Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (37 page)

By January 2006, profound repercussions were already being felt from Fox’s phoney war and the United States’ inexplicable apathy towards El Chapo and his partners. The Mexican drug gangs grew apace, as if fatted on bloodshed; that year they controlled the distribution of cocaine and methamphetamine in most of the United States. They were now the main distributors in five of the seven regions: Great Lakes, Pacific, South East, South West, and Midwest. Although Colombians still dominated in Florida and the Caribbean, the presence of Mexican traffickers was on the rise in this coveted zone. And, at least in New York, the Mexicans had displaced the Colombians as the main distributors and retailers of cocaine.
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When Vicente Fox completed his term in office, the toll from the drugs war was 9,000 dead. The rivers of blood were shifting their course, and destroying everything in their path.

In December 2006 the next president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón, was sworn in. He came from the same party as Fox, the National Action Party (PAN). Within days he announced the beginning of a supposed “war” on the drug trade, and chose none other than Genaro García Luna and his boys to lead it. The worst was yet to come.

CHAPTER TEN
Freedom Is Priceless

I
t was early in 2008 when General X, disciplined, tenacious, and daring as he was, traveled to the home territory of Mexico’s most powerful drug lord to speak to him face to face.
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El Chapo Guzmán was expecting the messenger from Los Pinos. Now more than sixty-five, the military man still exudes the vitality and verve of his best years. He’d been working with Juan Camilo Mouriño in the Presidential Office since 2007—an adviser in the shadows, as he had been through most of his forty-five years in the Mexican army, serving in the White Brigade, the Federal Security Directorate, and the National Security Coordination. Mouriño, one of President Calderón’s closest confidants, had given the general an impossible task: to broker peace between the drug cartels. In January 2008, Mouriño was made Interior Secretary, but the mission still stood, and coming from a man so close to the president it was not to be taken lightly.

If the general couldn’t succeed, with all the guile he had acquired over the years, then nobody could. He had spent seven years in prison, accused of links with Amado Carrillo Fuentes, El Señor de los Cielos. A number of witnesses testified against him, but there remained an element of doubt, as happens so often in these labyrinthine cases involving the military. He still had seven years of his sentence to go, but in the first year of Calderón’s government he was set free. Those in the know say his imprisonment was a political affair, as was his release.

Nine months after he left prison, to the astonishment of his colleagues, he was decorated by the secretary of defense, General Guillermo Galván, for his “patriotism, loyalty, and self-sacrifice.” The
government had to make him visible and credible to his interlocutors: the drug traffickers. General X has said that the secretary of defense also knew of the mission entrusted to him by Mouriño.

He’d never been too fussy about the tasks he took on. Many of them had required building relationships with different groups of traffickers. So in 2008, when he started knocking on the doors of the different groups involved in the narco war, most of them swung open. That’s what happened with El Chapo.

“Freedom is priceless,” El Chapo Guzmán told the general when they met. It sounded very cynical, even coming from a cynic like El Chapo. The remark was a cue for General X to inquire how he had managed to get out of the Puente Grande maximum security jail on that January day back in 2001. Guzmán was quite candid about it. They had begun to help him in 1995, when he was transferred from La Palma to Puente Grande on the orders of the Interior Secretariat. El Chapo named three men as being responsible for the “escape” itself. All were prominent figures in Mexico’s political and security establishment.

One was the former governor of Quintana Roo, Lieutenant Colonel Joaquín Hendricks. El Chapo said he helped him when he worked in the Interior Secretariat. The only post Hendricks occupied in that ministry was as director of sentence implementation in the prison service, from 1996 to 1997, when Francisco Labastida was the secretary.

In 1999, Hendricks became governor of one of the states with the highest intake of drug shipments in Mexico, a key operational base for both the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels. His predecessor had been Mario Villanueva, who was extradited in 2010 for his alleged links to the Amado Carrillo Fuentes organization, which El Chapo had belonged to.

