Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (10 page)

The DEA discovered that Camarena’s interrogation at the hands of the drug traffickers and police had been taped. The Mexican authorities at first denied the existence of any such recordings, but in the end the attorney general, Sergio García Ramírez, surrendered copies of some of the tapes to the DEA. Other items of physical evidence relating to Camarena’s torture and death were destroyed by the Mexican authorities.
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In 1988, during the trial of the first nine defendants in the Camarena case, some of the sound recordings of his interrogation were played back to the Los Angeles court. Those who heard them say they were excruciating. These same recordings were heard again in 1990 in the trial of Zuno, Matta, and Bernabé. In one part of the tapes played by the DEA, Camarena is asked about “Arévalo Gardoqui.” Presumably this referred to the secretary of defense, but this aspect was not followed up in the trial or anywhere else. One more untouchable Mexican general.

Today, Zuno Arce is serving a life sentence at a facility in Houston, Texas. And the photo of the erstwhile DFS officer, Sergio Espino, still appears on the DEA Los Angeles division’s list of fugitives.

Nine years later, in 1999, Héctor Berrellez, the head of Operation Leyenda, who obtained some of the cassettes of the interrogation in which Camarena died, gave an interview to
USA Today
: “On the tapes, the drug dealers repeatedly ask Camarena, ‘What do you know about the CIA? What do you know about the CIA’s involvement with the plantation?’ ” Berrellez said one of his informers told him that Caro Quintero got weapons through his connection with the CIA, and that while he was in Mexico investigating his colleague’s case, he obtained information about strange fortified bases in Sinaloa, Veracruz, Durango, and other states, which were not military bases. Supposedly, US military aircraft landed at these bases and, according to his sources, the planes were loaded with drugs. When Berrellez alerted his superiors at the DEA and US embassy staff in Mexico City, they simply told him: “Stay away from those bases. They are training camps, special operations.” Berrellez concluded, from all the information he had compiled, that the CIA was unquestionably involved in the drug trade.
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The return of Torre Blanca

On December 4, 1992, Lawrence Harrison took the stand again in the Los Angeles district court, this time as prosecution witness in a new trial of Zuno Arce and a gynecologist, Humberto Álvarez Machain. The latter had been kidnapped in an undercover DEA operation in Mexico in April 1990, and was accused of participating in Camarena’s torture.

Torre Blanca’s return to the witness box was crucial to the trial of Álvarez Machain. Next day, the newspapers described how for more than two hours he held the jury “spellbound” with his bizarre stories of life in the circle of drug traffickers around El Príncipe Caro Quintero. For example, on one occasion Harrison and several other men spent four or five weeks counting out $400 million that were to be paid as a bribe to a senior figure in the Mexican government. He also
described one of the many parties held by Caro Quintero in Don Neto’s houses. “Caro was sitting on a dancing horse, smoking cocaine like an animal,” he recalled.

Luis Echeverría worked for the United States

In 2006, the journalist Jefferson Morley revealed some information that appears even more relevant in the light of this story, linking both the Mexican and US governments to the narcotics trade. Thanks to declassified CIA documents, Morley was able to reconstruct the history of the Agency in Mexico between 1956 and 1968, as well as that of its station chief, Winston Scott. Scott was a “charming” American with considerable influence over the Mexican government, having recruited to the CIA’s payroll senior figures in the federal administration.

Scott set up a network called LITEMPO, through which Mexican officials could work on behalf of US government interests. Naturally, this labor did not come free. “How much Scott paid his LITEMPO informants is not disclosed in the records, but at least two CIA officials thought it was excessive. In a review of the LITEMPO program in 1963, the chief of the clandestine service’s Mexico desk griped that ‘the agents are paid too much and their activities are not adequately reported,’ ” wrote Morley. In one declassified document the program was said to be “a productive and effective relationship between CIA and select top officials in Mexico.”

