In October the body of the new mayor of the mountain town of Chilpancingo was found in his car. His head was on the roof. Matthew Campbell reports from the gangland of Guerrero state.
High in the Sierra Madre mountains, Chilpancingo should be a popular tourist attraction. Surrounded by tropical forest trickling with streams, its white-painted, neoclassical cathedral dominates a central plaza shaded by trees, famed for its fiestas.
On a November afternoon, the walls are painted with skulls and streets littered with rotting marigolds - remnants of the latest festival, Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. But such colourful rituals do not attract visitors: behind the façade is a city paralysed by fear. All the more so after the recent, gruesome discovery of a headless body slumped in the passenger seat of his white Volkswagen Saveiro Robust pick-up truck. The head had been placed on the vehicle’s roof.
Chilpancingo, capital of the Mexican state of Guerrero, is used to such gory spectacles. Rival gang members slaughter each other with the nonchalance of abattoir workers - and with impunity. Victims are dumped by the road after being shot or garrotted. Sometimes they hang from the overpasses. But the decapitated man was no ordinary casualty in the country’s notorious narco wars. Alejandro Arcos, 43, a popular figure whose ambition was to play a role on the national stage, had been sworn in as Chilpancingo’s mayor only six days earlier. He was married with a 10-year-old son.
Now he has become a symbol of the government’s failure to fight the crime gangs and the country’s endemic corruption, the images of his severed head a horrifying reminder of the perils faced by public officials and the shocking cruelty of the cartels.
There is not much optimism that a new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, a former physicist sworn in a few days before the mayor’s murder, will make any difference. Her mentor and predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as Amlo, pursued a “hugs, not bullets” policy of avoiding clashes with the cartels. It has been blamed for helping to make the country one of the most criminal and violent on Earth.
At least 2,700 people have been murdered since Sheinbaum was sworn in on October 1 and 400,000 have been killed since 2006. Another 100,000 have gone missing. These seem astonishing statistics for a country not officially at war. Guerrero, meanwhile, has become one of the bloodiest battlefields in this undeclared war. Chilpancingo is one of Mexico’s most violent cities, often featuring in lists of the world’s top 50 homicide capitals. Acapulco, on Guerrero’s Pacific coast and once a glamorous tourist resort, is also now one of the world’s most dangerous cities.
General elections in June brought the usual homicidal surge, with 37 candidates murdered across Mexico as gangs vied to get friendly candidates into key seats and eliminate those of their rivals. It was assumed Chilpancingo’s mayor had crossed one of these brutal gangs, his execution a warning of the penalty for disobedience.
But what he did to merit such a hideous death is a subject of intense speculation in this city of hidden alleys and whispered secrets - and where each clue seems to lead to another puzzle.
It is the end of the rainy season and Chilpancingo looks lush and green as it bakes under an azure sky. A window is open in the autopsy room of the city mortuary. But there is no ventilation. The air is suffocating, saturated with a pungent stench of decay.
“I’m used to it,” says Maria del Socorro Atilano, 67, a forensic pathologist dressed in blue overalls and a surgical mask, as she begins to examine the first corpse of the day. She places a gloved hand, almost tenderly, on the back of the head: “How do you think he died?” she asks me.
Lying on a stainless steel autopsy table is a man in his thirties, his stubbly face a purple hue, his body a dull grey. The feet, bizarrely, are crossed, as though he were relaxing. A little plastic card next to his head says “Unidentified male”. Like many of the hundreds of unnamed corpses stored in the mortuary’s fridges, he was dumped on a weed-choked plot of land.
His clothes - jeans with empty pockets, a clean T-shirt, sneakers and socks - have been removed. Judging from the face, it looks as though he’s been strangled. Atilano, a compact figure with dark gleaming eyes between strands of white hair, nods. “Yet there are no visible marks on the neck,” she notes.
Flies buzz around us and a mariachi band plays on the radio as one of the pathologist’s assistants, having used a scalpel to peel back the man’s scalp, goes to work on his skull with a hacksaw. “I don’t like the motor saw,” Atilano says, pointing to a powered saw with a circular blade on a shelf. “It can spray fragments of bone into the eyes - that’s a very painful thing.”
Atilano began to specialise in forensic pathology after her brother disappeared in Tijuana in 2002. “I know what it’s like to be left wondering in agony about someone you love,” she says. “I want to help give a name to the dead, to reunite them with their families. Sometimes I pray a little bit, I talk to them, I tell them, ‘I’ll soon have you back with your family.’ ”
She holds up the dead man’s right hand and invites me to look at the fingernails. “He was chewing them,” she observes. “You can tell a lot from the nails.” He may have been asphyxiated by a plastic bag placed over his head, a common form of gangland execution that saves the cost of a bullet.
