The Clowns of Narco Traffickers : Between Balloons, Cakes and Executions. Cases in Mexico

One of the strangest murders in the history of organized crime in Mexico occurred on the coast of Los Cabos, Baja California. It was October 18, 2013, and a party was being held in the Ocean House party room of the luxurious Marbella Hotel, which turned into a funeral in the evening.

The jet set was gathered at the celebration, according to reports. Among the attendees were soccer player Jared Borgetti, the vocalist of the band El Recodo Luis Antonio López, the family of boxer Julio César Chávez, and more, who toasted to the life of the man who had brought them together on the shores of the Gulf of California: Francisco Rafael Arellano Félix, the older brother of Benjamín, Carlos, Eduardo, Ramón and Javier, the clan that founded the Tijuana Cartel in the 1980s.

El Pelon, as he was nicknamed, celebrated his 63rd birthday. And he did it in the style of the drug lords: everything in excess, nothing with restrictions. Waiters, singers, dancers, acrobats and even a magician entertained the man who was in prison for 15 years for drug trafficking; there was also entertainment for the children who accompanied their parents. But one guest would steal the spotlight: a hitman clown.

Around eight o’clock at night, the clown pulled a 9 millimeter pistol from his clothing and shot the birthday boy at point-blank range. With five shots he killed him in front of his guests, who ran for cover, as recorded by a hotel security camera. Immediately, the clown hitman took off his clothes to flee without being recognized: a pink wig and oversized shoes were left behind.

Investigations into the case will conclude that the killer has an unoriginal nickname: he is known as El Payaso for his modus operandi of infiltrating parties with his face painted. He kills in Baja California and Baja California Sur under the orders of Chino Anthrax, the flamboyant hitman boss of Mayo Zambada, founder of the Sinaloa Cartel and mortal enemy of the Arellano Felix family.

In the following years, more criminals with the same nickname would appear: El Payaso is the nickname in the ranks of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel of Fabian Urbino Morales, who participated in the October 14, 2019 ambush against state police in Aguililla, Michoacan. He and his accomplices killed 13 uniformed officers who entered without permission the municipality where Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, El Mencho, was born.

And on December 8, 2023, Mexico learned that La Nueva Familia Michoacana also had its own Clown: Juan Carlos Garduño Martínez, plaza chief of Texcaltitlán, State of Mexico, where he was lynched to death by neighbors fed up with the collection of “derecho de piso” (a kind of “floor fee”) and torture as a method of pressuring for payment.

Other records in the press tell of a Clown who sold drugs in Tlaltizapán, Morelos; another Clown who stole cars with violence in the capital of Oaxaca; one who on weekends was called Puchungazo and the rest of the days kidnapped in Mexico City.

What makes crime hide behind a red nose?

CJNG hitman clowns and other nightmarish cases

Psychologists have a name for the fear felt – and I include myself – by those who encounter a clown: coulrophobia, an aversion experienced by millions of people around the world.

Canadian psychiatrist Rami Nader, an expert in this field, believes that coulrophobia is triggered by the clown’s makeup, which hides his true identity and intentions. And British psychologist Frank T. McAndrew claims that the crux of the fear lies in suspicion: those who interact with a clown never know whether they are about to get a pie in the face or be the victim of some humiliating prank. The clown’s unusual physical characteristics only add to that uncertainty.

Mystery and unpredictability are two qualities that appeal to members of organized crime. That could explain, for example, the terrifying nights in September 2019 in Camargo, Tamaulipas, where hitmen from the Jalisco New Generation Cartel strolled through the main streets wearing clown masks. Their hidden identity and the uncertainty of what they would provoke caused the community, accustomed to violence, to panic and lock themselves in their homes. The sadistic prank had had the desired effect among the neighbors: to reaffirm, without firing a bullet, the cartel’s dominance.

There are more reasons to fear clowns, experts say. The exaggerated facial features can be intimidating, the brightly colored costumes can be uncomfortable to look at, and people can inherit the fear from a family member. Although the most common reasons are the negative image of clowns in popular culture and an actual unpleasant experience with these circus figures.

In 1940, the writer Bill Finger gave Batman his great archenemy: a villain who doesn’t aspire to concentrate power or money, but to unleash chaos, and to personify that criminal mind he turned to an unpredictable clown. Thus The Joker was born. In 1978, detectives in Illinois, USA, found in the garage of Democrat John Wayne Gacy’s house the corpses of dozens of children and adolescents who had been sexually abused; the killer had lured them with his double identity, Pogo, a clown with a dark red smile and blue eyelids who murdered 33 youngsters.

