Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (4 page)

Jesús Bitar was known as the brains behind Carrillo Fuentes’s financial operations in South America. He was arrested in July 1997 after his boss’s death, and entered a witness protection program. Today he is a wealthy cattle rancher, with a franchise for Pemex gas stations, in Durango state. He also supplies a government-funded program called the Countryside Alliance. Four years after Cardinal Posadas’s murder, Bitar testified to the PGR that General Jorge Carrillo Olea was a friend of Amado Carrillo Fuentes. When I asked him directly, the general denied it.

At 3 a.m. on May 25, 1993, Carrillo Fuentes’s staff answered the phone at one of his homes in Cuernavaca, Morelos, where he was staying.

“Is the gentleman awake?” asked Javier Coello Trejo—no less than the former drug czar under Attorney General Enrique Álvarez del Castillo. “Ask him if I can visit tomorrow!”

“Tell him to come over right away,” responded Carrillo Fuentes.

Meanwhile, El Señor de los Cielos ordered El Güero Palma to suspend a shipment of two tons of cocaine that was due in by train
from El Salvador, and to contact the people who were keeping an eye on El Chapo. At 5 a.m., Coello arrived, alone. Amado was still accompanied by his lawyer Sergio Aguilar, Jesús Bitar, and El Güero Palma.

“I’ve just talked to the deputy attorney general of the PGR in Jalisco [Antonio García Torres]. You must hand over El Chapo with the utmost urgency,” said Coello.

For Carrillo Fuentes, there couldn’t be a better opportunity to get rid of El Chapo without bloodshed. But he knew that Guzmán had not killed the cardinal or had anything to do with it, according to the information he had obtained. He wanted to know just one thing before surrendering his man:

“Who killed the cardinal?” Amado asked Coello.

There was no answer, just a suggestion that it was better not to ask.

“So tell me, is it yes or no?” insisted Coello.

El Chapo’s fate was sealed. He would be the scapegoat, and not a shot would be fired in his defense.

Amado, El Chapo, and El Güero

Amado Carrillo Fuentes entered the narcotics business in the 1970s thanks to his uncle, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, the notorious Don Neto. Don Neto was a friend and partner of the Sinaloan Pedro Avilés Pérez, the first Mexican to smuggle cocaine from South America into the United States.

When Avilés was murdered in 1978, his replacement was Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo, the overall coordinator of the organization. The main members of this criminal group were Félix Gallardo himself, Don Neto, Manuel Salcido El Cochiloco, Juan José Quintero, Pablo Acosta, and Juan José Esparragoza El Azul. At a lower level were Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Rafael Caro Quintero, and Ismael Zambada El Mayo. Well below them, as small-scale growers, dealers, and gunmen, were Héctor Palma, Joaquín Guzmán, the Arellano Félix brothers and the Beltrán Leyva brothers. Although almost all the members of the organization led by Félix Gallardo were natives of Sinaloa, it became known as the Guadalajara group, because that city was their operational and residential base.

At that stage the term “cartel” was not widely used, nor had the drug traffickers carved up the country into areas of control as if it were their private property. The Federal Judicial Police (PJF) and the Federal Security Directorate (DFS) identified them as “cliques” or gangs. There were two main organizations: one that smuggled drugs on the Pacific coast (the Guadalajara group) and another that worked along the Gulf of Mexico (the Gulf group). At the beginning of President Miguel de la Madrid’s mandate (1982–88), the growing activity of the traffickers in Jalisco state and its capital, Guadalajara, was reflected in the big investments pouring into hotels, restaurants, housing developments, foreign exchange agencies, and car dealerships. But it was concealed by the state governor, Enrique Álvarez del Castillo, and tolerated by society. No lights were shone on it, nor was there any violence.

In 1981, Amado Carrillo Fuentes was working closely with his uncle Don Neto and Félix Gallardo in Guadalajara. However, it became impossible for him to remain in the state capital because of tensions with Rafael Caro Quintero, also a protégé of Don Neto’s. The conflict was over a woman. Caro Quintero sought the favours of an attractive seventeen-year-old called Sara Cosío. For her part, the young woman—from one of the most eminent political families in Guadalajara—flirted with Carrillo Fuentes at every opportunity. Before his protégés could come to blows, Don Neto decided to remove his nephew from the scene: he sent him north to Ojinaga, a border town in Chihuahua, to work with Pablo Acosta. Without realizing it, Don Neto was doing Carrillo Fuentes a favor.

