Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (24 page)

Pérez Rodríguez testified the same day. Judge Machorro heard an identical script: the head of the federal prison service never dreamed that El Chapo was planning to escape.

In the end, there was only one way Tello and Pérez could be linked to El Chapo’s escape: the evidence of Antonio Aguilar Garzón. The retired major was called as a defense witness on behalf of the guards
and other Puente Grande staff. However, he was unable to appear: in May 2002 he died in a mysterious car accident as he drove to work along the Mexico-Cuernavaca highway.

After El Chapo’s escape, Felipe Leaños, the first prison officer to denounce corruption there, stayed on at Puente Grande and even became commander of his sector. However, according to a freedom of information request made for this book, his last day on the job was May 15, 2007. Although “the motive is unknown,” his former colleagues say he was found dead in a sack in a Guadalajara back street. As for the other warder to present a similar complaint, Claudio Ríos, the most recent information is that in April 2009 he was still a commander at Puente Grande prison.

In January 2005, Luis Fernández, the former assistant warden of that prison, spoke for the first time from his cell in Mexico City’s Federal District. He had been incarcerated for almost five years and still hadn’t been sentenced.
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Fernández repeated what he had told the public prosecutors in 2001, that it was Miguel Ángel Yunes who had invited him to work in the maximum security prisons. He also talked about El Chapo Guzmán: he described him as tidy and diffident, never overbearing or rude, and “very intelligent.” He said El Chapo read a lot about the history and geography of Mexico.

Maintaining his innocence, Fernández recalled how after the escape “Federal Police took control of the prison, we were all shut into the hall, and armed personnel in balaclavas moved in.” His lawyer, Eduardo Sahagún, emphasized that the PGR had always avoided conducting a reconstruction of the events. Soon after that interview, Luis Fernández was released and allowed to complete his trial proceedings outside jail.

Nine years after Guzmán’s escape, in 2010, only six of the sixty-two defendants charged were still in prison. One of the most shocking cases was that of Leonardo Beltrán himself. For just over nine years the former warden of Puente Grande was lodged in the VIP wing of the Oriente prison. Tall, thin, with grey hair and tired eyes behind his spectacles, he was always very discreet. He paid his dues in silence, and never betrayed those who had really orchestrated and
carried out the escape—the escape of a gangster who now has the entire country cowed by a climate of uncontrollable violence. In 2009, the Fifth Criminal Court of the Federal District sentenced Beltrán to eighteen years and nine months in prison, but the Fourth Unitary Criminal Court, in spite of the evidence against him, reduced the sentence to barely eleven and a half years.
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In fact, soon afterwards, on June 24, 2010, Beltrán left the Oriente prison. He didn’t have to escape. Why should he? He was freed by the Federal Administration for Social Rehabilitation, courtesy of the then secretary of public security, Genaro García Luna.
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Wanted: adviser with drug trafficking experience

In 2006, Jorge Tello Peón returned to public office during the handover from the Fox government to that of Felipe Calderón. For some reason the latter wanted him as his secretary of public security. The shadow cast by the escape of the country’s main drug baron did nothing to temper the president-elect’s enthusiasm for the Cemex executive. At the time it was rumored that Genaro García Luna would head the PFP; his disastrous spell in charge of the PJF, which later became the Federal Investigations Agency (AFI), did not suggest he’d get anything better. Tello was cautious. He turned the job down for “health reasons”—apparently an incurable cancer—and pushed the ever servile García Luna to take it instead. Eventually, on November 30, 2006, Calderón announced that García Luna would indeed lead the Secretariat of Public Security (SSP).

Two years later, Tello did agree to return to public office. On October 19, 2008, the president made him his adviser in the fake war on drugs. The fact is that the advice of the former under secretary of public security, whatever it may have been, did not help to win the “war.” The violence only got worse.

