Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (44 page)

Arturo Beltrán Leyva died on December 16, 2009. His body lay as cold as the marble floor of the luxury apartment in Cuernavaca that he used as a safe house. He was executed in an operation carried out by the Navy Secretariat, with guidance from the United States. The Mexican Navy had information—provided by the DEA—that Arturo Beltrán was in the Altitude apartment blocks, but they didn’t know in which unit. At about 5:30 p.m. the marines began to search the towers, securing three apartments: numbers 201 and 202 in Tower Four, and 1001 in Tower Five. The result was three suspected drug traffickers arrested and seven killed, among them El Barbas, according to the military report. Some photographs of the place where the eldest of the Beltrán Leyva brothers died show a bed soaked in blood, but it was never made clear who had died there.

The powerful drug baron had been savagely blasted, so savagely that the right side of his chest was a pulp, and the arm had almost come off. It was as if they had either used dumdum bullets or fired repeated rounds into the same spot. The following day the press published gory photos of the body, covered in dollar and peso bills, with the pants pulled down, showing blood-stained underwear, and the shirt pulled up. The scene had been ghoulishly stage-managed.

The autopsies showed that all seven had either been drinking heavily or were drugged, which makes it difficult to imagine they put up much of a fight when the Navy attacked.

Arturo Beltrán Leyva’s corpse, even before it was manipulated for the photos, was found with the tee-shirt rolled up over the arms and the pants pulled down, a common technique for immobilizing a suspect during arrest. This led the forensic team carrying out the autopsy to believe he had already been subdued before he was killed. It didn’t suit anyone for El Barbas, in captivity, to reveal the secrets of the last twenty years of organized crime in Mexico.

Concerns over a possible summary execution were raised by Arturo Chávez, the newly appointed attorney general, at a meeting of the national security cabinet a few days after the operation. Chávez made it clear that he was against summary executions, and expected any alleged criminals to be taken alive so that they could be put on trial.

On December 18, 2009, El Barbas’s body was collected by his sister, Felícitas Beltrán Leyva, Erika Beltrán Martínez, his half-sister, and Araceli Flores, a family friend. Next day the remains of the celebrity drug baron were flown to Culiacán and buried, surrounded by wreaths of red, red roses, in the Jardines de Lumaya cemetery. He had reached his last resting place, from where he would continue to inflict much damage on the country.

Even in death, El Barbas was trouble. In the search after he was killed, they found a list of beneficiaries on his narco-payroll—officials in the Morelos state attorney’s office, in the SSP at federal and state levels, and police chiefs in five of the state’s municipalities, including Cuernavaca. According to the papers found, the Beltrán Leyvas paid monthly bribes of between $5,000 and $10,000 to federal and state officials, and of 10,000 pesos ($760 in 2009) to municipal
authorities. As we say in Mexico, you pick your stone according to the toad you’re aiming at: depending on the rank of the official being bought, the bribes were paid in pesos or in dollars.

It also turned out that the Beltrán Leyvas were paying 1.8 million pesos per month ($136,800) to journalists and the media in Morelos state. There was also a wide network of informants listed at two thousand pesos apiece ($152), without specifying whether this was per day, per week, or per month.

The information recovered in the operation showed that El Barbas wanted to turn Cuernavaca into “the Switzerland of Mexico, where calm reigns and their families can live in peace. To this end they had begun a clean-up operation.” Among the documents an inventory of weapons was also found, 112 items in all, including five rocket launchers. But only forty-three guns and grenades were actually recovered.
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The rest, including the rocket launchers, are still out there, in a Mexico that is ablaze.

The fall of El Barbas intensified the struggle between Mexican cartels for territorial control. His death severely weakened the group led by Vicente Carrillo in Ciudad Juárez. In the face of an unrelenting offensive by the Sinaloa cartel, El Viceroy gradually lost organizational and military capability. He is said to have abandoned the territory at the beginning of 2010. In his place, Sergio Villarreal, El Grande, was left to defend the historic and much coveted bastion of the Juárez cartel, using a group of fighters known as La Línea, who El Chapo was intent on defeating. Meanwhile Edgar Valdez, La Barbie, and Gerardo Álvarez, El Indio, two of Arturo Beltrán’s chief enforcers, sought to create their own cartel: El Indio had the contacts with Colombia, and La Barbie the brute force, to embark on such a project.

