El Narco

by Ioan Grillo

  The Salinas conspiracy focuses on the president’s brother, Raúl Salinas. During Carlos’s 1988-to-1994 term, Raúl had a government job at $192,000 a year. That was tasty money in a country where the minimum wage is $5 a day. But Raúl also proved an especially good saver. In 1995, he was found to have $85 million in a Swiss bank account when his wife got arrested trying to withdraw it. That was only the tip of the iceberg. Investigators found he had a whopping 289 bank accounts in such veritable institutions as Citibank. Swiss police estimated he had upward of $500 million altogether.9

  A Mexican politician has many ways besides drugs to skim money. However, Swiss police interviewed ninety Raúl Salinas associates, including convicted drug traffickers, and concluded that El Narco was the main source. Their report stated:

  “When Carlos Salinas de Gortari became President of Mexico in 1988, Raúl Salinas de Gortari assumed control over practically all drug shipments through Mexico. Through his influence and bribes paid with drug money, officials of the army and the police supported and protected the flourishing drug business.”

  Raúl and his brother, President Carlos Salinas, have consistently denied all this as smears and misinformation. However, when Salinas finished his term in 1994, Raúl Salinas was arrested in Mexico for masterminding a murder and served a ten-year prison term before being acquitted. Money-laundering charges against him in Switzerland still drag on.

  Carlos Salinas himself left Mexico after his term for a self-imposed exile in the Republic of Ireland. Apparently, he enjoys rain and thick black beer. Mexicans later vilified him as a puppet master akin to the evil emperor in the Star Wars movies and fear he is the hidden hand behind anything from guerrilla attacks to bad weather.

  After Salinas left, his economic miracle collapsed like a paper tiger. In 1995, months into the new government of President Ernesto Zedillo, money poured out of the economy and the peso fell like a dead weight, triggering double-digit inflation. Overnight, the number of Mexican billionaires was halved from twenty-four to twelve. Down below, the middle class had their life savings wiped out, while many companies went out of business, costing millions of jobs. Bill Clinton, who had worked closely with Salinas, rushed faithfully to the rescue with a $50 billion bailout package to save Mexico from collapse.

  This crisis sparked a surge in crime. Despite the steady rise of drug trafficking, modern Mexico had not been a dangerous country until then. Even in the eighties, mugging and robbery rates were relatively low, and Mexicans strolled the streets of big cities at all hours. But those good old days came to a rude end. Mugging, carjacking, and the heinous crime of kidnapping shot up, especially in the capital. Suddenly, everyone in Mexico City had a story about a family member getting a gun stuck to his head and turning out his pockets. Police failed to respond to this crime wave, creating an atmosphere of impunity that paved the way for the current criminal insurgency.

  One Mexican industry wasn’t affected by the peso crisis. Drug trafficking kept bringing in the billions, and as it got paid in dollars, the devaluation of the peso just gave El Narco more power. With an army of unemployed, the cartels could recruit foot soldiers more cheaply than before. El Narco became more deeply entrenched in slums across the country.

  Another crucial transformation happened in this time: Mexicans in meaningful numbers started taking hard drugs. Mexicans had long seen cocaine and heroin as a gringo vice. “The Colombians make it, the Mexicans traffic it, and the Americans snort it,” observers joked. But by the late nineties, Mexico had to concede it had its own army of heroin junkies and crackheads.

  The spread of these drugs was directly linked to traffic. To maximize profits, Mexican capos started paying their lieutenants with bricks of cocaine and bags of heroin as well as cash. Many of these midranking hoods unloaded their products on Mexico’s own streets to make a quick peso.

  Tijuana developed the highest level of drug use in the country, with Arellano Félix affiliates setting up hundreds of tienditas, or little drug shops, especially in the center and eastside slums. The cartel’s mob of hit men protected these drug retailers, adding an extra dimension to Mexican drug violence. Now it wasn’t just about moving tons over the border; it was also about slinging crack to addicts.

