Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (30 page)

Other companies listed include the Gasolinera Rosario—a gas station with the same address as the nursery—Multiservicios Jeviz, Jamaro Constructores, another stables called Establos Puerto Rico, and the dairy outfit Nueva Industria de Ganaderos de Culiacán. If there were any doubt these companies belong to the drug baron, in July 2008, two decapitated bodies were left in bags outside the gate of Nueva Industria, where El Mayo produces the popular Santa Mónica brand of milk. They had messages with them saying “
THE GOVERNMENT PROTECTS YOU TOO MUCH
,” and “
DON’T SEND THE FEDS
.”
⁴⁶

After the Treasury’s move in May 2007, Adam Szubin, Director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control, said the action exposed even further “the network of front companies and financial partners that Zambada used to conceal and launder the money from drugs that he then takes out of the United States’ financial system.”
⁴⁷
If there’s one thing that upsets the US authorities, it’s when the drug barons remove money from the US.

The reaction of Felipe Calderón’s government was a disappointment. The secretary of finance said that the Mexican businesses and
accounts of those identified by the Treasury Department would not be touched until the Mexican authorities could determine their guilt, given that the US investigation had presented “only indications.”
⁴⁸
As a result, the government’s support for those same companies continued through programs for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) as well as the Secretariat of Agriculture and even the National Water Board (Conagua). The Puerto Rico Stables is a case in point. Between 2001 and 2008 it received more than 5 million pesos (about $450,000 in 2005) from the government through the Agricultural Marketing Services and Support (Aserca) facility. This was a nice windfall for Vicente Zambada, El Mayo’s eldest son, who owns the Stables.

In 2001, Conagua gave a concession in Costa Rica district of 127,000 m
²
of state-owned land, to be used for the extraction of resources or for agriculture, pisciculture, or forestry. And in 2002, the Board gave a new concession for the use of a further 383,000 m
²
of state land. At the time, the head of Conagua was someone very close to the president, Cristóbal Jáquez: a former executive of Coca Cola and of the Grupo Industrial Lala. President Vicente Fox not only failed to combat El Mayo’s money-laundering activities, he actually lent him public resources to help him carry them out. The concessions remain in place to this day.
⁴⁹

El Mayo was astute enough to enroll the Puerto Rico Stables in an experimental program of the UNFCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), carried out in Mexico between 2005 and 2006, to improve the disposal of dairy cattle waste so as to reduce emissions of methane and nitrous oxide in an economically sustainable way. It’s an example of the drug traffickers’ skill at infiltrating many other domains. Of course, a certificate of participation in UN activities is an excellent way of legitimizing illegal businesses.

At the beginning of 2010, El Mayo Zambada did something unprecedented: he agreed to meet a journalist, Julio Scherer, the respected editor of
Proceso
—a weekly news magazine seen by the government as one of its great foes, apparently just because it is critical.

Strictly speaking, the interview yielded no new information. It seems the drug baron was more interested in sending some coded
messages to those who were in a position to understand them. One of the addressees was President Felipe Calderón: “If they catch me or kill me, nothing will change.” “So far, no one has betrayed me,” El Mayo also said, almost menacingly, this time perhaps to those partners who might be beginning to feel uneasy about him. What his laconic remarks show most clearly is the nature of fear among Mexico’s big drug bosses. They don’t worry that the government, the police, or the courts can or will take decisive action; they fear betrayal from within.

“Your friendship with El Chapo Guzmán is well known, so it’s not surprising that you were waiting for him outside Puente Grande on the day of his escape. Can you tell me how you felt that day?” asked Scherer.

“El Chapo and I are good friends. We often talk on the phone. But that story’s not true. It’s one more lie they tell about me. Like the idea that I planned an attack on the President of the Republic. I wouldn’t dream of such a thing,” asserted El Mayo. It sounded more like a confirmation than a denial.
⁵⁰

Ismael Zambada had a score to settle with Felipe Calderón. They both knew it; it was just a question of when. Each had struck at the other’s heart, and neither was likely to forget.

