It was early in 2008 when General X, disciplined, tenacious, and daring as he was, traveled to the home territory of Mexico’s most powerful drug lord to speak to him face to face.1 El Chapo Guzmán was expecting the messenger from Los Pinos. Now more than sixty-five, the military man still exudes the vitality and verve of his best years. He’d been working with Juan Camilo Mouriño in the Presidential Office since 2007—an adviser in the shadows, as he had been through most of his forty-five years in the Mexican army, serving in the White Brigade, the Federal Security Directorate, and the National Security Coordination. Mouriño, one of President Calderón’s closest confidants, had given the general an impossible task: to broker peace between the drug cartels. In January 2008, Mouriño was made Interior Secretary, but the mission still stood, and coming from a man so close to the president it was not to be taken lightly.
If the general couldn’t succeed, with all the guile he had acquired over the years, then nobody could. He had spent seven years in prison, accused of links with Amado Carrillo Fuentes, El Señor de los Cielos. A number of witnesses testified against him, but there remained an element of doubt, as happens so often in these labyrinthine cases involving the military. He still had seven years of his sentence to go, but in the first year of Calderón’s government he was set free. Those in the know say his imprisonment was a political affair, as was his release.
Nine months after he left prison, to the astonishment of his colleagues, he was decorated by the secretary of defense, General Guillermo Galván, for his “patriotism, loyalty, and self-sacrifice.” The government had to make him visible and credible to his interlocutors: the drug traffickers. General X has said that the secretary of defense also knew of the mission entrusted to him by Mouriño.
He’d never been too fussy about the tasks he took on. Many of them had required building relationships with different groups of traffickers. So in 2008, when he started knocking on the doors of the different groups involved in the narco war, most of them swung open. That’s what happened with El Chapo.
“Freedom is priceless,” El Chapo Guzmán told the general when they met. It sounded very cynical, even coming from a cynic like El Chapo. The remark was a cue for General X to inquire how he had managed to get out of the Puente Grande maximum security jail on that January day back in 2001. Guzmán was quite candid about it. They had begun to help him in 1995, when he was transferred from La Palma to Puente Grande on the orders of the Interior Secretariat. El Chapo named three men as being responsible for the “escape” itself. All were prominent figures in Mexico’s political and security establishment.
One was the former governor of Quintana Roo, Lieutenant Colonel Joaquín Hendricks. El Chapo said he helped him when he worked in the Interior Secretariat. The only post Hendricks occupied in that ministry was as director of sentence implementation in the prison service, from 1996 to 1997, when Francisco Labastida was the secretary.
In 1999, Hendricks became governor of one of the states with the highest intake of drug shipments in Mexico, a key operational base for both the Sinaloa and Juárez cartels. His predecessor had been Mario Villanueva, who was extradited in 2010 for his alleged links to the Amado Carrillo Fuentes organization, which El Chapo had belonged to.
In February 2001, just after El Chapo’s “escape” and without any particular prompting, the head of the Specialized Organized Crime Unit (UEDO), José Luis Trinidad, announced that he was not carrying out any investigation “into the alleged involvement of the elected governor of Quintana Roo, Joaquín Hendricks Díaz, in the case of the drug trafficker Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán.” Indeed, “no member of UEDO is carrying out such an investigation, in that state or in any other.”2 After leaving Puente Grande, Guzmán hid out mainly in the states of Nayarit and Quintana Roo.
The second man implicated by El Chapo in his escape was the then attorney general, Rafael Macedo de la Concha. It was his office that was in charge of the operation carried out after the escape and which put Genaro García Luna at the helm of the subsequent investigation—one that was carried out with striking negligence.
At the beginning of 2005, Macedo resigned as attorney general and was sent by President Fox as military attaché to the Mexican embassy in Rome, where he remained in exile until the end of the sexennial. When Felipe Calderón assumed the presidency, Macedo returned to Mexico and was made a judge in the Military Tribunal, where he kept a rigorously low profile.
The third accomplice named by El Chapo to General X was Jorge Tello Peón, the then deputy secretary in the Secretariat of Public Security (SSP). Tello, as we saw, visited the Puente Grande prison the very day of El Chapo’s escape, as if to finalize some of the details. From 2008 to 2009, this man, explicitly fingered by the drug baron as the man who set him free, was President Calderón’s chief adviser on public security, working with García in the SSP as executive secretary of the National Security System. In January 2010 he moved to the National Security Council, apparently because of disagreements with his erstwhile protégé. García Luna now had more power, and wanted to show his teacher that the pupil had outgrown him. Tello didn’t last long in that job either, and ended up simply as an adviser to Calderón.3
There is no doubt El Chapo is a perverse individual, capable of flipping his own destiny inside out. On June 9, 1993, he was delivered to General Carrillo Olea, the anti-drugs coordinator, in the back of a clapped-out old pickup truck, bent double with his hands and feet tied, on a remote roadside in Chiapas. Eight years later, it was Carrillo’s alter ego, Tello Peón, his anointed son, fashioned in his own likeness, who would seemingly set him free.
El Chapo told General X that all the “turfs” in Mexico, that’s to say all the states where organized crime operates, “have been sold.” The trouble was that some national officials, as well as some local government officials, had sold them more than once to different groups, resulting in chaos among the gangs.
When the envoy from Los Pinos met Guzmán, the drug lord had already joined open battle with the Beltrán Leyvas, his cousins and long-time partners. Maybe that was why El Chapo informed the general, in a tone of wounded complaint, that Juan Camilo Mouriño and his then chief adviser at the Secretariat of the Interior, Ulises Ramírez, had sold the rights to the State of Mexico to the Beltrán Leyva brothers for $10 million. The point was, this transaction took place after operations in that state had been promised to El Chapo Guzmán. Mouriño had been talked into it by Ramírez, who El Chapo described as a “crook.” “Ramírez must have kept at least a million for himself,” the general thought.
Sources close to Mouriño confirmed this story, but said the secretary was apparently unaware of the deal done in his name by Ramírez.
El Chapo Guzmán told the presidential envoy that he and his clan had already agreed with the federal government that the latter would combat his old partners, the Beltrán Leyvas. General X must have felt very uncomfortable at hearing this. It put him on the spot because there was no way, when he came to report back to Mouriño, that he would be able to repeat El Chapo’s complaint. He had worked long enough inside the system to know that it could cost him his life.
For obvious reasons, General X’s meeting with the drug baron was brief, and for his own safety he hasn’t said where it took place. By the time they said goodbye, the envoy from Los Pinos was sure of one thing: El Chapo did whatever he wanted, and he was not prepared to give up his freedom, whatever it might cost.
On December 1, 2006, the second president from the National Action Party (PAN), Felipe Calderón, delivered his maiden speech and announced that his government’s number one priority would be to restore public security. Four days later, he formally declared “war” on organized crime. This would become the main weapon in his government’s desperate bid to win support and legitimacy,4 in a society that was equally desperate for the rule of law.
“Rest assured that my government is working hard to win the war on crime, to ensure that the rights of all are protected and respected, with the right to property and investment; and fighting relentlessly against corruption and to safeguard the right to life, liberty, and heritage,”5 declared Calderón emphatically. He didn’t deliver. Either he couldn’t, or he wouldn’t.
What nobody could explain was why he decided to fight organized crime with the same officials that had so singularly failed in the task already, the one because he was inept, the other because he was corrupt: Eduardo Medina Mora and Genaro García Luna.
Medina was a colorless secretary of public security during the last year of the Fox government; under Calderón he served as a vacillating attorney general, who never managed to get out from under the thumb of García Luna. So much so that for the first two years his own secretariat’s police force, the AFI, was still controlled by García Luna rather than himself.
