Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (38 page)

Igor Labastida was given the key job of director of traffic and contraband at the Federal Police. Like him, Facundo Rosas Rosas,
Gerardo Garay Cadena, Rafael Avilés, Armando Espinosa de Benito, Luis Jafet Jasso, and other members of the “inner circle” were simply reshuffled.

García Luna also recruited fresh talent for his new tasks as head of the SSP. When he was director of the AFI, he had always boasted that one day he would have more power than a president; in this new job, he was closer than ever to making the dream come true. Marco Tulio López, a lawyer with a history of human rights abuses in Oaxaca and minor posts in district courts, was named legal director of the SSP, his only merit being that he had helped to get García Luna off the hook when he was accused by the Auditor of mismanagement in 2000. Another new signing was Edgar Enrique Bayardo, former judicial policeman and more lately the deputy attorney in Tlaxcala state, where he was reputed to be involved in a kidnapping gang allegedly run by his brother. García Luna named him deputy director of crime investigation with the Federal Police.

There was a rotten smell in the Secretariat of Public Security. Soon the stink would waft out onto the streets, and cause a public scandal.

The phoney war on drugs

From the beginning of his government, the phrase “war on drugs” became Calderón’s great buzzword. The first troop movement began on December 11, 2006, with the Michoacán Joint Operation. Seven thousand troops and police officers from the army, the navy, the AFI, and the PFP were deployed in the state of Michoacán, which was then controlled by the Gulf Cartel.

The military commander of that first battle was General Manuel García Ruiz, assigned by the secretary of defense, Guillermo Galván. In charge of the civilian forces was Gerardo Garay, appointed by García Luna. A year later Garay and other senior SSP officials were denounced after appearing in videos taking instructions from members of El Chapo Guzmán’s organization.

In the months that followed, Calderón continued to speak about the “war”:

I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: this is a deep-seated problem in our country, with such profound roots that it will take time, a lot of time, and money, a great deal of money, as a war on this scale does. And regrettably it will continue to cost, as it has already cost in the last two years, human lives.

But rest assured, my friends, the Mexican state, and your government, are absolutely determined to fight this battle, without respite, until we win back the streets, the squares, the cities, for all of Mexico’s citizens.
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Up to August 2010, the cost in human lives referred to by the president amounted to 28,000 people killed. By July 2011, this terrifying figure had risen to more than 40,000. To the sound of gunfights and grenades going off, Mexico was turning into a graveyard.

Throughout his six years in government, Felipe Calderón refused to change one iota of his anti-drug strategy. And when you look in detail at the operations undertaken, it raises all manner of suspicions about the president. When questioned on the direction taken by his “war,” Calderón bristled: either you were with him, unconditionally and without question, or you were against him. His critics were made out to be anti-patriotic.

Throughout this presidency, the enemies of El Chapo and his closest allies fell like flies, while he basked in his impunity.

On February 24, 2010, President Calderón was asked at a press conference whether his government had protected Joaquín Guzmán Loera. He exploded: “That is absolutely false!” and went on to explain:

We have fought all of them. And to all of them we have dealt serious blows, to their operational and financial structure, and to their leadership. This is a false and malicious accusation, I don’t know what the intention behind it is, but it just doesn’t stand up. We have attacked in the same way both the Gulf and the Pacific cartels.

What’s more, we’ve hit almost the same number of big drug barons and criminal bosses on both sides. It’s incredible to me that when we are catching criminals as important as El Teo, for example, who is from El Chapo’s organization, from the Pacific Cartel, the government is
accused of protecting that cartel. Or when we are extraditing someone like Vicente Zambada,
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we are accused of covering up for them. At best it’s pure ignorance.

Once again, the president was repeating a series of myths about his policy for fighting Mexico’s drug gangs. His supposed war on the drugs trade was as “real” as that waged by Ronald Reagan twenty years earlier, with the results that are only too well known. From the beginning of his government, Calderón’s strategy against the drug barons was designed to favour El Chapo Guzmán and his main partners: El Mayo Zambada, El Nacho Coronel, and El Azul Esparragoza.

