Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (18 page)

In February 1999, Enrique Pérez Rodríguez was appointed sub-director of prevention and rehabilitation at the Secretariat of the Interior; days later, his old friend Miguel Ángel Yunes Linares became the director; in May, Labastida made Jorge Enrique Tello Peón (Jorge Carrillo Olea’s intelligence man under Salinas) their boss, as under secretary of the interior.

It was while Tello, Yunes, and Pérez were in charge of the country’s federal jails that El Chapo Guzmán took control of the Puente Grande prison. All of them knew what was going on, but none of them did a thing to stop it.

The new assistant warden, Dámaso López Nuñez, had once been head of car theft investigations, but in reality he worked for the Sinaloa Cartel, more particularly for the group led by Ismael El Mayo Zambada. He had been sent by El Chapo’s friends. He brought with him a close-knit staff who became known as Los Sinaloas: Commanders Carlos Ochoa, Jesús Vizcaíno, and Fidel García; corrections officers including José de Jesús Cortes, El Pollo, and José Barajas, El Veneno. All were corrupt from head to toe. From the moment of their arrival, prison discipline went out the window.

The appointments were made in a hurry. Labastida was due to resign at the end of May, so that he could compete in the internal selection process of the PRI’s presidential candidate for July 2000. His successor as interior minister, Diódoro Carrasco, respected his choices. Indeed, in April 2000, Yunes was made Carrasco’s chief adviser, while his friend Pérez was promoted to replace him as head of prevention and rehabilitation. Under Secretary Tello stayed on as Pérez’s boss until one month after El Chapo’s escape.

From 1987 to 1992, Francisco Labastida Ochoa had been governor of Sinaloa, the cradle of Mexico’s foremost drug barons. At the end of his term, Labastida fled the country, allegedly because of threats from the traffickers; he became the Mexican ambassador to Portugal. Over time, Mexicans have learnt that the threats or attacks made against public officials by the narco
s
are not always because of their efforts to combat the drugs trade; they may also be because they have betrayed it.

Labastida’s tenure as governor in Sinaloa, like that of almost all the state’s governors, was tainted with suspicion.
¹⁶
In February 1998, the
Washington Times
’s fortnightly magazine,
Insight
, published an article based on a “CIA report” which claimed that Labastida had links with drug traffickers in his state when he was governor. According to the report, Labastida had denied taking bribes, but privately admitted to reaching “unspecified” agreements with the drug traffickers to overlook some of their activities. Labastida denied these accusations.

It is not often that information comes to light about how, when, and through whom, drug traffickers make contact with government figures. It is mentioned so often, but without hard evidence, that it almost seems a fantasy. The only convincing testimony relies upon some Deep Throat emerging from within one of the criminal gangs. As far as we know, nobody had made direct accusations against Labastida. Nobody, that is, until Pablo Tostado Félix appeared. He was reputed to be a close aide to another leader of the Sinaloa clan, Juan José Esparragoza, El Azul. In 2005 Tostado was behind bars in Irapuato, Guanajuato state, accused of kidnapping. Over fifty years old, of medium build, he was dark and bald, with a country accent. Two things were as important to him as the air he breathed, and he
was never without them: his baseball cap and his black bullet-proof vest. In March and April, Tostado was visited by José Antonio Ortega Sánchez, a lawyer for the Guadalajara archdiocese.

They’d heard at the archdiocese that Pablo Tostado had valuable information about the Sinaloa Cartel, and Cardinal Sandoval wanted to know what it was as he sought to clarify the murder of his predecessor, Cardinal Posadas. They understood the prisoner’s days were numbered, and they had to make the most of what time they had. Ortega had already tried to speak to El Chapo: he had been to see him in 1995, when he was still in Almoloya de Juárez. The lawyer had waited for hours, but when Guzmán eventually appeared in the small air-conditioned office, fresh from the shower, he refused to answer questions.

On April 13, 2004, there had been an attempt on Tostado as he was being transferred between jails. Eight members of the Sinaloa Cartel, wearing uniforms of the Federal Investigation Agency (AFI)—headed at the time by Genaro García Luna—tried to snatch him. At first the PGR thought it was a rescue attempt. But later one of the eight, Miguel Ángel Beltrán, admitted that the plan was to kill him, as the revenge of Juan José Esparragoza for having targeted Esparragoza’s family.

