Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (31 page)

The government of Felipe Calderón identified at least thirty-two properties belonging to Esparragoza, in at least seven states, although there is no indication that it has raided any of them. Since 1998 there have been three arrest warrants out for him, for drug trafficking and organized crime, but nobody seems to be keen on using them. One of these is for extradition to the United States. The gringos have put the usual price of $5 million on his head. Some people think El Azul could be the big winner from the war between drug traffickers, and that his best moment may be yet to come.

The Viceroy

Vicente, the second son of Don Vicente Carrillo and Aurora Fuentes, was used to being overshadowed; he’d never been a natural leader, like his brother Amado. He was born in 1962 in Guamuchilito, Sinaloa. His parents had moved there from Chihuahua. Don Vicente was taken on by La Primavera sugar mill, never imagining his children would wind up selling a different kind of white product. The couple had seven children, four boys and three girls.
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Their favorites were the eldest, Amado, and the youngest, Rodolfo, who was known as El Niño de Oro, the Golden Boy.

Vicente was sandwiched in between. He wasn’t as good-looking as Amado, nor did he have the charm that meant things always came so easily to his brother. He was always second-best, always just the kid brother of El Señor de los Cielos. His character was weak. Of all the partners in The Federation, he is the only one the DEA records as being addicted to drugs. They also believe he may have undergone plastic surgery.

After Amado disappeared from the scene, and thanks to El Azul’s always timely intervention, Vicente, El Viceroy, took over as head of the powerful Juárez Cartel. The Beltrán Leyva brothers accepted his leadership, and continued to collaborate. But El Viceroy’s reign was unsatisfactory. The empire built by his brother drained away through his fingers like water. Nonetheless, El Viceroy managed to hang on to one of the most important drug territories in Mexico, on the invaluable border with the United States. Thanks to the Beltrán Leyvas, he also kept the vital contacts in Colombia who supplied him with cocaine, and so he could ensure that his patch remained highly productive.

At least until July 2009, the Juárez–El Paso corridor was one of the three main trafficking routes across the northern frontier. Many tons of cocaine made their way there from the Norte del Valle Cartel, which had taken over what was left of the Medellín Cartel and the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). El Viceroy also began charging other cartels for the right to use “his” border crossing.
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In a case filed in the New York District Court, it is estimated that between July 2, 2000, and December 1, 2005, Vicente Carrillo
Fuentes obtained more than $10 million in annual gross receipts for the “manufacture, importation, and distribution of cocaine.” On July 24, 2009, the court announced that, in connection with the charges against him, it would seek to confiscate $2 billion from Vicente Carrillo, which gives some idea of the size of his fortune.

The murder of Rodolfo Carrillo Fuentes

In late 2004, Doña Aurora begged her son Vicente to break off relations with El Chapo Guzmán. And there’s not much you can refuse your mother. On September 11 of that year, her Golden Boy Rodolfo and his wife, Giovana Quevedo Gastélum, along with their two children, were leaving a cinema in Culiacán. On the way to their car, they were attacked by a group of gunmen. The shooting went on for fifteen minutes—an eternity. The little ones survived. Now they are in the care of their Aunt Celia, Giovana’s sister, who married Vicente Carrillo Leyva, Amado’s son—as if to keep the tragic family saga going.

The execution was blamed on El Chapo, at least by Vicente. Nonetheless, Sinaloa Cartel insiders say the order came from El Mayo. It seems Rodolfo wasn’t sticking to The Federation’s ground rules, and a line had to be drawn. The murder would have repercussions that can still be measured in the number of bullets fired in the name of El Niño de Oro.

“A Funeral Fit for a Prince,” is how they described it in the headlines the next day. In a double coffin with gold fittings, beneath a picture of the bleeding Christ, Rodolfo and his wife were buried in the grounds of the Santa Aurora ranch in Guamuchilito. While the funeral cortège paid its last respects to the drug baron, the Sinaloa band Los Plebes de Navolato played a new corrido, El Niño de Oro. The bodies were buried in a marble mausoleum where Don Vicente senior and the supposed remains of El Señor de los Cielos were already interred.

For Doña Aurora there would be no forgetting and no forgiving her son’s murderers. Yet, despite his mother’s request, Vicente continued doing business with El Chapo and El Mayo. They brought him the government protection that might one day enable him to match
his elder brother’s legend. If he had followed his mother’s advice straight away, his disappointment would surely have been less. When he did follow it, in January 2008, it was too late. Doña Aurora now lives alone, praying for her remaining sons; she has heard nothing from Vicente for years.
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“
The Mexican government, the police, the military: they are the cartel”

Guillermo Ramírez Peyro, alias Lalo, is a peculiar man. Perhaps that’s because of the dozen executions he has on his conscience, in which he also decreed the means of finishing off the victims: bullets, or a plastic bag over the head. All of them were drug trafficking rivals of his boss, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes. What El Viceroy didn’t know was that Lalo was a US government informer, under cover for ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement), with the code name SA-913-EP.

Lalo’s case has been highly controversial in the United States. It’s been on the front pages of the main papers and on National Public Radio. Ramírez belonged to the Federal Highway Police in Guerrero state. In 1995 he joined Amado Carrillo Fuentes’s organization. And in 2000 he decided to sign up on another equally or more dangerous payroll, that of ICE informers.
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He provided information for the next four years (the first four of the Fox administration).

