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Published: July 10th 2009
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Interviewing Luis
Luis at home two weeks after getting released It is already the end of our third week here in Nuevo Laredo and I must say that the last few days have flown by. Just a week ago, we were still unsure which inmates would prove the most interesting and which events the most exciting; but now, after following an inmate release, a couple preparing to be married, and a mentally unstable American trying to return home, I truly feel that we have found some incredible stories.
But before signing off from Nuevo Laredo for good, I would like to discuss a very important aspect of this shoot that has thus far gone purposefully unmentioned. Referring to it as a “pink elephant” would probably be a bit misleading since its presence, though constantly felt, has actually rarely ever been seen. I am referring, of course, to the Mexican drug cartels.
In previous episodes of Lockdown, we have met and talked to inmates from almost every major gang in America, from the Bloods and the Crips to the Surenos and the Mexican Mafia. But never have I ever feared a criminal organization as much as I currently fear the drug cartels of northern Mexico. One of our main characters,
Rogelio, probably scared me the most when he ominously told us, “when the dog barks, you don’t have to worry. It’s when it stops barking that you should be afraid.” And let’s just say that we haven’t heard a whole lot of barking.
In the past ten years, Nuevo Laredo has been plagued by one of the (if not the) most violent drug cartel battles in the history of the US-Mexico border war. Although the cartels have been around for decades, the arrest of one of the major cartel leaders in 2003 created a power vacuum that left the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels vying for control of the very lucrative I-35 corridor that begins in Laredo, Texas. As a result, unspeakable atrocities have been committed on both sides of the border over the past six years, including the kidnapping of dozens of children from prominent Laredo and Nuevo Laredo families as well as the murder of a number of journalists and elected officials.
Given this recent history of cartel violence, one would think that the prison in Nuevo Laredo would be brimming with cartel members or people who at least know about them. But in our three weeks interviewing inmates at CERESO II, we have heard the words “drug cartel” mentioned maybe a total of three times. When we first arrived at the prison, we would (perhaps naively) ask officers and inmates about the cartels, only to be met with baffling, and sometimes troubling, responses, such as “we don’t have cartels here” or “the cartel members are all in another prison now.”
But recently, a slightly more accurate picture of the drug cartels in CERESO II has begun to come into focus. Yesterday afternoon, we met up with Luis Bravo - the inmate whose release we documented during our first week here - at his aunt’s house in Nuevo Laredo. As far as we knew, Luis had been incarcerated five years earlier for trying to steal a car and had quickly become a model inmate who cut hair and taught English behind bars. From our perspective, there seemed to be almost nothing particularly gritty or dangerous to say about him.
But during the interview yesterday, a lot of information came out that was both surprising and disturbing. Luis, it turned out, had been an active cartel member before being incarcerated. He warned us (or just informed us?) that the cartels knew everything that was going on in Nuevo Laredo and even suggested that he had access to criminal information about which the prison, the police, and even the federal government were completely clueless.
Hearing these words come from the mouth of sweet and innocent Luis was admittedly a bit of a shock. But at the same time, it also filled in a lot of the gaps that had formed during our three weeks of interviews. Rather than trying to believe all of the inmates who told us that the cartels had no presence in CERESO II, I now think it is more likely that many of these people (like Luis) were just scared to tell us for fear of their lives (or ours). And considering that the overall goal of this documentary is to document life in prison and not do an investigative piece on the cartel violence, I am actually pretty relieved about this.
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