Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (19 page)

Aguilar had him empty out his pockets. There were US dollar bills of different denominations, a coded list of prison “services” with an
accompanying list of cash values, and a series of addresses in Guadalajara where the Puente Grande employees would go to receive their pay. Then they searched Cambrón’s locker, where they found a veritable pharmacy: masculine and feminine Viagra, vaginal lubricants, pessaries, contraceptive pills and injections, remedies for vaginal infections, and more than forty tablets of synthetic drugs. When Cambrón had no alternative but to confess, more than one of those present had reason to hold their breath. The commander said he brought all these things into the prison at the request of inmate Jaime Valencia Fontes, El Chapo’s main henchman, and that he, Cambrón, was the only person involved.

But there was to be no sanction for Cambrón.

Even so, on the drive back from the village of El Salto to Guadalajara airport, Aguilar summoned up the courage to say to Pérez:

“Surely we should transfer Joaquín Guzmán, Héctor Palma, and Arturo Martínez to different federal prisons, as a matter of urgency. What happened today confirms everything I was told about the irregularities in Puente Grande.”

“I’ll think it over,” was the only answer he got.

No doubt about it. At Puente Grande there was only one lord and master, and that wasn’t any of the officials there, it was El Chapo. If only Aguilar had understood this sooner.

The plumbers

Each of The Three had a private secretary, as though they were governors or legislators. El Chapo Guzmán’s secretary was Jaime Valencia Fontes, whose cell was strategically located five doors down from the boss. Fontes managed El Chapo’s diary, which was always full with people wanting to speak to him. He made sure the drug baron had everything he wanted: live music, food, alcohol, women, Christmas decorations for his cell. Fontes was also responsible for the performance and remuneration of the co-opted staff at Puente Grande.

Fontes would use three words to sum up his boss’s character: “Solitary, serious, and calculating.” For enforcement he relied on a group of miscreants inside and outside the jail that the guards came to know as Los Fontaneros, the Plumbers. “If you don’t behave, Los
Fontaneros will sort you out,” Valencia Fontes would say cheerily to anyone that refused to work for El Chapo.
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Any correctional officer unwilling to allow intimate visits at all hours, or to let in drugs, sexual stimulants, or special food, would get beaten up by the Plumbers.

Assaults often occurred in their homes or when out with their families, not just inside the prison. One example of intimidation was the experience of Manuel García Sandoval, who on the night of October 15, 2000, was on dormitory duty in Module 3 when El Chapo summoned him to his cell.

“I want to go for a walk,” the prisoner announced in peremptory tones.

“It’s late, I’m on duty and I can’t allow that outside of hours,” replied the law-abiding guard.

“Fine, no problem,” Guzmán said, with mock humility. “It’s good to know there are guys like you in here. I appreciate the way you do your job.”

Days later, García was brutally assaulted by three thugs. As Juan Pablo de Tavira used to say, “El Chapo never forgives or forgets.”

Joaquín Guzmán was not stupid. At least he didn’t act that way. Violence was not his preferred method for controlling the prison staff. That would provoke collective hostility, and nothing could be worse than having the guards united against him. His first step towards corruption was always seduction. He won the trust of the guards by making them think he was their friend.

In December 1999, Miguel Ángel Leal began to work as a guard in the prison. A colleague, Pedro Rubira, soon took him to see El Chapo.
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“Thank you so much for coming. We’re not going to put any pressure on you here,” El Chapo said to him in a friendly tone, as if he were welcoming him into a club. “Where are you from?”

“From Culiacán,” answered Leal, disconcerted by the drug baron’s attitude.

“What’s your surname? What are your parents’ names?”

Leal nervously muttered a few names.

“I think we must be related,” El Chapo said with a genial smile, as if to put any fears to rest.

Leal continued with his work in peace. He thought the fact he hadn’t asked for money might go down well with El Chapo Guzmán.
It was the beginning of a strange relationship. The guard once told him he was going on holiday, and Guzmán gave him a thousand pesos. On another occasion, Leal said his wife was very ill with a brain tumor, and El Chapo kindly offered to help him with expenses.

