Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (42 page)

On October 22, the attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora, officially announced the arrest of the drug baron and his son. Warning lights started flashing in the SSP. That same day Federal Police agents burst in on the search that the SIEDO was carrying out at the house in San Bartolo. At about 2 p.m., five police pickup trucks, each carrying about ten men, and three private vehicles arrived and went through the perimeter barrier that the investigators had set up.
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Four armed men got out of one of the vehicles and tried to break through a fence, but the AFI agents working with the SIEDO stopped them.

An unidentified individual in a bullet-proof vest, alighting from a black sports car with no license plates, said he was in charge of the contingent. He went to speak to one of the women officers responsible for the SIEDO investigation.

“I’m here on superior orders,” the man said, while conferring with someone else on his walkie-talkie.

“You’ll have to tell me whose,” the officer responded curtly.

Minutes later, the intrusive convoy of federal agents withdrew.

El Rey Zambada’s hideout contained evidence of his links to senior figures in the Secretariat of Public Security. And they didn’t want that getting into the hands of the PGR.

On Saturday 25 and Sunday 26 October, identical banners attributed to the Gulf Cartel appeared in ten Mexican states, rubbing salt into the wound. As the saying goes, the truth is the truth, even when told by a liar. The message read:

With the highest respect for your office, Mr. President, we ask you to open your eyes and realize what kind of people are in the PFP. We know you are not aware of the deal that Gerardo [
sic
] García Luna has had since the Fox government with the Sinaloa Cartel, protecting El Mayo Zambada, the Valencias, Nacho Coronel, and El Chapo.

As citizens we ask you to take a look at the following people who we are 100 percent certain are protecting the drug traffickers: Luis Cárdenas Palomino, Edgar Enrique Bayardo, Gerardo Garay Cadena. And we ask you to put people into the PFP who fight drug trafficking in a neutral way, without leaning on one side of the scale, and to investigate using the intelligence services of the Mexican army and the PGR, which are neutral independencies [
sic
]. You know that the PFP did not take part in the arrest of El Rey Zambada; if they had, he would have been tipped off in advance.

El Rey Zambada’s son and stepson, inexperienced and frightened young men, soon blurted out all they knew and began ratting right and left. The first card to fall was Edgar Bayardo, who was arrested on October 29, along with two other members of the PFP accused of helping El Mayo. One of them, Jorge Cruz, had taken part in the operation in Desierto de los Leones, and had a long story of his own to tell.

Of course, Bayardo had no intention of going down on his own. Among those he dragged down with him was Garay Cadena, exposing the corruption in the SSP that García Luna tried to conceal. In the last days of October, Garay and Francisco Navarro were summoned for questioning by SIEDO.

Some of those arrested in the operation against El Rey had already stated that both Bayardo and Garay received monthly stipends of up to $500,000 in exchange for protection. PFP officers who had been under the command of Acting Commissioner Garay further accused him of taking money, jewelry, and weapons—gold-plated, diamond-studded AK-47s—during operations against El Chapo’s adversaries, to be sold on to El Rey as war trophies. In this last operation in the Desierto, he had even stolen a pet bulldog.

The legal case against Garay was very serious, meaning the police chief would have to appear before a judge for a preliminary hearing.
This was very worrying for García Luna and Rosas, as the only two officials ranked above Garay in the chain of command. So, at 2 p.m. on October 30, they called an emergency meeting in García Luna’s offices in the SSP on Avenida Constituyentes. In attendance were the secretary himself, the four under secretaries, and the coordinators of the Secretariat’s various departments.

In his intervention, the coordinator of regional security, Ramón Pequeño, argued that under no circumstances should they allow Garay to appear in court, “because regardless of the truth of these allegations, they would cause irreparable damage to our plans for the Federal Police, at a time when both houses of Congress are precisely debating the new Security Law.” This was the bill in which García Luna was seeking to create a unified police force. The majority agreed.

García Luna spoke to Attorney General Medina Mora—with whom his relationship had been poor for some time—to request support in getting Garay freed. When Medina refused to commit, he went to see his friend, Interior Secretary Mouriño. They hacked out an agreement whereby Garay, after giving evidence for several hours in the PGR, would be released. The plan was that the PFP chief would resign the following day, enabling him be charged merely with theft and other minor offenses, of which he could later be acquitted. On this condition, Garay Cadena agreed to hand in his valuable police badge.

