Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (9 page)

On February 9, 1990, Berrellez and Schmidt contacted Harrison as part of Operation Leyenda. In their search for the truth about the death of their colleague, the special agents discovered the background to one of the darkest episodes in Mexican journalism: the murder of the influential
Excélsior
columnist, Manuel Buendía.
⁷

The DEA report says:

Manuel Buendía-Tellesgiron [
sic
] supported candidate Delmaso [Alfredo del Mazo], PRI party member who aspired to be the President of Mexico.
⁸
Buendía conducted an investigation into the collusion that existed between Manuel Bartlett-Diaz, former secretary of the interior, Miguel Aldana-Ibarra, former head of the Mexican anti-drug program [of the PJF], and Manuel Ibarra-Herrera, former head of the Directorate of Federal Security (DFS), who were acting in consort with narcotic traffickers.

Between 1981 and 1984, Buendía received information from another reporter, Velasco, in Vera Cruz, that Guatemalan Guerrillas were training at a ranch owned by Rafael Caro-Quintero in Vera Cruz state. The operations/training at the camp were conducted by the American CIA, using the FS as a cover, in the event any questions were raised …

Harrison told Schmidt and Berrellez that DFS representatives oversaw the training camp and allowed traffickers to move drugs through Mexico to the United States. However, it seems the DFS didn’t know that while its agents were acting in consort with the CIA and the traffickers, the PJF was doing its own investigation into drug trafficking at Caro Quintero’s Veracruz ranch. Members of the Federal Judicial Police arrived at the ranch, and were attacked by the guerrillas (he didn’t say which group). The upshot was nineteen PJF fatalities. Many of the bodies showed signs of torture.

It seems the journalist Buendía had also managed to gather information about the CIA’s arms smuggling and its relations with well-known drug traffickers in Veracruz. Buendía contacted Zorrilla, head of the DFS, and told him all he knew. He asked for advice on
how to proceed. Zorrilla told Buendía that the question of drug trafficking linked to the CIA was very delicate, and it would be better not to discuss it. He sent a group of agents supposedly to protect the columnist and his family. Nonetheless, forty-one days later, Manuel Buendía was killed by members of the DFS. Just one hour after that, “Velasco”—Buendía’s main source for the CIA story—was also killed, in Veracruz.
⁹

The DEA’s secret report notes that:

The DFS allegedly excluded the [PJF] from the investigation and removed all Buendía’s files concerning the information on CIA arms smuggling and the connection the CIA had to narcotic traffickers. Shortly thereafter Eden Pastor [
sic
],
¹⁰
aka Comandante Zero, another individual who had given Buendía information about CIA arms smuggling, allegedly suffered a CIA sponsored bomb attack while traveling in Costa Rica.

Lawrence Harrison, or Torre Blanca, also told the Operation Leyenda investigators that a German identified as Gerhard Mertins—who lived in Mexico City from 1981 to 1985—had a company in Guadalajara called Merex: “I knew that Mertins had links with the CIA in relation to arms trafficking,” he told them. This was entirely verifiable, since Mertins was known to the DEA. A former member of the SS, after the Second World War he became the German Federal Republic’s biggest arms exporter.

Buendía had published information about Mertins and the CIA in his column in
Excélsior
, after which the German is thought to have left Mexico. According to the DEA report, Mertins was working for a powerful Guadalajara family. Harrison told the investigators: “I have heard that the Leaño family controls large marijuana plantations in Jalisco, the same area of Mexico where Mertins used to sell large quantities of weaponry.”

Apparently, some colleagues of Buendía’s obtained information to the effect that high-ranking PRI politicians were assisting the CIA with arms smuggling, and were also informed about the Agency’s links with drug lords. By 1990 it was common knowledge that several narcotic traffickers had financed the Contra,
while poisoning US society with their wares—both activities with Washington’s approval.

According to Torre Blanca, before Velasco, the reporter from Veracruz, was murdered, he had been working on a story about how the CIA, using the DFS as cover, was responsible for setting up and operating clandestine landing strips used for refueling the planes carrying arms to Honduras and Nicaragua. The pilots, said Harrison, then loaded up with cocaine in Barranquilla, Colombia and flew it to Miami. Mexico was again the refueling point. Thus the DEA report confirms that it was the CIA that really operated the drug smuggling and the secret landing strips that were used.

