From The New York Times I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.
For the past three years, the city of San Fernando, Mexico had experienced a temporary lull in the cartel violence that for years marked it as one of the country’s most dangerous places. My colleague, Azam Ahmed, went to San Fernando to piece together what happened there and found a remarkable story of one woman’s implausible quest to bring the cartel to justice.
It’s Wednesday, February 3.
Azam, where does the story of Miriam Rodríguez start for you?
Azam Ahmed
I first heard about Miriam Rodríguez in 2017. I’d been in Mexico for a few years as the bureau chief here.
Azam Ahmed
Hola, hola. [INAUDIBLE]
Azam Ahmed
But it wasn’t until I sat down with her son Luis and her daughter Azalea that I really figured out what her story was about.
Azam Ahmed
(IN SPANISH) Okay, one question that I had —
Azam Ahmed
Back in 2014, Miriam and her family were living in San Fernando. She had three children. The family were shopkeepers. She owned a store called Rodeo Boots. It sold cowboy gear, hats, shirts, pants and boots. And her daughter, 20-year-old Karen — her youngest — helped out in the shop while she was kind of figuring out school and what she was going to do next. In late January of 2014, Karen was driving home one day and a car blocked her path, armed gunmen jumped out, and basically abducted her in her own car. The family was very close. Azalea the oldest sister, Luis the middle brother and Karen the little sister.
Azalea
(IN SPANISH) That day I kept calling and calling and she didn’t answer.
Azam Ahmed
Azalea was trying to call her sister who always answered.
azalea
(IN SPANISH) I went to bed worried, but I didn’t fall asleep because I was thinking that Karen didn’t return my call during —
Azam Ahmed
But now, Karen wasn’t picking up.
azalea
(IN SPANISH) During the night, I sent her a message and she didn’t answer either.
Azam Ahmed
Or responding to messages. And she began to get more and more frantic sending her messages, calling, calling.
Azalea
(IN SPANISH) When I saw my dad come back at that hour, when you could not go out, I said “Something bad happened.”
Azam Ahmed
By then, the whole family had convened in the house. Luis had come in from Ciudad Victoria which is about 2.5 hours away. Azalea was there, Miriam, who was also out of town, and they began to think through how to respond.
Azalea
(IN SPANISH) When my dad arrived here, he received a second call from the kidnappers.
Azam Ahmed
Hours later they got a call from the kidnappers.
Azalea
(IN SPANISH) And they passed it to my sister for a moment, not more.
Azam Ahmed
They passed the phone to Karen, they said, proof of life, and quickly took the phone back, demanded a ransom. Family hung up and spent the night considering what to do and how to do it.
Michael Barbaro
And does the family have a sense of who these kidnappers are?
Azam Ahmed
The family had a very clear sense because the people that ran organized crime in the town of San Fernando were the Zetas. They had absolute control. And anyone who lived there or even knew about San Fernando was very clear on who was calling the shots.
Michael Barbaro
And what do we need to know about the Zetas?
Azam Ahmed
The Zetas began as sort of the armed wing of one of the larger cartels, the Gulf Cartel. But a little bit before 2010 they split and formed their own cartel. And Tamaulipas, the state where San Fernando is located, became a war zone. Tamaulipas borders Texas. And San Fernando has the misfortune of being located in a strategic crossing point for the entire state, heading up to the border. These two cartels were fighting it out along the border and fighting it out in the actual areas of Tamaulipas. And the Zeta cartel had taken over San Fernando. And in the course of their operations — whether it was drug smuggling, human trafficking — one of the ways they raised money was through kidnappings, and kidnappings of locals. And so it was pretty clear the moment they hadn’t heard from Karen what had happened. But they only confirmed it when the kidnappers actually called. And there was little doubt those kidnappers were members of the Zeta cartel.
Michael Barbaro
So what did Karen’s family do? And who do they turn to knowing how routine this kind of kidnapping is?
Azam Ahmed
I think in ordinary circumstances, people would turn to the police.
Michael Barbaro
Right.
