In 1993, Joaquín Guzmán smiled for the cameras as it rained in the yard of Federal Social Rehabilitation Center No. 1, in the State of Mexico. The pictures taken by dozens of press photographers are misleading. At thirty-six, this harmless-looking man, a junior in the world of organized crime, already possessed all the traits of a professional criminal. Behind his unexceptional physique—just over 5’ 5” tall, regular build, square face, brown eyes, fair skin, thick eyebrows, wavy, chestnut hair, average forehead, and straight nose—was hidden a complex personality.
When El Chapo was admitted to the penitentiary, the PGR carried out a thorough analysis of his criminal profile. Guzmán was found to be “egocentric, narcissistic, shrewd, persistent, tenacious, meticulous, discriminating, and secretive,” with a “high level of criminal capacity,” and a “medium to high level of social adaptability” which had enabled him to develop networks of loyalty and complicity. Of all his character features, three single him out from the run-of-the-mill drug trafficker: he is ingenious, manipulative, and charming. Those who know him admit to falling prey to one or more of these. Who could forget his resourcefulness in sending cocaine to the United States in cans of jalapeño peppers at the beginning of the 1990s? Furthermore, Guzmán differs from his predecessors by being a master in the art of seduction.
Yet behind this amiable exterior, and the supposedly charitable works undertaken in the communities where he lives or does business, lies a ruthless egotist. His generosity is a mask. According to the prison’s analysis, Guzmán is driven entirely by self-interest, with no concern for how this affects others. His personal relationships are superficial and “exploitative.” He is capable of inflicting physical harm casually, without a thought, because other people’s needs and feelings have no real meaning for him. “Only his own desires are important and absolute.”
In 1993, El Chapo was a man who had difficulty controlling his sexual and aggressive impulses, and could not deal with frustration. During his eight years in various prisons, the drug baron from La Tuna committed countless excesses, all as a result of his limitless power to corrupt. And like any self-respecting mafia boss, he was big-hearted: at the time of his arrest, he had relationships with four women.
In 1977 El Chapo contracted his one legal matrimony, with María Alejandrina Guadalupe Salazar, the mother of his five acknowledged children. There is a saying among drug barons’ partners: “Once you marry a drug trafficker, you stay married to him, even when you don’t want to be.” These women can go for months without seeing their husbands, and have to put up with them having one or twenty lovers in the meantime, from those they pay for to those they fall for. Alejandrina could never have had another partner herself, but their marriage was no obstacle to El Chapo pursuing other women.
One girlfriend was Griselda Guadalupe López, alias Silvia Escoto, with whom he had another four children: Joaquín or Quiquín, Edgar, Ovidio or Ovi (a tribute to one of his brothers who died in a car crash in 1991), and Grisel Guadalupe. In 1993 they were seven, six, five and three years old; but in his statement to prosecutors, El Chapo denied knowing either Griselda or Ovidio.
In May 2010, just before President Felipe Calderón began a trip to Washington where there was expected to be criticism of his failure to arrest El Chapo, the Mexican government tried to give the impression it was out to get Guzmán with a high-profile operation involving agents from the Federal Public Prosecutor’s office supported by the Federal Police, the army, and the navy. They carried out seven searches of properties linked to Guzmán in Culiacán. Many of these locations had been known to the security services since 2007. In the course of the operation they arrested Griselda López.
The DEA had been waiting for the drug baron’s ex-partner to be arrested to investigate her for suspected money laundering. The agreement with the Calderón government was that she would be kept in custody. Griselda arrived handcuffed and hooded at the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) in Mexico City, but then unexpectedly walked out again, free as air. When the DEA discovered that she’d been released on orders from the Mexican government, it leaked the information to the New York Times: “[Felipe Calderón] played a role last week in the quick release of the wife of one of Mexico’s top traffickers because of concern that her detention would prompt a round of reprisal attacks, said officials briefed on the matter,” wrote Marc Lacey for the New York broadsheet.1
In 1993 Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán was also seeing a woman called Estela López. And when he was arrested in Guatemala, he was accompanied by María del Rocío del Villar Becerra, from Aguamilpa in Nayarit, where he has an operations center.
And yet, Guzmán is a solitary man. People in his profession get few opportunities to spend time with their families. Perhaps once or twice a year they manage to meet up at a hotel or a ranch. A few minutes, a few words, and adiós. That is why, over the course of their criminal careers, drug traffickers tend to acquire a lover in every town. Some such relationships are purely physical, but when they involve children, these are never forgotten. Fatherhood is another symbol of power.
