The Most Dangerous Soccer Match Was Played by Los Zetas vs. Gulf Cartel

On the last day of 2019, an unusual soccer match takes place at the Cieneguillas prison in Zacatecas. The final score is irrelevant in the face of 16 dead.

Good morning, soccer fan! Welcome to the field of the Centro Regional de Reinserción Social Varonil de Cieneguillas, Zacatecas, one of the most violent prisons in Mexico. Come, come in, hurry to the best seat you can find to enjoy the last sporting activity of the year in this prison, where organized crime rules. Settle in among the boys, girls, moms and dads of the inmates who spend the last day of 2019 as a family. 

Uncap the soft drinks, get the food ready and choose your cheer, because the match is about to start. Forget America vs. Chivas or Tigres vs. Rayados teams. You are in front of a true classic of classics, the confrontation between two rivals who hate each other to death and who will literally leave their bodies on the field: this afternoon of December 31, Los Zetas will play against the Gulf Cartel, let the ball roll!

Two rival groups needing to make peace

Sometime in the early winter of 2019, the authorities at the Cieneguillas prison, came up with a “genius” idea: to ease the tension between two antagonistic groups that were threatening to exterminate each other: they organized a sporting event between them that would channel the tension and vent grievances.

“Imagine that bullshit,” laughs Bernardo, a witness to what happened that afternoon. “In a prison full of drugs and weapons, you think of having a soccer match between people who hate each other so they can become friends! If these things in the neighborhood end in blows, what do you expect to happen between pure madmen and crafty people?

Bernardo has agreed to talk to me… in stages. The first half of his trust I gained because we are both soccer fans and play as strikers; the other half is because I have been pursuing this story for quite some time and I think he has taken pity on my five-year efforts. I noticed it on his face on January 18, 2023, when I entered the Cieneguillas prison to donate blankets and, by the way, meet in person those who saw the bloodiest game in Mexico’s history in the front row.

On the day of my visit, Bernardo was incarcerated, although he was counting the days until his release. A clumsy methamphetamine transaction had led him to this infamous prison where more than 1,300 inmates live and keep high-powered rifles in the dormitories -according to the prison authorities themselves- despite being “guarded” by some 33 guards, on shift, with just a few old and soft batons. We exchanged cell phones – in that prison having a cell phone is as common as a pillow – and we agreed that I would wait for his release so he could talk to me freely about what happened on December 31, 2019. In exchange, we joked, I would take him to the Azteca Stadium.

Two years later we are reunited by video call: Bernardo and three friends he met in jail are at an unknown address fleeing the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and I am in Mexico City, digging into a massacre that went unnoticed by most of the media, perhaps because the authorities admitted to the crime the next day, January 1st, while half the press was taking the day off after the New Year’s holidays.

“Do you remember the day we met there ‘inside’? Well, as I told you, it was all complete bullshit. They told us in advance two weeks before that we would be leaving to make peace. Since then I thought ‘either they are idiots or what they want is a bloodbath’,” says Bernardo. His former cellmate, Rodrigo, agrees: at some point, he saw how someone took advantage of the chaos and, in the middle of a pitched battle that broke out after the first half, began to kick a recently decapitated head as if it were a ball.

The offense that started it all: they threw the soft drink at El Diablito’s mother.

Before the game begins, let me tell you about the improvised “stadium” that is the prison in Cieneguillas, Zacatecas. It is a prison built an hour from Fresnillo, which the National Institute of Statistics and Geography last year called “the most violent city in the country.” Outside its cells, life is hard: Cieneguillas went from a peaceful, almost boring town to become the battleground between five groups that fight over its roads to get from the center and west to the north of the country and control the trafficking of drugs and undocumented migrants: La Chapiza, La Mayiza and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, although those who have been fighting the longest in the mining state are Los Zetas – today the Northeast Cartel – and the Gulf Cartel.

This criminal jumble is expressed in the violence of prison, where tension is always high. A look or a misunderstood signal can unleash hell. Every day they live on the verge of a riot like the one that occurred three months before my visit, according to Martin, who accompanies Bernardo and Rodrigo.

