Following the capture of Miguel Ángel Treviño Morales, alias "Z-40", details about the Zeta cartel he headed have continued to emerge. Mexican officials have said that the scratches that appear on the drug kingpin's face in his mug shot happened after Mexican marines descended upon his pickup near the border city of Nuevo Laredo, when Treviño Morales tried to evade capture by hurtling into heavy brush. El Universal reported on Wednesday that a death threat cited by former Mexican President Felipe Calderón in 2007 and again in 2012 was in fact real, and authored by Z-40. Now, the Associated Press reports that the cartel leader personally organized the opening of a Zeta cell in Guatemala.
"He is the one personally responsible for building up the Guatemala drug turf. There's intelligence that says he was here on various occasions...directing the whole launch," Guatemalan government minister Mauricio López Bonilla told the AP, adding that they entered in 2007 through the northern province of El Petén, which shares a border with Mexico.
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The Zetas are said to operate throughout the border area, which is overwhelmingly remote and subject to little supervision by law enforcement. And they have begun to extend their tentacles into the government: a former Los Angeles County sheriff, Richard Valdemar, told the Daily Beast on Thursday that the Zetas now recruit defectors from the Kabiles - an elite Guatemalan special operations force trained in counter-insurgency tactics - to collaborate in the shipment of cocaine through the country.
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The Associated Press also writes that the Zetas leader also participated in the 2008 murder of Juan León, a local Guatemalan drug kingpin, along with nine of his bodyguards. León had reputedly refused to join forces with the Zetas, who murdered him in retaliation for that refusal.
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Treviño Morales developed a reputation for notoriously grotesque acts of cruelty in his dealings with rivals, including putting victims in what he called the "guiso" or stew - a 55-gallon vat, where they were then cooked alive. Aside from his drug-trafficking activities, he also led the Zetas in attacks on migrants from Guatemala and other countries in Central America, sometimes using his contacts in Guatemala to brief him on the whereabouts of groups of migrants as they headed north on cargo trains. He is suspected of being responsible for the slaughter of 72 migrants in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas in 2010.
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