Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (12 page)

In exchange for an open door for its drug shipments, the Medellín Cartel gave cash to the Contras. In essence it was the same agreement as with the Guadalajara Cartel in Mexico. Since the Medellín and Guadalajara cartels had been partners since 1979, due to the cordial relations between El Mexicano and Félix Gallardo, today we can conclude that the two agreements were one and the same, and that this is one reason why the two cartels grew so much stronger in the region during the 1980s.

In 1983, Barry Seal was arrested while transporting cocaine from Colombia to Florida. The CIA were not about to endanger their entire operation to defend Seal, and so the pilot turned to the DEA, offering information about the Medellín Cartel in exchange for immunity. For the first time ever, the US anti-drug agency saw a precious opportunity to learn about the inner workings of this nefarious Colombian cartel and to destroy it from within. Agent Ernest Jacobsen, of the DEA’s Florida office, became Seal’s handler.

Consolidating the alliance between Colombia and Mexico

The Medellín Cartel’s favorite pilot told Jacobsen that between 1984 and 1986 the organization had a roughly sixteen-hectare ranch on the Yucatán peninsula in south-east Mexico, where there was a storage facility for cocaine being shipped on to the United States in small aircraft.
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The story is quite plausible. A recently declassified CIA report from 1998
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states that throughout the 1980s and 90s, South American traffickers used the Central American isthmus as an important route for transporting cocaine and marijuana; as well as for importing drugs that would be refined using chemicals, and for laundering the proceeds of their illicit operations.

It is impossible not to draw a connection between this operating base in Yucatán and Torre Blanca’s testimony in the California district court about the ranch belonging to Rafael Caro Quintero in Veracruz being used for the Nicaraguan Contra, in collaboration with the CIA and the DFS. Nor can we forget what The Informer told us for this book about United States Air Force planes in Oaxaca.

Jacobsen indicated that Seal, already acting as a DEA informer, asked him for a larger plane because the Medellín Cartel wanted him
to fly eighteen-ton loads of coca paste once a week from Peru to three processing laboratories in Nicaragua, and from there on to the ranch in Yucatán.
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The DEA helped Seal get a Fairchild C-123K, called
Fat Lady
, in order to secure his relationship with the Medellín Cartel. But before Barry Seal began to use the plane for this big operation with the Colombian traffickers, the CIA installed cameras and a satellite tracking device. The Reagan administration wanted to use the photographs to discredit the Sandinista government, so that Congress would release funds for the Contras. So, while the CIA was pushing to leak the photos to the press, the DEA was refusing, because this might jeopardize the operation to capture Escobar and his band.

In an interview given to the British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Ernest Jacobsen said that Barry Seal had told him the Colombians wanted to show the CIA their operating base in Yucatán, and their cocaine warehouses in Georgia and Florida.

In December 1985, Seal was put on six months’ probation by federal judge Frank Polozola for two drug felonies. One condition of his probation was that Seal had to be at the Salvation Army halfway house in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. every night. Another was that he was barred from carrying weapons or hiring armed guards. The probation sentence was thus turned into a death sentence. The DEA could do nothing to protect its witness, just as he was about to testify in open court against the leaders of the Medellín Cartel. The Colombians were patient. On February 19, 1986, Seal returned to the Salvation Army hostel at 6 p.m. As he was parking his white Cadillac, a man with a MAC-10 machine gun shot him dead. The official account identified Jorge Luis Ochoa as the person responsible for having him killed.

A year earlier, in February 1985, the Guadalajara Cartel murdered DEA agent Enrique Camarena. Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo and Rafael Caro Quintero were jailed for the crime. But their partner, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, the friend of Matta Ballesteros and the link between the Guadalajara and Medellín cartels, remained free to go about his business for many years to come. Was it just by chance that Don Neto and Caro Quintero were put away, but not the connection to the Medellín Cartel?

During the 1980s, the Medellín Cartel reached the peak of its power. It was the principal exporter of cocaine to the United States. According to the DEA’s own figures, in 1985 the number of US citizens who admitted to regularly taking cocaine went up from 4.2 million to 5.8 million.
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In the second half of the 1980s, Mexican traffickers became increasingly important. Mexico became a strategic location, halfway between producers and consumers.