In February 2000, Leal was promoted to supervisor, with two or three other guards under his command. The more power he had, the more useful he could be to El Chapo. Then, at the end of that year, he took several weeks off work, only coming back in January 2001. On January 7, El Chapo sent for him. The guard went along with some trepidation; he’d heard that the drug baron didn’t like his people in the prison to miss work, because he needed them on the spot.

“What’s up? Where have you been?” Guzmán gently reproached him. Then he gave him a big New Year hug, completely throwing Leal because that was the last thing he had expected. “Come on in, have something to eat!”

“No, thanks, I already ate. I was off looking after my son. He’s sick with a heart problem, and he’s not getting the treatment he needs through the Social Security. I only came back to hand in my resignation. My sister-in-law has a mini-market in Culiacán, and she’s asked me to run the business for her. She wants to go and live in Tijuana with her youngest daughter.”

El Chapo listened as if Leal were telling him the most important thing in the world.

“In the store I’ll earn twelve thousand a month.”

“You don’t need to quit,” Guzmán told him, breaking his silence. “I’ll help you with the expenses for your son. How much do you need in the meantime?”

“About fifteen hundred pesos.”

“If your boy needs an operation, I’ll pay for it,” said the trafficker magnanimously, as if it were up to him to decide matters of life and death for everyone else. “They’re going to let me out me soon and I need people like you, to provide security—legally, of course!”

Leal was tongue-tied. Whatever he said now, there’d be no backing down.

“I hope everything turns out well. Go see Fontes,” said El Chapo, by way of dismissal.

Leal went to see the “private secretary.”

“Mr. Guzmán sent me about some money,” he said to Valencia Fontes, who went to consult his boss and came back with 2,000 pesos.

Tests showed that Leal’s son suffered from an atrioventricular canal defect, plus dextrocardia. If he wasn’t operated on within six months, the ventricle would not be able to develop normally. On January 13, 2001, with El Chapo aware of this diagnosis, Leal was summoned along with Valencia Fontes and another officer at 10 p.m.

“Soon I shall be free, I’m clean,” Guzmán informed them. “My lawyers have been looking into it and I have no more charges in Mexico, the only case still pending is with the gringos …” El Chapo paused, as if saying to himself that this small inconvenience might not be so easy to overcome.

“When I get out I want to set up a security company that can work legally, so that when I travel they can watch out for me and carry weapons without any problems.”

The drug baron was inviting them to be part of this new firm.

El Chapo’s women

During his detention in Puente Grande, Joaquín Guzmán killed time with sex, alcohol, drugs, volleyball, and push-ups. Like El Güero Palma and El Texas Martínez, he was well supplied with Viagra and other prowess-enhancing products. Given their age, it seems unlikely they would have been prescribed Viagra, unless of course they suffered from some dysfunction. Witnesses among the prison commanders and warders say the obsession with sex was so great that The Three held competitions to see which of them could keep going the longest.
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Prostitutes came and went from Puente Grande unimpeded; prison managers referred to them pejoratively as “las sin rostro,” the faceless females. They would be brought in official cars, wearing blonde wigs. Prisoners received them in the Psychological Care section, in the conjugal visits rooms, or in their own cells. If ever there was a shortage, they would get their hands on female staff or inmates, with the connivance of Warden Beltrán. These women didn’t have much choice. Any who dared to resist the sexual demands of the drug barons had a rough time.

Of all the women El Chapo had at Puente Grande, three stood out: Zulema Yulia, Yves Eréndira, and Diana Patricia. Each learned what a hell it is to be the current favorite of a gangster. Their desperate stories blow apart the myth of the “love-struck drug baron.”

On February 3, 2000, Zulema Yulia Hernández, a young woman just twenty-three years old, was incarcerated in Puente Grande for robbing a security van. Even if she deserved to go to jail, the maximum security facility seemed an excessive punishment. There was no separate wing for women. They were kept in the Observation and Classification Center, where they had neither the appropriate medical services, nor adequate physical protection in the midst of an overwhelmingly male population.