The methods of murder, though, are multiple and have engendered their own lexicon of horror: embolsado (a body found in a bin bag); encajuelado (one left in the boot of a car). Another entry denotes one who dissolves victims in acid — pozolero, after a Mexican stew. A descuartizado may be the unluckiest victim, dismembered by knife or chainsaw in a process that often begins while the victim is still alive.
“I’ve seen it all,” Atilano says. “Of course you suffer, you panic, it affects you in your personal life, how you spend your time. But it’s my work, I have to do it. I’ve learnt to leave the pain here in my workplace.”
Guerrero’s history and politics, she says, are deeply entwined with corruption and organised crime. “There are bad people all around. People watch you everywhere.”
I ask her about the famous descabezado: the decapitated mayor. “I knew him. He was honest, he was doing the right thing,” she says. She did not perform the post-mortem examination on Arcos and did not know if he was already dead when he was beheaded. What struck her, though, was the expression on the face of the head lying on top of the white truck. His eyes were closed and his hair neatly combed. “He looked at peace,” she says. “I don’t normally see that expression on the faces of the dead.”
Unlike the usual gory scenes when headless bodies are found, there was not a drop of blood visible.
With dark hair, sharp, chiselled features and a generous smile, Arcos was known for his cheerful demeanour. He loved walking the streets and chatting to passers-by. Born and educated in Chilpancingo, he launched himself into politics after doing an online degree in political science and public administration. A social democrat, he joined the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and promised better care for the elderly and more help for single mothers. He was married to Sandra, an accountant, the mother of his son, also called Alejandro.
On walls outside the town hall, people have vented their outrage over the mayor’s murder: “We demand justice”; “We want peace”; “No more terrorist acts”. Candles flicker below a photograph of Arcos on a makeshift altar. “We want to have a nice memory of him — he was much loved, he wanted to change things,” says Alberto Guevara, 25, who has set up a stand collecting scrap metal - mainly old keys - to make a sculpture of the slain mayor.
The last time I came to this city of 300,000 inhabitants was six years ago to meet Mario Chavez Carvajal, a politician running for mayor of a nearby village. He had already survived three assassination attempts. When we went into a café, many of the customers hurriedly finished their breakfast and left in case the gunmen came looking for him again. His luck finally ran out two years ago, when he was gunned down in a shopping centre.
Another local figure with frightening personal experience of the risks of getting involved in politics is Pioquinto Damián. Now a 71-year-old businessman, he is taking no chances. “I have 48 cameras at home covering all the angles,” he says after ushering me into an office just off the main square. “And all my doors are armoured - even the one to the bathroom.”
Ten years ago gunmen sprayed his car with bullets, killing his 38-year-old daughter-in-law, Laura Rosas Brito, who was in the front seat. “They emptied a magazine into the car while I played dead in the back.”
So what makes Chilpancingo so violent? “We started with marijuana in the 1960s, then came the poppies,” Damián says, referring to the lucrative crop used to make heroin. “After harvest, the poppy farmers would spend all their profits in the brothels - they’d stay there for five days straight until they’d spent everything.”
When fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, replaced heroin about five years ago as the most popular drug in the US, the poppy market crashed. Criminal gangs splintered into smaller groups that began extorting local businesses. “The problem now is how powerful they have become,” says Damián, a seasoned figure in Chilpancingo’s political and business circles with deep-set eyes and a weathered face. “The government is not in control any more. The gangs are.”
Two murderous groups operate in and around Chilpancingo: the Ardillos - or “Squirrels” - and the Tlacos. They and gangs from Acapulco are estimated to control about 80 per cent of the state. The Ardillos dominate the wholesale market for chicken, the Tlacos the sale of pork and beef. Each controls certain bus routes and taxi chains. They also smuggle and sell drugs - the Ardillos’ crystal methamphetamine is blue; their rival’s is pink. Both force local governments to award public works contracts to businesses they control. They recruit young men as foot soldiers and try to appoint people under their influence to positions of power. “The police are totally bought by them,” Damián says. “And a lot of the politicians too.”
He adds: “You cannot go campaigning in their territories without doing deals with them. Alejandro Arcos’s sin was to do a deal with one group and then reach out to the other. The first group suspected they’d been betrayed.”
According to this version of events, Arcos agreed to give the Ardillos a slice of the municipal public works budget. But he also made contact with the Tlacos through an intermediary. He wanted to see if he could forge a peace agreement. He wanted an end to the killing. “But the conditions for peace were not there,” Damián says.