In spite of his somber record in the Fox administration, García Luna was made secretary of public security with backing from Tello Peón and from Mexico’s (and the world’s) richest man, Carlos Slim, who had been persuaded to support him. The United States embassy was soon keeping a close eye on him and his team. In a confidential cable dated December 11, 2006, the embassy describes García Luna as an “intense” character, and notes his “mumbled” Spanish which is “hard to understand even for native speakers.” Their overall view of him was positive, because several US Agencies like the DEA had worked with him in the past, and he had been very cooperative. But not all of his team were regarded in the same light.6
In charge of the SSP, he rapidly became a feared member of cabinet. Nobody could look him in the eye. Nobody trusted him. He has been publicly questioned over his sudden personal wealth, including more than 40 million pesos’ worth ($2.8 million in 2010) of real estate in Mexico City and Morelos. He has so far been unable to explain how he grew so affluent on a civil servant’s salary.7 In a letter sent to the Mexican Congress in 2008, a group of federal agents who had worked with him accused him of being connected to the drug trade, and said he had been directly threatened by drug barons like Arturo Beltrán Leyva to make him fulfil his agreements.8 Many legends have been written about him, like the existence of rooms full of money and lavish properties in the Dominican Republic.
His front companies include two restaurants called Café Los Cedros, registered in the name of his wife, Linda Pereyra Gálvez: one in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in the south of Mexico City, the other in Cuernavaca. These establishments function as operational centers separate from his official activities as a public servant. In 2010, Café Los Cedros was recruiting polygraphists, specialists in applying lie detector tests, to work throughout Mexico. An unusual skill for a restaurant employee.
US government sources say their intelligence services have monitored García Luna’s properties and carried out satellite scans in search of money. They claim that $15 million were identified in one of the houses.
Since December 2010, many civic leaders have accused him of links to drug traffickers, and of making death threats against those who question his integrity or imperil his interests.
Of course, García Luna did not come to the Secretariat of Public Security alone. His unholy band from the AFI came with him. He made Luis Cárdenas Palomino, El Pollo, first director general of private security and then Intelligence Coordinator for the Federal Police. Javier Garza Palacios came to the SSP as coordinator of regional security, but he didn’t last there even a year. In May 2007, eleven truckloads of hit men from the Sinaloa Cartel drove 200 miles along a federal highway to Cananea, in Sonora state, to execute twenty-two local policemen in the mining town. There was a public outcry, because no one in Garza’s department had been able to spot the monstrous convoy.
A few days later, García Luna sacked the entire Regional Security command, and appointed Edgar Millán in Garza’s place. However, García owed too much to Garza, so he sent him as SSP attaché to the Mexican embassy in Colombia. Some say that in fact Garza never went, and that he continued to do the clan’s business away from the spotlight. There is documentary evidence that Garza Palacios remained on the SSP payroll until early in 2009, although the Secretariat has denied it.
Igor Labastida was given the key job of director of traffic and contraband at the Federal Police. Like him, Facundo Rosas Rosas, Gerardo Garay Cadena, Rafael Avilés, Armando Espinosa de Benito, Luis Jafet Jasso, and other members of the “inner circle” were simply reshuffled.
García Luna also recruited fresh talent for his new tasks as head of the SSP. When he was director of the AFI, he had always boasted that one day he would have more power than a president; in this new job, he was closer than ever to making the dream come true. Marco Tulio López, a lawyer with a history of human rights abuses in Oaxaca and minor posts in district courts, was named legal director of the SSP, his only merit being that he had helped to get García Luna off the hook when he was accused by the Auditor of mismanagement in 2000. Another new signing was Edgar Enrique Bayardo, former judicial policeman and more lately the deputy attorney in Tlaxcala state, where he was reputed to be involved in a kidnapping gang allegedly run by his brother. García Luna named him deputy director of crime investigation with the Federal Police.
There was a rotten smell in the Secretariat of Public Security. Soon the stink would waft out onto the streets, and cause a public scandal.
From the beginning of his government, the phrase “war on drugs” became Calderón’s great buzzword. The first troop movement began on December 11, 2006, with the Michoacán Joint Operation. Seven thousand troops and police officers from the army, the navy, the AFI, and the PFP were deployed in the state of Michoacán, which was then controlled by the Gulf Cartel.
The military commander of that first battle was General Manuel García Ruiz, assigned by the secretary of defense, Guillermo Galván. In charge of the civilian forces was Gerardo Garay, appointed by García Luna. A year later Garay and other senior SSP officials were denounced after appearing in videos taking instructions from members of El Chapo Guzmán’s organization.
In the months that followed, Calderón continued to speak about the “war”:
I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: this is a deep-seated problem in our country, with such profound roots that it will take time, a lot of time, and money, a great deal of money, as a war on this scale does. And regrettably it will continue to cost, as it has already cost in the last two years, human lives.
But rest assured, my friends, the Mexican state, and your government, are absolutely determined to fight this battle, without respite, until we win back the streets, the squares, the cities, for all of Mexico’s citizens.9
Up to August 2010, the cost in human lives referred to by the president amounted to 28,000 people killed. By July 2011, this terrifying figure had risen to more than 40,000. To the sound of gunfights and grenades going off, Mexico was turning into a graveyard.
Throughout his six years in government, Felipe Calderón refused to change one iota of his anti-drug strategy. And when you look in detail at the operations undertaken, it raises all manner of suspicions about the president. When questioned on the direction taken by his “war,” Calderón bristled: either you were with him, unconditionally and without question, or you were against him. His critics were made out to be anti-patriotic.
Throughout this presidency, the enemies of El Chapo and his closest allies fell like flies, while he basked in his impunity.
On February 24, 2010, President Calderón was asked at a press conference whether his government had protected Joaquín Guzmán Loera. He exploded: “That is absolutely false!” and went on to explain:
We have fought all of them. And to all of them we have dealt serious blows, to their operational and financial structure, and to their leadership. This is a false and malicious accusation, I don’t know what the intention behind it is, but it just doesn’t stand up. We have attacked in the same way both the Gulf and the Pacific cartels.
What’s more, we’ve hit almost the same number of big drug barons and criminal bosses on both sides. It’s incredible to me that when we are catching criminals as important as El Teo, for example, who is from El Chapo’s organization, from the Pacific Cartel, the government is accused of protecting that cartel. Or when we are extraditing someone like Vicente Zambada,10 we are accused of covering up for them. At best it’s pure ignorance.
Once again, the president was repeating a series of myths about his policy for fighting Mexico’s drug gangs. His supposed war on the drugs trade was as “real” as that waged by Ronald Reagan twenty years earlier, with the results that are only too well known. From the beginning of his government, Calderón’s strategy against the drug barons was designed to favour El Chapo Guzmán and his main partners: El Mayo Zambada, El Nacho Coronel, and El Azul Esparragoza.
There is firm documentary evidence that Calderón’s war was overwhelmingly aimed against those drug traffickers who are El Chapo’s enemies or represent a threat to his leadership. Since 2007, the government has known the exact addresses of Mexico’s main drug traffickers and their relatives. In some cases they have the telephone numbers, bank accounts, and other valuable details that would allow them to take successful, targeted action against them. This is evident from the files on each drug baron drawn up by the SSP with the support of the intelligence agency, Cisen.11 In fact, what Mexico has experienced in the last decade is not a “war on drug traffickers,” but a war between drug traffickers, with the government taking sides for the Sinaloa Cartel.
The people responsible for designing President Calderón’s war strategy and setting its main priorities were Genaro García Luna and his team, with their long and reliable history of service to the same cartel. This strategy put forward by the SSP was based on certain “lines of inquiry” which identified as “strategic priority no. 1” the capture of the leader of the Gulf Cartel, Ezequiel Cárdenas—brother of Osiel Cárdenas—and of Jorge Costilla, El Coss, his second in command. The only leaders of The Federation labeled “strategic priority no. 1” were Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, El Mochomo, Arturo Beltrán Leyva, El Barbas, and Edgar Valdés, La Barbie.12
Of all El Chapo’s partners, the one who represented the greatest threat to him in terms of power was Arturo Beltrán Leyva and his group. El Barbas was beginning to get too much power of his own. Nor did Guzmán appreciate the fact that his cousin’s loyalties to Vicente Carrillo Fuentes seemed stronger than they were to him. The murder of the Golden Boy, Rodolfo Carrillo Fuentes, ordered by El Mayo and approved by El Chapo, was a wound that never healed. Relations between these two leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel and Vicente El Viceroy were hanging by a thread, and the former were disturbed by El Barbas’s close relation with the latter. Although the Beltrán Leyvas were still part of The Federation in 2007, it’s clear that from the beginning of Calderón’s term, the stench of betrayal hung in the air. It was just a matter of time.
