Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (35 page)

However, the apparent punishment dealt out to the AFI was a charade. A joke, as in the case of Nahúm Acosta. One day after Santiago’s press conference, the Federal District Prison Service informed that of the eight AFI officers supposedly in prison, only three were in fact still there. Citing a “lack of grounds for prosecution,” the Fifth District Tribunal ordered the immediate release of the five, including Sánchez who were Millán’s men. Legal proceedings continued against the other three.
³⁶
But ironically, because these were supplementary police attached to the Public Prosecution service, it was the AFI itself that had to carry out the investigation and present the evidence. Santiago Vasconcelos was looking ridiculous.

In spite of the direct accusations against him, Sánchez went straight from prison to work in the AFI head office in Mexico City, under Millán. He stayed for two more years, resigning of his own accord on April 30, 2007—a month after Millán had left to follow García Luna to the Secretariat of Public Security, where he would coordinate many new operations. The other four released with Sánchez continued to work in the AFI.
³⁷

As part of its phoney war on drugs, the federal government proposed to Congress to change the name of the AFI to the Federal Ministerial Police (PFM). From May 29, 2009, the disgraceful police
force created by Genaro García Luna changed its title yet again, as if that might erase its appalling record.

The Public Prosecution service was convinced the AFI was acting as the armed wing of The Federation, with the direct involvement of José Luis Sánchez. So much so that the story of the hunt for the Zetas ordered by La Barbie and the Beltrán Leyvas, and carried out by federal agents, was used as evidence against the Beltrán Leyvas in 2008. But despite the finger pointing directly at them, the AFI officers working with the drug traffickers seemed untouchable. Deputy Attorney General Santiago Vasconcelos was getting frustrated. Ever since García Luna had created the agency, with the support of the president and Attorney General Macedo, it had become almost a parallel prosecutor’s office. The stuttering García Luna gave himself airs, and the arrogant Santiago couldn’t stand it anymore.

Throughout the presidency of Vicente Fox, Santiago Vasconcelos saw how García Luna and his team continued to act with impunity. The head of the AFI had moreover acquired a fairy godmother, Marta Sahagún, the president’s ex-spokeswoman and now wife. He visited her frequently at Los Pinos, and it’s said he took her very nice gifts, contained in briefcases. Not collections of jewels, like those she had got from businessman Olegario Vázquez Raña,
³⁸
but cash from the drug trade.

The sudden fortune acquired by Sahagún and Fox remains one of the great black holes in the universe. Nobody knows its size or how it was created. We only know that they arrived in December 2000 almost bankrupt, and were filthy rich by the time they left.

Narco-cops

It is said that like attracts like. In the case of the team that has surrounded García Luna for the last twenty years, it seems to be a golden rule. Throughout his shady career in the police, as full of lies and myths as that of El Chapo himself, García has done everything possible to keep the corruption in his team under wraps. In the PGR there is a pile of case files sleeping the sleep of the just, which contain direct accusations against him and his team of links with organized
crime. They are considered a state secret, and the authorities refuse to hand them over.
³⁹

From the outset, García Luna and his team have been part of the problem, not the solution. Every city and municipality they have entered has ended up worse off than before in terms of chaos and corruption. “They’re not cops, they’re robbers,” say those who have good reason to know, especially after having worked with them.
⁴⁰
The story behind the whole group is a dark one.

The district of Iztapalapa, the roughest and most densely populated in Mexico City, is sadly notorious as a nest of kidnappers, drug peddlers, car thieves, and other crooks. It was here that the nucleus of the García clan came into being.

At the end of the 1990s, Luis Cárdenas Palomino, known as El Pollo, Javier Garza Palacios, alias El Frutilupis, Igor Labastida, José Ayala Aguirre, and Edgar Millán,
⁴¹
the renegade quintet, were sent to Iztapalapa by the Attorney’s Office of the Federal District (PGJDF). Their average age was less than thirty. They already had form: Garza Palacios, for example, had previously been deputy director of the PGJDF in Álvaro Obregón district, where helped by Labastida, his second, he fleeced small drug dealers and car thieves in exchange for letting them carry on.