Among the public figures included on the CIA’s payroll were the future presidents Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (LITEMPO-2) and Luis Echeverría (LITEMPO-8), as well as the head of the secret police or DFS, Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios (LITEMPO-4). The main aim of LITEMPO was for these officials and the CIA to cooperate in detecting “subversive” and “communist” groups.
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And there’s no doubt that later, the United States identified the Sandinista government as a communist threat to the region. In this context, the help given during the 1980s by various Mexican officials and the Guadalajara Cartel to the Nicaraguan Contras could be seen as a natural continuation of these links between the CIA and the Mexican government.

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Where drug traffickers are made

While in Mexico the CIA was making pacts with the Félix Gallardo clan, Don Neto, and Caro Quintero, further south a certain substitute member of the Colombian senate was beginning to emerge as a dark legend: Pablo Escobar. In the small world of drug trafficking, sooner or later Félix Gallardo and Escobar, the two big barons, would meet, facilitated by the United States.

Behind an innocuous pen-pusher’s face, with pallid skin, thinning hair and huge glasses, hid the chief accountant of the powerful and feared Medellín Cartel. The Cuban-American Ramón Milián Rodríguez, responsible for laundering $11 billion worth of profits, was one of the main witnesses at the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, set up by the US Senate in 1987 to investigate the links between drug trafficking and the CIA. Milián was said to be the link between Escobar and the leaders of the Cuban-American drug dealers, and the person who delivered $10 million to the Nicaraguan Contras from Escobar.

Milián’s criminal talents were unbounded, and he was happy to acknowledge them on Capitol Hill before Senator John Kerry’s investigating commission. While he laundered money for the Medellín Cartel and for businesses linked to the drug trafficking of Panamanian president Manuel Noriega, Milián also cleaned up assets for the CIA itself, helping the Agency to conceal some of its payments made abroad, at least until 1982.

“From what we have learned these past months, our declaration of the war on drugs seems to have produced a war of words and not action. Our borders are inundated with more narcotics than at any time ever before,” Kerry declared to PBS in 1988, as his committee’s investigations proceeded. They would conclude a year later. Nothing could have been more unpopular at the time than exposing President Reagan and Vice President Bush’s sham war on drugs. Reagan could hardly talk of a “war” when he was willingly sleeping with the enemy—something that was proven time and again by testimony given before the special commissions investigating the Iran-Contra affair.

In 1991, the co-founder of the Medellín Cartel, Carlos Lehder Rivas, confirmed that his organization had delivered $10 million to the Contras.
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Clearly, like the good businessman he was, Escobar’s contribution to the anti-Sandinista movement was not a gift but an investment. Thanks to the ever-obliging CIA, Escobar’s generous donation opened up for him the door to the United States—in particular, through the airport of Mena, in Arkansas.

CHAPTER FOUR
Raising Crows

The Informer

“I
’m going to tell you the real truth,” he said, through a thick cloud of smoke blown out through nose and mouth at once. This was someone who had watched, from within the Mexican government, all the changing phases of the drug trade over the last thirty-five years. The Informer, as we’ll call him, was impeccably dressed in a suit, tall and thin, holding the precious pack of Montana cigarettes that he smoked as swiftly as he talked. The conversation with the The Informer for this book took place in 2010. At my insistence, he finally broke the silence he had kept for years. He told his story in the kind of detail you can only pick up from a front-row seat.

North of the Rio Bravo it is the Iran-Contra affair that is key to understanding the growth of drug trafficking in the 1980s; to the south, The Informer’s account completes the mafia’s family tree.

His face is hidden behind cigarette smoke and his name must remain a secret; his life depends on it. For thirty-five years, his story was interwoven with that of the drug traffickers he dealt with face to face on dozens of occasions. First, The Informer points out,

In 1970 the term “cartel” didn’t exist. There were just “cliques,” which grew and transported across the border marijuana and “gum” [
goma
, heroin]. Almost no state in Mexico was free from this activity in some form or another.… Drugs were grown in Guerrero, Michoacán, Sinaloa, Durango, Chihuahua, Veracruz, and Oaxaca. It was the time of the Vietnam War, and the US government permitted the drug
trade to ensure access to stimulants for its soldiers in the field and for those returning home who were already addicted.

