Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (23 page)

Maximum alert

At 10:30 hours, Vizcaíno knocked on the door of Warden Beltrán’s office.

“Joaquín Guzmán is not in his cell,” said the commander, clearly agitated.

“Mobilize all of the staff, including those on breaks. They’re to make a thorough search of all parts of Unit 3,” ordered Beltrán calmly. He didn’t seem surprised by the news.

Then Beltrán himself went over to the Control Center, supposedly to direct the operation and keep abreast of developments. But he never set off the jailbreak alarm.
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It was not until after 1 a.m. on January 20 that Beltrán called Enrique Pérez Rodríguez, the head of the prison service, to tell him the drug baron had disappeared. Pérez told him to keep searching, but they found nothing. At 2 a.m. Beltrán informed the Federal Police in Jalisco what was happening. Twenty minutes later he called the regional military command, and then the local PGR office.
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At the same time commanders Pérez and Vizcaíno gathered all the correctional officers together inside the prison.
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Beltrán phoned his chief again at about 3 a.m. to tell him El Chapo still hadn’t been found. It was only then that Pérez Rodríguez
attempted to inform his own superior, Under Secretary Tello Peón. He dialed his cell, his office, his home, without success. Eventually he got hold of him on his wife’s phone. Tello merely responded that he would inform the secretary of public security, Alejandro Gertz, and get back to him in half an hour. At this, Pérez told Beltrán also to call back in half an hour. Thirty minutes later the prison warden complied, reporting that El Chapo still hadn’t appeared and that he’d informed all the relevant authorities of this fact. Precious time was passing, and nobody was doing anything.

Under Secretary Jorge Tello took no initiative; he was acting as if he didn’t care, or maybe as if he was waiting for something. At 4 a.m. the head of the prison service called him again. This time Tello instructed Pérez to meet him at the PJF hangar at Mexico City airport in an hour and a half, so they could travel to Puente Grande. At the airport, Tello, Pérez, Nicolás Suárez, Humberto Martínez, Octavio Campos, and two other men from the Federal Preventive Police (PFP) whose names are not recorded, boarded a plane belonging to the PFP.

Tello arrived at the prison at 7 a.m. on January 20. The story had begun to be reported on radio and TV, and President Fox was soon informed by his spokesperson, Marta Sahagún. A few minutes later, Secretary of Public Security Alejandro Gertz filled them in further, telling the president that according to Tello, Guzmán had escaped in a laundry cart through the garbage area. However, presidential advisers familiar with the high-security prison systems told Fox that this was impossible, because of the sensors.

Gertz gave orders for the Federal Police to take over perimeter security at Puente Grande. Meanwhile Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha had sent the new head of the PJF, Genaro García Luna, and the director of UEDO (the government’s specialized organized crime unit), José Larrieta, to Jalisco, along with two elite detachments to begin hunting for Guzmán between Jalisco state and the northern border. In a press conference that same day, Tello Peón explained that initial investigations showed that the fugitive “must have had help from prison administrators, which represents a betrayal of the institution. This is a criminal conspiracy,” he charged cynically, in spite of all that he had done himself to aid the drug baron’s flight.

“There are clear indications of who may have had a hand in springing the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel,” he added.
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Obviously, he didn’t include himself on the list.

That same day the warden of Puente Grande, Leonardo Beltrán, and thirty-three prison officers who were on duty at the time, were placed under provisional arrest on suspicion of abetting the drug baron’s escape. Jaime Fernández López was appointed acting warden. All the tapes of Tello’s visit to the jail, right up to the operation on January 20, were wiped.
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However, in spite of the obstacles, as the sworn statements piled up, the truth began to emerge.

At 11 a.m on February 9, 2001, Commander Antonio Aguilar Garzón made a statement to the UEDO public prosecutors about what he had witnessed at Puente Grande: it was a tale of complicity, corruption, and concealment, from Under Secretary of Public Security Tello on down, since early 1999. The web of deceit involved Miguel Ángel Yunes, head of the prison service from April 1999 to April 2000, his deputy and successor Enrique Pérez, and the warden of Puente Grande, Leonardo Beltrán. Aguilar also told how he had been relieved of his post at the prison after revealing how it was controlled by El Chapo Guzmán and his friends.

