Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (34 page)

The same day, Miguel Treviño, El Z40, called from Valle Hermoso to the cell phone of one of the kidnapped Zetas. Of course, the person who answered was from the other side. Treviño demanded to speak to La Barbie.

“Let go of El Pizcacha’s wife and daughter, they have nothing to do with this,” said El Z40, fearful of what could happen to them.

“I’ll only let the girl go,” answered La Barbie, raising the tension further.

What the wife could expect in the hands of such ruthless men was worse than death. That would come later, as a release.

“Leave the family out of it, we haven’t touched yours. If you start that, then we’ll go after your family and kill them too,” threatened Treviño.

El Z40 must have made his point, because La Barbie agreed to release the woman and the girl. He even gave them 1,000 pesos to leave the state immediately. As soon as she was freed, Norma went to the Guerrero state prosecutor’s office to report the kidnapping of her husband. For months she knew nothing of his whereabouts.

That Sunday, an unexpected call was made to the PGR. There was nobody there so the caller left a voice message. It was a man who said he belonged to the Gulf Cartel and was ringing to complain that the day before agents attached to the AFI in Acapulco and Ixtapa had detained six Zetas, but instead of delivering them to the Public Prosecutors, they had handed them over to the Beltrán Leyva organization. “AFI agents have no business playing at being narco-cops,” complained the caller, and hung up.
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Along with the call arrived a fax addressed to the then attorney general, Daniel Cabeza de Vaca, and the assistant attorney general for Special Investigations on Organized Crime (SIEDO), José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos. It directly accused García Luna of being responsible for what happened in Guerrero: “We already know that the director of the AFI [García Luna] is working with Arturo Beltrán Leyva’s organization, and has received large sums of money from the [AFI’s] former director of special operations, Domingo González.” The authors asked the attorney general to turn their comrades over to the public prosecutors. They denounced the fact that along with the Zetas, three women and three children related to the hit men had been taken (including El Pizcacha’s wife and daughter). The warning was clear. If those kidnapped didn’t appear within five days:

We will come down on these narco-policemen with all our rigor and anger. We will release all this information to the media, and two days later they will receive a personal message from us.… We know how
to lose fairly to such an institution, but in this case they have acted in a base and cowardly way by failing to respect our families. We have always respected the institution you command, but if you do not respond we will be forced to use violence.
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When the PGR still kept quiet about the scandal of corruption in its ranks, Los Zetas carried out their threat. In the early hours of August 2, 2005, the deputy director of the Guerrero public prosecutor’s investigative police (PIM), Julio Carlos López, was executed in a tourist area of Acapulco as he left an upmarket steak house. The local press reported it as an attack on the Guerrero prosecution office, but in reality it was revenge against the AFI. While López was serving as deputy director of the PIM, he was also a commander in the AFI, under Edgar Millán.

México Seguro, Fox’s war

The AFI’s activity in favour of The Federation was formalized on June 11, 2005, with the México Seguro program (Safe Mexico). That day a press release from the Presidential Office announced that Vicente Fox was launching a military operation, backed by civil institutions, “with the aim of combating organized crime and ensuring the safety of communities that have been victims of the violence resulting from disputes between criminal gangs.”
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The program was designed and managed by members of the security cabinet: Interior Secretary Santiago Creel, Public Security Secretary Ramón Herta, Defense Secretary José Clemente Vega, Navy Secretary Marco Antonio Peyrot, Finance Secretary Francisco Gil, Attorney General Rafael Macedo, and the director of the AFI, Genaro García Luna.
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The program was applied in several Mexican states. The first, of course, was Tamaulipas, in the city of Nuevo Laredo.

By then, The Federation had already established permanent contact with Los Pinos through Héctor Beltrán Leyva. At the end of 2004, the DEA discovered that the director of the Department of Presidential Tours, Nahúm Acosta, a member of the governing PAN, was holding telephone conversations with Héctor Beltrán Leyva, El H. The DEA passed the information on to the man they
were closest to, the SIEDO deputy attorney general, José Luis Santiago Vasconcelos.

