Gangland

by Jerry Langton

  Back in his hometown of Culiacán, Félix Gallardo did not exactly live quietly. He was a local celebrity and his exploits were often celebrated in local narcocorridas. He was known to be a close friend of PRI governor Antonio Toledo Corro, and was photographed with him at various events. It has been alleged that Félix Gallardo stayed at Toledo Corro's residence, but he denies that. For the record, Corro has not been charged with any wrongdoing.

  Félix Gallardo's men operated without hindrance from law enforcement and the entire state of Sinaloa saw murder rates skyrocket after he returned. “For years, we have lived under the reign of the machine gun,” said Norma Corona Sapien, director of the Human Rights Commission of Sinaloa. “The narcos thought they had protection and could act with impunity, so that's what they did, kidnapping and raping young girls, getting into drunken fights on the street, killing each other and generally acting as if they owned the city.”

  Late in 1987, Francisco Labastida Ochoa was elected governor of Sinaloa. Despite being a member of the PRI—his great-grandfather had fought in the Mexican Revolution and his grandfather had also been governor—he campaigned on a law-and-order, anti-drug platform. While campaigning he received numerous death threats and two assassination attempts, and after taking office, he worked to rid the state police of corruption. “When the new administration took over in 1987, we found some police commanders to be [traffickers],” Eduardo Aispuro Beltrán, a spokesman for the Sinaloa police told The New York Times. “It was the most incredible and intolerable thing to find the police body to be completely infiltrated by narcos.”

  After a long investigation and at the instigation of the DEA and PRI President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Labastida Ochoa sent in Mexican army troops to arrest Félix Gallardo on April 8, 1989. A week later, they interrogated all 300 members of the Culiacán police force. Seven of its commanders were charged with corruption, and as many as 90 officers fled the area after questioning. Toledo Corro was questioned and admitted that he was Félix Gallardo's friend, but had no idea that there were outstanding warrants for his arrest or that he had any connection to crime.

  Félix Gallardo would not be extradited to the United States—where he was wanted for the deaths of Caramena and Zavala Avelar—because of Mexico's policy of not extraditing to countries where the accused could potentially face the death penalty. In a Mexican court, he was sentenced to 40 years in prison for kidnapping, murder, drug trafficking, racketeering and other charges. An investigation by American journalists determined that Félix Gallardo was still operating as a key player from inside prison by cell phone until he was transferred to a purpose-built maximum-security prison in 1992. His website (http://www.miguelfelixgallardo.com) is still operational and portrays him as an upstanding citizen and shrewd businessman who was unfairly accused and imprisoned. It provides updates on his failing health and even has a forum where people can ask his advice. They write respectfully and always address him as “Don Miguel.”

  Rivalry among the cartels

  Without Félix Gallardo's steady hand at the helm, the individual cartels began to operate independently and tensions rose steadily, especially where territories overlapped. This was a particular problem between the Tijuana Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel. The Sinaloans' original territory was defined as the crossings between Mexico and California other than Tijuana. That region is largely desert and mountain with just two official border crossings—one at the small city of Tecate, Baja California, that abuts an almost unpopulated part of the United States, and the other at the medium-size city Mexicali across the border from the small city of Calexico—neither of which offers a quick or easy route to distribution centers or rich markets like San Diego and Los Angeles. With the strong Sonorans to the east of them, the Sinaloans turned to Tijuana to expand their territories, often resorting to gunfights with those loyal to the Arellano Félix brothers. There was a feeling among many in the Mexican underworld that the Arellano Félix brothers were a weak link in the organization because they had simply inherited their territory, which bred a great deal of resentment among their peers, while other leaders had proven their stripes and were elevated to capos on merit,

  But they were more than willing to defend what was theirs. And they were an eccentric bunch, even by the standards of drug lords. Seven brothers born between 1949 and 1969 (along with four sisters, two of whom, Alicia and Endinia, were also involved with the business), the Arellano Félixes divided up their responsibilities based on each brother's skill set.

