Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (11 page)

Religiously every month, a suitcase made the long journey around the whole of Mexico. Its final destination was the PGR headquarters, then located in Mexico City’s historic center. Simultaneously, other suitcases made their way to the Secretariats of the Interior and National Defense.

At regular intervals the suitcase made this trip, starting at the bottom, with those who directly collected the money, until reaching the attorney general’s desk. It was a long trip, but nobody would have dared to take any money out. There were wads and wads of bills, greenbacks. You can close your eyes and imagine even the smell of those bills every time the suitcase was opened. What happened to the suitcase later nobody knew. It was lost from sight as it passed from hand to hand towards the presidential palace of Los Pinos.

The taxes paid by the drug traffickers made fortunes overnight for government figures and businessmen in Mexico. Another part of the proceeds, as happened in the US, was spent on the struggle against subversive movements. These were considerable sums. At the time there was no National Human Rights Commission in Mexico, and no Public Oversight Office; government officials were exempt from scrutiny. All this was seen as a way of protecting national security. Drug trafficking was a matter of state. All that was asked of the traffickers was that they not carry weapons in public or draw attention to themselves, in order to protect the police and the army, but above all to protect the civilian population.

The Informer sketched the typical profile of early traffickers as follows: “They are violent people by nature, or, if you prefer, by the nature of
their business. They got involved in this because they have no education or prospects.” The immense majority of those involved in narcotics production at that time were men and women of humble, rural origins, who never got beyond fourth grade at elementary school.

In the years when the business was controlled, those who paid their tax to the authorities included Salcido, Eduardo Lalo Fernández, the Cuban Alberto Sicilia, Pedro Avilés, Pedro Díaz, Don Neto, the legendary Quintero Payáns, Félix Gallardo, Acosta, Esparragoza and Zambada.

It was in 1973 that a thirty-two-year-old Ernesto Fonseca, the future Don Neto, planted his first two hectares of marijuana at El Dorado in Sinaloa. He harvested three tons and took them to Tijuana, where he sold them to “the González brothers,” according to his later sworn statement. In those days Pedro Avilés used to receive everybody’s harvest and stored it in a warehouse in San Luis Río Colorado.

“The drug traffickers paid even to get a hearing from the authorities,” continued The Informer.

Just to listen, the regional police coordinators or the local police commander could charge a million dollars. Just to
listen
! When the trafficker and the official were face to face, the former would discreetly slide a suitcase full of money under the table in exchange for the right to an audience. Once they’d listened to him, they’d ask for instructions from the capital. Nothing was done behind the backs of the supremos at the PGR, the Secretariat of the Interior and Sedena.

The suitcase ritual continued during the presidency of José López Portillo (1976–82). It was during his term that, in 1978, Miguel Nazar Haro took charge of the DFS. Nazar, a favorite of the CIA, was to play a leading part in the story of US government tolerance of and aid to the international drug trade.
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In 1976, an eradication campaign in collaboration with the US, known as Operation Condor, was launched under the command of General José Hernández Toledo. Yet “in those days the drug traffickers operated by different rules. They would never attack the civilian population or a public official, however lowly his position. There was respect for authority and a clear division between the sides. It wasn’t
like today, when drug traffickers are public servants, there’s no separation, and you can’t see where the line is.”

In his fourth annual state of the nation report, President López Portillo referred for the first time to the “war” on drugs, in emulation of President Reagan.

It was the first time, as far as I can remember, that a president spoke of it in public. Javier García Paniagua [the head of the DFS before Nazar] began to involve the DFS in drug trafficking, no longer to control it, but to join in; what earlier wasn’t seen as corruption now began to be corruption. The phase known as the “years of control” lasted from Echeverría until 1982, with the difference that by López Portillo’s time the volume of produce was considerable. During de la Madrid’s presidency, everything began to change.

Moral renewal

Miguel de la Madrid began his six-year term in office in 1982 with the slogan of “moral renewal.” However, many leading figures from the previous administrations of Echeverría and López Portillo took positions in the new government, and they had no intention of behaving “morally.”