It was in Iztapalapa that the five first experimented with kidnapping. They unlawfully arrested a trader in the Iztapalapa Central Market, one of the largest in Mexico City, and demanded a ransom of a million pesos (almost $100,000 at the time) from the man’s family. They got away with it thanks to the intervention of lawyer Marcos Castillejos, Cárdenas Palomino’s father-in-law,
⁴²
who was himself executed on July 9, 2008. Feeling confident they branched out into another lucrative area: car theft. On one occasion, Garza and Cárdenas were caught red-handed, but the officers who arrested them didn’t know they were policemen. When they identified themselves, their colleagues, who had already informed their superiors of the arrest, let them go but demanded a scapegoat in exchange: someone had to be blamed for the theft.
⁴³

Their lawless activities expanded. It was in Iztapalapa that their contacts with gangs of kidnappers and drug dealers began. They reputedly charged 35 percent of the ransom money for turning a
blind eye. Sometimes they even got their patrols to block the roads, to let the kidnappers get away.
⁴⁴
Iztapalapa became a haven for some of the most merciless kidnap gangs Mexico has ever seen, including, for example, that of Humberto Ortiz, better known as El Apá.

The fifteen men of García Luna’s inner circle at the PGJDF included the likes of Armando Espinosa de Benito, who first became friendly with delinquents when he worked as a prison guard. After his enlistment in the PGJDF, he was accused of robbery and rape, but remained unpunished; García Luna saw no impediment to naming him head of the Organized Crime unit at the AFI. Then there was Rafael Avilés, who during the 1990s had created a Mexico City group of police from different forces, called La Hermandad, The Brotherhood. They specialized in high-profile kidnappings and hold-ups, and extorted criminal gangs in exchange for allowing them to operate. Yet in 1996 Avilés spent a few weeks as interim secretary of public security.

Rubén Hernández Esparza, who from being in the PGJDF joined the PJF in 1994, was rapidly promoted when García Luna arrived. In 2005 he was investigated, but let off, for alleged links to The Federation; indeed, he was so intimate with the Beltrán Leyva brothers that there is talk of his appearance with them in one of the incriminating photos they used to take to guarantee the loyalty of their tame policemen.
⁴⁵

Luis Jafet Jasso Rodríguez, with an allegiance to Cárdenas Palomino ever since his PGJDF days, entered the AFI as soon as it was inaugurated in November 2001. Besides his expertise in bribe collection, and alleged involvement in torture and homicide, Jasso was involved in the impudent attempt to hold up the presidential payroll van at the beginning of Fox’s sexennial. The PGJDF intervened to stop the robbery, accompanied by Jasso from the AFI; when the robbers saw him, they demanded he call the other policemen off. Despite his complicity in the attempted heist, Jasso was spared the consequences when his bosses put in a good word for him. He temporarily left the AFI in 2002.

These were the kind of men who joined the PJF/AFI under Genaro García Luna, in order to apply the recipes so successfully trialed in Mexico City to the country as a whole. They got on
famously with colleagues who were already in the force, such as Francisco Javier Gómez Mesa, who after thirty years as a PGR pen-pusher found a new, exciting career open to him in the AFI. Others came over from the Federal Police, such as Aristeo Gómez, Facundo Rosas, and Gerardo Garay, who had been close buddies with García Luna in Cisen.

Still other members of the team arrived highly recommended, from non-police backgrounds: one such was Mario Arturo Velarde, the spokesman of Zedillo’s last foreign secretary; he acted as private secretary to García Luna from 2001 to 2006. At the other end of the scale, men were recommended with nothing more than an IT degree or experience of working in a department store.

Luis Cárdenas Palomino, El Pollo, the AFI director general of police investigations, was born on April 25, 1969. Of all García Luna’s inner circle, he is the one to whom the secretary is most indebted, as the latter tacitly admits by his tolerance of everything Cárdenas gets up to. It was Cárdenas who got him promoted, from an insignificant official in the Federal Preventive Police during the Zedillo government, to director general of the AFI under Vicente Fox. Cárdenas had an excellent line to Rafael Macedo de la Concha, tipped to be the new Attorney General responsible for approving García’s appointment: Cárdenas’s wife is Minerva Castillejos, daughter of one of Macedo’s closest friends, the (since executed) lawyer Marcos Castillejos.

