Notes on the arrival of crack in Veracruz.

MAY 2, 2023

On October 4, 2009, the Veracruz drug tracker Lázaro Llinas Castro was sentenced to thirty-two years in prison. These notes recount his rise and fall as a drug baron in the so-called first port of Mexico. They also tell the stories of several addicts who survived the terrible vice commercialized by Llinas Castro: crack cocaine.

Fed up with the heat, the meals based on fried corn tortillas, and the stench of armpit inside those airless quarters, Veracruz’s Secretary for Public Safety shakes off the goon employed to protect him and heads for the city in his car. He hasn’t seen his family in weeks, not since the telephone threats began.

Somewhere around Rinconada, under a stubborn drizzle, two black pickup trucks flank him on either side; a third vehicle emerges from a side road and boxes him in. Four men with hoods pulled over their heads point their rifles at him and order him out of the car.

“I’m going to ask for your boys not to mess with my boys,” is the first thing the sicario boss said once they managed to wrestle the secretary into one of the pickup trucks. This message was followed by his wife’s full name, their family home address in Xalapa and the timetables of his children’s private schools.

The view from Doctor Careló’s yard in the Pocitos y Rivera neighborhood stretches all the way to the port facility and, on a clear day, even the sea. Doctor Careló has put some plastic chairs in his otherwise neglected garden. Sitting pensively in one of them, Pancho Pantera rolls a joint. He’s grown a mustache and dyed his hair black — to avoid being recognized on the street, he says.

“I have to think carefully about how I’m going to get those fuckers,” he schemes to himself.

Pancho Pantera has just been released from the Ignacio Allende prison, having served a five-year sentence for offenses related to organized crime. He was a legendary thief, famed for cheating the local mob, passing himself off as a sales representative for the cartels, selling cocaine at wholesale prices to local businessmen. He would go to the arranged meeting with a bag full of white lime, and just as the packages were about to be opened to test the quality of the merchandise, a dozen armed heavies dressed in PGR T-shirts — but who were actually Pancho’s security unit — would raid the place and confiscate the “drugs” and money, offering in return to let those present go free. Pancho would keep half the cash and the rest would be distributed among the team of hired muscle.

But by the time he got out of the slammer, Pancho Pantera could no longer make his living this way. Now Los Zetas controlled everything.

“Those guys aren’t looking for partners, they want bodies on the payroll,” Careló says, reading Pancho’s mind.

“I have to find a way to get those fuckers…”

The tip of his matchstick glows in the fading light. It smells of open countryside in that yard.

“They’re everywhere,” sighs Careló.

Pancho Pantera smiles.

“Inside that place,” he says, pointing his chin fleetingly down the hill towards Veracruz’s downtown and the thirty-foot walls where he spent the last five years of his life, “it’s the Zetas prisoners who punish the wardens, not the other way around.”

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Born to a single mother, El Pollero, or Chicken Man, was raised in a children’s home and trained from a young age for a life of confinement. He went into the poultry trade, but hated the early mornings, hated butchering the animals, hated the stench that clung to his hands all day. He dreamed of becoming a narco and getting out of poverty. Eventually he came up with a plan to make himself known among mafia circles: he started taking the unsold chicken to the prisoners inside the Allende prison. After several weeks doing this, he was summoned by a Guatemalan inmate who thanked the kid for all the food and rewarded him with his first connection: a stash of drugs hidden inside a seized pickup. All that El Pollero had to do was pass himself off as a relative of the owner and drive the vehicle away.

The story goes that when he got home with the drugs, El Pollero ran over to the stove and knocked the familiar pot of beans bubbling away there onto the floor.

The authorities refused to allow El Pollero to take his “uncle’s” truck because it had been used in a crime, but El Pollero managed to convince them that he was just looking for some prayer cards that had been left in the glove box; nothing of value, of course, just “family keepsakes.” And in the exact spot explained to him by the Guatemalan, El Pollo found two kilos of cocaine.

The story goes that when he got home with the drugs, El Pollero ran over to the stove and knocked the familiar pot of beans bubbling away there onto the floor.

“We’re in business. Come on, tonight we eat like kings,” he said, and he took the whole family out for seafood cocktails.