“Shortly before you arrived, a riot broke out. A brawl, as the directors say. It turns out that the shot caller at the prison, the one who controlled everything – not the authorities – a guy they call ‘El Diablito’ got angry because a recently admitted kid threw a soft drink at his mother on visiting day.

“They say it was unintentional, that the kid fell and knocked down ‘El Diablito’s’ mom. It was nonsense, because the lady didn’t get angry or hurt. Nothing happened. But in there everything is a grievance, everything is paid for and ‘El Diablito’ sent the guards on a break so they could beat the kid, so hard that the poor guy had to sleep standing up for about two weeks. Another inmate complained and everyone in the ranch was beaten,” says Martin.

El Diablito had a reputation for being wicked,” said Alberto, the fourth companion in the video call. They say that when he arrived at the prison in 2014, the first thing he did was slap the director at the time and make it clear that the prison was the property of the Zetas. That same day, the director disconnected the surveillance cameras and gave him control of the store, the bathrooms and the kitchen, the three powers of a prison.

El Zetón ruled without problems until more members of the Gulf Cartel began to arrive at the prison and his power had to be shared, through the authorities, with a certain ‘Comandante Miramón’, who became his sworn enemy. Both reigned in the prison with invisible borders, unwritten rules of coexistence and always on the lookout for a wrong move by the other.

A guard told me the day I set foot in Cieneguillas: organized crime rules. And when no one was watching, he gave me a horrific account: in such and such a corner of the prison they decapitated one of his fellow guards, in such and such a hallway they tortured a rapist to death, in such and such a corner they hide cell phones when there is an operation. Every Day of the Dead he adds one or two photographs to his offerings, in honor of his fallen comrades.

When we met at the prison, the guard pointed me to a corner of the prison, under a watchtower: a few weeks earlier, two pickup trucks had crashed into one of the prison walls and opened a hole. Several inmates escaped through there, and their accomplices gave them weapons to repel any attack. Those who couldn’t escape tried to escape a month later, quite naturally.

“Some time ago a church came to do social service with the inmates. They installed a nice vegetable garden for them to plant corn and learn how to take care of something alive,” the custodian told me. “When the bush grew, we realized that many inmates were going to ‘take care of the plants’. One day I approached them and I understood everything: among the grass they had buried the weapons with which they were going to kill us”.

Before the match they said they were going to be torn to pieces

On the morning of December 31, 2019, before the prison doors opened for family visits, the prison authorities did the second roll call and confirmed the lineup for the match: El Diablito would be the technical director of his Zetas team, and El Mino, heir to the crown left by ‘Comandante Miramón,’ now transferred to the Puente Grande prison in Jalisco, would serve as sports advisor to the Gulf Cartel squad. Bernardo tells us that the guards had insisted beforehand that it was a friendly match, a game to relax tensions and amuse the families before the New Year’s Eve dinner.

“Jokingly, they said, this wasn’t an elimination match… elimination, you know,” Rodrigo says and winks.

Around 2:00 p.m., the teams took the field, just as the professional rules dictate: 12 men on one side and 12 on the other. A referee in the center, a custodian who had lost a bet and now had to mediate the match. They warmed up, jogged and the ball rolled while a few watched the game and the rest attended to their families in the cement palapas with green roofs.

The testimony of the four inmates all agreed that the first half was a yawning 45 minutes. Only a couple of shots on goal excited the few fans sitting on the sidelines; too much alcohol and too many drugs had taken their toll on the physical condition of the players. The game went into halftime with a soporific score 0 – 0. “I was even surprised,” says Rodrigo. “Not that they were going to kill each other? Because that’s what they were saying before, that they were going to fucking hit each other, that they were going to tear each other to pieces. We’d been hearing that for a long time… but they were saving everything for later.”

Sometime after the break, at the beginning of the second half, the predictions of bloodshed came true. Bernardo says it was when one of the Zetas deliberately kicked the ball out of bounds to create a distraction; Rodrigo remembers it was a foul near midfield. Martín and Alberto maintain that nothing special happened: except that in the 50th minute, the referee whistled and a mob stormed onto the field, taking advantage of the 24 men panting and sweating, too exhausted to run to safety. They had fallen into a trap.