The rise of Amado Carrillo Fuentes

On April 24, 1987, a federal police officer called Guillermo González Calderoni arrived in Ojinaga. He was one of the most corrupt cops in Mexican history. His mission was to arrest Pablo Acosta, who as it happens had been paying him a fortune for protection. But the drug baron didn’t get out alive; they say he burned to death in his bunker. Some colleagues of the former policeman say the killer was González Calderoni himself. For drug traffickers there’s one thing worse than death, and that’s prison.

After Acosta’s death, Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, another former DFS commander—the Federal Security Directorate was then the Mexican equivalent of the CIA—took over the regional franchise, still with the support of Carrillo Fuentes, who was steadily climbing the ladder of the drug hierarchy.

Amado had a vision. In 1987 he left Ojinaga and moved to Torreón, where he began to assemble a fleet of aircraft, including Sabreliners, Learjets and Cessnas. His boyhood dreams of being a pilot were realized in the strangest of ways, but he still had a long way to go before becoming the legendary Lord of the Skies.

On August 21, 1989, Carrillo Fuentes was arrested by officers from the Ninth Military Zone based in Culiacán, Sinaloa, under the command of Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, whose military career was just taking off. Years later, fate would again bring these two together, the drug dealer and the three-star general. Appointed to prepare the case against Carrillo Fuentes in the PGR was the deputy attorney general, Javier Coello Trejo—Amado’s loyal servant as a result of the money periodically showered on him.

A few months earlier, in April, Commander Guillermo González Calderoni had arrested his own compadre, Félix Gallardo. Nobody could trust anyone.

It was the first year of Carlos Salinas’s presidency. Given the publicly-known relationship between his father, Raúl Salinas Lozano, his uncle, Carlos, and Juan Nepomuceno, the veteran leader of the Gulf Cartel, some writers on the drug trade in Mexico have seen these arrests as an attempt to favour the criminal organization closest to the president’s family. But the events of later years were to show that, in spite of their good relations with the Gulf traffickers, Salinas’s family were more inclined to do business with those on the Pacific side.

Too fat to be a bad guy

When in 1988 Salinas named Enrique Álvarez del Castillo as attorney general, he in turn appointed as deputy attorney general for drug control a man called Javier Coello Trejo. Coello’s most striking characteristic was his extreme corpulence, of similar dimensions to his corruption.

During the first two years of Salinas’s mandate, Jorge Carrillo Olea was at the Secretariat of the Interior under Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, reorganizing the state intelligence systems according to direct instructions from the president. Carrillo was highly experienced in this field; indeed he could be called the father of Mexican “intelligence,” if such a thing exists. He and Miguel de la Madrid dismantled the Federal Security Directorate, and set up in its place the Research and National Security Directorate (Disen), later the Center for Research and National Security (Cisen).

Carrillo was well placed to observe Coello’s chaotic mutations. In 1989, several of the deputy attorney’s bodyguards were arrested and charged with belonging to a gang that was plaguing the streets of southern Mexico City, snatching and raping young women. Only after intense pressure from Congress did the capital’s prosecution office, under Ignacio Morales Lechuga, find itself obliged to act, and finally some of Coello’s men were put behind bars.

In the final months of the Salinas administration, Carrillo frequently phoned Coello in order to pass on the complaints he was getting. Coello would typically protest, as he recalled:

“Of course not, Mr. Under Secretary, pure fairy tales. I’m too fat to be a bad guy!”

“Well, they’re saying you sit on the detainees, that’s the third degree,” Carrillo Olea would reply sardonically.

In 1989, Coello’s full weight was brought to bear on his friend Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who found himself imprisoned in the Reclusorio Sur along with Félix Gallardo and El Azul Esparragoza. But after the disgrace of his bodyguards, Deputy Attorney Coello had lost clout. He knew his days at the PGR were numbered, and that he’d need friends when he was ousted. Therefore he helped to get Carrillo Fuentes acquitted and released, to the surprise of his jailmates.

In 1990, President Salinas summoned Carrillo Olea and told him: “Jorge, Coello is severely undermining our image abroad. Enrique [Álvarez] has had enough. Help him out. He needs somebody he can trust.” As Carrillo Olea hadn’t trained as a lawyer, he could not take over the exact post occupied by Coello. Salinas created a job for him out of thin air: General Coordinator of the Fight Against the Drug Traffic.