Azam Ahmed
But that’s not the case in a lot of Mexico and certainly not in San Fernando. The police are either corrupt, complicit or just completely incapable of doing anything. In fact, something like 95 percent of homicides go unsolved.
Michael Barbaro
Wow.
Azam Ahmed
You think about that for a minute, five out of every 100 homicides, the police detectives whomever is investigating figure out who did it. And the other 95 out of that 100, it just remains in total and utter impunity. Look, Mexico is not a failed state. It’s got one of the largest economies in the world, multinational companies. It’s home to a remarkable culture, cuisine, art. But there are these places like San Fernando scattered throughout the country where people’s lives are dictated by the whims of armed men, where life is circumscribed by violence, where there’s literally no state coming to save or protect you. And I can’t put a specific number on how many people that is. But Mexico’s at its most violent point in more than 20 years since they began collecting this kind of data. And I think that speaks volumes about how many people live under that vice grip of impunity. Most people who suffer kidnappings know our best bet is to pay. They don’t even go to the police at first.
[music]
Luis
(IN SPANISH) Don’t worry, I tell him, it’s a matter of money. Let’s see how we do it —
Azam Ahmed
The family did the same. In fact, the people they went to were the local bank. And kidnappings were so common that banks were used to offering families these ransom loans.
Luis
(IN SPANISH) On the first call they asked him for a million pesos. So then the world does fall for us. Because you say, where we are going to get a million pesos?
Azam Ahmed
The kidnappers, they initially asked for a million pesos, which is about $50,000 in today’s exchange rate. That’s a lot of money for humble shopkeepers. They settled on a lower amount but the family still needed a loan to cover it.
luis
(IN SPANISH) Pass me my daughter, he said, don’t worry my child I’m going to bring the money.
Azam Ahmed
They filled a bag with the money and met the kidnappers at the appointed time outside the local hospital. And her father walked from there to the gates of the local cemetery where they promised she’d be returned. And after a few hours waiting, he realized she wasn’t coming.
Michael Barbaro
So he has now paid this money and she’s nowhere to be seen.
Azam Ahmed
Yeah. It’s their nightmare scenario. And so her family was sort of left with that, and that void after having basically used their life savings and indebted themselves to a bank.
Michael Barbaro
So the family probably now assumes, we’re never going to get Karen back.
Azam Ahmed
Families in these situations they start to look for glimmers of hope even when they don’t exist. Luis told his family, hey, we shouldn’t worry about this. There was a shootout last night and maybe they got tied up and they couldn’t return Karen. I’m sure they’ll bring her back. I’m sure they’ll bring her back. But time passed and they continued to wait. And nothing happened. The kidnappers stopped answering their phones. But it was a small community where everybody kind of knew each other. So eventually, Miriam asked one of her contacts to get her a meeting with the cartel. And they sent one of their young recruits to talk with her.
Michael Barbaro
And what happens?
Azam Ahmed
So she meets with this young man in late teens, early 20s at a restaurant called El Junior, one of Miriam’s favorite restaurants in San Fernando. While they’re sitting there, she hears his radio buzz on and off. A lot of lower level cartel guys have hand radios to communicate with each other in the street. And she hears a name, Sama. She doesn’t think anything of it, and they continue with their conversation. Miriam begins to implore this young man, please give me back my daughter. I’ll give you anything you want. We paid $50,000. We’ll pay more. Just please give me back my daughter. And the young man looks at her and says, we don’t have her. We never took her. We don’t know who took her. It must have been someone else. Now at the time, Miriam thinks that’s strange.
Michael Barbaro
Why?
Azam Ahmed
This cartel has absolute control. Nothing happens, no one would be kidnapped without either their explicit involvement or at least their knowledge. So it sounds strange that someone who works for them would suddenly say, well, we don’t have her and we don’t know who took her. But the young man said, listen. I understand what you’re going through. If you give me some money, I can move some people around and we can start looking for her. I’ll help you. And Miriam, even though she knows deep down that it can’t be true, he doesn’t know anything — even though she knows deep down he’s probably lying to her — she paid the young man a few thousand dollars and they left it at that. And then weeks later, she called, and she called, and she called. And he stopped answering. And then she finally realized, she had been duped.