When El Chapo was arrested, many thought his criminal career was over. However, drug trafficking is a business where you make money quickly and by the fistful; and Guzmán was a businessman whose potential was far from exhausted. At the time, even though he was only a secondary player, he already owned eleven properties, three private planes, twenty-seven bank accounts, four companies in different Mexican states, and hundreds of millions of dollars.
He had gone to live in Guadalajara in 1988, to work alongside other Sinaloa colleagues like Héctor Palma under the orders of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, and Amado Carrillo Fuentes. He left the city in 1992, after his car was sprayed with bullets by the Arellano Félix brothers, and moved back to Sinaloa with Alejandrina and the children, where he continued to prosper.
Between 1985 and 1990 Guzmán Loera shifted scores of tons of cocaine for Amado Carrillo Fuentes, linked with the Medellín Cartel, from a base in El Tonino, near Compostela in Nayarit state. This tiny village of no more than 100 souls lies on the Pacific coast, not far from the lush resorts of Guayabitos, Paraíso Escondido, and Playa Hermosa. Here El Chapo used a clandestine airstrip and the beach itself to receive the merchandise arriving from Colombia by plane or by boat, and ensured that it proceeded safely towards the buoyant US market.
Here he could also rely on the help of a local politician, Julián Venegas Guzmán, in tasks such as bribing members of Nayarit’s armed forces to work with him. The partnership between El Chapo and the strongman of Compostela was sealed when Julián made them compadres by inviting him to be godfather to his daughter Brenda; in Narcoland, this “co-parent” relationship is the equivalent of a blood covenant. At El Tonino, Venegas and Lieutenant Adrián Pérez welcomed numerous planeloads of cocaine guarded by Mexican soldiers, according to the testimony given in late 2001 by Marcelo Peña García, brother of one of El Chapo’s girlfriends, speaking under the pseudonym Julio as a protected witness for the PGR.
According to Julio’s expert testimony, El Chapo knew that the Mexican government was after him and was provident enough to prepare two bundles of dollars that would ensure the operation could continue functioning. He gave one to his compadre Julián and the other, consisting of $200 million, was entrusted to a cousin, Ignacio Burgos Araujo.
Although in 1993 Guzmán acknowledged his connection with Burgos, and gave his interrogators many details of the latter’s activities, including arms trafficking, the authorities made no move to capture either him or Venegas. They only got around to it after the scandal of Guzmán’s jailbreak in January 2001, in order to look as if they were cracking down on El Chapo. On September 21 of that year, Venegas was apprehended at his well-known residence in Compostela, Nayarit, and charged with felonies against public health and belonging to an organized crime group.
Straight after El Chapo escaped from the Puente Grande prison, he was hidden by Venegas on one of his properties. Had the authorities arrested Venegas before, El Chapo could never have found refuge in Nayarit, since the other members of his gang preferred to keep their distance until things calmed down.
Most of the Compostela team has now been dispersed, killed, or arrested—some, like the renegade Lieutenant Antonio Mendoza Cruz, were arrested as late as 2009, when the Forbes list placing Guzmán among the world’s richest men shamed Calderón’s government into a performance of pursuit. The municipality of Compostela is still frequently visited by the invisible man (invisible to the forces of law and order, at least): Guzmán owns at least eight properties in the area. They are registered in the name of Socorro García Ocegueda, Julio’s mother.
In 1993, the PGR had recorded only two high-profile crimes involving El Chapo Guzmán: the first was the homicide of nine members of Félix Gallardo’s family, whose bodies were found on September 3, 1992, in Iguala, Guerrero, with signs of having been tortured; the second was the failed attempt to kill the Arellano Félix brothers a few months later at the Christine Discotheque in Puerto Vallarta, an incident in which eight others did die.
Of these two events, it is the first that yields most clues as to who are El Chapo’s protectors. In 1993, on that flight from Tapachula to Toluca, he had revealed the protection he received from Deputy Attorney General Federico Ponce, as well as from commanders José Luis Larrazolo and Guillermo Salazar. Still more disturbing, however, were the names he left out. The tentacles of organized crime reached everywhere.
It was 19:39 on the evening of September 4, 1992, when an anonymous call interrupted the peaceful routine at the duty office of the Judicial Police in Mexico City, whose boss was the corrupt Rodolfo León Aragón. The caller warned that in the exclusive district of Bosques de las Lomas, a cherry-colored Suburban van was driving around with no plates and carrying several armed men. The phone call rang alarm bells. The duty office already had reports that people in a similar vehicle, posing as Federal Judicial Police, had kidnapped two bodyguards of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo.
The attorney general at the time was Ignacio Morales Lechuga. One of his responsibilities was the so-called Special Affairs Prosecution Service.