Álvarez welcomed Carrillo’s arrival at the PGR, and practically invited him to take it under his control, which little by little he did.

In 1991, Carrillo appointed Rodolfo León Aragón, El Chino, as chief of the Federal Judicial Police (PJF). According to the general, relations between them were always good, despite El Chino’s high corruption ratings. León also got along very well with the equally corrupt police commander, González Calderoni. It’s in the light of this closeness to the command of the Mexican prosecutor’s office that Benjamín Arellano Félix’s recent declarations about the Cardinal’s killing are important.

Readjustments

When Carrillo Fuentes left prison, the structure of organized crime had broken down as a result of the arrest of Félix Gallardo. The only man strong enough replace him was Salcido, El Cochiloco, who ruled in Sinaloa, and who had the support of Benjamín Arellano Félix and his brothers, ensconced in Tijuana.

For their part, Juan and Humberto García Ábrego, leaders of the Gulf organization and the protégés of Juan Nepomuceno, were not interested in the others’ territory. Their own vast territory was quite enough. Besides, at that stage all of them were cooperating. There was a kind of tacit peace agreement. At the time, El Mayo Zambada—always an independent force—and El Azul Esparragoza had no influence beyond Sinaloa, and had not built up their organizations into what we know them as today. As for El Chapo Guzmán, El Güero Palma and the Beltrán Leyva brothers, these were just emerging leaders who picked up the crumbs. Indeed, some of them—like El Chapo, El Güero Palma and the Arellano Félix brothers—had certain shared interests that encouraged them to do business together. Nonetheless, these links were too weak to withstand the blows of betrayal, and mutual hatred developed. It was a hatred that was to be measured in the hundreds of deaths they have contributed to the cruel war waged among the cartels over the last decade in almost every part of the country.

El Chapo and El Güero were ambitious, violent characters, who sought ever more money and power. They weren’t as strong but they
fought El Cochiloco and the Arellano Félixes for control of the Guadalajara “franchise.”

Amado Carrillo Fuentes hatched a more ambitious plan. In alliance with Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, he decided to seize control of the drug trade all along the northern Pacific coast. El Chapo Guzmán and El Güero Palma joined him, to build up their own strength.

El Cochiloco was executed in October 1991. Guzmán claims he was killed by his own followers, the Arellano Félix brothers. The war for the prize territory had begun. Those who had previously coexisted in the same area now engaged in a fight to the death. The dwarfs wanted to grow bigger, so they began to fight for control of Guadalajara. That was when El Chapo began to create problems for the Carrillo Fuentes organization; his lack of experience led him to commit serious mistakes.

Your closest friend betrays you

From 1990 until June 1993, the mafiocracy gave the same protection to El Chapo Guzmán as they had given to Carrillo Fuentes, El Señor de los Cielos—who could never have created such an empire without the help of illustrious businessmen, bankers, military chiefs, police officers, and politicians, including former presidents of the Republic and their relatives. This web of connections is inextricable. All are united around one single goal: money and power.

Aguilar Guajardo, the leader of organized crime in Juárez, the border city where drug trafficking was most intense, was murdered in Cancún in April 1993. Carrillo Fuentes was his natural successor. In mafia circles it was said that the person who ordered the killing of Aguilar was he who benefited most from it.

Carrillo Fuentes began to become a legend. One of his first decisions was to clean out the organization. El Chapo Guzmán was top of the list; he’d fallen out of favor with his boss. Carrillo Fuentes handed him over to the PGR, not because he thought he was involved in the murder of Cardinal Posadas, but because it was now or never. On March 9, 1999, during his interrogation, Andrade Bojorges revealed the traitor’s name.

“Let the witness say if he knows who was the intermediary whereby Amado Carrillo Fuentes provided the information that led to the
capture of Joaquín Guzmán Loera,” the public prosecutor asked point-blank.

“El Güero Palma,” answered Andrade, without hesitation.

Four months after making his statement, Andrade vanished. The earth swallowed him up. His last appearance in public was at the International Book Fair held in Mexico City in February 1999. The lawyer showed up dressed in black, accompanied by a mariachi dressed in white, who went through the corridors singing “The Man from Sinaloa,” Carrillo Fuentes’s favourite song. Andrade was there to launch his book on the “secret history” of drug kingpins and their respectable protectors.
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