Like the doctor, Damián is puzzled by the crime scene. “I’ve seen when they cut heads off,” he says, referring to photos of victims. “It’s an everyday thing. They die with a look of terror on their faces. But Alejandro looked so peaceful - and the cut was so clean it could have been done by a surgeon. I wonder if they put him to sleep and then killed him. That’s not typical of the gangs.”
It is thought that Arcos was already dead when he was driven in his car to Moctezuma Street, a hillside alley, where he was found just a few hundred yards from a police roadblock. CCTV from a nearby hotel captured images of a man on a motorbike leading the truck into the street at 4.39pm on October 6. It shows the motorbike leaving seconds later with two men on it. A member of the public reported the body and its severed head minutes later.
A 19th-century general on horseback looks out over the main square. Vicente Guerrero was a key figure in the fight for independence from Spain and went on to become Mexico’s second president. Just down the road from there, a businessman sits at a glass oval table and opens a bottle of vintage mezcal. He fills our glasses and raises his in memory of his dead friend. “Mmm, that’s good,” he says after a sip. A neighbour gave him the bottle and died two days later, he says - hastily adding with a laugh: “It was a heart attack, nothing bloody.”
He does not want his name in print. “It’s becoming clear to me that there is reason to be afraid not only of repercussions from crime gangs, but from other shadowy forces at work behind the scenes,” he says.
A 69-year-old street seller named Candido Domitilo was reported to have given investigators testimony implicating Germán Reyes, the municipal police chief, in the murder of Arcos. Reyes is in custody but denies any involvement in the crime. He says he’s a scapegoat. Domitilo, the witness, was found murdered a few days after making his statement.
Taking another sip of mezcal, the businessman reminisces about his friend Arcos. “He could be a bit too chummy, he was a bit naive, always going up to people offering to help, asking them all about their lives. He was charismatic, though - and he had a plan. He wanted peace.”
According to him, the mayor, whose wife and son have gone into hiding, won approval from the Ardillos to run in the election in June, as the representative of a coalition of parties including his PRD. He was the only candidate allowed to make speeches in areas they controlled.
Arcos was sworn in on September 30. That evening, Ulises Hernández Martínez, a former special forces police commander tipped to become the police chief, had been gunned down in the street. Three days later Arcos’s cabinet secretary, Francisco Tapia, was shot dead. On Sunday, October 6, Arcos loaded his pick-up with bottles of water for victims of Hurricane John, which had devastated parts of the Guerrero coast. He told his bodyguards to take the day off and drove off alone into an Ardillos-controlled area of the city. It is thought he had requested a meeting with the gang’s leaders to help end the killing.
“I think he got desperate, made a bad decision,” says his friend. “Maybe he thought he could win them over with his charm.”
His predecessor as mayor, Norma Hernandez, had once decided to sit down with the gangs. She was expelled from the country’s ruling party, Morena, after a video captured her at breakfast with an Ardillos boss. Hernandez got away with her life, but the meeting appears not to have gone well. A few weeks later seven descabezados (decapitated people) were found in a truck with a note for the mayor: “I continue to wait for that second breakfast you promised.”
Looking at my phone that evening I have a message from Atilano, the forensic pathologist. She is examining another body, this one in an advanced state of putrefaction. “The smell is very strong,” she says. “It gets into your clothes.”
The next morning guests are watching television in the breakfast room at Chilpancingo’s Holiday Inn, one with a pistol tucked into his belt, when a newsflash trumpets another gruesome discovery.
A red pick-up truck has been left during the night at a junction just 200 yards from where we are sitting with 11 bodies in the back. This time they are descuartizados - they have been dismembered with a chainsaw. They include two women, two 13-year-old boys and another boy of 15. A passer-by alerted police after seeing blood leaking from the back of the truck.
The victims are believed to be part of a group of people kidnapped by the Ardillos on suspicion of spying. The truck has already been taken to police headquarters and the remains to the mortuary next door.
By the time I get to the mortuary, families of the missing have gathered, awaiting news. They stand in a huddle outside the building, its walls decorated with Day of the Dead skulls. Inside, Atilano and a colleague are beginning the grim process of stitching together the hacked-up body parts so that the victims can be returned to the families in a recognisable condition for burial.
“It’s been very stressful,” Atilano tells me, referring to the human jigsaws she has had to complete. “We try to be as calm and relaxed as we can. First we take the heads, then the thoraxes. We have to match them up.”
There are hands, forearms, feet and thighs. The sort of cuts that have been made can help to match the different pieces, she says. They sew the pieces together with a large needle. There is no evidence that these poor people were not chopped up while still alive.
Besides the 11 descuartizados, Atilano and her colleague had to deal with five others, “the regular bodies” of the day, as she calls them. “It was a very hard day.”
