It was nearly eleven in the morning. The two generals were standing in the baking June sun, at an isolated spot on the road to Cacahoatán, Chiapas, five or six kilometers from the Mexican-Guatemalan border. The atmosphere was as taut as a violin string. The army had deployed a rifle squad in a security ring a hundred meters across. Closer by, there was a smaller circle of paratroopers. All were armed to the teeth.
The minutes seemed to last forever. They’d already heard on the radio that the convoy had crossed the Mexican border without problems. The handover had been perfectly planned and agreed. But there was always the possibility an ambush might damage the package before it arrived.
Standing on a mound of earth beside the road, General Jorge Carrillo Olea finally made out a small dust cloud in the distance. They were all astonished when an old pickup truck drove up, flanked by two more in an equally battered state. In the lead truck there was just the driver, a young co-driver, and in the back the valuable cargo.
A young Guatemalan army captain, aged no more than twenty-six, got out of the old wreck and greeted them with elaborate gallantry: “My general, I have been entrusted with a sensitive consignment that may only be delivered to you in person,” he announced ceremoniously to General Carrillo, who was overall coordinator of the Fight Against the Drug Trade for the government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and the man responsible for this important mission.
Looking at the captain, Carrillo Olea couldn’t help feeling a little ridiculous. The Mexican government had sent two generals—Guillermo Álvarez Nahara, head of the Military Police, and himself—plus two battalions to support the operation.1 Guatemala, on the other hand, had made do with a young officer to hand over someone who was still practically unknown, but who was being accused, along with the Arellano Félix brothers, of killing Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, in the course of an alleged shoot-out between the two sides. Less than a month earlier, on May 24, 1993, the cardinal had died in a spectacular hail of bullets in the parking lot of Guadalajara International Airport.
Without more ado, the Guatemalan captain opened the back of the pickup and pointed to his precious cargo. On the blistering metal deck, tied hand and foot like a pig, lay Joaquín Guzmán Loera. His body had been bouncing around like a bale of hay during the three-hour trip from Guatemala to Mexico.
At the time, El Chapo Guzmán—a member of the criminal gang led by Amado Carrillo Fuentes, better known as El Señor de los Cielos, the Lord of the Skies—was pretty much a nobody in the drugs world. He’d been just fleetingly in the limelight after a shoot-out at the Christine Discotheque in Puerto Vallarta in 1992, when he tried to kill one of the Arellano Félix family, former friends and partners with whom he’d fallen out.
The disputes between the Arellano Félix family, El Chapo Guzmán, and his friend Héctor El Güero Palma were like schoolboy squabbles with machine guns. They’d already featured on the crime pages of Mexican newspapers, but without much prominence. Guzmán had a lot of money, like any other drug trafficker of his ranking, but little power of his own. What power he did have came by using the name of Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Maybe that is why the Guatemalan government had sent him back to Mexico not as a high-risk prisoner. Nonetheless, El Chapo seemed to offer a vital political opportunity to the Mexican government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. That bruised figure in the back of the pickup provided an excellent pretext to explain the murder of Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo.
Supposedly, the Arellano Félix brothers and El Chapo Guzmán had had a shoot-out, and the cardinal had been killed in the crossfire. The story, as already reported in the press, was undoubtedly plausible, but a later post-mortem of what happened at Guadalajara airport cast doubt on this version. Forensic experts reported that there had been no crossfire, and that the cardinal had been hit by fourteen bullets at close range.
To look at him in that sorry, helpless state on June 9, 1993, nobody would have imagined that this short, uncharismatic thirty-six-year-old, with barely three years of elementary schooling behind him, would within sixteen years have become the head of the Sinaloa Cartel, the most powerful criminal organization in the Americas—much less that Forbes magazine would rank him as one of the richest, and therefore most powerful, men in the world. No one would have imagined either that sixteen years later Jorge Carrillo Olea, vilified and publicly demoted for his alleged protection of drug traffickers during his time as governor of Morelos state (1994–98), would be describing his detailed memories of El Chapo’s capture in an affable interview at his home in Cuernavaca, where he lives almost forgotten by all those he once served.
