Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (14 page)

According to the investigation reports, the kidnappings had been ordered by Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Rafael El Sha Aguilar, El Chapo, and El Güero Palma; they had been carried out by members of the Federal Judicial Police under the command of Rodolfo León Aragón.

The bodies of the nine victims were found south of the capital, on the Cuernavaca-Puente de Ixtla road, close to Iguala in Guerrero state. It was like a scene out of Dante’s
Inferno
. The men had their hands tied behind their backs with electrical cable, handcuffs, pieces of cord, and ties. They had clearly been tortured. The motive for the “Iguala massacre” was to find out by the most brutal methods what information they had given to the DEA—supposedly on instructions from Félix Gallardo—about the group led by Carrillo Fuentes and Aguilar Guajardo.

The PJF commander, Jorge Núñez, who had persuaded León Aragón to carry out this operation in Iguala, gave him $10 million to blame everything on El Güero Palma and get rid of any evidence that might point to the other traffickers.

El Chapo’s accountant

When the investigating officers stopped Cristina Sánchez, the maid who was going into the house in Almendros Street, she explained that she had been hired a year and seven months earlier by a certain accountant, Miguel Ángel Segoviano Berbera, and before that she had worked for the previous owner, Abraham Cohen Bisu. Segoviano paid her wages, but didn’t live there.

At first I worked for various people, five to eight of them, who used to stay here. They had Sinaloa accents. My job was to keep the house clean, do the laundry, and cook for them. That was the first six months. Then nobody came for five months until February or March this year, 1992, when Mrs. Ana Salazar arrived, with her little boy, Arturo, the nanny Josefina Hernández, and a friend of the madam’s called Claudia Meneses.

Señora Ana had a holiday home in Cuernavaca, at number 1, Magnolia Street. I never went in, I always waited outside, but I noticed
several people coming and going with guns. One of them was Jerónimo Gámez. Mr. Gámez was always armed, and he also visited the house in Bosques de las Lomas. Another one who sometimes came was El Chapo’s friend, Martín Moreno, and his personal bodyguard Antonio Mendoza. That gentleman was sometimes accompanied by a pale, blond-haired man with light eyes who they all called Mr. Palma.
³

After her detailed statement, Cristina was taken to the PJF offices at 4, López Street. Rodolfo León Aragón assigned her statement to the PGR’s preliminary inquiries department, where two inquiries were opened, labeled AP4971/D/92 and AP4992/D/92.

As the days passed, the PJF officers were able to piece together the jigsaw puzzle. On September 21, public prosecutors issued a warrant to find and detain the accountant, Miguel Ángel Segoviano, who worked for Carrillo Fuentes, Guzmán, and Palma. The search for Segoviano led them to a Mexico City-registered company called Galce Constructora, in which Segoviano was a partner. The police officers went to the premises, but nobody there had seen Segoviano for days.

In his statement of June 9, 1993, El Chapo would deny knowing Segoviano. Luckily, when he amplified his testimony on September 7, 1995, at least some of his memory had come back: “Carlos is the brother of Miguel Ángel Segoviano. I met them at a disco in the Zona Rosa in Mexico City, though I don’t recall which,” Guzmán said, when the public prosecutors showed him a photo of Carlos Segoviano.

It seems that Miguel Ángel Segoviano’s own memory was in better shape when, in California in 1996, he testified at the trial of Enrique Ávalos Barriga, one of El Chapo’s men who had been caught building a 350-meter tunnel intended to ferry drugs, undocumented workers, and weapons across the border between Tijuana and San Diego. “Guzmán had an assembly line packing the coke in tins of jalapeños. The drugs were exported to the United States by rail. In exchange for the drugs, Guzmán took millions of dollars back to Mexico in suitcases that were flown to Mexico City airport. They bribed federal agents to make sure there were no inspections,” declared Segoviano, El Chapo’s accountant who since 1993 had been a protected witness for the DEA.
⁴

Without specifying names, El Chapo’s accountant insisted that they had handed a lot of money to people working in the PGR.
⁵
This coincided with Guzmán’s first statement on the plane from Tapachula to Toluca, the one that disappeared from the archives.

