Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (26 page)

Barack Obama and Felipe Calderón: “The United States … for years has claimed to be challenging drug trafficking in Mexico, with no positive results.” (p. xi)

A US Drug Enforcement Agent aims a flashlight down a 55-foot-deep drug-smuggling tunnel cut through the floor of a small industrial unit south of Yuma, Arizona, in the town of San Luis. The tunnel runs almost 240 yards under the US-Mexico border and is estimated to have cost up to a million dollars and to have taken one year to build.

A woman whose family member was killed in drug-related violence in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

CHAPTER EIGHT
Blood Ties

O
n April 24, 1999, a few yards from the Eighth Naval Zone, on the magnificent beach of the Acapulco Hyatt Regency Hotel, the Mexican fashion designer Armando Mafud—who had just held a successful exhibition of his work at the Louvre in Paris—was showing his latest collection to a large but select group of guests. The couple who lent most glamor and aristocratic cachet to the evening was Baron Enrico di Portanova—one of the most flamboyant members of the international jet set, according to the
New York Times
—and his delightful wife, Baroness Sandra di Portanova.
¹
Enrico had the kind of personality that never went unnoticed. In his sunset years he resembled Don Corleone, with slicked-back hair, pencil mustache and bushy eyebrows, and obvious signs of surgery on his face revealing a vain attempt to hang on to the remains of his youth. The baron was crazy about Monte Cristo cigars, which he had sticking out of various pockets.

Little by little the guests began to arrive. The evening was graced by the presence of Saba Masri himself; the French ambassador to Mexico, Bruno Delaye, as well as the director of fashion events, Beatriz Calles, a leading figure in the industry, now the organizer of Mexico Fashion Week, and the producer of the show that night. Other Mexican society figures were there too, like actors ready to take part, perhaps unknowingly, in a show that would make history.
²

The sponsors of the fashion parade were an unknown Mexican businessman, Alonso Rivera Muñoz, and his wife, Clara Laborín Archuleta. Ostensibly the aim was to raise money for the Mexican
Foundation to Combat AIDS, headed by Guillermo Ocaña, a personal friend of “Engineer” Rivera and his wife. In reality, Clara wanted to publicize the luxury Debanhy spa she was building in Acapulco. So keen was she on this that a few days before the parade, the couturier Mafud and she had hosted cocktails at La Gran Casona restaurant in Mexico City, to announce details of the event.
³

Rivera was over six feet tall, slim and pale, with a thin mustache. He would do anything to please his restless wife; and besides, events like this helped him to develop his business contacts. Rivera’s presence was discreet. He watched from the bar area like a hyena on the prowl. Of all the actors who turned up to the show that night, his performance was surely the most complete. Had it been publicly known that the generous “engineer,” so concerned at the plight of AIDS victims, was in fact the daring and ruthless drug trafficker Héctor Beltrán Leyva, El H or El Ingeniero, from Badiraguato, Sinaloa, who along with his brother Arturo, El Barbas, controlled the Guerrero territory where Acapulco is located—the Baron di Portanova and his fellow guests might have wound up at the Attorney General’s Office (PGR), or on the DEA’s list of suspects. They might have thrown up their canapés if they’d known of the macabre, santería-based rituals El H is now reputed to practice on those he kills.
⁴

The Beltrán Leyva clan has been one of the most reckless, innovatory, and bloodthirsty in the history of the Mexican drug trade. They have proved capable of infiltrating all areas of Mexican society: politics, law enforcement, the judiciary, high society, and the gossip columns. This is the real achievement of Mexico’s drug traffickers—to work their way into every nook and cranny of the social edifice, like damp.

How El Chapo became a narco, according to his mother

In the Mexican army they say that while Joaquín Guzmán was in prison, his mother Doña Consuelo, back in the village of La Tuna, used to tell everyone how her son became a drug trafficker. Soldiers describe a video tape, apparently made by a French journalist, which for many years was used by the army in specialist training courses.
In the recording, El Chapo’s mother tells how when he was born the family was so poor that they could only afford to buy him a pair of coarse cotton pants.

His father, Emilio Guzmán, like many peasants in the region, grew both grain for immediate consumption, and drugs, to provide a little better for his large family. Don Emilio was a strict, irascible father who often hit his six children—especially El Chapo, the eldest and most unruly. Soon the boy was six, old enough to accompany his father to tend the cannabis and poppies that thrive in the dry soil of the “golden triangle.”

It is common for boys to be taken out of school and into the sierra for weeks during the sowing season. Months later they are again required to help with the harvest: their short stature and little hands are ideal for poppy-tapping. This means slicing with a razor blade into the bulb, not so deeply as to harm the plant, and setting small tin cans to collect the sap which dries into a rubbery gum, the basis for heroin. The cannabis branches are hung on special lines to dry. The work is strenuous, and there is little food or water. Many boys are fatally poisoned by pesticides, others die of sunstroke. The conditions make it practically impossible for any of them to finish elementary school. These kids can only aspire to being drug traffickers, hopefully with a fleet of SUVs and plenty of women.

Nothing will change until public policies are in place to offer such children different opportunities and goals. Otherwise the production of narcotics, including dope, crack, and synthetic drugs, will continue to swell; it seems that coca, too, is beginning to be planted in Guerrero and Michoacán. To date, however, the so-called war on drugs waged by the Mexican government has not included a single social program in response to the intractable cycle. Apparently it’s in nobody’s interest to cut the chain of delinquency.