El Chapo Guzmán, with a hood over his head, and Carrillo Olea, impressed by the young Guatemalan captain, never suspected that from that day on their destinies would be forever linked. Carrillo Olea took the credit for successfully arresting the drug trafficker. But seven years, seven months, and ten days later it would be one of his closest protégés, virtually his alter ego, that would help El Chapo to escape from the maximum security prison of Puente Grande on June 19, 2001, according to the trafficker’s own account and the investigation into the escape. In Mexico, the worlds of the drug traffickers and the police are quite similar. Maybe that’s why they understand each other so well. Complicity and betrayal go hand in hand. One day your closest friend is your accomplice, the next he is your worst enemy.
Carrillo Olea said that thanks to the Planning Center for Drug Control (Cendro), set up by him in 1992, they were able to follow the route taken by El Chapo from Guadalajara to Guatemala after the shoot-out at the airport. As he recalled it,
After he got into an unknown vehicle on the Chapala to Guadalajara highway, I say unknown because we never knew if it was ready and waiting, if it was to protect him, or it was a private car, I don’t know, he disappeared. But the system picked him up in Morelia and we started tracking him. He reached Mexico City, we half lost him, he reappeared. He had a radio and I don’t know how many credit cards, four, five, six, and we had [their numbers]. So we hear of a card being used in Coyoacán, in Puebla.… Sometimes he’d make mistakes, or he had no choice but to use the phone. That’s how we followed him all the way down to San Cristóbal.
Carrillo Olea said that the Cendro notified the Guatemalan government that Guzmán had crossed the border and was headed for El Salvador, which he probably reached via Honduras. “We got in touch with [the authorities in] El Salvador, and their legs turned to jelly. They told us: ‘Yes, we’ve detected him here.’ We said, ‘Arrest him.’ But they didn’t, they just scared him off, like a rat. They made it obvious he’d been spotted, so he went back to Guatemala.”
Here he was arrested. Carrillo Olea gave the news to the then Attorney General, Jorge Carpizo McGregor, and to President Salinas, to whom he’d had a direct line ever since he took office. It was excellent news. The cardinal’s murder was still a burning issue and public opinion wanted a head on a plate. “Now he has to be brought from Guatemala without all the legal hurdles of an extradition,” Salinas told Carrillo Olea. That’s how it was agreed to hand the prisoner over at the border, without any diplomatic niceties to get in the way.
Carpizo, a former rector of the National Autonomous University (UNAM) and president of the National Human Rights Commission, was the third attorney general in just five years of Salinas’s presidency. The first, Enrique Álvarez del Castillo, had been mostly renowned for allowing the Guadalajara (later Sinaloa) Cartel to thrive under his nose while he was the governor of Jalisco state. He was replaced as attorney general by Ignacio Morales Lechuga, who resigned abruptly in 1993. As a result, Carrillo Olea was the one constant factor in Mexico’s drug policy under Salinas.
* * *
Still in bed and acting on instructions from the president and Carpizo, Carrillo Olea dialed Antonio Riviello Bazán, the secretary of defense.
“I’m calling to trouble you with a rather strange matter. If you’re in any doubt, please call the president,” said Carrillo Olea.
“So, what’s it about?” Riviello asked anxiously.
“I need a 727, a rifle squad, and for the military commander in Chiapas to do what I tell him.”
“It’s that sensitive?”
“Yes, general, and I’m sorry I can’t say any more at this moment in time.”
“Don’t worry,” said the secretary, “we’ll see it’s done.”
Carrillo Olea arrived at 5:45 a.m. at the military gate of Mexico City airport. The paratroopers were already there; General Guillermo Álvarez Nahara turned up shortly afterwards.
“The general told me to go with you. Is that ok?” Álvarez asked Carrillo.
“On the contrary, the more witnesses the better,” answered Carrillo.
A few hours later, El Chapo Guzmán was in their custody.
When he saw El Chapo tied up in the truck, Carrillo felt sorry for him: “After all, he was a human being,” he recalled. The paratroopers lifted up the hooded figure and dumped him in one of the Mexican army vehicles.