  The leader was the handsome Benjamín “El Min,” born in 1952, who was arrested in Downey, California in 1982, but escaped and made it back to Mexico. Carlos, a trained surgeon born in 1955, and Eduardo, who also attended medical school, was born in 1956 and reputed to be the smartest of the brothers, handled money-laundering and other financial matters. At 220 pounds with a mean streak, Ramón “El Commandante Món,” born in 1964, was the organization's primary enforcer. He carried a gold-plated handgun and a fake Federale ID and badge with him at all times. The youngest brothers Luis Fernando, born in 1966, and Francisco Javier “El Tigrillo” (the Little Tiger), born in 1969, helped the others and learned the ropes. The oldest, Francisco Rafael, born in 1949, was perhaps the most interesting of them all. A flamboyant cross-dresser who had been arrested in San Diego and in Mexico, Francisco Rafael brokered deals with police and government officials at his disco, Frankie O's, surrounded by his five houses on Avenida Tiburón Ballena in Mazatlán's tourist district. At its peak, the Tijuana Cartel was reported by Time magazine to have paid out about $1.5 million in bribes a week.

  While most members of crime organizations came from very poor backgrounds or were family members who had been enriched only by crime, the Tijuana cartel recruited bored, middle-class youth from both Tijuana—many of them former police and military veterans—and San Diego across the border, aligning themselves with existing gangs in both cities. The brothers called these new recruits “narco-juniors” and they represented a drastic departure from traditional Mexican drug traffickers. “Some of those juniors went to school here in the United States,” Heidi Landgraff, a group supervisor for a San Diego DEA unit told PBS. “Some spoke English well. They dressed very nicely. They are not tattooed individuals like someone in a gang. So they could be sitting next to you in a restaurant, and you wouldn't know.”

  Typical of them were the 30th Street Gang from the heavily Mexican Logan Heights neighborhood of San Diego. Originally a car enthusiast club, the members of the 30th Street Gang started selling marijuana and later cocaine to help fund their car customizations, and by the early 1980s were associated with a number of gangland assassinations in San Diego. They often traded heavy weapons—usually unavailable in Mexico—for cocaine.

  The Tijuana Cartel pushes boundaries

  As long as there has been organized crime in Mexico, murder has been a weapon. Before the Tijuana Cartel rose, however, murder was generally considered a last choice, used only in times of extreme urgency. The Arellano Félix brothers changed that, routinely killing anyone who crossed them, especially dealers from rival cartels. Ramón and his men used terrifying methods like the Colombian necktie (a punishment for informants in which the victim's throat is slit and his tongue pulled through the wound), suffocating victims with clear plastic bags, beheadings, submersion in acid and carne esada (roasted meat), in which bound victims would be thrown alive on piles of flaming tires. “Wherever there is danger, that's where you'll find Ramón,” a former narco-junior, Alejandro Hodoyán Palacios, told Mexican magazine Proceso. “In 1989 or '90, we were at a Tijuana corner without anything to do and he told us, ‘Let's go kill someone. Who has a score to settle?’ Cars would pass and he'd ask us whom we knew. The person we pointed out would appear dead within a week.” Often the narco-juniors would wear Federale uniforms and have sirens in their cars to make abductions easier.

  In 1992, when a dealer affiliated with the Sinaloans who had traveled through their territory received a package containin
g his wife's head packed in dry ice, it looked to many as though the two cartels were on the verge of all-out war.

  Sinaloa chief Guzmán Loera called a summit meeting. The Arellano Félix brothers agreed to let Sinaloans through their territory in Tijuana for a considerable cut of their revenues and asked for unfettered access to the Mexicali–Calexico crossing as well. Although the sides appeared to part amicably, on November 8, 1992, Guzmán Loera sent a small army of men dressed as Federales to a disco in Puerto Vallarta owned by a friend of the Arellano Félixes while he knew the brothers were there. Their attack killed 19 people, including eight Tijuana Cartel members, but as soon as the shooting started, the brothers dashed for the men's room and escaped by climbing from a sink to the roof through a skylight. Published reports said that the brothers struggled to get Ramón's sizable gut through the small opening.