Segoviano said he had met El Chapo through his father, who owned a warehouse and a trucking company. He recounted in detail the criminal exploits of El Chapo and El Güero Palma, as well as their daily lives: parties, christenings, cock fights, even English classes. He also revealed how Galce Constructora had been contracted to refurbish properties occupied by the drug traffickers in the Desierto de los Leones district of Mexico City, as well as in Cuernavaca and Acapulco.

He evoked a house in Acapulco, in the luxury quarter of Punta Diamante, where SUVs with Jalisco and Sinaloa license plates regularly turned up. The passengers were men bedecked in gold chains, wearing denims and cowboy boots. The parties went on for days at a time. From the mansion, El Chapo Guzmán could see the two yachts named after his sons anchored in front of the exclusive Pichilingue beach in Puerto Marqués.
⁶

Luis Echeverrfa’s awkward neighbor

Continuing their enquiries, the federal police agents visited the home of Segoviano’s mother—only to find that someone else had been living there for five years. They eventually tracked down the address of the accountant himself: 205 Santiago, in San Jerónimo in the south of Mexico City. To their surprise, the house where Segoviano lived was not only next door to the home of Mexico’s ex-president, Luis Echeverría: it actually belonged to him. The person responsible for letting it had been his son, Luis Eduardo Echeverría Zuno.
⁷

The federal police officers were getting worried about the dimensions this investigation was taking on, and about just how far the drug traffickers’ web of complicity went. The trail was leading to the very highest levels of state power in Mexico. And of course they knew that searching the home of a former president could have serious consequences for their own careers.

When they asked Echeverría about the situation, he told them his son had employed a real-estate agent to rent the house out, and that they knew nothing about the tenant or his activities. This was difficult to believe, because the ex-president’s house had a squad of soldiers in civilian clothes assigned to it from the Presidential Guard; they would hardly be indifferent to what was going on next door, the kind of people who came in and out, and, in this case, their blatant display of weapons. This was the second time that the Echeverría family had appeared to be linked to members of the Guadalajara Cartel: the first was when the former president’s brother-in-law, Rubén Zuno Arce, had been acquitted of involvement in the murder of DEA Special Agent Enrique Camarena.

The Mexican police didn’t find anyone in the house rented by the accountant. It seemed they had arrived too late. Neighbors said they hadn’t seen the family for several days, although there had been no sign of them moving.

Attorney General Ignacio Morales gave the green light for the agents to proceed. A judge issued the appropriate warrant. The historic search of the house belonging to the former Mexican president took place on October 1, 1992.

Just as the investigators were about to begin their work, a couple of men arrived identifying themselves as Vicente Calero and Salvador Castro, employees of the accountant’s. They had orders to load everything in the house into two trucks belonging to Arce Removals. Segoviano’s wife, Rebeca Cañas, had paid them $10,000 for the job. They were due to meet her at 7 p.m., outside the cinemas in Plaza Universidad. Calero, intimidated by the policemen’s questions, confessed that not long ago he had also hidden a car for Segoviano. The trap was set. When Cañas arrived at the mall, the PJF officers were waiting. They stopped and questioned her. “My husband doesn’t live with me, because he has problems with the police. He’s on the run because he works for various drug traffickers. He lends them his name so they can put their properties in his name, and he launders money for them. They pay him very well for these services,” Segoviano’s wife told them.

In one of the vehicles they searched at Segoviano’s house the police found the payroll for El Chapo and his highly placed clients. It
contained lists of expenses, wages, loans, and the names of people who had been paid various sums in pesos and dollars. “The accountant looked after all of El Chapo’s financial dealings. He was very meticulous. He kept lists with the name of the official, the amount in dollars that he was paid, the equivalent in pesos, and what the money was for. Not all the money was paid in cash; some was in kind, for example a bottle of cognac, cars, houses, and suchlike,” one of those involved in the operation told us for this book.

The inquiry revealed, among other things, that Rodolfo León Aragón, the head of the PJF, was involved with the cartel El Chapo belonged to, as was Commander Luis Solís, Director General of the Federal Highway Police—in whose house at number 5600 J, Avenida Desierto de los Leones, El Chapo Guzmán even lived for a while.
⁸
The narco-payroll also indicated the apparent complicity of Jorge Carrillo Olea, the country’s anti-narcotics coordinator, of Jorge Núñez, operations director of the PJF, as well as other agents of the Federal Judicial Police and the public prosecutions service.

