Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (3 page)

A young Guatemalan army captain, aged no more than twenty-six, got out of the old wreck and greeted them with elaborate gallantry: “My general, I have been entrusted with a sensitive consignment that may only be delivered to you in person,” he announced ceremoniously to General Carrillo, who was overall coordinator of the Fight Against the Drug Trade for the government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and the man responsible for this important mission.

Looking at the captain, Carrillo Olea couldn’t help feeling a little ridiculous. The Mexican government had sent two generals—Guillermo Álvarez Nahara, head of the Military Police, and himself—plus two battalions to support the operation.
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Guatemala, on the other hand, had made do with a young officer to hand over someone who was still practically unknown, but who was being accused, along with the Arellano Félix brothers, of killing Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, in the course of an alleged shoot-out between the two sides. Less than a month earlier, on May 24, 1993, the cardinal had died in a spectacular hail of bullets in the parking lot of Guadalajara International Airport.

Without more ado, the Guatemalan captain opened the back of the pickup and pointed to his precious cargo. On the blistering metal deck, tied hand and foot like a pig, lay Joaquín Guzmán Loera. His body had been bouncing around like a bale of hay during the three-hour trip from Guatemala to Mexico.

At the time, El Chapo Guzmán—a member of the criminal gang led by Amado Carrillo Fuentes, better known as El Señor de los Cielos, the Lord of the Skies—was pretty much a nobody in the drugs world. He’d been just fleetingly in the limelight after a shoot-out at the Christine Discotheque in Puerto Vallarta in 1992, when he tried to kill one of the Arellano Félix family, former friends and partners with whom he’d fallen out.

The disputes between the Arellano Félix family, El Chapo Guzmán, and his friend Héctor El Güero Palma were like schoolboy squabbles with machine guns. They’d already featured on the crime pages of Mexican newspapers, but without much prominence. Guzmán had a lot of money, like any other drug trafficker of his ranking, but little power of his own. What power he did have came by using the name of Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Maybe that is why the Guatemalan government had sent him back to Mexico not as a high-risk prisoner. Nonetheless, El Chapo seemed to offer a vital political opportunity to the Mexican government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. That bruised figure in the back of the pickup provided an excellent pretext to explain the murder of Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo.

Supposedly, the Arellano Félix brothers and El Chapo Guzmán had had a shoot-out, and the cardinal had been killed in the crossfire. The
story, as already reported in the press, was undoubtedly plausible, but a later post-mortem of what happened at Guadalajara airport cast doubt on this version. Forensic experts reported that there had been no crossfire, and that the cardinal had been hit by fourteen bullets at close range.

To look at him in that sorry, helpless state on June 9, 1993, nobody would have imagined that this short, uncharismatic thirty-six-year-old, with barely three years of elementary schooling behind him, would within sixteen years have become the head of the Sinaloa Cartel, the most powerful criminal organization in the Americas—much less that
Forbes
magazine would rank him as one of the richest, and therefore most powerful, men in the world. No one would have imagined either that sixteen years later Jorge Carrillo Olea, vilified and publicly demoted for his alleged protection of drug traffickers during his time as governor of Morelos state (1994–98), would be describing his detailed memories of El Chapo’s capture in an affable interview at his home in Cuernavaca, where he lives almost forgotten by all those he once served.

El Chapo Guzmán, with a hood over his head, and Carrillo Olea, impressed by the young Guatemalan captain, never suspected that from that day on their destinies would be forever linked. Carrillo Olea took the credit for successfully arresting the drug trafficker. But seven years, seven months, and ten days later it would be one of his closest protégés, virtually his alter ego, that would help El Chapo to escape from the maximum security prison of Puente Grande on June 19, 2001, according to the trafficker’s own account and the investigation into the escape. In Mexico, the worlds of the drug traffickers and the police are quite similar. Maybe that’s why they understand each other so well. Complicity and betrayal go hand in hand. One day your closest friend is your accomplice, the next he is your worst enemy.

