Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (27 page)

At the same time as Arturo Beltrán Leyva was supporting Amado Carrillo Fuentes, with the latter’s permission he was also supporting El Azul—his sister’s father-in-law—his cousin El Chapo, and Ismael El Mayo Zambada, thereby strengthening his position in the criminal organization. The figure of El Barbas took on mythical proportions. In 2009, several State Department reports blamed him for the growing violence in Mexico. They said his organization was responsible for “kidnapping, torture, murder, and other crimes against men, women, and children in Mexico.”
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This inherently violent man reaped the fruits of his own dark legend. The armed gangs under El Barbas were considered the most ruthless and brutal of them all. They have been blamed for the killing of numerous
public officials in recent years.
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In the United States they never forgave him for threatening to kill officers of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2008. Those who have had dealings with him say that for him the word “loyalty” is written in blood, and any infringement must be paid in the same currency.

El H

Héctor Beltrán Leyva, El H, El Ingeniero (the Engineer), or El Elegante, was born in 1966. He is married to Clara Elena Laborín. He was his elder brother’s right-hand man. They did not use names or aliases with each other, it was always “carnal,” or “bro.” Héctor handled PR: Arturo gave him the task of developing links with senior public officials in both the police and civil administration. It was a task he was very good at.

His smooth appearance, polished manners, and good taste in clothes allowed him to pose easily as a businessman. In this guise he organized events like that at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Acapulco in 1999. Héctor Beltrán was always attentive to any politicians doing well in electoral campaigns in the states where his brother operated. His job was to get close to them and fund their campaigning activities, so that when they won, the gang would benefit.
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Héctor would often arrive at the Hotel Aristos in the Zona Rosa tourist area of Mexico City, discreetly flanked by his entourage. He could also count on his wife, Clara Laborín, for cover. She was the pretty face of El H. She’d been a contestant in the Miss Sonora beauty contest in 1993–94, the kind of event that often seemed like a marriage bureau for young beauties and drug traffickers.

Laborín was fascinated with the world of show business, and at the beauty contest she’d met Guillermo Ocaña, the well-known artistes’ agent.
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Come what may, she was determined to break into that world. So with her husband she set up a company called Rotceh
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Noticias y Espectáculos, and invited Ocaña to work with them. He accepted. It’s not clear exactly when the partnership began. Ocaña told public prosecutors it was in 1997.
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What is certain is that by 1999, Laborín, Beltrán, and Ocaña had been the object of complaints made by company employees to the Federal District Arbitration and
Conciliation Board.
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It seems things were not going well at the company. At the same time, the services Ocaña supplied for the drug baron were multiplying.

Better known as Ocañita, he had the ability to combine his interests in the world of organized crime with those in show business, the media, and Mexico’s most select social circles. He was a real
insider
. In the 1990s he represented many of the most popular artists of the day, from Juan Gabriel to Tania Libertad and Gloria Trevi. On March 16, 2003, he coordinated a mass gathering in Mexico City’s Zócalo square for Salma Hayek, who had just been nominated for an Oscar as Best Actress. Her film,
Frida
, was projected for free to 5,000 people.

In spite of his drug trafficking activities, he never let up on his intense social life, because the one depended on the other. He rubbed shoulders at social events with politicians like the then governor of the State of Mexico (now president of the Republic), Enrique Peña Nieto, or even the PRD politician Dolores Padierna. Ocaña’s contribution to the drug trade was not limited to satisfying the whims of Mrs. Héctor Beltrán Leyva; he would also be accused of laundering assets for the Pacific organization.

Eventually, the showman got careless. He relied too much on the protection the Fox administration had been providing to the criminal organization led by Joaquín Guzmán ever since they’d got him out of Puente Grande. On March 6, 2005, police arrested two men at the airport in Barcelona, Spain—José Arturo Ponce and his brother, Héctor Gerardo. They were about to board a jet to Los Angeles. Nothing unusual about that; except they were also trying to take with them $5.5 million belonging to the Beltrán Leyvas and the Colombian Valle del Norte Cartel, with which the Sinaloans had been working for over a decade.