Michael Barbaro
Wow. So this young member of the cartel re-exploits the Rodriguez family. And he just extracts a little more.
Azam Ahmed
Exactly. He uses that vulnerable position, which is often what organized crime does to extract more money. In fact, it wasn’t just them. Once it became known, a lot of people knew that Karen had been kidnapped. They would call Miriam or someone in the family and say, hey, we have Karen. If you spend another $1,000 and you pay it at this account at this particular location, we’ll return her. And the family of course knew it wasn’t true. And I think the most tragic part is they paid that anyways.
Azam Ahmed
At the time, the trauma of this kidnapping had created problems for Miriam’s marriage and she’d moved in with her daughter Azalea, where she sat and just obsessed over this. Azalea described it as waking up and going to bed in tears, just utterly destroyed, until one morning she woke up, came down the stairs, and saw Azalea in the kitchen. And she looked at her, and she had this almost peaceful look on her face. She said, you know what? They’re never bringing my daughter back. In fact, I believe my daughter’s dead. But I’m going to spend the rest of my life chasing down every single one of these guys until I get justice. And she was a different Miriam after that.
Michael Barbaro
We’ll be right back.
Azam, you said that Miriam becomes a different person after realizing that her daughter isn’t coming back. And what does that mean? What does she start to do?
Azam Ahmed
Down in that space of helplessness, she found something in herself that basically allowed her to move forward by trying to hunt down these people. She began her campaign for justice. And it began with a memory from that lunch. While she’d been sitting there, if you’ll remember, she heard the name Sama. It was a nickname of course but it was a starting point. So she logged into Karen’s social media account, her Facebook account, and began hunting for that name. Days on end, Azalea recalls her all hours of the day into the late night. She would just be looking at her phone or her computer, scrolling through social media looking for the name Sama. And eventually, after a couple of weeks, she got a lucky break. And she saw the name Sama tagged on a photograph. There was no other real identifying characteristics. There was no real name. There was no account to associate or link back to. But in that photograph was the young man she’d met with for lunch with presumably his girlfriend, but a young woman. Now, she was wearing a uniform of a restaurant called Helado Sultan (sp), which is an ice cream shop about 2.5 hours away in the town where Luis lived, Ciudad Victoria — Luis being Miriam’s son. And so she began staking out the ice cream shop hoping that one day Sama would show up. And sure enough after weeks of that, one day Sama did show up.
And she followed him and his girlfriend home. If she was going to get the government to do anything, she not only needed to investigate and locate Sama, but she needed a government name to go on the arrest warrant. But to get that she would have to talk to someone in that house who might know his actual name. And it dawned on Miriam that Sama would recognize her if she went knocking on the door. So she went home and she hatched a plan. She dyed her hair fire engine red, she cut it, she put on an old uniform for when she worked at the health ministry. She drove back to the neighborhood and conducted a poll and went through the entire block, getting everyone’s name, including Uriel Ulysses Elizondo Soto, the young man she knew as Sama.
Michael Barbaro
Wow.
So what does she do with this information, with this real name for Sama?