“Captain, thank you,” said Carrillo, giving the Guatemalan officer an embrace. “I wish we could have gotten to know each other better. I don’t even know your name or where I can call you.”
The Mexican convoy moved off swiftly towards the barracks. There a doctor and a lab technician were waiting to examine Guzmán. General Carrillo ordered the prisoner be given a bath and something to eat.
Next, the president’s trusted associate tried to call Attorney General Carpizo, to tell him about the operation, but in vain. Carrillo had left things in Mexico City in the hands of his young apprentice, Jorge Enrique Tello Peón, who had first worked with him at the state-owned United Shipyards, as his bag carrier. Now he was the head of the Cendro, but not always efficient: he hadn’t followed the instruction to leave three lines free for this very call. Carrillo had to dial his office direct.
“Jorge, didn’t I tell you?”
“Sorry, I forgot.”
“Put me through to the attorney general.”
“Hello, what’s up? How are things going?” asked Carpizo at the other end.
“The package is in our hands, and we’re on our way to the capital,” General Carrillo Olea told him.
“Wonderful, I’ll tell the chief.”
On March 7, 1999, José Alfredo Andrade Bojorges,2 a thirty-seven-year-old trial lawyer with a master’s degree in criminology, gave public prosecutor Gerardo Vázquez a very different account to that of Carrillo Olea of how the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) had learnt of El Chapo Guzmán’s whereabouts.
Andrade is key to understanding the details of the drug business at the time. He was a close friend and worked with Sergio Aguilar Hernández, lawyer to El Señor de los Cielos. In 1989, when Aguilar was sub-director of the PGR in Sinaloa state, he was sacked and imprisoned. However, released thanks to Andrade, his childhood friend, he soon went to work for the drug trafficker.
Later, Andrade enjoyed a direct relationship with El Señor de los Cielos when he took up the defense of Sósimo Leyva Pérez, the drug baron’s brother-in-law who was in Morelia prison in Michoacán, in 1994 and 1995. He was an unusual lawyer. His clients included not only drug traffickers but members of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) captured in 1995, as well as members of the UNAM’s trade union (STUNAM). Those who knew him say he was a good lawyer, a brilliant man, and also an accomplished informer. In 1993 he was drawing a modest retainer from the PGR.
Andrade’s account was recorded in the investigation into Cardinal Posadas’s murder. His testimony shed light on what had happened on May 24, 1993, at Amado Carrillo Fuentes’s house, when the cardinal was killed.
In 1993, Guzmán was working for Carrillo Fuentes in the Guadalajara area. In those days, El Chapo was a liability. Carrillo Fuentes was fed up with his subordinate’s chaotic ways, his liking for alcohol, drugs, scandal and violence. He was particularly irritated by the amount of time he spent with his bodyguards, taking over entire floors of luxury hotels and causing a stir. Working with El Chapo was more hazardous than handling gunpowder. Carrillo Fuentes’s concerns were not misplaced. The discretion traditionally sought by organized crime groups was in jeopardy.
As a result, Carrillo Fuentes decided to remove El Chapo from the Guadalajara patch and send him to Nayarit state, under the super vision of Héctor El Güero Palma, Guzmán’s friend and partner. However, El Chapo did not obey the order. He had other plans. In his place he sent his crony and accountant Martín Moreno to Tepic, the capital of Nayarit. At the same time he sent another henchman to Guatemala, to buy some farms. Central America was from around that time seen by the narcotics traffickers as just an extension of their own territory.
Carrillo Fuentes was deeply upset to hear that Cardinal Posadas had been killed in a shoot-out between drug gangs in Guadalajara. He immediately began to call military and police authorities, and summoned El Güero Palma. El Señor de los Cielos could not believe his own men were involved. He was furious.