Torre Blanca went on to talk about the bribes allegedly taken by Major General Vinicio Santoyo Feria, the then commander of the Fifth Military Region, and about Santoyo’s relations with the lawyer Everardo Rojas Contreras, who worked for Don Neto and Caro Quintero. The report affirms that for the last three years Rojas had been acting as General Santoyo’s assistant in the purchase and management of real estate, involving large sums whose provenance could not be explained. For example, Santoyo bought a ranch in Puerto Vallarta for $600,000. This sum, the report claims, was actually part of the money Santoyo received for “extorting” Félix Gallardo and Salcido El Cochiloco, when they were arrested in Guadalajara in November 1988 by troops under Santoyo’s orders.

Harrison renewed contact with Félix Gallardo three years after Camarena’s murder: he visited him in 1988 in one of his Guadalajara residences. Despite the arrests of Don Neto and Caro Quintero, Félix Gallardo continued his narcotics operations in peace until April 8, 1989, when he was arrested by a corrupt ex-associate of his, the PGF chief Guillermo González Calderoni.

In July 1990, extracts from the secret DEA report were published in the main US newspapers. Their content was predictably dismissed by the CIA and the Mexican government. Nonetheless, the outpourings of the witnesses at the Kerry Commission on the Iran-Contra affair and the conclusions of that commission suggest that the information given by Torre Blanca, the DEA’s informer, was pretty credible.

* * *

The Prince

“Los
gringos te hacen y
Los
gringos te deshacen
”: the gringos build you up and the gringos knock you down, would be one translation of this frequent saying among drug traffickers.
¹¹

On April 15, 1985, Rafael Caro Quintero, El Príncipe, was arrested in Costa Rica in the company of his girlfriend, Sara Cosío. In his statement to judicial police, he said: “Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo is a large-scale drug trafficker, mainly of cocaine which he gets from South America and takes into the United States.”
¹²
Félix Gallardo worked with the Medellín Cartel led by Pablo Escobar, Gonzalo Rodríguez alias El Mexicano, and Jorge Luis Ochoa.

Caro Quintero told the PJF that the day they went for Camarena, while Don Neto was eating at El Isao, he had gone downtown to buy some seeds before going home to Mariano Otero, where he found fifteen of Félix Gallardo’s armed men. A few minutes later José Luis Gallardo, El Güero, arrived, together with Samuel Ramírez, and one other. El Príncipe received them barefooted. “Here’s the person you told us to bring,” said El Güero, pointing to Enrique Camarena, whose face was covered by a jacket. Caro Quintero took him into one of the bedrooms and tied his hands behind his back.

“What’s new, compadre, have they brought him in yet?” asked Don Neto, when he came back from lunch. Caro Quintero took him straight to the room where Camarena was, pushed the door ajar so he could see him, then shut it again.

White Tower

On July 6, 1990, Lawrence Harrison (who had entered a witness protection program the previous year) gave the following testimony to the Camarena hearings, before an empty courtroom in the Los Angeles federal court: “Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo told me he thought his trafficking operations were safe, because he was giving arms to the Nicaragua Contras.” Harrison was not some character out of a spy novel, he was the real thing. Long before the court
hearing in California, Don Neto had confessed to Florentino Ventura that the gringo had helped get them radio communications. Harrison now admitted that he’d also installed radio equipment for the Mexican police and justice agencies in league with the crime gangs …

The lawyers for the three defendants (Rubén Zuno Arce, Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros, and Juan José Bernabé, the first two well-connected businessmen, the last, one of Fonseca’s bodyguards) had presented Harrison as a defense witness. They were hoping to show that Camarena’s death had been planned and organized by a power higher than either the former president’s brother-in-law (Zuno Arce) or the drug traffickers themselves: the CIA.

“I spoke face to face with [Félix Gallardo], and he told me that he’d managed to get others to contribute funds to the Contra movement, which was supported by the United States,” Harrison told the court. He then described a number of conversations he’d had with other Mexican drug barons about their agreements with the North Americans, although only Félix Gallardo said he had protection because of his contributions to the Contras. What the others did say clearly, including Don Neto and Caro Quintero, was that “they had a kind of relationship with the United States government.”