Azam Ahmed
So she takes this information and brings it back home, and is trying to figure out what to do with it. And of course in order to issue an arrest warrant, you not only need the name, you need the cooperation of the authorities. So she is looking for a police officer or some official who will take her seriously. And yet none of these people want to listen to her, until one day she sits down with a police officer. And I spoke to this police officer and he remembers sitting down with this desperate mother, carrying a black computer bag. And before they order, she slaps it on the table and she opens it up. And inside is this trove of information — Sama’s real name, other people involved, pictures from Facebook, numbers, addresses. And his jaw drops. He’s absolutely floored. He said some of his own detectives don’t do work like that. And he vowed to take up the case, and he did. So the police went to the location where Sama had been, but by then he’d left. After all this work, after this amazing breakthrough, she did not get her man because the police had delayed. And he’d moved on. It wasn’t until September, which was a few months later, he son Luis was working in the cowboy shop of Ciudad Victoria. And it was the day before Mexican Independence Day, which is a big festive day in Mexico. And right as he’s about to close, he sees a young slender man walk into the shop, pick up a hat, and look at it, and browse basically. And he does a second take and he realizes, oh my God. It’s Sama. His mother had shared all of these Facebook photos with him. He knew exactly what he looked like even though he’d never met him. And he immediately froze and he thought, I’ve got to call my mom. So he calls his mother and she’s back in San Fernando 2.5 away. And his mother says, Miriam says, don’t you lose him. Don’t leave him. His mom, of course, knows exactly what to do. She calls this police officer and she says, hey, my son is in Ciudad Victoria. He’s at this address. He is identified Sama, the person I told you about, the person you have an arrest warrant for. Can you get there? And the police officer races there. So Luis essentially surveils Sama for the next hour, following him around the plaza as there’s all these celebrations and fireworks until the police arrive. When they arrest Sama, they capture him in the plaza, and he is kicking and screaming and claiming his innocence. But when they bring him back to the precinct, Sama starts to give some names. One of them is a really young guy, he’s just turned 18. His name is Cristiano. And the other is guy Jose Gali Chapa. Jose is a much more seasoned member of organized crime. He’s a bit older, he’s not from San Fernando, and he says nothing. The police get nothing from him. But Cristiano is a bit younger, a bit more impressionable, a lot more fearful of the police. So under questioning at one point, he sort of stops and he looks at the officer. And Miriam, Miriam attended these interrogations.
Michael Barbaro
Wait so Miriam’s involved in the interrogations?
Azam Ahmed
She’s involved in the interrogations. Because she was the one feeding the police information. She’d be like, ask him this. And if he says he doesn’t know that person, show him this Facebook photo that I’ve downloaded that proves that he has knowledge of this person.
Michael Barbaro
Wow.
Azam Ahmed
At one point Cristiano is so upset, he asked the police officer he said, I’m sorry. Can I please call my mom? I’m hungry. And Miriam hears this. And it just strikes her. She realizes this is just a little boy. And so she pulled out of her purse a piece of fried chicken that she had wrapped and gives it to him and then goes to buy him a Coca-Cola. She brings the Coca-Cola back and the police officer’s just looking at her. He’s like, what are you doing? Do you know what this kid did? He killed your daughter. And Miriam looks at him and she says, yeah. I know exactly what he did. I know what he did better than you do. But I’m still a mother and he’s still a child. And so after she feeds him, Cristiano becomes much more open and begins to tell her and the police what happened. And he begins to describe the location where the kidnapping victims are taken, where they’re held. They call it a security house.
And Miriam shows up at this place and it’s a horror show.
Michael Barbaro
She’s just there by herself?
Azam Ahmed
She’s just there by herself. And she begins going through these small adobe structures on the property, looking at soiled mattresses and bullet holes in the walls.
Azalea
(IN SPANISH) When they came to the place, they found my sister’s scarf that my mom recognized was Karen’s, and a cushion that Karen had in her car. My mom said it’s proof that she’s here.
Azam Ahmed
And the first thing she finds is a seat cushion that she recognizes from Karen’s car. And her heart palpitates. And she continues to search. And she finds her daughter’s scarf, a scarf that she had given her. And it dawns on her that this is where her daughter was taken, these months of searching, this big question about what had happened. Now she’s here in the physical location by herself where her daughter had most likely been killed.
Michael Barbaro
And do the police find Karen’s body there?
Azam Ahmed
(IN SPANISH) They noted a place where Karen was?
interposing voices
(IN SPANISH) Many other people —
Azam Ahmed
So the authorities are taken there by Christiano and he shows them this pit. He tells them the cartel had been dissolving bodies in acids and pouring the remains in this pit. And there are a lot of bodies.
Azalea
(IN SPANISH) One of the two detainees said yes this is your daughter, she’s dead and that she’s among the rest.