For Santiago, it was a decidedly delicate situation. He must often have wondered whether the contacts between Acosta and El H were unknown to the presidential couple, or took place with their consent. In the hierarchy of Los Pinos during the Fox administration, there were only three levels above Nahúm Acosta: Enrique Ruiz, the coordinator of presidential tours, Emilio Goicoechea, the president’s private secretary, and Fox himself. If there was one person that symbolized the improvisation and rampant ambition in the Fox government, it was this fair-haired cowboy, Nahúm Acosta. From a modest family background in Coahuila, he had grown up envying everyone. Impulsive and careless, now he loved to show off his position. He suffered from delusions of grandeur.

Héctor, the most sophisticated of the Beltrán Leyvas, had moved to the exclusive Herradura neighborhood of Huixquilucan, State of Mexico. Compared with the other mansions, this one, with its black gate and pink stonework, hardly stood out. In fact it looked rather less opulent. Nonetheless it had six levels, an enormous garden, and a discotheque where the occupant often held parties. His stylish ways and the flair of his wife, Clara Laborín, helped the couple to sneak into the Acapulco jet set, after which they set their sights on Mexico City. Their millions—the main criterion in such circles—helped them to be accepted as “decent people.” They could also count on the contacts of the showbiz PR man, Guillermo Ocañita Ocaña.
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But El H’s low profile was imperiled when his elder brother, Arturo El Barbas, began to visit with his band of bodyguards in cowboy gear, flashing their weapons. Their looks and demeanor were a giveaway.

On January 25, 2005, a call was made to the PGR number for anonymous citizen complaints. Somebody claiming to live in Herradura reported that the people living at 17, Cerrada de la Loma, were acting aggressive with the neighbors. If anyone happened to glance at them they’d say, “What the hell you looking at, asshole? Mind your own business or I’ll lay you out,” and other abusive threats.

When El Barbas arrived, one of the thugs at the gate would shout, “Señor Arturo Beltrán has arrived, clear the way!” At once another
bodyguard at the house door would shout inside, “El Barbas has arrived. Tell El H!”

The DEA report and the anonymous phone call gave Santiago Vasconcelos the green light to act. The first thing he did was to ask the AFI for information about the house. To his surprise, the agency came back to tell him that the telephone number of that address, in the name of Clara Elena Laborín, had been given as a reference a year earlier by a member of El Mayo Zambada’s organization. Inexplicably, the AFI had done nothing to follow up. Next, Santiago ordered federal agents to go stake out the house. For three days they also spied on every movement of Héctor Beltrán Leyva and his wife. El H would usually go out alone at night. He frequented the swankiest spots in Mexico City and the State of Mexico, like the Hacienda and Lomas Country golf clubs. The elegant Clara Elena, with whom Héctor now had two children, was also very active, carrying briefcases to various addresses. When she couldn’t go, someone else took them, in a white Camry. The same man also went two or three times a day to an apartment at number 18, Avenida Club de Golf, near the La Vista golf club. Each time he arrived or left, cases would be put into or taken out of the trunk.

Here was a chance for the AFI to catch Héctor Beltrán Leyva and his men red-handed. But they let him get away. At that time the Beltrán Leyva clan was an integral part of The Federation, and enjoyed complete impunity. The agency waited until the beginning of February before it searched the seven homes used by Héctor, his wife, and his employees, but no one was arrested. What they found at the house in La Herradura were a series of cassettes on which El H had recorded conversations with Nahúm Acosta; the topics seemed trivial. There were also recordings of conversations with his subordinates, specifying the quantities of money to be delivered to Acosta. Witnesses stated they had seen Acosta’s wife visit number 17, Cerrada de la Loma. The Beltrán Leyva brothers, ever cautious, made a habit of recording, on video or in audio, all the public officials they bribed. It was a way of protecting themselves from future misunderstandings or betrayals.

Santiago and his boss, Attorney General Macedo, accused Acosta of leaking confidential information about President Fox’s activities
to the criminal organization led by El Chapo Guzmán. Acosta was arrested on February 3. He was sent to the maximum security jail of La Palma, where he was held for all of fifty-three days. On April 9 he was freed “for lack of evidence,” and the PGR declined to appeal against his release. “It shows with what impartiality cases are examined and reviewed, and then decisions are taken,” declared the Presidential Office, in a brief, unruffled communiqué. Nobody mentioned the subject again. To the end of his days, Santiago Vasconcelos maintained in private that there had been enough evidence to charge the official who organized the president’s tours, and whose contacts with the Pacific Cartel had begun in 2001, when El Chapo was sprung from Puente Grande. But the problem wasn’t what the deputy attorney general thought; it was what Los Pinos wanted.

