Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (45 page)

The official response of the airport administration to this firm was evasive, and suggests complicity. Although they said that Aviones was illegally sharing its hangar, they claimed not to know the name of the company it shares it with, even though it is clearly the administration’s responsibility to know. And although AICM accepted that this constituted grounds to evict, the company continues to operate unhindered—four years after the direct accusations made by El Rey Zambada’s stepson.
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If it is true that Aviones S.A. is owned by members of the Sinaloa cartel, as Richard María Fernanda Arroyo testified, then this would surely constitute the biggest scandal of corruption and collusion with the drug cartels in recent decades—one which would necessarily implicate authorities at the highest levels in the Secretariat of Communications and Transport, the Mexico City Airport administration, the Secretariat of Public Security, and even the Secretariat of Defense.

Sedena contracts a drug-related company

Aviones S.A., a company allegedly controlled by El Mayo Zambada, had thirty-two contracts with the Secretariat of Defense between 2001 and 2008, for the maintenance of planes belonging to the Mexican Army and Air Force. In the words of El Mayo’s nephew, the government put its planes literally in the hands of the enemy. But were they really the enemy?

Twenty-two of these contracts were signed by Sedena during the Fox administration, and ten during Calderón’s. The concessions were granted by General Fausto Zamorano, in the former case, and by General Augusto García Ochoa in the latter. (García Ochoa, one of the closest associates of the then Defense Secretary, General Galván, was hoping to take over that very post in the next government, even though questions have hung over his career ever since he
was accused by his colleague Gutiérrez Rebollo of protecting Amado Carrillo Fuentes, back in the 1990s.)

The majority of the contracts with Aviones were granted directly or by invitation to two or three companies; that is to say, they were not put out to tender. They include the purchase of spare parts, repairs and routine maintenance. They show that at different times Sedena handed over to the alleged narco-company everything from its Bell 206 helicopters, to a Boeing 727, and a giant Hercules C-130, as well as an array of light aircraft including no fewer than sixty-seven Cessna 182 Skylanes. Some of the contracts explicitly give Aviones the right to take the military planes on test flights after they’ve been repaired. For the delivery of spare parts purchased by Sedena from Aviones, they also make available the military airbase of Santa Lucía, in the State of Mexico, as well as the Lester Industries airstrip in San Antonio, Texas.
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Other contracts, like the maintenance policy for the Cessnas, signed in August 2003, allow for Aviones to “take the defective planes to a suitable place for their repair.”

In 2009, the Navy Secretariat likewise signed two contracts with Aviones for the purchase of spare parts. The National Institute of Geography and Information Technology signed twelve contracts between 2004 and 2009. Eleven were for the repair of its Cessnas and one was for “air transport,” even though Aviones has no license to offer this kind of service.

One other public security institution that used Aviones was the Preventive Federal Police (PFP), with contracts signed in 1999, when the head was Wilfrido Robledo and Genaro García Luna was coordinator of intelligence for crime prevention.

On September 19, 2000, the PFP bought five Cessna 182s from Aviones for $1.18 million. Public auditors criticized that contract, saying it was tweaked to suit the company’s interests, including the provision for the planes to be delivered at Cessna Aircraft’s installations in Independence, Kansas. It also noted that although the Aviones offer had supposedly been the cheapest, it ended up being more expensive.
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AFI and SSP help unload drugs at airports

In addition to Aviones S.A., María Fernanda said that since 2007 they had been able to count on a whole network of SSP and AFI officials who would help them to bring in planes and get the merchandise out. It’s worth recalling that until the beginning of 2010, the AFI and the SSP were both controlled, simultaneously, by García Luna.

María Fernanda specifically identified the regional delegate of the AFI in the Metropolitan Attorney General’s Office, Roberto Sánchez, who was appointed by García Luna. They paid him $75,000 a month to work for the Sinaloa cartel, $50,000 of which were for him and $25,000 for his second-in-command, identified only by the code X1.
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María Fernanda also mentioned another AFI agent who worked for them, Edwin González, who was attached to the airport from the metropolitan PGR. Apparently he helped them bring in suitcases full of cocaine, for which service he was paid $10,000 a month. “He carried out arrests in the airport for us, and helped provide us with security as far as the exit when we brought in a plane loaded with cocaine,” said El Mayo’s talkative nephew.

