by Ioan Grillo
The Colombian National Police bases its antidrug strategy on the DEA’s trusted use of informants. In fact, they have enhanced the technique. Large resources are given over to paying informants major rewards so they can become rich for their rest of their lives from a tip-off. The government also works to persuade the community that ratting out the bad guys is an honorable rather than dishonorable activity. Following arrests, officials declare, “the government congratulates the brave men who gave information leading to this detention,” or a similar line. Snitches are heroes, it argues, not toads.
I wanted to take a closer look at how Colombia’s use of informants works. So on one of my visits to Bogotá, German photographer Oliver Schmieg introduces me to his trusted narc contact in the Colombian National Police, an agent who goes by the code name Richard. When we call Richard, he says he is actually meeting an informant at that very moment. But don’t worry, he says, we can come along and talk to his snitch as well!
We go to the meeting at a police and military club in an upscale Bogotá neighborhood. Such clubs are all over the country and are a perk that helps build morale in the security services. One of the key problems for Mexican police forces is low morale, as well as the bad pay and disastrous casualty rate. In contrast, the Colombian police clubs include swimming pools, soccer grounds, and restaurants. We find Richard sitting at a table drinking coffee. On his right-hand side is a fellow officer; on his left are two informants. We sit down for a cozy get-together: two journalists, two narcs, and two snitches.
Richard is a smooth-operating Colombian cop in his early forties with long black hair and a light brown leather jacket. He makes all of us round the table feel at ease with each other, as if it were an everyday situation. The informant singing like a bird is a skinny, light-skinned crook, wearing grubby jeans. He works in a cocaine laboratory in a part of the Colombian jungle controlled by right-wing paramilitaries. However, he explains, these same gangsters actually buy their cocaine from leftist guerrillas. Richard picks up on the point: “You see, all these bad guys are working together now. It is all about money.” Colombia is really fighting a criminal insurgency just like Mexico, he argues, not an ideological one.
Richard coaxes the snitch to describe the whole laboratory setup so that Colombian police can take it down. He asks the informant where the gunmen stand, where the weapons are stashed, where the generator is, what vehicles they have. He needs to know all the information so that there will be no surprises when a team goes in blasting. This is data that you can’t get from satellite images. You have to buy it.
The informant says that between sixty to eighty men are around the lab. They use Toyota pickups and have snipers with Kalashnikovs. Richard sketches down the details into a notepad and reports information into a cell phone. A few minutes later, he gets a call and a big smile spreads across his face. “The mission has been authorized,” he tells the snitch. “You are on.” If everything goes to plan, he says, the informant will get a reward of tens of thousands of dollars.
“In this business, the infomants need enough money to take their whole family and live in a different place. They need to be able to really make their life with what we give them. We can make them have some pride in their work. But the key incentive for them is going to be the money.”
But while it might be all about the bottom line, Richard has incredibly amiable relationships with his informants. He laughs and jokes and discusses intimate family matters. Turning round to me, he comments on this sociability.
“You have to be friends with each other in this business because you have to trust each other. If someone is loyal and works well, it is because they trust you. It can be hard for an informant to trust me and for me to trust them. So you have to build that trust.”
Richard comes from a rough village in the north of Colombia and joined the police as a way out of poverty. He has now spent twenty-one years on the force, mostly in the antinarcotics division. In this time, he has seen the turnaround in the Colombian security services. The methodical buying of information, he says, is a crucial part of the change. He is one of the best informant handlers in the force. He currently has contact with some two hundred sources.
“The most important thing is intelligence. If you have the sources, if you have the intelligence, then you can get any trafficker on the planet.”
The Colombian-style use of snitches is being imported into Mexico on a big scale. While paying informants was for a long time prohibited in Mexico, Calderón’s government introduced a major reward system. In 2010 and 2011 such payments were key in locating a string of major traffickers, who were arrested or shot down. This use of snitches is one of the main reasons that the Calderón government has been able to hit so many top targets—to the cheers of American agents. Looking at the future of the Mexican Drug War, the use of informants is likely to increase, making kingpins more vulnerable.
The people with most knowledge about drug operations are the high-level gangster operators: lieutenants, right-hand men, and the capos themselves. So when police arrest these big players, they bleed them for as much information as they can. Then they go ahead and seize more drugloads, labs, and gangsters.
Colombians decided in the 1990s that these arch-criminals posed less threat if they were extradited to the United States. So much of the bleeding of information is done there, in the form of negotiated deals. Top narco-lawyer Gustavo Salazar—who represented Pablo Escobar, some twenty other capos, and fifty of their lieutenants—explained the negotiations to me as we chatted in a Medellín café:
“I deal with these drug lords every day. They are these fearsome gangsters. And then they get arrested and they are like crying children. They are scared. They don’t want to be locked up in isolation for the rest of their lives. So they make deals.
“They let the agents know where some of their bank accounts and assets are. And they hand over names and routes of other traffickers. Then they get time in easier prisons or reduced sentences.”
Everybody knows that American courts love a plea bargain. And they love seizing assets of drug traffickers. The major players boast accounts with tens of millions of dollars or more.
