Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (17 page)

Someone once said that in Mexico, politicians and public officials “are not punished for their felonies, but for their mistakes.” It seems that General Gutiérrez’s big mistake was to tell Secretary Cervantes that he possessed photos and recordings linking President Zedillo’s family to the González Quirarte brothers. One of the president’s cousins, León Zedillo, had worked for years in Zapopan at a food processing plant they owned, called Camichinez. The families were so close that when the president’s first cousin got married in 1997, the wedding party was held at that same factory. The celebration was presided over by Rodolfo Zedillo, Ernesto Zedillo’s father.
⁵
It was Don Rodolfo who made the speech congratulating the couple, in which he also paid tribute to the González brothers as “exemplary young entrepreneurs.”

Gutiérrez Rebollo produced various pieces of evidence: a video of the wedding, and photographs of the party which showed President Zedillo’s father and cousin with the González brothers. But when he told this story in the dock, it was ignored. Every time he started to talk about the links between other public officials and the Carrillo Fuentes cartel, the prosecutor shut him up, telling him he could only testify if it was to confess his own guilt.

Gutiérrez was accused by military prosecutors and the PGR of abuse of authority, corruption, offenses against public health, infringement of the Federal Law against Organized Crime, and illegal arms stockpiling. He was sentenced to more than seventy years in prison, and now resides in the Altiplano federal penitentiary. For three years we have used the federal freedom of information legislation to try to obtain from the PGR a copy of the initial investigation against General Gutiérrez. They refused. On the grounds of res judicata, in 2007 the Federal Freedom of Information Institute (IFAI) ordered the investigation to be produced; but the PGR appealed.

The Gutiérrez Rebollo case is one of the most important for understanding the degree of connivance between the Mexican authorities and the drug traffickers. Why are they so reluctant to make it public? In spite of everything, it has been possible to obtain some of the statements taken in the course of the general’s trial. They contain names of state officials and military brass who have never been tried,
or even investigated, for their apparent collusion with Carrillo Fuentes’s organization. The list is a long one, and some on it were still in public service under Felipe Calderón.
⁶

• Justo Ceja, former private secretary to Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

• Brigadier General Enrique Cervantes Aguirre, secretary of defense in the administration of Ernesto Zedillo.

• General Vinicio Santoyo, former commander of the Fifth Military Region—before Gutiérrez Rebollo—deceased in 1998.

• General Francisco Javier Velarde Quintero, regional coordinator in Colima of the organization of retired military officers, Alianza Nacional Revolucionaria, in 2006.

• General Luis Mucel Luna, Calderón’s director of the Investigative and Preventive Police Training Center, in Chiapas.

• General Augusto Moisés García Ochoa, Calderón’s administrative director at Sedena.

Rest in peace

On July 5, 1997, the Mexican media reported that at the age of forty-two, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the all-powerful Señor de los Cielos, had died in the elite Santa Mónica clinic in Mexico City, after plastic surgery that went horribly wrong. El Chapo and El Güero had color TV in their respective cells, so no doubt they followed every detail of the news. The death happened on the night of July 4; next day, Carrillo Fuentes’s body was taken to the García López funeral parlor in Colonia Juárez, before being conveyed to the San Martín funeral chapel in Culiacán, where it was confiscated by the PGR. All that starts comes to an end. No drug baron can hold sway forever, and The Lord of the Skies knew it all too well. After almost a decade at the top, Amado Carrillo had left the drug business.

It was a matter of “national pride” that Carrillo Fuentes stayed on the FBI’s Fifteen Most Wanted list from October 1995 until June 2002. The Mexican trafficker was regarded as so important that the US agency devoted more hours and more staff to investigating him than they did to Osama bin Laden. The FBI saw Carrillo Fuentes’s criminal gang as the main drug trafficking operation in Mexico.
⁷

In the United States, the DEA confirmed the gangster’s death two days after it was announced, without saying how they had reached this conclusion. In Mexico, the PGR still wasn’t prepared to assert that the deceased really was the feared drug baron.
⁸
From the start there had been speculation over whether the corpse at the Santa Mónica hospital was that of Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Suspicions grew when the authorities were unable to confirm anything for five days.
⁹
We know that after it was confiscated, the body in question was taken to the Military Hospital. One senior officer involved in intelligence at the time has told us that he is convinced the body was not Amado’s.
¹⁰

