Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (15 page)

The murky dealings of the Vásquez brothers

On the trail of El Chapo’s accountant, Miguel Ángel Segoviano, the investigators of the Special Affairs unit discovered that Segoviano not only had links with Galce Constructora: he was also on the board of Aero Abastos, a freight company whose two planes occupied a hangar at Mexico City’s international airport, very close to the presidential hangar. On October 5, 1992, they showed up at the hangar with a warrant and were surprised to find the building leased to two notoriously shady brothers of Spanish origin, Mario and Olegario Vázquez Raña. They were still more surprised when a flight log on the premises revealed the registration there of other users, namely Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán, and Héctor El Güero Palma.
¹⁰

The log book found in 1992 named one of Aero Abastos’s regular
pilots, Captain Carlos Enrique Messner, who in turn identified three regular passengers: a couple of PJF commanders, and an individual these referred to as “Mr. Guzmán.” The Transport Secretariat officially confirmed, when asked by this investigation, that Messner was a pilot, although his license had expired by 2010. However, none of his documentation could be located.

The planes’ cargos consisted of drugs, and copious quantities of cash. Those were the days when El Chapo, El Güero, and Amado were working with the Reynoso brothers, Jalisco men who had moved to the US where they ran a successful canning outfit under the trade names of Reynoso Brothers, Tía Anita, Grocery Depot, and Cotija Cheese. They were the receivers of the apparent cans of chilli peppers. According to a later report in El
Norte
newspaper (January 27, 1997), it was in their Learjets, based at the Vázquez Rañas hangar, that El Chapo took drugs to the Mexican border and brought money from the US.

The attorney general at the time, Ignacio Morales, told this investigation that after the discoveries in the hangar, Olegario Vázquez Raña himself assured him he had no idea who the other planes belonged to. Avoiding our query as to whether he believed this, Morales merely mentioned that the preliminary inquiry remained open until he himself left the PGR, in 1992. But any record of these inquiries, relating to the Iguala massacre and involving the Vázquez Raña hangar, has vanished as completely as El Chapo’s first confession. Their original file numbers (AP 4971/D/92 and 4992/D/92) are now, thanks to the collusion of the PGR, ascribed to a street brawl and a homicide. Thus the case of the Vazquez Raña brothers and the narco-hangar was closed. As for the overzealous Special Affairs agents, their unit was dissolved shortly afterward, and its members were banished to minor duties in far-flung states.

Despite the persistent whiff of corruption surrounding the business empires of the Vázquez Raña brothers, and the allegations linking them to drug-money laundering, nothing has hindered their progress; any investigation of their financial and fiscal maneuvers, as in 1995–96, was soon shelved. Olegario Vázquez Raña has acquired airports, hotel chains, private hospitals, and media companies, and founded a bank. Both brothers are said, by sources close to Carrillo Fuentes’s gang
interviewed for this book, to have been involved with laundering money for El Señor de los Cielos, and to currently do the same for El Chapo Guzmán. They were protected by successive presidents; Olegario was especially friendly with Vicente Fox and his wife (sexennial 2000–06).

Raúl Salinas and the Juárez Cartel

Attorney General Ignacio Morales Lechuga had always had a rocky relationship with President Carlos Salinas.
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It broke down completely when Morales agreed to receive the father of Roberto Hernández Nájar El Chiquilín, a middle-ranking member of the Juárez Cartel, well below Aguilar Guajardo or Carrillo Fuentes. In December 1990 El Chiquilín was in Juárez, at his house in the comfortable, cobble-stoned neighborhood of Rincones de San Marcos. The telephone rang and, in a moment of carelessness, he answered it himself. Fifteen minutes later, fifty rounds had been pumped into his body.

Two years after that execution, El Chiquilín’s father stepped into Morales Lechuga’s office. He wasn’t asking for his son’s assassins to be brought to justice. What he wanted was help in retrieving the $50 million his son had given to “the president’s brother” to invest in an airline, which he was now refusing to give back to the family. Fifty million greenbacks were not so easily written off.

“One of the president’s brothers? Which one?” Morales Lechuga asked.

