Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (16 page)

On January 19, 2001, the drug baron’s prison routine came to an end. Guzmán changed into black clothes. No one could see him in his cell. Behind the sheets he’d tied to the bars he had built his own private space, out of sight of the prison guards—who were always attentive to his wishes—or his fellow prisoners El Güero Palma and Arturo Martínez Herrera, El Texas. His stay hadn’t been too bad after all, thanks to his pals, and his disdain for the rules.

El Chapo raised a plastic cup and took a swig of rum and cola. His final toast in Puente Grande was to himself, and drunk in the solitude that was his true nature. Everything was planned and ready well in advance. Each piece was in place. Nothing could go wrong.

Two months earlier, on the evening of November 21, 2000, the first warden of Almoloya prison and former head of the PJF, Juan Pablo de Tavira, had been shot four times in a university dining hall in Hidalgo. Two weeks after that, on December 3, in a manner reminiscent of the murder of de Tavira, a man entered a modest house in the Haciendas del Valle projects of Zapopan, in Jalisco state. Once in the living room
he opened fire. Fifty-one-year-old Juan Castillo Alonso was mown down in front of his wife, son, and grandchildren. As in the earlier killing of the ex-warden of Almoloya, the gunman vanished without trace. Juan Castillo had been assistant warden of the maximum security prisons of Almoloya and Puente Grande, and was close to de Tavira.
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In March 1999, when he left his job at Puente Grande, he was replaced by Dámaso López Núnez, who arrived with a whole team from Sinaloa.

The two crimes had to be connected. The corpses of the two men were trying to speak, but the authorities couldn’t decipher the message. Both officials knew the high security prisons inside out. They knew exactly what could happen and what could not. That was the key to their deaths.

Before he was executed, de Tavira had confided to friends his concerns about levels of corruption at Puente Grande. He complained that the reforms he’d introduced had been thrown out overnight: “the filthy drug dealers run the prison.” The rumors circulating in the corridors of the Secretariat of the Interior and the Human Rights Commission were bound to reach his ears, sooner or later. The event heralded by Castillo and de Tavira’s deaths finally took place on January 19, 2001 at Puente Grande, hours after El Chapo Guzmán tossed his prison uniform onto the top bunk.

Hotel Puente Grande

From Corridor 1A in Block 3 you could see the cell number, 307, painted in blue on a white background. But the view into the cell was blocked by three beige sheets hung like curtains.
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Curtains in a maximum security prison? Epifanio Salazar, the director general of forensic services, must have asked himself as he stood in the doorway to El Chapo’s accommodation and examined the way the bars were covered. This was the height of impunity, as he saw further when he drew back the sheets to reveal a space measuring ten feet by thirteen, as snug and cozy as an egg—indeed, the walls were painted bright yellow. There was a pair of built-in concrete bunk beds, a concrete table with a bench, and another bed that didn’t seem to belong. The floor was of polished cement, splashed in places with the same yellow paint used on the walls.

Outside the so-called high security prison, located at kilometer 17.5 of the Zapotlanejo freeway, the media were desperate for a story, for any kind of a lead. How could the drug baron have escaped from a prison that had been specifically designed to prevent this from happening?

The alarm had been raised a little more than twenty-four hours earlier, when the drug trafficker hadn’t been found in his cell. The signs of El Chapo’s last minutes there were still fresh. The first thing that Salazar examined was the bunks. On the bottom bed there was a peach-colored pillow with a white pillowcase waiting to be put on, a brown blanket with coffee-colored edging, two white sheets and a duvet. On the top bed El Chapo had left his shirt, pants, jacket, and some unbranded fawn shorts. There was also a large white towel hooked on the bunk’s ladder, and that unforgettable khaki baseball cap with no logo that features so clearly in the prison photos of Guzmán that have been published hundreds of times in recent years.

On the bed there was also a fawn sweatshirt, on the lower part of which the number 516 had been scrawled in black marker pen; three pairs of white socks, two Hugo Boss t-shirts, size M, and three underpants of the same make and color. Beside the bunks were three shelves for the prisoner to keep his personal effects. They looked like the shelves in a grocery store. On the top shelf were packets of Ruffles potato chips, Lara cookies, and Canapinas crackers, Ricolino chocolate almonds, a bag of assorted sweets, some chocolate cereal, and two pieces of amaranth-seed candy wrapped in cellophane. Of course all these items would be forbidden under the prison rules, let alone by any nutritionist in their right mind. But Joaquín Guzmán’s appetite was insatiable.