The King of Crystal

He always was independent, even when he belonged to Guzmán’s organization. Like many others, he was a policeman before he became a drug trafficker. He went by the pseudonym of César Arturo Barrios Romero, although on his government file he was mistakenly given another alias, Dagoberto Rodríguez Jiménez. This mistake would later become the basis for one of the Calderón government’s biggest deceptions.

Ignacio Nacho Coronel has many nicknames: Cachas de Diamante (Diamond Hunk), El Licenciado, El Rey del Cristal—the last because he had led the field as a seller of crystal meth. However, his own people always call him Nacho Coronel. And now he has acquired the aura of immortality. His FBI and Mexican intelligence files concur that he was born on February 1, 1954, but it’s not clear if that was in
Veracruz or in Canelas, Durango. The trafficker Pablo Tostado Félix, in an interview before he was killed in Durango prison in 2010, insisted that he and Nacho Coronel were about the same age, fifty-two, and that both were brought up in Canelas He is married to Teresa Galindo, with whom he has one son; he keeps another partner and son elsewhere. He is said to be a distant relative of El Mayo Zambada.

Nachito Coronel—to those closest to him—was a “madrina”
⁵¹
to the PJF commander, José Luis Fuentes, in Baja California. Fuentes was the husband of Sandra Ávila Beltrán, the so-called Queen of the Pacific, a cartel leader in her own right. It’s said that after Fuentes’s death in 1992 Nacho became romantically attached to her, and that they remained lovers for a long time.
⁵²

Coronel’s complete immersion in the drug trade occurred in the shadow of Amado Carrillo Fuentes at the end of the 1980s, when he worked alongside Héctor El Güero Palma, Joaquín Guzmán, Ismael El Mayo Zambada, the Beltrán Leyva brothers, and Juan José Esparragoza. In June 1993, a few days after the murder of Cardinal Posadas, Nacho’s elder brother Raymundo was killed by intelligence officers from the Fifth Military Region under General Gutiérrez Rebollo. The operation was part of the investigations into the cardinal’s death. Two aspects were noteworthy. The first was the attitude of Raymundo Coronel himself: he confronted the security forces with a machine gun in each hand, firing furiously. The second was that in the trunk of one of his cars they found a notebook with the names of police chiefs, army officers, and politicians who were being paid by South American mafias for protection in Mexico. After Gutiérrez Rebollo handed over this evidence to attorney general Jorge Carpizo, Carpizo made sure it did not appear in the Posadas case files.

According to Tostado Félix, Nacho’s rise in the organization came in the wake of his brother’s death. In June 1995, he had a further stroke of luck: the arrest of El Güero Palma strengthened his growing influence in the Guadalajara area. Later, in 1997, the disappearance of another close collaborator of Carrillo Fuentes, Eduardo González, consolidated his leadership in Guadalajara still further.

Ignacio Coronel was able to develop his own networks. His file says he had a connection with Alejandro Patrón Laviada, known as
La Vaca (The Cow), the brother of Patricio Patrón, a former PAN governor of Yucatán state and until recently head of the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (Profepa). Apparently he also had links with General Guillermo Álvarez Nahara, who was head of the Military Judicial Police during Carlos Salinas’ presidency,
⁵³
then of the PJF at the end of Ernesto Zedillo’s term.
⁵⁴
To date, neither La Vaca nor General Álvarez have been investigated.

Ignacio Coronel acquired most power as a pioneer in the drugs of the future, ephedrine and methamphetamine, made in clandestine labs in Jalisco. Nacho supplied the huge market for these synthetic drugs in the United States—a market that is now controlled by the Sinaloa Cartel. That is why the US government christened him The King of Crystal. He is said to operate throughout Mexico, as well as in the United States, Central and South America, and even in some European countries, with the help of his trusted army of associates. He became indispensable to El Chapo and El Mayo.