Immediately after the call reporting the mysterious Suburban, the Special Affairs team launched an operation led by public prosecution officers Óscar Lozano and Ignacio Sandoval, assisted by four commanders and three investigating officers. At 22:00 the SUV was detected traveling at high speed in Ahuehuetes Street in the same neighborhood. When the PJF officers ordered the driver to stop, he accelerated and tried to escape; the other occupants poked their guns out the rear windows and started shooting at the police, with wild inaccuracy.
The dark night and heavy rain made ideal conditions for an escape. The chase lasted several minutes. When they got as far as Limones, the Suburban made a turn and headed for Almendros, where it stopped at number 42. Luckily for the police, the electric gate was too slow and they managed to catch up with the car. Its five passengers leaped out and scattered, firing as they went at the police officers, who were unable to follow. The suspects left their vehicle with the engine running and the doors open on both sides. Lozano and Sandoval got out of the patrol car and went to look. They found an M2 .30-caliber rifle with no magazine, and a cream-colored valise containing the deeds to a number of properties in the name of Félix Gallardo and other members of his family.2
The day before, on September 3, the sister of the head of the Guadalajara Cartel, Gloria Félix Gallardo, had reported to public prosecutors that a group of armed men had forced their way into their mother’s home at number 142, Cerrada de la Colina, in the Pedregal de San Ángel neighborhood. They had stolen an identical valise and kidnapped her son, her nephew, her brother, two lawyers who worked for the drug baron, and two others. It seemed obvious to the officers that the passengers in the Suburban were connected with the kidnapping of members of the family of the Boss of Bosses.
The police also found in the van a light brown leather jacket fitted with a bulletproof vest, various items of radio equipment, and another case containing rifle magazines—two for an AR-15, an empty thirty-round magazine and a forty-round one with thirty-two cartridges left. In the rear of the vehicle they found two tickets for the toll road between Cuernavaca and Puente de Ixtla, three credit cards belonging to those kidnapped the day before, the remains of some marijuana, a rope, blindfolds, and a bloodied pocket tissue. The key exhibits found in the Suburban that night were two enormous oil paintings. They were separate portraits of two men: one, in a white shirt and light grey pants, was Martín Moreno, a friend and associate of Joaquín Guzmán; the other, with his unmistakable mustache and baby-face, was El Chapo himself.
Nobody moved from the place. The police officers decided to wait for the suspects to make the next move. At eight o’clock the next morning, twenty-one-year-old Cristina Sánchez arrived at the house. She was one of the domestic staff working there. The officers immediately got out of their car and intercepted her.
The cherry Suburban had indeed been used to kidnap the nine people connected to Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, who was then in prison at the Reclusorio Sur, from where he continued to run his empire. Two days before the police chase in Bosques de las Lomas, a group of men had kidnapped Marco Antonio Solórzano Félix—a half-brother of the Boss of Bosses—from a house in Coyoacán, in the south of Mexico City; the gunmen also stole some valuables. Around noon they had carried out a similar operation at the home of Félix Gallardo’s mother, as his sister had reported. The kidnappers burst into the house in Pedregal de San Ángel claiming to be federal agents; in the end it turns out they were, only they were acting on behalf of drug traffickers rather than the law. The group was led by Ramón Laija, El Coloche, from the General Anti-Narcotics Directorate, who would later become the brother-in-law of El Güero Palma. They snatched seven people from the house in Pedregal: Alberto Félix, Alfredo Carrillo, Ángel Gil, Federico Livas, Teodoro Ramírez, and two others. Livas and Ramírez were the lawyers who were seeking a writ of habeas corpus for José Luis Félix López, another relative of the Boss of Bosses who had been picked up twenty-four hours earlier in Guadalajara, also by supposed federal agents.
According to the investigation reports, the kidnappings had been ordered by Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Rafael El Sha Aguilar, El Chapo, and El Güero Palma; they had been carried out by members of the Federal Judicial Police under the command of Rodolfo León Aragón.
The bodies of the nine victims were found south of the capital, on the Cuernavaca-Puente de Ixtla road, close to Iguala in Guerrero state. It was like a scene out of Dante’s Inferno. The men had their hands tied behind their backs with electrical cable, handcuffs, pieces of cord, and ties. They had clearly been tortured. The motive for the “Iguala massacre” was to find out by the most brutal methods what information they had given to the DEA—supposedly on instructions from Félix Gallardo—about the group led by Carrillo Fuentes and Aguilar Guajardo.
The PJF commander, Jorge Núñez, who had persuaded León Aragón to carry out this operation in Iguala, gave him $10 million to blame everything on El Güero Palma and get rid of any evidence that might point to the other traffickers.