His release on “orders from above” caused a storm of protest within Calderón’s administration, in particular from the PGR and Sedena, who argued that it would ultimately be impossible to protect him. On October 31, 2008, minutes before Garay announced his resignation at a brief press conference, the under secretary of public security, Facundo Rosas (later Commissioner of the unified Federal Police) was rumored to have suffered an attempt on his life in Mexico City. The SSP was being rocked by a schism that was barely perceptible to ordinary citizens. Rosas was not seen in public for several days, and his staff say he did not go to the office. It added fuel to the rumors of an attack, one presumably carried out by the Sinaloa Cartel, in reprisal for their “employees” not doing their job.

Two other close associates of García Luna’s were also subpoenaed: Mario Velarde, García’s private secretary during the Fox years, and
Luis Cárdenas Palomino, both suspected of links to the Beltrán Leyvas when these were allied with the Sinaloans. Medina Mora was not going to miss this golden opportunity to show the secretary who was attorney general. Nevertheless, after intense pressure from García Luna, Velarde and Cárdenas walked free. Velarde, who knew what he knew, resigned quietly in November 2008. Cárdenas Palomino kept his job.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
The President of Death

T
he day that twenty-two-year-old Jesús Zambada Reyes and thirty-one-year-old Richard Arroyo Guízar were arrested, they at once began to relate stories worthy of a crime thriller, whose central characters were senior figures in the Secretariat of Public Security (SSP). The Colombians’ reports of abuse by federal officers during the operation in Desierto de los Leones were merely the tip of the iceberg: now, the great submerged bulk came into view.

Jesús and Richard, respectively the son and stepson of Jesús Zambada García, El Rey, enrolled in the protected witness program run by the Attorney General’s Office (PGR), still led by Eduardo Medina Mora. Jesús took the pseudonym Rambo III, and Richard, whose role had been in intelligence work and delivering bribes to the authorities who protected El Rey,
¹
called himself María Fernanda.

One of those most incriminated by their testimony was Edgar Bayardo. The Federal Preventive Police (PFP) commander tried to deny to prosecutors that he knew or had worked for El Rey Zambada, but the evidence against him was so strong that he too opted to become a protected witness, using the cover name Tigre, Tiger. His testimony, consistent with that of Pitufo,
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unmasked the systematic corruption of top officials in the SSP, and especially their collusion with the organization of El Chapo and El Mayo. When you read these hair-raising statements you begin to understand why that institution has been unable to fight crime effectively, and why, wherever its representatives go, disaster follows.

This is how María Fernanda told his tale, on October 22, 2008:

I met Edgar Bayardo, alias El Jumex, two years ago. He was attached to the PGR, I don’t know his exact post, and I met him through El Pelón, who like I said is part of the organization led by my father, Jesús Zambada. Well, my father and Bayardo knew each other from way back, when they worked for Amado Carrillo Fuentes, I don’t exactly know what Bayardo was doing there, but then they lost touch.

In 2006, Bayardo had tried to resume contact with El Rey, and they fixed up a meeting in Mexico City. At the last minute the drug baron had to leave the capital, and sent his stepson to represent him. Bayardo and Richard Arroyo met in a fast-food restaurant in the luxury development of Bosques de las Lomas, where El Rey Zambada had one of his safe houses.

We greeted each other and he offered to work for the organization. From then on we were giving him money to get him promoted to more senior posts in the PGR, so that he’d be more useful to us. I should clarify that the amount we gave him at the time [2006] was $100,000 every time he told us he was going to be promoted, and the money was to pay the people who were helping him.… About a year and a half ago, Bayardo moved to the Federal Preventive Police, so we began paying him $25,000 a month for his services, which included warning us of any raids that were going to take place.