Several of the drug trafficker’s employees, who knew him well, were contacted in the course of the enquiries, said this source. Apparently, Amado had two unmistakable identifying marks: a dark, hairy mole on his back, and a prominent scar on one buttock. The corpse in the Santa Mónica didn’t have either, according to our informant. After his “death,” one of Carrillo Fuentes’s girlfriends, La Quemada, disappeared off the face of the earth. And the employee who saw most of him, Jaime Olvera, who was apparently the one who said the body wasn’t his, was executed in 1998 when he was a protected witness for the PGR—he’d talked too much. Carrillo Fuentes’s people reckon that Amado pulled the trigger himself.

Mexican government sources say that after faking his death, El Señor de los Cielos moved to Cuba; and that when Fidel Castro distanced himself from Carlos Salinas, he asked Salinas to remove two people from the island: Justo Ceja, his former personal secretary, and Amado Carrillo Fuentes. In 1997, the
Washington Post
revealed a little-known fact about Carrillo’s life that lends credibility to this version: the drug baron had a second family in Cuba. Very few people are in a position to know for sure whether Carrillo is alive or dead. What is certain is that he retired from organized crime. The leadership of his organization was taken over by his younger brother, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, known as El Viceroy.

Those who know him say that Vicente Carrillo lacked his brother’s talent for leadership. Although El Mayo Zambada and El Azul respected him for who he was, they doubted his ability to hold the Pacific organization together. Arturo Beltrán Leyva was loyal to him,
and that bolstered his strength. But his sometimes quick-tempered and violent character made him less than the ideal candidate to replace El Señor de los Cielos. The only other possible successor was Juan José Álvarez, El Compadre, regarded as the financial brains behind the Juárez Cartel. But friends say he never sought the top job, because he respected Amado too much to challenge his brother. The throne remained vacant.

After Amado’s death, the Pacific organization was formally split in two: the Sinaloa Cartel, led by El Mayo Zambada, and the Juárez Cartel, under the command of El Viceroy Carrillo. Although the two groups continued to work together in some areas of the business, their overall might had diminished.

Bankers to the Pacific organization

While exporting historic quantities of hard and soft drugs to the United States, Amado Carrillo Fuentes forged close links with the Mexican political, military, and business class, who gladly laundered the millions of dollars he gave them. Carrillo not only had connections with Raúl Salinas; his organization was also tied to bankers like Roberto Hernández, the erstwhile proprietor of Banamex. In 1997, the Yucatán newspaper
Por Esto!
published an article based on photographs allegedly taken on the beaches of Punta Pájaros, Hernández’s private island off Felipe Carrillo Puerto, in Quintana Roo state. The article said this was where shipments of cocaine were stored, after arriving from Colombia on speedboats guarded by armed men.

In 1998, Banamex, along with other Mexican banks, was involved in the Operation Casablanca scandal. This was a secret, three-year investigation by the US Treasury Department, which discovered that a number of banks were laundering money for the Carrillo Fuentes organization and for the Cali Cartel. The Mexican government learnt of the findings just minutes before they were made public. Among the other banks involved in the laundering of more than $100 million were Bancomer and Banca Confía. Some lesser employees were sent to prison, but never the big fish, the board members.

The links between Mexican banks and the drug traffic were nothing new. Ever since the 1980s, the DEA had identified the head of the
Mexican Association of Bankers, Arcadio Valenzuela, as “the patriarch of money laundering,” who carried out white-collar work for Félix Gallardo and Caro Quintero. The Mexican government never took any notice of the DEA’s accusations. For his part, our Informer alleged that Banamex had also received money from Juan García Ábrego, and when the latter was arrested, Roberto Hernández kept his entire fortune for himself. “García Abrego’s wife, who was very beautiful as it happens, even went to a Banamex board meeting to demand the money, but they never gave it back.”

