Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (36 page)

Francisco Javier Garza Palacios, El Frutilupis, was born in 1965. He has amassed a fortune since going into police work, and is reputed to own luxury apartments and bars, as well as three Cessna 206 aircraft which he keeps in the AtizApán de Zaragoza airport, in the State of Mexico, a popular airport among drug traffickers. As AFI’s
director of special operations, he was implicated in the affair of the execution of the Zetas members in Acapulco.
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With Cárdenas Palomino’s blessing, Garza allowed members of The Federation to actively supervise the police actions ordered by the Beltrán Leyvas against their adversaries.

Another notoriously corrupt member of the team was Igor Labastida. He arrived at the AFI as deputy director of crime investigation under Cárdenas Palomino, and was promoted to area director. Labastida used to complain that García Luna and Cárdenas left all the dirty work to him, and that whereas García and others had taken money from all the cartels, they had only remained on good terms with that of El Chapo Guzmán.
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He feared for his life because of all the foul deeds he’d committed, and with good reason.

There was no way García Luna’s boys could hide their real nature. They looked like ducks, they swam like ducks, and they quacked like ducks: they were ducks.

The unforgivable ones

Kidnapping is one of the the most reprehensible of crimes. Its perpetrators rob the other not only of their money but of their dignity. It is based on a display of power in which victims can be raped, tortured, mutilated, put into unimaginable situations; pain is pitilessly inflicted in order to force families to pay up. Among the different kinds of kidnapping gangs operating in Mexico, a particular network of interrelated groups has flourished over the last twelve years, all linked to drug trafficking, and whose brand of terror shares one key feature: the involvement of senior police officers, the unforgivable ones.

During the Fox presidency, the AFI’s anti-kidnapping squad led by Luis Cárdenas Palomino became one of its most active. The government was only recently installed when a number of murky episodes came to light. Some kidnappings were brought to a satisfactory conclusion, with the arrest of those responsible. But other cases, the more newsworthy or violent ones, often ran into difficulties, with the family finally paying millions of pesos or dollars after receiving fingers or ears, and videos showing the abuse.

On many occasions, when police officers were getting close to solving a case, Cárdenas and Millán would put the brakes on; sometimes they even threatened them if they persisted with their investigations. This was especially the case when the gang under investigation was working in Iztapalapa or the State of Mexico. Some AFI staff were surprised to notice that Cárdenas and Millán would send unarmed officers to accompany relatives when they went to pay a ransom. In fact, they only went along to make sure that payment was made, and for the correct amount. The suspicion that these commanders were in league with the gangs became a certainty when five of the best officers that the AFI had trained to negotiate with kidnappers, resigned: they had discovered that top police officials, their bosses, had been involved in several kidnappings, presumably with the approval of the top boss of all, García Luna.
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Not of course that the AFI chiefs were to be distracted from their main business, which was to serve the barons of the Pacific organization: many of the kidnapping gangs they were protecting were sub-cells of the cartel itself, or linked to one or other of its members.

Kidnapper Marcos Tinoco, nicknamed El Coronel, believed to be responsible for at least eleven high-profile kidnappings between 1999 and 2000, confessed in 2002 that one of the cells of his organization was led by Cynthia Romero, the sister-in-law of El Güero Palma, and a close friend of El Chapo Guzmán.
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Tinoco directly accused García Luna of covering up for the kidnap gangs, but nothing was done about it. A scoundrel like that was not to be believed.

Kidnapping has been a spin-off from drug trafficking for more than a decade. It is not a recent result of the supposed war on drugs, as President Calderón and his inseparable secretary of public security, García Luna, tried to make us believe.

The largest and most vicious kidnap gang of recent times, blamed for some of the most shocking instances, was nurtured and protected by Genaro García Luna and his inner circle; the documentary evidence is decisive. Authorities in the Federal District have baptised it La Flor (The Flower). Its different cells are believed to have been responsible for over 200 kidnappings, and in some cases murders, provoking an outcry from society.