Older children accompany their fathers to sell the crop. El Chapo and his dad would head through spectacular mountain scenery to Cosalá, in south-east Sinaloa—a miniature, colonial, cobble-stoned gem currently advertised as “magical” by the Tourism Secretariat. It was here that El Chapo’s evil legend was born, as the hungry, ragged youth saw the good things that could be bought with drug money, or
so his mother said. Once the produce had been sold, Don Emilio used to go on days-long binges in the cantinas and brothels. The little cash left over he spent on groceries and supplies for the family, returning home like a bread-winning hero.

El Chapo, eager to enjoy the small privileges his father earned, started his own plantations behind his family’s back. A general who had served in the “golden triangle” recalled that, on one remote inspection, he was mobbed by kids of no more than thirteen years old, who begged him not to destroy their small marijuana plots. The money, they pleaded, would enable them to celebrate Christmas.

Young Joaquín was supported in his aims by his brothers, the most gifted of which turned out to be the youngest, Arturo El Pollo. He also got help from his distant cousins, the Beltrán Leyva brothers, who lived in La Palma, another small community in Badiraguato. It is said to have been Arturo Beltrán Leyva, El Barbas, who first helped Joaquín to get started.

When Guzmán was in prison, it was El Barbas who helped El Pollo smuggle his brother’s shipments. They even made joint deliveries. As a favour, Arturo Beltrán sent Guzmán his share of the profits, to make life easier for him in Puente Grande. The money was delivered in briefcases by the businessman José Bargueño, and by Marcelo Peña, brother of one of El Chapo’s girlfriends. Both would later become protected witnesses for the PGR, using the pseudonyms César and Julio.
⁵

In mid 2000, El Chapo needed to pay his retinue in the jail, so he asked Peña to find Cousin Arturo in Acapulco, the territory he and his brothers had controlled for some time. Peña located El Barbas and met him at a McDonald’s on the coast. They didn’t exchange many words—just a slap on the back and a case full of money. After he got out of the prison, in just nine years El Chapo Guzmán and the Beltrán Leyva clan would forever change the shape of organized crime in Mexico, the United States, Central America, South America and, quite simply, the entire world. But their fraternal relations would not endure.

The Three Knights

Carlos Beltrán and Ramona Leyva had been neighbors in the community of La Palma, in Badiraguato. They were as poor as most campesino households in the region. Their fathers and grandfathers had grown drugs in the Sierra Madre Occidental, as had Rafael Caro Quintero and his brothers, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, Juan José Esparragoza, and Joaquín Guzmán. Their children, the Beltrán Leyva brothers, had it in their blood; the mountains gave them the opportunity, and time did the rest.

Four of the six brothers decided to continue the family “tradition”; they developed from drug-growing peasants into powerful traffickers. The best known and most active were Arturo, Héctor, and Alfredo, who became known as the Los Tres Caballeros, The Three Knights. There are intelligence reports that a sister, Gloria, is also involved in running the family business. The youngest of the Beltrán Leyva children, she is married to Juan José Esparragoza Monzón, son of El Azul, one of the most respected traffickers of the older generation.
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The religious ceremony tying together these families—the Beltráns, Esparragozas, and Guzmáns—took place in 1995 in a church in Querétaro.
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The FBI’s theory is that these blood ties were promoted to forestall betrayal and to encourage loyalty. Big mistake.

El Barbas

Marcos Arturo, the eldest of the Beltrán Leyva brothers and the most seasoned in the dark arts of trafficking, was born in 1958. He was tall and rangy, with fair skin and a permanent beard. Always well dressed, he could easily have passed for a businessman if his overbearing manner hadn’t given him away. In the course of his criminal career he used many nicknames, principally El Barbas (The Beard), and the final one that stayed with him until the end: El Jefe de Jefes, The Boss of Bosses. That was how he signed off on the grotesque murders committed on his orders across Mexico. Some who have met him speak of a vibrant, cheerful, ostentatious man, who was also extremely violent and vindictive. In spite of everything, he respected people
who looked him in the eye and spoke to him straight. Arturo was a creation of Carrillo Fuentes. He began working with him at about the same time as Joaquín Guzmán, his distant cousin, and Héctor Palma, his brother-in-law.

When Guzmán was arrested in Guatemala in 1993, El Barbas was below him in the criminal hierarchy. Nonetheless, he didn’t take long to become one of El Señor de los Cielos’s leading deputies. He specialized in laundering money and the logistics of drug shipments, which included buying off public officials who could provide protection. El Barbas began operating in Querétaro, a state where many drug traffickers were domiciled. He bought up property and companies, and extended his business to Monterrey in Nuevo León and the towns around it.

Because he was efficient, Carrillo Fuentes entrusted El Barbas with jobs around the country. Arturo Beltrán helped to build Carrillo Fuentes’s empire, and his legend too. In the 1990s, working with a team of assistants, businessmen, and public officials, he sent big shipments of cocaine to the United States. They used a fleet of aircraft that included Boeing 727s as well as smaller planes like the King Air, Learjet, and Velocity that were almost impossible to pick up on radar and posed a real headache for the DEA. They also used launches and bigger craft to unload drugs from Colombia on the coasts of Yucatán, Quintana Roo, and Veracruz, as well as along the vast Pacific seaboard. Sometimes the airliners carried up to 10,000 kilograms of cocaine, as well as millions of dollars in profits.