Between 1999 and 2001, Banamex faced fresh allegations of money laundering, which this time also involved the organization which Amado Carrillo had led. The DEA accused Banamex of carrying out financial operations with money from the drug trafficking proceeds of Mario Villanueva, the former governor of Quintana Roo (who was finally extradited to the US in May 2010). According to the US government, between 1993 and 1999 the former governor “provided federal and state support” to Amado Carrillo’s cartel.
¹¹
Thanks to the investigative work of the DEA office in Quintana Roo, in May 2001 the newly installed government of Vicente Fox had the narco-governor arrested.

In 2009, Vicente Carrillo Leyva, Amado’s son, described his father’s links not only with the Army and the police, but also with prominent businessmen. The thirty-two-year-old junior trafficker, nicknamed El Ingeniero, the Engineer, had been arrested on April 1 while jogging in a park near his home in Bosque de las Lomas.
¹²
The PGR accused him of playing a leading role in the cartel, and of concealing the proceeds of drug trafficking when the organization was taken over by his uncle, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, El Viceroy.
¹³
When he made his statement in the cold cells of the Organized Crime Special Investigations Unit (SIEDO), Vicente Carrillo Leyva said that after his father’s death in 1997, he, his mother, and his brothers went through his father’s hidden safes in search of money, but they couldn’t find more than $7 million. El Señor de los Cielos was so modern that the secret coves where the old Mexican and Colombian drug barons used to bury their money seemed old-fashioned and impractical to him.

Vicente Carrillo Leyva went cap in hand to his uncle, El Viceroy, and to his father’s other partners, to demand the family’s share of the assets. But they laughed in his face. The new head of the cartel, his uncle, assured him that Amado didn’t have any assets: all he had had been embargoed, or sold to pay off “debts,” so there was nothing left.
¹⁴

The cheated son continued doing the rounds. In 1998 he met with Juan Alberto Zepeda Méndez, his father’s alleged front-man and private secretary to the businessman Jaime Camil Garza, a friend of President Zedillo. Vicente knew his father had bought $30 million worth of shares in the Grupo Financiero Anáhuac through Zepeda, and he wanted the money back.

Directly or indirectly, the Anuáhauc group represented the confluence of the interests of two “presidential” families, the de la Madrids and the Zedillos. When Carrillo Leyva asked Zepeda to return his father’s investment, he received the excuse that the National Banking Commission had the Anáhuac under surveillance, so unfortunately he couldn’t oblige.
¹⁵

Amado Carrillo had purchased his shares in the bank through the good offices of Jorge Bastida Gallardo (a business partner of Zedillo’s brother Rodolfo), as well as those of Zepeda; a prominent PAN politician, Diego Fernández de Cevallos, was also paid to help in the deal. Fernández never hid his connections with Bastida, nor the latter’s with Carrillo Fuentes, but the shady coincidences don’t stop there: the PAN politican was also the legal representative of both the clinic and the funeral parlor associated with Amado Carrillo’s demise.

After his capture, Vicente Carrillo Leyva vengefully declared to the PGR that Zepeda was dealing in ephedrine with the Sinaloa Cartel. But no action was ever taken, even though the SIEDA had arrested narcotic traffickers and public servants on the other side—i.e., enemies of El Chapo Guzmán—for far less than that, over the last four years.

Military intelligence sources maintain that Jaime Camil Garza (Zepeda’s former employer) often hung out with El Chapo in Acapulco. In a photograph of the pair on Guzmán’s yacht, you can also spot an attractive young woman with a nose job: Maru Hernández, at the time a close aide to President Fox’s wife, Marta Sahagún,
and known to reminisce anxiously about “suitcases” she collected from Acapulco. Camil himself cultivated successive presidents, first Zedillo, then Fox. Before the 2012 election, he became very friendly with Enrique Peña Nieto, the current head of state.

Helpful neighbors

In April 1999, El Chapo Guzmán and El Güero Palma got some news that would be to their advantage: Commander Dámaso López Nuñez was taking over as assistant warden of Puente Grande, while Leonardo Beltrán Santana was coming back as warden. And these changes were not fortuitous: it seems El Chapo had just the right contacts to make sure certain things happened. At the beginning of 1999, the secretary of the interior, Francisco Labastida Ochoa, a former governor of Sinaloa state and PRI candidate for the Mexican presidency in 2000, made a number of appointments within the Secretariat that were to transform the situation inside Puente Grande. Especially for El Chapo.