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Right up until the 1930s, cocaine hydrochloride could be purchased in tablet form at several pharmacies around the city of Veracruz. It was in one of them, La Parroquia, located in the heart of the historic center, that the so-called Hijo Predilecto de Veracruz, the revered chronicler and poet Francisco Rivera Ávila, worked as a pharmacist, earning himself the moniker he used for his famed ten-line stanzas: Paco Píldora, or Pill Paco.

After this alkaloid and other drugs were banned, the supply and demand of cocaine hydrochloride was monopolized by a select community of businessmen, owners of the city’s large customs agencies, hotels, and real estate companies. The Colombian drug arrived from South America in shipping containers, or crossed the Caribbean aboard small planes to reach the warehouses in Mérida and Chiapas, completing its journey up the noses of Veracruz’s businessmen and rich kids.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that cocaine crossed the avenue known as Circunvalación — the symbolic boundary separating downtown and south Veracruz (the museum-like parts of the city, owned by white Mexicans and the nouveau riche) from the outlying districts (those repositories of savagery) — and started to be offered at affordable prices to the general public. Before that point — before the rise of Lázaro Llinas Castro as Veracruz’s principal drug baron — the sale of marijuana and psychotropic pills in Veracruz’s poor neighborhoods was dismissed by the authorities as mere “supply among addicts”: small-time vendors who earned next to nothing but were admired in their communities. People like Lázaro Llinas and his family.

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A butcher by trade, Lázaro was known in the city as the King of the Downers, although his close relatives knew him as El Loco. Lázaro, whose father and grandfather were drug dealers, struck his first blow when he snitched on El Pollero to the authorities and laid claim to his coke, his area of “operations,” and even his woman, Claudia. He set up his first tiendita,or little store, down a residential cul-de-sac on the corner of Calle Canal and Calle Victoria. People say the line to buy blow would be so long it looked more like a line for tortillas, especially in the morning.

Over time, Lázaro joined Veracruz’s nouveau riche. He got his teeth fixed and had surgery to narrow his nose. He even bought a yacht and a third-division football team, the famous Gloisa, which that same year competed for the junior league cup at the Luis “Pirata” Fuente stadium, home to Veracruz’s Tiburones Rojos. Kalusha, François Omam-Biyik, Antonio Carlos Santos, Luis García, and Antonio “El Turco” Mohamed were just some of the first division footballers Lázaro would hire to then pass them off as youth players in an effort to raise the standard of the matches.

The bare light bulb in the living room shines down on Doctor Careló’s bald head. He’s holding the photo of Yiyo lighting a pipe.

“People would lose their fucking shit if the guys down at the tiendita sold them substandard goods,” he recalls. “That’s why Yiyo asked me to talk to Lázaro, to get him to have a word.”

Yiyo didn’t have a job. He never even had to leave his house: every day someone would turn up at his door with drugs and booze. But he was tired of snorting coke cut with laxatives and he knew Careló hung around with the Llinas crew, not El Loco himself, but his cousin, Lazarito, a guy who paid regular secret visits to the doctor to smoke weed in peace and not have to share it with his family.

(In the Llinas family, as in a García Márquez novel, all the men were called Lázaro and all the women Gloria Isabel; hence Lázaro calling his football team “Gloisa,” in honor of his mother.)

“Lazarito was eight when he first came over to this house. He couldn’t even roll a joint but he could burn two back to back, all by himself,” Careló recalls.

Later on, as a teenager, at a dance at Capezzio’s, Lazarito suffered a rare sort of thrombosis that left both his legs paralyzed. Doctor Careló helped him to walk again with massage and acupuncture sessions, which is why the entire Llinas family gave Careló deferential treatment.

Doctor Careló went to talk to Lázaro’s cousins.

“They told me that from now on you should ask for ‘the shoe stuff,’ ” he told Yiyo.

He was of course referring to the better-quality cocaine that the dealers kept separate in a shoebox.

As a sign of his gratitude for this information, Yiyo gave Careló a place of honor at the gatherings at his house, which by then had begun to be known among the local junkies as the Temple of Vice.

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Inside “the temple” silence reigned except for the tap-tapping of the razor blade against the surface of a giant mirror. Everyone present watched Yiyo’s hands as they cut the rocks of cocaine and made fat, mile-long lines that they would proceed to snort, Doctor Careló before everyone else. Once they were all buzzing, the night could really begin: they’d talk about everything and nothing, dance and listen to music — mainly jazz and salsa — fuck, snort some more, smoke.