That evening, in a house on the edge of the city behind a high razor-wire fence, the secret intermediary in Arcos’s peace initiative - the man who acted as his go-between with the Tlacos gang - agrees to meet me on condition I do not mention his name: “That could be fatal for me,” he warns, one of his bodyguards sitting nearby.
He confirms that Arcos had approached him, knowing he was in contact with leaders of the Tlacos. “He said, ‘I’m ready to listen to them if they’re willing to help me make peace.’ That was basically his message to them. ‘Help me build peace.’ ”
He had passed on the message to the Tlacos leaders. It is possible that the Ardillos got wind of this overture and assumed the mayor was double-dealing, he concedes. Yet he, too, thought there was something odd about the crime scene.
“It’s not the first time that the gangs do this sort of thing, cutting off heads and exhibiting them on vehicles. It’s meant to deliver a message. But usually the victims show signs of having been tortured, or at least beaten. They’re covered in blood. In this case it looked almost surgical. Very, very, very strange. Was this really the work of the gangs? Or was it other, shadowy forces, something connected to politics?”
Neither of the Chilpancingo gangs has claimed responsibility for the killing, nor have they denied it. In an attempt to find out more I visit the new mayor, who was hastily sworn in after Arcos’s death, imagining he must be fretting about his own safety. But Gustavo Alarcón, a 64-year-old doctor who had been elected as an alternate on the same ticket as the dead mayor, is desperately trying to project a sense of business as usual. Politics in Chilpancingo, he suggests, is no more dangerous than any other profession.
“Farmers have to handle all sorts of poisonous fertilisers. Flying a plane, as I do, can be dangerous too,” says this portly man in a floral shirt. He giggles nervously.
The title of the novelist Graham Greene’s account of his 1938 visit to Mexico, The Lawless Roads, seems more appropriate now than ever. Driving southwest from Chilpancingo towards Acapulco, a haze hangs over the hills that flank the highway. “This is a cursed land. On this stretch of road they can kill you just for your car,” says Francisco Robles, a local photographer who covers the nota roja, or “red news” - anything involving the spilling of blood. “The gangs often put up checkpoints - there is no law here.”
Once a luxury getaway for Hollywood stars and Arab sheikhs (even Queen Elizabeth paid a visit in 1983), the seaside city of 700,000 people is now a murderous playground for criminals. The main warring gangs in Acapulco include Los Rusos and Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, plus numerous splinter groups.
Most of the tourists to Acapulco these days come from Mexico City, a five-hour drive away. But the authorities are trying to woo more foreigners. One morning I see some Americans being welcomed at the airport with garlands and gift bags as well as calaveras and Catrinas, characters with faces painted like skulls for Day of the Dead.
Among the day’s grim harvest of corpses are four people found together in the back of a car, all garrotted. Now Robles gets a call saying a man has been murdered a few yards from the beach. We find him lying under a black blanket beneath an almond tree, between two cars, a white-sleeved arm protruding. Children stand staring, eating ice cream, as forensic lab workers in white suits place little numbered yellow markers on the ground whenever they locate a shell casing. So far there are 13.
Robles takes another call: another body, at the entrance to an alley, garrotted. Then, in my hotel room late that night, I hear what sounds like fireworks. A block away, a man in blue shorts lies face down on the ground. He has been shot several times in the back of the head. The police cover him with a blanket.
In October, 122 people were murdered in Acapulco. In the first five days of November the figure was 36. Eduardo Valladares, an army colonel born in Chilpancingo and now in charge of Acapulco’s police force, calls the situation “critical” and “very delicate”. He is appalled by the escalating brutality: “It’s incredible,” he says, referring to the 11 descuartizados found in the truck in the state capital. He believes the perpetrators are “off their head on drugs”, recalling prison visits he made while in the army in Sinaloa. “I’d ask some of them why they did these awful things and they’d say, ‘I don’t remember a thing about it, I was on drugs.’ ”
Sheinbaum, the new president, is under enormous pressure to halt the violence in Guerrero and the northwestern state of Sinaloa, where rival cartel factions are fighting for fentanyl smuggling routes into America. “Under Amlo, the army was under orders not to engage with any organised crime gangs unless they were attacked,” says a diplomatic source with specialised knowledge of Mexico, referring to the former president. “He had no idea how to handle security.”
A new strategy is being developed, involving increased intelligence and co-operation with the Americans, he says.
Meanwhile the bodies are piling up in the mortuaries. “I’m exhausted,” was the last message I had from Atilano, Chilpancingo’s forensic pathologist. “I need to rest my body and mind.” She was taking a well-deserved, week-long holiday on Mexico’s Caribbean coast.
Written by: Matthew Campbell
© The Times of London