ZeroZeroZero

by Roberto Saviano

  Alfredo Beltrán Leyva was arrested in Culiacán in January 2008, together with three members of his security corps. He was found in possession of almost a million dollars, luxury watches, and a small arsenal, including frag grenades. A tough blow for Sinaloa, because Alfredo supervised drug trafficking on a large scale, handled the organization’s money laundering, and bribed the police. He was the cartel’s foreign minister. But as the Beltrán Leyva brothers saw it, El Chapo was behind Alfredo’s arrest. They had to respond in kind, and it was easy to decide where to strike.

  Édgar Guzmán López was only twenty-two , but he had a brilliant career ahead of him because he was El Chapo’s son. In May 2008, he went for a stroll with some friends in a shopping center in Culiacán. To check out the shop windows and the chicas. A peaceful day. On their way back to their car, which they left in the parking lot, they saw fifteen men approaching, in uniforms and blue bulletproof vests. The men moved in unison, like soldiers, and the boys were petrified, immobile. Before the men opened fire, the boys managed to read what was on their bulletproof vests: FEDA, which stood for Fuerzas Especiales de Arturo, or Arturo’s Special Forces. These were the men of Arturo Beltrán Leyva, the brother known as El Barbas. To prepare for the break with the Sinaloa cartel he’d created a unit with the same structure and discipline as the army and special police corps. They used heavy weapons, including the lethal P90 personal defense weapon, and were charged with protecting the bosses and eliminating hit men of rival cartels. Now, in 2008, baptized in the blood of El Chapo’s son, the Beltrán Leyva cartel was born. The brothers handled cocaine, marijuana, and heroin, thanks in part to their complete control of the principal airports in the states of México, Guerrero, Quintana Roo, and Nuevo León. Other activities included human trafficking; prostitution; money laundering, through hotels, restaurants, and resorts; extortion; abduction; and arms trafficking. From South to North America, they managed corridors that moved tons of drugs. It was a new, small cartel, but one determined to carve out a sizable slice of power. But the Mexican authorities were eager to put the family out of business right away, so when Arturo threw a party in the winter of 2009, they didn’t let the opportunity pass.

  For El Barbas, a Christmas party is not a Christmas party if there’s no entertainment. Money was no object, so he invited artists such as Los Cadetes de Linares and Ramón Ayala, winner of two Grammy Awards and two Latin Grammys with over a hundred albums, to play at his house in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods of Cuernavaca. Plus twenty or so call girls. The Mexican navy’s special forces surrounded the building. The shoot-out left several bodies on the ground, but not Arturo’s; he managed to escape. The Mexican navy was on his trail, though, and they found him less than a week later, in another residential neighborhood. Determined not to let Arturo escape again, the navy decided to do things big: two hundred marines, two helicopters, and two small army tanks. The battle lasted nearly two hours, and when it was finished, Arturo and four of his men were dead. The photo of his corpse made the rounds on the Internet: His pants lowered to show his underwear and his T-shirt rolled up to show his naked chest covered in lucky charms and bills, dollars as well as pesos. One last humiliation for the enemy. The army denied it had touched his body, but there was a strong suspicion that the humiliation techniques so dear to new cartels such as Los Zetas and Beltrán Leyvas themselves were contaminating the very men paid to eliminate them. The army and the narcos were becoming more and more alike.

  Vengeance came immediately after Arturo Beltrán Leyva’s death: Four relatives of one of the soldiers who lost his life in the operation were killed. Meanwhile, a decapitated head was left in front of Arturo’s tomb, in the Jardines del Humaya cemetery in Culiacán. Arturo’s brother Carlos Beltrán Leyva was arrested about ten days later by the Mexican federal police in Culiacán: He had shown a fake driver’s license when the police stopped him. Some people held that it was El Chapo again who provided the police with information that led to Carlos’s arrest.

