Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (47 page)

As long as the State prevaricates, and drug lords continue to earn multi-million dollar profits at little cost and less risk, the dreadful trade will continue. The profit margins are astonishing. Today [2010] you can buy a kilo of quality cocaine in Colombia for $2,500. It sells in New York for $28,000 and in Spain for €33,000. The big drug barons share some of the pie with smaller dealers who move maybe a quarter of a ton of cocaine a week, but make enormous profits and go quite undetected. Two hundred and fifty kilos of cocaine fit easily into a couple of suitcases, and drug traffickers on that scale are two a penny in our country.

The political rhetoric lurches this way and that. But when it comes to the crunch, the government fails us time after time.

The “death” of Nacho Coronel

On the afternoon of July 29, 2010, General Edgar Villegas, deputy head of operations at the Secretariat of Defense Chiefs of Staff, confirmed that Ignacio Nacho Coronel had died in an operation carried out in Guadalajara. He had been killed trying to resist arrest.

Nacho Coronel was at the height of his criminal career. The King of Crystal, as he was known, controlled the entire methamphetamine market, and had begun to produce it in Mexico. Personally, however, he had taken a hit. Weeks earlier, a death squad working for Héctor Beltrán Leyva had kidnapped and murdered his sixteen-year-old son. They say the drug baron was devastated.

At 5:30 a.m. on Friday, July 30, the military asked public prosecutors and the Jalisco Institute of Forensic Science to examine the body of Ignacio Coronel. Those who saw the body reported it was clean, with no signs of torture or mistreatment, apart from six bullet holes. It was that of a white man of medium height, slim, with perhaps some fat around the belly. His beard was neatly trimmed. He was the spitting image of a photo recently published in
Proceso
magazine, which showed him as a young man. But he bore little or no resemblance to another photo, also published by
Proceso
, showing Coronel much older.

While the national media published conflicting accounts of how this partner of El Mayo Zambada and El Chapo Guzmán had died, the autopsy came up with some disquieting results: “Corpse of masculine sex, probable age between 40 and 45, closer to the former.” That couldn’t be. According to his files in the SSP, Cisen, and the FBI, Nacho Coronel was born on February 1, 1954. They differ only on whether the place of birth was Veracruz or Durango. That means that in July 2010 he would have been fifty-six. How could his body then appear to have a biological age of forty?

Fingerprint tests came up with no match in the Jalisco state archives, so they were sent to Mexico City. A positive match was then found in the Sinaloa state archives, with one Dagoberto Rodríguez, born on January 1, 1964. Another positive match was apparently found in police records in Culiacán, corresponding to “Dagoberto Rodríguez Jiménez, date of birth July 31, 1964.”
³⁰
This information was never made public, so it is not known how the authorities identified the corpse.

Back in 1993, PGR Bulletin 492 reported that on November 2 the Sinaloa Judicial Police had captured a person calling himself Dagoberto Rodríguez, aged twenty-nine, along with eleven other suspects who were his bodyguards. The PGR identified Dagoberto Rodríguez as being really Ignacio Coronel. This information was taken to be true, which is why the name Dagoberto continued to feature as a pseudonym for Nacho Coronel in his SSP file drawn up in 2007.

However, a day after his supposed demise, two newspapers, El
Noroeste
in Culiacán and
La Jornada
, made an important discovery.
Nacho Coronel had indeed been arrested with those eleven people in November 1993. But he was booked by the police under the pseudonym César Barrios, not Dagoberto Rodríguez; Dagoberto was actually one of the other men detained with him.
³¹
In other words, if Nacho Coronel’s finger prints were indeed on file in Sinaloa or anywhere else, they would have come up as belonging to César Barrios, not to Dagoberto Rodríguez.

It seems clear that the person killed by the Mexican army, who the government trumpeted was Nacho Coronel, was not in fact him. Either they didn’t analyze the fingerprint evidence, because they already knew the body was someone else’s; or the deceased really was Dagoberto Rodríguez, whose age would match the estimated age of the corpse. People close to the Coronel family say the drug baron is still alive.

Nacho Coronel’s alleged body spent three long days laid out on the cold slab at the forensic center. Apparently his sister went to collect it on August 1. It was released without a DNA test, because the PGR saw no need for one, and was subsequently buried in the Jardines de Humaya cemetery in Culiacán, where Arturo Beltrán Leyva also lies.