Azam Ahmed
And police find a bone fragment from the femur of Karen. Karen had been killed and buried there.
Michael Barbaro
This is an absolutely horrifying sight. A mass grave.
Azam Ahmed
It’s a mass grave. It’s a mass grave in a community, in a state, in a country where there are no shortage of mass graves. It’s so grim that the poor go into these open stretches of land with long metal spikes, and they hammer them into the ground where they feel like the Earth might be disturbed. And then they wrench them out and they smell for death to see if there might be a mass grave. That’s how the poor search for their dead here.
Michael Barbaro
So in a country where so few cases are solved, Miriam finally does now have an answer. And I wonder if that feels to her like a bit of closure. And is her work now done?
Azam Ahmed
I think for a lot of people, it would be. Finding the remains of your loved one, you would bury them and move on. But for Miriam, this is the end of chapter 1 and the beginning of chapter 2, because she has vowed to herself she’s going to track down everyone responsible. And she knew there were a lot more than just the few people she’d found.
So Miriam began this second chapter of going after those individuals. One of them she talked to his grandmother. She located his grandmother in this small town in Tamaulipas and she said, oh, my grandson he’s doing better now. He’s converted to Christianity and he’s going to this church. So Miriam started going to the church. Now she had pictures of him from his era in organized crime and identified him and eventually got the police to arrest him. For another, she tracked him down to his job and then found out his wife was pregnant and showed up at her prenatal appointment, where he was with her. A third one was selling used cars in another state entirely. But she had friends in the used car business. And she gave them pictures and said, if you ever see this person, I think he’s in this area. Please tell me. And ultimately she found that person that way. It was this series of remarkable, investigative, creative ways of finding the people responsible.
Michael Barbaro
I mean, she’s a superhero. One by one by one she is tracking these people down through inventive, homespun, detective methods. And she is getting people arrested who seem to be otherwise out of reach of Mexico’s legal system.
Azam Ahmed
Completely. She basically forced the police into doing their job by doing their job for them and making it hard for them to say no. She even tracked someone down to the international bridge between Mexico and Texas and held them down at gunpoint while she waited for the police to arrive. And the police ultimately still came and arrested him. But if she hadn’t, he would have disappeared. And who knows when or how she might have found him.
Michael Barbaro
Is that the only time that she does this?
Azam Ahmed
The last person she physically assisted in the capture of was a woman who was working as a babysitter in Ciudad Victoria. And it was [INAUDIBLE] Soto Rodriguez. And so Miriam began to spend night after night outside of the house where she had been told Elba was babysitting. And she spent so long out there she would have to pee in cups, because she didn’t want to leave her car for fear of being seen. Her car died at one point, because she would listen to the radio while she was waiting outside. And her son Luis had to come and give her a jump the next day so she could leave. But then eventually she did her and she got the police involved and orchestrated an arrest.
Michael Barbaro
So how many people does Miriam end up getting arrested?
Azam Ahmed
She gets 10 people arrested through this wild three-year campaign.
Michael Barbaro
Wow.
Azam Ahmed
She actually gets so good at this, she comes to represent others who have missing or dead relatives that the government’s been ignoring. And she begins to petition the government on their behalf, forming a collective in San Fernando for the first time ever. The collective became this much bigger thing than just Miriam. Suddenly she was giving others the power to fight back as well, the power to demand answers about things they’d remained quiet about for most of their lives. And that brought even more attention to her and what she was doing. With that attention came more scrutiny.
Michael Barbaro
And I assume that includes scrutiny from the cartel.
Azam Ahmed
Yeah. And nobody had done this. Nobody had gone against the cartels in this kind of way. And she was standing up against them. And not just her, but she was teaching others to do that as well and forcing the government to do something about it. But in early 2017 —
archived recording
(IN SPANISH) In Tamaulipas, we’re reporting an escape of inmates from the Center for Executions of Sanctions of Ciudad Victoria —
Azam Ahmed
There was a prison break from the very same prison where she put Karen’s kidnappers and killers. And at the time, Miriam had been receiving threats of course. She never told her children about it. She didn’t want to scare them. But she went to the government. And there’s a video recording of this — archived recording (speaker)
(IN SPANISH) What security?