  After Arturo’s death, a civil war over leadership broke out within the cartel: On one side were lieutenants Edgar “La Barbie” Valdez Villarreal and Gerardo “El Indio” Álvarez Vázquez; on the other, Héctor Beltrán Leyva, El H, and his right-hand man, Sergio Villarreal Barragán, a former Mexican federal police agent, known as El Grande or King Kong, because he was over six feet five. All but Héctor were arrested in 2010; El H took the reins of what remained of the cartel. The United States had put a price on his head of $5 million, and the Mexican government was offering 30 million pesos. Héctor was a sort of financial genius; after years of anonymity he succeeded in controlling the group, thanks to his business talent and his ability to maintain good relations with his new allies, Los Zetas.

  But the race was soon over for him too. On October 1, 2014, Héctor was arrested in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato. He was enjoying dinner at a seafood restaurant together with the financial operator of his cartel when the special forces of the Mexican army swooped in. Though he initially passed himself off as a refined businessman and artwork trader, he and his tablemate were carrying pistols exclusively issued to the military. But confirming his proverbial elegance, he let them handcuff him without resisting.

  Héctor was the last of the Beltrán Leyva brothers still at large. After his arrest the Mexican authorities believe the cartel will lose most of its influence on the country. But thrones do not remain empty for long in the narco-trafficking world. The real question is: Who will be the new leader?

  The war between the Beltrán Leyvas and their old Sinaloa partners not only devastated Culiacán and Sinaloa, it has made its way to the United States, to Chicago, where the twins Margarito and Pedro Flores, two Americans with Mexican roots, operated. Their fleet of trucks connected Los Angeles to cities in the Midwest twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. They were serious, efficient distributors. They guaranteed their customers two tons of coke and heroin a month, from the border all the way to the shores of Lake Michigan. But they were greedy: They worked with the Sinaloa cartel, but they didn’t disdain working with the Beltrán Leyvas either. When El Chapo found out, he sent some men to Chicago to keep his distribution monopoly from being put at risk by rival cartels. At the same time that the Flores twins were receiving threats from Sinaloa, the DEA set its sights on them. They were arrested in 2009. In part thanks to the testimonies of Margarito and Pedro, who turned informers, the Americans were able to add a few more pieces to the complex puzzle of El Chapo’s and the Beltrán Leyvas’ movements.

  A few months earlier the U.S. government had delivered another blow to the king of Sinaloa by arresting 750 members of his cartel in the United States. An army. American presidents don’t talk much about it, but there are entire legions of narcos within their borders. During the twenty-one months of the operation, more than $59 million in cash, more than 12,000 kilos of cocaine, more than 7,000 kilos of marijuana, more than 500 kilos of methamphetamine, about 1.3 million ecstasy pills, more than 8 kilos of heroin, 169 weapons, 149 vehicles, 3 airplanes, and 3 boats were seized in various states, from the East to the West coasts. An enormous success but a worrisome one, for its very scale was alarming. The American authorities looked the Sinaloa cartel in the eye, and what they saw was a multinational corporation with connections and branches all over the world, on whose boards sat supermanagers handling relations in every corner of the planet. Narco executives on Sinaloa salaries acted as contact points in numerous South American countries. And El Chapo was well along in conquering western Africa and making inroads in Spain.

  For El Chapo, total domination over the 370 or so miles of border between Mexico and Arizona was the flywheel of his personal economy. He followed the market: When the demand for hielo—crystal meth—surged, he was there. A terrible drug—it costs less than coke and eats you up sooner. When you overdo it you start feeling the parasite effect: worms crawling under your skin. So you scratch yourself raw trying to cut open your flesh to get rid o
f them. It’s the side effect of a drug that otherwise has the same effect as coke, only bigger and worse. Request for it was on the rise, but there was no boss, no one who knew how to transform an opportunity into a river of money. El Chapo saw the opportunity; the Sinaloa cartel was ready. And he had the right man to manage the new business: Ignacio Coronel Villarreal, who became the King of Crystal. All you need to produce methamphetamine are clandestine labs and the right chemical substances. If you have good contacts on the Pacific coast, it’s not hard to get precursor shipments from China, Thailand, and Vietnam. And it’s very profitable: For every dollar you invest in raw materials, you’ll earn ten on the street.

