Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (22 page)

Farewell

If the Jalisco human rights commissioner, Guadalupe Morfín, still had any doubts about the complicity of senior government figures in the corruption at Puente Grande, these were finally dispelled on January 19, 2001.

The resounding defeat suffered by Antonio Aguilar had left his right-hand man and Morfín’s original informant, Felipe Leaños, perilously exposed. On November 7, 2000, he visited Morfín again, this time accompanied by a guard named Claudio Ríos, to denounce the beating of two colleagues by prison staff who were still on the “payroll.” Leaños had reason to fear for his life.

On January 16, 2001, Lupita Morfín—as her friends call her—tried to get hold of the national human rights commissioner, José Luis Soberanes, to complain about his decision to shelve the complaint Leaños had made a year before. The only action taken had been for Enrique Pérez and Leonardo Beltrán to move Leaños to work in another part of the prison, where he was soon the target of renewed harassment. Soberanes wasn’t in his office; Morfín left a message; the ombudsman never returned her call.

The next day, prison officers Claudio Ríos and Salvador Moreno requested an urgent meeting with Morfín. When she received them they were almost in tears. They couldn’t take any more. On top of the pressure from The Three, The Plumbers, and The Sinaloas, now it seemed members of the human rights commission had become another co-opted group. The guards related how, on January 15, two representatives of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) had arrived in Guadalajara. They had called Claudio Ríos and asked him to come to their hotel with the other guards who had complained about the harassment and corruption in Puente Grande. “At last!” Ríos must have thought. But in fact the visitors had no intention of investigating the matter: they just wanted the guards to drop their
complaint. The collusion between these representatives of Soberanes’s commission and the corrupt prison officials was clear. As a result, only three correctional officers maintained their complaint to the CNDH: Felipe Leaños, Claudio Ríos, and Salvador Moreno.

The following evening, January 16, all three were summoned to Warden Beltrán’s office. One by one, they were called in by the CNDH representatives to confront the prison authorities they had denounced. The aim was obviously to intimidate them, and get them to retract their accusations about who really controlled the prison. The ever cynical director general of the prison service, Enrique Pérez, was also present at this illegal confrontation.

On the morning of January 17, in Morfín’s office, what most worried Ríos and Moreno was that since then their fellow guard Leaños hadn’t answered his phone. By now, they told her, the whole prison knew about their complaints, because the CHDH representatives had shown no discretion at all. Morfín immediately called the secretary of public security, Alejandro Gertz. He wasn’t there, so she left a message: they needed to take immediate action to ensure the whistle-blowers’ safety. She also phoned Soberanes again, to no avail. She left another message.

Given the seriousness of the situation, on January 18 Morfín called the secretary of the Interior, Santiago Creel. She couldn’t get through to him, either. Later she did manage to speak to the special ambassador for human rights and democracy at the Secretariat for Foreign Affairs, Marieclaire Acosta, who suggested she talk to the president’s national security adviser, Adolfo Aguilar Zínser—the only one who responded at all.

On the morning of January 19, under secretary Jorge Tello phoned Morfín, to say that he was in Guadalajara to investigate the irregularities at the federal jail. Two years after he was first fully apprised of the abuse and corruption, Tello had developed a plan, and he would use Lupita Morfín’s complaint to help him carry it out.

“I’m now number two at public security, and Secretary Gertz has sent me to investigate what you told him [on voice mail]. Can we get together?”

“Yes,” she answered immediately.

“I’m on my way to the prison,” said Tello.

“I think you’d better come back and speak to me first,” cautioned Morfín.

“I’m already at El Salto.”

“Never mind, just turn around.”

Morfín then heard Tello ask someone about directions.

“Excuse me?” said Morfín, thinking he was talking to her.

“No, I’m asking the prison warden, who’s right here with me.”

“You mean you’re coming here with Leonardo Beltrán?” asked Morfín, surprised and outraged.

“Yes, but relax, he won’t come in, he’ll wait outside.”

“You are putting my safety at risk, I have nothing to tell you, and I won’t see you!” shouted Morfín, and hung up.