— archived recording (Miriam Rodríguez)
In fact my business since the 22 of March, that was the play of the inmates, and for many reasons wouldn’t be dealt with publicly.
Azam Ahmed
— saying she needs protection, that the people who escaped from this prison, she has intel through her network that they are coming after her.
Michael Barbaro
Right.
Azam Ahmed
And the government pseudo acknowledges and says, oh have police pass by your house every now and then. But of course, that, like everything else they had done, was insufficient. So following this prison break in March of 2017, and following the government’s inability to offer her the sort of around the clock protection she felt she needed, Miriam continued with her investigation, continued with her life. And on Mother’s Day in 2017, she had dinner with Azalea at her favorite restaurant and then she went to her shop, Rodeo Boots, to do a final accounting of what she had in the store. She drove home from there. It’s a 10-minute drive from Rodeo Boots to her house. But she didn’t notice there was a white Nissan truck trailing her filled with men, many of whom had just escaped from prison, the same prison break she’d been fearful of. She pulled up in front of her house almost 11:00 p.m., got out, began to walk to her door, and she hears a car pull up behind her. And the men jump out and shoot 13 rounds at her. And she dies on her lawn.
Michael Barbaro
In some ways, this feels inevitable and still heartbreaking. After all this work, the cartel strikes back.
Azam Ahmed
Yeah, I think they ultimately did a calculation that the cost of her staying alive, and continuing her movement — and it spreading — was greater to them than the cost of killing her and the blowback that might ensue from that. And they were right, at least to some degree.
Michael Barbaro
And so what did happen? And what were the repercussions for her killers?
Azam Ahmed
A few people were arrested after pressure was placed on the government. But in Luis’s words, the intellectual authors, the people that actually planned the hit, they were never found. And a few years later, kidnappings were right back where they were before. And to me, it is the perfect metaphor for impunity.
Michael Barbaro
And it feels like the lesson is not just the impunity of the cartel, but that the cartel always wins.
Azam Ahmed
Yeah. I think if you ask me to tell you the story of impunity in Mexico, I will tell you the story of a mother whose daughter is kidnapped and killed by the cartel, who heartbroken, does the extraordinary thing to track down all of these individuals responsible and get the police and the government to do their jobs, and then winds up dead by the very same cartel as an act of revenge.
Michael Barbaro
So what then is the legacy of Miriam Rodríguez?
Azam Ahmed
It’s complicated. I think it’s a lot more complicated than we would like it to be. After Miriam’s death, the town almost went dormant as if spent by its own tragic history.
Michael Barbaro
You mean cartel violence actually quieted down in the wake of Miriam’s death?
Azam Ahmed
Yeah, until at least last year when a young 14-year-old boy was kidnapped — Luciano Leal Garza — from a public park. And his mother, like Miriam, decided to make it an issue. She held press conferences, she held marches, searches, she made it a public spectacle forcing the government into a reaction. The government ultimately found some of the people responsible. And most importantly, they found Luciano’s body buried in a shallow grave in an open field. A few days later, the family held a funeral. And Luis and Azalea attended.
And during the eulogy, the father said something that I think resonated with both of them. He said, we may not have you back the way that we wanted, but at least we have somewhere to mourn.
So what is her legacy? Part of it is just that. It’s somewhere to mourn. And I think for Luis and Azalea, if not the legacy, the impact of what their mother had done was shown a way for people to get there, to have closure, to find the bodies of their loved ones which is no small feat in Mexico where 80,000 people are missing. Miriam’s template, albeit a complicated one, it’s a template that says, you can ask. It’s been done. You can push, but maybe not too far. It is both an inspiration and sadly a cautionary tale.
Luis Rodríguez with portraits of his younger sister, Karen, and his mother, Miriam
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Hosted by Michael Barbaro; produced by Neena Pathak and Rachelle Bonja; edited by Mike Benoist and Lisa Tobin; and engineered by Chris Wood.