By contrast, Joaquín Guzmán, Ismael Zambada, Ignacio Coronel, and Juan José Esparragoza were only classified as “strategic priority no. 2,”13 in spite of the fact that they were leading the most powerful drug trafficking organization in the Americas, and the one with the strongest presence in the United States.
A declassified document from the US Northern Command, drawn up in 2009, states categorically that the Sinaloa Cartel is the most dangerous of the Mexican drug trafficking organizations, and blames this “rogue cartel” for the violence along the border. The authors note with concern that the Sinaloa Cartel controls the Pacific corridor, and there is little or nothing to stop it taking over the corridor that was in the hands of the Arellano Félix organization.14
The government’s dubious strategy has helped to strengthen El Chapo Guzmán, since most of the drug traffickers arrested belong to groups that oppose him. Edgardo Buscaglia,15 one of the main critics of the Calderón government’s failed war, has done the math: of the 53,174 arrests made in the four years to 2010, for either involvement in organized crime or criminal association, he says that only 941 were connected with El Chapo Guzmán’s cartel.
What is more, most of the arrests that did take place came to nothing. Buscaglia points out that when you look for consequences after the arrest of the son, or the grandfather, or whatever, of El Mayo Zambada, there are none to be found: “Was somebody sent to prison? Did they reveal the details of the fortunes belonging to El Chapo, El Mayo, or El Azul Esparragoza?” The facts back up this troublesome UN adviser.
The protection given by the Mexican government to Joaquín Guzmán is palpable. And the drug lord himself makes a show of it. At the beginning of July 2007, El Chapo decided to “get married” in broad daylight, with Mexican army soldiers as minders, and drug traffickers and politicians from both the PRI and the PAN as his guests.
That July day in 2007, in the municipality of Canelas, in Durango state, the band Los Canelos suddenly stopped playing. The ranch was surrounded by soldiers in olive green. For a few seconds at least, the couple celebrating their nuptials with this sumptuous fiesta ceased to be the center of attention: The King of Crystal had arrived. Ignacio Coronel was the regional big shot and guest of honor on a day when “royalty” were sealing such an important union. The bridegroom, at fifty-three, was undoubtedly the king of Mexican drug traffickers. The bride, at just eighteen, was the recently crowned Queen of the annual Canelas Coffee and Guava Fair. Canelas is a heavenly spot, surrounded by waterfalls, woods and all manner of wild flowers, but Emma Coronel was the loveliest flower of them all.16
In the course of his life, El Chapo has had quite a collection of women. Now, it seems he has eyes only for Emma. The name she adopted after her coronation suits her well: Emma I. Slim and childlike, she has long, brown, curly hair that reaches halfway down her back, white skin, an oval face and brown, melancholy eyes. But the union was not really a wedding, says the daughter of one drug baron who knows the situation well. “El Chapo cannot marry because he never divorced his first wife, Alejandrina.” What he did was to formalize his relationship and commitment to Emma.
When El Chapo saw his friend and partner Nacho arrive, he hurried over and gave him a bear hug, the kind you give to a brother. They were having a party. It had been a long time since El Chapo had felt at peace. That wasn’t because he feared arrest by the government, but because of the war The Federation had started against the Gulf Cartel four years ago. Now, at last, he could spare a few moments for his personal life.
El Chapo enjoyed considerable freedom of movement in Canelas, where the mayor was Francisco Cárdenas Gamboa, of the PAN. In May of 2007 the mayor had been involved in a scandal after local police officers were caught by the army carrying several kilos of opium gum with a permit signed by him.
Apart from the star guest, Nacho Coronel, El Chapo had invited all his nearest and dearest. After all, it was a day to celebrate in style. El Mayo, El Azul, the Beltrán Leyva brothers and La Barbie were all there. People in the know say that one of the politicians present was the young PAN senator, Rodolfo Dorador, who is close to President Felipe Calderón. He would stand unsuccessfully for mayor in Durango in 2010 as the candidate of the “Durango Unites Us” coalition, made up of the PAN, the left-of-center PRD, and Convergencia. When asked whether he really was at the wedding, Dorador doesn’t deny it. And if a party colleague reproaches him for it, he replies testily: “So what? Fox hung out with El Chapo, too.”
Some of those who attended say the Sinaloa state district attorney, Alfredo Higuera Bernal, was also there. When the magazine Proceso reported this, Higuera called a press conference to deny it. In fact he said he had never been to Durango, although other guests still insist he was present.
El Chapo also invited Jesús Aguilar, the governor of Sinaloa, and he apparently accepted, although the former governor of Durango state, Ismael Hernández, did not, preferring to avoid trouble. People in Durango claim he was so closely involved with El Chapo that the latter once went around to his house and tell him off, reminding him that he had to answer his calls whenever he phoned, and not to forget it again.
The party went on long into the night. In times of truce, El Chapo could allow himself such a luxury. However, not everything went his way. The celebration soon became public knowledge, and that infuriated him. The repercussions of the leak were severe. Cárdenas Gamboa, who completed his term as mayor of Canelas in August 2007, was shot by two gunmen on September 22 in downtown Durango city. The following day, Reynaldo Jiménez, the leader of the PAN in Canelas and a former municipal secretary, was kidnapped and never seen again. The last thing El Chapo needed right then was the glare of publicity. Only weeks before his “marriage” to the Queen of the Coffee and Guava Fair, he had attended a less agreeable gathering.
In June 2007, various drug barons from The Federation and the Gulf Cartel held a series of meetings in different parts of the country. The aim was to put an end to the war between the two organizations that had lasted almost four years (since 2003) and caused thousands of deaths. One of the meetings took place in Tamaulipas, on Zetas territory,17 at a property belonging to Heriberto Lazcano, near the junction of the Valle Hermoso and Matamoros highways. Since the members of The Federation were the “aggressors” and those of the Gulf Cartel the “aggrieved,” the latter set the terms for the encounter.
Many grudges had been piling up, but what the Zetas most resented was that while they had conquered their territory in battle, “fairly and squarely,” The Federation had relied on “the support of the government and of people at the top of the AFI and the Secretariat of Public Security.” The fact that the Zetas had managed without “official support” made them feel invincible. A little ingenuously, they even thought they could snatch back from The Federation its traditional strongholds in Jalisco and Sinaloa.
The Federation was represented at the meeting by Joaquín Guzmán, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, Juan José Esparragoza, Ismael Zambada, Ignacio Coronel, Arturo and Héctor Beltrán Leyva, and their chief enforcer, Edgar Valdez, La Barbie, who had started the war in Nuevo Laredo on the orders of the cartel.
Although in 2002, it was Esparragoza, El Azul, who had urged his partners to begin hostilities against the Gulf Cartel, now the high cost for both sides had convinced him to be one of the main promoters of the truce meeting. It is said he was encouraged by a senior government official, who promised nobody would be harassed if there were a ceasefire. At the beginning of 2007, El Azul had already made one attempt at a pact, through an official in the Public Prosecutor’s Office.18 But the Gulf Cartel, and especially the Zetas leader, El Verdugo Lazcano, had refused. He didn’t trust his adversaries an inch, and didn’t want to fall into the same trap as his boss, Osiel Cárdenas. “We’ll never make a pact with them,” had been Lazcano’s response. In the end, The Executioner was forced to sit down with his enemies after the Beltrán Leyva brothers kidnapped one of his cousins. El Azul intervened to secure his safe return before the meeting, as a token of peace.
The Gulf Cartel was represented by Ezequiel Cárdenas and Heriberto Lazcano. Humberto García Ábrego, regarded as the honorary leader of the Gulf Cartel, was not present; the brother of Juan García Ábrego had not been directly involved in the drug business for some time, though he still took his cut of the profits.
Such a meeting between Mexico’s top drug traffickers, in the middle of one of the bloodiest wars ever, seemed unthinkable. But business is business. The hostilities between the organizations was costing them dearly, in terms of both cash and casualties. Even their respective contacts in Colombia were beginning to wonder if the Mexicans could still be trusted. Intelligence reports indicate that cocaine shipments from Colombia had noticeably fallen off around that time.