Ronald Reagan was beginning his second year as president, while Vice President George H. W. Bush was the next most powerful man in the US administration. In Mexico, the secretary of defense was General Juan Arévalo Gardoqui, one-time commander of the Fifth Military Zone, in Chihuahua. A controversial figure from Jalisco, Sergio García Ramírez, was attorney general, and the secretary of the interior was Manuel Bartlett. From that time on, the US government would never lose sight of any of them. As under secretary of the interior there appeared a military man, Jorge Carrillo Olea—someone who over the years would become key to understanding the current situation of insecurity and impunity in the country. Chief of the DFS was José Antonio Zorrilla, while Manuel Ibarra headed the PJF. Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, the legendary leader of the DFS, was officially made director general of roads and bridges, but continued
to pull the strings in the intelligence agency at the Secretariat of the Interior.

“Sergio García sent the commanders most trusted by the new government team to head the regional offices of the PGR and federal police located along the main trafficking routes,” recalled The Informer. That was how the fine line between drug traffickers and public officials began to blur.

The taxes paid by the drug traffickers began to turn into direct payments to politicians and state officials. Fortunes were made and political projects got financed, but the levers of control over the traffickers began to be lost. García sent in people he could trust, not to control the traffickers but to take their place. The regional coordinators of the PJF ceased to be policemen and became drug traffickers, who used the professional traffickers for their own ends.

One of García’s trusted acolytes was Guillermo González Calderoni, whom he had released from jail, and now sent to Tamaulipas. “On the one hand, these policemen created drug traffickers of their own to do their dirty work and the actual trafficking for them. On the other, they gave support and protection to some of the most important drug barons, in exchange for money which no longer went into government coffers or to buy equipment, but into the pockets of politicians.” The Informer went on:

That’s how the organization of the Arellano Félix brothers was born. It was Commander Salvador Peralta who taught the Arellano Félixes how to work when they were still just third-rate car thieves and smugglers. He gave them equipment to intercept communications so they could find out where the goods were heading, steal them, and then share the proceeds with Peralta.

When González Calderoni arrived in Tamaulipas he became good friends with [Gulf Cartel lynchpin] Juan García Ábrego. Very soon, González turned a local band of people smugglers into important drug traffickers. It was he who provided protection for Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo and Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

In 1987, González Calderoni was head of the PJF in Guadalajara, where he met Félix Gallardo, according to letters sent to journalists by the drug baron from the Almoloya de Juárez maximum security prison.
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Explaining that “the nub of cocaine trafficking was in the state of Oaxaca,” The Informer described his experience of the transportation arrangements:

The Cessnas flew down to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec—in Oaxaca state—from Tijuana, Juárez, and Matamoros, picked up the cocaine and returned to their home base, where the storage centers were. Sometimes the US government came for the merchandise in person. Its planes might equally be carrying Colombian pelo rojo [red marijuana] or cocaine. I saw it with my own eyes. In the early 1980s, when I was in Puerto Escondido, I had to look after a US Air Force plane that arrived with a load of pelo rojo from Colombia. The only difference between Mexican and Colombian marijuana is the color: the red kind is extra prized, even today. This plane landed at Puerto Escondido to refuel, and went on to the United States.

Any contacts between the Mexican drug lords and their Colombian colleagues had to be through the goverment. Anybody who wanted to buy cocaine, Félix Gallardo, El Chapo Guzmán, El Azul, anybody, they had to do it through the government.

The figures, dates, and events narrated by The Informer coincide in time with the CIA’s Iran-Contra plan, which encompassed an area from Colombia to Mexico. Obsessed with its anti-communist mission in Latin America, denied resources by Congress, the unscrupulous CIA fell into the arms of the narcotic traffickers.

From Medellín to Guadalajara

Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros, known as El Negro, is remembered as the man who offered to pay off the national debt of his country, Honduras. They say he made the proposal directly to the then president, José Azcona Hoyo, but was turned down.