The Sinaloa cartel suggested to Vicente Carrillo that he sign a peace deal and form a new alliance with them. But El Viceroy refused, because his family still wasn’t ready to pardon the murder of his brother, Rodolfo. Instead he maintained his alliance with Héctor Beltrán Leyva, who took over the leadership from his late brother. The ones who did sign a truce with the Sinaloa cartel were the leaders of the Gulf Cartel. Apparently with the consent of the government, the two organizations set as their joint main target the elimination of
Los Zetas, who, according to US official reports, went from being the armed wing of the Gulf Cartel to forming a new cartel in their own right. The feared Zetas were now the best allies of the Beltrán Leyva clan. Together they turned the flourishing city of Monterrey, capital of Nuevo León state and internationally famed for its industry and economic strength, into a carnival of horrors, where the spectacle of tortured bodies hanging half-dismembered from footbridges is an everyday occurrence.

All these shifting alliances led to a savage increase in violence in Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, Michoacán, Guerrero, and Morelos. In all of these states, body parts from one side or the other turn up on an almost daily basis—not to mention the many innocent individuals who perish in the crossfire.

After more than twenty years of domination by the Carrillo Fuentes gang in Ciudad Juárez, and nearly fourteen years after El Viceroy inherited the Juárez cartel from his brother, El Señor de los Cielos, El Chapo Guzmán had virtually taken over the prized territory. He achieved it at the cost of an immense bloodbath: 1,500 people executed in the border city in 2008; 2,660 in 2009; and by 2010 the figure was 3,116, or about eight murders a day.

On April 9, 2010, Andrea Simmons, the FBI spokesperson in El Paso, Texas, said that after two years of war between the gangs for control of Juárez, the Sinaloa cartel had virtually won. Ironically, the announcement of this “victory” coincided with the withdrawal of the Mexican army and its replacement on the streets of Ciudad Juárez by the SSP’s Federal Police. After the arrival of García Luna’s sturdy cops, the violence in that part of the country rose to unprecedented levels. The earlier suspicions of complicity between the Sinaloa cartel and the institutions answering to García Luna can only add to speculation that this move to put the Federal Police in charge of Ciudad Juárez was also designed to favor that particular criminal organization.

El Mayo’s air fleet

During its so-called war on drugs, the Calderón government dealt some much-publicized blows to members of the Sinaloa cartel, in an attempt to distract public attention from the many clues to its
complicity with that organization. These blows were always aimed at middle-level personnel. They never struck at the heart of the cartel: its top leaders and its core business.

The Sinaloa cartel’s main artery runs through Mexico City airport. It remains intact and fully operational, pumping money to the leaders, money which in turn empowers them to continue their criminal enterprise. Inside Mexico City International Airport (AICM), on the inner road from Terminal 1 to Terminal 2, are the offices and hangars of Aviones, S.A., a company that officially does aircraft repairs.
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It’s a good location. It has hangars, maintenance and repair sheds, a spare parts center, and 50,000 square feet of apron that connects directly to the runways. The company has branches at several other airports in the center of the country, in the State of Mexico, in Puebla, and in Cuernavaca. It also hires out airplanes, according to the brochure.

In his sworn statement of 2008, the PGR’s protected witness Richard Arroyo, code name María Fernanda, insisted that in this firm’s AICM hangar, drugs and cash belonging to El Mayo and El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel are loaded and unloaded every day.

I wish to state that next to Terminal 2 in the AICM, although I don’t remember the exact address, we have a company called Aviones which is right next to the AESA [ASESA] hangar, with direct access to the airport, and you can see the name from outside, blue lettering on a white façade, and you can make out its offices, on two floors, employing around thirty people.

To get in, there is a security barrier manned by a policeman. Inside there’s this blue cargo plane we never had a chance to use, but which was bought with illicit money. At least it was blue last time I saw it, they paint it every month. We also have two helicopters in there, one of them hired out to the municipality of Ecatapec, the other is getting a propeller fixed. Both were bought with illicit money. We also use these helicopters to spot enemy positions and for leisure trips. There are three fuel tanks of ours, too, two small ones and one large. They are white with the name “Aviafuel” written on them.