In February 2001, just after El Chapo’s “escape” and without any particular prompting, the head of the Specialized Organized Crime Unit (UEDO), José Luis Trinidad, announced that he was not carrying out any investigation “into the alleged involvement of the elected governor of Quintana Roo, Joaquín Hendricks Díaz, in the case of the drug trafficker Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán.” Indeed, “no member of UEDO is carrying out such an investigation, in that state or in any
other.”
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After leaving Puente Grande, Guzmán hid out mainly in the states of Nayarit and Quintana Roo.

The second man implicated by El Chapo in his escape was the then attorney general, Rafael Macedo de la Concha. It was his office that was in charge of the operation carried out after the escape and which put Genaro García Luna at the helm of the subsequent investigation—one that was carried out with striking negligence.

At the beginning of 2005, Macedo resigned as attorney general and was sent by President Fox as military attaché to the Mexican embassy in Rome, where he remained in exile until the end of the sexennial. When Felipe Calderón assumed the presidency, Macedo returned to Mexico and was made a judge in the Military Tribunal, where he kept a rigorously low profile.

The third accomplice named by El Chapo to General X was Jorge Tello Peón, the then deputy secretary in the Secretariat of Public Security (SSP). Tello, as we saw, visited the Puente Grande prison the very day of El Chapo’s escape, as if to finalize some of the details. From 2008 to 2009, this man, explicitly fingered by the drug baron as the man who set him free, was President Calderón’s chief adviser on public security, working with García in the SSP as executive secretary of the National Security System. In January 2010 he moved to the National Security Council, apparently because of disagreements with his erstwhile protégé. García Luna now had more power, and wanted to show his teacher that the pupil had outgrown him. Tello didn’t last long in that job either, and ended up simply as an adviser to Calderón.
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There is no doubt El Chapo is a perverse individual, capable of flipping his own destiny inside out. On June 9, 1993, he was delivered to General Carrillo Olea, the anti-drugs coordinator, in the back of a clapped-out old pickup truck, bent double with his hands and feet tied, on a remote roadside in Chiapas. Eight years later, it was Carrillo’s alter ego, Tello Peón, his anointed son, fashioned in his own likeness, who would seemingly set him free.

El Chapo told General X that all the “turfs” in Mexico, that’s to say all the states where organized crime operates, “have been sold.” The trouble was that some national officials, as well as some local government officials, had sold them more than once to different groups, resulting in chaos among the gangs.

When the envoy from Los Pinos met Guzmán, the drug lord had already joined open battle with the Beltrán Leyvas, his cousins and long-time partners. Maybe that was why El Chapo informed the general, in a tone of wounded complaint, that Juan Camilo Mouriño and his then chief adviser at the Secretariat of the Interior, Ulises Ramírez, had sold the rights to the State of Mexico to the Beltrán Leyva brothers for $10 million. The point was, this transaction took place
after
operations in that state had been promised to El Chapo Guzmán. Mouriño had been talked into it by Ramírez, who El Chapo described as a “crook.” “Ramírez must have kept at least a million for himself,” the general thought.

Sources close to Mouriño confirmed this story, but said the secretary was apparently unaware of the deal done in his name by Ramírez.

El Chapo Guzmán told the presidential envoy that he and his clan had already agreed with the federal government that the latter would combat his old partners, the Beltrán Leyvas. General X must have felt very uncomfortable at hearing this. It put him on the spot because there was no way, when he came to report back to Mouriño, that he would be able to repeat El Chapo’s complaint. He had worked long enough inside the system to know that it could cost him his life.

For obvious reasons, General X’s meeting with the drug baron was brief, and for his own safety he hasn’t said where it took place. By the time they said goodbye, the envoy from Los Pinos was sure of one thing: El Chapo did whatever he wanted, and he was not prepared to give up his freedom, whatever it might cost.

