Western Underworld

Notorious Opitzotl gangster Hueyi Ayotzin, one of the founders of the modern Western Underworld

The Western Underworld is a blanket term for the criminal society operating across the west coast of Zacapican, particularly within the Zacaco Republic, and its various interdependent organizations and outposts across the country. Organized crime in western Zacapican is controlled by various street and prison gangs operating together within the same criminal ecosystem dominated by the highly influential Akuitsiurhiri organization and the gangs that pay tribute to them, collectively referred to as the Opitzome (tr. "street pigs"). The network of Akuitsiurhiri relationships is far a peaceful and unified order. Akuitsiurhiri members are not considered to be part of the Opitzotl gangs or vice versa, while the Opitzome regularly wage war on one another in a near-perpetual internecine conflict that touches most elements of the criminal underworld in Zacapican. However, the western underworld is governed by a code comparable to international law that governs the interactions between groups, including the conduct of violent actions and gang warfare, and is backed by the Tzitzimime hit-squad which acts as the enforcement arm of the Akuitsiurhiri.

Different elements of the western underworld are involved in virtually all facets of organized criminal activity at different levels. Racketeering (including numbers and protection), robbery, extortion and other forms of street crime are carried out by Opitzome as well as a number of independent outfits active in the west. The upper levels of the Opitzotl gangs are also engaged in drug trafficking, operating international smuggling routes as well as local distribution networks. Disputes over drug profits and territorial rights for distribution are the main motivator for conflict between Opitzotl outfits. White-collar crime, specifically money laundering, is the realm of the Akuitsiurhiri occupying the highest and most profitable echelon of the underworld.

History

The origins of organized crime in Zacapican go back to the 19th century and the adoption of capitalist economic principles during the self-strengthening phase of the late Angatahuacan Hegemony. Attempts at the privatization of land were chaotic at best, leading to unrest among the calpolli peasants as well as rising crime as commons were eliminated in some areas. The Zacaco valley with its highly fertile farmland was most impacted by this due to the attempts to reform the calpollist agricultural system into a commercialized profit cropping to jump-start the economy of the west. Dispossessed peasants turned to banditry, theft, and illegal squatting, while many would go on to organize Red Banner brigades to oppose the Angatahuacan reforms. The rise in crime, however, resulted in the growth of certain clans which began to specialize in selling private protection to the landowners. This relationship quickly turned extortionate, giving rise to a widespread protection racket which served to hamper the effectiveness of any land reforms, while simultaneously fueling the rise of organized crime in the Zacaco valley.

The civil war that marked the end of Angatahaucan hegemony and the violent birth of the United Republics was a boon for the nascent criminal racket. With revolutionary armies on the march and virtually all local militias and police forces engaged in the fighting in one way or another, insecurity was at an all time high, providing a golden opportunity to expand the extortionate protection scheme that had already taken root in the Zacaco. Many criminal clans expanded their influence far and wide, even as Red Banner peasant-soldiers seized private land and undermined their original sources of profit through land reform. In time, however, the rampant expansion of the underworld drew unwanted attention from the newly established Zacapine authorities. Xolotecatl Acuixoc relocated the center of power to Quitzapatzaro in 1914, directly into the heart of the most active regions of organized criminal activity. The Countryside War, the Xolotecate repression against all forms of rural resistance labeled 'banditry', targeted known gangsters and extortionists in the hills and valleys for elimination. Those clans which survived the Xolotecate era did so by adopting new, more secretive methods to avoid detection by the authorities, ushering in a new age for the criminal underworld in the west.

Under the new order, the gangs that had existed previously appeared to vanish from view as they took on the character of secret societies. Those that survived and prospered under Xolotecatl's new Zacapican were those that implemented codes of secrecy and compartmentalized information to protect their hierarchy in the inevitable case of their low level footsoldiers being targeted by Tliltzon intervention. The years that followed market a silent arms race between organizations to explore new avenues of making profit in the underworld, including human trafficking and narcotics, activities that had been considered taboo by the criminals of the 19th century. Criminal outfits not only faced fierce and often violent competition from one another, but now too had to contend with the agents of the new state which now had the means and inclination to crack down on organized crime wherever they could prove its activities. These pressures eventually gave rise to a sophisticated set of relationships and standards between gangs, a sort of inter-organizational order, which gave rise to what can be recognized as the precursor of the modern Western Underworld in the 1960s.

Much of what is known today about the Western Underworld and its inner workings was successfully kept secret from the outside world for decades. Although the presence of organized crime in the growing industrial cities of the west was a generally accepted fact, the extent of its activities was vastly underestimated by authorities and the public. The mere existence of powerful groups like the Akuitsiurhiri were matters of absolute secrecy. The Ometzontli Trial and the infiltration of the TIAT into the bowels of the criminal underworld blew apart this concealment and made the public aware of many of the major players in the criminal ecosystem. The Western Underworld would ultimately survive the 1990s although in a diminished state, with many of its activities further entrenching themselves into secrecy, or else becoming more active within the prison system. This was also a turning point in the tensions between the western factions of the underworld and their eastern Angatahuaca-based counterparts such as the Yo Tarshazag, opening up opportunities for the smaller and more focused criminal enterprises of the east to take over areas of the business previously dominated by western gangs, thus laying the groundwork for the modern era of intense east-west competition in the Zacapine criminal underworld.

Organizations

Akuitsiurhiri

The Serpent's Blood are an ethnic Purépecha clan based in the minor city of Akambaru in coastal Zacaco. Due to the group's secrecy and extensive propagandized mythology, their true origins are difficult to establish, although it is believed that they were one of the many groups active in the earliest days of the Wester Underground in the 1860s. The Akuitsiurhiri claim to be legitimate continuation of the Purépecha secret societies established to resist the occupation of the west by Angatahuaca, something which would put their true age at roughly one thousand years, although the veracity of this claim is highly questionable. The Akuitsiurhiri did not become known to the public until the revelations of the Ometzontli Trial, which exposed their vast network of criminal influence over the street pig gangs in what was labeled by the press "Akuitsiurhiri Hegemony" in reference to their mythology of supposed resistance to Angatahuaca's medieval hegemony. Even after Ometzontli, however, the Akuitsiurhiri succeeded in remaining relatively well hidden and thus surviving the inquisition intact if less protected by layers of secrecy than before. Their primary role is to handle the immense upward cash flow generated by the many players of the Western Underworld, running extensive money laundering operations and participating in various frauds and financial crimes in order to legitimize criminal profits, making them a central player in the underworld's ecosystem. The vast majority of criminal outfits in the west use the Akuitsiurhiri's services and thereby fall under their influence.

Opitzome

Opitzotl gangs are a broad category of predominantly Nahua street and prison gangs that form the bulk of the underground in terms of numbers and scale of their activities. The modern Opitzotl was founded as an alliance between the notorious gangsters Hueyi Ayotzin and Ozama Milchiuhqui operating in the Zapan district of Tequitinitlan. This original alliance paved the way for a creation of a wider network of Nahua gangs in the many industrial cities of the Zacaco valley, particularly recruiting from among the calpolli that underperformed and were shut down, forcing its members into desperation to make ends meet in the absence of a federal state-sponsored support system. The modern Opitzotl are an extensive but loosely associated and decentralized network of gangs active both on the streets and within the prison system, primarily dealing in illegal drugs. Each local gang is called a neyaotecpanatli, or set of soldiers, and reports to its own boss. Neyaotecpanatli frequently engage in warfare with one another over territory and standing within the Western Underworld.