When El Güero arrived, looking completely unperturbed, he calmed down. El Señor de los Cielos knew that the Arellano Félix brothers came from a very religious family, which had cultivated personal links with Cardinal Posadas since his time in Tijuana. What’s more, their mother admired the cardinal and would never forgive her sons such a thing. (Indeed, she stopped talking to them for as long as doubts remained.) As for Carrillo Fuentes, he had no connection with the Catholic hierarchy. The closest he got to the Church was when he built a temple at Guamuchilito, in Navolato, Sinaloa, his home town.
“El Chapo was being followed, it can’t have been him,” El Güero said reassuringly.
“Who’s got the guns, and the balls, to do this?” asked Carrillo Fuentes.
“And a motive …” added Palma.
After getting answers to his calls, Carrillo Fuentes informed his people that neither the Arellano Félix brothers nor Guzmán had taken part in the shoot-out. It was a third group, whose members were not from the north, although they were dressed as northerners: “They had short hair, and were wearing jeans, plaid shirts and new boots they could hardly run in,” he said, adding that he had gotten this information from General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo3 and his son-in-law, Horacio Montenegro.
“Let the witness say who told him that Amado Carrillo Fuentes found out about the shoot-out at Guadalajara airport at 16:40 on May 24, 1993,” was one of the public prosecutor’s requests to Andrade Bojorges, as he made his sworn statement in March 1999.
“On that day, Mr. Sergio Aguilar [a friend of Andrade’s] was with Amado Carrillo at one of his houses in Morelos state. Jesús Bitar Tafich, the ‘Arab,’ was there too,” answered Andrade.
Jesús Bitar was known as the brains behind Carrillo Fuentes’s financial operations in South America. He was arrested in July 1997 after his boss’s death, and entered a witness protection program. Today he is a wealthy cattle rancher, with a franchise for Pemex gas stations, in Durango state. He also supplies a government-funded program called the Countryside Alliance. Four years after Cardinal Posadas’s murder, Bitar testified to the PGR that General Jorge Carrillo Olea was a friend of Amado Carrillo Fuentes. When I asked him directly, the general denied it.
At 3 a.m. on May 25, 1993, Carrillo Fuentes’s staff answered the phone at one of his homes in Cuernavaca, Morelos, where he was staying.
“Is the gentleman awake?” asked Javier Coello Trejo—no less than the former drug czar under Attorney General Enrique Álvarez del Castillo. “Ask him if I can visit tomorrow!”
“Tell him to come over right away,” responded Carrillo Fuentes.
Meanwhile, El Señor de los Cielos ordered El Güero Palma to suspend a shipment of two tons of cocaine that was due in by train from El Salvador, and to contact the people who were keeping an eye on El Chapo. At 5 a.m., Coello arrived, alone. Amado was still accompanied by his lawyer Sergio Aguilar, Jesús Bitar, and El Güero Palma.
“I’ve just talked to the deputy attorney general of the PGR in Jalisco [Antonio García Torres]. You must hand over El Chapo with the utmost urgency,” said Coello.
For Carrillo Fuentes, there couldn’t be a better opportunity to get rid of El Chapo without bloodshed. But he knew that Guzmán had not killed the cardinal or had anything to do with it, according to the information he had obtained. He wanted to know just one thing before surrendering his man:
“Who killed the cardinal?” Amado asked Coello.
There was no answer, just a suggestion that it was better not to ask.
“So tell me, is it yes or no?” insisted Coello.
El Chapo’s fate was sealed. He would be the scapegoat, and not a shot would be fired in his defense.
Amado Carrillo Fuentes entered the narcotics business in the 1970s thanks to his uncle, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, the notorious Don Neto. Don Neto was a friend and partner of the Sinaloan Pedro Avilés Pérez, the first Mexican to smuggle cocaine from South America into the United States.
When Avilés was murdered in 1978, his replacement was Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo, the overall coordinator of the organization. The main members of this criminal group were Félix Gallardo himself, Don Neto, Manuel Salcido El Cochiloco, Juan José Quintero, Pablo Acosta, and Juan José Esparragoza El Azul. At a lower level were Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Rafael Caro Quintero, and Ismael Zambada El Mayo. Well below them, as small-scale growers, dealers, and gunmen, were Héctor Palma, Joaquín Guzmán, the Arellano Félix brothers and the Beltrán Leyva brothers. Although almost all the members of the organization led by Félix Gallardo were natives of Sinaloa, it became known as the Guadalajara group, because that city was their operational and residential base.