Capture

Carrillo Olea said that thanks to the Planning Center for Drug Control (Cendro), set up by him in 1992, they were able to follow the route taken by El Chapo from Guadalajara to Guatemala after the shoot-out at the airport. As he recalled it,

After he got into an unknown vehicle on the Chapala to Guadalajara highway, I say unknown because we never knew if it was ready and waiting, if it was to protect him, or it was a private car, I don’t know, he disappeared. But the system picked him up in Morelia and we started tracking him. He reached Mexico City, we half lost him, he reappeared. He had a radio and I don’t know how many credit cards, four, five, six, and we had [their numbers]. So we hear of a card being used in Coyoacán, in Puebla.… Sometimes he’d make mistakes, or he had no choice but to use the phone. That’s how we followed him all the way down to San Cristóbal.

Carrillo Olea said that the Cendro notified the Guatemalan government that Guzmán had crossed the border and was headed for El Salvador, which he probably reached via Honduras. “We got in touch with [the authorities in] El Salvador, and their legs turned to jelly. They told us: ‘Yes, we’ve detected him here.’ We said, ‘Arrest him.’ But they didn’t, they just scared him off, like a rat. They made it obvious he’d been spotted, so he went back to Guatemala.”

Here he was arrested. Carrillo Olea gave the news to the then Attorney General, Jorge Carpizo McGregor, and to President Salinas, to whom he’d had a direct line ever since he took office. It was excellent news. The cardinal’s murder was still a burning issue and public opinion wanted a head on a plate. “Now he has to be brought from Guatemala without all the legal hurdles of an extradition,” Salinas told Carrillo Olea. That’s how it was agreed to hand the prisoner over at the border, without any diplomatic niceties to get in the way.

Carpizo, a former rector of the National Autonomous University (UNAM) and president of the National Human Rights Commission, was the third attorney general in just five years of Salinas’s presidency. The first, Enrique Álvarez del Castillo, had been mostly renowned for allowing the Guadalajara (later Sinaloa) Cartel to thrive under his nose while he was the governor of Jalisco state. He was replaced as attorney general by Ignacio Morales Lechuga, who resigned abruptly in 1993. As a result, Carrillo Olea was the one constant factor in Mexico’s drug policy under Salinas.

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Still in bed and acting on instructions from the president and Carpizo, Carrillo Olea dialed Antonio Riviello Bazán, the secretary of defense.

“I’m calling to trouble you with a rather strange matter. If you’re in any doubt, please call the president,” said Carrillo Olea.

“So, what’s it about?” Riviello asked anxiously.

“I need a 727, a rifle squad, and for the military commander in Chiapas to do what I tell him.”

“It’s that sensitive?”

“Yes, general, and I’m sorry I can’t say any more at this moment in time.”

“Don’t worry,” said the secretary, “we’ll see it’s done.”

Carrillo Olea arrived at 5:45 a.m. at the military gate of Mexico City airport. The paratroopers were already there; General Guillermo Álvarez Nahara turned up shortly afterwards.

“The general told me to go with you. Is that ok?” Álvarez asked Carrillo.

“On the contrary, the more witnesses the better,” answered Carrillo.

A few hours later, El Chapo Guzmán was in their custody.

When he saw El Chapo tied up in the truck, Carrillo felt sorry for him: “After all, he was a human being,” he recalled. The paratroopers lifted up the hooded figure and dumped him in one of the Mexican army vehicles.

“Captain, thank you,” said Carrillo, giving the Guatemalan officer an embrace. “I wish we could have gotten to know each other better. I don’t even know your name or where I can call you.”

The Mexican convoy moved off swiftly towards the barracks. There a doctor and a lab technician were waiting to examine Guzmán. General Carrillo ordered the prisoner be given a bath and something to eat.

Next, the president’s trusted associate tried to call Attorney General Carpizo, to tell him about the operation, but in vain. Carrillo had left things in Mexico City in the hands of his young apprentice, Jorge Enrique Tello Peón, who had first worked with him at the state-owned United Shipyards, as his bag carrier. Now he was the head of
the Cendro, but not always efficient: he hadn’t followed the instruction to leave three lines free for this very call. Carrillo had to dial his office direct.

“Jorge, didn’t I tell you?”

“Sorry, I forgot.”

“Put me through to the attorney general.”

“Hello, what’s up? How are things going?” asked Carpizo at the other end.

“The package is in our hands, and we’re on our way to the capital,” General Carrillo Olea told him.

“Wonderful, I’ll tell the chief.”

