El Narco (15 page)

The Arellano Félix brothers survived the longest. Ramón Arellano Félix, the baby-faced psycho who pioneered narco terror in Mexico, lived on until the twenty-first century. Then in 2002, he was shot dead in a traffic stop by a local policeman in the seaside resort of Mazatlán. It was quite an undramatic death for a legendary outlaw. Something had gone seriously wrong with his network of police protection. Blancornelas penned the story about the killing of the man who tried to kill him, noting, “If some of his many victims could speak from the grave, maybe they would say to Ramón, ‘As you are now, so once was I. As I am now, so you shall be.’”
¹³

A month later, army special forces nabbed Benjamin Arellano Félix in a home where he kept his wife and children. The bosses’ chief aides apparently failed to smell the trap. The capo is currently in Mexico’s top-security prison, fighting extradition to the United States. Robbed of its two leaders, the Arellano Félix clan struggled on with the other brothers and sisters, but was severely weakened.

Blancornelas wasn’t long celebrating the demise of his nemesis. In 2004, assassins shot dead Francisco Ortiz, the third founder of
Zeta
magazine. Ortiz was leaving a downtown clinic with his young son and daughter when gunmen fired four bullets into his neck and head. His two children shouted, “Papi! Papi!” as he died beside them, a witness said. This time,
Zeta
magazine was not even sure who was behind the hit.

Blancornelas despaired. While his reporting may have helped bring down one set of bad guys, cartels had only got more powerful and more violent. He was one of the few that saw the writing on the wall. As he said in an interview shortly before he died:

“El Narco used to be in certain states. But now its has grown across the whole of the Mexican republic. Soon El Narco will knock on the door of the presidential palace. It will knock on the door of the attorney general’s office. And this will present a great danger.”
¹⁴

CHAPTER
6

Democrats

If the dog is tied up,

Although he barks all day,

You shouldn’t let him free,

My grandma used to say.

But the fox broke the plates,

And the dog chewed on his leash,

And then the dog was freed,

To cause a bloody mess.

—“
LA
GRANJA
” (
THE
FARM
),
TIGRES
DEL
NORTE
, 2009

The world threw up some intrepid and inspiring heroes of democracy at the end of the twentieth century. In Poland, there was Lech Walesa, the hardened union man who endured years of repression before leading his people to rise and defeat authoritarian communism. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela survived twenty-seven years on a prison island, then rid the world of the dastardly affliction of racist apartheid while avoiding a bloody vengeance that might have shattered his country. Then in Mexico there was … Senor Vicente Fox.

The man who led Mexico’s final march from the authoritarian PRI to multiparty democracy was the unlikeliest of characters. He came from neither the socialist left nor Catholic right, the two factions that rose up to challenge PRI hegemony. Instead, he was a wealthy rancher and Coca-Cola executive who haphazardly stepped into politics at age forty-six and became governor of his native state of Guanajuato seven years later. While he joined the conservative National Action Party, he was never one of their true religionists. Rather than being ideological, he espoused his country values of hard work and forthrightness. He was known for his frank, rancherlike comments that could turn into gaffes. He once said, “Mexicans do the jobs in the United States that even blacks don’t want to do,”
¹
as well as calling women “washing machines with two flippers.”

Fox had political talents suited for the moment in history. Mexicans were sick of conniving politicians who had sacked their country. Fox appeared an outsider, a straight shooter who would fix the broken political machine as if he were mending a tractor. In contrast to the tedious speeches of PRI presidents, he spoke in an everyday language that people understood. When he called for democracy, he sounded as if he believed in it from the bottom of his heart. Throughout the election cycle, both for his party’s nomination, and then for the presidency, he was in a zone. He kept saying the right things at the right time. When he won, he was suddenly out of the zone. He looked like a cornered fox, overwhelmed and puzzled as to what to do.