  That is Sinaloa’s great gift: the speed with which it sniffs out every new business opportunity. Sinaloa colonizes. Sinaloa wants to rule. Only Sinaloa.

  • • •

  El Chapo has a clear vision of today’s world: The West is in trouble; its ideals are in conflict with the market’s iron logic, so it needs lands without laws, lands without rights. Mexico has cocaine and the United States has cocaine users. Mexico has the cheap labor the United States needs. Mexico has soldiers and the United States has weapons. The world’s drowning in unhappiness? Mexico has the solution: cocaine. El Chapo grasped all this. He became the king of the narcos, the Steve Jobs of cocaine, with the mystical authority of the pope. Which is why February 22, 2014, will go down in history, for Mexico and the entire world. On that day, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, El Chapo, the most wanted narco on the planet, was arrested. At 6:40 A.M. in a hotel in the center of Mazatlán, in Sinaloa state. A maxi operation by Mexican marines and in collaboration with the DEA: two helicopters and six land artillery units. But not a single shot was fired. The most dangerous fugitive in Mexico, with a price of $5 million on his head, was hiding out in Sinaloa. Maybe that’s where he’d been for the past thirteen years, hiding in the region that made him what he was, that offered him protection.

  The military operation had been launched about ten days before: Law enforcement officers had managed to identify several residences in Culiacán, El Chapo’s stronghold, where he usually stayed. The man who had been a master at digging tunnels to get drugs into the United States relied on them for his own getaways too: Several of his residences were connected by underground passageways. The military nearly caught him more than once, but he always managed to escape. Several members of the Sinaloa cartel had been arrested, though; El Chapo’s inner circle was shrinking. Earlier that week a raid of his ex-wife Griselda López’s house turned up some weapons and a tunnel that fed to the sewers. Mexico’s drug lord would clamber through the sewers to get from one hiding place to another.

  What’s most extraordinary is that El Chapo was caught by surprise in Mazatlán, a tourist town. He wasn’t hiding up in the Sierra mountains, as most people thought. And his hotel in Mazatlán was nothing fancy: an ordinary building, with a nondescript lobby and a simple room. The way he’d always lived.

  In Mexico his arrest was followed with the same anxiety as the World Cup finals, with more interest than a presidential election. Rumors of his arrest or murder had circulated for years. Which is why, on February 22, no one could believe it had actually happened. Thousands of tweets: “Is it really him? Where’s the proof?” “I won’t believe it till I see the photo of El Chapo in handcuffs.” “El Chapo is still El Chapo, they don’t have him!” Many tweeters did not hide their disappointment; many expressed their solidarity with the boss; many wrote in English. A hashtag was even created: #FreeChapo. These tweets say more about the world today than most articles and political powwows.

  Verifying El Chapo’s capture proved to be as agonizing as the arrest itself. At first there were just unconfirmed reports: The Associated Press gave out the news at 9:54 A.M., after receiving a tip-off from an anonymous American official. The Mexican authorities did not confirm it, however. Meanwhile, word of his arrest started spreading all over the Internet. The Mexican authorities called a press conference for 11:30, but the secretary of state canceled it, leading people to think it wasn’t him. But the photo of a bare-chested man with a mustache, arrested by a soldier in camouflage, started to circulate. It sure looked like him, but thirteen years had passed since the last official photos; it could just be a close resemblance. Everyone waited with bated breath. At 12:08 the secretary of the interior, Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, called a new press conference, this time for 1:00 P.M. Would the rumors be denied or confirmed? Doubts were quelled at 12:33; the Mexican authorities confirmed the arrest on CNN. But still no official announcement. El Chapo’s fans were hoping it was all a terrible mistake. At 1:20 El Chapo’s photo disappeared from the DEA’s most wanted list. That’s how the Americans confirmed the news. They beat out the Mexican confirmation, which came a few minutes later, in the form of a tweet by President Enrique Peña Nieto, expressing his gratitude for the work of the security forces. In truth, he was patting himself on the back for the most important arrest since he’d taken office. At 2:04 a federal police helicopter landed in front of the group of reporters gathered in a navy hangar. During the press conference they confirmed what everyone already knew: El Chapo had been arrested. They filled in some details, about where and when. The attorney general of Mexico read the list of people arrested and goods seized: thirteen men, ninety-seven large guns, thirty-six handguns, two grenade launchers, forty-three vehicles, sixteen houses, and four farms. Only one thing was missing: the man himself. El Chapo made his entrance at 2:11, captured by photographers as he was escorted across the square to the police helicopter: black jeans and white shirt, neat hair and mustache. Looking a little tired and not in the least cocky as Mexican marines in camouflage hold him by the arms and make him lower his head. No presentation to the media, just these few photos to confirm his arrest. At 3:00 P.M., word was given that El Chapo was behind bars at the Penal del Altiplano, the prison in Almoloya de Juárez, in México state.