The uncomfortable truth

On December 1, 2006, the second president from the National Action Party (PAN), Felipe Calderón, delivered his maiden speech and announced that his government’s number one priority would be to restore public security. Four days later, he formally declared “war” on organized crime. This would become the main weapon in his government’s desperate bid to win support and legitimacy,
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in a society that was equally desperate for the rule of law.

“Rest assured that my government is working hard to win the war on crime, to ensure that the rights of all are protected and respected,
with the right to property and investment; and fighting relentlessly against corruption and to safeguard the right to life, liberty, and heritage,”
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declared Calderón emphatically. He didn’t deliver. Either he couldn’t, or he wouldn’t.

What nobody could explain was why he decided to fight organized crime with the same officials that had so singularly failed in the task already, the one because he was inept, the other because he was corrupt: Eduardo Medina Mora and Genaro García Luna.

Medina was a colorless secretary of public security during the last year of the Fox government; under Calderón he served as a vacillating attorney general, who never managed to get out from under the thumb of García Luna. So much so that for the first two years his own secretariat’s police force, the AFI, was still controlled by García Luna rather than himself.

In spite of his somber record in the Fox administration, García Luna was made secretary of public security with backing from Tello Peón and from Mexico’s (and the world’s) richest man, Carlos Slim, who had been persuaded to support him. The United States embassy was soon keeping a close eye on him and his team. In a confidential cable dated December 11, 2006, the embassy describes García Luna as an “intense” character, and notes his “mumbled” Spanish which is “hard to understand even for native speakers.” Their overall view of him was positive, because several US Agencies like the DEA had worked with him in the past, and he had been very cooperative. But not all of his team were regarded in the same light.
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In charge of the SSP, he rapidly became a feared member of cabinet. Nobody could look him in the eye. Nobody trusted him. He has been publicly questioned over his sudden personal wealth, including more than 40 million pesos’ worth ($2.8 million in 2010) of real estate in Mexico City and Morelos. He has so far been unable to explain how he grew so affluent on a civil servant’s salary.
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In a letter sent to the Mexican Congress in 2008, a group of federal agents who had worked with him accused him of being connected to the drug trade, and said he had been directly threatened by drug barons like Arturo Beltrán Leyva to make him fulfil his agreements.
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Many legends have been written about him, like
the existence of rooms full of money and lavish properties in the Dominican Republic.

His front companies include two restaurants called Café Los Cedros, registered in the name of his wife, Linda Pereyra Gálvez: one in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in the south of Mexico City, the other in Cuernavaca. These establishments function as operational centers separate from his official activities as a public servant. In 2010, Café Los Cedros was recruiting polygraphists, specialists in applying lie detector tests, to work throughout Mexico. An unusual skill for a restaurant employee.

US government sources say their intelligence services have monitored García Luna’s properties and carried out satellite scans in search of money. They claim that $15 million were identified in one of the houses.

Since December 2010, many civic leaders have accused him of links to drug traffickers, and of making death threats against those who question his integrity or imperil his interests.

Of course, García Luna did not come to the Secretariat of Public Security alone. His unholy band from the AFI came with him. He made Luis Cárdenas Palomino, El Pollo, first director general of private security and then Intelligence Coordinator for the Federal Police. Javier Garza Palacios came to the SSP as coordinator of regional security, but he didn’t last there even a year. In May 2007, eleven truckloads of hit men from the Sinaloa Cartel drove 200 miles along a federal highway to Cananea, in Sonora state, to execute twenty-two local policemen in the mining town. There was a public outcry, because no one in Garza’s department had been able to spot the monstrous convoy.

A few days later, García Luna sacked the entire Regional Security command, and appointed Edgar Millán in Garza’s place. However, García owed too much to Garza, so he sent him as SSP attaché to the Mexican embassy in Colombia. Some say that in fact Garza never went, and that he continued to do the clan’s business away from the spotlight. There is documentary evidence that Garza Palacios remained on the SSP payroll until early in 2009, although the Secretariat has denied it.