  Fighting over street corners drove violence to new highs with some three hundred homicides a year in Tijuana, and the same number in Juárez toward the end of the nineties. These were rates comparable to those of gang-infested U.S. cities such as Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans. The American media began to pick up on the bloodshed and, for the first time, talk about the danger of “Colombianization,” or the prospect of a full-blown narco war exploding on the United States’ doorstep. Most dismissed such naysayers as alarmist nut jobs. As it turns out, the alarmist nut jobs were right.

  American media also picked up on the bubbly characters of the Arellano Félix brothers and their cocaine binges, disco dancing, and dissolving of victims in acid. Time magazine published a story on them,10 and the movie Traffic even had characters based on them making cocaine deals with Catherine Zeta-Jones. Accompanying the media attention were a series of indictments and rewards in the United States. And anytime that anyone mentioned the Arellano Félix brothers, the name of journalist Blancornelas flashed up. He really pissed them off.

  Blancornelas thinks the last straw for Ramón Arellano Félix wasn’t even a story he wrote but a letter he printed. One day, a distraught woman came into the Zeta office and asked to publish an ad. When she was told how much it would cost, she said softly that she didn’t have enough money. The curious Zeta worker asked to see what she wanted on display, and when he saw it, he immediately called Blancornelas. The journalist read the letter and was so moved he agreed to run it for free.

  The woman had written a letter addressed directly to Ramón Arellano Félix, who’d ordered the murder of her two sons. The young men had been caught up in some street beef with one of Ramón’s lieutenants. The mother wrote fearlessly out of love for her lost children:

  “My beloved sons were the victims of the envy and cowardice of you, the Arellanos … You don’t deserve to die yet. Death should not be your price or your punishment. I hope you live for many years and know the pain of losing children.”11

  The woman disappeared from Tijuana after publishing the letter. Blancornelas believes she ran before the mafia could execute her. The frustrated Ramón Arellano Félix thus turned his wrath on the journalist.

  Ten hit men ambushed Blancornelas as he drove with his bodyguard Luis Valero. They sprayed their car with bullets, killing Valero instantly. But Blancornelas was still alive with four caps in him. The chief hit man than strolled up to the car to take the final shot. But as the assassin walked forward, he fired a bullet that ricocheted off the concrete and into his own eye, killing him instantly. The rest of the gang abandoned their chief in a pool of blood. Blancornelas was saved by a miracle.

  “Ramón ordered me dead. God didn’t want it … but disgracefully they killed my companion and protector Luis Valero.”12

  The chief hit man was identified as David Barron, a Chicano gangbanger from San Diego known to work with the Arellano Félixes. Barron had tattoos of fourteen skulls on his midriff and shoulders, reputedly one for each man he had killed. Zeta reporters identified six more of the attackers as fellow thugs of Barron’s from the San Diego barrio of Logan Heights. But despite the fact that Zeta handed piles of evidence to Mexican police, the thugs were never indicted and they were seen moving freely in San Diego. Some are still there.

  The three border tycoons of the nineties all went down eventually. Juan Garcia Ábrego of the Gulf Cartel was arrested in 1996. He gave himself up without a shot, nabbed in a ranch near Monterrey. As an old-school capo, he was ultimately respectful of the Mexican system, in which the government called the shots. A year later, Amado Carrillo Fuentes died of plastic-surgery complications in a Mexico City hospital. Or did he? A gangster of mythological proportions in life, he went out in his own puff of
smoke. It was all a trick, people whisper on the Juárez streets; Amado is really kicking it in the Caribbean sipping margaritas. Or maybe he is working in a gas station in Texas alongside Elvis Presley.

  The Arellano Félix brothers survived the longest. Ramón Arellano Félix, the baby-faced psycho who pioneered narco terror in Mexico, lived on until the twenty-first century. Then in 2002, he was shot dead in a traffic stop by a local policeman in the seaside resort of Mazatlán. It was quite an undramatic death for a legendary outlaw. Something had gone seriously wrong with his network of police protection. Blancornelas penned the story about the killing of the man who tried to kill him, noting, “If some of his many victims could speak from the grave, maybe they would say to Ramón, ‘As you are now, so once was I. As I am now, so you shall be.’”13

  A month later, army special forces nabbed Benjamin Arellano Félix in a home where he kept his wife and children. The bosses’ chief aides apparently failed to smell the trap. The capo is currently in Mexico’s top-security prison, fighting extradition to the United States. Robbed of its two leaders, the Arellano Félix clan struggled on with the other brothers and sisters, but was severely weakened.

