The Unfortunate Luck Of Brothers And A Liposuction Ended The Gulf Cartel

Mexico’s longest-running cartel, born in 1930, met an unknown and unexpected demise: it didn’t disintegrate because of a military operation or an armed incursion by its enemies; nor was it because the government attacked its finances. Its demise, in reality, was more earthly and ended eight decades of criminal hegemony in the northeast of the country: the Gulf Cartel died on a hospital gurney.

El Majadero made a secret trip to Monterrey, Nuevo Leon. He left Matamoros and carried two fake IDs in his wallet. This was how he wanted to hide his real name, Homero, and his last names, Cardenas Guillen, which still provoke fear in the border state of Tamaulipas. It was March 27, 2014 and that four-hour road trip was crucial to secure his position as the top leader for years to come.

His brothers Osiel, Antonio and Mario had been criminals well known to US and Mexican authorities; they crossed tons of drugs north of the Rio Bravo, especially cocaine. Homero, on the other hand, had managed to go unnoticed, among the violent personalities of his relatives. But the time of operating in the shadows was over. In the fall of 2012, he became, by accident, the head of the Gulf Cartel.

The capo entered through the back door of a private hospital in Nuevo Leon’s capital and the panicked doctors began preparations for his surgery, which had been paid for in advance and in cash. His protruding belly and double jaw was a carbon copy of his brother Mario’s complexion, and those extra kilos were well known to federal authorities. If El Majadero wanted to run the cartel his family once led smoothly, only aggressive cosmetic surgery would make him look unrecognizable.

So on that Thursday afternoon, the drug trafficker lay down on the operating room gurney and his eyes closed under anesthesia. Only he knows what he dreamed of his new appearance, but he didn’t get to see the final results of the surgery. There are no official records of his death, but the Matamoros military garrison insists that El Majadero never returned to his criminal throne or home.

Two military sources in Tamaulipas, whose identities have been withheld, tell DOMINGA, MILENIO’s digital magazine, this story that the local government, under the mandate of PRI member Egidio Torre Cantú, wanted to hide, fearing that chaos would be unleashed.

This is how the Gulf Cartel of Mexico was born.

Homero Cárdenas Guillén was not even born when, in the early 1930s, a man named Juan Nepomuceno Guerra, a so-called cattle rancher, saw the opportunity of a lifetime to stop living off the land. He took advantage of the hypocrisy in the United States, where conservative and religious groups had pushed for the prohibition of the manufacture, sale and transportation of liquor, at the same time that the country was receiving European migrant families -Italians, for example- whose social life revolved around fermented and distilled liquors.

Nepomuceno took advantage of that need for alcohol on the other side and forged an alliance with Italian-American families to smuggle bottles from Tamaulipas. He became so successful that one of his partners was the legendary Al Capone. Thanks to this duo, the also nicknamed The Godfather of Matamoros turned his dirty business into a millionaire criminal emporium with routes that connected Texas with New York and Florida with California. By the time the United States vetoed Prohibition – and the wine and contraband whiskey business collapsed – Don Nepo had to traffic arms, until, as a senior citizen, in his seventies, he announced his retirement and inherited to his nephew Juan García Ábrego. The latter included marijuana and cocaine trafficking in his new menu. Thus was born the Gulf Cartel of Mexico.

Abrego became the undisputed vertical leader of the criminal group until 1996, when he was arrested in Monterrey and later extradited to the United States. With three daughters and a young son as descendants, Nepomuceno Guerra’s family succession had been cut short. It was time for an outsider to take the position of unappealable boss with enough personality to quell any splits within the organization.

That position fell to Osiel Cardenas Guillen, then 29 years old, from a family well known in Matamoros for using a mechanic’s shop as a major cocaine sales point. When he was very young and poor, he got his girlfriend Celia pregnant, which prompted him to chase more money by crossing drugs into Texas. As documented by journalist Ricardo Ravelo, his braggadocio style, his explosive personality, his ability to make deals with cops and his time in prison in Brownsville, Texas – the legend he had built of himself – pleased Abrego, who chose him as his successor.

Osiel proudly coined the nickname El Mata Amigos as a seal of horror and pioneered the paramilitarization of organized crime: so that no one could touch him, he summoned elite Mexican soldiers to form part of his personal guard, something no cartel had done in the late 1990s. Because of the color of the first uniforms of that compact group, a Zeta blue color, that escort became known as Los Zetas, wrote scholar Ricardo Raphael in his book Hijo de la guerra (Son of War). That was how the Cárdenas Guillén brothers entered the big leagues of organized crime.

Like dominoes, the brothers gradually fell.

Fortune smiled on Osiel for seven years until 2003, when, at his home in Matamoros after his daughter’s party, he was surprised by the Army and the then Attorney General’s Office. Disoriented by alcohol, the capo didn’t react in time and was arrested. Following the family rites of organized crime, he passed his position to another Cardenas Guillen, his brother Antonio, alias Tony Tormenta, but a year later he would lose control of the monopoly that the Gulf Cartel had achieved.