Guadalupe Morfín couldn’t understand what was happening. She found it hard to credit that everything Leonardo Beltrán had done over the past two years at Puente Grande had been with the clear knowledge and approval, not only of Enrique Pérez, but also of Jorge Tello, the overall boss of both of them. She tried to contact the secretary, Alejandro Gertz, to express her surprise at the way his team were behaving. It seemed obvious to her that Tello should not go to her office with Beltrán. It would immediately give her away as a source of information, and further endanger the guards who had placed their trust in her.

That day was unfolding strangely at Puente Grande. From very early, the staff who monitored the video cameras were diverted from their duties and given cleaning chores outside the Control Center.
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The door to the corridor that led to El Chapo’s cell was covered with a sheet of plywood, at the top of which were small openings so you could see out. It was the first time in five years that the drug baron had taken such a liberty.
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The plywood was removed at 11 a.m. by one of Guzmán’s goons, and put back an hour later, remaining there until the evening.

El Chapo had a busy day ahead of him. First he played a game of volleyball, his favourite sport. After that he began to receive visits in his cell, almost non-stop, one after another, well into the afternoon. The first audience was at 11:15 with El Güero Palma and El Texas. It lasted twenty minutes. At midday, El Chapo spent fifteen minutes with Commander Pérez Díaz, who he saw twice again in the course
of the day. He also had two brief meetings with Commander Navarro, of the perimeter guard. Other visitors included commanders Vizcaíno and Ochoa, and even the prison doctor, Alfredo Valdez, the same one who had carried out a forced abortion on Zulema Hernández. There were so many people who wanted to say goodbye that at 2 p.m. Guzmán didn’t go to the canteen for lunch: the food on tray number 516 remained untouched.
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Jorge Tello arrived at Puente Grande after midday, on a lightning visit to the maximum security prison which he was ultimately responsible for. With him were the head of the prison service, Enrique Pérez, and two top Federal Police officials, Humberto Martínez and Nicolás Suárez. As soon as Tello arrived, Valencia Fontes—as if reminding his boss of an appointment—handed El Chapo a card with the names of all the visitors written on it.
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El Chapo was breathing calmly; he seemed quite unruffled.

During his visit, Tello dropped into the Control Center, where everything that went on in the prison was supposedly filmed. As he left that room packed with TV monitors, the under secretary was overheard to murmur something strange: “Today they are not leaving the prison.”
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Ostensibly, Tello had come to investigate the accusations of corruption made by the guards. However, the under secretary didn’t even bother to meet them in the total of forty-one minutes he spent at the prison.
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The only thing he did was order that El Chapo, El Güero and El Texas should be moved to the prison’s Observation Center. Before he left, Tello had a brief meeting with Pérez, Suárez, Martínez, and the prison warden, Beltrán. In spite of the allegations of corruption in the prison, they agreed to put off until the following week an examination of technical issues at the Control Center and possible changes in personnel. This gave Joaquín Guzmán a window for leaving the prison in the following hours.

No, Tello had not come to look into irregularities, but to coordinate a quite different plan. In 1993, from his office in the Secretariat of Defense, he had helped to lock up El Chapo Guzmán. Now, eight years later, he was going to unlock the door. Immediately after he left, fifteen people from internal security were seen inside the staff dormitory—wearing not their regulation blue uniforms, but the
black ones used by external, perimeter security; while those who really were from external security were also deployed inside the prison, still in their black kit.
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The same color as the clothes that El Chapo put on before leaving the prison. At 4 p.m., four Federal Police personnel were seen on the roof of the prison clinic and communications area.
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Something was afoot.

Meanwhile, El Chito Camberos was engaged in his last outside job for El Chapo. He called his friends José de Jesús Briseño and Ramón Muñoz, asking them to drive him to Plaza del Sol, a Guadalajara mall, in the gray Golf he’d recently bought on Guzmán’s orders.
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El Chito, clutching a small valise, seemed unusually nervous and taciturn; all he said was he had to collect some air tickets to the capital, plus a car from El Chapo’s son César, a business administration student. At around 4 p.m. they arrived at the mall and parked outside a pizza house. Before long they saw a grey Cutlass approach.

