FEAR IS JUST A WORD: A Missing Daughter, a Violent Cartel, and a Mother’s Quest for Vengeance, by Azam Ahmed
According to “2666,” Roberto Bolaño’s magnum opus, published posthumously in 2004, the “secret of the world” remained hidden in Santa Teresa, the alias he used for Ciudad Juárez, a city on the U.S.-Mexico border that first became notorious in the late 1990s for the serial killing of women. Had Bolaño read Azam Ahmed’s “Fear Is Just a Word: A Missing Daughter, a Violent Cartel, and a Mother’s Quest for Vengeance,” he might have included San Fernando, a small town in the state of Tamaulipas, as a subsidiary of Ciudad Juárez’s hell on earth.
Drawing on four years of meticulous archival and field research, as well as countless interviews, scholarly works and his own journalism, Ahmed, a former Mexico bureau chief (and current investigative correspondent) for The New York Times, lifts the veil on daily life in a war-torn zone. While people employ the phrase “war on drugs” to mean an effort to combat illegal trafficking, or, worse, as a euphemism for state-sanctioned violence, Ahmed sets out to prove that in Mexico cartels have behaved as occupying armies on newly gained territory, governing by force and submitting local communities to increasingly spectacular acts of cruelty. The so-called war on drugs shows its truest face here: as a war against the civilian population. Ahmed’s book is a study of how such a war touches every aspect of social life, tearing it to pieces, and how the impunity with which cartels operate perpetuates a never-ending cycle of evil.
Tamaulipas — an agrarian state and stronghold of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, since its inception in 1929 — figured discreetly in the tales of violence surrounding the first surge of drug cartels in northern Mexico. Beginning in the 1930s, Juan N. Guerra, the leader of the Gulf cartel (portrayed with finesse by the actor Jesús Ochoa in the recent Netflix series “Narcos”), managed to maintain a firm hold on the syndicate’s activities, before ceding control to his nephew Juan García Ábrego, who concentrated on cocaine smuggling. After Ábrego was sent to prison in 1996, Osiel Cárdenas, a Gulf foot soldier, eventually took command, recruiting members of the military to the cartel’s ranks to form a small army: the Zetas. Then, in 2007, Cárdenas’s arrest and extradition to the United States ended the alliance between the Gulf group and the Zetas and inaugurated a bloody turf war.
San Fernando first came into international view in August 2010, when the murder on the town’s outskirts of 72 migrants from Central America was headline news. By then, the Zeta cartel was fighting the Gulf cartel for territory and smuggling routes, San Fernando becoming a central battlefield. Obliged to grapple with unprecedented levels of brutality, many local citizens were paralyzed with terror, while others began organizing resistance. Miriam Rodríguez, Ahmed’s heroine — more than a character, she is a veritable force of nature — is a shining example of the latter.