At that stage the term “cartel” was not widely used, nor had the drug traffickers carved up the country into areas of control as if it were their private property. The Federal Judicial Police (PJF) and the Federal Security Directorate (DFS) identified them as “cliques” or gangs. There were two main organizations: one that smuggled drugs on the Pacific coast (the Guadalajara group) and another that worked along the Gulf of Mexico (the Gulf group). At the beginning of President Miguel de la Madrid’s mandate (1982–88), the growing activity of the traffickers in Jalisco state and its capital, Guadalajara, was reflected in the big investments pouring into hotels, restaurants, housing developments, foreign exchange agencies, and car dealerships. But it was concealed by the state governor, Enrique Álvarez del Castillo, and tolerated by society. No lights were shone on it, nor was there any violence.
In 1981, Amado Carrillo Fuentes was working closely with his uncle Don Neto and Félix Gallardo in Guadalajara. However, it became impossible for him to remain in the state capital because of tensions with Rafael Caro Quintero, also a protégé of Don Neto’s. The conflict was over a woman. Caro Quintero sought the favours of an attractive seventeen-year-old called Sara Cosío. For her part, the young woman—from one of the most eminent political families in Guadalajara—flirted with Carrillo Fuentes at every opportunity. Before his protégés could come to blows, Don Neto decided to remove his nephew from the scene: he sent him north to Ojinaga, a border town in Chihuahua, to work with Pablo Acosta. Without realizing it, Don Neto was doing Carrillo Fuentes a favor.
On April 24, 1987, a federal police officer called Guillermo González Calderoni arrived in Ojinaga. He was one of the most corrupt cops in Mexican history. His mission was to arrest Pablo Acosta, who as it happens had been paying him a fortune for protection. But the drug baron didn’t get out alive; they say he burned to death in his bunker. Some colleagues of the former policeman say the killer was González Calderoni himself. For drug traffickers there’s one thing worse than death, and that’s prison.
After Acosta’s death, Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, another former DFS commander—the Federal Security Directorate was then the Mexican equivalent of the CIA—took over the regional franchise, still with the support of Carrillo Fuentes, who was steadily climbing the ladder of the drug hierarchy.
Amado had a vision. In 1987 he left Ojinaga and moved to Torreón, where he began to assemble a fleet of aircraft, including Sabreliners, Learjets and Cessnas. His boyhood dreams of being a pilot were realized in the strangest of ways, but he still had a long way to go before becoming the legendary Lord of the Skies.
On August 21, 1989, Carrillo Fuentes was arrested by officers from the Ninth Military Zone based in Culiacán, Sinaloa, under the command of Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, whose military career was just taking off. Years later, fate would again bring these two together, the drug dealer and the three-star general. Appointed to prepare the case against Carrillo Fuentes in the PGR was the deputy attorney general, Javier Coello Trejo—Amado’s loyal servant as a result of the money periodically showered on him.
A few months earlier, in April, Commander Guillermo González Calderoni had arrested his own compadre, Félix Gallardo. Nobody could trust anyone.
It was the first year of Carlos Salinas’s presidency. Given the publicly-known relationship between his father, Raúl Salinas Lozano, his uncle, Carlos, and Juan Nepomuceno, the veteran leader of the Gulf Cartel, some writers on the drug trade in Mexico have seen these arrests as an attempt to favour the criminal organization closest to the president’s family. But the events of later years were to show that, in spite of their good relations with the Gulf traffickers, Salinas’s family were more inclined to do business with those on the Pacific side.
When in 1988 Salinas named Enrique Álvarez del Castillo as attorney general, he in turn appointed as deputy attorney general for drug control a man called Javier Coello Trejo. Coello’s most striking characteristic was his extreme corpulence, of similar dimensions to his corruption.
