Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (29 page)

In Mexican intelligence circles, some say it was easier for the US authorities to deal with just one organization when it came to controlling the flow of drugs on their territory. But others say this was precisely the argument used by sectors of the Mexican army and by the secretary of public security, García Luna, who had been protecting El Chapo Guzmán ever since his escape.

Guzmán’s scheme broke with all previous practice. Most of the drug barons at the meeting had their own gang, and still controlled the routes they had worked for Amado Carrillo Fuentes. On occasions they’d help each other out, taking a delivery of cocaine,
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or providing assistance in exchange for payment in cash or in kind. However, the drug traffickers did not cooperate systematically, and this is exactly what El Chapo was proposing. This was the only strategy that could ensure growth, with an advantage over the Colombian and Asian gangs inside the United States. Though there must have been misgivings, by the end of the meeting The Federation had been established. It was set up on the basis of strict hierarchy and discipline. To maintain internal order, it’s said The Federation imposed a verbal code that all members were obliged to follow.
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Everyone would share the routes that different leaders had secured over the years, as well as their respective armed groups, and even their money-laundering men. Thus were unified the operations in sixteen Mexican states, representing more than half the country: Sinaloa, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango, Colima, Jalisco, Nayarit, Morelos, the Federal District, the State of Mexico, Yucatán, Quintana Roo, Guanajuato, Aguascalientes, and Querétaro. At the top of the pyramid sat Joaquín Guzmán as the coordinator, with a vertical chain of command below him. Why him? Not just because it was his idea, but because he was the one who had the arrangement with the government, indeed with the Presidential Office of Vicente Fox—who was himself investigated by the DEA during his sexennial.
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In this way The Federation began to function as a council, with representatives from the main leaders of drug trafficking organizations. “Through a network of corrupt police and political contacts, it directed a large-scale narcotics transportation network involving the use of land, air, and sea transportation assets, shipping multi-ton quantities of cocaine from South America, through Central American and Mexico, and finally into the United States.”
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If at times there were “rifts and in-fighting among the leaders of the Federation,” they managed to keep these to a minimum, to ensure their “common political and judicial protection.”
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Public officials and politicians who had provided protection to one member of the group would henceforth extend it to all. The Federation became virtually immune.

Apart from El Chapo and his cousins, the Beltrán Leyvas, the main leaders of The Federation were Ismael El Mayo Zambada, Ignacio Nacho Coronel, Juan José Esparragoza, El Azul, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, El Viceroy, and Armando Valencia.

El Mayo Zambada

Within the organization, El Mayo has been seen as the man behind El Chapo’s throne. Ismael Zambada García is from a village known as El Álamo, in the district of Costa Rica, Culiacán, Sinaloa. It’s a tiny community that has gradually been swallowed up by the urban sprawl. El Mayo is from a very poor background, a campesino who began planting marijuana and poppies. Tall, swarthy, and stout, now aged around sixty, he is married to Rosario Niebla Cardoza, with whom he had at least six children. His favorite is the youngest, Vicente, his right-hand man in the business (his left-hand man is his brother, Reynaldo Zambada García). He boasts of having at least five other sets of wives and children, otherwise he could hardly call himself a narco.

El Mayo was introduced to the drugs trade by José Inés Calderón, one of the main traffickers in Sinaloa and in Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s.
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People still remember him paying his “drug taxes” in the PJF offices in 1978, during the so-called years of control. He also experienced first-hand the period when drug trafficking became a political
weapon for the CIA, and observed how its fat profits made it a tempting business proposition for the Mexican establishment.

Ismael Zambada is certainly the most experienced of all the drug barons today. His name features in all of Mexico’s big drug cases—for example in the “Maxitrial,” which put the former governor of Quintana Roo, Mario Villanueva, behind bars in the United States. El Mayo was also involved in the case of the Anáhuac Financial Group, which revealed links between prominent Mexican politicians, of both the PRI and the PAN, and money-laundering schemes.