  Their retaliation was bungled. On May 24, 1993, in the parking lot of Guadalajara International Airport, a number of gunmen ambushed a white Mercury Grand Marquis they were told contained Guzmán Loera. They opened fire and killed both of the car's occupants and five innocent bystanders. The man they believed to be Guzmán Loera was actually Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo.

  In such a devoutly Catholic country as Mexico, the gunning down of a cardinal was too much for authorities to sweep under the rug. Francisco Rafael, the most visible and approachable of the brothers, was arrested on weapons charges and linked to the murder. To secure his release, published reports say Benjamin handed over $10 million in cash and two 30th Street Gang members, Juan “Puma” Vasconez and Juan “Spooky” Torres Méndez, to Mexican authorities. He then expelled the Logan Heights men from Mexico, but continued to do business with them across the border. U.S. authorities later arrested nine more 30th Street Gang members in San Diego in connection with the assassination, and when the case was re-opened in Mexico after the PRI lost power, a childhood friend of the cardinal's testified that he had been warned that he was in great danger by high-ranking members of the PRI government. Many Mexicans have told me that they believe that the government intentionally led the Tijuana Cartel to believe that Posadas Ocampo was Guzmán Loera, in effect setting up his assassination.

  Business proved more important than revenge to both cartels and they were soon working together again under a rarely broken truce. They were moving so much product that they were overwhelming legal border crossings. Taking a page from the other cartels—particularly the Sonorans—both the Tijuana and Sinaloa Cartels turned the bulk of their trafficking operation to illegal border crossings. Large numbers of Mexicans migrating over the border illegally were then convinced—either by money or threats—to carry drugs with them.

  Chapter 5

  Enemies of the State

  The first indication that the Mexican cartels would face difficulty—and perhaps the first move that started the process that became the Mexican Drug War—occurred on March 23, 1994. Crime was rampant, the economy was tanking and discontent with the PRI was growing. The Mexican constitution states that a president may not serve two consecutive terms and tradition states that the outgoing president name his successor. Outgoing president Carlos Salinas de Gortari appointed Social Development Secretary Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta as his choice, telling reporters “Don't be confused, the candidate is Colosio.”

  Colosio Murrieta was unlike any PRI presidential candidate in memory. He campaigned actively all over Mexico—“as though he had a chance of losing,” said one Mexican journalist. Handsome and well-spoken, Colosio Murrieta revitalized the party and was a popular candidate. He made a campaign stop in a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood of Tijuana—something unheard of previously—and in the middle of a crowd of thousands, a man lifted a nickel-plated handgun a few inches from his face and shot him through his brain.

  The man who killed him was Mario “Alberto” Aburto Martínez, a failed academic from Michoacán who was working in a factory assembling low-quality clock radios for the now-defunct Audiomatic company. Aburto Martinez refused to talk and an official investigation determined he worked alone, killing Colosio Murrieta because he was enraged by his lot in life. Perhaps more important, the legendary muckraking journalist Jesús Blancornelas, a sworn enemy of both PRI corruption and the cartels, conducted his own three-year investigation, including interviewing Aburto Martinez in prison, and concluded that although there were major inconsistencies in the government investigation, Aburto Martinez had indeed worked alone.

  But that did not matter to most Mexicans. Rumors abounded. Conspiracy theories like those surrounding the John F. Kennedy assassination surfaced, focusing on a second shot many claim to have heard. So deeply ingrained is mistrust of the government that many academics and journalists have all disagreed, pointing their fingers variously at the PRI, who they claim were afraid Colosio Murrieta was making too many concessions, the opposition PAN party who feared his charisma would make him unbeatable, and Federales anticipating a crackdown on corruption or the cartels for his anti-crime platform.

