It is a festive day, one of those of the long, warm Mexican spring that is very reminiscent of the summer heat. Mexico City celebrates the anniversary of Benito Juárez. People go to the bars, the parks, the countryside. In a quesadilla restaurant at the foot of Ajusco, a family celebrates a child's birthday. The police are lying in wait: they believe they are facing a secret meeting of the leaders of the Unión Tepito, the Chilango cartel that made the capital their own through bloodshed and extortion. Against his prediction, it's not a criminal summit, just a family picnic.
There is something strange, however. The police have been following the birthday boy's father for months. Carolina Herrera dresses impeccably. She only moves at dawn between Tepito, Polanco, Cuajimalpa and other neighborhoods in the capital. She usually has an escort, but that Monday holiday she lets her guard down, she gives them the day off. The police believe he is the new leader of the Union. They are not entirely sure, but in Ajusco they see some tattoos, some scars, that leave no room for doubt. He is El Chori.
Eduardo Ramírez,
El Chori
, whom intelligence reports place as the new leader of the Unión Tepito, is spending the day without his personal security in a recreational area of Ajusco. The police wait patiently: there are too many people, they run the risk of a shooting breaking out that affects civilian victims. The family finishes eating, gets in the car, and heads to Mexico City. The agents intervene at a point between the mountain and the
Six Flags
amusement park
.
When they stop him, El Chori cries. He, a violent and feared man in the streets of the rough neighborhood of Tepito; accused of murder and membership in a criminal organization; suspected of disappearing his girlfriend, whom no one has heard from since 2019; one of the cruelest leaders of the Union, according to sources close to the investigation, bursts into tears when the police catch him. He says that they have the wrong person, that he imports sneakers from Panama, that he is just a merchant who adheres to the law. The agents don't blink. They have seized his prey.
An operation against members of the Unión Tepito in the Guerrero neighborhood (Mexico City), in 2020. Armando Monroy (Cuartoscuro)
Complicity from children
El Chori, says the same source, is an extremely violent man who has made a name for himself through beatings, beatings, torture, murders, mutilations, extortion. A repertoire far removed from that of a shoe merchant. In the massive Tepito market, the cartel's hard core, they fear him. When the mafia sends him to collect extortion, they are sending a message: danger, the matter is serious, you better not fall behind on your payments or you already know it.
The authorities of the capital assure that the Unión Tepito is these days an atomized cartel, divided between independent cells, without clear leadership. “Everyone wants to rise, everyone feels like leaders,” explains the source. Still, they are very dangerous, she says. In six months, any of his leaders can rise through the criminal ranks and become strong. The police strategy is to stop them before that happens, to cut off the heads that stand out in the organization. A few days after El Chori's fall, on Saturday, police arrested another Union lieutenant, José Mauricio Hernández Gasca,
El Tomate
, one step below El Chori in the group's hierarchy.
In his 14 years as a chronicler of events in the capital, journalist Antonio Nieto has covered more than 100 deaths related to the Union at street level. After more than a decade of research, he published
The Chilango cartel: Origin, power and viciousness of the Unión Tepito
(
Grijalbo,
2020), the most complete x-ray that exists about them. The reporter disagrees with the police. He believes that the official version about the atomization of the mafia is a “simplistic story.”
“It is a misinterpretation of the media and police agencies. It is true that the cartel has lost its level of organization: if you grab the strong parts of the same body, of course it hits the system. Like a kind of Al Qaeda or a terrorist organization, [the Union] is divided into cells, but they are not in confrontation. I have never documented a single case in which these cells wanted to kill themselves for power,” says Nieto.
Police seize weapons, marijuana and synthetic drug precursors from the Union in the Cuauhtémoc mayor's office, in October 2019. Armando Monroy (Cuartoscuro)
The journalist believes that the authorities tend to give less importance to the Union than it actually has. For him it is a full-fledged cartel, with connections to other criminal groups at the national and international level. His strength, he develops, lies in a kind of primitive loyalty that outweighs power struggles. They are friends from the neighborhood who have grown up together and have each other's backs: “They have had complicity since they were children, it is difficult for those ties to be broken.”
—And isn't that also a simplistic story?
—Yes, but the point here is that the history they have means that they know your families, they know exactly which foot you limp on, where your children are, your lover, your grandfather, your mother, under pain of being shot. Although it sounds a bit like a fiction film, it is something that has been documented.
History of a union
There is a leading name in the beginning: Pancho Cayagua. In 2009, Cayagua brought together a group of young people from the neighborhood and created a kind of security company that protects the businesses and customers of the Tepito market against extortion. Édgar Valdez Villarreal,
La Barbie
, split from the Beltrán Leyva Cartel after the capture of capo Arturo Beltrán Leyva, tries to create his own organization and penetrate the rough neighborhood. The kids from Cayagua stop La Barbie. At that first moment, they wear red t-shirts, a kind of homemade uniform, which reads “Unión Tepito.”
