcua brothers relinquished control of Colima.
Colima is one of the few states in Mexico that has the dishonor of having, or having had, a cartel bearing its name. It is an unfortunate and exclusive club that includes Sinaloa, Jalisco, Chiapas, Michoacán, and Oaxaca. All located on the Mexican Pacific coast, as there is no Veracruz Cartel, Coahuila Cartel, Tabasco Cartel, or Querétaro Cartel.
The Colima Cartel existed, according to most historians, between 1988 and 2005. It was founded by a clan of brothers named Amezcua Contreras: Jesús, Adán, and Luis, who had learned the drug trafficking business to the United States from members of the Guadalajara Cartel and, later, the Sinaloa Cartel. They had experience, contacts, and the audacity to move drugs, but they lacked power. Compared to other criminal clans, such as the Arellano Félix or the Carrillo Fuentes, they were still small. They needed to differentiate themselves with a multi-million dollar operation to gain the recognition they so desperately craved.
Globalization made their growth possible. The Amezcua brothers found that their native Colima offered a strategic advantage: the port of Manzanillo was open to the world and was already considered one of the ten most important in the world at the end of the last century. Today, it is the most important in Latin America, along with the port of Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán. By controlling Manzanillo, the Amezcua brothers could obtain a novel substance in the drug world, manufactured in China, Pakistan, and India: the chemical precursors for producing synthetic narcotics. The era of clandestine drug labs was beginning, and they were the first to enter it.
While traditional drug traffickers moved marijuana from Michoacán and Guerrero and received cocaine from Colombia and Bolivia, the Amezcuas sought the ingredients in Asia to make amphetamines and methamphetamines, a novelty with a growing market in the United States. Their success was so great that they soon became known as “The Kings of Methamphetamine.”
That position of power allowed them to create their own cartel and negotiate strongly. They were no longer subordinates, but partners of the Sinaloa Cartel and the Milenio Cartel, which years later would morph into the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. They opened routes, conducted business, trafficked ephedrine, and despite all this, the founders of the Colima Cartel managed to remain under the U.S. radar for many years.
Their key: not killing the goose that laid the golden eggs—the port of Manzanillo—by drowning it in deadly infighting.
“They learned from the mistakes made by other organizations, specifically avoiding violent confrontations for control of territory and markets,” states a DEA report on their operations. The same document reports that they were no longer just operating in Asian countries, but also in European ones like Switzerland and Germany. Suddenly, they became a global threat, and the Mexican government decided to halt their rapid expansion.
In 1997, Adán Amezcua was arrested in Colima by federal forces, the same ones who had been receiving his bribes. The following year, 1998, Luis and Jesús were arrested in Jalisco. The rest of the criminal organization began to crumble in 1999, when the Mexican government blamed the three brothers and their accomplices at large for the murder of comedian Paco Stanley over a drug dispute. The new century dawned, and the Colima Cartel was dying without its founders or mid-level leaders.
The remaining members sought refuge in the north of the country. Some traveled to Sinaloa to join the Pacific Cartel; others stopped there and joined the Milenio Cartel. Each splinter group claimed control of the port of Manzanillo. And when no one could agree, and they decided to fight with gunfire, Colima began its descent into the depths of violence.
The Amezcua brothers, imprisoned and distracted by their battle to avoid extradition to the United States, relinquished control of the Colima Cartel, and blood began to flow everywhere.
The dismissal of police officers who failed background checks
When Lieutenant Fabián Gómez Calcáneo took over as police chief of Atizapán on January 1, 2022, the municipality was a disaster. There were uniformed officers assigned to work as gardeners or doormen in gated communities where the wealthiest residents played golf, while working-class neighborhoods complained of a lack of patrols and extortion was rampant.
Police uniforms were incomplete, weapons were old, and some officers waited up to 15 years for a promotion, all while suffering from health problems such as obesity and smoking, or even drug addiction. That year, the perception of safety in the municipality was at rock bottom.
“I set three conditions,” recalls Lieutenant Gómez Calcáneo. “First: no one could ask me for bribes, and anyone who did would be prosecuted. Second: no resident of the municipality could use police officers as private bodyguards; they would all return to public service. And third: the values of the Mexican Navy—honor, duty, loyalty, and patriotism—had to be instilled in the police.” To the lieutenant’s surprise, the mayor of Atizapán, Pedro Rodríguez Villegas, accepted his conditions. Following this approval, he personally selected an elite team of 23 members of the Armed Forces. The situation was critical: Atizapán was experiencing an early stage of criminal contagion. Criminals claiming to belong to powerful groups, such as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel or La Nueva Familia Michoacana, were infiltrating the city across the border with Naucalpan and Cuautitlán. These borders exist only on maps and in real life represent a street, a traffic light, a planter.
