Category: EVIL MF
On October 14, 1888, Louis Le Prince released The Roundhay Garden Scene. With a run time of 2.11 seconds and starring Annie Hartley, Adolphe Le Prince, Joseph Whitley, and Sarah Whitley, this was the world’s first moving picture. The Roundhay Garden Scene changed the world. Here’s a link.
Dwayne Johnson is the most highly-paid actor in the world. This is The Rock celebrating Halloween with his family. Though I’ve never met him, Big Dwayne seems like a pretty cool guy.Ours is a generation raised on movies. In 2020 the movie industry brought in $25.9 billion. That’s down from $35.3 billion the year before thanks to the Covid pandemic. The top four most successful actors in 2020 were Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, Mark Wahlberg, and Ben Affleck. During that one year, The Rock pulled down a cool $87.5 million.
With those kinds of numbers, the movie industry can obviously afford top-grade talent. I am a professional writer. I bang out gun-related prose in exchange for ammo money. By contrast, the scriptwriters who drive these Hollywood blockbusters make some serious coin. For that kind of investment, Hollywood producers expect a quality product.
Everybody knows that a great movie turns on its villain. Vapid leading men are a dime a dozen, and hot girls with fake bosoms and a convincing scream are even cheaper. However, it takes talent to build a proper Bad Guy. Hannibal Lecter, Darth Vader, Agent Smith, the Joker, Voldemort, and Hans Gruber were some of the best.
Sometimes you trip over a story in the real world that is even more compelling than a Hollywood screenplay. As all good tales turn on their villains, that was what first caught my eye in this case. Today we will explore the short life and violent death of Z-1, Arturo Guzmán Decena. Guzmán Decena put the bloodthirsty in “bloodthirsty Mexican drug cartel”. He was the founder and leader of Los Zetas, some of the most soulless butchers on the planet.
Origin Story
Arturo Guzmán Decena was born into abject poverty in January of 1976 in Puebla, Mexico. In a world where nobody had anything, Decena saw military service as his ticket out of hell. Once he joined the Army he found that he had a knack for the business. His natural talent and capacity for aggression landed him a billet with the elite Grupo Aeromovil de Fuerzas Especiales or GAFE. This Mexican Army Special Forces unit specialized in COIN or counter-insurgency operations.
Guzmán Decena and his unit were trained by US Special Forces advisors and IDF (Israel Defense Force) contractors. Their mission was to find, fix, and eliminate major personalities in Mexican drug trafficking organizations. GAFE operators were extremely good at what they did.
More than 3,000 Zapatista rebels seized a number of border communities in the southern state of Chiapas in 1994. The insurgents were trying to make a statement against crushing poverty and the PRI (Institutional Revolution Party), the sole political party ruling Mexico at the time. The GAFE broke the back of the uprising in short order, killing 34 rebels and capturing three. The bodies were subsequently discovered discarded on a remote riverbank. Their noses and ears had been sliced off.
For all the vociferous whining about American Law Enforcement shortcomings, corruption among American cops is thankfully fairly rare. By contrast, cops in many foreign lands see bribery, extortion, and sometimes murder as a routine part of the job. In some parts of Mexico, bribes are viewed as “benefits” to supplement their otherwise modest salaries. However, before Arturo Guzmán Decena the lines separating the Good Guys from the Bad were still fairly clear-cut. Decena changed all that.
Greener Pastures
Arturo Guzmán Decena was one of the most effective GAFE operators. His star was rising. He was soon promoted to security chief and transferred to Miguel Aleman in the northern state of Tamaulipas. While there he met a proper villain named Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, the leader of the thriving Gulf Cartel. In short order, Arturo Guzmán Decena, a highly-trained and ruthless member of the Mexican Army Special Forces, was in the drug lord’s employ.
The man had some curious motivations. Mexican cops and soldiers at the time often turned a blind eye to drug shipments in exchange for a little folding cash. In this case, however, Guzmán Decena went full Dark Side. While the money was way better, this also meant the hard young warrior embraced life as a hunted fugitive.
In retrospect, Mexico’s grinding slog toward democracy likely frightened him. With a true representative government came the real probability of accountability for all those sliced-off ears and noses. Guzmán Decena saw service with the cartels as the wave of the future.
Once Guzmán Decena had tasted the good life he made a few phone calls. Not long after, he had recruited 38 fellow Special Forces operators to make up his happy troupe. Each man was assigned a unique Z-number. Guzmán Decena was Z-1 or Zeta 1. This cadre of trained killers became Los Zetas.
It has been alleged that Guzmán Decena’s boss, Cárdenas Guillén, had the original idea. This is purportedly a transcript of a cell phone intercept made by the Mexican military that documents the birth of Los Zetas–
Cárdenas Guillén – “I want the best men. The best.”