Right from January 20, Guadalupe Morfín, the Jalisco human rights commissioner, had bravely offered to give testimony. “I wish to denounce acts which may constitute a crime,” her statement began. Morfín related how the the national human rights commission headed by José Luis Soberanes had tried to shelve the complaints of corruption and harassment of employees at Puente Grande. She not only confirmed that Enrique Pérez and Leonardo Beltrán were aware of the irregularities; she also denounced the strange behavior of Jorge Tello when it came to investigating the abuses in the jail. On February 2, Morfín presented a series of documents proving her points. However, neither her accusations nor her documentation had any effect. The investigations were exclusively targeted at the corruption lower down, that of Warden Beltrán and the prison guards who were complicit; there was no probe into those responsible for the corruption at the top, those with the power to prevent or permit El Chapo’s escape. Thus the investigations by the PGR and
the PJF quickly turned into a farce. One explanation is that the new head of the PJF, Genaro García Luna, was one of Tello’s most loyal subordinates, who had worked with him since 1989.

García Luna’s servile nature and personal loyalty to his bosses, rather than to any institution, made him just the right man to lead the investigation into Guzmán’s escape. He put one of his own most faithful subordinates in charge of the enquiries; Edgar Millán was so obliging that he never produced a report into what really happened at Puente Grande. For the best part of a month, Jorge Tello and Enrique Pérez could sleep in peace. Nobody troubled them and nobody questioned them. They were part of the group doing the investigating, not that being investigated. It was only after Antonio Aguilar appeared before public prosecutors that they were called on to testify. Still, it was only a formality; they appeared as witnesses, not as suspects.

Enrique Pérez Rodríguez made his statement on February 11, 2001. Speaking of the visit to Puente Grande on January 19, 2001, Pérez said that the prison warden “never mentioned any signs, suspicions, or rumors of a possible prisoner escape, so we had no prior knowledge of what would happen.” It was a barefaced lie. He was never confronted with the five clear and decisive statements implicating him, made by Antonio Aguilar, Felipe Leaños, Claudio Ríos, Salvador Moreno, and Guadalupe Morfín.

Jorge Tello Peón took the stand on the afternoon of February 12, 2001. It was twenty-four days since the escape. If his lies had been bricks, you could have built a wall with them. The under secretary stated that in the meetings with the representatives of the human rights commission, no irregularities had been detected: “Director General Pérez Rodríguez informed us that some of the complaints made proved to be false, and that when the representatives of the CNDH interviewed the complainants in the presence of the prison authorities, nothing came up in their view that amounted to any kind of infraction.” Tello further claimed that during the visit he had undertaken on orders from Secretary Gertz, all he noticed was “clear signs of disorder resulting from inadequate cleaning and maintenance.” Thus he had merely ordered Guzmán, Palma, and Martínez to be relocated, because up until then he did not have any “concrete
information about a possible escape.” It was obvious that Tello was lying, and they were letting him lie. In the absence of questions, such testimonies became demented monologues. The enquiries carried out by the Fox administration were a joke.

Tello Peón would not be troubled again by the PGR. At the end of February 2001, he resigned as under secretary of public security, for “personal reasons.” His resignation was news for a couple of days, then it was forgotten. The following month he became a top executive in Cemex, the Mexican cement company that is one of the biggest in the world.

Pérez Rodríguez also resigned, four weeks later. Neither of these two officials was held responsible for El Chapo Guzmán’s escape from prison, in spite of all the testimony incriminating them. The full weight of the law fell on the prison warden, Leonardo Beltrán Santana, the assistant warden, Luis Francisco Fernández Ruiz, and sixty-one lesser members of the prison staff who had been in detention since January 20, 2001. Three of these were released almost immediately for lack of evidence, while fifty-nine of them were charged. El Güero Palma and El Texas Martínez were also indicted for bribery, organized crime, and helping a prisoner to escape. Antonio Aguilar’s honesty and bravery were rewarded by sending him to the Federal Center for Psychosocial Rehabilitation, in June 2001.

