Whiteout

by Alexander Cockburn

  The DEA officers investigating Camarena’s death thus knew that the drug agent’s murder was a joint operation between the drug cartel and the DFS, an agency with intimate ties to the CIA. “The CIA didn’t give a damn about anything but Cuba and the Soviets,” said retired DEA agent James Kuykendall, who worked alongside Camarena in Mexico. “Indirectly, they [the CIA] have got to take some of the blame.”

  Kuykendall claims that the CIA protected the DFS for decades, even though they knew the agency had been corrupted by the narco-traffickers. “They didn’t want their connection with the DFS to ever go away,” Kuykendall said. “The DFS just got out of hand.” Among the top DFS agents tied to Camarena’s murder were Miguel Aldana and Sergio Espino Verdin. The DEA also had evidence linking two other high-ranking Mexican officials to the Camarena abduction: Manuel Ibarra, director of the Federal Judicial Police, and Ruben Zuño Arce, brother-in-law of Luis Echeverría, the former president of Mexico.

  Much of the DEA’s information on the ties of top-level Mexican officials to the Camarena kidnapping came from reports of an interrogation of drug lord Rafael Caro Quintera by Sergio Saavedra Flores, a special assistant to Manuel Ibarra. Saavedra was a Cuban exile whom DEA agents believe had ties to CIA-backed anti-Castro groups operating in Mexico. Before becoming Ibarra’s right-hand man at the Mexican Judicial Police, Saavedra had been a ranking officer in the DFS. Immediately after his arrest, Caro Quintero had received soft treatment from the Mexicans and was allowed to continue running his drug empire via a cellular phone in his prison cell. Under mounting pressure from the US, Saavedra finally questioned Caro Quintero about Camarena’s murder. To compel the drug dealer to talk, Saavedra employed a method of torture called el tehuacanazo, after Mexico’s popular brand of sparkling water. Saavedra forced carbonated water laced with jalapeño peppers up Caro Quintero’s nose. It didn’t take the drug dealer long to spill his guts, revealing the names of top Mexican officials on the cartel’s payroll. Prominent among the names given up by Caro Quintera was José Antonio Zorrilla Pérez, the commander of the DFS. Like other heads of the DFS, Zorrilla Pérez enjoyed the indulgence of the CIA.

  Though never charged in the Camarena case, Zorrilla was arrested in 1989 for his involvement in the May 1984 murder of Mexico’s top political columnist, Manuel Buendía. When he was gunned down, Buendía had been in the midst of an investigation into the ties between the DFS and the drug cartels. The Buendía assassination and subsequent cover-up were part of a DFS project called Operation News.

  Caro Quintero’s connections to the top leaders of the DFS and Mexican Interior Department apparently convinced Saavedra that it might be more prudent to switch sides. He promptly joined in the cover-up of the Camarena case, helping Matta Ballesteros evade arrest in Mexico and escape to the safe haven of Cartagena, Colombia. Saavedra soon left Mexico for Los Angeles, where he took a well-paying position with the Mexican television network, Televisa. Televisa, which then enjoyed a near monopoly on Mexico’s television market, is closely associated with the ruling PRI party and is run by “the richest man in Mexico,” billionaire Emilio Azcarraga. The DEA tracked down Saavedra in 1988 and asked for his cooperation in the Camarena case. A few days later Saavedra and his family disappeared.

  He wasn’t the only missing witness. At least thirteen people connected to the Camarena case were murdered during the course of the investigation, including three of the twenty-two defendants and several police detectives. Other potential witnesses were picked up by the DFS and Mexican Judicial Police and held, so the DEA believed, to keep them silent.

  One of the DEA’s most explosive witnesses was a Californian named Lawrence Harrison. Harrison was a former student at the University of California at Berkeley, where he says he dabbled in left-wing politics and helped organize anti-war rallies before heading to Mexico in the early 1970s. There Harrison eventually landed a position as a communications specialist with the DFS and the Mexican Interior Ministry’s Office of Political and Special Investigations. Harrison says his job was to install high-tech electronic bugging systems for the two intelligence agencies.

  The blond 6-feet-7-inch Californian was known to his Mexican colleagues as Torre Blanca, the White Tower. He says in the early 1980s he learned of the DFS’s close relationship to the Guadalajara cartel. According to Harrison, DFS agents served, in effect, as the cartel’s private army, protecting them from arrest and suppressing rival operations. In 1983 Harrison says he was instructed by his bosses at the DFS to set up a sophisticated telecommunications and electronic surveillance system for the Guadalajara cartel.

