by Dan Slater
La Barbie scrambled. He separated from his first wife, his high school sweetheart, and married Priscilla, the teenage daughter of a Laredo trafficking associate. But La Barbie was losing friends and money fast. Via his attorney, he contacted the DEA office in Laredo. DEA wanted an informant to help capture Arturo Beltrán-Leyva (ABL), the Sinaloan associate who was La Barbie’s boss, as well as Chapo, the Sinaloan head. La Barbie told DEA that he would surrender only under certain conditions. From an internal DEA memo:
(1) VALDEZ-Villareal will provide information and intelligence on top corrupt Mexican Gov’t officials, whom DEA and other federal agencies in Mexico work with;
(2) will not provide information on [cartel leaders] discussed in the first negotiation;
(3) if and when arrested, VALDEZ-Villareal wants to immediately be extradited to the U.S.;
(4) wants immunity from prosecution for himself and two of his cousins;
(5) does not want to testify against any person who he provides information on.
“Legal considerations still need to be reviewed by AUSA Angel Moreno,” the memo said. “The terms agreed upon by the District Office and the McAllen District Office are listed below.”
(1) VALDEZ-Villareal must agree to meet with Agents of the DEA in a neutral country in order to fully debrief;
(2) VALDEZ-Villareal must provide information which will result in the arrest of one of three [cartel leaders] (BELTRAN-Leyva, GUZMAN-Loera, or ZAMBADA-Garcia);
(3) VALDEZ-Villareal will not be granted full immunity from prosecution (possibly consider minimum jail time);
(4) VALDEZ-Villareal will turn himself in to U.S. authorities at a U.S. port of entry or a country where extradition is possible; and
(5) VALDEZ-Villareal will surrender an amount equal to the amount he wants to bring into the U.S. (VALDEZ-Villareal has expressed his desire to bring $5 million into the U.S.)
La Barbie offered to help nab ABL or Chapo, but not both. Laredo agents were eager to strike a deal, but their boss in Houston quashed the negotiations: “He’s a fucking doper; if he doesn’t want to cooperate, screw him.”
At the time, the American government was talking to one of its biggest cartel cooperators. Osiel Cárdenas, the Gulf Cartel leader from whose mind the Zetas sprung a decade earlier, was extradited to the States in 2007, and sentenced in 2010. Eligible for a life sentence, Osiel was scheduled for release in 2025. His plea agreement remained sealed. But Osiel, through his own informant, passed along information to U.S. authorities about drug loads and the whereabouts of Gulf Cartel and Zeta underbosses—the kind of meaningful, real-time intelligence that only a top capo could possess. There may have also been an exchange of money between Osiel and the U.S. government. In 2013, in a Zeta-related federal trial in Washington, D.C., a former Zeta lieutenant would testify that the Company sent $60 million for Osiel “to use in the United States to lower his sentence.”I
The kingpin strategy—in which American and Mexican authorities sought to dismantle cartels by going after their top leaders—was not just a fallacy (extradited leaders cut great deals for short sentences, while lackeys tended to get much heavier sentences) but a catastrophe: When a capo was captured, the ensuing power vacuums only ignited more violence. As one scholar observed, President Calderón’s effort to clean up his country locked Mexico into “a self-reinforcing equilibrium of instability.”
It wasn’t all Calderón’s fault. He may have lost Mexico to the savages, just like Presidents Fox, Zedillo, and Salinas before him . . . all the way back to Benito Juárez, Mexico’s twenty-sixth president, from 1858 to 1872, who ran off the French and Spanish occupiers but established a too-weak central government of his own. Like the lord of Culhuacán, ruler of the old empire when his Aztec mercenaries revolted, Calderón and Fox inherited a doomed kingdom. The paternalism of American drug policy—combined with the Great Father’s clever trade agreements, geopolitical agendas, and tricky systems of debt—ensured that Mexico remained, as the intelligentsia put it, problematic.
