ASMSG Scifi Fantasy Paranormal Emagazine May 2014 | Page 13

SFP Indie Issue 2

The Mexican Mafia of The Nightlife: San Antonio
Travis Luedke discusses the real-life Mexican Mafia and how it impacted his new novel, The Nightlife San Antonio.

In writing The

Nightlife San

Antonio,

I was inspired by events in
my life from 2005 through 2010, when I
lived in Sonora Mexico, on the border of
Arizona. At this time the border situation
was red hot. By 2007, every week brought a
new headline of the escalating drug war in
the border towns that often spilled over
onto U.S. soil. Though our small town of
Agua Prieta, Sonora didn’t see any major
conflict, I noticed the camouflage-painted
tanks cruising through the scrub brush in
the countryside, patrolling the line.
Yes, tanks, and camouflaged military
soldiers with assault rifles. I had never
seen this kind of thing in the U.S.,
actual military
occupation.
This
was
interesting, but the incident that really
brought the border conflicts to my
attention was the assassination of the
Commandante of Agua Prieta, known as
“Tacho.”

killed in the parking lot of the police
station, in broad daylight. Rumor was he’d
been taking cartel payoffs for years, but,
his cooperation wasn’t satisfactory
anymore. The cartels had made a bold
statement, an example, one of many cartel
assassinations in those years.
Don’t fuck with the Mexican cartels, not if you
value your life, or the lives of your family.
About a third of the Agua Prieta police
force quit their jobs. New officers were
brought in from all over Sonora. Most of
the locals were too afraid to take the job.
Police in border towns everywhere
experienced tremendous pressure and

constant threats.
The manhunt for Tacho’s killers went on
for months, but the cartel assassins
escaped and were never caught. This kind
of violence against police and authorities
hit both sides of the border, yet it was far
worse in Texas and California. Arizona
experienced only a fraction of the drug
wars that Tijuana/San Diego and Ciudad
Juarez/El Paso suffered.
The catalyst of this war was the new
President of Mexico, Felipe Calderon,
who had made the cartels his number one
target. Across Mexico and the U.S., joint
task forces of DEA and Mexican federal

The Commandante, the chief of police, is
like the sheriff of the municipality. I saw
the Commandante’s Jeep after the
shooting. The windows of Tacho’s vehicle
had been reinforced with inch-thick
bulletproof glass, and would have saved
his life, if he could have closed the door.
The bullet holes I saw were in the interior
of the door. He’d been standing in the
open door of the Jeep when they attacked
with automatic assault rifles. Tacho was

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