When the investigating officers stopped Cristina Sánchez, the maid who was going into the house in Almendros Street, she explained that she had been hired a year and seven months earlier by a certain accountant, Miguel Ángel Segoviano Berbera, and before that she had worked for the previous owner, Abraham Cohen Bisu. Segoviano paid her wages, but didn’t live there.
At first I worked for various people, five to eight of them, who used to stay here. They had Sinaloa accents. My job was to keep the house clean, do the laundry, and cook for them. That was the first six months. Then nobody came for five months until February or March this year, 1992, when Mrs. Ana Salazar arrived, with her little boy, Arturo, the nanny Josefina Hernández, and a friend of the madam’s called Claudia Meneses.
Señora Ana had a holiday home in Cuernavaca, at number 1, Magnolia Street. I never went in, I always waited outside, but I noticed several people coming and going with guns. One of them was Jerónimo Gámez. Mr. Gámez was always armed, and he also visited the house in Bosques de las Lomas. Another one who sometimes came was El Chapo’s friend, Martín Moreno, and his personal bodyguard Antonio Mendoza. That gentleman was sometimes accompanied by a pale, blond-haired man with light eyes who they all called Mr. Palma.3
After her detailed statement, Cristina was taken to the PJF offices at 4, López Street. Rodolfo León Aragón assigned her statement to the PGR’s preliminary inquiries department, where two inquiries were opened, labeled AP4971/D/92 and AP4992/D/92.
As the days passed, the PJF officers were able to piece together the jigsaw puzzle. On September 21, public prosecutors issued a warrant to find and detain the accountant, Miguel Ángel Segoviano, who worked for Carrillo Fuentes, Guzmán, and Palma. The search for Segoviano led them to a Mexico City-registered company called Galce Constructora, in which Segoviano was a partner. The police officers went to the premises, but nobody there had seen Segoviano for days.
In his statement of June 9, 1993, El Chapo would deny knowing Segoviano. Luckily, when he amplified his testimony on September 7, 1995, at least some of his memory had come back: “Carlos is the brother of Miguel Ángel Segoviano. I met them at a disco in the Zona Rosa in Mexico City, though I don’t recall which,” Guzmán said, when the public prosecutors showed him a photo of Carlos Segoviano.
It seems that Miguel Ángel Segoviano’s own memory was in better shape when, in California in 1996, he testified at the trial of Enrique Ávalos Barriga, one of El Chapo’s men who had been caught building a 350-meter tunnel intended to ferry drugs, undocumented workers, and weapons across the border between Tijuana and San Diego. “Guzmán had an assembly line packing the coke in tins of jalapeños. The drugs were exported to the United States by rail. In exchange for the drugs, Guzmán took millions of dollars back to Mexico in suitcases that were flown to Mexico City airport. They bribed federal agents to make sure there were no inspections,” declared Segoviano, El Chapo’s accountant who since 1993 had been a protected witness for the DEA.4
Without specifying names, El Chapo’s accountant insisted that they had handed a lot of money to people working in the PGR.5 This coincided with Guzmán’s first statement on the plane from Tapachula to Toluca, the one that disappeared from the archives.
Segoviano said he had met El Chapo through his father, who owned a warehouse and a trucking company. He recounted in detail the criminal exploits of El Chapo and El Güero Palma, as well as their daily lives: parties, christenings, cock fights, even English classes. He also revealed how Galce Constructora had been contracted to refurbish properties occupied by the drug traffickers in the Desierto de los Leones district of Mexico City, as well as in Cuernavaca and Acapulco.
He evoked a house in Acapulco, in the luxury quarter of Punta Diamante, where SUVs with Jalisco and Sinaloa license plates regularly turned up. The passengers were men bedecked in gold chains, wearing denims and cowboy boots. The parties went on for days at a time. From the mansion, El Chapo Guzmán could see the two yachts named after his sons anchored in front of the exclusive Pichilingue beach in Puerto Marqués.6
Continuing their enquiries, the federal police agents visited the home of Segoviano’s mother—only to find that someone else had been living there for five years. They eventually tracked down the address of the accountant himself: 205 Santiago, in San Jerónimo in the south of Mexico City. To their surprise, the house where Segoviano lived was not only next door to the home of Mexico’s ex-president, Luis Echeverría: it actually belonged to him. The person responsible for letting it had been his son, Luis Eduardo Echeverría Zuno.7
The federal police officers were getting worried about the dimensions this investigation was taking on, and about just how far the drug traffickers’ web of complicity went. The trail was leading to the very highest levels of state power in Mexico. And of course they knew that searching the home of a former president could have serious consequences for their own careers.