After the scandal had died down, and four months before the end of the Fox administration, Nahúm Acosta landed a new job, as head of one of the departments in the state energy company, Pemex Gas.

The protection provided by the Mexican Presidency to The Federation became “official,” as it were, on June 13, 2005, during the first public event for the México Seguro program. The streets of Nuevo Laredo reverberated with the sound of marching boots, as 600 members of the AFI and the PFP, as well as special forces of the Mexican army’s GAFE, paraded to mark what they called the “first phase.” It’s worth mentioning that days before this official ceremony the local municipal director of public security, Alejandro Domínguez, was executed. He’d been in the job just seven hours.

In this first phase, the federal government relieved the municipal police of their duty to patrol the streets, on the pretext of purging and retraining them. In their place, federal forces, mainly the AFI, took over, generating an atmosphere of tension and violence. The war against the drug trade was as false then as it is now. Central government used the federal security forces to help consolidate The Federation and remove the Gulf Cartel from this prized territory. The maneuver turned out not to be such an easy one. After more than five years of of open warfare, they still haven’t succeeded. These have been years of blood and terror for a population caught in the middle of a battle between cartels, and where the government has been not on their side, but on the side of one of the cartels.

It soon became obvious that the México Seguro program was producing very contradictory results. The federal government forces, that were meant to bring security, left a trail of death and destruction behind them. They were in fact the cause of the violence. On August 3, 2005, a few weeks after the launch of President Fox’s program, two bodies appeared in Nuevo Laredo. The killers had left a written message on the corpses, the first time such a thing had been seen in Mexico: “
DAMN YOU BARBIE AND ARTURO BELTRÁN, YOU WON’T GET IN HERE NOT EVEN WITH THE SUPPORT OF THE SPECIAL FORCES OR BY KILLING INNOCENT PEOPLE.”
Since then, tortured bodies, dismembered or decapitated, have become the ghoulish messengers between the drug gangs. After the launch of México Seguro, the violence concentrated in the border zone of Tamaulipas spread to the rest of the state, and then to almost all of the states of Mexico.

The most brutal image of this first phase of the drugs war came courtesy of the
Dallas Morning News
at the beginning of December 2005, when it released a blood-curdling video. That day, Norma Olguín learnt for certain what had happened to her husband, Juan Manuel Vizcarra, El Pizcacha. The video showed four of the Zetas seized by the AFI on May 14 and 15 in Ixtapa and Acapulco. The men had been handed over to The Federation and looked beaten and frightened as they sat beside each other on the floor. Behind them a black plastic sheet concealed any details of the location. The Zetas were questioned about their activities in the group. Neither the questions nor the answers made much sense, except to those directly involved. Suddenly a voice asks the fourth Zeta sitting on the far right of the picture, “What’s up with you?” Then there’s a single deafening shot to his head. It was El Pizcacha. The language of blood is more direct and effective than any other, all its grammar contained in a single drop. Of the two other women and their children who were seized in May 2005 in Guerrero, according to the letter sent by Los Zetas to the PGR, nothing more has been heard. Los Zetas say they were savagely abused and killed, and that this too was filmed.
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The part played by the AFI enraged the Gulf Cartel to a point beyond return. At the same time, the brutal images in the
Dallas Morning News
created such a public commotion that the PGR was
forced to break its silence. In a stormy press conference, Santiago Vasconcelos admitted that AFI agents in Guerrero were involved in the illegal detention of the Zetas. He also admitted that the authorities had known about the video since September 12, when somebody had left a copy in a manila envelope outside the PGR offices. Santiago announced that eight AFI officers had been arrested, accused of involvement in organized crime, felonies against public health, kidnapping, and possession of ammunition reserved for the exclusive use of the armed forces. Five of these, including José Luis Sánchez, the head of the AFI agency in Guerrero, belonged to the department led by Edgar Millán. Santiago affirmed that all of these agents were being held at the Oriente prison in Mexico City. The charges against them would have been enough to keep them behind bars for many years, even while the facts were still being investigated. At the same time an initial investigation was opened into the the AFI chief, Genaro García Luna.
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