At the age of forty-one, Bayardo was already an old policeman. From 1997 to 1999 he was in the Federal Judicial Police (PJF), where he met El Señor de los Cielos, Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Then he became Deputy Attorney for Specialized Organized Crime Investigations in the state of Tlaxcala. On July 1, 2007 he became a deputy head of department at the PFP; Facundo Rosas, who appointed him, was acting commissioner of the PFP at the time. Under his auspices, Bayardo rose rapidly.

Early in 2008, at the beginning of the war against the Beltrán Leyvas, Bayardo brought more recruits from the SSP to help El
Rey, gathering information and supporting operations against the enemy gangs.

In María Fernanda’s words:

From November last year, when [Bayardo] was made commissioner or chief inspector in the PFP, he began to provide us with security, of a purely logistical kind … And when we raided houses belonging to the enemy, the Zetas, Vicente Carrillo, or the Beltrán Leyvas, he’d come with us to provide security, bringing people from his own force.

In January and February 2008, Bayardo went to a safe house in Las Lomas along with two people who worked with him in the PFP, called Jorge and Fidel … Jorge often went on these operations, to break into houses, like my father or I would give him the addresses and he’d go search them. While Fidel is the PFP man in charge of bugging the enemy’s telephones, so when he found out anything he used to pass it straight on to me.

Jorge Cruz Méndez, who María Fernanda refers to above, was no newcomer. He’d worked for García Luna since 1998, following him from Cisen to the PFP and the AFI, with Facundo Rosas; Fidel Hernández, the other policeman mentioned by María Fernanda, worked under Cruz, and like him had experience under Rosas.

According to El Rey’s stepson, Bayardo, Cruz, Hernández, and a certain Giovanni who has not been fully identified, carried out a string of operations for El Mayo against Arturo Beltrán Leyva, in Cuernavaca, Morelos, and Huixquilucan, State of Mexico. “We descended on the Beltrán Leyvas houses and if there was anybody in they were arrested and taken into custody,” boasted María Fernanda, hinting that Rosas was acquiescent:

Bayardo split the twenty-five thousand dollars he was paid a month with his assistants, including Fidel and Jorge, and I also know they shared some with Commander Facundo. As far as he is concerned, I remember that in May or June Bayardo mentioned to me that Commander Facundo was also helping to supply us with information.

The only “Commander Facundo” above Bayardo was Facundo Rosas, then under secretary in the SSP. He was Bayardo, Hernández, and Cruz’s boss, and had appointed them to the positions in which they served El Mayo’s group. So it seems almost certain that there was tacit approval by Rosas of the collaboration with El Rey Zambada’s people, as his stepson said. On the basis of much less substantial testimony, numerous national and local authorities have been subpoenaed or subjected to travel bans. Commander Facundo, it seems, remained untouchable to the end.
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For his part, Bayardo said in his statement to the PGR that he had begun to work directly with Gerardo Garay Cadena in 2007, when the latter was made head of the Anti-Drug Division of the PFP’s Third Section. Garay told him that if, in the course of his investigations, he ever came across specific references to Arturo or Héctor Beltrán Leyva, he shouldn’t tell anyone else but should let Garay himself know, in person or by telephone. “It seemed strange,” Bayardo recalled.
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Those were the days when the Beltrán Leyva group was part of The Federation, and the SSP’s protection extended to all of its members.

Bayardo told the PGR that on one occasion he and two other officers spotted Harold Poveda in Santa Fe, a then new development in Mexico City. The Colombian cocaine trafficker, who at the time was supplying all of The Federation, was accompanied by twenty or thirty men wearing uniforms from the State of Mexico State Security Agency (ASE), so Bayardo called for reinforcements. Garay assured him he was dispatching a patrol that was just approaching the Mexico City–Toluca highway, so they’d be there in ten minutes. The back-up arrived three and a half hours later, by which time the suspects were long gone.

Another time, the US embassy informed Bayardo that the Mexican-American Edgar Valdez, La Barbie, would be outside the Ángeles de Interlomas Hospital. Bayardo mobilized 150 officers and a Black Hawk helicopter, but Garay ordered them not to begin the operation until he got there, which he did at 7 p.m. Later, Bayardo heard—it’s not clear if from the Zambada clan or from the embassy again—that La Barbie and his people were still near the hospital. But Garay declined to carry out aerial reconnaissance, and sent the officers home.