The Zetas, the elite soldiers, began to rebel against their bosses, and to counteract this dispute Antonio decided to share the throne with someone else. If the Sinaloa Cartel was led by the duo of El Chapo and El Mayo, by 2004 the Gulf Cartel was led by the pair formed by Tony Tormenta and Jorge Eduardo Costilla Sánchez, better known as El Coss. But that reign wouldn’t last long either. On November 5, 2010, Tony Tormenta was killed by marines and soldiers.

Then the leadership was taken over by another brother, Mario ‘El M-1’. But two years later, on September 3, 2012, he was arrested in a raid in Altamira, Tamaulipas. Like dominoes falling – and discarding Liliana, the only sister – the last male member of the Cardenas Guillen family standing was Homero.

But there was a problem: the Gulf Cartel troop, nervous about so many changes, didn’t believe that the new boss had earned his position by his own merits, but by mere chance or the bad luck of his brothers. Homero didn’t provoke the fear of Mata Amigos, nor did he have the toughness of Tony Tormenta or the skill of M-1. Secretly they began to call him El Orejón.

The new capo also had the tough task of keeping together a group of criminals who were beginning to form tribes.

Homer had to show personality to bring them into line, but he couldn’t do so without first making sure he didn’t suffer the same bad luck as his brothers. For 15 months he devised a plan, while trying to keep a shaky criminal structure on its feet. Finally, he dared to take a crucial step.

In March 2014, he scheduled liposuction to commit a crime without fear of being recognized. Now changed, according to the plan, he could restore the Gulf Cartel and put it back in one piece. But when he lay down on the table, the opposite happened.

Liposuction gone wrong

The two military sources agree on Majadero’s demise, but with slight changes in the story. One assures that his body didn’t resist the surgery and he died in the operating room due to a respiratory arrest; the other says that initially the operation went well, but the following day he decompensated in his room and had a heart attack. With small differences in the stories, as happened with the Señor de los Cielos, both come to the same conclusion: he walked in, but didn’t leave the hospital alive.

His death was kept secret so as not to create chaos in the state, however on social media you can still read how the news spread over the days: “What about the rumor that Homero Cárdenas Guillén died?” asked @FreeLanceloth on March 28, 2014. “It is said that Homero Cárdenas Guillén, the top leader of the CDG, died of cardiac arrest,” tweeted @chavasycheves on April 2, 2014. “Gulf Cartel Leader Homero Cárdenas Guillén El Majadero Dies,” confirmed @compa_fundi four days later.

The Gulf Cartel was trying to pretend they were still united. In fact, they continued to sign their narco messages with the initials CDG, to protect themselves from their enemies, even though the factions were already at odds. The death of the last Cárdenas Guillén revealed that the group had secretly broken up.

Different factions disputed the territory. Initially, those loyal to Majadero were named Los Ciclones and remained in Matamoros; those who still saw Tony Tormenta as their leader formed the group Los Escorpiones and moved to the town of Rio Bravo; and those who followed Coss were named Los Metros and took Reynosa as their stronghold. The three groups were at odds with each other and, at the same time, against their peers, Los Bravo in Ciudad Victoria, Los Rojos in Tampico and Los Pantera in the southern part of the state, while fighting over drug, arms and undocumented migrant trafficking routes against other spin offs, such as the Northeast Cartel, the Zetas Vieja Escuela and Sangre Nueva Zeta.

Despite the ruptures and betrayals, the Gulf Cartel continued to be referred to in Mexico as a single group. But reality faced the country on June 19, 2021, when an armed criminal cell of members of Los Ciclones entered Reynosa at noon with one objective: to murder as many innocent people as they could in order to “heat up the plaza” for Los Metros and for the Army to go against them.

At random, Los Ciclones murdered 15 people walking down the street, among them a nurse and future doctor, cab drivers, laborers, shopkeepers and senior citizens. Hours after the massacre, Tamaulipas prosecutor Irving Barrios stated the obvious to the media: the Gulf Cartel had ceased to exist. Now there are splinter groups with their own leaders, their own interests and their own armed groups. 

In addition to fighting among themselves, they defend themselves from the incursions of the Sinaloa Cartel (CDS) and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) into their territory. One day they make peace and work together to eliminate common rivals; another day, they accuse each other of disloyalty and shoot at each other. Their violence is such that these groups have come close to causing a diplomatic conflict with the United States.

In March 2023, four U.S. citizens were kidnapped in Matamoros. The crime mobilized the FBI and outraged Republican congressmen, such as Dan Crenshaw, who launched harsh criticism of President Lopez Obrador to curb violence in the Frontera Chica, a key trafficking zone spanning five municipalities. Investigations showed that the multi-kidnapping, which resulted in two people freed and two killed, was the work of Los Ciclones, who hoped to foist the bodies on their enemies.

The crime analysis think tank Insight Crime notes that the divisions have even managed to erase the political division of the state. Metros, Ciclones, Escorpiones, Rojos and more can be in four or more municipalities of Tamaulipas at the same time fighting cities and communities, where there are now only two types of people: those who are feared and those who are afraid.

Source: Milenio