“There’s César, in the armored car. Keep your phone turned on, and if you don’t hear from me, leave the Golf in my mom’s garage or in yours,” said El Chito to Briseño, as he got out and went over to talk to his boss’s eldest, a stocky young man with streaked hair and dark glasses. Then El Chito drove off, reaching Puente Grande around 7 p.m.—the time when Guzmán went to bid farewell to his old accomplice and compadre, Héctor Palma, in the latter’s cell. They conferred for barely five minutes, before strolling together down the corridor to the exit of Unit 4. “Take care, compadrito,” Palma said.
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They would not see each other again.

El Chapo did not escape in a laundry cart

About half an hour later, at 7:30 p.m., Guzmán was seen on Level C of Unit 3, talking to fellow inmates Valencia Fontes and Vázquez Méndez and two guards, Antonio Díaz and Victor Godoy. El Chito, was also there. A few laundry carts stood nearby. El Chapo asked his fixer to put blankets and food in one cart, and more blankets and some religious paintings done by a fellow prisoner in another. Then El Chito and Godoy began pushing them towards the kitchen area. A third cart was pushed by Valencia Fontes, El Chapo’s “private secretary.”
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At 8 o’clock, El Chito pushed one of the carts out of Unit 3 and apparently passed security checkpoints V7, V6, V4, V2, and V1 until he got to the vehicle checkpoint. The guards who saw him pass later declared to public prosecutors that the cart he was pushing must have been pretty heavy, because of the effort he was making, but they never said that he looked nervous or in a hurry.
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At 8:15, guard Miguel Ángel Leal Amador waved El Chito out through the main gate, trundling his laundry cart covered in blankets. The checkpoints at Puente Grande have sophisticated heat and movement sensors, capable of detecting a living creature the size of a cat. If the cart had indeed been carrying Joaquín Guzmán, the alarms would necessarily have gone off.
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It was quite common, albeit against the rules, for The Three’s “trash” to be taken out of the prison in a laundry cart whenever an inspection was due. Usually these were things they weren’t allowed to have, like microwave ovens, clothes, telephones and so on. The items were then handed to intermediaries sent by the prisoners.
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In the staff car park, El Chito abandoned the laundry cart once he had passed the wire fencing.
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He had taken El Chapo’s household items, but not the man himself. At 8:40, the guard in charge of the prison’s mail, Jesús Cortés Ortiz, was ordered to bring back the laundry cart that had been left out by the guard post. There were only a few dirty blankets inside.
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Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán did not leave Puente Grande with El Chito. Nor did he leave in a laundry cart. Guzmán was seen inside the prison after his fixer had driven off. This is clear from the hundreds of written witness statements contained in Case 16/2001-III, dealing with the escape.
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In these legal proceedings, the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) under the Fox government states that El Chito left the Puente Grande car park at 8:40 p.m., and that El Chapo left with him, thanks to the supposed trick with the laundry cart. However, the PGR also asserts that El Chapo escaped from the prison at 9:30.
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Clearly, both things cannot be true.

What really happened that night is that at 9:30 p.m., El Chapo, Valencia Fontes, and Vázquez Muñoz walked down the corridor on level 1B. Vázquez was carrying a mattress folded in half, and a white sheet like those on prisoners’ beds. The guard Antonio Díaz was
intrigued by their behaviour, and discreetly followed them. All three entered the medical cubicle where Dr Velázquez usually saw patients; access to this area, next to the prison uniform storeroom and close to the exit, was prohibited for inmates.
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They left the third laundry cart outside the door.

A few seconds later, Valencia and Vázquez came out again; Guzmán was not with them. Díaz slipped into the security cabin and from there observed how El Chapo’s two companions stood guard outside the medical area, as if to prevent anyone from entering. When he left the cabin at the end of his shift, at 9:55 p.m., they were still there. At almost the same time, Commander Vizcaíno and his two companions were heading to dormitory A to carry out their orders to move El Chapo Guzmán to the Observation Center. He was not in his cell, and nobody thought of looking for him in the medical area.