As The Informer went on, the ashtray filled up with butts. Once he’d started, he couldn’t stop; it was as if he were exorcizing his own ghosts.

It was at the beginning of the presidency of Luis Echeverría (1970–76). Mexico’s Attorney General was Pedro Ojeda Paullada, who was also a personal friend of the president’s. The secretaries of defense and the interior were, respectively, Hermenegildo Cuenca Ríos and Mario Moya Palencia. The head of the Federal Judicial Police (PJF) was Manuel Suárez. Luis de Barreda was officially in charge of the Federal Security Directorate (DFS), but Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios had been its real chief since the times of President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz. In those days it was more dangerous to be a guerrilla, or a political dissident, than a drug trafficker. The state agencies that mercilessly hunted down the former were the same bodies that kept the latter in check and periodically charged them millions of dollars out of the profits of this fledgling but already highly lucrative business.

There were 600 federal police officers for the whole country, each with fifteen to twenty assistants. These were the so-called madrina
s
, “godmothers,” who never appeared on the official payroll of the federal Attorney General’s Office (PGR), but whose illegal and uncontrolled activity was essential to its operations. In the hierarchy of the PGR there was the attorney general, Pedro Ojeda Paullada at the time, two general coordinators, and a senior officer called Alejandro Gertz Manero, who some thirty years later would become the first secretary of public security. At that time Gertz had a bodyguard called Rodolfo León Aragón, who would go on to write his own dark legend of corruption.

The Judicial Police received no budget for expenses, equipment, or even office space. Each regional coordinator supplied his own people with cars, weapons, radios, and offices. The only thing they didn’t supply was the badges. They raised money from cock fights, horse racing, and drug trafficking. That’s how things were. I’m not saying it was good or bad, just that that’s how it worked.

In those days the government had almost complete control over drug cultivation and transport. Hardly a consignment got through without the permission and supervision of the Mexican army, the Federal Security Directorate and the Federal Judicial Police. Control meant it was “arranged” with the army, the DFS, and the PJF. To plant fifty or sixty hectares you needed permission from the head of the military zone or region.
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Once the fields had been sown, they stuck little colored flags on them, according to the arrangement. This meant that when the helicopters flew over, instead of fumigating them they would water them. Every three months, when the harvest was ready, the growers asked for a permit to take the drugs to a warehouse. Then the transporters had to get another permit to convey the drugs to a border crossing; for example, from Oaxaca to Miguel Alemán in Tamaulipas. To stop the goods from being stolen, the trucks had federal police protection. There were clear instructions that not one kilogram could stay in the country. There was no retail trade inside Mexico. When we caught anyone with drugs for sale locally, the full weight of the law would come down on them and they’d be locked up, whoever they were.

The Informer insists that the secretary of the interior and the secretary of defense, the attorney general, and even the president of the Republic, were all fully aware of these operations. In addition, the authorities in the United States knew from the beginning of the 1970s that the DFS was involved in drug trafficking, yet they continued to support and protect the agency.
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The suitcase ritual

In the upper echelons of the state, everyone had a job to do and everyone was handsomely rewarded for doing it “well”:

The Mexican army kept watch over the plantations; the PJF was in charge of transporting the merchandise; while the DFS was in direct contact with the traffickers and controlled them. The drug traffickers paid a kind of “tax” to the federal government—sixty dollars per kilo. Twenty dollars were for the local army commander, twenty for the
PJF, and another twenty for the DFS. Inside the federal police, each regional coordinator took a cut of this money to pay for weapons, offices, equipment, and the wages of the assistants [“godmothers”]. These weren’t bribes, they were a tax authorized at the highest level—explained The Informer in self-defense—. In particular, of the money charged by the PJF to the traffickers, half remained to cover the police’s own expenses, while the other half went to the attorney general’s office.