In 2001, the Mexico City government began to note a series of kidnappings characterized by the particular savagery with which the targets were treated, especially women. However, these victims took their cases not to the capital’s District Attorney but to the PGR, which in turn put the investigations in the hands of the AFI.
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By 2003, the AFI had got precise information, including addresses and phone numbers, on members of a gang led by a true predator: former cop Sergio Ortiz Juárez, El Apá or El Patrón. The gang boasted to their associates that they got support from the SIEDO (the specialized organized crime investigations unit) and were protected in the capital by members of the AFI, the PFP, and the Secretariat of Public Security. This was confirmed by the initial investigations opened—paradoxically as ever—by the SIEDO itself into El Apá’s gang in 2003. For three years the AFI headed up the investigation, but it never got anywhere.

In June 2005, during a routine investigation into petty dealing in the Polanco neighborhood of Mexico City, officers from the Federal District Attorney’s Office detained a man by the name of George Khouri Layón. El Koki, as he was called, was a genial, well-known figure of Mexico City nightlife, the owner of two discotheques, who liked to hang out with soap stars and other celebrities. He was also known to The Federation, as he had links to the Beltrán Leyvas and worked for La Barbie. They caught him red-handed with two guns, one .35 and one .22 caliber, and a whole store of psychotropic pills.

The yuppie businessman resisted arrest and demanded they call his friend Igor Labastida, the AFI commander and one of García Luna’s men, to have him set free. El Koki became increasingly defiant, warning he was on good terms with a gang called La Cancha and “you don’t want to mess with them.” It’s not known if anyone did call Labastida, but the fact is the narco-businessman was soon released.
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The only person to suffer any consequences was a federal agent who lost his job.

Before working for the drug traffickers, El Koki had collaborated with a gang of kidnappers led by Luis López, El Vale, thought to be responsible for some forty kidnappings and to have amassed a fortune of over $100 million from ransoms. Ortiz, El Apá, was also
a member of this gang,
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before he joined another, and finally went on to lead his own outfit, La Flor. This was made up of at least eight cells, a hydra-headed monster in which El Apá apparently had the help of his sons, both in carrying out the kidnaps and in processing the receipts.

El Apá continued collaborating with El Vale and El Koki; anything goes in the ugly world of kidnapping. Sometimes El Vale would sell his victims on to El Apá when he got tired of waiting for the family to pay. He handed them over in a very bad state. El Apá would then push the family to the verge of madness. Any money made he made over and above the sum paid to El Vale was pure profit. The organization charged with investigating El Apá’s gang was the AFI. Its lack of results was no accident. Years later, the reason would become clear.

Another cell of El Apá’s gang was led by Abel Silva. His group was known as Los Tiras (The Cops) because it included policemen. They are believed to have been responsible for the kidnapping of the singer Thalía’s sisters. After the women were let go in September 2002, their testimony suggested that the AFI were involved, either directly or as accomplices.
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Today we know that Los Tiras were indeed an extension of Ortiz’s gang and the AFI, and that AFI agents were indeed involved. Silva was apprehended in 2006, and tried as sole perpetrator of the ambitious snatch; his place at the head of Los Tiras was taken by Luis Ignacio Torres, still under the umbrella of Sergio Ortiz, El Apá.

The way they worked was this. Ortiz carried out the kidnapping and collected the ransom, with the help of the AFI. Los Tiras or another cell were responsible for guarding the victims. El Apá always dropped by, to torment them.
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When Calderón moved into Los Pinos, and García Luna took over at the Public Security Secretariat, El Apá’s protection remained intact. Except that now his protectors were more powerful. It’s estimated that El Apá amassed a fortune of more than $35 million from kidnapping—not including the 35 percent of receipts earmarked for García Luna and his team, just like in the old days in Iztapalapa. The Federal District SSP says El Apá owns hotels in Cancún, as well as houses in Xochimilco, Jardines en la Montaña, San Jerónimo, and Santo Domingo.

As his impunity grew, mainly thanks to the AFI, so El Apá became more brutal. The hallmark of his organization was cruelty. Often,
whether or not the ransom was paid, they would execute their victims just for the fun of it. To begin with, many of their prey were small businesspeople: a builder, a gas supplier, a florist. This last case, of a woman with a flower company in Xochimilco, may be why prosecutors in the capital called the gang La Flor.