Open with the press, Fox gave off a warm, familiar quality, appearing like the neighbor you used to chat to occasionally or an old friend from college. His tall, lanky body and mustache have a slightly comic air, akin to that of the English comedian John Cleese, although Fox wore cowboy boots and I never saw him in a bowler hat. His voice is deep and powerful, making him a charismatic speaker.

“I felt an incredible happiness to be at the head of this movement that liberated Mexico from the yoke of authoritarianism,” Fox later told me, reflecting on his presidency in an interview in his native village.
²

What was quite remarkable is that the PRI allowed Fox to win at all and didn’t announce any computer failures in the middle of the vote count. The last PRI president, Ernesto Zedillo, was a curious character, a man from a poor family who became a Yale-educated technocrat and stepped into the Mexican presidency after the previous PRI candidate was assassinated. Zedillo, resistant to pressures from within his own party, was determined to allow the democratic transition. If Mexico were the Soviet Union, Zedillo was the reforming genius Mikhail Gorbachev and Fox the less sparkling Boris Yeltsin, who took the helm.

Zedillo made brave moves against his own corrupt establishment: he oversaw the arrest of Raúl Salinas for alleged murder; the arrest of the governor of Quintana Roo state on drug-trafficking charges; and even the arrest of his own drug czar General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo for being in league with mobsters. Zedillo also coaxed the PRI to loose its grip on power before it gave up the presidency. Mexico’s federal electoral institute gained autonomy in 1996, and the PRI lost its majority in Congress in 1997. It would be harder to fix an election, even if the PRI wanted to.

These actions all shook up the drug underworld and its system of police and political protection. Gangsters nervously repositioned themselves and held tight to see what a democratic president would do. When Fox took office, the seismic lines of Mexican power shifted; the end of seventy-one years of PRI rule was a genuine political earthquake.

From his first days in office, Fox showed himself to be without a clear direction on most issues, drug trafficking included. Time and time again, he put forward plans, and when faced with resistance, he changed course or capitulated. He swore to convict officials from the old regime for their dirty war that “disappeared” five hundred leftists. But when the PRI wouldn’t play ball, he left prosecutions hanging and just released a report about it. He promised sweeping modernizations of Mexico’s economy and justice system. But when the opposition booed him in parliament, he avoided dealing with Congress as much as possible. He pushed hard for the rights of migrants, becoming the first Mexican to speak before a joint session of the U.S. Congress and urging a new guest-worker program. But then the September 11 attacks happened, and Americans put the immigration issue on the back burner.

Quite soon, it seemed, Fox abandoned trying to have much of a domestic program and spent time swanning round the world or entertaining visiting dignitaries. The United Nations, Organization of American States, World Trade Organization, and dozens more groups held summits in what critics started calling “Foxi-landia.” Fox never looked happier than when he was hosting these events and cheering the wonders of multilateralism and the spread of democracy.

Fox had talked little about drugs in his election campaign—his focus had been on getting the PRI out of power. But when he took office, American drug warriors hoped that a democratic president could mean a new era of cooperation. The days of corrupt police conspiring to murder DEA agents were over. Now Mexico could help agents clock up arrests and busts the way the Colombians did. Fox keenly accepted the challenge, making a highly quotable promise in his first interview with American television following his victory. As he told ABC’s
Nightline
, “We are going to give the mother of all battles against organized crime in Mexico. No doubt.”
³

Fox had promised to take the military out of the war on drugs. But after an initial meeting with American officials, who felt soldiers were the most reliable antidrug operatives, he switched course and said he would keep troops fighting traffickers after all. The Americans were happy. This was a guy they could work with.

The first sign that Fox’s drug policy might not be as good as these Americans hoped came just two months into his administration. On January 21, 2001, arch-mafioso Chapo Guzmán escaped from a high-security prison in Guadalajara. The Sinaloan godfather was back in town.