* * *
I. The government excluded this testimony from the public record, and denied the author’s request pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act. The transcript, provided to the author by a confidential source, shows that the judge held a private meeting with the lawyers and said: “The witness implied that $60 million was sent here to help reduce [Osiel’s] sentence. Are we going to let that stay just the way it is on the record?” The judge added: “It leaves a certain implication that one would like to have cleared up, if the $60 million was going to affect his sentence. I hope that wasn’t the case. If it was $60 million to pay an attorney, maybe we could bring that out rather than making it sound like something different.” The issue was never resolved and never raised again on the record.
30
The Messiest War
Ever since 1990, the old authoritarian PRI government that once managed a relatively peaceful drug industry in Mexico had been losing power in an average of eighty municipalities per year. Every electoral cycle, opposition parties claimed another 10 percent of Mexico’s total local government. By 2012, a PRI president was in office again, but the party’s dictatorial hold on Mexico was gone. A story that began, half a century earlier, with a centralized political system in which traffickers and politicians shared tables at wedding parties, ended with traffickers assassinating fifteen mayors and one gubernatorial candidate in 2010 alone.
In that year, Heriberto Lazcano, the Zeta leader, orchestrated a split from the Gulf Cartel, dividing the two entities that once comprised the Company, and turned the Zetas against their former masters. Lazcano appointed Miguel Treviño to be the Zetas’ national commander.
Under Miguel’s leadership, the Zetas appeared to pivot from a criminal business to a terror organization. When Miguel heard that the cartels allied against him were summoning reinforcements from the south, rumored to be arriving in northeast Mexico in low-profile public buses, he intercepted buses in San Fernando, a minor plaza between Veracruz and the border, and oversaw the slaughter of what appeared to be simple laborers. It was hard to tell what they’d been. When the burial pits were discovered, the bodies had been deformed by blunt-force trauma. “Who wants to live?” Miguel reportedly asked, before forcing the men into gladiatorial combat, with the losers beaten to death and the winners sent on missions against rivals.
Miguel also turned against his old Zeta co-commander, Iván Velásquez-Caballero, El Talivan, who split from the Zetas and recruited soldiers from a new cartel called the Knights Templar. In 2012, a narcomanta—a poster that cartels use, like a billboard, to spread intimidation—hung from a bridge in Tamaulipas, and was allegedly written by Miguel. The narcomanta provided insight into Miguel’s thinking about the cartel landscape, as well as his take on the latest internecine battles:
To all the Knights Templar and dumb asses that have left with the stupid fag and mediocre El Talivan, you can all suck my dick. You are a bunch of fags that run in packs. . . . You are a bunch of thieves, extortionists, and half-dead hungry fucks that don’t know how to confront me. . . . You are traitors. . . . I am loyal to the Letter [Z] and to Comandante Lazcano. CDG [Cartel del Golfo, the Gulf Cartel] is done. . . . The ones that remain in CDG are thieves, snitches, and pussies. What is left is secondary and third-level guys. They’re going to fuck each other up. That’s what happens when there is no leader to control those pussies. The Knights Templar are a bunch of crystal meth addicts that are always charging avocado farmers quotas and even schools. . . .
When Lazcano tried to cool him off, Miguel turned on his boss and set him up. One month after the narcomanta, Lazcano was leaving a baseball game in Coahuila when Mexican security forces closed in. Lazcano and his companion sped away in a pickup truck as Lazcano shot rocket-propelled grenades from the back. The driver was hit first. Lazcano was shot dead three hundred yards from the vehicle. Masked men later stole his body from a funeral home.
As head of the Zetas, Miguel traveled from city t
o city, usually during the night, to check operations and deliver munitions to his comandantes and soldados. He would move with large groups of bodyguards, then disappear into a city by himself. Sometimes he hid out alone at ranches.
Through high-level informants, J. J. Gomez, now a veteran DEA agent, tracked Miguel’s movements and coordinated with other U.S. and Mexican agencies. On July 15, 2013, Mexican authorities captured Miguel before dawn, without a shot fired, after he spent time with his newborn child at a house near the border. In his pickup truck, he had eight guns and two million dollars in cash. He assumed he could buy his way out of the arrest.
“Don’t even ask any questions,” he told his captors, “because I’m not answering any.”
In his perp-walk photo, Miguel wore a black golf shirt and camouflage pants. Now in his forties, he’d put on weight. Bloat concealed his once-prominent cheekbones. Head back, chest out, he looked down his nose through irritated eyes, a commander interrupted during important work.