Ramírez was a prolific stool pigeon. It is said he contributed to the arrest of more than fifty people, including Heriberto Santillán, one of the most senior aides in the Juárez Cartel, and a number of bent US immigration officers who took bribes from traffickers. Lalo was also very productive as a criminal. Presumably with the knowledge of ICE, this thirty-six-year-old smuggled drugs for Carrillo Fuentes and witnessed the killing of at least twelve people in Ciudad Juárez. Apart from giving him carte blanche to commit crimes, the United States government paid him for his information: $220,000 over the period of his employment.
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After the murders, Lalo revealed the location of the so-called “house of death.” That was the end of his American dream. A scandal erupted in the United States when it became clear that ICE had
known about the executions, even as they were happening, and done nothing to stop them. After wringing all the information they could out of him, the US authorities began proceedings to deport Lalo back to Mexico. However, in March 2010, the US Board of Immigration Appeals gave protection to the now ex-informer, on the grounds that if he returned to Mexico he would immediately be tortured and killed by the cartel he had betrayed.

Ramírez Peyro was thoroughly familiar with the organization of Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, both before and during the era of The Federation. Indeed he had been the right-hand man of Heriberto Santillán, the boss he betrayed to the US. His account of what happened during Fox’s presidency is essential to understanding Calderón’s. He claimed to have worked with federal and local authorities in Chihuahua, and with the Mexican army, in drug-related activities, including transporting the goods in Navy boats and PGR patrol cars.
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In a sworn statement filed in federal court in Bloomington, Minnesota, Ramírez said that he had been told that the office of the Mexican president had an arrangement with the Juárez Cartel. Santillán explained to me that President Fox had decided to coordinate and consult with the Juárez Cartel. He [Fox] would attack the opposing cartels like those of Tijuana and the Gult; then the Juárez Cartel could work without the government being on top of them”.”
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And that is what happened.

Ramírez Peyro’s testimony corroborates what a DEA official in Mexico said in May 2006: that the Fox government was giving protection to Joaquín Guzmán and his partners.
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“The Mexican government, the police, the military: they are the cartel,” said Ramírez, with unquestionable exactitude.
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At the same time, the rules governing the relation between drug traffickers and government changed forever during the Fox administration: the public officials became employees of the drug traffickers, and their armed wing.

The Juárez Cartel’s sanguinary hit squad, La Línea, which in the last two years has defended that coveted border crossing with blistering violence, is made up mainly of local and federal police and members of the Mexican army, according to Ramírez Peyro. They are the narco
s
’ hired assassins, using the guns, uniforms, and badges
that are paid for by us, the same Mexican taxpayers who are assaulted by death from every side. This is the true nightmare: that the enemy, the mafioso, who is tearing society apart, goes unnoticed in public office. Many officials are capable of doing anything to protect their positions, the coveted posts they actually hold at the behest of the drug barons. Because even government ministers, as far as the drug traffickers are concerned, are nothing more than their employees, their servants, part of the staff.

The judge dealing with the immigration status of the ICE’s witness noted that “the police and security forces” in Mexico have been implicated in “unlawful killings,” and that “there were numerous reports of executions carried out by rival drug cartels, whose members allegedly included both active and former federal, state, and municipal security forces.”
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Lalo had put names and faces to this collusion ever since 2005. In one of his statements to the US court, he alleged that at all levels of the Mexican police there are unlawful ties to drug trafficking. But of all these police forces, he only specifically mentioned one: the AFI—then led by Genaro García Luna—which he accused of passing on to drug gangs the names of protected witnesses so they could be eliminated. “In light of the serious documentation submitted,” the judge found Lalo’s testimony “to be credible.”
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The names of President Calderón’s secretary of public security and his team, along with the initials of the different police forces that García Luna has led over the last decade, little by little have begun to appear more frequently in drug cases connected with Guzmán and his associates. Not, of course, as investigating authorities, but as accomplices.

In the savage gang wars that kicked off in 2001, the battles have not been equal. The armies available to either side are asymmetrical. That of El Chapo Guzmán and his camp is composed primarily of senior government officials. This is no isolated or fortuitous occurrence, but such a constant feature that it looks like government policy. And that is what inflames the belligerence of El Chapo’s enemies.

Two years after creating The Federation, with the support of central government, in 2003 Joaquín Guzmán and his partners decided to start
a new war. This time the artillery would no longer be aimed at the Tijuana Cartel, but at the Gulf Cartel. The violence, death, and brutality redoubled. Mexico has been plunged into a dark and seemingly bottomless pit, because federal government institutions decided to protect the Sinaloa Cartel and use the state apparatus to combat its rivals.

CHAPTER NINE
Narco Wars

I belong to The Zetas and we look after the boss.

We are twenty bodyguards, loyal and brave.

Ready to give our lives to serve the Man.

Since I was small, I wanted to be what I am.

My father he told me, there’s nothing like honor.

The man who believes that is naturally brave.

We are twenty Zetas, united like a family.

We twenty are the mighty, with suicide diplomas,

We know that in every mission we could die.

How fine is my Tamaulipas, where no one is afraid.

To go up to the mountains, I’ll stay here in Victoria,

to serve my boss, from Tampico to Laredo.

I’m from Matamoros, Tamaulipas is my land,

Victoria is my capital, at the foot of the mountains.

Greetings to XR, who’s made of the same stuff.

We are twenty Zetas, united like a family.

We twenty are the mighty, with suicide diplomas,

We know that in every mission we could die.

T
hese are the lyrics of “Escolta Suicida” (Suicide Bodyguard), a “narco-corrido” dedicated to the armed group known as Los Zetas. It was playing on many radio stations in the states of Tamaulipas and Nuevo León back in 2008. The chorus blared out over and over again at full volume from the pick-up trucks doing their rounds in the city of Monterrey. “We twenty are the mighty, with suicide diplomas, we know that in every mission we could die …” rang out
gaily, in an atmosphere of tense calm. It was some time before the city understood that this was the beginning of the end to a period of economic prosperity and peace.