One night, some guy from Mexico City, a mime artist by trade, turned up at Yiyo’s house and showed him how to boil sodium bicarbonate or ammonia with cocaine hydrochloride to make “black rock.” The new dish was an instant hit and at “the temple” Yiyo climbed the ranks from whipping boy to Master Chef.

“That’s the end of snorting under this roof!” he declared, after smoking his first hit of crack. But it wouldn’t be long before he was sacrificed at the altar of his own temple.

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Scientists have yet to establish what makes crack cocaine — or “black rock” or “base” — so addictive, but it does cause serious dependence, with withdrawal symptoms including insomnia, fatigue, apathy, and severe depression.

Crack’s effects are short-lived: as soon as the smoke from the first dose passes through the system, the brain and guts start begging for more. “Rock,” like methamphetamine, is a drug designed for repeated consumption; a narco-marketing success story that impoverishes the user and makes them prey to their basest instincts.

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Ever attentive to his customer’s wishes and the latest fads, “El Loco” Llinas added this new dish to the menu at his tienditas. He relocated them outside of downtown and set up new areas of operation in the poor suburbs to the west and north of the city. He bought an entire block of buildings from the Institute of the National Housing Fund for Workers"in Buenavista and diversified his services: his tienditas were no longer just convenience stores selling drugs, but also safe places to hide hostages and store weapons and stolen goods.

Law enforcement agents arrested him several times, once even at the airport, but his money and connections among the state and federal authorities saved his skin. His luck ran out at noon on Wednesday, June 18, 2001, when a task force from the Federal Special Prosecutor’s Office for Drug Crimes burst into El Sanborncito, a restaurant located in the heart of the Hueca neighborhood, where Lázaro Llinas often ate breakfast in the company of locals, including journalists and law enforcement insiders. Legend has it that as federal agents dragged him to the exit, Veracruz’s most powerful drug baron left a trickle of urine on the tiled floor.

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For Doctor Careló, there are two types of addicts: those who smoke crack in a pipe (the sublime) and those who use a perforated can (the wretches).

On the table before him sits his greatest achievement as a craftsman: a glass tube, now blackened, with a tangle of wire knotted at one end. The “rock” would be placed between the copper wires and warmed over a low heat with a spirit lamp; in this way, Careló prevented any of the rock’s precious vapors from being wasted. He even calculated to the last milligram the ingredients for a perfect hit: a game of stoichiometry requiring, in equal parts, the knowledge he’d acquired in his high school chemistry lab and the gnawing fervor of addiction.

The thing is, Doctor Careló is no doctor. They call him that because of his crazy face. Car-e-ló, “cara de loco.”

“What made you quit crack?” I ask him.

The dealers are barely out of diapers and they earn three hundred pesos for a twelve-hour shift.

Careló looks over to the door, out to the yard. I notice for the first time a slight depression in his head where he’s missing a small piece of his skull: a souvenir from a bullet he took in the jungle in Nicaragua, he tells me, where he played at being a guerrilla.

“The only good hit with crack is the first one,” he says. “You feel like you’ve grabbed God by the ears. It’s all downhill from there.”

“And if I offered you some right now?” I ask, trying to fuck with him.

“Lady, you’d have to have at least a kilo to even tempt me.”

Most of the independent dealers have disappeared in recent years, but you can still buy cocaine — in powder or rocks — in the rain-washed hills of this neighborhood. Like real convenience stores, they operate twenty-four hours a day. The dealers are barely out of diapers and they earn three hundred pesos for a twelve-hour shift. Any shortages during the cash count are punished with a hiding: ten beatings with a bat for every gram missing. And no one slips up twice, because they’d pay for that with their life.

The police know the location of Los Zetas’ tienditas, but they don’t interfere. The message is clear: “Don’t mess with my boys.”

"Don't Mess with My Boys," by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes, from THIS IS NOT MIAMI, copyright © 2013 Fernanda Melchor. Spanish text copyright © 2021 by Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, S. A. de C. V., Mexico. Translation copyright © 2023 Sophie Hughes. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.