Rather than a criminal enterprise, the group’s founder, Heriberto “Herbie” Huerta, describes the Mexikanemi as something spiritual or cultural — a unity meant to liberate the minds of Mexican people and to seek the return of the land stolen from them by the U.S. government. Law enforcement authorities, however, have described the Texas Mexican Mafia as the No. 1 crime organization in San Antonio.
The executive board includes a president, a vice president and a council. A strict constitution governs who is supposed to make critical decisions.
The organization’s goal is to make money.
But the profit-and-loss statements of this enterprise are dominated by something more sinister than stocks, bonds or corporate statements.
For the Texas Mexican Mafia, also known as Mexikanemi, business is conducted in a brutal array of drug running, robbery, extortion and murder.
“Being a criminal organization, we work in any criminal aspect or interest for the benefit and advancement of Mexikanemi,” states the Mexikanemi constitution, a set of by-laws and rules that surfaced in trials against gang figures in the 1990s. “We shall deal in drugs, contract killings, prostitution, large scale robbery, gambling, weapons and in everything imaginable.”
The 20-year-old prison-based gang has been blamed for scores of murders — at least 91 in the early 1990s.
Two broad crackdowns in the 1990s sent more than 30 of the gang’s leaders and soldiers to prison, but violent activity in recent months has renewed investigations into what has become the largest prison gang in Texas.
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