  During two trials in Los Angeles, Harrison testified that he spent from July to January of 1984 at the Guadalajara house of drug kingpin Ernesto Fonseca, where he installed and managed a bugging operation. Among his other duties, Harrison claims to have developed a system to monitor Camarena’s office at the DEA.

  He says he recorded hundreds of conversations between the drug traffickers and their associates in the DFS in Mexico City. “As systems engineer,” Harrison testified, “I listened to the system and had full control of it 24 hours a day during the entire time that it was installed and operated.”

  Harrison recalled a conversation with Félix Gallardo in which the drug trafficker told him that the cartel’s operations in the United States enjoyed a high-degree of protection because they were sending weapons and money to the Nicaraguan Contras. A DEA report from February 1989 says that Harrison also told investigators that Félix Gallardo’s ranch near Vera Cruz had been used by the CIA to train Guatemalan troops. The report quotes Harrison as saying, “representatives of the DFS, which was the front for the training camp, were in fact acting in consort with major drug overlords to ensure a flow of narcotics through Mexico into the US.” The report says Felix Gallardo’s ranch was the target of a marijuana raid in the early 1980s by the Mexican Federal Judicial Police, who were unexpectedly confronted by the Guatemalan troops and slaughtered. “As a result of the confrontation, 19 MFJP agents were killed,” the DEA report says. “Many of the bodies showed signs of torture. The bodies had been drawn and quartered.”

  Of course, the CIA promptly denied it had ever used the Vera Cruz ranch as a training ground. But Harrison wasn’t finished. He testified during the trials of the Camarena defendants that CIA agents had visited the leaders of the cartel. While Harrison was working at Fonseca’s house, he said two Americans showed up to arrange a drug deal. Harrison says he warned them to be careful taking the drugs back across the US border. But the two men chuckled and said they didn’t have much to worry about because the drug run was protected by the CIA. “We’re working with the Contras,” they told Harrison.

  Harrison also identified another American visitor to Fonseca’s house as Theodore Cash, a former Air America pilot. In a separate drug case, Cash testified as a government witness and admitted that he had worked for the CIA for ten years. Cash was apparently running drugs and guns for the Guadalajara cartel, including several weapons drops to Contra camps in Honduras.

  Attorneys for the defendants in the Camarena case believed that Harrison himself was a CIA contact, a suspicion shared by several DEA agents. “The CIA obviously was cultivating a very powerful and efficient arms transport network through the cartel,” said Gregory Nicolaysen, one of the defense lawyers. “They didn’t want the DEA screwing it up.” Nicolaysen described Harrison as “the liaison between the agency and the cartel.”

  Harrison left Mexico in 1988 and went on the DEA’s payroll as an informant. Matta Ballesteros was tracked down in Colombia, arrested, and convicted of conspiracy charges for his role in Camarena’s abduction and death. Félix Gallardo and Caro Quintero and more than a dozen others were tried and convicted in Mexico.

  The CIA’s ties to Mexico’s drug lords far predate the Camarena case. The Mexico City station has long been the CIA’s most important base of operations in Latin America. Despite a somewhat rocky relationship with Mexican politicians, the Agency has always maintained and
cultivated a cozy partnership with Mexico’s military and internal security apparatus. Indeed, the DFS, founded in 1946, was largely a creature of the CIA, which has contributed a substantial portion of the outfit’s budget since the 1950s and has kept many of its senior officers on its payroll.

  The CIA viewed the DFS as an important component of the US intelligence network. It served as a source of information on the activities of the Soviets, Cubans and Eastern Bloc officials in Mexico, provided intelligence on popular insurgencies throughout Latin America, and protected some of the CIA’s most problematic associates, particularly the growing cadre of anti-Castro Cubans. One of the Cuban exiles who enjoyed the indulgences of the DFS was Alberto Sicilia-Falcon. Sicilia-Falcon was flamboyant and cruel. By the mid-1970s, the Cuban was regarded as the pre-eminent drug smuggler in the Western Hemisphere, a fame that won him the favors of many high-ranking Mexican politicians, including Maria Ester Zuño de Echeverría, the wife of Mexican president Luis Echeverría. Señora Echeverría’s family had its own links to the drug trade, including ties to European heroin operations. Her brother, Rubin, would later be convicted of involvement in the slaying of Enrique Camarena.