Questioned by the cardinal’s men, Tostado revealed a wealth of new information about the Pacific organization. It was a treasure chest of facts—one which the government had no interest in opening. In spite of the allegations Tostado had made as part of his defense during his trial, none of the authorities had ever come to press him on the names and whereabouts of important drug barons linked to El Chapo Guzmán.

Pablo Tostado told how he had started out in the drug trade as a driver for El Azul Esparragoza. Low-level employees in his position often worked for more than one boss at a time, and Tostado had also worked for El Chapo: “We all know each other. I’ve known El Chapo Guzmán since he was just plain ‘Chapo’ [Shorty]. He’s a traitor; he’d double-cross his own mom if he could.” He also said he’d known El Mayo Zambada ever since he was a “poor bastard and broke.” Tostado’s criminal career had been on the rise until he had the bad idea of kidnapping some of El Azul’s relatives. That signed his death warrant.

Tostado explained that “drug trafficking without government protection and government without the support of the drug traffickers wouldn’t be able to do anything, they couldn’t work. Both have to work together. It was Raúl Salinas de Gortari who was in charge of drug trafficking during his brother’s presidency; we all paid Raúl for the right to work a territory, and the go-between was El Chapo Guzmán. Nothing moved in Mexico until it was authorized by [Raúl].”

Every word he said confirmed the unremitting presence of the drugs trade in the very fabric of government: “The traffickers pay for the campaigns, and then get protection when their guys are elected.” Labastida’s presidential campaign in 2000, he asserted, was paid for by Manuel Beltrán Arredondo, Labastida’s compadre and a well-known mining entrepreneur. But behind that public image, Beltrán was also a member of the Sinaloa Cartel, and one of El Chapo’s closest friends and assistants. “When Juan S. Millán was governor [of Sinaloa, 1999–2004], Manuel Beltrán had a bunch of federal judicial policemen as his bodyguards,” recalled Tostado. “So when El Chapo [from inside Puente Grande] wanted to get hold of him and couldn’t, he’d get on the radio to the head of the Federal Judicial Police who in turn would contact Beltrán though his police bodyguards.”

Pablo Tostado stated bluntly:

Manuel Beltrán Arredondo is one of the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel, even though you may not be too familiar with his name, because the United States hasn’t put a price on his head yet. Because, as you know, in Mexico drug traffickers lose their protection as soon as the US puts a price on them.

On November 2, 2007, Beltrán Arredondo was gunned down in a Culiacán mall. But it was not until 2009 that the PGR officially recognized his involvement with the drug traffic.
¹⁷
It was Beltrán Arredondo, the friend of Secretary of the Interior Francisco Labastida, who sent Dámaso López as assistant warden to Puente Grande.

Pablo Tostado knew he would have to pay for his indiscretions. On April 22, 2009, he was acquitted in Irapuato, and transferred to Social Rehabilitation Center No. 1 in Durango, to face other
outstanding charges—where, as it turned out, it was not the criminal justice system that caught up with him, but the drug traffickers he had betrayed. He only lasted thirteen days. On May 5, he was found hanged in his cell with a bullet in the heart.

Labastida achieved his goal of becoming the PRI’s presidential candidate, running against Cuauhtémoc Cardenas of the left-wing PRD, and Vicente Fox of the right-wing PAN. But on July 2, 2000, for the first time in Mexico’s history, an opposition party won the presidency. Fox won by a clear margin, and Labastida went to lick his wounds in Spain, in a fine house owned by Olegario Vázquez Raña, one of his biggest supporters.

Many people believed that the victory of the PAN under a businessman like Fox spelt the death of the old, corrupt regime, and the beginnings of a transition in Mexico. They thought this might shake the grip of the illegal organizations. Curiously, however, Labastida’s defeat had no consequences in Puente Grande. El Chapo’s power in the prison was not diminished; in fact it increased.

During the tenure of Felipe Calderón (2006–12), Labastida served as senator for the state of Sinaloa. He went about Mexico City without visible bodyguards, seemingly oblivious of the threats that made him scuttle off to Portugal some twenty years ago.

Lord and master

El Chapo Guzmán formed a common front with El Güero Palma and Arturo Martínez Herrera, El Texas—a member of the Gulf Cartel, and one of the monsters created by Guillermo González Calderoni. The staff at Puente Grande dubbed them Los Tres, the Three. With Commander Dámaso and Los Sinaloas behind them, they were invincible.

