The Cross-Border "Northeast Cartel"

We look at the mafia that rose to power in the Two Laredos

By Juan Alberto Cedillo and Ioan Grillo

Para leer en español click aqui.

The photo shows a typically-horrifying narco image of thugs in camo and helmets, armed to the teeth before a kneeling victim, in this case a woman bound and blind-folded. Following a common practice, the gunmen have a logo on their chest to identify their affiliation, with the letters CDN, short for the Cártel del Noreste, or Northeast Cartel. But more unusually, they also have the words “Operativa Texas” or “Texas Operation” claiming they are a division of the mob that works on the northside of the Rio Grande inside the United States.

It’s unclear where the photo was taken and if it was indeed in Texas or in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, the base of the cartel, or somewhere else altogether. (And with cartel propaganda you are never sure who is really behind it). But the CDN does operate in Texas, especially in the city of Laredo over the border from its stronghold in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

It traffics drugs through the “Two Laredos” - the busiest crossing for trucks on the entire border - and onto the strategic Interstate 35 where dope can flow northward to reach the Eastern Seaboard. It also traffics firearms south, with Texas being the biggest source of cartel guns in the United States. And while it keeps murders down on the U.S. side to avoid heat on its lucrative operations it has carried out kidnappings on Texan soil and driven the victims into Mexico.

Still, the way it moves in Texas is night and day compared to how it functions in a chunk of Tamaulipas where it is like a shadow government, imposing a monopoly on criminal rackets including human smuggling and local drug sales. And it runs a paramilitary wing known as La Tropa del Infierno, or Squad From Hell, which wields full-on improvised fighting vehicles or “monsters” that look like trucks in Mad Max.

To add to its image as a true power, the CDN released a video in March with an unusually high production-value and cinematic title screen in which it addressed the Mexican president. Flanked by gunmen in blue uniforms, the speaker cited reports in the Mexican media outlet Latinus and the New York Times about narco corruption and called it “fake news,” even citing Trump. “We do not get involved in politics. As Donald Trump says, ‘It is all fake news.’ ”

The CDN is smaller than either of Mexico’s two biggest mafia networks, the Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Yet it’s a significant force at a regional level and makes incursions into other battlegrounds across Mexico. In a sense, it represents key aspects of what cartels have morphed into: paramilitary organized crime networks with a range of rackets, fierce control of a local fiefdom but sprawling tentacles that stretch out - and cross the border.

Here, we examine how the CDN emerged from the fires of the cartel wars that have raged in northeast Mexico for two decades. And we look at the scope of its current operations, especially in Nuevo Laredo but also in the power-house city of Monterrey and in south Texas. The emergence of the CDN shines light on the complex and shifting nature of cartel power that can be missed amid the headlines of corpses and firefights.

The Rise and Fall of the Zetas

The name CDN first appeared in about 2015 but it was really a rebranding of a core faction of the feared cartel army the Zetas and an attempt to change the reputation of part of that mob. Also known as “The Last Letter,” the Zetas were a force that exploded into the cartel world and revolutionized elements of it yet they would eventually be smashed apart.