The DEA files

In August 1985 at its offices on 8–61 Calle 38, in the heart of the Colombian capital, Bogotá, the DEA wrote a graphic report on the growth of drug trafficking in Mexico during the presidency of Miguel de la Madrid, from 1982 to 1988.

It’s a small file of yellowing pages that looks as if it will fall apart if you so much as look at it. On the outside is written in block capitals: “STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL,” then “Brief report, updated to August 1985, on links between Latin American narco-terrorists.”

Latin America was ablaze with drug scandals. The pages of the DEA report reek with blood, corruption and impunity. The list of names of prominent Mexican politicians, past and present, is invaluable for understanding the long history of impunity.

In the beautiful Peruvian city of Lima, the Villa Coca scandal had just erupted.
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The clues left by the trade attaché at the Mexican embassy in Peru, Ricardo Sedano, pointed to three top-level Mexican officials who were then protecting drug traffickers. The DEA found in the debris at Villa Coca the remains of a private telephone line from Sedano’s home to the laboratory that blew up. The report moves from establishing Sedano’s links with the Peruvian trafficker Reynaldo Rodríguez, to qualifying the narco-terrorist connections in Mexico: since the elimination of guerrilla leaders such as Lucio Cabañas, an accord between Mexico and Cuba prevented more local outbreaks. Instead, “terrorists” from other Latin American countries who had obtained political asylum enjoyed protection from state security forces. Among the police chiefs, politicians, and traffickers in league with the Peruvian Reynaldo Rodríguez, the report singled
out three important political figures at the heart of the networks traced by the DEA: Sergio García Ramírez, Victoria Adato Green, and Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios.

The anti-drug agency was keeping a close watch on Mexico’s attorney general, Sergio García Ramírez. The DEA document also makes detailed observations on Victoria Adato. She began her career as a deputy public prosecutor in Mexico City, and ended up as a full member of the Mexican Supreme Court (SCJN). She was especially tainted by her family connections. Her brother-in-law, Manuel Ibarra Herrera El Chato, as head of the PJF had promoted Armando Pavón Reyes, who got 60 million pesos from Rafael Caro Quintero El Príncipe “to let him escape to Guadalajara airport.” Her other brother-in-law, Arturo Ibarra, was said by the DEA to run a money laundering operation in Tijuana, involving ghost companies and currency exchange outlets.

As for Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, the report alluded to a 1984 Interpol dossier showing that President López Portillo, Attorney General Agustín Alanís, and Under Secretary of the Interior Gutiérrez Barrios all were thoroughly cognizant of the facts behind the 1981 Tula River massacre, in which thirteen Colombians were killed “for belonging to a different narcotics gang,” the report said. It also noted that Gutiérrez Barrios had brought off a massive electoral fraud in the mid-term elections of 1985.

The era of Escobar and Félix Gallardo comes to an end

In 1989 the DEA estimated that 60 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States came from Colombia via Mexico.
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In January of the same year, the Republican George H. W. Bush became president of the United States. His strategy for continuing Reagan’s supposed war on drugs was to concentrate on an extradition treaty with Colombia to lock up traffickers who took drugs into the United States. The Iran-Contra operation had already done its work. The counter-revolutionary movement, combined with the Sandinistas’ own mistakes, forced Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and the FSLN, under pressure from the Organization of American States, to open a national dialogue that year.

On April 8, 1989, in Guadalajara, Félix Gallardo, Escobar’s Mexican partner, was arrested by his own good friend González Calderoni. In August the Managua accords were signed, which included holding “democratic” elections and demobilizing the Contras. Now that the CIA had no more use for Escobar and Félix Gallardo, drug barons began to be captured or killed. It all happened quite naturally. There seemed to be no connection.

At the beginning of August 1989, a list of the twelve drug traffickers most wanted by the United States was made public. At the top were Escobar, Lehder, and the Ochoa brothers, all of them partners of the CIA in supporting the Contras. Escobar’s reaction was immediate. On August 18, on his orders, the candidate for the Liberal Party’s presidential nomination, Luis Carlos Galán, was assassinated. He was in favor of extraditing drug traffickers to the United States.