El Chapo’s boss

On March 7, 1999, José Alfredo Andrade Bojorges,
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a thirty-seven-year-old trial lawyer with a master’s degree in criminology, gave public prosecutor Gerardo Vázquez a very different account to that of Carrillo Olea of how the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) had learnt of El Chapo Guzmán’s whereabouts.

Andrade is key to understanding the details of the drug business at the time. He was a close friend and worked with Sergio Aguilar Hernández, lawyer to El Señor de los Cielos. In 1989, when Aguilar was sub-director of the PGR in Sinaloa state, he was sacked and imprisoned. However, released thanks to Andrade, his childhood friend, he soon went to work for the drug trafficker.

Later, Andrade enjoyed a direct relationship with El Señor de los Cielos when he took up the defense of Sósimo Leyva Pérez, the drug baron’s brother-in-law who was in Morelia prison in Michoacán, in 1994 and 1995. He was an unusual lawyer. His clients included not only drug traffickers but members of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) captured in 1995, as well as members of the UNAM’s trade union (STUNAM). Those who knew him say he was a good lawyer, a brilliant man, and also an accomplished informer. In 1993 he was drawing a modest retainer from the PGR.

Andrade’s account was recorded in the investigation into Cardinal Posadas’s murder. His testimony shed light on what had
happened on May 24, 1993, at Amado Carrillo Fuentes’s house, when the cardinal was killed.

In 1993, Guzmán was working for Carrillo Fuentes in the Guadalajara area. In those days, El Chapo was a liability. Carrillo Fuentes was fed up with his subordinate’s chaotic ways, his liking for alcohol, drugs, scandal and violence. He was particularly irritated by the amount of time he spent with his bodyguards, taking over entire floors of luxury hotels and causing a stir. Working with El Chapo was more hazardous than handling gunpowder. Carrillo Fuentes’s concerns were not misplaced. The discretion traditionally sought by organized crime groups was in jeopardy.

As a result, Carrillo Fuentes decided to remove El Chapo from the Guadalajara patch and send him to Nayarit state, under the super vision of Héctor El Güero Palma, Guzmán’s friend and partner. However, El Chapo did not obey the order. He had other plans. In his place he sent his crony and accountant Martín Moreno to Tepic, the capital of Nayarit. At the same time he sent another henchman to Guatemala, to buy some farms. Central America was from around that time seen by the narcotics traffickers as just an extension of their own territory.

Carrillo Fuentes was deeply upset to hear that Cardinal Posadas had been killed in a shoot-out between drug gangs in Guadalajara. He immediately began to call military and police authorities, and summoned El Güero Palma. El Señor de los Cielos could not believe his own men were involved. He was furious.

When El Güero arrived, looking completely unperturbed, he calmed down. El Señor de los Cielos knew that the Arellano Félix brothers came from a very religious family, which had cultivated personal links with Cardinal Posadas since his time in Tijuana. What’s more, their mother admired the cardinal and would never forgive her sons such a thing. (Indeed, she stopped talking to them for as long as doubts remained.) As for Carrillo Fuentes, he had no connection with the Catholic hierarchy. The closest he got to the Church was when he built a temple at Guamuchilito, in Navolato, Sinaloa, his home town.

“El Chapo was being followed, it can’t have been him,” El Güero said reassuringly.

“Who’s got the guns, and the balls, to do this?” asked Carrillo Fuentes.

“And a motive …” added Palma.

After getting answers to his calls, Carrillo Fuentes informed his people that neither the Arellano Félix brothers nor Guzmán had taken part in the shoot-out. It was a third group, whose members were not from the north, although they were dressed as northerners: “They had short hair, and were wearing jeans, plaid shirts and new boots they could hardly run in,” he said, adding that he had gotten this information from General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo
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and his son-in-law, Horacio Montenegro.

“Let the witness say who told him that Amado Carrillo Fuentes found out about the shoot-out at Guadalajara airport at 16:40 on May 24, 1993,” was one of the public prosecutor’s requests to Andrade Bojorges, as he made his sworn statement in March 1999.

“On that day, Mr. Sergio Aguilar [a friend of Andrade’s] was with Amado Carrillo at one of his houses in Morelos state. Jesús Bitar Tafich, the ‘Arab,’ was there too,” answered Andrade.