Rising organized crime activity in Mexico and the resulting insecurity and violence across the country have caught the attention of journalists and social scientists alike. Despite the rapid growth of both journalistic investigations and academic analyses of organized crime, the case of Tamaulipas has been scantly studied. Violence in this Mexican border state has reached such high levels and become so public and brutal that doing fieldwork there has become too dangerous.
Few observers have attempted to disentangle what is really going on along the country’s northeastern border. Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera is one of the exceptions. In Los Zetas Inc., she speaks out about the violent reality in Tamaulipas, documents its transformation since the 1990s, and analyzes crucial understudied aspects of organized crime in this state, including criminal interests in natural resources and connections with the broader oil industry and political elites. Her focus is on Los Zetas, a former private militia of the Gulf Cartel and a current major transnational criminal organization (TCO), as she refers to it. The author not only provides great historical detail on the formation, evolution, and internal organization of the Zetas, but also offers a careful review of Mexico’s most recent political and economic reforms, which are deeply related to changes in the criminal organization.
Organized in three sections, Los Zetas Inc. first presents an overview of the Zetas’ origins, main historical confrontations, and organizational characteristics. Given that the Zetas originally emerged as part of the Gulf Cartel, Correa-Cabrera examines the creation of private militias across cartels, situating the Zetas as the first private army in the Mexican criminal underworld when they made their first public appearance in 2002. In her analysis of the Zetas’ internal organization and structure, Correa-Cabrera uses a business administration approach and refers to this criminal group as a transnational corporation (TNC) with subsidiaries that act in a relatively independent way.
The author argues that the Zetas’ organization includes areas dedicated to marketing, research, technology, human resources, and finance. Correa-Cabrera highlights the Zetas’ careful branding strategy through decapitations, massacres, and social media; its recruitment strategies; and the organization’s laundering operations through the international banking system. The use of a business administration approach is innovative and helpful; it highlights the internal organizational aspects that cannot be dismissed, as organized crime scholars try to understand the quick evolution and transformation of Mexican criminal groups that have diversified their activities well beyond drug trafficking.
In the second section, Correa-Cabrera examines Mexico’s war on drugs more generally, using a civil war perspective, focusing on what she calls the paramilitarization of organized crime, with the Zetas as the leading actor in this process. In this regard, she argues that the Zetas set a trend of militarization that the rest of the major criminal groups followed; they also began to use military tactics, amassed large arsenals, and diversified their activities to include extortion, kidnapping, and forced recruitment, among other things. Moreover, according to the author, this “new paramilitarism” led the Mexican state to stimulate the creation and activity of vigilante groups that have taken different shapes across Mexico, ultimately raising the level of violence.
The book’s final section contains perhaps the richest and most innovative analysis, addressing the Zetas’ interest in the energy and mining sector and revealing crucial evidence on linkages with specific companies in these industries. Correa-Cabrera carefully documents organized crime’s zones of interest across Mexico, as criminal groups seek to exploit oil, coal, iron ore, and gas deposits, not only in Tamaulipas but also in the states of Coahuila, Colima, and Michoacán. This is a crucial contribution of the book. The current literature on organized crime has focused mainly on its diversification of activities through human trafficking, kidnapping, and extortion, but we still know little about criminal organizations’ engagement in the trafficking of hydrocarbons and exploitation of mineral resources. This aspect is crucial for distinguishing some of the unique characteristics that have enabled the Zetas to establish territorial controls, which have resulted in widespread population displacement in many of the criminal organization’s zones of influence in Tamaulipas and subsequently have facilitated its extraction of natural resources.