On April 5, 2005, the Spanish Interior Ministry issued a statement saying that Ocaña was the leader of the ring the Ponce brothers belonged to, and “responsible for the illegal transfer of money from Spain to Mexican territory.” José Arturo Ponce and his brother had fled back to Mexico; Ocaña didn’t bat an eyelid. In December that year, the PGR mounted a raid in the Tecamachalco area of the State of Mexico, acting on a tip-off from the DEA about a group of Colombians, aided by Mexicans, involved in transporting cocaine and
money laundering. Eight suspected traffickers were arrested. One was the illustrious Ocañita, who was admitted to the Oriente prison in the Federal District in January 2006. The charges were not trivial: organized crime, handling illegally obtained resources, and felonies against public health.
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As long as the Beltrán Leyva brothers were part of Guzmán’s organization, Ocaña could not be disturbed, whatever the evidence against him. He was soon released from prison, even though the Spanish authorities had blacklisted his name through Interpol. The Mexican office of Interpol came under Genaro García Luna, the head of the Federal Investigations Agency (AFI, formerly called the Federal Judicial Police, PJF). So Guillermo Ocaña continued to live his life of King Midas. One party—for which he earned the description “host of the decade”—was inspired by the
Thousand and One Nights
. He hired a camel and an elephant to greet the guests, and the only drink available was champagne.

In June 2009, Ocaña’s accomplice, José Arturo Ponce, was extradited to Spain. Guillermo Ocaña’s good fortune was about to run out. In April 2010, in the midst of the federal government’s war against the Beltrán Leyva clan, the authorities decided to arrest him. Strangely, the accusations against him were exactly the same as they had been the first time he was arrested. Mrs. Héctor Beltrán was deprived of her best contact for living in a soap opera, but her political connections held firm, and her own siblings did extremely well.

Héctor was regarded as the second-in-command of the family’s criminal business, responsible for planning and running the trafficking and financial operations in Mexico City. Now he is top dog.

Since 2004 he has been accused in the District of Columbia Federal Court and the New York Eastern District Court of smuggling tons of cocaine and marijuana into the United States.
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El Mochomo

Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, El Mochomo, is the youngest of the brothers.
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He is married to Patricia Guzmán, with whom he has two children: Karmina and Alfredo. Patricia is a cousin of El Chapo, her father Ernesto being half-brother to El Chapo’s father, Emilio.
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El Mochomo had an iron grip on several units of armed followers, and is the only one of the Beltrán Leyva brothers to have developed a relationship with the younger generation of traffickers, in particular with Vicente Zambada, El Mayo’s favorite son. By the age of twenty-five his brothers were already giving him important tasks, like taking charge of relations with the Colombian drug baron, El Profe. Alfredo looked after the shipments of cocaine to Monterrey, from where he organized passage over the border into the United States. El Mochomo had at least three accounts at Banamex, the bank that had been implicated in cases of trafficking and money laundering for Amado Carrillo Fuentes and his group, to which the Beltrán Leyva brothers had of course belonged. He was arrested on January 21, 2008, in Culiacán.

The Beltrán Leyvas’s workforce

Arturo Beltrán Leyva, El Barbas, had an efficient team working with him for Carrillo Fuentes. It included Alcides Magaña, El Metro, Albino Quintero; Sergio Fierro Chávez, José Javier Bargueño Urías, and others amounting to a “dream team” of Narcoland. In the name of El Señor de los Cielos, Arturo had set up a broad protection network, both within the federal government and among the local authorities from Baja California to Veracruz. The chain of corruption and bribery stretched from members of the Judicial Police to the top echelons of Sedena.
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Since 1997 El Barbas had some of the Mexico City airport police in his pocket, a group called Los Pachangos, useful for shepherding cocaine through the terminal. Any luggage they were warned contained drugs from Colombia was put on a separate conveyor by co-opted baggage handlers and taken to the airport branch of the PGR, where the Pachangos collected it for delivery to El Barbas’s men outside. Each operation was paid something between $150,000 and $220,000.