El Pollo Cárdenas wanted a top job for himself, too, but his criminal record was an obstacle. To the outside world, he is decent-looking and presentable—the acceptable face of García Luna’s team. But colleagues who have worked with him complain of arrogance, bullying, and corruption. Beneath that handsome face is a man capable of killing in cold blood.

When he was eighteen he was accused of taking part in a murderous spree in Lindavista, a smart neighborhood of Mexico City. His chilling, signed confession is in a file in the Federal District Attorney’s Office.

On August 12, 1987, Luis Cárdenas, along with one René Álvarez, did nothing to intervene when their friend Octavio Navarro blew the
brains out of a taxi driver who had just given them a ride. They didn’t have the money to pay him; a bullet that left the windscreen covered in blood was his solution.

“It’s your unlucky day,” said Octavio menacingly, when the driver demanded his fare. After a brief argument, he shot him and laughed. Later, Cárdenas went on with his friend to drink champagne and look for some hookers.

Two more people were to die that evening. After a lot of champagne in the Sugar Bar, for which he had no intention of paying, Octavio started an argument with the bar staff, and Luis ran away. But he didn’t go to the police to report what had happened. In the early hours of August 13, after negotiating with the owners of the bar, Navarro shot them. In his statement, Cárdenas swore that he had not been present at these two other killings, but Octavio’s wife Rosana assured the public prosecutors he’d been there.

Cárdenas Palomino got off thanks to the influence of his father, but he knew that the episode would dog him forever. That’s why he decided to push forward his good friend Genaro García Luna, for director of the PJF. Cárdenas had the run of the PGR, thanks to his father-in-law’s friendship with Macedo and the fact that his brother-in-law was the new attorney general’s chief adviser. To begin with, García Luna’s relationship with Attorney General Macedo was very good, and the latter was cooperative with the name change of the PJF to the AFI.

The policemen who saw them arrive at the PJF still recall how García Luna, accompanied by Cárdenas Palomino and others, requested an intensive course in torture. Of course the training was given as a practical, hands-on course, and García and Cárdenas were fast learners.

One of the most repugnant moments of that training involved a young man falsely accused of kidnapping. Guillermo Vélez, Memo as he was known, worked in a gym whose owner, Maciel Islas, had been kidnapped days earlier. On March 29, 2002, the manager asked Vélez to go with him to meet a client who was interested in buying the gym. Memo agreed, thinking the money would be used to pay the ransom. It was all a trick. The following day his father found what was left of him in the morgue. What they did to Guillermo Vélez was indescribable.
The cruel anonymous letter sent to his family mocked how Memo had cried while he was tortured. His father fought for justice like David against Goliath, because he knew his son was innocent. On November 26, 2009, for the first time ever, the PGR had to admit publicly that it had made a mistake: Memo was not a kidnapper. The PGR publicly apologized to the family, and paid substantial damages. With García Luna’s arrival at the AFI, and later at the Secretariat of Public Security (SSP), torture once again became common practice, especially against the innocent. With the guilty, you could usually reach a deal.

Cárdenas carefully cultivated Enrique Peña Nieto, the current Mexican President, when he was a governor, in hopes of being named secretary of public security if Peña Nieto won. However, the Secretariat has been dissolved and its functions moved to the Interior. In December 2012, Cárdenas Palomino announced his resignation from the force and intention to move into the private sector.
⁴⁶

Edgar Millán was born in 1966. He was two years older than García Luna, who he had known since 1989, longer than any other member of the team. First they were together in the intelligence agency, Cisen, where they worked for four years. Then their careers parted for a while, coming back together in the PJF. It was Millán who carried out the police investigation into El Chapo’s “escape” from Puente Grande, taking care in the process to watch the back of García Luna as well as that of his mentor, Jorge Tello Peón. He was soon rewarded by being made director general of regional deployments at the AFI. Millán, who had only completed high school, was thus in charge of appointing the agency’s regional chiefs throughout the country, making him one of the most powerful figures in the AFI. They say he charged the drug traffickers, especially members of The Federation, between $200,000 and $1 million for appointing a particular boss to a given region, as well as a monthly fee of $50,000 to $100,000 for the AFI director general of the moment.
⁴⁷
In time, Millán became a time bomb waiting to go off in García Luna’s face.