María Fernanda’s description of the building and how to get there was accurate. What’s more, this was not the first time that Aviones
S.A. had come to the PGR’s attention. The file from a previous investigation (siedo/ueicc s/132/2008) states that on March 30, 2008, police officers from the PFP—then headed by Edgar Millán—used official vehicles to escort a shipment of chemical precursors to the Aviones hangar. The container was carrying 600 kilograms of ephedrine, which had come in from the Netherlands on KLM flight 685.
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On December 1, 2008, the PGR recognized that “there is sufficient evidence to say for certain that the accused [the Zambada clan] were active in operations such as drug trafficking at Mexico City International Airport.”

The company Aviones, S.A. was founded in Mexico City in 1948. Its original registered owners were Héctor Mariscal, Benjamín Burillo, Raúl Esponda, and Aarón Sáenz Garza, who appeared as the only shareholders. According to its constitution, the company provided a range of services pertaining to the purchase and rehabilitation of aircraft—a broad enough brief to enable El Mayo Zambada and his henchmen, years later, to acquire the necessary narco-planes, as well as assure secondary services such as maintenance and refueling. The firm has been ensconced in AICM since at least 1978.

It seems that Benjamín Burillo is uncle to Alejandro Burillo Azcárraga, the cousin of Emilio Azcárraga, the chairman of Mexico’s biggest TV empire, Televisa. Aarón Sáenz was a politician and military man who held posts in several post-revolutionary governments, before founding key companies like the airline Mexicana de Aviación, the bank Banca Confía, Seguros Atlas insurance company, and a number of sugar mills. Today the official owners of this company, that El Mayo’s stepson insisted was linked to the Sinaloa cartel, are another company, Consan (the majority shareholder), plus various members of the Sáenz Couret and Sáenz Hirschfeld families, who in turn also own Consan. The business history of the “official” owners of Aviones S.A. is itself controversial. Several of the shareholders have been implicated in financial scandals, including the Banca Confía and Atlas Insurance affairs.
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Complicity and negligence at Mexico City airport

Indeed, everything to do with this company, Aviones, is murky. From January 2005 to the end of 2012, the director general of Mexico City International Airport was Héctor Velázquez Corona, a man close to Felipe Calderón.
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In spite of the scandals over what seem to be the Sinaloa cartel’s operations in the airport, he was not replaced by Calderón. In June 2012,
Proceso
magazine reported allegations in El
Universal
that the US Justice Department regarded Velázquez Corona as linked to organized crime, along with the PGR’s swift denial of it in a communiqué on the same day: the PGR claimed it had no data justifying such a link, and had never heard of one from its regular contacts in the US.
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Velázquez Corona did not last into a third presidency: the current AICM director is Alfonso Sarabia de la Garza.

The AICM management refuses to give any explanation of since when, how, and why a company apparently controlled by El Mayo Zambada has a strategically placed hangar in the country’s principal airport. The only thing that is known for certain is that on August 1, 1994, five months before the end of Carlos Salinas’s presidency, it was granted a contract to occupy the hangar, valid until July 31, 2008. On November 17, 2005, during the government of Vicente Fox, and with Velázquez now head of the airport administration, the company was given an extension.

The airport administration did reveal in 2010 that Aviones was paying to the AICM the modest sum of 41,030 pesos ($3,200 at the time) per month in rent for the hangar, excluding value added tax. This is absurdly little compared with the millions of dollars in profit it can bring in every week. Although the airport administration admits that Aviones no longer has a valid rental contract, they are unable or unwilling to take the space away from the company, regardless of its alleged drug links.
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Another serious irregularity that ought to be enough to stop Aviones from using the hangar is the fact that it has agreed to share this space with another company, MTC Aviación, in clear contravention of AICM rules. This other company, founded in 1997, also
provides aircraft repair services, as well as running an air taxi service. In fact, private flights have been banned from Mexico City airport since 1994; but for some reason that doesn’t apply in this case. It seems to be the only one allowed to fly private planes in and out of the capital’s prized airport.