The El Chito Show

On September 5, 2001, Francisco Javier Camberos, El Chito, arrived unexpectedly in a lawyer’s office to say that he feared for his life, and wanted to hand himself in. El Chapo’s fixer knew rather too much about the escape, and many people had an interest in his silence. The affair was getting tense, since the guards’ testimonies contradicted the official version. In fact, it was Guzmán Loera who had told him to go to the law and tell the story of the laundry cart.

Obedient to his script, El Chito stammered that he alone had achieved the springing of the Sinaloa boss.
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“Nobody helped me, I have sole responsibility for the little favor I did him,” was how he confessed his guilt to a judge at the Reclusorio Oriente prison—in the presence of the fifty-nine former guards and employees of the
prison, his co-defendants in this trial, as well as a score of defense attorneys. The performance lasted more than four hours.

“I, too, am a Mexican, and I don’t think it’s fair for the authorities in this country to do whatever they want. Mr. Guzmán said to me that even though he’d done his time, they still wanted to drag him away to the States!” Camberos conveyed the pathos of this, then added: “There was no plan, I just suddenly thought of it.”

El Chito Camberos sacrificed himself, but he saved the current and former public security chiefs who were beginning to fret at the turn the case was taking. He produced a giant sketch of the Puente Grande layout, in order to illustrate how he had pushed the cart with El Chapo inside through seven security checkpoints until the exit booth, which they cleared at 7:28 p.m. By the end of his exhausting performance, El Chito hadn’t lost his sense of humor:

“I’ve had enough, bring me a laundry cart so I can get out of here, no, wait, a trailer truck so we can all get out!” he said, to laughter in the court.

Many were relieved by his statement. Although it was a poor lie, well told, the custodians of Mexican justice took it at face value. Yet there is not a shred of evidence for it. On the contrary, there is the solid fact that El Chapo was seen inside the penitentiary after his man left with the cart.

Today, El Chito is serving out twenty-five years in the Reclusorio Oriente. Apparently Guzmán only sent him maintenance money for the first five. If he knows how El Chapo really escaped, his mind is now too drug-sodden to recall it.

Impunity

In spite of the evidence against them, in January 2002 a federal court acquitted drug traffickers El Güero Palma and El Texas Martínez of helping in the escape of Joaquín Guzmán. The court adduced “lack of evidence,” and also overturned their conviction for organized crime.
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In April that same year, the story of Guzmán’s escape became the center of conversation once again when the Fourth District Judge, José Mario Machorro, called on Pérez Rodríguez and Tello Peón to testify as defense witnesses for some of the prison guards on
trial. Neither attended. Pérez was fined, while the former under secretary of public security could never be located in time to notify him of the summons. Nonetheless, the judge persisted.

Tello finally showed up to testify for a second time on April 29, 2002. Once again, he lied to evade responsibility. In front of the judge, Tello declared that Cisen—the intelligence service he had directed in the two years before the escape, precisely the period in which the drug barons took control of the jail—had not monitored the Puente Grande prison.
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This was false. There are dozens of statements by prison guards and administrators in the files on the escape, that even identify the Cisen officers by name—Carlos Arias is one of them. They say quite clearly that one of the tasks of the Cisen officers was to record the prisoners’ conversations, and that their offices were located on Levels B and C of the prison.

Tello declared that only the Intelligence Coordination of the PFP—then headed by García Luna—carried out surveillance in the prison, but that it never got wind of the escape.
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Tello knew that the same García Luna, his ever loyal subordinate, was one of those in charge of the investigation, and that there was no way he would be investigating himself.

Over the course of eighteen questions, the examination covered much of the same ground as the first time. Why had he ordered the “immediate” reassignment of the three felons’ cells on January 19? Because some guards had complained of corruption, and an inspection had been conducted jointly with the CNDH, and the guards had retracted their accusations (though of course those guards had taken their concerns to the Jalisco ombudsman, Morfín). He thought that rehousing the drug traffickers would avoid trouble. Before the court, he repeated that no “concrete information” about any escape had come to light at that moment.