El Narco (14 page)

To get a better grasp on how Mexican traffickers got the upper hand over the Colombians, I talked to the DEA’s Andean regional director, Jay Bergman. The agent followed the seismic shift while working on dozens of huge busts and probes across the Americas. But Bergman didn’t come across as the typical DEA agent trying to sell the company line or impress with stories of drug-busting bravado. In fact, Bergman appeared to be quite an intellectual who had read widely on economic theory to understand the smuggling mafias. When I sat down with him, he unleashed a tirade about the shift in power with the vigor of a writer with a book inside him struggling to get out. He explained, “What is interesting is that there was no hostile takeover or violence. At each progression, the Colombian cartels made a conscious decision to allocate more share to the Mexicans. And then it got to a time when the Mexicans started calling the shots.”

Colombians first let Mexicans get their fingers into the cocaine pie after Reagan cracked down in Florida, which made cartels spread their smuggling risk along the Mexican-U.S. border. By 1990, Bergman explained, American agents had figured out how to shut down the Florida smuggling corridor completely, using naval vessels and aircraft to keep watch on a ninety-mile choke point. The Colombians were forced to hand almost all their merchandise to Mexican couriers, who would end up moving nine tenths of the cocaine that entered the United States. This shifted the white lady’s routes to the East Pacific, a vast stretch of water with no natural choke points and a lesser U.S. navy presence. Typical of drug enforcement, solving one problem had created another bigger one.

U.S. agents then turned on Colombian head honcho Pablo Escobar to stop the flow of blow. The end of the Cold War aided them in their mission. With no communists to hunt, American spooks and soldiers were eager to fight drug traffickers for a brief moment (until they discovered Islamic militants). Rather than tripping each other up, the Pentagon, CIA, and DEA all worked together, feeding data from street informants and spook satellites to the Colombian police.
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Escobar had drawn particular attention to himself by his terrorist tactics—he even bombed an airliner, killing 110 passengers, as pressure to stop his being extradited to the United States. His brutal violence against rivals also created so many enemies that victims formed a paramilitary group to get him. A curious alliance was formed of Colombian police, soldiers, and criminals, and American spies, drug agents, and troops, all after the big guy. Escobar was just waiting to die. Colombian police finally caught up with him in a residential Medellín house, shot him dead, and posed smiling with his corpse. Drug warriors learned a new modus operandi—sometimes it is better to forget about an arrest and go for the clean kill.

Under pressure from all sides, Colombians started paying Mexican couriers in cocaine rather than cash. The Colombians had a huge markup. While a kilo of cocaine was worth $25,000 wholesale in the United States, it only cost Colombians $2,000 from a lab. But the Mexican border tycoons could see the huge business advantage of having product rather than money. They could sell it on the street for greater gain and build up their own distribution networks.

The DEA soon hit the Colombians again, arresting their sellers in New York and Miami and using the cases to indict kingpins back home on conspiracy charges. Faced with American jail time, Colombians took their deal with the Mexicans to a third phase, getting out of the United States altogether and letting Mexicans sell it there. Bergman explains their reasoning:

“They were thinking, ‘How do I diminish my exposure to potential extradition? Why don’t I just hand this whole thing to the Mexicans? I still make a huge amount of money and I lower my exposure to potential extradition as it’s no longer my kilo. I get out of the business because it is getting too much pressure to do this in the United States. And concurrently I’ve got the European market, I’m making hand-over-fist money in Europe, I’m making tons of money in Mexico. Let the Mexican cartels deal with the DEA and the FBI and the U.S. customs.’”

However, Bergman goes on, U.S. laws were later changed so prosecutors could extradite Colombians even if they weren’t directly connected to sellers in the United States. Someone selling drugs abroad could now be nailed just by knowing those drugs were headed to American soil. At the same time, the Colombian national police began to hammer the drug barons from behind.

“It completely backfired. Not only did the Colombians make less money, not only did the Mexicans take over, but the Colombians were being extradited left and right, and the cases being built against them were stronger and more powerful. The Colombians never quite got it. They always played checkers and never really played chess. They never really thought two steps ahead.”