“Raúl … Raúl Salinas de Gortari,” came the nonchalant reply. The surprise on the attorney general’s face was obvious.

Staff at the PGR quickly drew up a report of the accusations leveled by the drug trafficker’s father against the president’s brother. The attorney general then personally informed the president of the details of his meeting. Salinas glared at him, tugging his mustache. It was something he did when he was annoyed. That was when Morales knew he would shortly be out of a job. In January 1993 he was relieved of his duties.

For many years it has been widely thought that the Salinas family’s connection with organized crime was exclusively with García Ábrego and the Gulf Cartel. This was based on the close relationship between Don Raúl Salinas Sr. and Juan Nepomuceno, the godfather who
created García Abrego, or rather who pulled his strings. The frequent visits made by the president’s father to Don Juan, and the chummy photographs of the two of them that hung on the walls of his restaurant, Piedras Negras, showed just how close they were.

In those days there was no open warfare between the drug cartels. By and large a civilized coexistence reigned, and everyone enjoyed official protection. This was especially true of the Gulf and Juárez cartels, which even collaborated on making shipments to the United States, according to The Informer. In fact, the ties of the Salinas family were not only with the Gulf Cartel; they also had links with Carrillo Fuentes, who had brought together the drug traffickers of both Sinaloa and Juárez.

The case of Guillermo González Calderoni, revisited

The Salinas family’s PR man with the Gulf and Juárez cartels was the controversial commander of the Federal Judicial Police, Guillermo González Calderoni. He knew Carrillo Fuentes from his time serving in Chihuahua. The PJF chief protected both El Señor de los Cielos and García Ábrego.

Jorge Carrillo Olea remembers González Calderoni as “a likable guy, respectful, like all policemen. He seemed very young, he must have been about forty-two, but he looked younger. He was always very polite and easy to talk to, so he inspired confidence.” Nonetheless, General Carrillo recalls, in 1990 Calderoni had been frozen out; there was simply “no place for him” in the PJF. That same year, Attorney General Morales Lechuga told Carrillo Olea that they had to open an office in Quintana Roo state, in south-east Mexico, and wondered whether they should approach González Calderoni for the job. Carrillo told him he thought that would be a “crass mistake,” because everyone knew what Calderoni was like and this would be giving him “a virgin territory where the Gulf Cartel didn’t exist.”

When Tello Peón, the future Cisen recruiter, then director of planning, learned of Morales Lechuga’s plans, he also opposed sending González Calderoni. They told the attorney general about the police commander’s links with organized crime in Tamaulipas, about his relationship with García Ábrego, and also about the properties he had mysteriously acquired in McAllen and Monterrey. Carrillo Olea
says that even León Aragón was afraid of trespassing on Calderoni’s territory: “El Chino wouldn’t go near it, if I mentioned it to him he’d just play deaf.”

Three years later, after Calderoni had indeed gone to Cancún in Quintana Roo, and the anticipated trouble had begun, Jorge Carpizo (who had just replaced Morales as attorney general) said to Carrillo Olea: “My dear Jorge, only you will know my secret. We are going to arrest Calderoni. You go to Washington, speak to the director of the DEA and tell them not to get involved, otherwise it will be a dreadful sign of how they’re protecting him.”

“We knew perfectly well how the DEA worked,” recalled Carrillo. “They hooked up with the drug traffickers to obtain information. What the Mexican state has never understood is that information is a commodity; those who possess it have power.” So the general went to Washington and met the then director of the DEA and current Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), John T. Morton. Carrillo was taken aback to learn that González Calderoni had not only received US protection, he had even been given a green card.

In the US, Calderoni had told numerous stories about Raúl Salinas and his supposed links with Juan García Ábrego. In General Carrillo’s opinion, “these were tricks. For the Americans, it was like gold dust; even though they knew it wasn’t true, they could exploit it.” Nonetheless, in an interview he gave to the newspaper
Reforma
on January 29, 1996, when he was no longer attorney general, Morales Lechuga said that he had obtained information linking Raúl Salinas to the Juárez Cartel, but as Carrillo Olea controlled the Judicial Police, he could do nothing about it.