Correa-Cabrera highlights how the Zetas’ incursion into the hydrocarbon and energy sectors has occurred in the context of Mexico’s energy reform and of recent discoveries of shale gas and oil along the Gulf of Mexico. Thus, not only have opportunities opened up for new firms, but transnational corporations in particular have greatly benefited from the Zetas’ control of hydrocarbon-rich territories. The author provides examples of transnational companies that negotiated access to key resource-rich areas with criminal groups, which, on occasion, have even served as intermediaries with locals who oppose the exploitation of their communities’ natural resources. Moreover, transnational businesses have benefited from improved security conditions that have resulted from a paramilitarized and repressive social context. In contrast, Pemex, the Mexican state-owned petroleum company, is the major loser of the Zetas’ war, not only because of increasing oil and gas theft but also from important human losses, as several of its workers have fallen victim to organized crime violence.
From a methodological perspective, it is important to note that Correa-Cabrera faced the challenge of doing research and collecting information in an environment permeated by fear, violence, and consequently, press censorship. Therefore, she carefully uses multiple sources of information, from official statistics, semistructured interviews, and participant observation to blogs and social networks. Social media outlets in particular have become valuable spaces for citizens and criminal groups alike to communicate, and Correa-Cabrera pays close attention to these sources of information. According to her, cyberspace has become a new arena for warfare.
While citizens in Tamaulipas use social media to report crime, even becoming “citizen journalists,” the Zetas have also attempted to take control over cyberspace to terrorize and manipulate. This transformation of warfare in cyberspace is a field that scholars should examine more closely. Correa-Cabrera’s process of social media content “curation,” as she calls it, should also push social scientists to reflect more deeply about the extent to which social media networks can become sources of valuable information, and how to use them scientifically and objectively, particularly when conducting research in contexts where freedom of expression is greatly limited.
This book will undoubtedly become required reading for scholars studying organized crime. The quick evolution and transformation of the Zetas, together with the unique organizational characteristics the group exhibits—and which the author documents thoroughly—is intriguing. Correa-Cabrera opens a whole new set of questions about the internal organization of organized crime, its quest for territorial controls, and the composition of informal protection networks that may include not only government officials but also large corporations in the private sector.
It is important to note that the author’s analysis is guided by a civil war perspective, which may raise some questions among readers. As Kalyvas (Reference Kalyvas2015) has argued, large-scale organized crime and civil wars overlap in some dimensions, but analyzing organized crime through a civil war model and applying concepts from the civil war literature to criminal organizations can have drawbacks. What do we gain and lose by conceptualizing criminal organizations as paramilitary groups? Cannot organized crime stand on its own as a concept, with specific characteristics from which we can consequently theorize with more precision and account for its possible mutations? While the author’s argument on new forms of paramilitarism in Mexico is interesting and thought-provoking, it is worth reflecting on how far we may be overstretching concepts of civil war and the importance of using and developing richer and finer analytical concepts in the growing literature on organized crime.
Correa-Cabrera provides a careful historical recount of organized crime in Mexico and constantly contextualizes each of the Zetas’ transformational processes, but her focus on this group might keep the reader from gaining a broader vision about historical and parallel processes in the Mexican criminal underworld. For example, the author argues the Zetas were the first organized crime army in Mexico. However, while the Zetas were indeed the first private militia with very specific paramilitary characteristics, as described in the book’s second section, Blancornelas (Reference Blancornelas2002) shows that in the early 1990s, the Tijuana Cartel developed a private militia under the command of Ramón Arellano Félix. This is likely to have been the starting point of a series of private armies in Mexico, including the Zetas. Still, after reading this book, one cannot deny that the Zetas have profoundly shaped criminal violence in Mexico.
Los Zetas Inc. is relevant not only for organized crime scholars. Journalists analyzing criminal dynamics in Mexico will also greatly benefit from this book, both to better understand a Mexican border state few dare to examine and to learn from the author’s versatile use of multiple sources amid the widespread silencing of the press. Furthermore, the many thought-provoking concepts, analyses, and new forms of evidence Correa-Cabrera presents should push Mexican policymakers and organized crime experts alike to formulate and answer new and urgent questions to better understand, and hopefully help resolve, a reality that has led to the deaths and disappearances of tens of thousands of people across the country.