When they asked Echeverría about the situation, he told them his son had employed a real-estate agent to rent the house out, and that they knew nothing about the tenant or his activities. This was difficult to believe, because the ex-president’s house had a squad of soldiers in civilian clothes assigned to it from the Presidential Guard; they would hardly be indifferent to what was going on next door, the kind of people who came in and out, and, in this case, their blatant display of weapons. This was the second time that the Echeverría family had appeared to be linked to members of the Guadalajara Cartel: the first was when the former president’s brother-in-law, Rubén Zuno Arce, had been acquitted of involvement in the murder of DEA Special Agent Enrique Camarena.
The Mexican police didn’t find anyone in the house rented by the accountant. It seemed they had arrived too late. Neighbors said they hadn’t seen the family for several days, although there had been no sign of them moving.
Attorney General Ignacio Morales gave the green light for the agents to proceed. A judge issued the appropriate warrant. The historic search of the house belonging to the former Mexican president took place on October 1, 1992.
Just as the investigators were about to begin their work, a couple of men arrived identifying themselves as Vicente Calero and Salvador Castro, employees of the accountant’s. They had orders to load everything in the house into two trucks belonging to Arce Removals. Segoviano’s wife, Rebeca Cañas, had paid them $10,000 for the job. They were due to meet her at 7 p.m., outside the cinemas in Plaza Universidad. Calero, intimidated by the policemen’s questions, confessed that not long ago he had also hidden a car for Segoviano. The trap was set. When Cañas arrived at the mall, the PJF officers were waiting. They stopped and questioned her. “My husband doesn’t live with me, because he has problems with the police. He’s on the run because he works for various drug traffickers. He lends them his name so they can put their properties in his name, and he launders money for them. They pay him very well for these services,” Segoviano’s wife told them.
In one of the vehicles they searched at Segoviano’s house the police found the payroll for El Chapo and his highly placed clients. It contained lists of expenses, wages, loans, and the names of people who had been paid various sums in pesos and dollars. “The accountant looked after all of El Chapo’s financial dealings. He was very meticulous. He kept lists with the name of the official, the amount in dollars that he was paid, the equivalent in pesos, and what the money was for. Not all the money was paid in cash; some was in kind, for example a bottle of cognac, cars, houses, and suchlike,” one of those involved in the operation told us for this book.
The inquiry revealed, among other things, that Rodolfo León Aragón, the head of the PJF, was involved with the cartel El Chapo belonged to, as was Commander Luis Solís, Director General of the Federal Highway Police—in whose house at number 5600 J, Avenida Desierto de los Leones, El Chapo Guzmán even lived for a while.8 The narco-payroll also indicated the apparent complicity of Jorge Carrillo Olea, the country’s anti-narcotics coordinator, of Jorge Núñez, operations director of the PJF, as well as other agents of the Federal Judicial Police and the public prosecutions service.
The administration of Miguel de la Madrid (1982–88) saw the emergence of a tightly-knit team that would come to the fore in the following presidential term. It included Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the planning and budget secretary; Manuel Camacho Solís, first the under secretary for the same department, and then head of urban development and ecology; and Emilio Lozoya Thalmann, the under secretary of social security in the Secretariat of Labor. The group also included José Francisco Ruiz Massieu, Salinas’s brother-in-law; General Juan Arévalo Gardoqui, the secretary of defense; Emilio Gamboa Patrón, the president’s private secretary, and General Jorge Carrillo Olea. They were collectively known as Los Toficos, after a popular—and sticky—brand of toffee.
“The politicians wanted the drug money: they wanted it for themselves, for their private businesses, and for their political campaigns,” remarked The Informer in relation to drug trafficking operations during Salinas’s six-year term as president.
Executions of the “old guard” of drug traffickers began before the end of the de la Madrid government, opening the way to a new generation with a more modern mentality. No more “paying taxes”: now you had to offer hefty bribes, enough to make the fortunes of politicians and businessmen overnight. At the same time there was a move to dismantle Mexico’s intelligence agencies, which had never been very effective and were riddled with corruption, but which at least made it possible to see who was in bed with who.
The first notable execution of an older drug trafficker was that of Pablo Acosta, murdered in 1987 by Guillermo González Calderoni in Ojinaga, on the US border in Chihuahua state. His removal strengthened Carrillo Fuentes and allowed him to take control of the Chihuahua region and the jewel in the whole crown, Ciudad Juárez.