The mission was both simple and complex: to make Atizapán a model of municipal policing in prevention and response. The plan included firing more than 400 officers who failed their background checks and polygraph tests, identifying ghost employees and confiscating their uniforms, uncovering budget leaks, and treating police officers as public safety professionals. Municipal police salaries increased by up to 40%, and new uniforms, patrol cars, and weapons were purchased. Training, exercise, and firearms practice became mandatory.
“If no one steals, there’s enough for everything,” he said when he invited me to the inauguration of the Atizapán police gym. It was a new facility in an abandoned shack where it’s believed commanders secretly shared bribes. “Everyone knows, including the marines who are with me, that anyone who takes money that isn’t theirs will be personally taken to jail and have their cell door slammed shut,” he insisted, proudly observing the transformation of that corrupt space.
Morale began to rise with the operations. Unlike other municipal police forces, which avoid confronting organized crime, the Atizapán police began to believe they had the resources to take on the worst elements in the country. They rescued the kidnapped businesswoman from the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, arrested members of the Beltrán Leyva Cartel, kept the Sinaloa Cartel at bay in the municipality, and dismantled gangs of Colombian and Venezuelan thieves with ties to Mexico City cartels.
When common criminals saw this, a chain reaction ensued. Chats among car part thieves and truck robbers arrested by the police revealed their fear of “the Marines”—that is, the municipal police officers trained and steeped in the mindset of the Mexican Navy. “Don’t go to Atizapán anymore, the Marines are there and they’re really tough,” they texted each other. Suddenly, the invisible border between the territory that Lieutenant Fabián was watching over and the other municipalities seemed like a physical wall, a barrier that the criminals didn’t want to climb.
The numbers backed up the police work: by 2025, Naucalpan and Cuautitlán had a perception of insecurity of nearly 90%, while Atizapán, its border neighbor, was just slightly above 20%, making it the municipality with the greatest sense of security in the State of Mexico. Vehicle theft fell by 70% and residential burglary by 65%. Reports of extortion increased as a result of the growing trust between residents and police.
The “Atizapán model,” its creator told me, was a blend of improving the working conditions of the police, unwavering honesty, community engagement, and a firm hand against crime, which earned it recognition in Mexico and even Colombia. The lieutenant explained it to me in his office, where one of his favorite “decorations” hung: a poster of the movie Cobra with Sylvester Stallone firing indiscriminately, but altered with the lieutenant’s face and the phrase: “Crime is a disease, and I am the cure.”
Under that poster, the lieutenant finished his book, Public Security with Intelligence-Based Strategies, last year, in which he detailed his working model, convinced that it is replicable in other parts of Mexico. The publisher Tirant Lo Blanch sold like hotcakes at the Guadalajara International Book Fair, and interest in him skyrocketed. A strange and fascinating character: a police officer who is also a marine, who fights crime, who writes books, and who is decorated internationally. Weeks after the launch of his book, his life would take a 180-degree turn.
The CJNG and other drug cartels escalated the violence in Colima.
At the end of January, Lieutenant Fabián Gómez Calcáneo received a long-awaited call: he was invited to become the new Secretary of Public Security in Colima, given the results he had achieved in Atizapán. A significant leap from municipal to state security.
The news came as a complete surprise: he received it while preparing for another presentation of his book at the International Book Fair at the Palacio de Minería, and the job offer came with the backing of the Secretary of Security and Citizen Protection, Omar García Harfuch. His boss, Mayor Pedro Rodríguez Villegas, gave him the support to step down from his current duties and prepare for the new assignment.
“It’s not an easy decision, of course, but I’m here to serve my country wherever they put me,” the lieutenant told me, while the news was still just a rumor and he was packing his bags to move some 650 kilometers away from home. “I will deliver results wherever I am.”
But Colima isn’t “wherever I am.” It’s the land of the Amezcua Contreras family and their offspring. In 2005, when the Colima Cartel ceased to exist, the fight for the port of Manzanillo drew in the Sinaloa Cartel, the Milenio Cartel, and Los Zetas, who were already seeking independence from the Gulf Cartel.
2006 arrived, and with it, the beginning of the “war on drugs.” While the nation’s attention was focused on the disintegration of Michoacán and Guerrero, Colima and its 730,000 inhabitants were relegated to the back burner of national security priorities. The first mutilated kidnappings, executions in public, and massacres appeared. In 2010, former governor Silverio Cavazos Ceballos was assassinated outside his home, and the message was loud and clear to the people of Colima: no one was safe.
