“We were eating at Los Compadres, and two guys came in. We could tell they weren’t from here. They looked different. They were kids – 18 to 20 years old. They ordered fifty hamburgers to go. That’s when we figured something was going on, and we decided we’d better get home.”
— Guadalupe García, retired government worker
“Things began to happen in the afternoon. Armed men arrived. They went house to house, looking for the people who had betrayed them. By 11:00 at night there was no movement of cars on the streets. There was no movement of any kind.”
— Martín Márquez, hot dog vendor
Allende, Coahuila (October 2019). Barber shop (left) and horse in a field (right).
To this day, Allende bears the deep scars of the terrible narcos rampage unleashed in March 2011. For three days, this small town at 40-minutes-drive from the US border was invaded by dozens of Los Zetas cartel gunmen who looted and devastated as many as 40 homes and 7 ranches, and kidnapped, murdered, and burned the bodies of at least 300 victims. Most of the victims did not know each other, but many of them had something in common, beyond calling the same region home: they shared a combination of the same common surnames: Garza, Gaytán, Moreno, and Villanueva. This roundup and reprisal operation was carried out as an act of revenge against two informants, their families and anyone remotely connected to them. Their names were José Luis Garza Gaytán and Héctor Moreno Villanueva.
Allende, Coahuila (October 2019). Cemetery (left) and a woman with a goat (right).
Several months earlier, on the other side of the border, the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) had launched Operation Too Legit to Quit after a series of surprising busts. At first, their target was a Dallas native nicknamed El Diablo, who was managing cocaine distribution in east Texas moving truckloads of drugs, guns, and money each month. While he managed to avoid the arrest and escape to Mexico, the DEA agents still had leverage over him, and decided to seize this opportunity to get access to the activity of Los Zetas leaders (the Treviño brothers, known as Z-40 and Z-42). Through El Diablo the DEA managed to start tracking their mobile phones. However, after a DEA superior had shared the state of the investigation with a Mexican federal police unit, the information leaked to the Treviño brothers.
Allende, Coahuila (October 2019). Wall with advertisement (left) and a house in ruins (right).
In the days of the assault, the 089 Emergency System in Allende and Piedras Negras received a total of 1,451 calls for help, to which no one responded. According to the National Human Rights Commission, the municipal police took active part in the disappearances of people. After the massacre, the people kept quiet for years. Although it was an open secret, no one did anything. Neither the authorities nor the security forces dared to confront what was then the most powerful and bloodthirsty cartel in the country, although some relatives of the victims had filed complaints with the Piedras Negras Public Prosecutor’s Office. In most of the cases, the relatives did not report the disappearances for fear of being tracked down and killed, and it was not until early 2014 that the Allende massacre was made public.
Nicola Moscelli (Taranto, 1980) is a photographer and documentarist based in the Netherlands and Italy. Using his own photographs as well as archival material, he creates visual narratives focused on the environment from an anthropological perspective, with the aim of analyzing its identity, historical and cultural legacies. His works have been published on platforms such as Urbanautica, Der Greif (Guest-Room curated by Christof Wiesner & Aurélien Valette), Fotograf Magazine, Discorsi Fotografici, and C41 Magazine. ‘Dead End’ is his first long-term visual project, soon to be published as a book by Penisola Edizioni.