Up in Mexico, this meant cartels were raking in more money than ever before. Reports ebbed out of huge fiestas from Tijuana to the Gulf of Mexico, with guests arriving on private jets, tigers displayed in cages, and beauty queens serving up cocaine. These were party years on the border. And in turn, bigger bribes than ever flowed into the system.

During seven decades of PRI rule, the loudest allegations of narco corruption at the top are shouted at President Salinas. Nothing has been conclusively proven. But investigations themselves highlight the depth of suspicion about the government’s role in organized crime at the end of the twentieth century.

The Salinas conspiracy focuses on the president’s brother, Raúl Salinas. During Carlos’s 1988-to-1994 term, Raúl had a government job at $192,000 a year. That was tasty money in a country where the minimum wage is $5 a day. But Raúl also proved an especially good saver. In 1995, he was found to have $85 million in a Swiss bank account when his wife got arrested trying to withdraw it. That was only the tip of the iceberg. Investigators found he had a whopping 289 bank accounts in such veritable institutions as Citibank. Swiss police estimated he had upward of $500 million altogether.
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A Mexican politician has many ways besides drugs to skim money. However, Swiss police interviewed ninety Raúl Salinas associates, including convicted drug traffickers, and concluded that El Narco was the main source. Their report stated:

“When Carlos Salinas de Gortari became President of Mexico in 1988, Raúl Salinas de Gortari assumed control over practically all drug shipments through Mexico. Through his influence and bribes paid with drug money, officials of the army and the police supported and protected the flourishing drug business.”

Raúl and his brother, President Carlos Salinas, have consistently denied all this as smears and misinformation. However, when Salinas finished his term in 1994, Raúl Salinas was arrested in Mexico for masterminding a murder and served a ten-year prison term before being acquitted. Money-laundering charges against him in Switzerland still drag on.

Carlos Salinas himself left Mexico after his term for a self-imposed exile in the Republic of Ireland. Apparently, he enjoys rain and thick black beer. Mexicans later vilified him as a puppet master akin to the evil emperor in the
Star Wars
movies and fear he is the hidden hand behind anything from guerrilla attacks to bad weather.

After Salinas left, his economic miracle collapsed like a paper tiger. In 1995, months into the new government of President Ernesto Zedillo, money poured out of the economy and the peso fell like a dead weight, triggering double-digit inflation. Overnight, the number of Mexican billionaires was halved from twenty-four to twelve. Down below, the middle class had their life savings wiped out, while many companies went out of business, costing millions of jobs. Bill Clinton, who had worked closely with Salinas, rushed faithfully to the rescue with a $50 billion bailout package to save Mexico from collapse.

This crisis sparked a surge in crime. Despite the steady rise of drug trafficking, modern Mexico had not been a dangerous country until then. Even in the eighties, mugging and robbery rates were relatively low, and Mexicans strolled the streets of big cities at all hours. But those good old days came to a rude end. Mugging, carjacking, and the heinous crime of kidnapping shot up, especially in the capital. Suddenly, everyone in Mexico City had a story about a family member getting a gun stuck to his head and turning out his pockets. Police failed to respond to this crime wave, creating an atmosphere of impunity that paved the way for the current criminal insurgency.

One Mexican industry wasn’t affected by the peso crisis. Drug trafficking kept bringing in the billions, and as it got paid in dollars, the devaluation of the peso just gave El Narco more power. With an army of unemployed, the cartels could recruit foot soldiers more cheaply than before. El Narco became more deeply entrenched in slums across the country.

Another crucial transformation happened in this time: Mexicans in meaningful numbers started taking hard drugs. Mexicans had long seen cocaine and heroin as a gringo vice. “The Colombians make it, the Mexicans traffic it, and the Americans snort it,” observers joked. But by the late nineties, Mexico had to concede it had its own army of heroin junkies and crackheads.

The spread of these drugs was directly linked to traffic. To maximize profits, Mexican capos started paying their lieutenants with bricks of cocaine and bags of heroin as well as cash. Many of these midranking hoods unloaded their products on Mexico’s own streets to make a quick peso.