The struggle for control of the seaport was compounded by other illegal activities: the sale and consumption of methamphetamines, extortion, fuel theft, and sexual exploitation. And in 2015, the escape of El Chapo Guzmán Loera revitalized the Sinaloa Cartel in Colima. Other criminal groups were forced to reinforce their presence along the Pacific coast. Thus emerged the Jalisco New Generation Cartel as a conglomerate of violent and sophisticated criminals determined to place their leader, El Mencho, in the position of power once held by Guzmán Loera.
The stakes were raised in Colima. The battle ceased to be fought with weapons and began to be reinforced with technology: high-caliber weapons, armored vehicles, drones. Businesspeople, politicians, and even judges, such as federal judge Uriel Villegas Ortiz, fell victim to the violence.
A coalition of citizens involved in state security also emerged. Groups of mothers searching for their missing loved ones, artists for peace, committed musicians, conscientious businesspeople, and police officers participating in disarmament campaigns all formed. And with them came the demand for security leaders with clean records. “This is how one of the most peaceful entities in the country came to be positioned (in 2022) as an entity that was recommended not to visit, as it reached the number 14 spot of the 50 most violent cities in the world, with a rate of 59.11 homicides per 100 thousand inhabitants, dethroning Mexican cities that for decades were recognized for being violent.
“Today, bodies found in bags, dismembered, shot, tortured, kidnapped, etc., are part of daily life in the state of Colima, which, without much surprise, observes and perceives this situation as commonplace […]. Even at the end of 2022, the Federal Government announced that the state continued to lead the nation in homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants, with 295, a 409% increase compared to March of that year, with the figure skyrocketing in just seven months,” reads the study “Violent Colima: From Fear to Indifference” by researcher Liliana Yonué Covarrubias Hernández.
The names of the protagonists in the current battles have changed. Today they are called Los Chapitos, La Mayiza, and Mencho’s Special Forces. The battle is the same: the port of Manzanillo. As it unfolds, Colima remains the state with the highest homicide rate. It is also the only state where homicide is the fifth leading cause of death for women.
And it is one of the most dangerous territories to be a police officer. That’s where Lieutenant Fabián Gómez Calcáneo was told he would be taking his security model. A test only for the brave.
The double homicide of Mario Delgado’s relatives
On January 30, Lieutenant Fabián Gómez Calcáneo relinquished his post as Public Security Commissioner in Atizapán to prepare for his move to Colima, currently governed by Indira Vizcaíno Silva of the Morena party. He did so in a ceremony at the Government Palace in front of the mayor and the police officers who had served with him for 48 months. In a profession where the departure of the police chief usually brings relief and happiness, the reassignment of the “marine” produced a mixture of sadness and pride.
“Today, no door is closing, no position is being handed over. Today, a shift simply ends. We didn’t come to Atizapán to keep up appearances or pretend to do the right thing. We came to transform, to break things down, to purge, to remind everyone that the uniform isn’t a privilege, it’s a great moral burden,” he said in his farewell address.
When the cameras were off, he approached his colleagues and charged each of them with protecting what they had gained: “Keep at it, you bastards, don’t let up; don’t neglect what you’ve won; keep pushing, because they’re going to try to take advantage of this moment to get back into Atizapán; not a single damn bribe, okay? No bullshit; stand firm, you bastards, stand firm; be worthy of the uniform, don’t let me down, because I’ll come back and set you straight.”
“If I were a criminal, I’d better leave the state, because the real boss has arrived,” said one municipal police officer after the ceremony. Another nodded in agreement. “Now you’ll see what’s what,” one more replied. The fear seemed to be shifting sides.
Another marine has taken over the position. Lieutenant Daniel Gerard Vázquez Mercado will continue the work in Atizapán, where the police have no doubt that the model will be replicated in Colima.
Hours later, Lieutenant Fabián Gómez Calcáneo received more news on his phone. While his suitcases were still open, an armed criminal cell took advantage of the early morning hours of February 1st to carry out a double femicide in the Placetas Estadio neighborhood in the capital of Colima: María Eugenia Delgado and her daughter Sheila Amezcua Delgado, aunt and cousin, respectively, of the federal Secretary of Education, Mario Delgado, were shot to death in their home. This was how the new assignment was received.
The news reminded me of another phrase I heard at the lieutenant’s farewell ceremony: the members of organized crime in Colima had better learn to swim, because it’s easier to go around the territory occupied by the marines than to cross it.
It’s always preferable to swim with sharks than to get in the way of Lieutenant Fabián Gómez Calcáneo and his police officers.
Source: Milenio
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