Before that fateful year of 1989 was up, Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, El Mexicano, was executed in a high-profile aerial operation organized by the Colombian intelligence service, the DAS (Department of Administrative Security). With a bullet in the head, the drug baron’s body lay splayed on the marshes by his El Tesoro ranch on the paradise beaches of Coveñas and Tolú, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. Press reports said Rodríguez Gacha was unrecognizable, and could only be identified by his fingerprints.
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In 2006 the Colombian magazine
Cambio
published an article that gives a further twist to the story of CIA links to the Medellín Cartel. It revealed that, during a search of Rodríguez Gacha’s properties, the Colombian authorities found a copy of a covenant for $60 million supposedly paid to the US Government by his relatives, in exchange for his not being implicated in criminal activity and being allowed to keep the rest of his ill-gotten gains. The obvious question is whether El Mexicano is really dead, or whether he bowed out, with a reward for services rendered: money in exchange for silence and impunity.

Escobar, on the other hand, became an uncontrollable liability for both the Colombian and US Governments. Escobar wasn’t like the Ochoa brothers. He wasn’t about to give up the power he’d acquired. Of all the crows that had been raised in the CIA nest, he was the most dangerous. He was quite prepared to set Colombia ablaze, and he
proved it. Three minutes after taking off from Bogotá airport en route to Cali, on November 17, 1989, Avianca Flight 203 exploded in thousands of pieces. There were 107 fatalities as a consequence of the drug baron’s fury.

On April 25, 1990, Ortega was defeated in the Nicaraguan presidential elections by Violeta Barrios de Chamorro.

In January 1991, Jorge Luis and Juan David Ochoa gave themselves up to the Colombian authorities, on condition they would not be extradited to the United States. They were sentenced to just eight years in prison, and are currently free. Of the three brothers, only Fabio was extradited, in 2001. He was charged with trafficking drugs into the United States, and with the murder of the US government informer Barry Seal. In 2003 Fabio Ochoa was condemned to life imprisonment.

Weakened and stripped of North American support, Escobar gave himself up in June 1991, expecting the same treatment as the Ochoa brothers. When he found out they were going to extradite him, he escaped, the following year, from his luxury prison known as “The Cathedral.” A day after his forty-fourth birthday, on December 2, 1993, Escobar was shot dead by police on the roof of a house in the busy La América neighborhood of Medellín. The operation was carried out by a fifteen-man police commando unit known as the Search Block, including, by some accounts, US government personnel.

Twenty-five thousand people turned out for Pablo Escobar’s funeral. Over the years the legend surrounding him had swelled out of all proportion. He was reputed to be “intelligent,” “audacious,” and “cruel,” as well as vastly rich. In reality the Medellín drug boss was not extraordinary in any sense. Who wouldn’t have been successful trafficking tons of cocaine into the United States with the help of the US Government itself? When Pablo died, his successor was already warmed up and waiting, in Mexico. It was his one-time partner, Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Along with a new cohort of traffickers led by El Chapo Guzmán, the Beltrán Leyva brothers, and El Güero Palma, he was poised to take over the baton and create his own legend as El Señor de los Cielos, The Lord of the Skies.

During the 1980s the United States authorities raised a murder of crows that today are pecking their eyes out. Two clans of drug
traffickers, separated by geography and history, were brought together by the CIA in an alliance that has endured to this day. The most complete expression of that alliance is the Sinaloa Cartel and El Chapo Guzmán, the currently unchallenged leader of the most powerful drug gang in the world.

CHAPTER FIVE
El Chapo’s Protectors

From Compostela to
Forbes

I
n 1993, Joaquín Guzmán smiled for the cameras as it rained in the yard of Federal Social Rehabilitation Center No. 1, in the State of Mexico. The pictures taken by dozens of press photographers are misleading. At thirty-six, this harmless-looking man, a junior in the world of organized crime, already possessed all the traits of a professional criminal. Behind his unexceptional physique—just over 5’ 5” tall, regular build, square face, brown eyes, fair skin, thick eyebrows, wavy, chestnut hair, average forehead, and straight nose—was hidden a complex personality.