Tijuana developed the highest level of drug use in the country, with Arellano Félix affiliates setting up hundreds of
tienditas
, or little drug shops, especially in the center and eastside slums. The cartel’s mob of hit men protected these drug retailers, adding an extra dimension to Mexican drug violence. Now it wasn’t just about moving tons over the border; it was also about slinging crack to addicts.

Fighting over street corners drove violence to new highs with some three hundred homicides a year in Tijuana, and the same number in Juárez toward the end of the nineties. These were rates comparable to those of gang-infested U.S. cities such as Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans. The American media began to pick up on the bloodshed and, for the first time, talk about the danger of “Colombianization,” or the prospect of a full-blown narco war exploding on the United States’ doorstep. Most dismissed such naysayers as alarmist nut jobs. As it turns out, the alarmist nut jobs were right.

American media also picked up on the bubbly characters of the Arellano Félix brothers and their cocaine binges, disco dancing, and dissolving of victims in acid.
Time
magazine published a story on them,
¹⁰
and the movie
Traffic
even had characters based on them making cocaine deals with Catherine Zeta-Jones. Accompanying the media attention were a series of indictments and rewards in the United States. And anytime that anyone mentioned the Arellano Félix brothers, the name of journalist Blancornelas flashed up. He really pissed them off.

Blancornelas thinks the last straw for Ramón Arellano Félix wasn’t even a story he wrote but a letter he printed. One day, a distraught woman came into the
Zeta
office and asked to publish an ad. When she was told how much it would cost, she said softly that she didn’t have enough money. The curious
Zeta
worker asked to see what she wanted on display, and when he saw it, he immediately called Blancornelas. The journalist read the letter and was so moved he agreed to run it for free.

The woman had written a letter addressed directly to Ramón Arellano Félix, who’d ordered the murder of her two sons. The young men had been caught up in some street beef with one of Ramón’s lieutenants. The mother wrote fearlessly out of love for her lost children:

“My beloved sons were the victims of the envy and cowardice of you, the Arellanos … You don’t deserve to die yet. Death should not be your price or your punishment. I hope you live for many years and know the pain of losing children.”
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The woman disappeared from Tijuana after publishing the letter. Blancornelas believes she ran before the mafia could execute her. The frustrated Ramón Arellano Félix thus turned his wrath on the journalist.

Ten hit men ambushed Blancornelas as he drove with his bodyguard Luis Valero. They sprayed their car with bullets, killing Valero instantly. But Blancornelas was still alive with four caps in him. The chief hit man than strolled up to the car to take the final shot. But as the assassin walked forward, he fired a bullet that ricocheted off the concrete and into his own eye, killing him instantly. The rest of the gang abandoned their chief in a pool of blood. Blancornelas was saved by a miracle.

“Ramón ordered me dead. God didn’t want it … but disgracefully they killed my companion and protector Luis Valero.”
¹²

The chief hit man was identified as David Barron, a Chicano gangbanger from San Diego known to work with the Arellano Félixes. Barron had tattoos of fourteen skulls on his midriff and shoulders, reputedly one for each man he had killed.
Zeta
reporters identified six more of the attackers as fellow thugs of Barron’s from the San Diego barrio of Logan Heights. But despite the fact that
Zeta
handed piles of evidence to Mexican police, the thugs were never indicted and they were seen moving freely in San Diego. Some are still there.

The three border tycoons of the nineties all went down eventually. Juan Garcia Ábrego of the Gulf Cartel was arrested in 1996. He gave himself up without a shot, nabbed in a ranch near Monterrey. As an old-school capo, he was ultimately respectful of the Mexican system, in which the government called the shots. A year later, Amado Carrillo Fuentes died of plastic-surgery complications in a Mexico City hospital. Or did he? A gangster of mythological proportions in life, he went out in his own puff of smoke. It was all a trick, people whisper on the Juárez streets; Amado is really kicking it in the Caribbean sipping margaritas. Or maybe he is working in a gas station in Texas alongside Elvis Presley.