  Sicilia-Falcon fled Cuba after the revolution in 1959, landing in Miami. He says he was trained by the CIA in Miami for several night raids on Cuba, delivering weapons to anti-Castro troops on the island. In the late 1960s, Sicilia-Falcon moved to Mexico and got involved in the marijuana trade. He entered the cocaine business in the early 1970s after being introduced by Juan Matta Ballesteros to Calí cocaine lords Santiago Ocampo and Benjamin Herrera Zueita, known as the “black pope of cocaine.”

  Soon Sicilia-Falcon was a billionaire, living in a fortified compound outside Tijuana called the Roundhouse. The premises were guarded by a contingent of DFS troops armed with AK-47s. From the Roundhouse, Sicilia-Falcon commanded his $5-billion-a-year drug enterprise, an international arms-smuggling network and a team of thugs, ready for use against rival drug outfits or incorruptible cops.

  One of Sicilia-Falcon’s closest associates was a Bay of Pigs veteran and CIA-trained operative named José Egozi Bejar. Egozi, a financial wizard, inhabited the twilight world where intelligence agencies, private armies and organized crime intersect. Since the Bay of Pigs, Egozi had worked off and on for the CIA. He had also lent his considerable talents to the DFS and maintained cordial relations with the mob in Las Vegas.

  During their investigation of Sicilia-Falcon, DEA agents interviewed Egozi. He admitted that he had introduced Sicilia-Falcon to “political contacts” in the Mexican elite, helped him set up a network of bank accounts to launder his drug proceeds and had once given the drug lord a CIA catalogue of weapons. They also worked together in an attempt to finance the Morgan super-rifle, a high-powered gun made by a Los Angeles-based firm that the CIA wanted put in the hands of its covert armies in Latin America. In 1974, Egozi and Sicilia-Falcon arranged a $250 million weapons shipment for a CIA-supported coup attempt against the recently elected socialist parliament in Portugal.

  Sicilia-Falcon’s other connection to the CIA came in the person of Miguel Nazar Haro, the head of the DFS from the mid-1970s to 1982. After Sicilia-Falcon’s arrest by Mexican police and the US DEA in 1976, Nazar intervened, keeping the Cuban drug trafficker from being tortured during interrogation. Nazar’s judicious intervention also, of course, kept Sicilia-Falcon from exposing his connections to Mexican politicians and intelligence agencies.

  Nazar had been on the CIA’s payroll for years and headed a CIA-financed counterinsurgency team called the Guardias Blancas, the White Brigade, notorious for its bloody suppressions of populist uprisings. The security chief’s interests also extended to more traditional criminal enterprises. The DEA produced witnesses at two drug trials in the 1980s who fingered Nazar as ordering his DFS troops to serve as security details for Mexico’s leading narcotics traffickers. The witnesses also testified that Nazar himself had made a fortune in the drug trade.

  In 1979, Nazar came under investigation by the FBI for running a car-theft ring out of his office in Mexico City. According to the FBI, car thieves would steal cars in Los Angeles and San Diego, drive them across the border and drop them off at the DFS office in Tijuana. The hot cars were then driven by DFS agents to Mexico City for Nazar’s personal inspection, after which they were sold. By no means was this a small-time operation. The FBI estimated that this car-theft ring had stolen more than 4,000 cars.

  A grand jury in San Diego indicted Nazar and some of his collaborators. But the CIA came to the rescue of its Mexican protégé. Warnings were issued to the Justice Department saying that Nazar was “an essential repeat essential contact for the CIA station in Mexico City.” The Agency insisted that prosecution of Nazar would deal a “disastrous blow” to the “security of the United States.” The CIA claimed that Nazar was its “most important source in Mexico and Central America.”

  The CIA got its way. Deputy Attorney General Lowell Jensen intervened to block Nazar’s prosecution. The move outraged William Kennedy, the US Attorney for San Diego, who disclosed to a reporter the CIA’s heavy-handed tactics in the Nazar case. For this impertinent act, Kennedy was promptly fired by Ronald Reagan.

  Two of the other DFS officers indicted but not tried in the auto theft case, Juventino Prado Hurtado and Raúl Pérez Carmona, were later arrested in Mexico for their involvement in the 1984 slaying of Mexican journalist Manuel Buendía. The DFS was finally disbanded in 1985, following revelations of high-level involvement in the Camarena case. But many of its key operators simply switched agencies, ending up in similar positions in the equally corrupt and brutal Federal Judicial Police or the military. As for Nazar, he disappeared for a while but resurfaced in 1989 when Mexico’s new president, Carlos Salinas, picked him to head up his new Police Intelligence Directorate.