There’s no doubt that Joaquín Guzmán had got hold of the perfect men for his war on the Gulf Cartel, and the other wars to come. Deep down, they were no different from Los Zetas: drug traffickers, kidnappers, and evil through and through.

The continued pressure from Santiago Vasconcelos bothered García Luna, who didn’t conceal his own dislike. Luckily for him, during the Fox presidency García found a number of natural allies in the PGR, all the more necessary given his falling-out with the attorney general himself, Rafael Macedo de la Concha, and this dispute with Deputy Attorney Santiago. The most powerful of these allies was Gilberto Higuera, who was directly in charge of appointing the PGR’s delegates in states across the country. Higuera has been accused of making these appointments in accordance with the interests of The Federation. This supposedly happened in the State of Mexico, Durango, Campeche, Veracruz, Sonora, Yucatán, Sinaloa, Chihuahua, and Guerrero.

In February 2005, the protected witness Julio (who was El Chapo’s brother-in-law), in a statement made in the Mexican embassy in Washington, said that El Chapo Guzmán, with whom he’d worked for years, had told him that Higuera was keeping him up to date about the cases against him and the request for his extradition to the United States. The PGR dismissed this evidence against Higuera. In a brief press release it said the declarations were based on hearsay, and were therefore legally invalid. Later a judge had Julio’s testimony struck out.
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Yet there are public officials currently behind bars on far less evidence than this, once they’re defined as inconvenient. In 2010, Higuera openly backed Juan Vizcarra for governor of Sinaloa—the same candidate who couldn’t bring himself to deny his friendship with El Mayo Zambada. After that he worked with García Luna in the Secretariat of Public Security.

Rafael Macedo left the PGR in April 2005, and was replaced by Daniel Cabeza de Vaca. Gilberto Higuera stayed on, supposedly to
show the new attorney general the ropes. Macedo’s resignation came just months before his name appeared in an FBI report. This quoted the McAllen Intelligence Center’s conclusion, that the Zetas were working that part of the frontier with the “blessing” of the attorney general.
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See no evil

By the end of the Fox presidency in 2006, the balance of the crusade against drugs was disastrous. The group of traffickers that came together in The Federation, under the leadership of El Chapo Guzmán, had become very powerful. Joaquín Guzmán, Ismael Zambada, the Beltrán Leyva brothers, Juan José Esparragoza, Ignacio Coronel, and Vicente Carrillo, all were completely impregnable. Their interests remained undisturbed by so much as the brush of a feather.

Even before Fox left Los Pinos, the DEA had begun investigating him and his family. The Tijuana Cartel had almost ceased to exist after 2002, what with the killing of Ramón Arellano Félix and the arrest of more than 2,000 members of the organization in the course of that year, including Benjamín Arellano Félix. At the same time the Gulf Cartel had been decapitated in February 2002 with the arrest of Osiel Cárdenas. In contrast, no leader of The Federation had been captured.

The United States government also had its share of responsibility for what happened. Panic and a mistaken diagnosis—whether deliberate or accidental—meant they focussed their attention on the Gulf Cartel and their fearsome Zetas. Between May 2004 and May 2005, thirty-five US citizens were kidnapped in Nuevo Laredo, apparently by the Zetas. Twenty-three were freed, nine remain unaccounted for, and two were killed. In the same period, twenty-six people were seized in San Antonio, Texas, presumably by the same organization.
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By concentrating on the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas, US authorities allowed The Federation to grow exponentially under their very noses, on their own side of the border. The war for control of the US market became a lot more ferocious and lethal.

In just a few years, the map of drug distribution across the States was radically redrawn. The National Drug Intelligence Center
(NDIC) in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, divided the United States into seven regions:
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Pacific, Midwest, South West, North West, Great Lakes, North East, and South East. In 2004, the zones were divided roughly evenly between drug traffickers from Mexico, Colombia, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic. The Colombians were dominant in New York and also Miami, the two most important markets for cocaine; the Mexican cartels held sway in cities like Atlanta and Houston, while in Chicago and Los Angeles the market was fairly evenly divided. The distribution of methamphetamine was heavily dominated by Mexicans, even though most of the supply was manufactured in the United States.
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