The deals made by these traffickers have been documented for some time. Among the Colombian gangsters to make such a pact is Andrés López, a capo in the Norte del Valle Cartel. López snitched on other members of his criminal organization, who in turn also snitched. López then wrote a book about it all, called The Cartel of the Toads, which was made into a successful television series in Colombia.2 Apparently released and living in Miami, López then went on to co-write another book and live in the glitzy world of Latin American TV stars, dating some famous Mexican soap beauties.
Mexico has also substantially increased extraditions of kingpins to the United States. The deals developed between Colombian kingpins and American courts are moving to the Mexican capos.
The most high-profile deal has been made by drug lord Osiel Cárdenas, the founder of the Zetas. Osiel was extradited in 2007 and participated in negotiations with American authorities over the following three years. Details of the resulting pact were initially held from the public. But reporting by Dane Schiller of the Houston Chronicle uncovered much of the deal. Osiel Cárdenas was not sent to the roasting Colorado desert and locked up with Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros, inventor of the Mexican trampoline. Instead, Osiel was sent to a medium-security facility in Atlanta, where he can go to meals, the library, and recreation time. Also unlike Matta, he is not serving centuries behind bars. Cárdenas has a release date of 2028. In return, agents seized $32 million in his assets and Cárdenas gave up information about his old drug-trafficking allies. That data is likely behind many major arrests of Zetas in 2010 and 2011.3
More such deals are likely to mark the future of the Mexican Drug War. Bargains could be waiting for other Mexican traffickers wanted in the United States, such as Benjamin Arellano Félix or Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, or—if he is ever caught—even Chapo Guzmán
himself.
This system has some obvious flaws. When major criminals make deals to get out early, it can be seen as a bad example. It is not such a deterrent when a criminal career ends with the villain dating beautiful soap-opera stars. A long list of drug traffickers have ended up as celebrities.
Asset seizure is also controversial. American agents get to spend dirty drug dollars. They say they are making money for Uncle Sam, but then again, they are also paradoxically reaping the benefits of cocaine and heroin being sold. When agents make money busting traffickers, there is an added incentive to sustain the whole war on drugs.
Nevertheless, once these capos have been extradited and made deals, they are truly out of the game. The greater good, agents argue, is to use them to nail more crooks. That is the central imperative of drug warriors: keep seizing, keep arresting.
However many traffickers that police bust, the good guys still face a fundamental problem: other villains always take their place. This is one of the major criticisms of the drug war—it can’t be won. As long there is the cash incentive to smuggle narcotics, some hungry crook is going to do it.
The argument is supported by much historical experience. When Richard Nixon first declared the war on drugs, he spoke in absolute terms, calling for “the complete annihilation of the merchants of death.”4 Four decades later, no one dares show such optimism. The goal has changed to damage control. If we weren’t here, drug warriors claim, the situation would be a lot worse.
The Colombian experience is a classic example of this paradox. The Colombian police have got much better at busting traffickers, but good evidence shows that the amount of cocaine coming out of the Andean country has not significantly changed. Police spray crops, bust labs, seize submarines, nail capos. And other villains sow more coca leaves, build more labs, and ship out the new product on speedboats. So what has Colombia really achieved? I put the question to DEA Andean Bureau chief, Jay Bergman, who comes out with a persuasive answer. By hammering traffickers, he says, their power to threaten national security has severely been reduced.
“When you go back to Pablo Ecobar, this guy blew up a passenger plane, police headquarters, funded guerrillas to kill Supreme Court justices, and had the number one Colombian presidential candidate assassinated. Now there is no organization in Colombia that can go toe-to-toe with the government, that can threaten the national security of Colombia. In each successive generation of traffickers there has been a dilution of their power.
“Pablo Escobar lasted fifteen years. The average kingpin here now lasts fifteen months. If you are named as a kingpin here, you are gone. The government of Colombia and the government of the United States will not allow a trafficker to exist long enough to become a viable threat.”
In this analysis, drug enforcement can be seen as a giant hammer that keeps on falling. Any gangster that gets too big gets smashed by the hammer. This is known as cartel decapitation, taking out the heads of the gang. The villains are kept in check. But the drug trade does go on, and so does the war.
Soldiers and American agents are using the cartel decapitation tactic in Mexico, taking out kingpins such as the Beard Beltrán Leyva, Nazario el Más Loco Moreno, and Antonio “Tony Tormenta” Cárdenas. It has been an impressive list of hits. But will it hammer Mexican cartels hard enough that they won’t be a national security threat? Drug agents argue that is working already. With all the arrests, cartels are getting weaker, they say. The violence is a reaction to the attacks and a sign of desperation by criminals. Mexico simply has to see the struggle through. Maybe they are right.