The following year, on March 25, 2009, Tello became executive secretary of the National Public Security System, which came under García Luna’s jurisdiction. The pupil had overtaken his teacher. Of course, García Luna had changed a lot since the time he had blocked any investigation of Tello for El Chapo’s escape. Now he didn’t need anyone. His proximity to Calderón gave him unbounded power.
When men like García suffer humiliation at the hands of their bosses in order to go up in the world, once they get to the top they want nothing more than to crush their former mentors. At first Tello tried to distance himself from García Luna. He even denied it was he who had recommended him to the president. His offspring had grown more than he’d intended. After a few months under the secretary’s yoke, demoralized by García Luna’s bullying behavior, Tello Peón retreated. He asked to be moved, and his request was granted.

Turf wars

At the beginning of 2009, from his confinement in the Altiplano prison in Almoloya, the one-time drug baron Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo gave a written interview to journalist Diego Enrique Osorno. There is one basic fact in his account that puts El Chapo Guzmán’s escape in proper perspective: “Senior officials came to Altiplano and offered some of the best known inmates to escape. Nobody accepted.”

Some prisoners at Altiplano say one of these officials proposing “escape” was Miguel Ángel Yunes Linares. The politician from Veracruz state had, they suggest, made the offer while Ernesto Zedillo was still president, and he himself was chief adviser to Interior Secretary Diódoro Carrasco, another long-time Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) figure who had recently defected to the PAN.

In 2004, after Yunes resigned from the PRI, the leader of the teachers’ union (SNTE), Elba Esther Gordillo, got him a good job in the sphere of national security. In spite of his poor record as director general of the prison service, on January 1, 2005, Yunes was appointed under secretary for citizen participation in the Secretariat of Public Security; in 2006, Fox made him executive secretary of the National Public Security System, giving him even more power in that area. Contrary to expectations, Yunes survived the change of presidency. Calderón must have seen him as useful in some way or other, making him director of the Public Employees’ Social Security Institute (ISSSTE). Later, in June 2008, Yunes joined the PAN and clad himself in its protective blue mantle.

We should remember that at the time of El Chapo’s escape, Yunes was no longer head of the prison service at federal level. That post had been taken over by Pérez Rodríguez, who had been his private secretary back when Yunes was secretary of the interior for Veracruz state. Nonetheless, it is said that Yunes was well aware of the repeated warnings of a possible escape. After Guzmán’s escape, Pérez waited a prudent time before returning to public office. And when he did, alongside his friend and former boss, it was done with great discretion, almost imperceptibly. In February 2007, Yunes made him ISSSTE delegate in the Federal District. Later he sent him as the ISSSTE office in Veracruz.

At the beginning of 2010, Yunes Linares requested leave from his post as head of the ISSSTE and was nominated as the PAN’s candidate for Governor of Veracruz state in the elections due on July 4 that year—his coalition partner was Elba Esther Gordillo’s New Alliance party. Quite unashamedly, Yunes brought Pérez into his pre-campaign team, and then made him operational coordinator of the campaign itself. In the run-up to the poll, the press asked Yunes about his relation with Pérez and the latter’s links to El Chapo’s escape. He refused to answer, saying he no longer commented on security issues, only on social ones. In fact, there was a clear link between the impunity surrounding El Chapo Guzmán’s escape from Puente Grande and the protection the drug baron enjoyed from the very start of the Fox administration.

The race for governor of Veracruz turned out to be rather more than an electoral contest between the PRI and the PAN. Many people insisted that at root it was a fight between drug cartels for control of the territory. Historically, Veracruz had been seen as belonging to the Gulf Cartel, now led by Ezequiel Cárdenas, brother of the much-feared Osiel. But the Sinaloa Cartel had been disputing that control for months. Yunes did not win the governorship of Veracruz.

Official protection

In May 2006, the DEA obtained valuable information about the drug trafficking networks in Mexico, after it managed to infiltrate a cell of the organization led by Ignacio Coronel Villareal, one of the Sinaloa
Cartel’s main partners and a personal friend of Guzmán. According to the US anti-drug agency, in that year a number of officers were investigating the details of a story involving Vicente Fox.
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It was said that the then president had received a bribe worth $40 million, in exchange for providing political protection for El Chapo’s escape. But Fox’s alleged involvement didn’t stop there. The DEA had direct reports from its informants infiltrated with Nacho Coronel, which stated that the Fox presidency had provided protection to Guzmán and the Sinaloa Cartel throughout its six years in office.