The Zetas retrieved the weapons they had hidden from a small cave that is now the prison’s water purification center; the Gulf Cartel unearthed the pistols and knives they had hidden behind the new musical classroom, says Rodrigo. “Knives about the size of a leg!” Bernardo recalls, amused. “And they even carried rifles. One individual they called El Chiquilín carried a weapon almost as big as him!” The families ran for cover; the guards, unarmed, did the same. Some inmates locked themselves in the old library, now an abandoned space since the 2022 riot in which members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel burned the books in an attempt to set the entire prison on fire. Others ran to the prison school, “Luis Álvarez Barret,” but it had already been taken over by members of the Sinaloa Cartel, and they had to flee to the infirmary.

As if it were a Roman coliseum, the ground of the pitch began to turn red. Gunfire from the small area, a round from a short weapon on the left flank, a melee under the goal. For about two minutes, the ball was left untouched, while dozens murdered each other. All the authorities could do was take cover and call in the Mexican Army to contain the chaos.

“There was a head, I think it was from Los Zetas, and someone kicked it by grabbing it as a ball,” Bernardo recalls. “And there was a madman who was killing and celebrating as if he had scored a goal,” laughs Martín. “I didn’t even remember the celebrations! That was really crazy! It made me laugh, really!”, laughs Alberto. I just shuddered and grimaced. 

By 5 p.m., when the soldiers arrived, with the state police, the pitched battle was over. All of the inmates were taken back to the dormitories, while forensics took the bodies covered with sheets to the ambulances and others tried to put pieces of bodies together to identify them. The state government issued a timid statement confirming the riot and avoiding giving a figure for the end of the sporting event. The outcome of the game was put on hold.

The next day, the inmates tried to feign normalcy. Roll call took place as it normally does and, as always, food was served on the same dirty plates. The only thing that warned that a massacre had occurred hours before was the soccer field delimited by ribbons and some dark spots on the ground that were not covered by the custodians turned gardeners to cover the blood.

“Already in the ranches, people were counting each other, ‘let’s see, who’s missing’ and that’s how you realized: they killed so-and-so, they killed so-and-so. One of the dead was El Gordo, a fucking Zeta who kept saying that he had been the right-hand man of Heriberto Lazcano, El Z3, and that according to him he had been a judicial police officer,” said Martin.

This informal count, he tells me, is common in the prison. It was done, for example, in May 2020: 12 highly dangerous inmates, members of Los Zetas, escaped through a tunnel 50 meters long. They did it in complete tranquility, they didn’t even have to wait for the darkness of the early morning. At 2 p.m. they escaped and a vehicle parked outside the prison took them out of the state.

After the brawl, “many were very upset for the family, because the visits were going to be suspended. A new kid, recently admitted, even started to cry, because it was horrible and it was the first time his mother went to see him,” recalls Alberto.

The Cieneguillas prison has a failing grade of 5.5 points out of 10, according to the most recent evaluation by the National Human Rights Commission in 2024. It is overcrowded, underfunded, and lacks basic services, such as a library. What it does have is self-government – control of the facilities is up to the inmates, not the authorities – and since December 31, 2019 it has a dishonorable title: the soccer headquarters of the bloodiest match in the country’s history.

The bloodthirsty soccer match took place in a prison.

Thanks for coming, soccer fan! It has been a pleasure to receive you on the field at the Center for Reinsertion and Social Readaptation of Cieneguillas, Zacatecas. Get out, flee, run, from this prison with a black record. Dodge the machete blows, hurry the pace between bullets, think of your family member who remains incarcerated and inside the prison that was turned into a battle arena. Leave the soft drinks there, abandon the food and keep silent about the cheer you chose, because the game is over. Forget about the final score. The goals don’t matter. The real score, the one you’ll keep in your head when you step on the street again, is this: 16 dead.

Source: Milenio