Guzmán’s family visits coincided with those of Zulema. She quickly caught El Chapo’s eye. The drug trafficker’s obsessive nature and the young woman’s vulnerable situation were to shape their dark tale.

Through one of the members of The Sinaloas, known as El Pollo, Guzmán sent “love” letters to Hernández. The almost illiterate drug trafficker dictated these letters to an unidentified scribe, who embellished them with a dose of drama. Of course, writing to a female inmate was one of the thousands of forbidden things that he was allowed to do quite freely. Very soon, Guzmán began to have intimate relations with the young delinquent barely more than half his age. Their meetings took place in the communications area, aided and abetted by female guards and by the prison management.

Hernández got pregnant, and all the indications are that the baby was El Chapo’s.
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She was not allowed conjugal visits, so there was no justification there. The authorities wanted to prevent a scandal over the abuse of women in this male prison. In September 2000, she was forced to have an abortion inside the jail, which was carried out by prison doctor Alfredo Valdés. Afterwards, she tried to commit suicide.
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This level of degeneration, covered up by the Secretariat of the Interior, ruined Zulema’s life. After a few months as El Chapo’s favorite, the vulnerable young woman ended up as a piece of merchandise to be used at will by prison managers and inmates alike. On one occasion she was even sent to El Güero Palma’s cell.
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In May
2001, after Guzmán’s escape, Hernández had another abortion, requiring a blood transfusion. She was seventeen weeks pregnant, so that baby too could have been El Chapo’s.

Several guards recall that, by the end of her time in Puente Grande, Hernández had lost the last shreds of dignity. Through the bars of her cell she would open her legs and display herself. It was perhaps a last act of revolt. They had reduced her to this: a piece of meat available to the highest bidder. When Zulema Hernández finally left prison, her life became a ceaseless search for death. On December 17, 2008, her body was found in the trunk of an abandoned car in the municipality of Ecatapec, State of Mexico. The press reported that the woman’s body had the letter Z inscribed with sharp objects and black paint on the buttocks, back, both breasts, and abdomen.

Diana Patricia was twenty-seven when she was transferred to the maximum security prison in Jalisco on July 10, 1999, accused of murder. There she discovered a whole new meaning for the word purgatory. When she got to Puente Grande, she was the only woman there. The place was already completely controlled by The Three. She was put in a narrow cell, outside which she could move in a radius of eight yards. Nothing could save her. Within a few months, Diana Patricia had begun to waste away of hunger and depression in the prison hospital. She lost fifty-five pounds in six months, and tried to hang herself.

At the end of 1999, Diana Patricia got some female company: Érika Zamora and Virginia Montes arrived at the prison, accused of belonging to an armed movement, the Revolutionary Popular Army (EPR).
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In February 2000, Zulema Hernández arrived.

Diana Patricia was sexually abused by El Chapo and other inmates. A female warder made notes about the gang rape, listing the names of those who took part,
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but nobody took any notice. Nobody, that is, except Guadalupe Morfín, president of the Jalisco Human Rights Commission, who in a private conversation described Joaquín Guzmán as an “animal.” She also tried to speak out but was ignored. The Lord of Puente Grande was untouchable. The day before El Chapo’s escape, Diana Patricia tried to commit suicide again.
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The story of Yves Eréndira Moreno, the cook at Puente Grande, is quite different. A thirty-eight-year-old single mother, she had worked at the prison since 1996 and had just been assigned to Block 3. She was older than Zulema Yulia and Diana Patricia, and not as pretty, but there was something about her that made El Chapo treat her like a person and not an object. While he was sleeping with Zulema, he began to woo Yves Eréndira. He saw her for the first time in May 2000, when she had had to bring him one of his special dishes. He’d liked her immediately, asked her name, and began to inquire about her and her family. In June 2000, Guzmán went over to the grille separating the kitchen from the dining room and tried to strike up a conversation.

“Hasn’t your boss told you about me?”

“No,” answered Moreno, as she collected the last dirty plates from the prisoners’ meal. She felt alarmed by the drug baron’s approach: the rot at Puente Grande had already reached the kitchen. Prisoners with money demanded sexual favors from the kitchen workers, who were made available to them with the agreement of the prison management.