Mexican military and civilian intelligence sources have told this investigation that the alleged link between the Sinaloa Cartel and Vicente Fox go back to the time when he was first seeking election as governor of Guanajuato state in 1991. At that time Guzmán was still free, and working for Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Pablo Tostado—who had been a member of the group led by El Azul Esparragoza—revealed that traffickers belonging to the Pacific organization had moved into Guanajuato back in the 1980s for logistical reasons. For example, El Azul had interests in the small neighboring state of Querétaro, but he began to use the airport in Irapuato, Guanajuato, for drug shipments because it was better equipped.

When Vicente Fox was governor of Guanajuato—and later as president of the Republic—he was close to Luis Echeverría, allegedly one of the protectors of the Pacific organization ever since his own sexennial in power, 1970–76. Members of both Fox’s campaign team and his government have told how, as president, he often sought advice from Echeverría, either directly or via Marta Sahagún. Their relationship was much closer than it seemed in public.

Given the alleged links between the Fox administration and the Sinaloa Cartel, the privileged treatment given to the narco-business-man Manuel Beltrán Arredondo—El Chapo’s protector—by “the government of change,” as this first PAN administration liked to be known, is nothing less than outrageous. Between 2001 and 2002, the federal government granted Beltrán Arredondo exploration rights at seven mines in Tamazula, Durango state, for a period of six years. This was of course the same Beltrán who had financed much of of the presidential campaign of the PRI candidate, Francisco Labastida, in 2000. The rewards rained down until 2004, when he was given the
concession for two mines, La Fortuna and La Fortuna Fracción, in Concordia, Sinaloa state. By then a scandal had already broken out after the drug trafficker and kidnapper, Pablo Tostado, in detention in Irapuato prison, had revealed Beltrán’s real occupation: “I’ll tell you who Manuel Beltrán Arredondo is. He is one of the main leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel, which operates in the states of Durango, Jalisco, Nayarit, Chihuahua, and Sinaloa. Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán, Julio Beltrán Quintero, Adolfo Beltrán Quintero, Ignacio Coronel, Juan José Esparragoza, El Azul, are all members of the same cartel,” stated Tostado to the court. Even so, the mining concessions granted to El Chapo’s sidekick were not withdrawn.

After his escape, El Chapo Guzmán told friends, and even negotiators sent by the president of the Republic, how it really happened. It was not until the morning of January 20, 2001, when Under Secretary of Public Security Jorge Tello, the head of the prison service, Enrique Pérez, and Humberto Martínez of the PFP arrived to investigate the supposed jail break, that the drug trafficker actually left Puente Grande. The deployment of police officers from the PFP and the PJF created a deliberate confusion, all the more so on a dark winter morning. Dressed in a PFP uniform, his face concealed by a regulation police helmet and mask, Joaquín Guzmán walked out of the prison surrounded by a group of PFP officers. He was then driven a few miles in an official vehicle. At some point down the road, he got out of the car and into a helicopter which flew him to Nayarit. That was where the real legend of Joaquín Guzmán began.

In 1993, when he was betrayed by Carrillo Fuentes and El Güero Palma and arrested, El Chapo was a virtual nobody. However, just eight years after his escape he had become one of the 701 richest men in the world, and
Forbes
magazine estimated his profits from drug shipments at a billion dollars.
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It put him on a par with Emilio Azcárraga, the main shareholder in Televisa, or with Alfredo Harp Helú, the former owner of Banamex. Only one other person in the history of drug trafficking had ever won a place in
Forbes
—Pablo Escobar. The long-empty throne of Amado Carrillo Fuentes had finally found a “worthy” occupant.

Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán: “In 1993, when he was … arrested, El Chapo was a virtual nobody. However, just eight years after his escape he had become one of the 701 richest men in the world, and
Forbes
magazine estimated his profits from drug shipments at a billion dollars.” (p. 160)