  NAFTA, Carlos Salinas and the rise of the Mexican Cartels

  Carlos Salinas de Gortari was selected as the PRI candidate for the 1988 Mexican presidential election. The Harvard-trained economist enjoyed the enthusiastic backing of the US government and press. Salinas came from the ruling elite of Mexico. His father, Raúl Salinas Lozano, had long served as Mexico’s minister of industry and commerce. Since 1982, Carlos Salinas had been the architect of the Mexican economy, overseeing the wild fluctuations of the peso from his post as cabinet secretary for programs and budgets.

  The ruling PRI party, which Salinas now headed, had not lost its grip on the Mexican presidency for more than seventy years. But during the 1988 elections, Salinas was pitted against the left-populist candidacy of Cuauhtémoc Cardenas. As the first votes began to be tallied, Cardenas appeared to be winning. Then Interior Minister Manuel Bartlett Diaz ordered a suspension of the counting. Bartlett, a long-time powerbroker in the PRI who had been accused of involvement in the Camarena kidnapping, claimed that the electoral computer system had crashed Ten days later Salinas was declared the winner with 52 percent of the vote. Over the next month, official vote sheets were found to have been altered by the placement of additional zeros in Salinas’s PRI column. More than 20,000 ballots that favored Cardenas were found in waste dumps or floating in riverbeds. An independent analysis of the vote estimated that Cardenas had in fact won with 42 percent, against Salinas’s 36 percent.

  Washington was delighted with Salinas’s triumph. An April 13, 1989 editorial in the Washington Post is typical of the kind of reception Salinas received in the American press: “When Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari took office last December, he was known as a technocrat with three degrees from Harvard and an interest in economics – not exactly a scintillator. That, together with the relatively narrow margin by which he won the election, seemed to indicate a distant and cautious style of leadership. Instead, Mr. Salinas has been enforcing the law and, not incidentally, asserting presidential power, with a ferocity that Mexicans have not seen for a generation.”

  The great project of the Salinas regime was to privatize the Mexican economy. Land reform initiat
ives in rural Mexico were rolled back and the heritage of the revolution ruthlessly dismembered. Salinas and his cronies also moved swiftly to suppress the Mexican labor movement. One of his first actions was against Joaquín Hernández Galicia, the head of the powerful Oil Workers Union, who had campaigned on behalf of Cardenas. Less than three weeks after taking office, Salinas ordered the arrest of Hernández on bogus charges of stockpiling weapons. Later that year, Salinas sent 5,000 paratroopers to crush a strike at the Cananea copper mine in Sonora. The US Embassy showed a particular fondness for Salinas’s secretary of labor, Arsenio Farrell, who cracked down mercilessly on labor unions and striking workers. “Farrell has maintained his reputation as a formidable labor opponent,” exulted a US Embassy report on Mexican labor trends under the Salinas government. “He has maintained pressure on the labor sector in an effort to hold the line on wage demands. Farrell has not hesitated in declaring a number of strike actions illegal, thus undercutting their possibility for success.”

  In 1992, Salinas responded to concerns voiced by American factory owners doing business in northern Mexico that Agapito Gonzáles, the 76-year-old leader of the Day Laborers and Industrial Workers Union in Matamoras, was making life difficult by agitating for higher wages. Salinas had Gonzáles picked up on charges of tax evasion, later found to be groundless.

  While Salinas as opening up Mexico to a flood of foreign investment, he was also engaged in the biggest disposal of government-owned businesses in the history of Mexico. In his six years in office, Salinas sold off 252 state-owned companies, including the national telephone firm and the nation’s eighteen largest banks, a $23 billion stream of revenues to the PRI insiders and intimates of Salinas, who were able to profit first from the looting of Mexico’s public assets. The bonanza produced a new crop of billionaires. This largesse did not go unappreciated. In February 1993, when the PRI coffers were running low and the leftist opposition was gaining strength, the Mexican Twelve, the country’s top billionaires, gathered for a fund-raiser, where Carlos Salinas pleaded with them to dig deep in their pockets. By the end of the meeting the twelve businessmen had ponied up $750 million. Emilio Azcarraga, head of the Mexican television network Televisa, alone pledged $50 million.