Manuel is twitchy. He wears jeans, a heavy black hoodie and a knitted balaclava over his face. He fiddles with his gun, pulling it out of his waistband, yanking the clip from the magazine and then snapping it back into place, before eventually tucking it under his thigh.
Manuel — not his real name — sits in an upscale apartment in Playa del Carmen but far from the tourist strip, on Mexico’s Caribbean coast. He has two bodyguards, both armed and masked. One has an assault rifle slung across his chest. The other has a gun at his hip, butted up against his cartel-issued walkie-talkie.
W5 confirmed with credible sources that Manuel is who he claims to be: a Mexican narco, a cartel member, in charge of the local drug trafficking cell of the world’s most powerful gang: the Sinaloa Cartel. Its leader, Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman, was recently convicted of federal drug trafficking charges in the United States and faces life in prison.
The rare television interview is granted on the condition Manuel’s face not be seen and his real name not be known. He offers disturbing insight into the unprecedented wave of cartel violence that has recently washed over the muchloved Canadian tourist hotspots of Playa del Carmen and Cancun.
“There is no order,” Manuel says. “In the northern part of Mexico there is order. Over here there’s no order. It’s easy to invade the enemy’s territory if they are divided. But it doesn’t mean that the cartel is weakened. Just that everyone is fighting in their own block.”
Manuel — not his real name — sits in an upscale apartment in Playa del Carmen but far from the tourist strip, on Mexico’s Caribbean coast. He has two bodyguards, both armed and masked. One has an assault rifle slung across his chest. The other has a gun at his hip, butted up against his cartel-issued walkie-talkie.
W5 confirmed with credible sources that Manuel is who he claims to be: a Mexican narco, a cartel member, in charge of the local drug trafficking cell of the world’s most powerful gang: the Sinaloa Cartel. Its leader, Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman, was recently convicted of federal drug trafficking charges in the United States and faces life in prison.
The rare television interview is granted on the condition Manuel’s face not be seen and his real name not be known. He offers disturbing insight into the unprecedented wave of cartel violence that has recently washed over the muchloved Canadian tourist hotspots of Playa del Carmen and Cancun.
“There is no order,” Manuel says. “In the northern part of Mexico there is order. Over here there’s no order. It’s easy to invade the enemy’s territory if they are divided. But it doesn’t mean that the cartel is weakened. Just that everyone is fighting in their own block.”
The “block” has never been so bloody. The murder rate in Quintana Roo state, which encompasses Playa del Carmen and Cancun, has increased by 335 per cent in the last two years. There were an astounding 840 murders in 2018, despite a population of just 1.5 million people. It’s a rate so high it can be counted by the hour: someone is murdered in this region every 10 hours.
“It’s a jungle,” says Manuel. “Jungle enemies that with one opportunity kill each other without a doubt, (like) a lion and a hyena.”
Manuel claims his cartel career began as a low-level “sicario” — an executioner. So good at killing, he rose through the ranks and is now in charge of the local drug trade, fuelled by tourists. He also claims responsibility for transporting up to 300 kilograms of cocaine every month through the Mayan Riviera and up to the United States border, some finding its way to Canada. The Rand Drug Policy Research Center estimates Mexico’s drug trade is worth $10 billion (Canadian) a year.
Manuel speaks in near-perfect English. He rifles through his wallet and produces a tattered photo of a soldier in uniform. Using his thumb to obscure the face, he shows the picture as proof that he lived for some time in the U.S. and claims that he did two tours in Afghanistan with the American military, training that prepared him for his current life.
“It helps you to recruit, to train and to kill,” Manuel says. “The only way to maintain a cartel is by order. Now how do you maintain order? OK, if you don’t obey, I’ll f---ing kill you and your whole f---ing family. There’s no other way.”
The cartel landscape in the Mayan Riviera is a labyrinth of shifting allegiances and fluctuating control. Los Zetas cartel used to rule Playa del Carmen and Cancun with relative stability. But now the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels are battling for power and the bodies have been piling up.
Added to this volatile mix, the fastest growing and most violent group: the New Generation Jalisco cartel, which has a grotesque trademark of torture and dismemberment.