Rambo III, the son of El Rey Zambada, also recognized González as the policeman who one afternoon in February 2008 went to see his father at a house in Bosques de las Lomas. On that occasion, he added, the AFI agent was accompanied by the agency’s regional head, Roberto Sánchez, himself.

For his part, Edgar Bayardo remembered González recruiting “mules” to carry drugs or money for the organization, often to other countries. He described one occasion, before the split in The Federation, when Sergio Villarreal, El Grande, who ran the airport operations for El Mayo, sent one of the people recruited by González to Venezuela, where he was supposedly received by some government authorities. He didn’t say who they were or what posts they held, only that they received money from the drug traffickers.

After the testimony against him, Edwin González was arrested on December 13, 2008 when he went to make a statement. Three days later he was given a conditional release, on the grounds of changed legal circumstances, suggesting he too has become a protected
witness. Sánchez, however, in spite of the accusations against him, continued in his same job at least until May 2009.

Another PGR witness, codenamed Jennifer, who claimed to have worked for Edgar Valdez and his boss, El Barbas, stated that Mexico City was not the only airport used by The Federation. They also favored Cancún, on the Caribbean coast. According to Jennifer, Arturo Beltrán Leyva controlled that airport on behalf of the whole Federation, giving orders to let all the associates freely move their merchandise by plane, as though he owned the place. Between March 2007 and February 2008, for an outlay of just over $19 million, The Federation apparently unloaded thirteen planes at Cancún airport, with the complicity of authorities at all levels.

The split in The Federation forced the officials who worked for it to negotiate with one side or the other to save their lives. When AFI agent Edgar Ramos, El Chuta, the organization’s contact at Cancún airport, heard about the quarrel between the bosses, he got González to arrange for him to meet El Rey Zambada in Mexico City. María Fernanda tells the story:

He wanted to persuade the organization not to take reprisals against him for belonging to the Beltrán Leyva group, and promised in advance he wouldn’t support Arturo Beltrán against us.… They met in the middle of July that year [2008] at one of the offices in that city, specifically a building in Calle Río Bamba … Jesús Zambada García told him they wouldn’t take any reprisals, he’d just have to make sure he didn’t interfere with them and undertake not to handle any merchandise from Arturo at the airport, because that region was now controlled by the Zambadas’s organization.

Later El Chuta was transferred to Mexico City, where he continued to help El Mayo and his clan. From there he served the Sinaloa cartel by “unloading suitcases of cocaine and loading money into planes, together with the Preventive Federal Police,” recalled protected witness Jennifer.

In the midst of this web of complicity around Mexico City airport, on the morning of June 25, 2012, the country awoke to shocking news: a shoot-out in Terminal 2 of the International Airport between
two sets of Federal Police officers when the force was under the command of Luis Cárdenas Palomino, who is alleged to be a drug lord disguised as a police chief. The dispute was over another cargo of drugs being handled by the PF. Two of the officers involved in the firefight publicly identified Cárdenas as the person who coordinated these drug shipments in the AICM. But despite the scandal, the police chiefs kept their jobs.

Inside a drug baron’s head

The drug barons are unsophisticated people. Most can hardly read. They are little given to reflection, except upon matters of business and their particular cut of the profits. The rest of the time they are guided by the extremely aggressive instincts which, according to them, keep them alive.

In their world, anyone who gets a university education is to be admired, as if a degree were synonymous with intelligence. One anecdote illustrates this attitude. In jail a group of prisoners from the Pacific cartel joined a group from the Gulf Cartel for a game of volleyball. The captain of one side was a veteran drug baron from Sinaloa, his counterpart a young trafficker from the Gulf. On seeing this younger man fluff a pass, the old narco murmured to one of his team:

“It’s hard to believe he plays so badly!”