During the first two years of Salinas’s mandate, Jorge Carrillo Olea was at the Secretariat of the Interior under Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, reorganizing the state intelligence systems according to direct instructions from the president. Carrillo was highly experienced in this field; indeed he could be called the father of Mexican “intelligence,” if such a thing exists. He and Miguel de la Madrid dismantled the Federal Security Directorate, and set up in its place the Research and National Security Directorate (Disen), later the Center for Research and National Security (Cisen).
Carrillo was well placed to observe Coello’s chaotic mutations. In 1989, several of the deputy attorney’s bodyguards were arrested and charged with belonging to a gang that was plaguing the streets of southern Mexico City, snatching and raping young women. Only after intense pressure from Congress did the capital’s prosecution office, under Ignacio Morales Lechuga, find itself obliged to act, and finally some of Coello’s men were put behind bars.
In the final months of the Salinas administration, Carrillo frequently phoned Coello in order to pass on the complaints he was getting. Coello would typically protest, as he recalled:
“Of course not, Mr. Under Secretary, pure fairy tales. I’m too fat to be a bad guy!”
“Well, they’re saying you sit on the detainees, that’s the third degree,” Carrillo Olea would reply sardonically.
In 1989, Coello’s full weight was brought to bear on his friend Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who found himself imprisoned in the Reclusorio Sur along with Félix Gallardo and El Azul Esparragoza. But after the disgrace of his bodyguards, Deputy Attorney Coello had lost clout. He knew his days at the PGR were numbered, and that he’d need friends when he was ousted. Therefore he helped to get Carrillo Fuentes acquitted and released, to the surprise of his jailmates.
In 1990, President Salinas summoned Carrillo Olea and told him: “Jorge, Coello is severely undermining our image abroad. Enrique [Álvarez] has had enough. Help him out. He needs somebody he can trust.” As Carrillo Olea hadn’t trained as a lawyer, he could not take over the exact post occupied by Coello. Salinas created a job for him out of thin air: General Coordinator of the Fight Against the Drug Traffic.
Álvarez welcomed Carrillo’s arrival at the PGR, and practically invited him to take it under his control, which little by little he did.
In 1991, Carrillo appointed Rodolfo León Aragón, El Chino, as chief of the Federal Judicial Police (PJF). According to the general, relations between them were always good, despite El Chino’s high corruption ratings. León also got along very well with the equally corrupt police commander, González Calderoni. It’s in the light of this closeness to the command of the Mexican prosecutor’s office that Benjamín Arellano Félix’s recent declarations about the Cardinal’s killing are important.
When Carrillo Fuentes left prison, the structure of organized crime had broken down as a result of the arrest of Félix Gallardo. The only man strong enough replace him was Salcido, El Cochiloco, who ruled in Sinaloa, and who had the support of Benjamín Arellano Félix and his brothers, ensconced in Tijuana.
For their part, Juan and Humberto García Ábrego, leaders of the Gulf organization and the protégés of Juan Nepomuceno, were not interested in the others’ territory. Their own vast territory was quite enough. Besides, at that stage all of them were cooperating. There was a kind of tacit peace agreement. At the time, El Mayo Zambada—always an independent force—and El Azul Esparragoza had no influence beyond Sinaloa, and had not built up their organizations into what we know them as today. As for El Chapo Guzmán, El Güero Palma and the Beltrán Leyva brothers, these were just emerging leaders who picked up the crumbs. Indeed, some of them—like El Chapo, El Güero Palma and the Arellano Félix brothers—had certain shared interests that encouraged them to do business together. Nonetheless, these links were too weak to withstand the blows of betrayal, and mutual hatred developed. It was a hatred that was to be measured in the hundreds of deaths they have contributed to the cruel war waged among the cartels over the last decade in almost every part of the country.
El Chapo and El Güero were ambitious, violent characters, who sought ever more money and power. They weren’t as strong but they fought El Cochiloco and the Arellano Félixes for control of the Guadalajara “franchise.”
Amado Carrillo Fuentes hatched a more ambitious plan. In alliance with Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, he decided to seize control of the drug trade all along the northern Pacific coast. El Chapo Guzmán and El Güero Palma joined him, to build up their own strength.