Guzmán Decena – “What type of people do you need?”
Cárdenas Guillén – “The best-armed men that there are.”
Guzmán Decena – “These are only in the army.”
Cárdenas Guillén – “I want them.”
Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely
Now that the Gulf Cartel had its own trained and equipped Specops unit, they exercised it. Z-1 and his troops collected outstanding debts, secured drug routes, and brutally exterminated the cartel’s enemies. They were fabulously successful. Cárdenas Guillén wielded his merry band of monsters to cement his grip on power.
Ángel Salvador Gómez Herrera was a close friend of Cárdenas Guillén. He had even been named godfather of Cárdenas Guillén’s child. However, in this rarefied world of high-stakes professional criminals, the line between friend and rival can be thin. Cárdenas Guillén suspected that Gómez Herrera was becoming covetous of his empire. That warranted a phone call to Z-1.
Immediately following the baptism of Cárdenas Guillén’s child, Gómez Herrera was invited to take a ride in the drug lord’s souped-up Dodge Durango. The newly-minted godfather sat in the passenger seat up front. Guzmán Decena had the seat behind him. The men exchanged laughs and basked in the moment following the infant’s baptism.
Then with little fanfare, Guzmán Decena drew his handgun and shot Gómez Herrera through the head. Mexican police later discovered his badly-decayed body discarded outside the town of Matamoros. In the aftermath of the execution, Guzmán Decena earned the nom de guerre “Mata Amigos” or “Friend Killer.” Apparently, he was good with that. The drug kingpin Cárdenas Guillén felt he had a buddy for life.
Eventually, Guzmán Decena and his fellow Special Forces operators came to appreciate that they really no longer needed the Gulf Cartel. They were accustomed to operating in hostile environments as a military unit and knew logistics, organization, and particularly extreme violence of action better than their soft decadent civilian bosses. As such Los Zetas took their show on the road.
In short order, the military-regimented Zetas displaced the Sinaloans as the largest drug cartel in Mexico. However, as Putin is discovering to his detriment in Ukraine, the challenge is not seizing power, it is keeping it. As the original Zetas were captured or killed by rival drug organizations and the Mexican government, their replacements were not cut from the same hard stuff. Regardless, for a time, Los Zetas was the dominant drug cartel in Mexico.
All Good Things Come to an End
The life of a successful drug lord is both stressful and fraught with peril. On November 22, 2002, Guzmán Decena was taking a meal with a few of his soldiers at a restaurant in Matamoros, Tamaulipas.
Feeling the need to unwind, he knocked back some Chivas and snorted a line of cocaine before heading over to the home of Ana Bertha González Lagunes, one of his several handy mistresses. She lived only a few blocks distant. Wishing his dalliance to be uninterrupted, Guzmán Decena had his troops seal off the roads leading into the area.
Guzmán Decena apparently got his quick roll in the hay, but the disruption to the community was substantial. A local denizen saw the commotion for what it was and notified the Mexican authorities. The cops notified the nearby Mexican Army quick reaction force who descended upon the woman’s house. They found Guzmán Decena duly distracted and gunned him down like a dog. He was 26 years old.
The Rest of the Story
Los Zetas did not take the execution of their flamboyant commander well. In the immediate aftermath, Zetas hitters kidnapped and murdered four members of the Office of the General Prosecutor near Reynosa, Tamaulipas. Mexican troops arrested Cárdenas Guillén, the head of the Gulf Cartel, in March of 2003.
The following year they bagged Z-2, Rogelio González Pizaña. Z-3, Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, duly took his place. He fell in a shootout with the Mexican Navy in 2012. Chasing the Zetas was like playing Whack-a-Mole.
The gory death of Arturo Guzmán Decena was the first real blow that the Mexican government landed against Los Zetas. While the organization came back like a hydra, Guzmán Decena’s killing made a serious dent. This story is ultimately a great tale of Good Guys beating Bad Guys, but there yet remain persistent rumors that the ruthless SF operator-turned-drug lord was actually murdered by his own troops on the orders of his former mentor Osiel Cárdenas Guillén. For a proper king, maintaining one’s kingdom can indeed be a full-time job.
A seaworthy replica of the Batavia was built in the 20th century.Distilled to its essence, capitalism and communism fractionate based upon one overarching worldview. Now, I realize I’m oversimplifying. College professors and political scientists have built entire careers out of these nuances.
Despotic ideologues have slaughtered millions along the way. However, if you were called upon to compare and contrast the foundational differences between these disparate worldviews, I would propose that it is this: Capitalists believe that people are innately bad. Communists believe that people are innately good. Everything else stems from that.