On the middle shelf stood some pink Hinds skin cream, a razor, and a packet of paper handkerchiefs. On the bottom shelf El Chapo had left an open bottle of Snoopy baby oil, a small blue jar of Nivea cream, a blue plastic tub of Gillette shaving cream, a Pro toothbrush, some white Hinds hand cream, a tube of Colgate toothpaste, and a bottle of Folicure shampoo, against premature hair loss. On one of the shelves stood a plastic cup containing the dregs of his last drink.

To the right of the small room was a washstand with a round basin where Guzmán had left two eroded bars of green soap. In the
corner was a white toilet. On the table lay twelve school books, a dictionary, and the small Bible he frequently read. The only thing El Chapo had taken with him were his books on Mexican history and geography. The drug baron’s sneaker collection was no longer in the cell, but the hundreds of statements made by prison employees say he had as many as twenty pairs of Reeboks and Nikes—a fortune in sports shoes.

El Güero and El Chapo, together again

El Chapo started his sentence with three years in the Almoloya de Juárez prison in the State of Mexico. Little is known of his daily life there. Juan Pablo de Tavira came to know him well. As warden, he had the job of admitting him on June 9, 1993. The following year, de Tavira left to become head of the PJF. On one occasion someone asked him which of the drug lords he’d had in the prison was the most dangerous. “El Chapo,” he answered without hesitation, before adding: “Guzmán is a quiet, disciplined man who obeys all the rules without complaint. But when he looks at you, you can see the hatred in his eyes; he is a dangerous man.”

On November 21, 1995, Guzmán succeeded in getting transferred to the Puente Grande facility, then under the direction of Leonardo Beltrán Santana. That day an official letter, reference number 12879/95, arrived at Almoloya from the General Directorate of Prevention and Rehabilitation—part of the Secretariat of the Interior—whose head was Luis Rivera de Montes de Oca. It requested the drug trafficker to be moved to another prison, according to the documents seen by the author. After a swift review of Guzmán’s administrative file (0451/AJ/93), no reason was found not to transfer the dangerous inmate.

El Chapo was facing a string of lawsuits: for bribery, for felonies against public health—in the form of possession of cocaine and diazepam—for trafficking marijuana and cocaine, for unlawful assembly, and for homicide. By 1995 he had only been sentenced on one count, to seven years and nine months in prison, but there were four other cases pending. Such circumstances were no barrier to his being transferred in under twenty-four hours to Jalisco. On
November 22, 1995, at 1:55 a.m., Guzmán was handed over to prison staff from Puente Grande by officials from the PGR. El Chapo had taken an important step towards freedom.

At Puente Grande, Guzmán met up again with his old partner, El Güero Palma, who had been held there since June 27 of that year. Palma had won fame and power working for Amado Carrillo Fuentes since 1993, when the two of them had delivered up El Chapo. However, his luck had suddenly changed. On June 12, 1995, El Güero boarded a Learjet 36 in the company of two bodyguards, flying from Ciudad Obregón to Guadalajara. El Güero’s plane crashed, but he survived. Everything seemed to be back under control until, on June 23, the military police burst into the house where El Güero was recovering. Someone must have betrayed him, revealing his whereabouts and the delicate state of his health. There was nowhere to run. Not even his pistol, with its butt encrusted with diamonds and emeralds in the shape of a palm tree—his symbol—was enough to bribe the soldiers. Far from us to suggest that they were incorruptible. But orders were orders: the implacable Amado Carrillo Fuentes had leaked the information about El Güero to his henchmen in the Mexican army.

The re-encounter between El Chapo and El Güero strengthened both of them. It’s not known whether Palma ever had the guts to confess to El Chapo that he and Carrillo Fuentes had betrayed him by telling Fatty Coello that he was in Guatemala. But soon after, from behind the bars at Puente Grande, the two of them watched their boss, Amado, fall.