“There was no longer any idea of keeping the drug trade separate from politics. And drug trafficking was now carried out, not just by the drug barons, but by politicians and public officials as well,” said The Informant. It was in this climate that the controversial Salinas administration got underway, cementing a new relationship with the recently revamped security and intelligence services.
As we’ve seen, Salinas’s first attorney general was Enrique Álvarez del Castillo (1988–91), followed by Ignacio Morales Lechuga (1991–93), and Jorge Carpizo McGregor (1993–94). The post went to Diego Valadés Ríos in 1994, and finally to Humberto Benítez Treviño. Antonio Riviello Bazán was chief of defense, and Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, secretary of the interior. Carrillo Olea set up and headed the Investigation and Security Department (Disen, later Cisen). His number two here was Jorge Enrique Tello Peón, who spearheaded the recruitment of young college graduates to the new-look Mexican intelligence frameworks.
One of these new boys was an engineer named Genaro García Luna, whose stammer earned him the nickname Metralleta (Machine Gun). The most recent post of his long career was as secretary of public security under Felipe Calderón, until 2012. García Luna’s dream of joining the PJF was shattered when he flunked the entrance exam. Instead he joined Cisen, becoming an expert wire-tapper—his great, but only, talent, according to his workmates. The duo of Guzmán Loera and García Luna encapsulates, perhaps, the most reprehensible overlap of the evils of the old system with those of the new, as each rose to prominence in their chosen branch of organized crime.
Concurrent reshuffles in the narco leadership were equally significant. Some bosses vanished and others arrived, more prepared to play by the new rules. Once Acosta was out of the picture, for example, he was replaced by Aguilar Guajardo, who shared power in Juárez with Carrillo Fuentes. However, on April 12, 1993, Aguilar met his end in sunny Cancún, enabling Carrillo Fuentes, El Señor de los Cielos, to tighten his grip as lord and master of the drugs business. Several others formed alliances with him, including El Azul Esparragoza; El Mayo Zambada; Arturo, Alfredo, and Héctor Beltrán Leyva, known as Los Tres Caballeros (the Three Knights), and the Valencia Cornelio brothers.
The death of Pablo Escobar a few months later, in December 1993, would strengthen Amado even more, because now he could strike a deal with the Cali Cartel, headed by the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers. Once he was linked to both the main Colombian cartels, El Señor de los Cielos began to move forty times more cocaine into the United States than Félix Gallardo had ever managed. The DEA now ranked Carrillo Fuentes as the most powerful Mexican drug trafficker.9
On the trail of El Chapo’s accountant, Miguel Ángel Segoviano, the investigators of the Special Affairs unit discovered that Segoviano not only had links with Galce Constructora: he was also on the board of Aero Abastos, a freight company whose two planes occupied a hangar at Mexico City’s international airport, very close to the presidential hangar. On October 5, 1992, they showed up at the hangar with a warrant and were surprised to find the building leased to two notoriously shady brothers of Spanish origin, Mario and Olegario Vázquez Raña. They were still more surprised when a flight log on the premises revealed the registration there of other users, namely Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán, and Héctor El Güero Palma.10
The log book found in 1992 named one of Aero Abastos’s regular pilots, Captain Carlos Enrique Messner, who in turn identified three regular passengers: a couple of PJF commanders, and an individual these referred to as “Mr. Guzmán.” The Transport Secretariat officially confirmed, when asked by this investigation, that Messner was a pilot, although his license had expired by 2010. However, none of his documentation could be located.
The planes’ cargos consisted of drugs, and copious quantities of cash. Those were the days when El Chapo, El Güero, and Amado were working with the Reynoso brothers, Jalisco men who had moved to the US where they ran a successful canning outfit under the trade names of Reynoso Brothers, Tía Anita, Grocery Depot, and Cotija Cheese. They were the receivers of the apparent cans of chilli peppers. According to a later report in El Norte newspaper (January 27, 1997), it was in their Learjets, based at the Vázquez Rañas hangar, that El Chapo took drugs to the Mexican border and brought money from the US.
The attorney general at the time, Ignacio Morales, told this investigation that after the discoveries in the hangar, Olegario Vázquez Raña himself assured him he had no idea who the other planes belonged to. Avoiding our query as to whether he believed this, Morales merely mentioned that the preliminary inquiry remained open until he himself left the PGR, in 1992. But any record of these inquiries, relating to the Iguala massacre and involving the Vázquez Raña hangar, has vanished as completely as El Chapo’s first confession. Their original file numbers (AP 4971/D/92 and 4992/D/92) are now, thanks to the collusion of the PGR, ascribed to a street brawl and a homicide. Thus the case of the Vazquez Raña brothers and the narco-hangar was closed. As for the overzealous Special Affairs agents, their unit was dissolved shortly afterward, and its members were banished to minor duties in far-flung states.