  Blancornelas wasn’t long celebrating the demise of his nemesis. In 2004, assassins shot dead Francisco Ortiz, the third founder of Zeta magazine. Ortiz was leaving a downtown clinic with his young son and daughter when gunmen fired four bullets into his neck and head. His two children shouted, “Papi! Papi!” as he died beside them, a witness said. This time, Zeta magazine was not even sure who was behind the hit.

  Blancornelas despaired. While his reporting may have helped bring down one set of bad guys, cartels had only got more powerful and more violent. He was one of the few that saw the writing on the wall. As he said in an interview shortly before he died:

  “El Narco used to be in certain states. But now its has grown across the whole of the Mexican republic. Soon El Narco will knock on the door of the presidential palace. It will knock on the door of the attorney general’s office. And this will present a great danger.”14

  CHAPTER 6

  Democrats

  If the dog is tied up,

  Although he barks all day,

  You shouldn’t let him free,

  My grandma used to say.

  But the fox broke the plates,

  And the dog chewed on his leash,

  And then the dog was freed,

  To cause a bloody mess.

  —“LA GRANJA” (THE FARM), TIGRES DEL NORTE, 2009

  The world threw up some intrepid and inspiring heroes of democracy at the end of the twentieth century. In Poland, there was Lech Walesa, the hardened union man who endured years of repression before leading his people to rise and defeat authoritarian communism. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela survived twenty-seven years on a prison island, then rid the world of the dastardly affliction of racist apartheid while avoiding a bloody vengeance that might have shattered his country. Then in Mexico there was … Senor Vicente Fox.

  The man who led Mexico’s final march from the authoritarian PRI to multiparty democracy was the unlikeliest of characters. He came from neither the socialist left nor Catholic right, the two factions that rose up to challenge PRI hegemony. Instead, he was a wealthy rancher and Coca-Cola executive who haphazardly stepped into politics at age forty-six and became governor of his native state of Guanajuato seven years later. While he joined the conservative National Action Party, he was never one of their true religionists. Rather than being ideological, he espoused his country values of hard work and forthrightness. He was known for his frank, rancherlike comments that could turn into gaffes. He once said, “Mexicans do the jobs in the United States that even blacks don’t want to do,”1 as well as calling women “washing machines with two flippers.”

  Fox had political talents suited for the moment in history. Mexicans were sick of conniving politicians who had sacked their country. Fox appeared an outsider, a straight shooter who would fix the broken political machine as if he were mending a tractor. In contrast to the tedious speeches of PRI presidents, he spoke in an everyday language that people understood. When he called for democracy, he sounded as if he believed in it from the bottom of his heart. Throughout the election cycle, both for his party’s nomination, and then for the presidency, he was in a zone. He kept saying the right things at the right time. When he won, he was suddenly out of the zone. He looked like a cornered fox, overwhelmed and puzzled as to what to do.

  Open with the press, Fox gave off a warm, familiar quality, appearing like the neighbor you used to chat to occasionally or an old friend from college. His tall, lanky body and mustache have a slightly comic air, akin to that of the English comedian John Cleese, although Fox wore cowboy boots and I never saw him in a bowler hat. His voice is deep and powerful, making him a charismatic speaker.

  “I felt an incredible happiness to be at the head of this movement that liberated Mexico from the yoke of authoritarianism,” Fox later told me, reflecting on his presidency in an interview in his native village.2

  What was quite remarkable is that the PRI allowed Fox to win at all and didn’t announce any computer failures in the middle of the vote count. The last PRI president, Ernesto Zedillo, was a curious character, a man from a poor family who became a Yale-educated technocrat and stepped into the Mexican presidency after the previous PRI candidate was assassinated. Zedillo, resistant to pressures from within his own party, was determined to allow the democratic transition. If Mexico were the Soviet Union, Zedillo was the reforming genius Mikhail Gorbachev and Fox the less sparkling Boris Yeltsin, who took the helm.