It was just after midday when Joaquín Guzmán arrived at the meeting place. The tension rose. There were so many grievances on both sides. All the men were armed to the teeth, but there were no fingers on the triggers. When El Chapo Guzmán stood face to face with Heriberto Lazcano, the room fell silent. “If I was queer, I’d have fucked you already”, said Guzmán, looking the Zeta leader’s youthful, athletic figure up and down with a face of surprise. Then he gave him the sort of hug only a mafioso can give one of his rivals. The ice was broken. Everybody burst out laughing. It wasn’t for nothing that El Chapo was who he was; his ability to charm, even at moments of life and death, was scarily impressive.
The first agreement they came to was to stop the violence. They decided to respect the territorial advances made by each cartel during the war, and not to attack the authorities in the areas where they were operating. The Gulf Cartel would keep Tamaulipas, Coahuila, Veracruz, Tabasco, Campeche, and Quintana Roo. The Federation would have Sonora, Sinaloa, Durango, Chihuahua, Nayarit, Jalisco, Guerrero, Guanajuato, Querétaro, and Oaxaca. In states like Nuevo León, Michoacán, the Federal District, and the State of Mexico, each group would keep the areas it had conquered, sharing the territory as a whole. Aguascalientes, San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas, and Puebla would be left as “neutral” states. They also agreed, at the request of the government, to try to put a stop to retail drug dealing, and to ensure that most of the product left Mexico. Of all the agreements, that would be the most difficult to fulfill. Furthermore, it was agreed that the two organizations would join together to pay for state protection, on the understanding that this would henceforth be provided to all the groups, not just El Chapo’s.
The Valle Hermoso pact was in fact an opium dream, a fleeting illusion. Two factors made it only too easy for the truce to break down. The first was the difficulty of sharing territory, especially between drug traffickers who had been at one another’s throats for years. It was one thing for the generals to reach an agreement, quite another for the rank and file to obey. The second factor was, strange to say, the United States government—very fond of making pacts itself, but not so keen on others making them behind its back.
In typical narco style, the meeting in Valle Hermoso ended with a wild party. Heriberto Lazcano and his colleague went to bed, while the guests enjoyed an abundance of alcohol, music, and prostitutes. Other meetings followed, in Cuernavaca and the Polanco neighborhood of Mexico City, to wrap up the final details of the accord. A fragile calm descended on the country’s streets. The death rate fell sharply, from ten executions a day to an average of eight a week.
For his part, Heriberto Lazcano got on famously with Arturo Beltrán Leyva. Their violent personalities were a perfect match. It is said that around this time El Verdugo had a plane accident and that Arturo, El Barbas, came to rescue him in a helicopter. As a sign of his friendship, El Barbas began to share with the Zetas leader all the protection The Federation enjoyed from officials in the SSP. Those who had been hunting the Zetas like dogs were now helping them collect their bribes. At the same time the Mexican government, rotten to the core, in speech after presidential speech continued to extol its phoney “war on drugs.”
The truce could not last. Betrayal is the only constant among drug traffickers. If El Chapo had foreseen that this pact would turn out to mark not the end, but the beginning of the worst phase of the war, he would never have held out his hand to El Verdugo.
It was the beginning of 2008, and Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, El Mochomo, was feeling wound up. By nature he was a cautious man, but that day he was in a hurry to visit one of his women, who it is said was a relative of Joaquín Guzmán’s. He usually carried a Colt .38, and moved around with a group of bodyguards, but in matters of the heart he preferred privacy. His rendezvous was to be in Culiacán, at no. 1970 Juan de la Barrera, in the Burócratas neighborhood. Very few people knew where the couple would meet, much less at what time.
On Sunday, January 20, two AFI officers traveled to Culiacán to follow up a supposed anonymous phone call, giving advance notice of where El Mochomo would be that day.
In 2007, the PGR and the SSP had signed an agreement to place the AFI under the jurisdiction of the Secretariat, together with its assets, weapons, offices, and files. Genaro García Luna aspired to create a single police force, bringing together the Federal Preventive Police (PFP) and the Federal Investigation Agency (AFI) under a single command: his own. The agreement was a first step towards what would be known as the Federal Police.
The AFI officers, following orders from García Luna’s team, checked out the address they had been given at 4:30 p.m.19 They could be sure that El Mochomo would spend a good few hours there with his lady friend, maybe for the last time. At 2 a.m. the officers returned, with reinforcements from the Mexican army. Something, or someone, caused El Mochomo to leave the premises at precisely that time. The property’s electric gate swung open for Alfredo Beltrán Leyva to depart in a chunky white BMW, accompanied by just three bodyguards.
The trafficker, sitting in the back seat behind the driver, was livid when the police officers ordered him to stop. But he and his men were so convinced it was a mistake that they all got out without their guns. The last to alight was El Mochomo, who confidently gave his real name and never thought of using his pistol. It could only be a mix-up, or else one of those pointless pantomimes they put on from time to time. Alfredo was the one who paid the bribes to the former AFI chiefs who now ran the SSP, as well to the army chiefs. Like the rest of The Federation, he took it for granted that he was untouchable.
The officers showed him a summons. El Mochomo couldn’t understand what was happening; suddenly everything was going wrong. Then they confiscated an AK-47, five handguns, magazines and ammunition of various calibers, a bullet-proof vest, and three travel cases whose contents added up to $950,000—not a lot for a drug baron of his stature. They also found in the car valuables worth five million pesos (about $450,000 in 2008), including eighteen Rolex, Dior, and Chopard watches, made of platinum or gold and set with precious stones, as well as emerald and diamond rings, and five spectacular rosaries. Drug traffickers often use religious images or objects as talismans. These rosaries were of gold, with black pearls for beads and diamond-encrusted crucifixes, but they didn’t bring El Mochomo any luck on that occasion.
The situation reeked of betrayal. El Mochomo’s arrest had little to do with justice and much more with the envy of his cousin, El Chapo Guzmán. And it didn’t take long for his brother, Arturo, to figure that out. The Beltrán Leyva brothers had been climbing the ladder inside The Federation way too fast for El Chapo’s taste. They owed their rise to the fact that, through them, the organization was developing many new contacts with local, regional, and national authorities in its operational zones. To some extent El Chapo had been sidelined: he was no longer the cartel’s only means of getting close to the government, as he had been since his escape.
The truce agreed in 2007 had also strengthened the Beltrán Leyvas. It was Arturo, El Barbas, who had the contact with Los Zetas, with whom he began to arrange his own shipments without consulting anyone. This made El Barbas feel more powerful, and encouraged him to throw his weight about. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a clash between El Chapo and El Barbas over the handling of Mexico City airport, where thanks to García Luna’s team they could fly in all the drugs and dollars they wanted.
All the members of the cartel had long known that it was El Mayo Zambada who controlled Mexico City International Airport. That was his quota of power, and the source of much of his influence in the organization. In 2007, the Federal District as a whole was a territory run by Reynaldo Zambada, El Rey, El Mayo’s brother, with help from the Beltrán Leyva brothers and from Sergio Villarreal, El Grande, who had moved to Mexico City from Durango.
Once El Grande became operational boss he started executing people left, right, and center. A violent and taciturn man, he carried out the killings himself, with little in the way of explanation. In December 2007, when a shipment of pseudoephedrine belonging to El Chapo Guzmán arrived at the airport, Villarreal refused to release it, claiming it needed authorization from El Barbas. El Chapo was furious, and called a meeting in Culiacán with El Mayo Zambada and El Barbas to sort things out.
Strangely, Zambada backed Beltrán, and told Guzmán not to worry, he only had to let them know when he wanted to shift any merchandise. Arturo explained that his people hadn’t recognized El Chapo’s men, and of course they couldn’t let just anyone in; but as long they were forewarned, they’d always be happy to help out. El Chapo felt like a fool, and was not at all mollified, but he held his tongue, as is his way. The incident became common knowledge within The Federation when El Mochomo, Arturo’s younger brother, started bragging about it. El Chapo soon convinced El Mayo that it had been a mistake to support his cousin; the two of them agreed to teach the Beltrán Leyva brothers a lesson that would serve as a warning to other members of the organization.