Despite the persistent whiff of corruption surrounding the business empires of the Vázquez Raña brothers, and the allegations linking them to drug-money laundering, nothing has hindered their progress; any investigation of their financial and fiscal maneuvers, as in 1995–96, was soon shelved. Olegario Vázquez Raña has acquired airports, hotel chains, private hospitals, and media companies, and founded a bank. Both brothers are said, by sources close to Carrillo Fuentes’s gang interviewed for this book, to have been involved with laundering money for El Señor de los Cielos, and to currently do the same for El Chapo Guzmán. They were protected by successive presidents; Olegario was especially friendly with Vicente Fox and his wife (sexennial 2000–06).
Attorney General Ignacio Morales Lechuga had always had a rocky relationship with President Carlos Salinas.11 It broke down completely when Morales agreed to receive the father of Roberto Hernández Nájar El Chiquilín, a middle-ranking member of the Juárez Cartel, well below Aguilar Guajardo or Carrillo Fuentes. In December 1990 El Chiquilín was in Juárez, at his house in the comfortable, cobble-stoned neighborhood of Rincones de San Marcos. The telephone rang and, in a moment of carelessness, he answered it himself. Fifteen minutes later, fifty rounds had been pumped into his body.
Two years after that execution, El Chiquilín’s father stepped into Morales Lechuga’s office. He wasn’t asking for his son’s assassins to be brought to justice. What he wanted was help in retrieving the $50 million his son had given to “the president’s brother” to invest in an airline, which he was now refusing to give back to the family. Fifty million greenbacks were not so easily written off.
“One of the president’s brothers? Which one?” Morales Lechuga asked.
“Raúl … Raúl Salinas de Gortari,” came the nonchalant reply. The surprise on the attorney general’s face was obvious.
Staff at the PGR quickly drew up a report of the accusations leveled by the drug trafficker’s father against the president’s brother. The attorney general then personally informed the president of the details of his meeting. Salinas glared at him, tugging his mustache. It was something he did when he was annoyed. That was when Morales knew he would shortly be out of a job. In January 1993 he was relieved of his duties.
For many years it has been widely thought that the Salinas family’s connection with organized crime was exclusively with García Ábrego and the Gulf Cartel. This was based on the close relationship between Don Raúl Salinas Sr. and Juan Nepomuceno, the godfather who created García Abrego, or rather who pulled his strings. The frequent visits made by the president’s father to Don Juan, and the chummy photographs of the two of them that hung on the walls of his restaurant, Piedras Negras, showed just how close they were.
In those days there was no open warfare between the drug cartels. By and large a civilized coexistence reigned, and everyone enjoyed official protection. This was especially true of the Gulf and Juárez cartels, which even collaborated on making shipments to the United States, according to The Informer. In fact, the ties of the Salinas family were not only with the Gulf Cartel; they also had links with Carrillo Fuentes, who had brought together the drug traffickers of both Sinaloa and Juárez.
The Salinas family’s PR man with the Gulf and Juárez cartels was the controversial commander of the Federal Judicial Police, Guillermo González Calderoni. He knew Carrillo Fuentes from his time serving in Chihuahua. The PJF chief protected both El Señor de los Cielos and García Ábrego.
Jorge Carrillo Olea remembers González Calderoni as “a likable guy, respectful, like all policemen. He seemed very young, he must have been about forty-two, but he looked younger. He was always very polite and easy to talk to, so he inspired confidence.” Nonetheless, General Carrillo recalls, in 1990 Calderoni had been frozen out; there was simply “no place for him” in the PJF. That same year, Attorney General Morales Lechuga told Carrillo Olea that they had to open an office in Quintana Roo state, in south-east Mexico, and wondered whether they should approach González Calderoni for the job. Carrillo told him he thought that would be a “crass mistake,” because everyone knew what Calderoni was like and this would be giving him “a virgin territory where the Gulf Cartel didn’t exist.”
When Tello Peón, the future Cisen recruiter, then director of planning, learned of Morales Lechuga’s plans, he also opposed sending González Calderoni. They told the attorney general about the police commander’s links with organized crime in Tamaulipas, about his relationship with García Ábrego, and also about the properties he had mysteriously acquired in McAllen and Monterrey. Carrillo Olea says that even León Aragón was afraid of trespassing on Calderoni’s territory: “El Chino wouldn’t go near it, if I mentioned it to him he’d just play deaf.”