During the first year of Ernesto Zedillo’s presidency, in March 1995, Raúl Salinas was arrested on murder and corruption charges.

González Calderoni’s secrets

Towards the end of the ten years he spent in exile in Texas, González Calderoni repeatedly threatened to return to Mexico and tell “everything” he knew.

In December 1996, in an interview with the
New York Times
, he well and truly destroyed the reputation of the former president’s brother. The article was signed by Sam Dillon, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for other pieces on drug trafficking in Mexico. Dillon writes:

In two days of interviews in McAllen, Tex., Mr. González said a major Mexican drug trafficker had told him of making large cash payments to Raúl Salinas de Gortari during the presidency of Mr. Salinas’s brother, Carlos. Mr. González said he relayed these allegations to President Salinas in 1992 and to American officials a year later.
¹²

In 1992, Carlos Salinas had already heard from Morales the accusations made against his brother by El Chiquilín’s father. In his interview, Calderoni also claimed he had told various US officials of the drug trafficking corruption at the highest levels in Mexico.

But in spite of all the reports that Washington received about Raúl Salinas’s alleged complicity with drug trafficking, “the Clinton Administration never expressed concern to the Mexican government about the reported activities of the president’s brother; nor was an investigation requested,” US officials told Dillon. The most anyone in the Clinton administration ever said was a brief insinuation during a meeting between President Salinas and US ambassador James Jones, after Mexico had asked for Calderoni’s extradition. “González Calderoni has so much bad stuff on your administration that it could bring down your government,” Jones warned the Mexican president, who “did not flinch,” according to one US official who talked anonymously to Dillon. In fact, the US government did nothing. It was not the first time that Washington put its foreign policy interests ahead of combating the drug trade.

In October 2000, just after the National Action Party (PAN) led by Vicente Fox had for the first time won the presidential election, Guillermo González Calderoni continued to level accusations against Raúl Salinas from the United States. The Sinaloa Cartel was set to prevail during Fox’s government, and Calderoni got a second chance.

Once the new administration had taken office, he made himself useful to the ambitious sons from an earlier marriage of first lady
Marta Sahagún, who were desperate for good business opportunities. Manuel Bribiesca Sahagún helped the former police commander to obtain, indirectly and using a front name, a major contract with Pemex to buy a much sought-after petroleum solvent, used for dry cleaning but also to adulterate gasoline and produce synthetic drugs.

González Calderoni received protection and began to collaborate with the DEA through his contact with Special Agent Héctor Berrellez, who years earlier had headed Operation Leyenda. In an interview with
Frontline
, Berrellez said Calderoni had asked for help:

He wanted our assistance in hiding in the United States, as his life was in serious jeopardy. We had heard that there were plainclothes Mexican military officials in the L.A. area looking to assassinate him. And at that time, he reported to us that a major drug lord had actually been given the contract to assassinate two political opponents of Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

He told me he was disgusted and frustrated because it not only involved just the drugs, it also involved other crimes, such as murder, and that shocked González Calderoni.
¹³

Commander González Calderoni, the man who knew the sewers of the Mexican police system, also claimed that Amado Carrillo Fuentes was alive and well in the United States, even though he was supposed to have died in July 1997 as a result of botched cosmetic surgery.

On February 5, 2003, at 12:45 p.m., González Calderoni, now fifty-four years old, had his own appointment with death. As he left his lawyer’s office at 6521 North 10
^th
Street in the border city of McAllen, he was killed with a single shot. His troublesome stories would be heard no more.

CHAPTER SIX
The Lord of Puente Grande

J
oaquín Guzmán Loera began to take off the brown uniform with the number 516 printed on the back of each garment. He removed his pants, his shirt, and his jacket, and threw them carelessly on the top bunk bed in cell 307 of Block 3 at Puente Grande—the penitentiary where he had spent the last five years and seven months. Usually El Chapo liked to keep his quarters neat and tidy, because at any time he might have a female visitor: Zulema Yulia, a co-detainee; Yves Eréndira, the prison cook who he had fallen in love with, or one of the prostitutes he liked so much.