The Zetas’ messages

El Chapo, El Mayo, and El Azul are firmly in control of an empire. Between them they have achieved a virtual monopoly of narcotics trafficking in Mexico and the United States, a dominion based on blood, sweat, and tears. Their men know the price of betrayal or desertion: in the last ten years, the Sinaloan leaders have seen off most of their enemies, including the Arellano Félix brothers, Osiel Cárdenas, Arturo Beltrán Leyva, Edgar Valdez, Sergio Villarreal, and Heriberto Lazcano.

But they haven’t won yet, and the war will surely cost countless more lives. Lazcano’s killing by Mexican marines on October 9, 2012, may have altered the balance of forces in favor of the Sinaloa Cartel and to the detriment of the Zetas. But just as Lazcano’s body immediately disappeared, stolen by a Zetas commando from the funeral parlor, and is thought by many not to be his body at all, so the shape
of future struggles is uncertain. Now led by Miguel Treviño, Los Zetas have not ceased to constitute a “global threat,” as the White House described them in 2011.
³²
Meanwhile Héctor Beltrán Leyva, El Ingeniero, continues making blood sacrifices and consulting santería priests whose magic formulas convince him of imminent victory over his enemies.

General X got a glimpse into the Zetas world when, on his mission from Juan Camilo Mouriño to pacify the country, he met with them in March 2009. He was appalled when the delegation saluted him in smart military style. Yet it was not a mockery, for although they have lost all sense of right and wrong, these renegades continue to regard themselves, deep down, as part of the Mexican Army. The general formally requested Heriberto Lazcano to moderate the violence. Z3’s reply confirmed the envoy’s worst fears: while the Zetas controlled twenty-two states, it had spawned many “satellite” groups that didn’t take orders from them.

According to US government sources, one of their agencies possesses a lengthy video of the encounter between General X and Z3, presumably mailed to that agency by the Zetas as documentary proof of government complicity with the Sinaloa cartel. When they parted, the soldier turned narcoterrorist gave General X two messages for President Calderón.

Following Mouriño’s death in the plane crash, the general was never again received in Los Pinos or any other government office. Defense Secretary Galván stopped taking his calls. What did those messages from the Zetas leader to Calderón say? General X never told another soul.

Fallen Angels

The balance of Genaro García Luna’s time as a secretary speaks for itself. From December 2006, when he was put in charge of the Secretariat of Public Security, to August 2011, of his sixteen closest collaborators, twelve were killed, forced to resign, taken to court, or jailed. That’s over two thirds. The ones who were meant to be fighting the “war on drug trafficking” were accused of being in league with the traffickers. Maybe that’s why García Luna and his controversial
team failed from the start, and became part of the problem rather than the solution.

The frequent fall of people working for García Luna shows that the corruption surrounding the secretary was not an isolated circumstance, nor was it accidental. In fact, it was systemic. The charges against the members of his team were never initiated by the SSP, and on several occasions the secretary stepped in to try to prevent his people going to prison.

After the removal of Medina Mora, another attorney general was appointed who García soon fell out with: Arturo Chávez, the protégé of a prominent PAN leader and one-time presidential candidate, Diego Fernández de Cevallos, who never liked García Luna.

In May 2010 the Mexico City Attorney’s Office arrested Luis Jafet Jasso—who worked in the operational command center of the Federal Police (PF) and was one of García Luna’s men—for car theft on behalf of the Beltrán Leyvas. In March 2010, the flashy Rafael Avilés, coordinator of Federal Support Forces, long rumored to lead a secret group of corrupt policemen known as The Brotherhood, got a fresh stain on his record: his director of operations, Roberto Cruz, was caught in possession of drugs and weapons.

In August 2010, Avilés had a further problem. Four hundred federal policemen, sent to fight the drug traffickers in Ciudad Juárez, turned around and accused their own bosses of being the criminals. In a public revolt, the officers claimed that the commanders assigned by Avilés and García Luna kept stashes of drugs and arms, which they used to incriminate and extort innocent people.