To secure their privileges, The Three set up an elaborate payroll. Monthly stipends were allocated according to the recipients’ status and tasks: the guards and ordinary employees got 2,000 pesos (about $200 in 1999); the commanders usually got 3,000 ($300); a head of section was paid 10,000 pesos ($1,000). Commanders Ochoa and Vizcaíno, as members of Los Sinaloas, received 15,000 ($1,500) each, and the prison warden pocketed between 40,000 and 50,000 pesos
($4,000 to 5,000). A number of inmates were also allowed to work as servants and bodyguards.

Numerous prison employees became part of El Chapo Guzmán’s retinue. For example, workers in the prison laundry washed not only the prisoners’ clothes, but also those of Guzmán’s relatives when they came to visit. None of this would have been news to the officials Labastida had appointed. Jorge Tello, Miguel Ángel Yunes, and Enrique Pérez not only received complaints from prison staff who objected to the corruption; they also witnessed it for themselves.

In January 2000, the retired Major Antonio Aguilar Garzón, with a long and notably honorable trajectory at Sedena, was sent to work under Yunes as supervisor of security and transfers. It wasn’t as if he’d won the lottery—Aguilar would be responsible for overseeing the proper running of Mexico’s federal prisons, and the transfer of low-risk inmates. After a few phone calls and interviews with former colleagues and honest officials in different penitentiaries, he soon became aware of the irregularities in the prison system.
¹⁸

In Puente Grande, the situation looked especially dire. Under the management of Beltrán and López, it was chaos—anything was allowed in, cell phones, prostitutes, liquor, cocaine, and restaurant food, mostly for El Chapo, El Güero, and El Texas. According to the reports Aguilar was getting, things had gone askew after May 1999, when Tello, Yunes, and Pérez had been put in charge of the country’s high security prisons.

“I verbally informed my boss, Mario Balderas Álvarez, about all these irregularities. He told me he’d already informed Enrique Pérez,” Aguilar declared to public prosecutors on February 9, 2001. A few days after his conversation with Balderas, Aguilar decided to make quite sure that Pérez knew about the anomalies at Almoloya and Puente Grande:

I mentioned it to Enrique Pérez, who responded that Miguel Yunes’s administration had done more than any other to bring prison staff to account for irregularities. He said I should put my comments in writing, stating who had given me the information, which I didn’t do, because I knew that nobody had been brought to account.

Antonio Aguilar wanted to make it clear that he had done everything he could, and that those who could have done more chose not to.

When Enrique Pérez was promoted to director general of prevention and rehabilitation in May 2000, replacing his friend Yunes, he decided to put Aguilar to the test. Maybe he wanted to prove to himself that everybody was just as rotten as he was. At the end of August, he asked Aguilar to investigate the irregularities at Puente Grande first-hand. Before traveling to Jalisco, Aguilar called some former colleagues who now worked at the prison. On arrival, his first action was to meet with them in Guadalajara; they confirmed that the prison was controlled by El Chapo, El Güero, and El Texas. Aguilar sent a report to Pérez the next day, with a precise enumeration of the irregularities detected in the prison.

On September 15, Pérez called Aguilar to tell him he’d received the report, and that they should make the inspection together. Pérez assured him that not a word of this plan would go beyond his office. That night, a team set off towards Puente Grande: Antonio Aguilar, a driver, and three more assistants, to be joined by Enrique Pérez who was flying in.

The “surprise operation” kicked off at 2 a.m. on September 16. Aguilar quickly got the impression something was not quite right. Everything seemed strangely tidy. His suspicions were confirmed by a prison employee, who told him they’d been expecting his visit since the day before. Aguilar kept hearing Pérez’s voice: “Not a word goes beyond this office.”

But you can’t hide an elephant behind a tree for long. At 8 a.m., Miguel Ángel Cambrón, commander of the Third Custody and Security Company, arrived with the usual suitcase. López asked him to hand it over, at the request of Aguilar, who proceeded to open it. Inside was an assortment of vitamins, plus cash. Aguilar informed Pérez of the find, and he had Cambrón taken to the warden’s meeting room. There the officials questioned him about the objects in his case. Cambrón replied quite naturally that the money was to pay off a debt of his brother’s, which he was planning to do after leaving work.