  Zedillo made brave moves against his own corrupt establishment: he oversaw the arrest of Raúl Salinas for alleged murder; the arrest of the governor of Quintana Roo state on drug-trafficking charges; and even the arrest of his own drug czar General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo for being in league with mobsters. Zedillo also coaxed the PRI to loose its grip on power before it gave up the presidency. Mexico’s federal electoral institute gained autonomy in 1996, and the PRI lost its majority in Congress in 1997. It would be harder to fix an election, even if the PRI wanted to.

  These actions all shook up the drug underworld and its system of police and political protection. Gangsters nervously repositioned themselves and held tight to see what a democratic president would do. When Fox took office, the seismic lines of Mexican power shifted; the end of seventy-one years of PRI rule was a genuine political earthquake.

  From his first days in office, Fox showed himself to be without a clear direction on most issues, drug trafficking included. Time and time again, he put forward plans, and when faced with resistance, he changed course or capitulated. He swore to convict officials from the old regime for their dirty war that “disappeared” five hundred leftists. But when the PRI wouldn’t play ball, he left prosecutions hanging and just released a report about it. He promised sweeping modernizations of Mexico’s economy and justice system. But when the opposition booed him in parliament, he avoided dealing with Congress as much as possible. He pushed hard for the rights of migrants, becoming the first Mexican to speak before a joint session of the U.S. Congress and urging a new guest-worker program. But then the September 11 attacks happened, and Americans put the immigration issue on the back burner.

  Quite soon, it seemed, Fox abandoned trying to have much of a domestic program and spent time swanning round the world or entertaining visiting dignitaries. The United Nations, Organization of American States, World Trade Organization, and dozens more groups held summits in what critics started calling “Foxi-landia.” Fox never looked happier than when he was hosting these events and cheering the wonders of multilateralism and the spread of democracy.

  Fox had talked little about drugs in his election campaign—his focus had been on getting the PRI out of power. But when he took office, American drug warriors hoped that a democratic president could mean a new era of cooperation. The days of corrupt police conspiring to murder DEA agents were over.
Now Mexico could help agents clock up arrests and busts the way the Colombians did. Fox keenly accepted the challenge, making a highly quotable promise in his first interview with American television following his victory. As he told ABC’s Nightline, “We are going to give the mother of all battles against organized crime in Mexico. No doubt.”3

  Fox had promised to take the military out of the war on drugs. But after an initial meeting with American officials, who felt soldiers were the most reliable antidrug operatives, he switched course and said he would keep troops fighting traffickers after all. The Americans were happy. This was a guy they could work with.

  The first sign that Fox’s drug policy might not be as good as these Americans hoped came just two months into his administration. On January 21, 2001, arch-mafioso Chapo Guzmán escaped from a high-security prison in Guadalajara. The Sinaloan godfather was back in town.

  According to data dug up by journalist José Reveles, Chapo built up his power in the prison over several years by throwing bribes at officials.4 In return, he won the right to bring in different women to his cell; choose girls from the cleaning stuff to have sex with; and have relations with a female prisoner called Zulema Hernandez, a tall, blond armed robber in her thirties. Chapo also smuggled Viagra into the penitentiary. More pertinently, Guzmán used his network of corruption to break himself out. Zulema later gave journalist Julio Scherer a love letter from Chapo, in which the drug lord said his escape was imminent. As Chapo, or what some have guessed was a ghostwriter, penned:

  “I want to give you a sweet kiss and feel you in my arms to conserve this memory every time I think of you, and withstand your absence so God can permit us to reunite in other conditions that will not be in this place.”5

  Two prison guards helped smuggle Chapo out of the pen. To get them on his side, the kingpin paid for the medical operation of the son of one and set up another with a beautiful Sinaloan girlfriend. This happy guard then personally drove Chapo out of the prison in a laundry truck.