In Matta Ballesteros, everything is dark: the colour of his hair, his skin, and his shifty eyes, his violent character and his history as a trafficker. In the hearings of the Kerry subcommittee on the Iran-Contra affair, his name came up repeatedly, as did that of his company, Setco. Setco was an airline hired by the CIA to carry “humanitarian aid” to the Contras, in spite of all the evidence the agency had that Matta was a drug trafficker—or perhaps precisely because of that.

In 1977, El Negro Matta had forged the link between the Medellín and Guadalajara cartels, when he introduced the Colombian, José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha—one of the founders of the Medellín Cartel—to Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo. The two drug barons soon struck up a close understanding.

Rodríguez Gacha was born to a peasant family. He began his rise in the midst of a violent conflict in the emerald-producing region of Colombia. He was only just twenty-nine when he joined the organization being set up by Pablo Escobar Gaviria, along with Carlos Lehder and the Ochoa brothers Fabio, Juan David, and Jorge Luis. When he met Félix Gallardo, he was thirty. At that time, the Guadalajara Cartel was simply a well-organized operation ferrying marijuana and heroin into the United States. Rodríguez opened Félix Gallardo’s eyes to a more appealing business: cocaine. For much smaller volumes, the profits were vastly higher.

Rodríguez Gacha felt so at home with the “Mexican model” that his taste for mariachi culture soon earned him the nickname of El Mexicano. He developed the eccentric habit of naming his Colombian ranches after Mexican states and cities, like Cuernavaca, Chihuahua, Sonora, or Mazatlán. The fake “war on drugs” begun by Reagan did not mean the Medellín Cartel distanced itself from US territory; on the contrary, it helped it get closer.

The biggest narco of them all was CIA

In 1981, a curious character entered the story of the Medellín and Guadalajara cartels, and of the Matta Ballesteros group: the multi-faceted Adler Berriman Seal, better known as Barry Seal. Seal became the perfect combination. “The biggest drug smuggler in American history was a CIA agent,” wrote Daniel Hopsicker in the
Washington
Weekly
in August 1997. In fact, Seal, with his sparkling eyes and knowing expression, had a triple personality: in addition to flying planes for the Medellín Cartel, he was an undercover agent for the CIA and later for the DEA.
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Like El Negro Matta, Barry Seal worked for the CIA supporting the Nicaraguan Contras.
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The connection between these two, and between both of them and the Medellín and Guadalajara cartels, was by no means fortuitous.

Seal’s wife, Deborah, stated that he had begun to do occasional jobs for the CIA in the 1950s.
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In 1972 he was arrested in New Orleans in a DC4, accused of trying to fly explosives to anti-Castro Cubans operating in Mexico. Thirteen years later, this same plane was the link between Seal and El Negro. The aircraft was used by a company called Hondu Carib to carry aid for the Contras to Honduras, before being loaded up with drugs destined for the United States. The owner of the company was one Frank Moss. Previously, Moss had worked as a pilot for El Negro’s airline, Setco, which like Hondu Carib received funds from the CIA.

Moss flew from Florida with the weapons for the Contras; on the way back from Honduras with the drugs, he would make a stopover in Mérida and load some frozen fish to distract the US customs.

Barry Seal began to work officially as a pilot for the Medellín Cartel in 1981. He soon moved on from flying light aircraft with 100 kgs of cocaine to flying a plane that could carry a ton. It is said this miracle was achieved by the CIA, spurred by its impatience to get more resources to the Contras. Being so productive, Seal became very important to Pablo Escobar and his organization. And they paid him well for his services: $1.5 million per round journey, according to his own account.

Barry Seal began to land his main drug flights for the Medellín Cartel at Mena airport, in Arkansas—whose Democratic Party governor was then Bill Clinton, before he became the country’s forty-second president in 1993. From 1981 to 1985, Mena was a foremost center for international smuggling. According to estimates by the Internal Revenue Service and the DEA, as well as to sworn testimonies, the volume of cocaine and heroin being trafficked at that time was several thousand kilograms, and the profits reached hundreds of millions of dollars.