There is firm documentary evidence that Calderón’s war was overwhelmingly aimed against those drug traffickers who are El Chapo’s enemies or represent a threat to his leadership. Since 2007, the government has known the exact addresses of Mexico’s main drug traffickers and their relatives. In some cases they have the telephone numbers, bank accounts, and other valuable details that would allow them to take successful, targeted action against them. This is evident from the files on each drug baron drawn up by the SSP with the support of the intelligence agency, Cisen.
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In fact, what Mexico has experienced in the last decade is not a “war on drug traffickers,” but a war between drug traffickers, with the government taking sides for the Sinaloa Cartel.

The people responsible for designing President Calderón’s war strategy and setting its main priorities were Genaro García Luna and his team, with their long and reliable history of service to the same cartel. This strategy put forward by the SSP was based on certain “lines of inquiry” which identified as “strategic priority no. 1” the capture of the leader of the Gulf Cartel, Ezequiel Cárdenas—brother of Osiel Cárdenas—and of Jorge Costilla, El Coss, his second in command. The only leaders of The Federation labeled “strategic priority no. 1” were Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, El Mochomo, Arturo Beltrán Leyva, El Barbas, and Edgar Valdés, La Barbie.
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Of all El Chapo’s partners, the one who represented the greatest threat to him in terms of power was Arturo Beltrán Leyva and his group. El Barbas was beginning to get too much power of his own.
Nor did Guzmán appreciate the fact that his cousin’s loyalties to Vicente Carrillo Fuentes seemed stronger than they were to him. The murder of the Golden Boy, Rodolfo Carrillo Fuentes, ordered by El Mayo and approved by El Chapo, was a wound that never healed. Relations between these two leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel and Vicente El Viceroy were hanging by a thread, and the former were disturbed by El Barbas’s close relation with the latter. Although the Beltrán Leyvas were still part of The Federation in 2007, it’s clear that from the beginning of Calderón’s term, the stench of betrayal hung in the air. It was just a matter of time.

By contrast, Joaquín Guzmán, Ismael Zambada, Ignacio Coronel, and Juan José Esparragoza were only classified as “strategic priority no. 2,”
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in spite of the fact that they were leading the most powerful drug trafficking organization in the Americas, and the one with the strongest presence in the United States.

A declassified document from the US Northern Command, drawn up in 2009, states categorically that the Sinaloa Cartel is the most dangerous of the Mexican drug trafficking organizations, and blames this “rogue cartel” for the violence along the border. The authors note with concern that the Sinaloa Cartel controls the Pacific corridor, and there is little or nothing to stop it taking over the corridor that was in the hands of the Arellano Félix organization.
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The government’s dubious strategy has helped to strengthen El Chapo Guzmán, since most of the drug traffickers arrested belong to groups that oppose him. Edgardo Buscaglia,
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one of the main critics of the Calderón government’s failed war, has done the math: of the 53,174 arrests made in the four years to 2010, for either involvement in organized crime or criminal association, he says that only 941 were connected with El Chapo Guzmán’s cartel.

What is more, most of the arrests that did take place came to nothing. Buscaglia points out that when you look for consequences after the arrest of the son, or the grandfather, or whatever, of El Mayo Zambada, there are none to be found: “Was somebody sent to prison? Did they reveal the details of the fortunes belonging to El Chapo, El Mayo, or El Azul Esparragoza?” The facts back up this troublesome UN adviser.

The protection given by the Mexican government to Joaquín Guzmán is palpable. And the drug lord himself makes a show of it.
At the beginning of July 2007, El Chapo decided to “get married” in broad daylight, with Mexican army soldiers as minders, and drug traffickers and politicians from both the PRI and the PAN as his guests.