On the same day that Alfredo was arrested, the PFP—which came under García Luna as Secretary of Public Security—carried out surprise raids on three of Arturo’s houses in Mexico City. Things were happening very fast. Arturo barely avoided capture, slipping away minutes before the police arrived. He had already guessed that El Chapo was behind his brother’s arrest. Apart from his obvious anger, something else must have pained Arturo Beltrán. It seemed his cousin had forgotten that he was the one who had sent him money in Puente Grande, enabling him to live like a king; he’d also forgotten that their family ties had become even closer since the marriage of his daughter to one of Guzmán’s sons.
“El Chapo is a big traitor, he’d betray his own mother if he could.” That’s what Pablo Tostado, the erstwhile aide to Esparragoza, was always saying; his words must have been echoing in El Barbas’s head. At that moment of crisis and definition, the Beltrán Leyva clan had one unconditional ally: Heriberto Lazcano, The Executioner, the head of Los Zetas. Lazcano immediately provided Arturo with his most trusted lawyer to take on Alfredo’s case, thereby sealing the bond between them. The strength of the Zetas helped El Barbas to make a drastic decision: he would break with The Federation, and take revenge for his younger brother’s capture.
Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, Sergio Villarreal, Edgar Valdez, and the Gulf Cartel sided with the head of the Beltrán Leyva clan. They realized that if El Chapo and El Mayo were capable of handing over Alfredo and trying to get El Barbas arrested, then they could be next. La Barbie and El Verdugo, the two “military” chiefs, had never gotten along very well. But they were now together in the same boat, with the same objective: to put an end to El Chapo Guzmán and his clan. Thus two big blocs of drug traffickers emerged in Mexico: the Sinaloa Cartel headed by El Chapo and El Mayo, and the Beltrán Leyvas’ organization, united with the Juárez and Gulf cartels, and with what was left of the Tijuana Cartel. The split at the core of The Federation would trigger a war such as the country had never seen, a merciless struggle to the death, from which nobody would be safe.20
For seven years The Federation had been protected en bloc by the main public bodies in the judicial and security sectors: the army, the navy, the PGR, the AFI, and the SSP at federal level. Its rupture produced another, equally violent rupture among these state institutions. Public officials who worked for The Federation, at local, regional, or national level, now faced an acid test. They were like the children of a marriage that has suddenly broken down, and have to decide if they want to live with Mom or Dad. Many corrupt officials found themselves trapped between the two sides, and unable to dodge the bullets.
The warnings were explicit. At the end of May 2008, a banner appeared in Culiacán with a chilling message on it: “THIS IS FOR YOU AGUILAR PADILLA [THE STATE GOVERNOR], EITHER YOU MAKE AN ARRANGEMENT OR I’LL ARRANGE YOU. THIS WHOLE GOVERNMENT WORKING FOR EL CHAPO AND EL MAYO IS GOING TO DIE.” A few days earlier, the governor had already received an anonymous phone call falsely claiming that one of his sons had been murdered. Arturo Beltrán Leyva began to leave dozens of banners in the streets of Culiacán that became a sort of criminal mural newspaper: “LITTLE LEAD SOLDIERS AND STRAW POLICEMEN, THIS TERRITORY BELONGS TO ARTURO BELTRÁN.” No one does more certain damage than a friend who becomes a foe. The fight between El Chapo and El Barbas was to the death. In this battle of titans, the first victims were from García Luna’s ranks. They began to fall like flies, dead or captured.
The first of García’s men to fall was Roberto Velasco, a recent appointee to the Federal Police who had previously worked in a department store. On the afternoon of May 1, 2008, he was returning to his home in the Irrigación district of Mexico City. Close to the house, two men intercepted his vehicle and shot him three times in the head. He died a few hours later. The US embassy in Mexico was quick to condemn the “brutal” murder, and paid tribute to Velasco for his “outstanding work in the front line of the battle against drug trafficking.” The truth is he had a bad reputation, and was accused by several people of links with the drug business.
That same day, Francisco Hernández, who had just been moved from Cancún to a new post as deputy representative of the AFI in Victoria, Tamaulipas, was kidnapped by a group of heavily armed men in AFI uniforms. The following day his body was found dumped outside a stadium in Culiacán, on the other side of the country. However, by a bureaucratic mix-up not uncommon in Mexico, the body was handed over to the wrong family. Since his own family and the authorities continued to search for him, seven days later someone hung a banner on the stadium railings which read: “STOP LOOKING FOR ME IN TAMAULIPAS, BECAUSE I WAS BETRAYED AND KILLED OUTSIDE THE BANORTE STADIUM IN CULIACÁN ON MAY 2.”
For at least a year, Hernández had been working for The Federation enabling planes full of drugs or money to land at Cancún international airport. His second-in-command, José Luis Soledana, another García Luna man, had already been murdered in November 2007.
The third member of García’s team to be murdered was Aristeo Gómez, aged thirty-four. On May 2, 2008, he was talking to a woman colleague in a parked vehicle in the Romero de Terreros neigh borhood of Mexico City, when two men pulled him out of the car and tried to force him into a van. His companion moved to intervene but they warned her off, shouting, “The problem isn’t with you!” When Aristeo resisted, they shot him at point-blank range.
The fourth to die was Commander Igor Labastida. On June 26, 2008, he was shot down in a cheap diner near the AFI offices where he still worked, even though by then he was employed in the Federal Preventive Police. A lone assassin emptied two weapons, a 9mm Uzi and a .380 caliber, into him and his bodyguard. Outside the restaurant Labastida’s Cadillac was parked with $1 million in the trunk, according to unofficial information from the Defense Secretariat.
The previous month, Labastida, who was then director of Traffic and Contraband at the PFP, revealed a delicate secret to an attorney friend in Nuevo León: he was trying to contact the US authorities with a view to becoming a protected witness, and revealing all he knew about the corruption in the AFI and the SSP. He was the one who had complained that García Luna and Cárdenas Palomino gave him all the dirty work.21
Hardest of all for García Luna, however, was an earlier killing. At dawn on May 8, at 132 Camelia Street, in a densely populated and notorious part of Mexico City called Tepito, nine shots felled Edgar Millán, García Luna’s close friend and one of his most trusted and powerful subordinates. As well as being reputedly among the most highly trained and educated of the commanders, Millán had specialized as a police observer for United Nations missions, and was the SSP’s contact person with the US Government for the exchange of sensitive information. Days earlier he had been the target of an attack at Federal Police headquarters by a sniper with poor aim. His death was a shocker. Millán was ranked third in the hierarchy of the SSP, behind Secretary García Luna and Under Secretary for Police Intelligence Facundo Rosas.
In Tepito, where he was killed, Millán had been a familiar figure ever since his family moved there ten years earlier. Camelia is one of the most dangerous streets in the area, because of the amount of drug peddling that takes place there. It’s said there is a small store where they sell drugs right in front of the building where Millán’s parents owned several apartments.22 A few doors further down is a well-known brothel. The federal police commissioner, however, was very respectful towards his dodgy neighbors, and his frequent presence did nothing to deter them from lawlessness.
Everyone made it their job to turn Commander Millán into a hero. In his public tribute, Calderón declared: “The Mexican government expresses its profound grief at the cowardly murder of an exemplary official like Edgar Millán, who was committed to keeping Mexican families safe.” García Luna lamented the death of his friend and colleague in rousing terms: “The country has lost one of its most valiant men, a true professional at the service of the nation.… Rest in peace, Edgar Millán, with the honor of knowing you did your duty.”
The death of Edgar Millán was treated like an occasion for national mourning. The US ambassador himself, Tony Garza, joined the emotive chorus:
I am deeply saddened by the murder of Edgar Millán Gómez, Coordinator of Regional Security at the Preventive Federal Police. Struck down by criminals in the prime of his life, Mr. Millán was an example of the highest professional standards and a broad dedication to public service.… Mexico has lost another hero. Another life has been lost, and this is a cause of indignation to all of us who admire and respect the thousands of officials who selflessly devote their lives to the betterment of their country.
Judging by what the authorities said of Millán, it seemed that all the negative reports about him, all the accusations of corruption and complicity with criminals, were nothing but idle gossip. Now the press room in the SSP headquarters bears the name of Edgar Eusebio Millán, following the example of the DEA in calling its El Paso building after the agent killed in 1985, Enrique Camarena.