By way of example, communists believe that, if left to their own devices, mankind will come together selflessly and work toward a common goal for the greater good. By contrast, capitalists espouse that humans will forever strive to improve their individual lot. As a card-carrying conservative capitalist myself, I can attest that communists are delusional and that human greed is the most powerful engine in the known universe.
Properly harnessed, however, capitalism has brought us such stuff as Mars robots, smartphones, supersonic airplanes, GPS-guided bombs and silicone breast implants. Now, to illustrate my point …
A 17th-Century Case Study
Launched in 1628, the Batavia was the flagship of the Dutch East India Company. On her maiden voyage, she carried 341 passengers and crew along with a dozen treasure chests full of silver and a load of precious gems. She was bound for Batavia, her namesake, in the Dutch East Indies. The mission was to deposit the passengers, swap the valuables for spices, and return to Europe, making the East India shareholders filthy rich in the process.
Unbeknownst to Capt. Francisco Pelsaert, an East India official named Jeronimus Cornelisz was plotting a mutiny. Cornelisz’s nefarious plan involved stealing the ship and associated swag and using it to embark on a newfound career in piracy. His ultimate life goal was to start a new nation someplace in his own image. Clearly, everyone involved was a devout capitalist.
The rumor was that Cornelisz sabotaged their navigation but legitimately screwed it up in the process. The Batavia subsequently struck Morning Reef near Beacon Island off the western coast of Australia. It took a while for the tides and surf to tear the ship apart. Of the 341 souls on board, 301 survived to reach the nearby island. The remaining 40 drowned.
A fair amount of the original treasure that remained in the Batavia wreck has since been recovered. Photo by Guy de la Bedivere.
Things Get Real
These small islands offered no fresh water and little protein, aside from sea lions and birds. The captain and a small contingent struck out in a 30-foot longboat in search of Batavia and help. The rest of the survivors were left under the command of Jeronimus Cornelisz, who turned out to be a psychopath.
Cornelisz, the aspiring pirate, consolidated all weapons and food under his personal control. He then dispatched the soldiers in the group led by a man named Wiebbe Hayes in another small boat to nearby islands, ostensibly to find water. His tacit hope was that these 20 or so guys would just die.
With limited resources and a lot of mouths to feed, Cornelisz then directed his subordinates to start killing the survivors. At first, he contrived legal charges against his victims like theft or hoarding. Eventually, however, they began killing for fun. When the dust settled, Cornelisz and his band of cutthroats had murdered 110 men, women and children. A few of the comelier lasses they kept on as sex slaves.
Much to everyone’s surprise, the Hayes expedition did indeed find food and potable water on nearby West Wallabi Island. They communicated this back to the main group via prearranged smoke signals. Now Cornelisz was in a bit of a spot.
Meanwhile, after an arduous 33 days at sea in their small boat, Cpt. Pelsaert actually arrived at Batavia. The local Governor-General, Jan Peterson Coen, immediately gave him command of the ship Sardam. While his mission was to rescue the shipwreck survivors, the good governor also asked that he perhaps bring back all that treasure while he was at it. It took Pelsaert a further 30 days or so to find the right islands again.
At least one survivor of the massacre on Beacon Island made it over to West Wallabi with the horrific news. Hayes and his men had no weapons. They were, however, trained soldiers, so they set about building a fort and fashioning implements of violence from materials that had washed up from the wreck.
By now, Hayes’ troops were relatively well-fed, while those of Cornelis were quite peckish. Despite only one side having access to muskets, Hayes’ men successfully withstood several amphibious assaults. It was, however, quite the iffy thing. Much blood was spilled and in a most brutal fashion.
Hayes eventually took Cornelisz hostage just as the Sardam arrived. With the assistance of the guns and crew of the Sardam, Cornelisz’s mutineers were subdued. Here’s where the real fun began.
Actions Have Consequences …
Cpt. Pelsaert was none too pleased to hear the sordid details of what Cornelisz and company had been up to in his absence. He held a cursory trial and then remanded Cornelisz and his primary henchmen to nearby Seal Island. There, his sailors chopped off the offenders’ hands and hanged them to a man.
Two of the lesser mutineers, one of whom was a cabin boy named Jan Pelgrom de Bye, were marooned on the Australian mainland and never heard from again. These were actually the first two European criminals to be abandoned on this curious continent. There would eventually be many more.