The United States government has been after him since 2002, putting a reward on his head of $5 million—a snip compared with what El Mayo can pay for his protection. He is known to own many properties in Jalisco, the Federal District, and Sinaloa, where he is said to be the proprietor of the Hotel El Mayo, in downtown Culiacán.

On June 20, 2000, the Mexican army carried out a raid on a ranch of El Mayo’s called Puerto Rico, near Culiacán. The 650-hectare property was producing milk for his company, Industrias de Ganaderos de Culiacán. The soldiers found 5,700 head of cattle, more than 100 farm workers, a stable of thoroughbreds, and thirty-seven vehicles.
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After the raid, El Mayo’s wife Rosario went to the PGR with an irate representative of the local businessmen’s association, Coparmex, in tow and divorce papers in hand, to demand her property back. She claimed she had nothing to do with the drug baron, and that the jobs of 1,500 families were at stake.
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But the wives of drug barons are wives for life, and their husbands’ rule endures. Nobody in the drugs world would believe for a moment that the properties in Doña Rosario’s name were independent of her ex.

El Mayo’s compadre: drug dealer and politician

It was precisely at the Puerto Rico ranch, more than twenty years ago, that El Mayo had a meeting with the businessman and cattle rancher Jesús Vizcarra, a former mayor of Culiacán for the PRI and a candidate for the governorship of Sinaloa in the elections of July 2010. Six months before those elections, the national paper
Reforma
published a front-page photo apparently showing Vizcarra with various drug traffickers, including El Mayo.

According to the article, the gathering at the Puerto Rico ranch had been to celebrate the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe. However, Jesús Vizcarra stated publicly that the photo had been taken at a cattle trade event, and that he couldn’t remember where it had been. Either way, by the time the photo was published, stories of Vizcarra’s alleged links to drug trafficking were nothing new. It was said that El Mayo was a compadre of his, something he never dared deny, for the simple reason that it was true.

When the photograph was published, Jesús Vizcarra explained to his campaign team that he did know El Mayo. Some years before, he told them, one of his sons was kidnapped, and the only person who helped rescue him was the drug baron. But he insisted that was their only connection. Soon his loyalty to El Mayo Zambada would cost him the governorship of Sinaloa. A few weeks before the election, in the last debate between the candidates, Mario López Valdez, nicknamed Malova (an old PRI hand recently converted to the PAN), asked him the question that killed his aspirations dead: “Are you or are you not a compadre of El Mayo Zambada?” asked Malova on live TV. Nobody in Sinaloa could forget the sight of Vizcarra struck dumb. Eventually he managed to mumble something incoherent about how “I have never done anything illegal,” and other such phrases. If he had denied it, El Mayo might have understood it, but he wouldn’t have forgiven it. On the other hand, admitting it would have meant the end not only of his candidacy, but probably also of his multimillion-dollar interests in meat and allied businesses.

López Valdez concluded triumphantly, “Silence is as good as assent.” But the topic of drug trafficking clearly makes Malova nervous. He clasps and unclasps his hands, sweating.
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López Valdez won the governorship of Sinaloa. But contrary to appearances, El Mayo did not lose out thereby. People close to him say that López was also his candidate. Indeed, the drug baron could not forgive Vizcarra for his ingratitude, and the fact that he didn’t even have the grace to greet his wife when they met in some public event. It seems Vizcarra went to see El Mayo to tell him he wanted to be governor of Sinaloa. The message was clear, he wanted his support. El Mayo simply wished him well in his new venture. A few days later,
they say, he decided to back López Valdez, to teach his old friend a lesson.

In 2010, the former PAN politician Manuel Clouthier, referring to the elections in Sinaloa, denounced the mafioso clique led by the outgoing governor for the PRI, Jesús Aguilar Padilla. He accused him, and his predecessor Juan Millán, of working for the Sinaloa Cartel. Clouthier insisted that Vizcarra represented the clear intention to keep the Sinaloa Cartel in charge of the state administration. The big question is whether López Valdez, Malova, represented anything different.