Also on May 8, 2008, at 8 p.m. in the parking lot of the Culiacán’s City Club shopping mall, a barrage of AK-47 rifles and a bazooka riddled dozens of vehicles, according to press reports, and killed Edgar Guzmán López—the twenty-two-year-old son of El Chapo and Griselda López. With him died Arturo Meza Cázares, the son of Blanca Cázares, known as The Empress, who handled finances for El Mayo Zambada.
The body of the apprentice drug baron lay face down on the tarmac, covered in blood, outside the Bridgestone Tyre Center. A month later an iron cross was erected on that spot, above a stone plinth with the inscription: “We will always love you.” El Chapo Guzmán’s pain was real, and ran deep. He was certain that Arturo Beltrán had ordered his son’s killing as revenge.
The US government was growing increasingly alarmed at the violence in Mexico. It feared the gangs might start targeting members of President Calderón’s cabinet. Within weeks, those fears would become reality. Meanwhile, the paranoia at the SSP intensified. They had upset a lot of people.
On May 9, 2008, six federal policemen dressed in navy blue carried the weighty casket of Edgar Millán past the luxurious SSP offices on Mexico City’s Avenida Constituyentes. The casket was draped in the national flag, for a hero’s send-off. President Felipe Calderón, Genaro García Luna, Interior Secretary Juan Camilo Mouriño, Defense Secretary Guillermo Galván, Navy Secretary Mariano Saynez, and Attorney General Eduardo Medina Mora, lined up in a guard of honor for the fallen commander. This image will be remembered as one of the most emblematic of what was really going on in the “war on drugs” launched by the Mexican government, this theater where nothing is what it seems. The true story of Edgar Millán is a far cry from all those honors bestowed at his death.
* * *
Back in June 2007, Arturo Beltrán Leyva had summoned two senior SSP officials to receive their instructions. The meeting took place at one of his houses in Cuernavaca, where he spent most of his time. He asked his brother Alfredo to join them. The purpose of the meeting was to inform the federal police chiefs of the conciliatory agreements reached between The Federation and the Gulf Cartel. Joaquín Guzmán and his partners had a new brief for the SSP: they were to stop arresting members of the Gulf Cartel, and instead give them the same protection already being provided to themselves.
Arturo Beltrán Leyva recorded the whole meeting on audio and video. On the tapes you can clearly see the faces of Edgar Millán, who at the time was acting commissioner of the Preventive Federal Police (PFP) and general coordinator of regional security, and Gerardo Garay Cadena, the supervisory chief of the central region of the PFP. According to the SSP, Garay had “triple anti-corruption credentials,” having been vetted by the DEA, the FBI, and the SSP (in the form of the PFP) itself. This account is contained in the sworn statement of a protected witness, José Puga, who the PGR gave the code name of Pitufo.23
Neither Millán nor Garay were aware of El Barbas’s habit of photographing and recording his meetings with government officials, which went back to 2005. Millán, Garay, and Igor Labastida all appear receiving bribes in a number of such recordings, according to Pitufo. The tapes were made, he said, so that if the officials ever went back on their agreements, they could be shown to the media.
Later in 2007, the recordings of Millán and Garay negotiating with members of The Federation fell into the hands of Los Zetas. In fact they were given to Miguel Treviño, El Z40, by Arturo Beltrán himself, as proof that they had already told the SSP to lay off the Gulf Cartel.
Everything indicates that Millán was not killed for his valiant stand against the drugs trade, but because he betrayed the drug barons he had been protecting, and from whom he had presumably received millions of dollars in bribes for himself, his colleagues, and his superiors. It was he who was in charge of the Federal Police when the operation was mounted to capture Alfredo Beltrán, in January 2008.
But Millán’s was not the only corpse that now disturbed García Luna and his team. On July 31, in a car trunk in the south of Mexico City, they found the lifeless body of a fourteen-year-old named Fernando Martí. The boy had been snatched a few weeks before.
By 2007, Mexico City’s fearsome kidnapper, Sergio Ortiz, El Apá, was once more on the job. He sent the family of one kidnapped woman a video of the moment when she was being sexually abused. Then, as proof of life, he sent them her ears. And once the $5-million ransom had been paid, the only thing the family got back was her head. Emboldened by the protection he apparently received from the AFI during Vicente Fox’s government, Ortiz now decided to look for bigger fish.
To this end, El Apá became interested in a group of businessmen who liked to race cars. During the week they’d meet at the Hermanos Rodríguez circuit and show off their ability to drive very expensive sports cars, very fast. Among the habitués of these get-togethers were the main proprietor of Televisa, Emilio Azcárraga, the owner of a sports chain, Alejandro Martí, and his friend, Óscar Paredes. Early in 2008 El Apá kidnapped Óscar’s son, Javier Paredes. Months after, he kidnapped Alejandro’s son, Fernando Martí.24 Javier was freed after a sum of millions of dollars was paid; Fernando was murdered, even though his father had paid the ransom. But the matter of the boy soon became a nightmare for El Apá, García Luna, and his crooked team.
The grief and indignation of Alejandro Martí was contagious. Mexican public opinion was moved as seldom before. The PGJDF arrested El Apá in September 2008. At almost the same time, they arrested a woman called Lorena González, who had been named in previous investigations as an active accomplice of El Apá and the La Flor group. They accused her of being a member of the gang, and of putting up a roadblock with AFI signs on it to facilitate the kidnapping of Fernando. The boy’s chauffeur identified González by sight.
Lorena González was no ordinary kidnapper. In fact, she was the deputy head of the Federal Police’s anti-kidnapping unit when she set up that roadblock, and was still in the post the day she was arrested.25 Her bosses were Luis Cárdenas Palomino and Facundo Rosas, and she was so close to their cabal that she was a regular guest at their select parties. After she was arrested, the SSP tried to wash its hands of her. Rosas announced that she had worked in the AFI, but never in the Secretariat. García Luna said the same, incriminating himself even further. It was untrue. Thus a war began between the SSP and the PGJDF.
From prison, González sent greetings and a message to her pals in the Secretariat: either they got her off the hook, or she would tell everything. García’s team jumped to it, but they were working against the clock. They had at all costs to separate El Apá and González from the case of Fernando Martí. But the deputy head of the anti-kidnapping unit was in a tight spot. Back in 2007, an accomplice of El Apá’s gang had testified to the PGJDF that Lorena—La Comandante Lore, as she was known—and another federal officer, Gerardo Colín Reyes, El Colín, had been in the gang since the time of the Fox administration, when both of them were serving in the AFI. The witness stated that they had not only provided protection, but had taken active part in the kidnappings. However, as the case was turned over to the Federal Police’s Department of Kidnappings and Theft, where La Comandante was section head, naturally the investigations went nowhere.
In July 2009, Lorena’s former boss, Cárdenas Palomino, himself an expert in kidnappings and not precisely because he’d investigated many of them, announced the arrest of one Noé Robles and presented him to the media as a member of the Petriciolet gang, led by Abel Silva Petriciolet, which in reality had been a branch of El Apá’s organization for several years. At the press conference, Cárdenas showed one of his famous videos—many of which were recorded under torture, and have no legal validity—where Robles states that he killed Fernando Martí, and that El Apá and Lorena were not part of the gang.
People close to Alejandro Martí say he obtained permission to speak to Robles in the prison where he was being held.
“Why did you kill my son?” he demanded.
“Because you didn’t pay what we asked for.”
“But I did pay,” said Martí desperately.
“Well, the Federal Police only gave us some of it,” shrugged the hired crook.
On July 20, 2009, Javier Paredes’s chauffeur, who had been kidnapped along with Martí’s friend’s son, declared before the Mexico City authorities that he recognized Noé as the person who had guarded them during their captivity. And he recognized El Apá, without a shadow of a doubt, as the man who had gone to visit them in the safe house during their captivity. He confirmed that both were members of the same gang.
The SSP were feeling cornered. On September 2 they arrested José Jiménez, El Niño, and accused him of belonging to the Beltrán Leyva organization and of taking part in the kidnappings of Fernando Martí and another boy, Marco Antonio Equihua. Later in the month they arrested Abel Silva himself, who also “confessed” to the kidnappings, and declared that neither El Apá nor Lorena were involved. This refrain was no longer credible, and his testimony was soon contested by Alejandro Martí, who was becoming ever more of a nuisance for the SSP. Martí exposed every one of Silva’s contradictory assertions, so that despite García Luna and his cronies’ best efforts, the case against El Apá and La Comandante
Lore was beginning to look solid.