In 1990, a movie traumatized the millennial generation: That, by writer Stephen King, who invented Pennywise, a murderous and almost pedophile clown, to terrorize seven children trying to stop his infanticidal streak. And many others have been protagonists of horror cinema, from Killer Clowns from Outer Space (1988) to amateur shorts with Ronald McDonald, the image of McDonalds, as a deranged killer.

In those representations we could find the answer to why the forced disappearance of municipal policeman Juan Carlos B., who on February 5, 2020 was taken from his home in Jacona, Michoacán, remains unpunished. The hitmen did it in broad daylight, at four o’clock in the afternoon, so it was likely that someone would see them and report the abduction. But those who took him had a strategy: to dress up as clowns to increase the terror. There were no witnesses and the policeman is still missing.

Kidnapper Bomboncito and other clowns in Santa Martha Acatitla

In 2014, I traveled to the Centro de Readaptación Social Varonil de Santa Martha Acatitla following the trail of an uncomfortably laughable fact: in that prison there were 130 clowns accused of all kinds of crimes, from homicide to rape.

They were the members of a clown workshop in the penitentiary facilities. Some of them had already combined a criminal career with children’s parties before they were locked up, like the kidnapper Bomboncito; others had discovered their vocation for red noses in prison, like Feluchón, accused of drug dealing.

Watching them take juggling, acting or makeup classes in the main auditorium of the Santa Martha Acatitla men’s prison was like entering a madhouse: there were clowns with barely a layer of white makeup that made them look terrifying, with shredded clothes, with extra-large cardboard shoes, smelling of marijuana, solvent or sweat.

The teacher was as peculiar as his students: Martín Eliseo Rodríguez Aguirre, better known as Chispín, a street clown who founded the Mexican Union of Popular Workers and who, as a social service, went to the maximum security prison of El Altiplano to make dangerous men laugh, such as kidnapper Daniel Arizmendi, El Mochaorejas, or Rafael Caro Quintero, founder of the Guadalajara Cartel.

I still remember Puchungazo telling jokes about life in prison and the best methods to kill someone and pass it off as a suicide. His character always carried a straw in his hand that pretended to be a knife to bury anyone who crossed him. When my visit to the jail was over, he laughed showing me his yellow, drug-eaten teeth. “When are you inviting me to your house?” he said and, I admit, I felt like I was seven years old again and saw Pennywise the clown come out of the shower drain.

Organized crime knows well that the clowns’ access to their clients’ homes is worth gold. People pay to invite a stranger who often arrives with his face painted and in costume, making it difficult to know his real identity. And while he does his routine of jokes or plays with the children, he can keep an eye on what is in the house: the cars, the appliances, the jewelry, the money.

In 2018, the streets of Acapulco, Guerrero, saw an atypical parade: clowns carrying banners and shouting at the top of their lungs instead of using their high-pitched, childish voices. Motorists were told that it was a peace demonstration, but reporters were told, with fear, that they were gathered to ask for help, as local criminals were forcing them to spy on their clients and warn who might be kidnappable or extortable.

Some clowns who refused to work as spies had been tortured, their colleagues revealed. Still others, faced with the danger of being killed, had handed over the requested information with an enormous burden of guilt. They all regretted that their profession, perfected to make people laugh, was deformed into the weeping of a family celebrating a child’s birthday one day and attending the father’s funeral the next.

A dead clown turns up in San Pedro Garza, Nuevo León

A similar claim was made in 2016 by the then mayor of San Pedro Garza, Nuevo León: cartels should stop using childish symbols in their crimes. The PAN political party member Mauricio Fernández made this criticism when the body of an elderly man was found in his municipality. His attackers had hanged and abandoned him wearing a clown mask, they even painted the word “Cochi” and a finger on his chest, a reference to snitches who report criminals to the authorities. Thanks to the mask, the killers managed to get the crime covered in the media.

And recently, on Halloween 2024, two hitmen took advantage of people taking to the streets in costumes to go unnoticed and murdered the owner of a pharmacy in the Campestre Aragón neighborhood, in the Gustavo A. Madero borough of Mexico City. Perhaps because the masks were poorly visible, the clown hitmen missed their shots and, instead of killing the shopkeeper, murdered his 7-year-old son.

When the capital’s police reconstructed the crime and found the motorcycle the killers fled on, it was linked to several crimes committed by the Anti-Union Force, the criminal group seeking to displace La Unión Tepito.

Organized crime thrives on symbols and has chosen one that makes us uncomfortable. It even terrifies many of us. And it uses our deepest fears to subdue us, to ensure that we remain silent in the face of its atrocities. We already know the reason: behind some clowns, there’s a story that doesn’t make us laugh.

Source: Milenio