El Cochiloco was executed in October 1991. Guzmán claims he was killed by his own followers, the Arellano Félix brothers. The war for the prize territory had begun. Those who had previously coexisted in the same area now engaged in a fight to the death. The dwarfs wanted to grow bigger, so they began to fight for control of Guadalajara. That was when El Chapo began to create problems for the Carrillo Fuentes organization; his lack of experience led him to commit serious mistakes.
From 1990 until June 1993, the mafiocracy gave the same protection to El Chapo Guzmán as they had given to Carrillo Fuentes, El Señor de los Cielos—who could never have created such an empire without the help of illustrious businessmen, bankers, military chiefs, police officers, and politicians, including former presidents of the Republic and their relatives. This web of connections is inextricable. All are united around one single goal: money and power.
Aguilar Guajardo, the leader of organized crime in Juárez, the border city where drug trafficking was most intense, was murdered in Cancún in April 1993. Carrillo Fuentes was his natural successor. In mafia circles it was said that the person who ordered the killing of Aguilar was he who benefited most from it.
Carrillo Fuentes began to become a legend. One of his first decisions was to clean out the organization. El Chapo Guzmán was top of the list; he’d fallen out of favor with his boss. Carrillo Fuentes handed him over to the PGR, not because he thought he was involved in the murder of Cardinal Posadas, but because it was now or never. On March 9, 1999, during his interrogation, Andrade Bojorges revealed the traitor’s name.
“Let the witness say if he knows who was the intermediary whereby Amado Carrillo Fuentes provided the information that led to the capture of Joaquín Guzmán Loera,” the public prosecutor asked point-blank.
“El Güero Palma,” answered Andrade, without hesitation.
Four months after making his statement, Andrade vanished. The earth swallowed him up. His last appearance in public was at the International Book Fair held in Mexico City in February 1999. The lawyer showed up dressed in black, accompanied by a mariachi dressed in white, who went through the corridors singing “The Man from Sinaloa,” Carrillo Fuentes’s favourite song. Andrade was there to launch his book on the “secret history” of drug kingpins and their respectable protectors.4
The friends of his I spoke to had different theories about how Andrade got hold of the information for his book, but all agree on one thing: everything he wrote about Carrillo Fuentes was true—so true that, one friend claimed, Carrillo’s own mother was up in arms over the publication. She was very upset with him.
Nothing more was known of Andrade’s whereabouts. His acquaintances think he is dead.
Carrillo Olea denied in the interview that he, Coello, and Álvarez del Castillo were ever involved in drug trafficking.
On the way back to Mexico City, with his explosive cargo on board, General Carrillo Olea ordered four paratroopers to guard the cabin. Two others kept El Chapo handcuffed in a seat at the back. The rest of the battalion guarded the exits, while General Guillermo Álvarez Nahara, head of the military police, sat next to Carrillo.
The Boeing 727 landed at 7 p.m. at Toluca airport, in the State of Mexico. The head of security was there to meet it. El Chapo got off the plane with a hood over his head.
“Here is your prisoner,” said Carrillo.
“Quite a responsibility you have there, sir.”
“Don’t say a word … and don’t mention my name.”
Carrillo got into the waiting car and phoned the attorney general, Jorge Carpizo: “The plane is on its way back to base, and our friend is on his way to his cell.” The operation was finally over.
There are some, like José Antonio Ortega, lawyer for the Guadalajara archdioceses, who say the murder of Cardinal Posadas was the work of the state, with Carrillo Olea presumably taking part as the brains behind the logistics. Although the Arellano Félix brothers and El Chapo do appear to have been at Guadalajara airport that day, summoned by the head of the Federal Judicial Police, Rodolfo León, none of them took part in the shoot-out. According to this account, the cardinal’s death happened just as Carrillo Fuentes told his people it did.
Eighteen years later, Benjamín Arellano Félix would provide a different account of the cardinal’s death. In testimony given on April 15, 2011, to the PGR at the Altiplano prison in Almoloya de Juárez, the former leader of the Tijuana Cartel made the following declaration: “Rodolfo León Aragón told me he and a federal police commando unit killed Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo because he was supplying weapons to the guerrillas.”