In September 2009 the SSP once more detained George Khouri Layón, El Koki, the yuppie businessman from Polanco who in 2005 had boasted of his connections in both the criminal and police worlds. But the arrest was surreptitious: his friends thought he might have been kidnapped. The SSP was only pre-empting the PGJDF, to prevent the Federal District authorities from questioning him. They announced the arrest in late November, when they accused him of attempting to murder an unspecified member of the force. Later, the PGJDF found witnesses who would link El Koki to El Apá.
The fact is that El Apá and his various kidnapping cells were all part of the same organization, and all have been linked to Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán.
Igor Labastida, Edgar Millán, and Comandante Lore were behind the kidnappings, torture and unimaginable abuse committed against youngsters like Fernando Martí, Marco Antonio Equihua, and numerous others. An internal document from the Mexico City Attorney’s Office (PGJDF) directly accuses Millán and Labastida of protecting Sergio Ortiz, El Apá.26 Ortiz died in jail in November 2009, of respiratory failure. Two other cells of the organization, as well as El Apá’s sons who have been directly accused by some kidnap victims, remain at large. In January 2013, Comandante Lore was still pleading her innocence in jail. Other arrests have been made. The case continues.
The search for justice has cost Alejandro Martí dearly. It is said he received death threats from the heads of the SSP, before it was dissolved under Peña Nieto. At the time of the kidnapping, the avalanche of mud loosened by the García team’s foul deeds was only just beginning to pour down.
After the Valle Hermoso pact, Garay Cadena was sent by García Luna to Nuevo León state, where he began to protect The Federation’s new “friends.” At the time the Public Prosecutors, attached to the PGR, were about to carry out a series of raids on warehouses and homes, and arrest members of the Gulf Cartel they had already identified. Following his new orders, Garay contacted Jaime González, El Hummer, one of Heriberto Lazcano and Miguel Treviño’s main associates, told him what was going to happen, and proposed a deal. The proposal seemed reasonable to the drug trafficker, who told him sort out the details with another Zeta, Sigifredo Talamantes, El Canicón. The PFP commander, with his “triple anti-corruption vetting,” asked El Canicón for a million dollars. Permission was sought from Treviño, El Z40, who agreed, not without misgivings. “Goddam Feds,” thought José Puga Quintanilla, Pitufo, who was working for the Gulf Cartel and would be the one to hand over the bribe.
Pitufo met a representative of Garay’s at the Gonzalitos fire station in Monterrey, and showed him the money. However, his instructions were to give it to nobody but the prosecutor they were meant to be buying off. Z40 had told Pitufo to take advantage of the meeting to fix future deals with Garay as well. But the appointment with the prosecutor, supposedly arranged by Garay, never materialized. The man sent by Commander Garay had to tell Pitufo that in fact there was no arrangement with the prosecutor, and that his boss was like that sometimes.
El Hummer immediately called Garay, who tried to explain that although the prosecutor had backed out, they should give him and his people the money anyway: they would simply refuse to accompany the prosecutor on his projected raids, and “there’s no way he’s going to arrest anyone on his own.” But El Hummer wasn’t stupid. He ordered El Canicón to fetch Commander Garay from the hotel where he was staying, and take him to Tampico. Garay didn’t want to come out, and ordered his men to resist. Two of them were seized, and tortured to death; the other three were shot dead in the hotel doorway.
El Canicón’s phone soon rang. It was Garay Cadena, quaking in his boots. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please don’t kill me, I only did it because the guys lied to me, they said they were going to raid warehouses and arrest people, but they were really investigating things that didn’t matter,” whimpered the police chief, fully aware that he had tried to cheat the Gulf Cartel by charging for a non-existent favor, and that it had gone badly wrong.
After Millán’s death in May 2008, García Luna made Garay acting commissioner of the PFP. After all, he already knew what the orders were and who was giving them. But the more untouchable Garay felt, the more unruly he became.
After the split in The Federation, Garay received a counter-order from El Chapo Guzmán and El Mayo Zambada’s organization. He had to stop protecting the Gulf Cartel and the Beltrán Leyva brothers, who he’d been dealing with since 2005.
In October 2008, Commissioner Garay Cadena, Senior Commander Edgar Bayardo, and Francisco Navarro, director general of the Federal Support Forces Coordination at the Federal Police, led an operation that covered them in glory, and soon after in shame. It took place in the early hours of October 16, at a mansion in Desierto de los Leones, on the edge of Mexico City. The police chiefs burst into the ornate building—which had its own zoo with white tigers, panthers, gorillas, and lions—during a party organized by their target, the Colombian Harold Poveda, one of the main suppliers of cocaine to the Beltrán Leyva organization. Poveda got away. The police managed to capture eleven other suspect guests, including Teodoro Fino Restrepo, alias La Gaviota, The Seagull—a Colombian with links to the Valle del Norte Cartel.
On October 19, the under secretary for police strategy and intelligence, Facundo Rosas, announced the “successful” operation. He said it was the result of at least two years’ painstaking intelligence work. Marisela Morales, then head of SIEDO (the specialized organized crime investigations unit) before becoming President Calderón’s last Attorney General, assured the press that this was one of the most important operations carried out in recent times.
Days later, a number of García Luna’s principal aides were exhibited to the press in the same SIEDO office, accused of links with drug traffickers. They included Gerardo Garay, Edgar Bayardo, and Francisco Navarro, as well as Luis Cárdenas Palomino and Mario Arturo Velarde (another veteran member of the inner circle).27
It turned out that the operation in Desierto de los Leones hadn’t been quite as impeccable as was made out. The four days it lasted were an orgy of sex and violence. Thanks to the testimony of two Colombian women arrested, Ángela María Quintero28 and Juliana López, believed to be Poveda’s partner, the truth came out. That night Garay Cadena decided to forget his responsibilities as a lawman; he chose four women from the thirty alleged prostitutes present, ordered cocaine for them and shut himself in the jacuzzi. While that was going on, Bayardo and Navarro tortured several of the men at the party, plunging them in a tub full of ice. After that, they went with other police officers to rob the homes of four of those detained, taking both money and jewellery.29 Eye-witnesses say that during those four outrageous days, Luis Cárdenas Palomino called in on the house, but did nothing to check the abuses. At the end of it all, $500,000 had disappeared from the “war chest” stolen from the drug barons; it seems Garay and Bayardo fought over who was to keep it.
The war of extermination between former members of The Federation turned out to be much more efficient than that of the government, perhaps because it was more deeply felt. The police operation in Desierto de los Leones was not the fruit of patient intelligence work, as Rosas had claimed: it happened because El Chapo and El Mayo’s camp tipped them off. And the murkiest part of the affair was still to emerge. The following week, in response to the police attack on the Beltrán Leyvas’s friends and suppliers, something happened that would give a sudden new twist to the story of drug trafficking in Mexico.
According to the AFI agents, it all began with an anonymous call to the PGR, reporting that at number 430, Calle Wilfrido Massieu, in the San Bartolo Atepehuacán area of Mexico City, they would find armed men from El Mayo Zambada’s group. AFI agents attached to the PGR went to check it out. Nearby they spotted a Volkswagen Polo carrying two men with rifles. When challenged, the car veered into the driveway of the reported address, and more men began to fire from inside the house.
A month earlier, on September 23, 2008, a group of AFI officers had demonstrated in the street against García Luna’s proposal to unify the police forces. As they marched along Reforma, the main avenue in the center of Mexico City, the agents carried banners that read: “Out with corrupt PF commanders from the AFI,” and “Out with Genaro, he favors the bandits.” Far from owning up to the deep reasons for the protest of these men who had been working for him for six years, García Luna insulted them, in many cases unfairly, claiming they didn’t want to submit to trustworthiness tests. He never imagined that the officers would pay back the affront by bringing his pact with El Chapo to the verge of collapse.
In the gunfight in San Bartolo Atepehuacán, the federal agents stood their ground and managed to capture four of the shooters. The others were about to escape when reinforcements arrived from the Mexico City security department, three of whom were wounded. The battle continued for some time.