El Chapo’s wedding

That July day in 2007, in the municipality of Canelas, in Durango state, the band Los Canelos suddenly stopped playing. The ranch was surrounded by soldiers in olive green. For a few seconds at least, the couple celebrating their nuptials with this sumptuous fiesta ceased to be the center of attention: The King of Crystal had arrived. Ignacio Coronel was the regional big shot and guest of honor on a day when “royalty” were sealing such an important union. The bridegroom, at fifty-three, was undoubtedly the king of Mexican drug traffickers. The bride, at just eighteen, was the recently crowned Queen of the annual Canelas Coffee and Guava Fair. Canelas is a heavenly spot, surrounded by waterfalls, woods and all manner of wild flowers, but Emma Coronel was the loveliest flower of them all.
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In the course of his life, El Chapo has had quite a collection of women. Now, it seems he has eyes only for Emma. The name she adopted after her coronation suits her well: Emma I. Slim and childlike, she has long, brown, curly hair that reaches halfway down her back, white skin, an oval face and brown, melancholy eyes. But the union was not really a wedding, says the daughter of one drug baron who knows the situation well. “El Chapo cannot marry because he never divorced his first wife, Alejandrina.” What he did was to formalize his relationship and commitment to Emma.

When El Chapo saw his friend and partner Nacho arrive, he hurried over and gave him a bear hug, the kind you give to a brother. They were having a party. It had been a long time since El Chapo had felt at peace. That wasn’t because he feared arrest by the government, but because of the war The Federation had started against the Gulf Cartel four years ago. Now, at last, he could spare a few moments for his personal life.

El Chapo enjoyed considerable freedom of movement in Canelas, where the mayor was Francisco Cárdenas Gamboa, of the PAN. In
May of 2007 the mayor had been involved in a scandal after local police officers were caught by the army carrying several kilos of opium gum with a permit signed by him.

Apart from the star guest, Nacho Coronel, El Chapo had invited all his nearest and dearest. After all, it was a day to celebrate in style. El Mayo, El Azul, the Beltrán Leyva brothers and La Barbie were all there. People in the know say that one of the politicians present was the young PAN senator, Rodolfo Dorador, who is close to President Felipe Calderón. He would stand unsuccessfully for mayor in Durango in 2010 as the candidate of the “Durango Unites Us” coalition, made up of the PAN, the left-of-center PRD, and Convergencia. When asked whether he really was at the wedding, Dorador doesn’t deny it. And if a party colleague reproaches him for it, he replies testily: “So what? Fox hung out with El Chapo, too.”

Some of those who attended say the Sinaloa state district attorney, Alfredo Higuera Bernal, was also there. When the magazine
Proceso
reported this, Higuera called a press conference to deny it. In fact he said he had never been to Durango, although other guests still insist he was present.

El Chapo also invited Jesús Aguilar, the governor of Sinaloa, and he apparently accepted, although the former governor of Durango state, Ismael Hernández, did not, preferring to avoid trouble. People in Durango claim he was so closely involved with El Chapo that the latter once went around to his house and tell him off, reminding him that he had to answer his calls whenever he phoned, and not to forget it again.

The party went on long into the night. In times of truce, El Chapo could allow himself such a luxury. However, not everything went his way. The celebration soon became public knowledge, and that infuriated him. The repercussions of the leak were severe. Cárdenas Gamboa, who completed his term as mayor of Canelas in August 2007, was shot by two gunmen on September 22 in downtown Durango city. The following day, Reynaldo Jiménez, the leader of the PAN in Canelas and a former municipal secretary, was kidnapped and never seen again. The last thing El Chapo needed right then was the glare of publicity. Only weeks before his “marriage” to the Queen of the Coffee and Guava Fair, he had attended a less agreeable gathering.

The Valle Hermoso pact

In June 2007, various drug barons from The Federation and the Gulf Cartel held a series of meetings in different parts of the country. The aim was to put an end to the war between the two organizations that had lasted almost four years (since 2003) and caused thousands of deaths. One of the meetings took place in Tamaulipas, on Zetas territory,
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at a property belonging to Heriberto Lazcano, near the junction of the Valle Hermoso and Matamoros highways. Since the members of The Federation were the “aggressors” and those of the Gulf Cartel the “aggrieved,” the latter set the terms for the encounter.