Gutiérrez Rebollo and Amado Carrillo’s green army

Amado Carrillo Fuentes’s reign began to come to an end on February 5, 1997, with the arrest of General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, head of the National Anti-Drugs Institute (INCD) attached to the PGR, when Jorge Madrazo was attorney general. The general had been appointed to that post by President Ernesto Zedillo in 1996. The president was looking for someone with a broad knowledge of the drug cartels and tough enough to fight them. Gutiérrez came from a rural background in Morelos state, and his CV suggested he was the
best man for the job. (He also came with a recommendation from the then defense secretary, Enrique Cervantes Aguirre.) Those who know him describe him as brusque, ignorant, and coarse.

In 1989, when Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo’s star was on the wane, Gutiérrez worked at the third regional command which included Sinaloa. Later, from 1989 to 1996, he was in charge of the Fifth Military Region in Jalisco, where he scored some hits: for example, the capture of El Güero Palma and the arrest of the Lupercio brothers, who were important members of the Arellano Félix cartel. Gutiérrez was effective because he was getting his information from Carrillo Fuentes and his gang.

Enrique González Rosas, from Jalisco, had three sons: Eduardo, Enrique, and René. In public they posed as growers and cattle ranchers. In fact, they were members of the Pacific organization based in Guadalajara. The family started out in the drug business in the 1980s, working for Félix Gallardo; when that kingpin fell, they went to work with Amado Carrillo Fuentes. In the 1990s, Eduardo González Quirarte was identified by the DEA as a key player in Carrillo Fuentes’s organization, with links to the Army and various elements of the Mexican judicial system. El Flaco, as he was known, was responsible for sending cocaine shipments to the United States and seeing that the profits came back to Mexico.
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When General Gutiérrez was head of the Fifth Military Region, El Flaco González got in touch and asked if he could rent some land on the Zapopan military airbase. The family began by growing maize on Secretariat of Defense land, and ended up leaking information about drug shipments, or the whereabouts of Amado Carrillo’s rivals.

González gradually tightened the net around Gutiérrez Rebollo. Several people acted as liaison: Sub Lieutenant Juan Galván Lara, the general’s chauffeur; the teacher Gerardo López, son of Luis Octavio López, who was involved with El Chapo Guzmán, and Sub-Lieutenant Pedro Haro, another of Gutiérrez’s drivers, who subsequently became El Flaco’s bodyguard.

After Gutiérrez Rebollo was made anti-drug czar, he asked González, through Galván, for an apartment to house one of his lovers, Lilia. Galván arranged to meet González himself in Mexico
City, at number 1000, Calle de Tamarindo, in Bosques de las Lomas, to see if the accommodation was suitable. When he arrived at the door, he got a shock.

“Let me introduce you to Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the Lord of the Skies,” El Flaco said to the general’s chauffeur. “You should be proud to meet him. There are a lot of people who want to.”

“How do you do? I’m Juan Galván,” responded the shaken sublieutenant, as he held out his hand.

Amado looked nothing like the bearded hippie in the press photos of the time. He had a long face with an aquiline nose, green eyes, no facial hair, and no scars. He was almost as tall as El Flaco, but more sturdily built. What most stood out was the nervous tic in his left eye whenever he fixed his gaze on something.

“Amado Carrillo, pleased to meet you,” he said, giving him a big embrace as if they were old friends. “Eduardo has told me all about you.”

“My compadre knows about the general’s request,” explained Eduardo. “If you don’t mind waiting, the keys will be here in a moment so you can see the apartment and then show it to the lady.”

That day they showed the general’s chauffeur a profusion of houses and apartments to choose from. Within weeks the general’s lover was installed in an apartment belonging to Carrillo Fuentes in the residential district of Tecamachalco, State of Mexico. The head of the anti-drug institute himself lived there at the end of 1996, something that came up as the first piece of evidence against him, and the main justification for his arrest.

Once General Gutiérrez Rebollo was put on trial, his driver Galván turned protected witness for the PGR, and his account of the general’s relations with El Flaco and El Señor de los Cielos was taken as absolute truth. In self-defense, Gutiérrez insisted the secretary of defense had full knowledge of all his movements, and the only reason he himself had been in contact with Eduardo González was to get information about the drug cartels. As proof, he said that on at least three occasions, at the end of 1996 and the beginning of 1997, González had attended meetings with Defense Secretary Enrique Cervantes Aguirre and a group of generals in the Sedena offices.
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