Shortly after, this group created to protect the neighborhood against extortion forces all businesses to pay them for “security.” This is where the most profitable business in the Union begins, the right to land. They are no longer just kids from Tepito: Cayagua attracts corrupt police and federal officers who join its ranks, “everything that was wrong with the police,” summarizes the source. They become big, powerful, bloodthirsty, they diversify their businesses. In 2013, 13 young people were massacred at the
Heavens
nightclub in the heart of the city. Another name begins to sound: El Betito.
In 2017, in one of the first major blows against the Union, a rival organization gunned down Cayagua. About 15 young people from the original group organize and take a step forward. They call themselves “little brothers,” “the brotherhood,” Nieto illustrates. As in the old Italian mafias, they are captains: a “horizontally structured” hierarchy in which only one name stands out above the rest, the only real boss: Roberto Moyado Esparza,
El Betito.
A few years before, El Betito was a flannel man and took care of cars in the neighborhood, says the source familiar with the investigation. Nieto adds that he belonged to a gang that stole armored trucks and had a long criminal record. Caguaya hires him and other boys to be the Union's shock group. They become known for their brutality: murders, kidnappings, dismemberments.
After the death of Cayagua, El Betito steps forward. In 2018, the Union raises the decibels. One day in September, five hitmen disguised as mariachis burst into Garibaldi Square, a temple of popular Chilanga music, and in six seconds they shoot down 13 people. Six die. They were going after the leader of a rival group, Fuerza Antiunión. El Betito had been detained for a few weeks, but few doubted that his hand was behind the massacre. He has been in federal prison ever since. For Nieto, he is the true boss of the Union, despite being behind bars.
An image of Roberto Moyado Esparza, El Betito, at a press conference after his capture, in 2018. Galo Cañas Rodríguez (Cuartoscuro)
Nieto also does not believe that El Chori was the current leader, but rather Alberto Fuentes Castro,
El Elvis
: “The highest-ranking captain is El Elvis, who was always higher up than El Chori in the criminal world. There is not even a photo of him: the photo that the Prosecutor's Office has distributed is false, that person is not him. You realize the level of mafia that he has: 14 years have passed since the founding of Unión Tepito and neither the media nor the authorities have a photo of him.”
With El Betito, the cartel immerses itself fully in drug trafficking. They find a cocaine distributor in Colombia, who unloads the material in the Mexican southeast, but when the boss is arrested, they lose the connection. His main business continues to be extortion – between 4,000 and 5,000 pesos per week for each business, according to the source – but El Betito wants to expand, covering the entire city: he goes to the bars and clubs of Roma, La Condesa, Polanco, Coyoacán, “partners” with the owners: he places one of his men selling his product in the bathroom. If someone consumes drugs from outside, they will be beaten. Police corruption throws them a curveball. Everyone profits.
Low profile, extortion and roots in the neighborhoods
They sell coke, but also what they call “boutique drugs”: hydroponic marijuana, tutsi (a pink powder that is popular among wealthy consumers). Other cartels from outside, such as Sinaloa or Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), try to penetrate the city, but the Union becomes strong in its fiefdom. “An urban mafia behaves very differently from a group that is not primarily urban. When large groups like the CJNG or Sinaloa intervene in urban areas, they lower their profile. The Union is immersed in the urban monster, it takes other criminal forms that allow it to consolidate its presence but not necessarily be visible," says Rodrigo Peña, a researcher at the College of Mexico, an expert in the criminal dynamics of the capital, who believes that the Unión Tepito It remains the “most dominant” group in Mexico City.
Peña mentions other factors that have helped the Union retain its power: “The gentrification that has occurred in the neighborhood has to do with a different way of understanding the market, and the criminal group also participates there: they no longer steal, they no longer steal. "There is no kidnapping, but we do know that extortion has increased." The apartment fee, for the researcher, is the main resource of those from Tepito: “It is fundamental, it becomes a kind of political device: it allows them to mark their presence, build a group identity, consolidate an idea of territoriality that for the criminal groups is usually very important, and gives them a relatively low profile.” In the capital, Peña recalls, there is a “great drop in high-impact crimes (in the case of homicides there is an important debate), but one of the few crimes that has increased is extortion due to this type of practices.”
So, is the Unión Tepito a group in decline and atomized, as the authorities defend, or a shadow monster that retains its strength? “Now he is in that ellipsis of remaining stuck in his comfort zone, but unfortunately for the authorities and citizens, once he lay low, there does not seem to be an end no matter who they catch. They cut off one head of the hydra and others grow. It does not seem that in the short term we can presume the end of the Union,” considers Nieto.
The journalist adds another factor: many adolescents who grow up in working-class neighborhoods such as Morelos, Guerrero or Santa María la Ribera aspire to be from the Union. “A piece of the neighborhood culture of the subculture in Mexico City is attached to this criminal group. This means that they have a lot of cannon fodder, that they have many soldiers. It is very difficult for the authority to uproot that.”
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