In February, 2014, members of the Army, Navy, State, and Federal Police forces began searching for the remains of at least 300 residents of the region, who had been murdered in 2011 and buried in a series of clandestine graves in local ranches.

After more arrests, DEA Agent Richard Martinez and Assistant U.S. Attorney Ernest Gonzalez determined that El Diablo was 30-year-old Jose Vasquez, Jr., a Dallas native who’d started selling drugs in high school and was now the leading Zetas cocaine distributor in east Texas, moving truckloads of drugs, guns and money each month.

If they could persuade Vasquez to cooperate, it would give them rare access to the senior ranks of the notoriously impenetrable cartel and a chance to capture its leaders, particularly the Treviño brothers, who had killed their way onto the list of the DEA’s top targets.

The Treviños found out; in response, members of the Zetas seized the towns of Allende and Nava, destroyed 80 houses with heavy machinery, and kidnapped approximately 80 families.

These people were not seen again, until the operation began uncovering some of their bodies, many of which allegedly had been dissolved with a mixture of diesel fuel and caustic soda in large barrels of improvised "kitchens", in 2014.

Allende is also crossed by the railway that connects Saltillo to the border city of Ciudad Acuña (across the river from Del Rio, Texas, United States).