The Salinas project

The administration of Miguel de la Madrid (1982–88) saw the emergence of a tightly-knit team that would come to the fore in the following presidential term. It included Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the planning and budget secretary; Manuel Camacho Solís, first the under secretary for the same department, and then head of urban development and ecology; and Emilio Lozoya Thalmann, the under secretary of social security in the Secretariat of Labor. The group also included José Francisco Ruiz Massieu, Salinas’s brother-in-law; General Juan Arévalo Gardoqui, the secretary of defense; Emilio Gamboa Patrón, the president’s private secretary, and General Jorge Carrillo Olea. They were collectively known as Los Toficos, after a popular—and sticky—brand of toffee.

“The politicians wanted the drug money: they wanted it for themselves, for their private businesses, and for their political campaigns,” remarked The Informer in relation to drug trafficking operations during Salinas’s six-year term as president.

Executions of the “old guard” of drug traffickers began before the end of the de la Madrid government, opening the way to a new generation with a more modern mentality. No more “paying taxes”: now you had to offer hefty bribes, enough to make the fortunes of politicians and businessmen overnight. At the same time there was a move to dismantle Mexico’s intelligence agencies, which had never been very effective and were riddled with corruption, but which at least made it possible to see who was in bed with who.

The first notable execution of an older drug trafficker was that of Pablo Acosta, murdered in 1987 by Guillermo González Calderoni in Ojinaga, on the US border in Chihuahua state. His removal strengthened Carrillo Fuentes and allowed him to take control of the Chihuahua region and the jewel in the whole crown, Ciudad Juárez.

“There was no longer any idea of keeping the drug trade separate from politics. And drug trafficking was now carried out, not just by the drug barons, but by politicians and public officials as well,” said
The Informant
. It was in this climate that the controversial Salinas administration got underway, cementing a new relationship with the recently revamped security and intelligence services.

As we’ve seen, Salinas’s first attorney general was Enrique Álvarez del Castillo (1988–91), followed by Ignacio Morales Lechuga (1991–93), and Jorge Carpizo McGregor (1993–94). The post went to Diego Valadés Ríos in 1994, and finally to Humberto Benítez Treviño. Antonio Riviello Bazán was chief of defense, and Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, secretary of the interior. Carrillo Olea set up and headed the Investigation and Security Department (Disen, later Cisen). His number two here was Jorge Enrique Tello Peón, who spearheaded the recruitment of young college graduates to the new-look Mexican intelligence frameworks.

One of these new boys was an engineer named Genaro García Luna, whose stammer earned him the nickname Metralleta (Machine Gun). The most recent post of his long career was as secretary of public security under Felipe Calderón, until 2012. García Luna’s dream of joining the PJF was shattered when he flunked the entrance exam. Instead he joined Cisen, becoming an expert wire-tapper—his great, but only, talent, according to his workmates. The duo of Guzmán Loera and García Luna encapsulates, perhaps, the most
reprehensible overlap of the evils of the old system with those of the new, as each rose to prominence in their chosen branch of organized crime.

Concurrent reshuffles in the narco leadership were equally significant. Some bosses vanished and others arrived, more prepared to play by the new rules. Once Acosta was out of the picture, for example, he was replaced by Aguilar Guajardo, who shared power in Juárez with Carrillo Fuentes. However, on April 12, 1993, Aguilar met his end in sunny Cancún, enabling Carrillo Fuentes, El Señor de los Cielos, to tighten his grip as lord and master of the drugs business. Several others formed alliances with him, including El Azul Esparragoza; El Mayo Zambada; Arturo, Alfredo, and Héctor Beltrán Leyva, known as Los Tres Caballeros (the Three Knights), and the Valencia Cornelio brothers.

The death of Pablo Escobar a few months later, in December 1993, would strengthen Amado even more, because now he could strike a deal with the Cali Cartel, headed by the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers. Once he was linked to both the main Colombian cartels, El Señor de los Cielos began to move forty times more cocaine into the United States than Félix Gallardo had ever managed. The DEA now ranked Carrillo Fuentes as the most powerful Mexican drug trafficker.
⁹