“What do you mean?” asked the other.

“Well, he went to university, didn’t he!”

But when a drug trafficker is forced to choose between intelligence and loyalty, he won’t hesitate to choose loyalty—an invaluable quality, but one that’s in danger of extinction. These days they try to have it both ways, by sending their sons to university or by directly recruiting more educated people. Yet it will take several generations for drug bosses to become any kind of educated, professional caste, given the nature of their day-to-day activities.

For example, El Chapo’s children have graduated with degrees, or diplomas in administration. Many thought that Iván Guzmán Salazar, El Chapito, was the closest to his father within the cartel, but it appears that it is rather Alfredo, Alfredillo, the youngest of the sons from his marriage to Alejandrina, who is following most closely in
his footsteps. The US authorities say he coordinates the logistics for multi-ton shipments of cocaine and heroin into the United States, together with one of El Mayo’s sons.
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The only laws governing the battles of the drug kingpins are that of the vendetta and that of business. If one group slaughters a member of another, the offended group will respond by slaughtering two. The violence spirals on, until nobody can remember who started it. Volatile, capricious, and contradictory, with a keen survival instinct, these men talk a lot about loyalty, but in reality they have none. The motto of their existence is: “I win, everybody else loses.” Their weakness for drugs and drink, allied to the stresses of the trade, renders them paranoid and quick to panic; someone can be a boon companion one minute, and a mortal threat the next, with inevitable consequences.

Roles are clearly demarcated. For them, the businessmen who launder their money are allies, genuine partners, to be regarded with respect as fine fellows who work hard and take risks—not like those cops and politicians who simply hold out the begging bowl. When asked who approached who, the narcos affirm: “The entrepreneurs come to us. They want our money in order to make more money.” As far as one can tell, there have been very few instances of deals gone sour between businessmen and drug traffickers.

The drug trade is armor-plated by these networks of money-laundering moguls. For they are not small businessmen, but big-time entrepreneurs. And if there is one criminal organization that throughout its history has known how to handle such people, it is the Sinaloa cartel. Of all the drug groups, the Sinaloa cartel has for many years had the most stable leadership. El Mayo Zambada has never been in prison, and he’s been trafficking drugs for more than forty years. That stability gives greater confidence to the producers in Colombia and Peru, and is one reason why the Sinaloa cartel has grown so much more than any other in the continent.

Edgardo Buscaglia, a senior research scholar in law and economics at Columbia Law School in New York, has thoroughly researched this aspect of the story, in Mexico and elsewhere. His conclusion is that the Mexican government treats the narco-tycoons as untouchable.
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They are not doing the most important thing, which is to attack the basic reason why organized crime groups exist. And that is to increase the wealth they get from unlawful activities, so that someday they can enjoy
la dolce vita
. The aim of these groups is to legalize their wealth, integrate it into the legal economy, and pay taxes. I always tell friends and colleagues that El Chapo’s goal is to pay taxes. When the criminal groups legalize their wealth—which derives from twenty-two different kinds of crime—and pay taxes, their success is complete. Their crowning achievement comes when they manage to hide in the mainstream economy and legitimize the income generated by crimes ranging from people trafficking, smuggling, and piracy, to extortion, kidnapping, and drug trafficking. As a matter of fact, drugs are only in second place in terms of capital generation; in first place come piracy and smuggling.

This is why there is a problem with the way the Mexican president [Calderón] understands this; unfortunately he is very poorly advised. The Mexican government already possesses the legal instruments to identify and confiscate this wealth, once it enters the legal economy. But they aren’t being used, so organized crime continues to expand—both Mexican organized crime, and that of twelve other countries that operate in Mexico.

We tend to focus only on home-grown groups, but Mexico has also become a haven for the assets of criminals from China, Japan, Ukraine, or Russia, who buy real estate and generate returns by investing in construction, trust funds, chemicals, and so on. The government hasn’t touched any of this. So, the likelihood of a criminal group that launders money and assets in Mexico being identified, investigated, and tried, is less than one percent.