The somber expression on Gabriela’s face somehow deepens. She stares past me, off into a distance only she can see, and speaks softly.
“There was this woman a couple years ago, she was an online journalist kind of like me. She lived in Tamaulipas, which was controlled by the Gulf Cartel and Zetas. The cartels had final say over what got printed or broadcasted. Probably still do, to be honest. But this woman, she would post danger alerts on Twitter that pinpointed the locations of violence as it was happening. People would send her information and she would help it get out there for everybody else. She also encouraged victims of crime not to remain silent and to report what happened to the police even with the knowledge that there would probably be reprisal. She understood that the only way to defeat the fear the cartels had brought to the people was for the people to finally stand up.”
Gabriela shakes her head slowly, still staring off into that distance.
“The cartels put out a ransom on her. And not just her, but others who worked for the news hub and tried to defy them. The founder of the site even shut it down and left the state because he feared for his life. But this woman … she kept doing what she had always done, which was to help the people of Tamaulipas stand up to the cartels. And it wasn’t just helping people stand up to the cartels—she did so much more. She helped raise money for the community, organized blood donations, and helped people find affordable housing and free medical care. She was a hero, to be honest. A true hero.”
Tears have begun to well in Gabriela’s eyes. She wipes them away, focusing once again on me.
“The cartel found her. I don’t even know which cartel it was. And the cartel … killed her. But before they killed her, they tweeted from her phone, first outing her as the citizen journalist who had defied the cartels, then sending a message that the cartels would be coming for the other citizen journalists next. They posted a picture of her with her hands folded in front of her staring at the camera, and then a picture of her lying on the ground with a bullet hole in her head. The founder of the news site confirmed that it was her, and Twitter eventually shut down her account.”
Gabriela goes silent again, wiping at her eyes.
“She was truly a hero. A role model, I guess you would say. Her fearlessness was absolutely spellbinding. She knew what she was doing was dangerous, that it would some day get her killed, but she did it anyway. I guess that’s why I do what I do. I know it’s dangerous, that it will probably get me killed some day, but if I don’t do it, who else will?”
Gabriela stops there, letting the question hang between us.
I nod and glance again at the computer screen.
“So tell me about the Devil.”
Twenty-Four
Nobody knows when the Devil first started killing, Gabriela says. Cartel families are not like celebrities. They’re not in the public eye. Drug lords, yes, but not all drug lords. The government offers rewards for many of the drug lords, but the drug lords have too much power politically that the rewards don’t matter. Oftentimes it’s the politicians and law enforcement who must rely on those drug lords that they’re supposed to be hunting to make ends meet, so of course they won’t turn them in even though sometimes the rewards can go up to 30 million pesos. They know that once they turn in a drug lord, there will be a target on their backs.
The Devil has been killing for over a year now. Sometimes several months will pass between his kills. Sometimes weeks. The Devil, Gabriela says, is unpredictable. The first cartel the Devil attacked was the Juarez Cartel. One of the drug lord’s wives and children were found burned to death out in a field. It was first reported on La Baliza, which had launched maybe a month earlier. From there, the rest of the news hubs picked it up, though the major newspapers were hesitant to carry the news for fear of retribution from the Juarez Cartel.
La Baliza didn’t give the Devil his name. They had simply reported the events. Several months passed, and most people forgot about what happened, until another woman and her three children were found burned to death several miles outside Matamoros. It was reported that another drug lord’s family had been targeted. This time it was the Gulf Cartel who had been hit.
Now more and more people started paying attention. The first time may have been a fluke, they reasoned, but now another drug lord’s wife and children had been found burned to death.
Gabriela asks me, “Are you familiar with the cartels?”
I shake my head. While much of my work for the government had been all over the world, I hadn’t done any work in Mexico.
“There are seven major cartels. Each of the cartels has several different leaders, and many times they fight with each other over product or territory. But families are usually off limits. The fact that somebody had taken the wife and children of one of the leaders from the Juarez Cartel and burned them alive was an act of war. But from what I heard, all of the families immediately claimed they had nothing to do with it.”
Over the course of the next year the Devil struck two more times. This time the cartels affected were the Beltran-Leyva and the Tijuana. Each time the mother and