The drug baron who had his base in that bourgeois neighbourhood was not Ismael El Mayo Zambada but another, almost as sizable, fish: Jesús Zambada, alias El Rey (The King), his younger brother. As we saw, El Rey controlled the capital’s airport for El Mayo and El Chapo’s group. For an hour and a half, as the bullets flew, nearby residents cowered in their homes. It was impossible to tell the goodies from the baddies. On one side, in the street, were federal agents and Mexico City police officers trying to detain a drug boss; on the other, on the roof of the house, were police officers on the drug trafficker’s payroll, trying to cover his escape.30
El Rey, in despair at the firefight raging around him, sought help. He called Commander Bayardo, who only a few days earlier had been up to his pranks in Desierto de los Leones. “I’ll be right over, godfather,”31 answered Bayardo, giving him to understand that he was riding to the rescue. But time passed, and nothing happened. Terrified that he was about to be captured, El Mayo’s brother called again.
“Where are you, godson? We’re getting screwed to hell, we’re about to be taken by the others,” cried the drug baron, possibly referring to authorities who hadn’t been bribed by them or were answering to the Beltrán Leyvas.
“Hang in there, I’m on my way,” replied Bayardo.
El Rey and his son Jesús, aged twenty-two, were on the roof of the surrounded house. Zambada made another call, this time to the Mexico City security department, and without saying the name of the person he was talking to, begged urgently: “Listen son, you’ve got to send in the pitufos,32 because I don’t know if these guys are the others or the government.”
About eight minutes later a detachment of Mexico City police officers did arrive, but because officers from the same force were already in combat on the scene, they could do nothing to help their man. “Call him again, get him to come and help us,” pleaded young Jesús, from behind the water tank. El Rey phoned Bayardo again: “What’s going on, godson? What’s going on?” As a helicopter circled overhead, the drug trafficker, beside himself, told Bayardo: “Okay, you take care of my kids, I’m through, I’m not going to let them catch me, I’ll kill myself first.” El Rey took his pistol and raised it to his head, but his son jumped out from his hiding place and stopped him committing suicide.
In the end, Jesús El Rey Zambada was arrested along with his son, his stepson Richard Arroyo—the son of his Colombian partner, Patricia Guízar—and thirteen other members of the organization. That same day the PGR issued a news release informing that sixteen people had been arrested. Four of them were being held at the SIEDO, and the others were in medium security detention in the PGJDF building. Neither institution revealed that one of them was Jesús Zambada; instead he was presented under the name Víctor Rosas Montes. Nor did they say that two of his sons had been captured. These hours were precious. As long as the public didn’t know the importance of one of the prisoners, there was still a chance to set him free. It is said that the US government started pressing the Mexicans to reveal that Víctor Rosas was in fact El Rey Zambada, one of the most prolific traffickers of cocaine and methamphetamine from South America.
On October 22, the attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora, officially announced the arrest of the drug baron and his son. Warning lights started flashing in the SSP. That same day Federal Police agents burst in on the search that the SIEDO was carrying out at the house in San Bartolo. At about 2 p.m., five police pickup trucks, each carrying about ten men, and three private vehicles arrived and went through the perimeter barrier that the investigators had set up.33 Four armed men got out of one of the vehicles and tried to break through a fence, but the AFI agents working with the SIEDO stopped them.
An unidentified individual in a bullet-proof vest, alighting from a black sports car with no license plates, said he was in charge of the contingent. He went to speak to one of the women officers responsible for the SIEDO investigation.
“I’m here on superior orders,” the man said, while conferring with someone else on his walkie-talkie.
“You’ll have to tell me whose,” the officer responded curtly.
Minutes later, the intrusive convoy of federal agents withdrew.
El Rey Zambada’s hideout contained evidence of his links to senior figures in the Secretariat of Public Security. And they didn’t want that getting into the hands of the PGR.
On Saturday 25 and Sunday 26 October, identical banners attributed to the Gulf Cartel appeared in ten Mexican states, rubbing salt into the wound. As the saying goes, the truth is the truth, even when told by a liar. The message read:
With the highest respect for your office, Mr. President, we ask you to open your eyes and realize what kind of people are in the PFP. We know you are not aware of the deal that Gerardo [sic] García Luna has had since the Fox government with the Sinaloa Cartel, protecting El Mayo Zambada, the Valencias, Nacho Coronel, and El Chapo.
As citizens we ask you to take a look at the following people who we are 100 percent certain are protecting the drug traffickers: Luis Cárdenas Palomino, Edgar Enrique Bayardo, Gerardo Garay Cadena. And we ask you to put people into the PFP who fight drug trafficking in a neutral way, without leaning on one side of the scale, and to investigate using the intelligence services of the Mexican army and the PGR, which are neutral independencies [sic]. You know that the PFP did not take part in the arrest of El Rey Zambada; if they had, he would have been tipped off in advance.
El Rey Zambada’s son and stepson, inexperienced and frightened young men, soon blurted out all they knew and began ratting right and left. The first card to fall was Edgar Bayardo, who was arrested on October 29, along with two other members of the PFP accused of helping El Mayo. One of them, Jorge Cruz, had taken part in the operation in Desierto de los Leones, and had a long story of his own to tell.
Of course, Bayardo had no intention of going down on his own. Among those he dragged down with him was Garay Cadena, exposing the corruption in the SSP that García Luna tried to conceal. In the last days of October, Garay and Francisco Navarro were summoned for questioning by SIEDO.
Some of those arrested in the operation against El Rey had already stated that both Bayardo and Garay received monthly stipends of up to $500,000 in exchange for protection. PFP officers who had been under the command of Acting Commissioner Garay further accused him of taking money, jewelry, and weapons—gold-plated, diamond-studded AK-47s—during operations against El Chapo’s adversaries, to be sold on to El Rey as war trophies. In this last operation in the Desierto, he had even stolen a pet bulldog.
The legal case against Garay was very serious, meaning the police chief would have to appear before a judge for a preliminary hearing. This was very worrying for García Luna and Rosas, as the only two officials ranked above Garay in the chain of command. So, at 2 p.m. on October 30, they called an emergency meeting in García Luna’s offices in the SSP on Avenida Constituyentes. In attendance were the secretary himself, the four under secretaries, and the coordinators of the Secretariat’s various departments.
In his intervention, the coordinator of regional security, Ramón Pequeño, argued that under no circumstances should they allow Garay to appear in court, “because regardless of the truth of these allegations, they would cause irreparable damage to our plans for the Federal Police, at a time when both houses of Congress are precisely debating the new Security Law.” This was the bill in which García Luna was seeking to create a unified police force. The majority agreed.
García Luna spoke to Attorney General Medina Mora—with whom his relationship had been poor for some time—to request support in getting Garay freed. When Medina refused to commit, he went to see his friend, Interior Secretary Mouriño. They hacked out an agreement whereby Garay, after giving evidence for several hours in the PGR, would be released. The plan was that the PFP chief would resign the following day, enabling him be charged merely with theft and other minor offenses, of which he could later be acquitted. On this condition, Garay Cadena agreed to hand in his valuable police badge.
His release on “orders from above” caused a storm of protest within Calderón’s administration, in particular from the PGR and Sedena, who argued that it would ultimately be impossible to protect him. On October 31, 2008, minutes before Garay announced his resignation at a brief press conference, the under secretary of public security, Facundo Rosas (later Commissioner of the unified Federal Police) was rumored to have suffered an attempt on his life in Mexico City. The SSP was being rocked by a schism that was barely perceptible to ordinary citizens. Rosas was not seen in public for several days, and his staff say he did not go to the office. It added fuel to the rumors of an attack, one presumably carried out by the Sinaloa Cartel, in reprisal for their “employees” not doing their job.
Two other close associates of García Luna’s were also subpoenaed: Mario Velarde, García’s private secretary during the Fox years, and Luis Cárdenas Palomino, both suspected of links to the Beltrán Leyvas when these were allied with the Sinaloans. Medina Mora was not going to miss this golden opportunity to show the secretary who was attorney general. Nevertheless, after intense pressure from García Luna, Velarde and Cárdenas walked free. Velarde, who knew what he knew, resigned quietly in November 2008. Cárdenas Palomino kept his job.