According to data dug up by journalist José Reveles, Chapo built up his power in the prison over several years by throwing bribes at officials.
⁴
In return, he won the right to bring in different women to his cell; choose girls from the cleaning stuff to have sex with; and have relations with a female prisoner called Zulema Hernandez, a tall, blond armed robber in her thirties. Chapo also smuggled Viagra into the penitentiary. More pertinently, Guzmán used his network of corruption to break himself out. Zulema later gave journalist Julio Scherer a love letter from Chapo, in which the drug lord said his escape was imminent. As Chapo, or what some have guessed was a ghostwriter, penned:

“I want to give you a sweet kiss and feel you in my arms to conserve this memory every time I think of you, and withstand your absence so God can permit us to reunite in other conditions that will not be in this place.”
⁵

Two prison guards helped smuggle Chapo out of the pen. To get them on his side, the kingpin paid for the medical operation of the son of one and set up another with a beautiful Sinaloan girlfriend. This happy guard then personally drove Chapo out of the prison in a laundry truck.

As news of Chapo’s escape broke, an embarrassed Fox published ads in newspapers and put up posters with a special hotline number to catch the kingpin. Almost a hundred calls came in every hour. But they all gave false or useless information, and in many of them laughter could be heard in the background. A naive president asking for help seemed hilarious both to children and adults. Mexicans hadn’t quite caught on to the idea of citizen support for policing.
⁶

So what can the escape of Guzmán really tell us about the Fox presidency? Conspiracy theorists cite it as evidence that the Fox administration allied with Guzmán and his Sinaloan gangster friends. Orders for the breakout, they say, must have come from upstairs. Fox’s secret aim was to make a renewed Sinaloa Cartel the strongest mafia, with Guzmán as a national godfather, the way the eighties capo Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo had been. After unleashing Chapo from his cage, Fox brought down his rivals, such as the Arellano Félix brothers, and allowed Chapo to expand across the country. This policy of supporting Guzmán, these theorists argue, carried on when Felipe Calderón took office.

Such a conspiracy theory, in various forms, has bugged both presidents in the democratic era. It has been written by gangsters on placards, shouted by politicians, and filled thousands of column inches.
⁷
But is there any truth to it?

Certainly no evidence has directly linked either Fox or Calderón to Chapo Guzmán. More substantiated than the conspiracy theory is the cock-up theory. Fox may have had nothing to do with Chapo Guzmán’s escape and no power over his subsequent rise. Simply, Guzmán and his mafia partners were the most effective gangsters at building a network of corrupt officials from all wings of government. Neither Fox nor Calderón could really control the Mexican state. With the demise of the PRI, the basic system of power was gone. And this was the key to Mexico’s breaking down.

With the benefit of hindsight, the escape of Chapo Guzmán appears to be a landmark event. But back in 2001, few saw it as an earthshaker. It was just one more gangster and one more example of bad Latin American prisons. Courts had indicted Chapo in Arizona in 1993 for racketeering, and in San Diego in 1995 for conspiracy to import cocaine. But there were not yet million-dollar rewards for him. Most observers of Mexico focused on a totally different agenda—looking at a convoy of Zapatista rebels driving peacefully to Mexico City and at ongoing investigations into the PRI’s old dirty war. As Fox said in the later interview when I asked him about Chapo’s escape:

“It is an important case, but it is not the hallmark of my government. One swallow does not make a summer … Today, it is used by my opponents, by my political enemies, as an enigmatic issue.”

Over the next three years, Fox’s drug policy looked great to Americans. In 2002, municipal police shot dead Tijuana psycho Ramón Arellano Félix and the next month, soldiers seized his brainy brother Benjamin. Then in 2003, Mexican security forces nabbed kingpin Armando Valencia in Michoacán state and capo Osiel Cárdenas up in Tamaulipas. To American drug agents, who love busts and seizures, things had never looked better. I sat down with three DEA agents in the Mexico City embassy in early 2004. They said they were ecstatic with the Fox administration. An agent told me: