The Narcotics War of Nuevo Laredo

One evening three weeks ago, Auto Salesman Jose Jimenez Lizcano was talking with a young customer in front of his home in Nuevo Laredo, just across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas. Suddenly, a late-model yellow Mustang cruised past, and a gunman stuck the barrel of an AR-15 automatic rifle out the window and fired a burst at the two men. Jimenez, whom someone in the underworld apparently suspected of working with the police, escaped the second attempt on his life in nine months and promptly departed for Chicago. His customer, a young carpet salesman, was killed.

He was the 86th person to die in 22 months of a vicious drug war that has engulfed Nuevo Laredo. The sprawling Mexican border town (pop. 160,000) has become the principal point for smuggling into the U.S. Mexican marijuana, South American cocaine and European heroin funneled through Latin America. Upwards of $1 million worth of drugs passes through Nuevo Laredo to U.S. buyers each week.

Anyone who has tried to muscle in on the established traffickers, or avoid paying the 50% cut demanded by local gangs, has usually been found dead. But 15 of the war's casualties have been lawmen. Most of the victims were gunned down Chicago-style, by old-fashioned .45-cal. tommy guns fired from moving cars.

The drug war began bizarrely when 31-year-old Refugio Reyes Pruneda gunned down a Mexican federal police agent and his aide in a Nuevo Laredo restaurant. Simona Pruneda de Reyes, the 72-year-old matriarch of the clan, reacted sharply to the unwanted publicity; with the help of another son, she tied Refugio's arms and legs to stakes driven into the earth of their farmyard, then left him there for two days in temperatures that often rose above 100DEG F.

A month later, Refugio was found with 30 bullets in his body. An ex-paratrooper from Tennessee, who was pushing narcotics in Nuevo Laredo, was suspected of the killing and dispatched with the mathematical precision that has become a trademark of the war, and particularly of the Reyes Pruneda gang. For Refugio's 30 bullets, he received 90. His companion, a U.S. Army deserter who was only interested in buying a pound of pot, was found alongside the Tennessean with 60 bullets in his body. In another grisly episode, an independent dealer was found in a clump of bushes near the Rio Grande. He had been decapitated with a machete.

Rival drug dealers are not the only victims. On one occasion last June, gunmen crept into a customs official's home and asked his small daughter to identify her father. She did--and watched in horror as he was shot 15 times.

Local police, with fewer men, cars and guns than the gangs, have been unable to stop the killings. But the federal government frequently strikes back. Last May a tough police comandante named Everardo Perales Rios was sent to clean up Nuevo Laredo. In six weeks, Perales collected three tons of marijuana, two pounds of heroin and quantities of cocaine and raw opium--more drugs than local police had confiscated in 20 years. Unfortunately, Perales' success was his undoing. The gangs put a $5,000 contract on his head.

Shortly after Perales left Nuevo Laredo's Federal Building in a borrowed car one evening in July, gunmen in a red Mustang pulled up alongside and shot him. Perales' replacement, who also has a contract out on him, is taking no chances. He is attended by a score of federal bodyguards. A special federal investigator looking into the killings sleeps across the border in Laredo, Texas.

Clean People. One prominent Nuevo Laredo citizen, rumored to be altogether too close to the gangs, is Francisco Javier Bernal Lopez, a mustachioed attorney who used to make his living from the quickie-Mexican-divorce trade, which was stopped when the law was changed in 1970. Bernal denies that he is in fact El Padrino (the Godfather); "I don't have a gang," he told TIME Correspondent Bernard Diederich last week. "How am I going to order killings? My clients consult, but that is legal." His clients include the Reyes Pruneda family, whose forces are supplemented by hired gunmen. Says Bernal: "This town is in the hands of two or three people. I can't mention any names. They are civic leaders. They are clean people at this moment, but they have killed. They have smuggled."

Many of the Reyes Pruneda gangsters are believed to be hiding in the hill country not far from Monterrey. Nonetheless there is little sign of a letup in the killings. Just eight weeks ago, for instance, a Mexican customs official seized a trailer van full of household appliances and color television sets that had been stolen in the U.S. and were being smuggled into Mexico--a lucrative return cargo for the men who smuggle drugs the other way. The customs official made the mistake of allowing the local newspaper to run his photograph. Two days later he was machine-gunned to death while driving home from work.

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