by Ioan Grillo
Matta helped channel this money back to gangsters in Medellín, who fast became the richest criminals on the planet. No one ever knows how much drug kingpins really make, probably not even the gangsters themselves. But the Medellín traffickers were likely the first drug-smuggling billionaires. Forbes magazine later estimated the personal fortune of the number one Medellín smuggler, Pablo Escobar, to be $9 billion, making him the richest criminal of all time. The number two is estimated to be his colleague Carlos Lehder, at $2.7 billion. Who knows how the hell Forbes found data for those numbers. But they were certainly on the right track: the cocaine cowboys were stinking rich.
By the early eighties, Medellín mobsters had become visible and powerful figures. Escobar built an entire housing project for the homeless and was elected to Colombia’s parliament in 1982, serving a short stint before being pushed out because of his trafficking. Around this time, the gangsters began to be called the Medellín Cartel, the first time the word cartel was used to describe drug smugglers. The term implied that traffickers had become an omnipotent political bloc. It was a frightening concept. But was it true?
The phrase drug cartel has won scorn from some academics, who argue it misleads people by giving an inaccurate description of traffickers engaged in price-fixing. But despite their moans, the word has firmly stuck for three decades, used by American agents, journalists, and, importantly, many traffickers themselves. Consequently, the cartel concept has had an immense influence on how the drug trade in Latin America is perceived, both by people inside it and out.
It is unclear who first coined the phrase. But it was certainly influenced by use of the term cartel to describe the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, which was ever present in the media in the 1970s. OPEC represented the interests of exploited third-world countries who banded together to set oil prices and wield power over wealthy nations. In a similar vein, the Medellín Cartel cast an image of men from struggling Latin America who threatened the rich North. Escobar himself cultivated this idea, dressing up as revolutionary Pancho Villa4 and calling cocaine an atomic bomb that he dropped on the United States.
For the DEA, the concept of cartels was highly useful to prosecute gangsters. Many early cases against Latin American smugglers were built using the so-called RICO laws, from the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which had been designed to combat the Italian-American mafia. Under RICO, you need to prove suspects are part of an ongoing criminal organization. It is far easier to give that organization a name, especially one that sounds as threatening as the Medellín Cartel, than to say it is just a loose network of smugglers.
Later, prosecutors attacked traffickers with the law against conspiracy to distribute controlled substances. Again, it makes it easier if these conspiracies have names, and indictments against Mexican traffickers usually quote cartel titles. For example, court documents used to send Matta to the Supermax say, “The evidence showed that Matta-Ballesteros was a member of the Guadalajara cartel and that he participated in some of the meetings with other members of the cartel …”5
One man with explicit knowledge of the Medellín gangsters was their attorney Gustavo Salazar. Perhaps the most famous narco-lawyer of all time, Salazar has represented twenty major capos, including Pablo Escobar himself, and some fifty of their lieutenants. He has survived to tell the tale. He goes on today working with the latest generation of Colombian cocaine smugglers.
On a visit to Colombia, I called Salazar’s office and left a message with his secretary saying I wanted to talk about drug cartels. Two days later, I got a surprise call from Salazar saying he would meet me in a Medellín café. When I asked how I would recognize him, he replied, “I look like Elton John.” Sure enough, I arrived and found he was a dead ringer for the English pop icon. After some Colombian crepes, Salazar said the cartel concept was a fiction made up by American agents:
“Cartels don’t exist. What you have is a collection of drug traffickers. Sometimes, they work together, and sometimes they don’t. American prosecutors just call them cartels to make it easier to make their cases. It is all part of the game.”
The media was also quick to jump on the cartel label. It is easier to give a group a name than some long-winded description. Hacks were also fond of the alliteration, Colombian cocaine cartels. It all made for lively copy.
Three decades later, the idea of cartels has taken on a definitive meaning on the bloody streets of Mexico. Corpses are found daily next to calling cards of organizations such as the Gulf Cartel—scrawled CDG in shorthand. These networks of killers and traffickers are far bigger than mere street gangs. And they certainly do try to limit competition, as in the dictionary definition of cartel. They are also federations of gangsters rather than monolithic organizations. Perhaps modern dictionaries need to define drug cartel or criminal cartel as a separate entry, to better reflect the way the word has come to be used.