At last, after putting up for years with the terror and impunity of García Luna and his team, in January 2011 various social and civil organizations broke their silence, denouncing the links between the SSP cabal and the criminal gangs. A priest in Oaxaca, Alejandro Solalinde, director of the Hermanos en Camino shelter that assists Central American migrants, accused García Luna and his team of protecting the cruel gangs that kidnap migrants, and in some cases of actually taking part in the kidnappings. Solalinde says he has received death threats from García Luna, as do other social leaders who have criticized the police chief. In July 2011, as he led a protest
march of citizens and migrants, the “Step by Step towards Peace Caravan,” the priest was arrested and held for several hours by García’s police. He was charged with carrying firearms, but freed when he showed that these belonged to his bodyguards, and had all the necessary licenses. Of course, the reason he had bodyguards in the first place was because of the threats from García Luna.

In May 2011, Javier Sicilia, a respected poet living in Cuernavaca, called a National March for Peace when his son became one more casualty of the bogus war on drugs. On May 8, 2011, in the Zócalo square in the heart of the capital, Sicilia demanded on behalf of Mexican society the sacking of Genaro García Luna. He urged President Calderón to ask for his resignation.

Although the crowd shouted all together, “Out, out, out!” Calderón has remained a silent witness to the crimes of those who captain his real war, not against but between drug traffickers. He didn’t fire García Luna, nor ask for his resignation. What he did do was institute a Federal Police Day to be held every June 2, so people could celebrate his misdeeds year after year. And on that first occasion in 2011, Calderón presided over a ceremony to decorate eminent policemen like Luis Cárdenas Palomino.

García Luna contributed with a peculiar speech, boasting that in record time they had succeeded in building an institution—the unified police force—to the highest international standards, with all the strength and the tactical-strategic intelligence capabilities needed to take on organized crime. The facts suggest that what they managed in record time was exactly the opposite.

Every two years at most, all SSP officials are meant to undergo a test of trustworthiness. This includes drug dependency tests, a session with a lie detector, and a psychological evaluation. The tests on García Luna’s team, carried out in-house, cannot be challenged. The SSP consistently refused to reveal either the content of the tests or the results.
³³

Nobody evaluated García Luna himself. He never took any trustworthiness tests during the Calderón presidency, because supposedly he held an administrative job, not an operational one—yet he was the man President Calderón chose to design and oversee his “war on drugs.”

The surrender of La Barbie and El Grande

In the current climate of violence, some narco
s
prefer to surrender to their friends rather than remain exposed to their foes. After the death of Arturo Beltrán Leyva, his brother Héctor moved to divest Arturo’s chief henchmen—Edgar Valdez Villarreal, La Barbie, and Sergio Villarreal, El Grande—of everything they had. With help from the Zetas, a ruthless hunt began.

La Barbie was described by the US State Department in 2007 as Arturo El Barbas’s closest lieutenant, and one of the main promoters of the slaughter resulting from the discord between the gangs. His love of speed almost did for him in 2010, when he was badly injured in a motorcycle accident. At the time, as we’ve seen, he and El Indio Álvarez were thinking of setting up their own organization.

Then, on August 30, 2010, Valdez was captured in what was portrayed as a PF operation in the State of Mexico. In reality La Barbie decided to give himself up, because he felt safer in the custody of the federal government than on the run from the Zetas and Héctor Beltrán. The deal was that Valdez would grass on other members of his former gang. As a bonus, he would also point the finger at politicians who threatened the ruling PAN, such as the then governor of the State of Mexico and current president of the Republic, Enrique Peña Nieto, of the PRI. In return he would get an easy ride in court, and permission to keep his ill-gotten gains—which are, after all, the most important things to a narco.

Friends of La Barbie report that he spends little time in his cell, and is even free to roam the city in the interests of his unlawful businesses.

Sergio Villarreal, El Grande, was arrested shortly after La Barbie, on September 12, 2011, in the city of Puebla, and promptly signed up to the PGR’s witness protection program under the name of Mateo. His statements blackened the late hero Edgar Millán, as well as men still alive and in office at the time, such as Cárdenas Palomino and Armando Espinosa de Benito, both members of García Luna’s inner
circle. Villarreal accused them both of collusion with the Sinaloa Federation of El Chapo and El Mayo.
³⁴