During his campaign, this
priísta
opportunistically disguised as a
panista
publicly recognized that, apart from his own biological father, he had a debt to two other men: Leonardo Gutiérrez, El Nalo, who had been a father to him in his business career, and Millán, his father in politics. El Nalo has also been linked to El Mayo Zambada. He was identified by a journalist in 2006 as the owner of six planes allegedly used to transport drugs, and of car dealerships acquired with drug money.
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In earlier times, the two governors, Aguilar and Millán, were part of the same group and were fed by the same hand. The split between them led to a political dispute in the state, with each supporting his own candidate: Vizcarra and López respectively, both originally from the PRI, in other words from the same “political mafia.”

There was indeed a change of political party in Sinaloa, which led many to jump to the conclusion that more than eighty years of PRI hegemony had come to an end. But underneath it seems there was no change in the ruling clique, nor, in all probability, in their underlying interests.

Mario López Valdez became governor on December 31, 2010. Within months, doubts gathered over him. On May 30 people awoke to the sight of eight banners draped around the state capital, Culiacán. They read, “Malova, when you went to Mexico City you told the president you’d met El Chapo Guzmán on September 6, 2010, at the Kila ranch—don’t deny he [El Chapo] told you to clean out northern Sinaloa to make way for him and to supply him with information.”

On July 2, 2011, the warnings were signed in blood. Two decapitated bodies were left in front of two newspapers in Mazatlán,
El
Debate
and
Noroeste
, accusing the governor and the mayor of protecting El Chapo and the Sinaloa Cartel. “If this continues, there will be reprisals.”

Public enemy

Of all the drug barons, El Mayo is the one that provokes the most contradictory reactions. He is either loved or hated. There is nothing in between. Some describe him as a generous, easy-going man. As one of the old generation of drug traffickers, they say he’s the kind that lavishes money on the rural communities where he carries on his illegal business. They tell of people queuing up when he comes to their village. He has never tried to look refined like others of his colleagues. He regards himself as a simple rancher, and behaves like one. He was one of the biggest growers of marijuana and poppy before getting into the world of cocaine. But this was the future, so he adapted. He had the staff, the routes, and the contacts in the United States; he just had to sell a different product. They say that when he started out in the white powder business, he used his dairy companies to move it in milk cartons.

But while some speak of him so highly, others describe him as manipulative and treacherous. Even members of his own organization accuse him of delivering up one of his most trusted lieutenants, Javier Torres. El JT had managed to get out of prison three times, and was the sole survivor of a massacre carried out by the Arellano Félix brothers in El Limoncito, Sinaloa, where one of his brothers and eleven other people died. But he didn’t survive the maneuvers of El Mayo. Torres was arrested by the Mexican army in January 2004 without a shot being fired. They caught him unawares, usually a sign of betrayal.

Like other drug barons, El Mayo is no angel. He is criticized because supposedly he is El Chapo’s real boss, but prefers the latter to take the limelight. However, if this is the strategy it hasn’t worked that well. For thirty-five years, El Mayo’s criminal activities went almost unnoticed in the United States. Thanks to The Federation, on May 31, 2002, the Bush administration classified him as a Grade I drug trafficker, a true public enemy.

During Vicente Fox’s presidency, El Mayo Zambada began seriously to exasperate the US Treasury Department, in view of the freedom with which the drug baron was able to operate in both Mexico and the United States. Zambada ran an extensive network of companies that he used to traffic drugs and launder assets, with either the tolerance or the ignorance of both governments. In May 2007 the Treasury identified six companies and twelve individuals as part of El Mayo’s financial network. It froze any assets they might have in the US, and blocked any US financial or commercial dealings with them.

Among El Mayo’s companies is a nursery called Estancia Infantil del Niño Feliz. It has all the necessary permits from the Mexican Institute of Social Security, which even gives it a subsidy for every child that has attended since November 22, 2001
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—one of the benefits introduced by the Fox government. However, it seems nobody bothered to check when Zambada’s gang gave the nursery’s Culiacán address as that of another of his companies, the Santa Mónica stables, also cited by the Treasury Department as a money-laundering operation.