Three years later, after Calderoni had indeed gone to Cancún in Quintana Roo, and the anticipated trouble had begun, Jorge Carpizo (who had just replaced Morales as attorney general) said to Carrillo Olea: “My dear Jorge, only you will know my secret. We are going to arrest Calderoni. You go to Washington, speak to the director of the DEA and tell them not to get involved, otherwise it will be a dreadful sign of how they’re protecting him.”
“We knew perfectly well how the DEA worked,” recalled Carrillo. “They hooked up with the drug traffickers to obtain information. What the Mexican state has never understood is that information is a commodity; those who possess it have power.” So the general went to Washington and met the then director of the DEA and current Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), John T. Morton. Carrillo was taken aback to learn that González Calderoni had not only received US protection, he had even been given a green card.
In the US, Calderoni had told numerous stories about Raúl Salinas and his supposed links with Juan García Ábrego. In General Carrillo’s opinion, “these were tricks. For the Americans, it was like gold dust; even though they knew it wasn’t true, they could exploit it.” Nonetheless, in an interview he gave to the newspaper Reforma on January 29, 1996, when he was no longer attorney general, Morales Lechuga said that he had obtained information linking Raúl Salinas to the Juárez Cartel, but as Carrillo Olea controlled the Judicial Police, he could do nothing about it.
During the first year of Ernesto Zedillo’s presidency, in March 1995, Raúl Salinas was arrested on murder and corruption charges.
Towards the end of the ten years he spent in exile in Texas, González Calderoni repeatedly threatened to return to Mexico and tell “everything” he knew.
In December 1996, in an interview with the New York Times, he well and truly destroyed the reputation of the former president’s brother. The article was signed by Sam Dillon, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for other pieces on drug trafficking in Mexico. Dillon writes:
In two days of interviews in McAllen, Tex., Mr. González said a major Mexican drug trafficker had told him of making large cash payments to Raúl Salinas de Gortari during the presidency of Mr. Salinas’s brother, Carlos. Mr. González said he relayed these allegations to President Salinas in 1992 and to American officials a year later.12
In 1992, Carlos Salinas had already heard from Morales the accusations made against his brother by El Chiquilín’s father. In his interview, Calderoni also claimed he had told various US officials of the drug trafficking corruption at the highest levels in Mexico.
But in spite of all the reports that Washington received about Raúl Salinas’s alleged complicity with drug trafficking, “the Clinton Administration never expressed concern to the Mexican government about the reported activities of the president’s brother; nor was an investigation requested,” US officials told Dillon. The most anyone in the Clinton administration ever said was a brief insinuation during a meeting between President Salinas and US ambassador James Jones, after Mexico had asked for Calderoni’s extradition. “González Calderoni has so much bad stuff on your administration that it could bring down your government,” Jones warned the Mexican president, who “did not flinch,” according to one US official who talked anonymously to Dillon. In fact, the US government did nothing. It was not the first time that Washington put its foreign policy interests ahead of combating the drug trade.
In October 2000, just after the National Action Party (PAN) led by Vicente Fox had for the first time won the presidential election, Guillermo González Calderoni continued to level accusations against Raúl Salinas from the United States. The Sinaloa Cartel was set to prevail during Fox’s government, and Calderoni got a second chance.
Once the new administration had taken office, he made himself useful to the ambitious sons from an earlier marriage of first lady Marta Sahagún, who were desperate for good business opportunities. Manuel Bribiesca Sahagún helped the former police commander to obtain, indirectly and using a front name, a major contract with Pemex to buy a much sought-after petroleum solvent, used for dry cleaning but also to adulterate gasoline and produce synthetic drugs.
González Calderoni received protection and began to collaborate with the DEA through his contact with Special Agent Héctor Berrellez, who years earlier had headed Operation Leyenda. In an interview with Frontline, Berrellez said Calderoni had asked for help:
He wanted our assistance in hiding in the United States, as his life was in serious jeopardy. We had heard that there were plainclothes Mexican military officials in the L.A. area looking to assassinate him. And at that time, he reported to us that a major drug lord had actually been given the contract to assassinate two political opponents of Carlos Salinas de Gortari.
He told me he was disgusted and frustrated because it not only involved just the drugs, it also involved other crimes, such as murder, and that shocked González Calderoni.13
Commander González Calderoni, the man who knew the sewers of the Mexican police system, also claimed that Amado Carrillo Fuentes was alive and well in the United States, even though he was supposed to have died in July 1997 as a result of botched cosmetic surgery.
On February 5, 2003, at 12:45 p.m., González Calderoni, now fifty-four years old, had his own appointment with death. As he left his lawyer’s office at 6521 North 10th Street in the border city of McAllen, he was killed with a single shot. His troublesome stories would be heard no more.