  A few years earlier El Chapo had formed a new tie with the United States. In August 2011, his young wife Emma, an American citizen, tranquilly gave birth to twin girls in a clinic in Lancaster, near Los Angeles. The DEA knew but couldn’t do anything, because Emma, twenty-two at the time, had a clean record. El Chapo’s men had accompanied her to Lancaster, but she did take one precaution: Emma left the father’s name blank on the twins’ birth certificates. But everyone knows who the father is. The Mexican and American authorities exulted after El Chapo’s arrest, but alongside their messages on social networks were others, posted by regular people who considered El Chapo a hero, a benefactor, a Mexican god. The most widespread reaction was disbelief: “El Chapo is too clever to let himself be caught”; “El Chapo is too smart to let himself be framed”; “impossible that they nabbed him two feet from his stronghold.” As if El Chapo had orchestrated it all, as if he had decided that the moment for his arrest had come. There are all sorts of theories: Maybe he sensed that he was becoming too big a story politically, and the only way his cartel could keep doing business would be if he was arrested. Or maybe he knew a big feud was about to erupt, so he took himself out of the equation to avoid being killed by a new generation of Sinaloa narcos eager to take his place. Some have even quietly insinuated that his fedelissimo, El Mayo, also in hiding and fearing his own arrest or murder, sold his boss’s head. In fact, the press had been expecting El Mayo’s arrest for days, but to their surprise, El Chapo was arrested instead. The only certainty is ambiguity. At any rate, it’s hard to believe that it was purely a police action, because, as everyone knows, nothing in Sinaloa happens without El Chapo’s blessing. The king is dead, long live the king.

  4.

  FRIEND KILLER

  Matamoros, in the state of Tamaulipas in northeastern Mexico, rises on the southern bank of the Rio Bravo and is connected to the Texas city of Brownsville by four bridges. Those four bridges are like four pipelines through which white petrol is pumped into the United States. Here it’s the Gulf cartel that rules. In 1999 it was bringing up to fif
ty tons of cocaine into the United States every month, and its power had spread from the Gulf of Mexico to parts of the Pacific, areas conquered with violence, corruption, and agreements with other narco groups. The Gulf cartel was number one. And its number one was Osiel Cárdenas Guillén.

  Osiel had heard the story a million times. El Padrino arrived last, took a seat, and toasted the new territory bosses. Sure, the details changed from one teller to the next, as unsteady as April showers, but the gist was always the same: The new world had been created at that meeting.

  “If you can have the whole world, why be satisfied with just a piece?” This was said to be his retort to an impudent interlocutor who’d annoyed him for the umpteenth time with the story of El Padrino and the division of the kingdom. Osiel was born angry. Quarrelsome as a boy, tough as a teenager, violent as a young man. A blind, senseless rage that he nourished and nursed constantly, and that his lively intelligence made sadistic and demonic. He was born to parents who, indifferent to the poverty in which they lived, continued unperturbed to churn out babies whom they then left to crawl around in the dirt with the scrawny chickens; Osiel invented his own world, as far away as possible from the chaos that surrounded him. By age fourteen he was working as a mechanic’s assistant in the morning, and at a maquiladora, or factory, in the afternoon, where he, along with two hundred other people, assembled vacuum cleaners that some Yankee housewife would use a few miles to the north.