On May 25, 1993, Benjamín Arellano Félix received a disturbing phone call in Tijuana. The previous day, an old family friend had died: Cardinal Posadas. The Salinas government was blaming him and his brothers for the crime, along with their former partner, Guzmán. Their mother was furious and refusing to speak to them, a very serious matter for any self-respecting drug baron, who regards his mother as sacred.
The phone call was from the federal police chief, León Aragón, El Chino. He told Benjamín they needed to meet urgently at Tijuana airport, and the drug trafficker promptly agreed.
The Arellano Félix family had a long-standing relationship with León. Carrillo Fuentes introduced him to Ramón Arellano Félix at one of his houses in Mexico City in 1991, just a few months after Carrillo Olea had appointed León head of the Federal Judicial Police. By 1993, the police chief and Ramón were close friends. Amado had recommended León highly. He told the Arellano Félixes they could rely on him whenever they wanted to travel somewhere in the country unmolested. So Benjamín trusted his brother’s friend, enough to decide to attend the meeting at the border airport. It was 4 p.m. when he met León, who told him flatly:
“You’re in big trouble: they’re blaming you for the cardinal’s murder.”
“It wasn’t us. I was here in Tijuana, and my brother Ramón had already boarded his plane when it happened,” answered Benjamín.
“I know it wasn’t you,” replied the police chief. “The perpetrators were members of a federal police commando under my command at Guadalajara airport. If I’m to help you, you have to give me ten million dollars and six addresses we can raid, because I have apprehended two of your men who traveled with Ramón to Guadalajara.”
“All right, let me see what I can do. I’ll look for the addresses, just give me time for the money.”
“Ok,” said León, and immediately made a call. “Done. All well,” he said into the phone.
León told him he’d been calling the attorney general, Jorge Carpizo, who instructed him to “go ahead with the plan.”
That night Benjamín met his brother Ramón, who told him he’d already given the money to León. The following day the police chief called Benjamín just to tell him that he was searching some addresses and that he’d received the money from Ramón. Ramón had told Benjamín that while he was in Guadalajara, before the cardinal’s murder, León had called to tell him that he could travel without a care on the 24th. So, at the police chief’s suggestion, Ramón arrived at Guadalajara airport at almost the same time as the archbishop.
The Arellano Félix brothers and El Chapo Guzmán had fallen into a trap carefully set by the PGR.
After making his statement in April 2011, Benjamín Arellano Félix asked the witnesses from the Guadalajara archdioceses to pray for him, because he would soon be killed.5 On April 29, however, Benjamín was suddenly extradited to the United States without his lawyers apparently knowing that this was about to happen.
In Mexico, the murder of Cardinal Posadas remains one of the most controversial episodes of recent decades, and one that has marked the country’s history.
Days before El Chapo Guzmán was captured, Attorney General Carpizo announced a $1 million reward for information leading to his arrest. Officially, it was Drug Control Center (Cendro) staff and authorities in El Salvador and Guatemala that supplied the information.
Carrillo Olea proposed sending some of the money to the foreign authorities who had participated in the capture. In El Salvador, $300,000 in cash was delivered to the then president Alfredo Cristiani, to be shared out among those who had forced El Chapo to flee from there to Guatemala.
General Carrillo himself took another $300,000 to the new president of Guatemala, Ramiro de León Carpio, and that young captain who had made such an impression on him.
By 2010, the reward on Guzmán’s head had increased sevenfold. The US government was offering $5 million for information on his whereabouts, and since 2009 the Mexican government had been offering $2.5 million. El Chapo had ceased to be a two-bit trafficker and convenient fall guy, to become the CEO of a global business. Today he is the best-known face of Mexico’s crime industry.
On that two-hour flight from Chiapas to the State of Mexico, El Chapo Guzmán learned the first big lesson of his prodigious criminal career. A few minutes after the 727 took off, the head of the military police and two other officers sat down beside him.
“Well?” said General Álvarez to El Chapo.
The time had come to confess.