The DEA’s star witness stated that in 1983, at Don Neto’s house, he had met two men who told him they were US secret agents, although they never showed him any ID; they also told him they’d been involved in the Contra affair. Could these have been El Güero and El Chelín, the duo with gringo looks who worked with Félix Gallardo and had been briefly mentioned in the statements given by Don Neto and Caro Quintero? The same “brothers” who, thanks to the US consulate in Guadalajara, had delivered Camarena to the traffickers? Harrison also said that he’d once met another man, called Theodore Cash, who had flown arms shipments for Don Neto. In 1988, at a trial in Los Angeles, Cash would reveal that he had flown planes for the CIA for ten years.

“Based on my own investigations, I believe that at [Caro Quintero’s] ranch there was a Contra training camp. My impression is that it was set up there on the orders of the US government,” Harrison testified. He insisted he had never said the group training on the
ranch in Veracruz were Guatemalan guerrillas; rather that they were Nicaraguan Contras.

It is important to emphasize that this, Harrison’s first court appearance in Los Angeles, was in June 1990, in the fourth week of the Camarena murder trial. His very presence there, under the auspices of the DEA, threatened to trigger all-out war between the drug enforcement agency and the CIA. In court on June 7, 1990, Harrison recalled some conversations he’d had with Don Neto: “I once said to Ernesto Fonseca that he might be hunted down by the law.” “Are you crazy? There’s no danger of that,” Don Neto had replied. He was sure he was untouchable.

“Did Fonseca say this, that he was sure he was safe, for political reasons?” Harrison was asked on the stand.

“Yes,” he answered, without hesitation.

Defense lawyer Mary Kelly questioned Harrison about his links with an agent of the Federal Security Directorate (DFS), Sergio Espino Verdín, who the DEA said was responsible for interrogating Camarena at Caro Quintero’s house. According to the report by Berrellez, who was in charge of Operation Leyenda, the DFS was the Mexican government agency that worked “in consort” with the narcotic traffickers and the CIA. Harrison answered: “I worked for Espino, who was close to Ernesto Fonseca. Espino reported to Miguel Nazar Haro. Nazar was my ultimate boss and was implicated in drug trafficking.” Miguel Nazar Haro was head of the DFS from 1977 to 1982—the year the Iran-Contra operation began—and was forced to resign when it was discovered he was involved in vehicle smuggling.

When Mary Kelly asked Harrison if he knew of the links between the main Mexican drug traffickers and the CIA, Judge Rafeedie forbade him to answer. Harrison was only allowed to confirm that there was a close working relationship between the traffickers and senior Mexican officials.
¹³

The conviction of Zuno Arce and the lost tapes

On July 31, 1990, Rubén Zuno Arce, brother-in-law of former Mexican president Luis Echeverría, was found guilty by the Los Angeles jury of taking part in the conspiracy to murder Camarena.
In the trial, the prosecution alleged that Zuno “acted as a link between the highest levels of the Mexican government and the multimillionaire cartel based in Guadalajara.” By that time two other defendants had already been found guilty: Matta Ballesteros, the Honduran drug trafficker, and Bernabé, Don Neto Fonseca’s bodyguard.

According to the DEA’s investigation and forensic experts, Camarena was not tortured at the house in Mariano Otero, where Don Neto saw him for the last time, but at 881 Lope de Vega, also in Guadalajara.

The charge against Zuno related to the fact that he was the previous owner of the house where Camarena was killed, which he had sold to Caro Quintero before the murder. The main witness against Zuno was the policeman Héctor Cervantes, one of the bodyguards assigned to Don Neto, who, under a witness protection program, revealed that as far back as September 1984, after the raid on the El Búfalo marijuana farm, Zuno had ordered the kidnapping of El Kiki Camarena. Cervantes claimed that Zuno had said they needed to find out what Camarena knew about “my general,” referring to Juan Arévalo Gardoqui, the then secretary of defense in the government of President Miguel de la Madrid, thus implicating the highest levels of the Mexican government.
¹⁴