Los Güeritos and El Tirso

Ignacio Coronel had two brothers under his command, Luis and Esteban Rodríguez Olivera, better known as Los Güeros or its diminutive, Los Güeritos (Blondies). They were under investigation by the DEA throughout the presidency of Vicente Fox, suspected of being one of the links between the president’s family and The Federation. The Rodríguez brothers were based in Guanajuato,
⁵⁵
and have been linked in particular to Manuel Bribiesca Sahagún, the son of Marta Sahagún, President Fox’s spokeswoman and then his second wife. Thanks to this connection, it is said, they got support for transporting drugs by sea. The brothers are currently wanted, along with Nacho Coronel, El Mayo, and El Chapo, by a federal court in Brooklyn, and are officially classified as fugitives from justice. It is striking that the warrant issued by this court names the two brothers along with a third person whose name is, unusually, redacted on several pages of the court papers. All three are accused of drug trafficking and money laundering.

In 2008, the Rodríguez brothers made themselves felt in Michoacán, beyond their usual base, in the form of macabre messages to
the new and threatening players on the cartel scene, Los Zetas: corpses with signs of torture and their throats cut, accompanied by the notice, “
THIS IS A GREETING FROM LOS GÜERITOS, JOSÉ LUIS RODRÍGUEZ OLIVERA AND ESTEBAN RODRÍGUEZ OLIVERA AND LA CALABAZA, TO EDUARDO COSTILLA AND HERIBERTO LAZCANO AND EFRAÍN TEODORO, AZ 14.”

They are also connected to Tirso Martínez Sánchez.
⁵⁶
In his mid-forties, a native of Guadalajara, Tirso runs his own outfit, with direct links to Colombia, while performing importation and distribution services for The Federation and others. He uses a string of cocaine warehouses purchased or rented via front companies.
⁵⁷
There is a $5 million reward in the US for any information as to his whereabouts.

El Azul

If there is one drug baron in Mexico who understands the importance of blood ties, it is Juan José Esparragoza, one of the veteran Godfathers of the trade. He was born in 1949 in Huixiopa, Badiraguato, Sinaloa. Tall and brown-skinned, with dark hair and mustache, regular mouth, aquiline nose, rounded chin, and average build, he weighs around 200 lbs. His most striking features are the bushy eyebrows and bulging eyes. His FBI file speculates that he may have had plastic surgery, but he could hardly change those peculiar eyes, hence no doubt his fondness for dark glasses. His false identities include José Luis Esparragosa, Juan José Esparragoza-Italino, Juan José Esparraguza-Valino, Raúl González and Juan Robles;
⁵⁸
but in the criminal underworld they know him as El Azul.

The US authorities call him The Peace Maker. Although he doesn’t always succeed in making peace between the groups, he invariably comes out on good terms with everyone. For each he has a tender word or some wise advice. He is the consigliere. In exchange, the others let him traffic on his own routes and participate in joint deals. Those who know him say he is the most skillful of them all; he gets what he wants without risking too much.

In the 1970s, Esparragoza was one of the agents of the Federal Security Directorate (DFS), the Mexican intelligence agency, whose commanders were friends with Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Rafael Caro Quintero, and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo. El Azul was one of Carrillo Fuentes’s most trusted men, not as his subordinate but as his negotiator, in both Mexico and Colombia. In the 80s he established a base in the towns of Querétaro and Cuernavaca. Lacking the incendiary temperament of Arturo Beltrán Leyva, the brother of his son’s wife, he is not as ambitious as El Mayo Zambada, his compadre, and not as boisterous as another compadre, the jailed Rafael Caro Quintero, whose sister is married to El Azul’s nephew.

In the name of his official wife María Guadalupe Gastélum he owns a mall in Culiacán, the Plaza Comercial Residencial del Lago, which has reaped state funding worth more than 3 million pesos (around $270,000 in 2004) through the Law of Investment Promotion for the Economic Development of Sinaloa.

In 1992, El Azul completed a sentence in the prison of Puente Grande. His connections in government were nonetheless so good that in 1993 he was able to obtain a passport like any ordinary citizen.
⁵⁹
That same year, thanks to his good offices, a bloody showdown was avoided between the Gulf Cartel and Carrillo Fuentes’s Juárez organization. A pact was made, which became known as “The Northern Peace.”
⁶⁰
Ten years later, however, Esparragoza himself would be one of the instigators of the most brutal war for the spoils of the drug trade that Mexico has ever seen. El Azul is an astute man, one of the quiet ones, who softly climb up rung by rung.