WEEKS AFTER MIGUEL’S ARREST IN Mexico, one of his older brothers, José Treviño, was convicted in the United States for laundering Company money through a quarter-horse outfit in Oklahoma. Details about Miguel’s horse business came out at trial: how races were fixed, how front men were used to buy horses, and how prominent members of the quarter-horse industry were co-opted.
It was good grist for local Texas newspapers. But to people like Robert Garcia, the horse trial was a case in point: massive resources poured into a years-long investigation that achieved, ultimately, nothing. In the overall scheme of cartel finances and money laundering, the horse business was minuscule. The real money-laundering cases never went to trial. Between 2004 and 2006, Wachovia, the American banking giant, helped cartels clean billions. The prosecutor said Wachovia disregarded banking laws and gave cartels “a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations.” Wachovia’s punishment was 2 percent of the bank’s 2009 profits.
When Washington handed out the award for “Outstanding OCDETF Investigation,” the horse case, for all the press it received, was passed over. Instead, the award went to Operation El Chacal, a different Zeta case that yielded $22 million in cash, a half ton of coke, nearly a ton of marijuana, and 301 firearms. It also saved a kidnapping victim, and provided evidence to solve three Laredo homicides. In El Chacal, Robert was a lead investigator on the state side, handling the homicides and kidnappings, but it was hard to get too excited about the award.
On paper, OCDETF was a beautiful concept—a financing mechanism that facilitated interagency cooperation and focused resources on a single target. And top cartel guys did get captured. In 2013, Talivan was extradited to Laredo, where he pleaded guilty, was debriefed, and awaited sentencing. Omar Treviño, Miguel’s brother, who liked to launder his money through the coal mining and construction industries, was captured in Matamoros in 2015.
Ten years earlier, this slate of arrests had been what Robert wanted: to bring down “the fuckers doing the violence.” But these guys fell, and someone else stepped up. The southwest region could do fifty OCDETF investigations a year and see little impact. Removing the head of a cartel sent a message to criminals, but to what end? Without addressing the drug market on this side, it didn’t matter how many capos you killed on the other.
LA BARBIE KEPT SHOPPING HIS intelligence around at federal agencies—CIA, ICE—and found a receptive party at FBI, which used his information (and used him to transfer a tracking device) to capture and kill Arturo Beltrán-Leyva in Mexico in 2009. “At that point, La Barbie would’ve loved to come to the States and get a big sentence reduction,” said Art Fontes, an FBI agent who worked on the case. “But there was never an explicit agreement where we told him, ‘Yes, we can help you.’ It was complicated. Too many jurisdictions had charges on him. There’d also been some executions of police officers in Mexico.”
So La Barbie was in the wind once again, hoping, in ABL’s absence, to take control of the hefty cocaine business that came through the port at Zihuatanejo. But without affiliation, La Barbie didn’t last long. He was captured by DEA, FBI, and Mexican authorities in 2010 at a house near Mexico City. Trotted before the cameras, smiling, he wore a green rugby jersey with a big Polo symbol on the chest. His legacy lived on in the fashion craze he created, “Narco Polo.” After five years in a Mexican prison—a time during which his usefulness as an informant faded—La Barbie was extradited to Atlanta, where he pleaded guilty to one of the charges against him, and awaited sentencing.
Capo of capos, head of the Sinaloa Cartel, Chapo Guzmán, the most wily and enduring drug lord, was apprehended in 2014 and incarcerated in Puente Grande, one of Mexico’s highest-security prisons. Underscoring the extent of Chapo’s reach into the United States, American twin brothers from Chicago played a crucial role in his capture. Between 2001 and 2008, Pedro and Margarito Flores became the Midwest hub of the Sinaloa Cartel. The identical brothers were in their early twenties when they started, and smuggled at least seventy-one tons of cocaine and heroin to Chicago and beyond. They moved $700 million worth of drugs annually—about five times what’s seized in Chicago during a typical year—and employed legions of henchmen.
