SAN FERNANDO, Mexico — When he was deported from the U.S. to Mexico for the third time, Martin Estrada Luna was a high school dropout with a rap sheet of petty crimes like burglary.
Less than two years later, Mexican authorities say, he has transformed himself into a drug baron known as El Kilo, leader of a ruthless cell of the Zetas gang who masterminded the mass killings of more than 250 people. He is now under arrest in Mexico City.
Mexican prosecutors have not presented any evidence publicly to support their claim that he was responsible for the deaths of 72 migrants in August and 183 people months later. The Mexican government often announces big arrests after high-profile crimes, but according to its own statistics, three-quarters of those initially accused as drug traffickers or assassins are let go without charges.
Whether he was a big player or not, Estrada Luna appears to have succumbed to a cross-border crime culture that is growing as hundreds of thousands of deportees with criminal backgrounds are dumped in Mexico.
Under a tough-on-crime immigration crackdown, half of the 393,000 people deported from the United States between October 2009 and September 2010 were convicted criminals, with crimes that could have ranged from minor drug offenses to murder.
There are seldom arrest warrants to hold the ex-convicts in Mexico, so they are let loose into a lawless border land increasingly run by drug lords eager to train recruits.
In San Fernando, Tamaulipas, neighbors are too scared to talk about the 255 bodies found executed in groups or buried in pits. State police are afraid to venture onto the backroads where the Zetas drug gang hides out, and even federal police cower for protection in an understaffed base.
Ranchers complain that their isolated spreads are being taken over by Zetas gunmen, who Mexican officials say are recruited through violence and turned into killing machines.
Tamaulipas state Interior Secretary Morelos Canseco said there has been a “terrible upward spiral” in brutality since 2010, when war broke out between the Zetas and their old allies, the Gulf Cartel.
“You get status in these groups based on who can do the worst thing, who can do what nobody dares to do. It is like a competition in perversity,” he said. “First they would steal cars and let the people go, but later they would steal the car and take the women. . . . After that, they steal the cars, take the women, and kill anybody who resisted.”
It was here where Estrada Luna arrived — a 34-year-old tattooed member of the Norteno gang, known as El Kilo, a measure of weight, because of his more than 6-foot, 200-pound frame. Estrada Luna could not be reached in custody and does not have a lawyer of record.
Estrada Luna was born in Mexico and grew up in Tieton, a tiny Washington-state farm town dominated by the apple industry. His mother lived in Laredo, Texas, and his stepfather was a U.S. citizen.
People who knew Estrada Luna in Washington state said he was trouble, but don’t think he could have killed more than 250 people.
“We got along. He had never, ever mouthed off to me,” said Tieton Police Chief Jeff Ketchum, who recalled Estrada Luna as a product of a broken family, crashing on friends’ couches and finding petty trouble. “He was a leader, in a bad sense, obviously, but I don’t believe he actually did (the murders).”
Numbers
393,000 People deported from the U.S. between October 2009 and September 2010
50 percent Estimate of those deported who were convicted criminals, with crimes that could have ranged from minor drug offenses to murder