But the dynamics of Mexican cartels have also developed in distinct ways from Colombia. Mexico has seven major cartels—Sinaloa, Juárez, Tijuana, La Familia, Beltrán Leyva, the Gulf, and the Zetas—so it is hard to decapitate them all at once. When leaders such as Osiel Cárdenas are taken out, their organizations have only become more violent, as rival lieutenants fight to become top dog. Groups such as the Zetas and Familia have also become powerful because of their brand names rather than the reputation of their capos. Even if Zetas leader Heriberto Lazcano, the Executioner, is arrested, the Zetas will likely continue as a fearsome militia.
Whether the cartels will get weaker or not, everybody agrees that Mexico needs to clean up its police to move forward. Different corrupt cops firing at each other and working for rival capos is nobody’s vision of progress. Such police reform is of course easier said than done. Mexican presidents have talked about it for years, going through numerous cleanups and reorganization of forces, only to create new rotten units. A central problem is the sheer number of different agencies. Mexico has several federal law enforcement departments, thirty-one state authorities, and 2,438 municipal police forces.
However, in October 2010, Calderón sent a bill to be approved by Congress that could make a real difference to the police. His controversial proposal was to absorb all Mexico’s numerous police forces into one unified authority like the Colombians have. It is a colossal reform with a huge amount of technical problems. But such a reform could be a key factor in pulling Mexico away from the brink. Even if drugs are eventually legalized, a single police force would be a better mechanism to fight other elements of organized crime, such as kidnapping.
The approach has many critics. Some argue it would only streamline corruption. But even that would be a better thing for peace. At least corrupt cops could be on the same side instead of actively gunning each other down. Others argue an all-powerful force would be authoritarian. Maybe. But any such force would still be controlled by democratic government. The spiderweb of different police forces only worked because one party ran everything. In democracy, this arrangement needs reform. If a crucial cause of the breakdown in Mexico has been the fragmentation of government power, then a way forward could be to unify its police under one command. Some of the fundamental problems and core solutions lie in Mexico’s institutions.
CHAPTER 14
Expansion
It has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the laws of gravity.
—KOFI ANNAN, SECRETARY-GENERAL OF THE UNITED NATIONS, 2000
It wasn’t poverty that drove Jacobo Guillen to sell crack and crystal in his East Los Angeles neighborhood; he had no problems getting jobs in restaurants and car shops and making enough money to get by. The cause wasn’t a broken family either; his parents were together, hardworking and encouraging. He just loved gangbanging.
“I just fucking loved the crazy life. I loved getting high. And I loved being to able to score ten thousand dollars in a couple of hours. And I loved the adrenaline of someone wanting to fight me. I didn’t care about anything.
“I’ve got no one to blame but myself. My brothers and sisters all became doctors and accountants and shit. I’m the only one that fucked up.”
Jacobo is paying quite a cost for his mistakes. While he grew up in California, he was born in Mexico, in the state of Jalisco. After he was arrested in L.A. with a bag of crystal, he was incarcerated and then deported. Border agents dropped him off at the Tijuana gate and told him not to come back. He was in a strange land with no money and spoke broken L.A. Spanish. If he had been a foreigner in California, he was even more of a foreigner in Mexico. But he did have one marketabe skill: drug dealing. He was soon on a Tijuana street corner serving up crystal meth.
“Down in Mexico, I really did need to sell drugs to survive. But it was way more fucked-up and dangerous than Los Angeles. There is a real mafia down here to deal with. And some people are really crazy. Right after I got here, someone stabbed me. I survived that and kept on selling and smoking crystal. Then someone tried to shoot me over a deal. I only survived by a miracle—because their gun jammed. That was when I realized I had to stop. I had to get out of the drugs and the gangbanging.”
He tells me the story two months after this attempted murder. We are sitting in an evangelical Christian drug-rehab center in Tijuana where he has been drying out. He is twenty-five years old
with a crew cut, round, chubby face, and pudgy hands. In the spirit of the Christian rehab, he wears a black T-shirt declaring I GANGBANG FOR JESUS. He also listens to Christian hip-hop and plays me songs from the tiny speakers of his cell phone. Some are in Spanish, but he prefers the English ones, many made by rappers in Los Angeles. Living in Tijuana has made his Spanish improve dramatically, but he still feels more comfortable with English, and his heart is in L.A.
The product of a cross-border culture, Jacobo is one of the many links between the drug-trafficking world of Mexico and the drug-distribution world of the United States. He has sold crystal meth in both Tijuana and Los Angeles. He has also smuggled drugs over the border, walking across the California desert with backpacks full of marijuana. In his trafficking, he has dealt with organized-crime figures on both sides of the line.
But while Jacobo’s illustrious career illustrates how these worlds are linked, it also illustrates how those links are tenuous. As he discovered painfully, the rules are different in Mexico from in the United States. Different bosses and organizations hold power on either side of the border. And the attitude of gangsters toward police and government changes radically as soon as you cross the Rio Grande.
These sharp contrasts can help us see what El Narco will look like in the future. A central theme in the outlook for Mexican gangsters is their expansion beyond the borders of Mexico as cartel thugs establish themselves across the western hemisphere and over the Atlantic Ocean. El Narco’s destiny, some fear, is to emerge as a global power. But what form will it take in these other countries? Experience shows that cartels are likely to take different forms in the different realms where they take root.