The remaining mutineers were transported to Batavia for proper trials. Five were hanged. Several others were keelhauled, flogged or dropped from the yardarm. This last punishment involved being suspended from the ship’s superstructure by a rope and dunked repeatedly into the ocean while underway. Think waterboarding on steroids. Cornelisz’s primary lieutenant, Jacop Pietersz, was broken on the wheel. Being broken saw one lashed to a wagon wheel and having your arms and legs crushed and then threaded through the spokes. That would suck.
Ruminations
Of the original complement, only 122 survived to reach Batavia in peace. A subsequent tribunal found Cpt. Pelsaert to have been partially responsible for the chaos. He, therefore, had his financial assets seized. Pleaser succumbed to disease within a year. Wiebbe Hayes was promoted to sergeant and rightfully hailed a hero.
Over the course of four years in the early 1970s, the Batavia was raised and subsequently preserved in the Shipwreck Galleries in Freemantle, Western Australia. Preservationists recovered 20 tons of timber, an anchor, multiple cannons and scads of other ore mundane stuff, including four navigational astrolabes. The sordid story of the Batavia and her crew serves simply to illustrate that, if left to our own devices, human beings are indeed reliably bad.
In a shocking turn of events, Fort Wayne, Indiana, police have determined that a high school football player, initially reported as a tragic victim and the lone person to die from a mass shooting at a weekend Halloween party, was in fact the aggressor who entered the party and began shooting. Willie Ivy III, 17, opened fire after forcing his way into the crowded party, injuring nine people ranging in ages from 14 to 20 before an armed partygoer returned fire, killing him in what authorities have determined was an act of justifiable self-defense. Interestingly, despite the intense initial coverage surrounding Ivy’s death portraying him as a loving, ambitious member of his school football team and another tragic case of an innocent black youth caught up in gun violence, when it was learned he was the one who opened fire first, media attention of the case went comparatively dark.
Follow-up articles merely mentioned he was the shooter and noted that police weren’t going to charge the man who shot him. Was it a case of the narrative no longer fit what the media wanted to sell or had the news cycle merely gone cold on the topic? It’s hard to say. But after all the positive coverage of the young “victim,” once the truth was discovered, an examination of what caused this otherwise seemingly good kid to carry a gun into a party and begin gunning down innocent victims begs for some follow-up from the local media.
The incident began this past Saturday night at a home in Fort Wayne, where dozens of teenagers had gathered for a Halloween party promoted on social media. With the party already out of control, the homeowner reportedly locked herself in her room, opting not to call the police. Partygoers were patted down for weapons at the front entrance, but Ivy and a group of friends bypassed the check by entering through the back door. When two attendees attempted to stop them from entering, Ivy allegedly pulled a handgun and began firing as he moved from the back door through the kitchen and into the living room, where more partygoers were gathered. He reportedly continued firing indiscriminately as he moved through the house.
“Shots were fired at random,” Captain Jeremy Webb of the Fort Wayne Police Department told local news, describing the “utter chaos” that greeted first responders.
“As Ivy continued shooting, one partygoer, also armed, returned fire, fatally striking Ivy and ending the attack,” Webb said. Evidence confirmed that Ivy’s weapon was responsible for all nine injuries.
In a statement, the Allen County Prosecutor’s Office confirmed that no charges would be filed against the partygoer who shot Ivy, citing Indiana’s clear self-defense laws.
“This was an undeniable act of self-defense in a life-threatening situation,” said Webb, highlighting that Ivy’s death prevented further bloodshed.
Initially, media coverage centered on Ivy’s death and his identity as a North Side High School football player, with statements from family members grieving his passing. Ivy’s father, who traveled from Memphis, reflected on a final phone conversation with his son, where they said “I love you” before he left for the party.
“He was supposed to make it—he was supposed to go to college, he was supposed to watch over his sisters,” Ivy’s father told 21 Alive News.
“There’s no doubt about him being a loved child and he showed that in his actions with his friends and his family,” Vickii Ivy, the shooter’s aunt, said. “He just had this spirit of love for everybody that was around him.” She noted that he “did not follow or go to trouble.”
It’s clear the kid was loved and had the opportunity to do something with his life, and no doubt it can only be one extreme level of pain to lose a child to violence and an entirely different level of pain to discover the child you loved and thought you knew, was the one who initiated the violence that led to his end. It must be particularly painful to learn he caused undue pain and suffering among so many others in his final moments.
But that is the real story in Fort Wayne. That is the story the media needs to be covering. But until today’s journalists, as well as leaders, are willing to discuss the painful truths behind the extreme violence in many of our communities, no amount of gun laws they might want to pass will solve a single problem. What made a young man from a loving family engage in such violence when he apparently had so much going for him? How did he get the gun at 17, and why did he carry it into a party? These are the questions that need to be answered. Where’s the media when the real questions need to be asked?