After they were caught, the Flores twins became DEA informants and recorded conversations in Mexico with Chapo himself. At their 2015 sentencing, the Chicago federal judge called the twins the “most significant drug dealers” he’d ever seen, while praising their performance as snitches. The Flores twins got fourteen years; with six years already served, as informants, a time during which they secretly imported hundreds of pounds of heroin to Chicago, they’d be out of prison by their fortieth birthdays. Six months after the twins’ sentencing, Chapo escaped from prison (again) through a tunnel, and six months later he was once again apprehended.
But in October 2015, while still on the lam, Chapo gave a rare interview to the American actor Sean Penn and the Mexican actress Kate del Castillo. Wearing a baseball cap and a button-down shirt of blue paisley, Chapo, located on what appeared to be some kind of farm, sat before a camera. While roosters crowed nearby, he answered questions for seventeen minutes.
Where he grew up, in the Sierra Madre mountains, there were no decent job opportunities, he told his interviewers. His family grew corn and beans. His mother made bread and he sold it, along with oranges, soft drinks, and candy. To survive, people also grew poppy and marijuana. Drug trafficking, Chapo explained, is part of a culture that originated with “the ancestors.” But now there are more drugs, more people, more traffickers, and more ways of doing business. It’s a reality that drugs destroy humanity, he confessed, but he’s not responsible for the drugs in the world. The day he ceases to exist, drugs won’t stop flowing. He also denied that his organization is a cartel. People who dedicate their lives “to this activity,” he said, don’t depend on him; drug trafficking doesn’t depend on one person. As for the violence that goes with it, some people “grow up with problems, and there is some envy,” he said, but he doesn’t go looking for trouble. He only defends himself.
STATISTICS ABOUT HOMICIDE ARE HARD to prove, particularly in an underworld, and particularly in Mexico, where, scholars claim, only 25 percent (or less) of crimes are reported. Some say at least 60,000 people died between 2006 and 2012, the years Calderón held office. Others report that, during that same period, at least 150,000 died or went missing in Mexico. Neither of those estimates includes deaths from the pre-2006 era, nor the more than 800 people Miguel claimed to have killed by 2005. If the estimate of 150,000 dead or missing between 2006 and 2012 is based only on reported incidents, then multiply that number by four: The Mexican Drug War took more lives in those six years than all the American soldiers lost in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War combined. In Latin America, the murder rate for young males is the highest in the world.
Mainstream America’s disinterest in the war is often attributed to a lack of spillover violence. But many in U.S. law enforcement see it differently: The war is pushing north to new conteste
d areas. In 2005, the Department of Justice identified 100 American cities where cartels maintained distribution networks. By 2008, that number jumped to 230 cities—including Anchorage, Atlanta, Boston, and Billings. During that time, cartel-related violence occurred in Oregon, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Maryland, and New Jersey, among other northern states. After arresting fifteen members of the Sinaloa Cartel in North Carolina, the local sheriff said, “A few years ago, U.S. law enforcement didn’t see this as a problem for somewhere other than the border. But what happens at the border doesn’t stay at the border. It makes its way to my county pretty soon.”
Back in Texas, the Department of Public Safety said six of Mexico’s seven major cartels were actively recruiting Texas high school students to support drug, immigrant, currency, and weapon smuggling. Meanwhile, drug warriors in the DEA and elsewhere clung tighter to the war’s righteousness. Spillover violence, they insisted, was justification for renewed efforts, not cause for reassessment of a policy.
War had become a huge industry at home, just as it had abroad. One of Laredo’s many prosecutors-turned-defense-attorneys observed that Laredo, despite being on the border and mostly Hispanic, was similar to other big crime cities in America, insofar as approximately one-third of its legitimate economy depended on the drug war. Cops and agents, lawyers and judges, prisons and bail bondsmen—the list of beneficiaries went on.
The occasional victory made heroes out of agents. Jack Riley, the head of Chicago DEA, who helped turn the Flores twins against Chapo, said: “These days we operate as if Chicago is on the border.” Riley’s success was rewarded with a move to Washington and a promotion to number three overall in DEA. According to ABC’s Chicago affiliate, Riley left “a city where heroin and crack cocaine are still sold like ice cream bars by street corner vendors.”