As for Magaña, El Metro, around 1993 he was holding down two theoretically incompatible jobs: head of the anti-narcotic squad at the PJF, and chief bodyguard for Carrillo Fuentes. El Metro grabbed headlines when he was detained in November 1993, after defending
Carrillo Fuentes, quietly dining in the capital with his wife, from hit men sent by the Arrellano Félix gang.
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However, the judge quickly let him go “for lack of evidence,” and though he lost his police badge, he continued to serve Carrillo Fuentes.

Albino Quintero, El Beto, was a compadre of Arturo Beltrán Leyva, and very effective along the Atlantic coast. Other valuable operators were Humberto and Jesús Loya Pérez. Humberto was adept at buying up police commanders. Through a civilian named Fernando Brigas, Humberto also made the arrangements with military authorities involved in protecting the cartel. The brothers recruited excellent men for El Barbas, such as Bargueño Urías and his boss Sergio Fierro Chávez; the latter was a well-connected cocaine smuggler with a base in Colombia. It was a delicate negotiation, since Fierro had long ago fallen out badly with El Chapo Guzmán, no one knew why. The Loya brothers spoke to Guzmán in jail, and got him to pardon the offense. Thus Fierro was cleared to work with the Beltrán Leyvas, recalled Bargueño in declarations made in 2000 and 2005. It was a fruitful relationship all round.

The governor and the secret airstrip

At the beginning of 1995, Fierro Chávez was informed by his PGR contact that he could no longer conduct business in that state, because the territory now belonged to the Arellano Félix family. Fierro decided not to plunge the region into a blood bath. Instead he ordered an airstrip to be built in Guaymas, Sonora, where he got protection from the Federal Judicial Police chief, Rodolfo García Gaxiola, known as El Chipilón.
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The “secret” airstrip, if you can call it that, was to be a massive one and a half miles long by seventy-six yards wide. The runway had just been finished when Commander García Gaxiola announced that the Mexican army had “discovered” the immense construction and destroyed it, supposedly because it lay on an existing flight path. The project was abandoned. It is curious that it was the army and not the Sonora state authorities that destroyed the landing strip. Could that be because Commander García had a direct relationship with the then state governor, now an illustrious senator for the PRI,
Manlio Fabio Beltrones, who had hoped to win his party’s nomination for the 2012 presidential elections?

García Gaxiola was regarded as very close to Governor Beltrones and to his brother Alcides, who was director of Tijuana airport.
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Just how close was seen when they took charge of the initial enquiries into the murder of Luis Donaldo Colosio in 1994.
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García Gaxiola was the Federal Police commander in Tijuana when Beltrones suggested to President Salinas that he, Beltrones, travel to the border city to oversee the investigation into the assassination of their presidential candidate.
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Federal prosecutors would later say that “this phase of the Federal Police investigation, in particular, was marred by the falsification of evidence, the manipulation of witness statements, and other irregularities.” One such irregularity was when Commander García and Governor Beltrones took the main suspect, Mario Aburto, to a house near the PJF offices and questioned him on their own account for hours. It has often been suggested that this was when the true story of the assassination got twisted. Soon after that, García was removed from Tijuana and sent to Sonora state as head of the PJF there, and as deputy representative of the PGR.

Manlio Beltrones has been accused of ties to drug trafficking more than once. Even former president Vicente Fox has said that the DEA had a file on Beltrones’s involvement with drug smuggling. Beltrones denied it, as he always has, and Fox himself was hardly in a position to point the finger. Soon after he was posted to Sonora, General Sergio Aponte identified Rodolfo García Gaxiola as one of the PJF commanders who protected the traffickers of the Pacific organization.
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Either way, Sergio Fierro found a new base for his operations in Sonora, in the port city of Guaymas, where he enjoyed the best possible facilities without any interference from the Army.