“If one organization doesn’t prevail,” says Valentin Pereda, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Criminology, “violence can continue to go up and we could see a scenario potentially like the one that Mexico experienced in Acapulco.”
For generations, Acapulco, on Mexico’s west coast, was a magnet for the rich and famous, a major port of call for cruise ships, a jetsetter’s paradise. The beach resort town is now a no-go zone. It is one of the most dangerous cities in the world. It is one of the most dangerous cities in the world.
The U.S. government has a “do not travel” advisory in place for Acapulco. The Canadian government has a warning to avoid “all non-essential travel” to the region.
Unlike Acapulco, the violence in the Mayan Riviera doesn’t usually bleed into the tourist zones, but the cartel code against targeting tourists is tenuous.
“Have you ever been close to a firefight?” Manuel asks, while sitting in the apartment, which is a narco safe house. “You’re not going to live by those rules. People get shot. We have enemies that are willing to kill us in plain view. He’s not going to care and I’m not going to care.”
Those “rules” were broken in 2017 at a Canadian-run music festival, called BMP, that had been operating in Playa del Carmen for a decade.
On the final night of the event, armed gunmen stormed the tourist festival at The Blue Parrot Club and opened fire on the crowd of thousands. By the time it was over, five people were dead, including a Hamilton bouncer named Kirk Wilson, who was hired to protect the partygoers.
Pereda believes that the Canadian organizers either didn’t pay protection money or paid the wrong cartel. A narco banner, erected the day after the shooting, supported his theory.
“These organizations have tried not to hurt tourists,” says Pereda, who has been studying the increasingly barbaric cartel violence for five years. “But they don’t really care that much when it comes to using violence.
“If a tourist gets caught in the crossfire, they’re not going to care.”
The Canadian government warns Canadians to exercise a “high degree of caution” when travelling to Mexico, and the latest travel advisory specifically mentions increased violence in Quintana Roo.
Although tourists aren’t targeted, the statement says, “drug cartels are very active. Foreigners may be in the wrong place at the wrong time and could become victims of violent crime. Remain vigilant.”
Canadians have not been scared off by either the government warning or the skyrocketing murder rate. Two million Canadians visit Mexico every year. The Mayan Riviera recorded an 8-per-cent increase in the number of Canadian visitors in 2018, compared with 2017.
“If I go to any big city in any other country, there is crime,” says Lizzie Cole, head of the Quintana Roo State Tourism Board.
“Most of our visitors come here and stay within their resorts, go out on excursions and go out partying at night and they’re absolutely safe. The incidents that we have are very targeted and … not in the areas where tourists go.”
The entire country of Mexico is struggling with cartel violence. A record 33,000 homicides were investigated in 2018. Newly sworn-in President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was elected on a promise he would regain control from the cartels and end corruption. Within months of taking office, the president announced the creation of a new National Guard. Made up of federal police, the army and the navy, the force is expected to number 150,000 by the end of the year.
The level of corruption is so deep inside the government and the police, says Manuel, the Sinaloa member, that he doubts the cartels will be affected.
“People are always willing to take money from us,” he says. “Always. And if they don’t take it, they’re scared to say no. So basically they just work with us.”
On the beaches and streets of Playa del Carmen and Cancun, the juxtaposition of heavily armed soldiers patrolling alongside bikini-clad vacationers is jarring, but the mission is clear: protect tourists.
Little is being done, however, for those most affected by the cartel crisis. The locals who pour the drinks, set up the beach chairs and sell tourist trinkets must navigate home at the end of their shifts to neighbourhoods now transformed into battlegrounds.
There is little hope for change from this reality, where the cartel’s quest for control has few boundaries.
“If I (came) from your country maybe I would have hope. Maybe I wouldn’t want to throw it away,” says Manuel. “But my country is thrown away. And I was born in this. I didn’t make it.
“There is going to be a day where I’m old enough to get out of this. But not right now. I can’t.” W5’s investigation into drug violence in Mexico — The Narco Riviera — airs Saturday at 7 p.m. on CTV.