  No matter why Colosio Murrieta was killed, it changed things in Mexico. The PRI scrambled to find a suitable replacement, naming Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León, a Yale-educated Mexicali native who had been Colosio Murrieta's campaign manager. Zedillo went on to win every state in the 1994 federal election, which was hailed as an improvement over the obviously rigged 1988 vote, but still criticized as intensely corrupt.

  Aware that he had to do something to satisfy his critics or face open rebellion, Zedillo made a move that would have been unthinkable even a few years before—he appointed a non-PRI cabinet minister. In an attempt to add legitimacy to his administration and appease his opponents, Zedillo named firebrand PAN prosecutor Fernando Antonio Lozano Gracia as attorney general.

  Lozano Gracia's first target was Raul Salinas de Gortari, older brother of the outgoing president, who he arrested on charges ranging from murder to embezzlement. After his arrest, the ex-president fled Mexico and lived in self-imposed exile in Ireland. His wife, Paulina Salinas Castanon, was arrested in Geneva for attempting to withdraw cash from Raul's account, with Mexican officials alleging that the $160 million in the account was drug money. Eventually Raul was acquitted of murder, but not of the other charges. His Swiss accounts were frozen then returned to various Mexican parties with claims against him. Another Salinas de Gortari brother, Enrique, was found tortured and strangled in his car in Mexico City in 2004.

  Emboldened, Lozano Gracia's next target was the Federales. He and his men investigated every one of its 4,400 officers. He fired almost one-third of the national police force for having verifiable links to organized crime: on his first pass, he dismissed 513 of them for having compromised ethics and on his second 737. While his actions shocked Mexico, particularly PRI politicians, he didn't go far enough according to nongovernment observers who estimated that at least 90 percent of all police, prosecutors and judges in northern Mexico were cooperating with the cartels in exchange for cash.

  It would be hard to blame them. Not only do police in Mexico make very low wages, but they face great danger if they don't accept bribes. Ramón Arellano Félix—who the San Diego Union-Tribune reported seeing frequently at Tijuana's best restaurants, protected by what at least appeared to be Federales—had a saying at the time, that police, prosecutors and judges were to receive their choice of “plata o plomo” (silver or lead). “It's kind of like this,” said former chief of International Operations for the DEA Robert Nieves. “You're offered a bribe. If bribery doesn't work, you're offered violence. And that violence will be exacted against you or your family members.”

  The police pay the price

  After a series of shootouts with officers and former officers in Tijuana and the surrounding region, Lozano Gracia was desperate for help. To bolster his weakened police force in the area, he hired Ernesto de Ibarra Santés—who he described as fearless and honest—to take over the local police force. De Ibarra Santés arrived on August 16, 1996 with 55 of his own men. After a tho
rough investigation, on September 12 he told The Los Angeles Times that “police here have become so corrupted that they aren't just friends of the traffickers, they are their servants” and identified the Arellano Félix brothers as the primary threat to public safety.

  On September 14, he and two bodyguards were driving away from the airport in Mexico City, when two other cars blocked their path. Men from the cars opened fire with AK-47s, killing all three. A bag containing $50,000 in U.S. currency was found in the trunk, but a lack of bullet holes in the bag convinced many that it was planted there by the killers or the Federales to discredit de Ibarra Santés.

  Less than a week later, Jorge Garcia Vargas, Tijuana chief for the National Institute for Combating Drugs, told reporters that he had compiled enough evidence to arrest at least 15 high-profile traffickers and money-launderers working with the Arellano Félix brothers. Two days later, Garcia Vargas and five of his top men went missing. Their tortured bodies were later recovered in the trunks of cars in a suburb of Mexico City.

  Zeta, the magazine published by Blancornelas, became highly critical of the brothers, especially Ramón. The gang's enforcer was particularly enraged when Zeta published a letter from a victim's mother that labeled him a coward. First Zeta's co-founder was murdered, then its editor-in-chief. On November 27, 1997, a car stopped in front of Blancornelas on a Tijuana street in broad daylight and its occupants opened fire. Blancornelas was shot four times, but survived. His bodyguard was killed.