In the early eighties, the Medellín cartel smuggled most of its cocaine straight over the Florida coast. It was a nine-hundred-mile run from the north coast of Colombia and was simply wide-open. The Colombians and their American counterparts would airdrop loads of blow out to sea, from where it would be rushed ashore in speedboats, or even fly it right onto the Florida mainland and let it crash down in the countryside.
Traffickers of the era smile over happy-go-lucky stories of those carefree days. In the documentary film Cocaine Cowboys,6 smuggler Mickey Munday—a Florida redneck with an out-of-shape quiff—remembers driving in a speedboat loaded with 350 kilos of cocaine and giving a tow to a customs boat whose engine had blown out. On another occasion, an airdrop of cocaine crashed through the roof of a Florida church just as the preacher was giving an antidrug sermon. It was better than fiction.
The cocaine trade also rained dollars onto the Florida economy. No one will ever know quite how much of the white-stained money built Miami’s skyline. But the financial storm left some obvious traces. In 1980, the Miami branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta was the only branch bank in the U.S. reserve system to show a cash surplus—a whopping $4.75 billion!7 Authorities weren’t too worried about these greenbacks. But they got uppity when the bullets flew.
Over the first five years of the cocaine boom, the homicide rate for Miami-Dade County almost tripled from just over two hundred in 1976 to over six hundred at its peak in 1981.8 Violence wasn’t just about blow. The influx of 120,000 Cuban immigrants, many from the island’s jails, also sparked crime. Furthermore, the gangster killings had little to do with the Medellín bosses and more to do with local beefs of Colombian distributors, such as a psychotic female dealer called Griselda Blanco. The stocky Colombian had been a child prostitute and then teenage kidnapper in Medellín before moving to the United States to sell yayo. She snuffed anyone who pissed her off in any way, including three of her own husbands, earning her the nickname the Black Widow. It was certainly quicker than divorcing through the courts. But back in Medellín, the bosses cursed her for bringing heat on their billion-dollar operation.
This heat rose all the way up to the White House of Ronald Reagan. Old Ronnie took the helm after his predecessor Jimmy Carter had taken a less confrontational policy to narcotics, focusing on treatment rather than war. Reagan’s first move was to blame Carter for the cocaine explosion. The charges stuck, with drug warriors holding up Carter and the liberal 1970s as bugbears for decades to come. These bad years of permissive America were over, roared a triumphant Reagan. It was time to get tough on evil drug pushers. And Miami was ground zero.
In January 1982, Reagan created the South Florida Task Force to go toe-to-toe with the cocaine barons. Headed by Vice President George Bush, the task force brought in the FBI, army, and navy to the fight for the first time. This was a real war, Reagan said, so let’s fight it with real soldiers. Suddenly, surveillance planes and helicopter gunships swarmed on Florida while FBI agents hit dirty banks. The state was so wide-open it didn’t take long to haul in results. Withi
n eight months, cocaine seizures were up 56 percent. Reagan and Bush sung their success and smiled for photo ops with confiscated tons of snow.
Back in Colombia, the kingpins felt the task force’s bite. Seizures meant losses of hundreds of millions of dollars; the Medellín cartel needed to rethink its strategy. So it turned to Matta for a fix.
Matta had first used the Mexican “trampoline” to bounce drugs into the United States in the early 1970s, when he sold cocaine to Cuban American Alberto Sicilia Falcon. Since Falcon’s imprisonment, Matta had cultivated relations with the rising stars among Sinaloan gangsters. These Mexicans could provide a great solution for the cocaine kings: why did they need to risk everything through Florida when they could spread it over another two thousand miles of land border? The Mexicans already had the smuggling routes, so for Matta and the Colombians it was just a question of handing them the cocaine and picking it up north of the river. DEA Andean regional director Jay Bergman describes the deal:
“The first stage of negotiations was ‘We’re the Colombians, we own this product, we own distribution of cocaine in the United States. Mexicans have got your weed and your black-tar heroin. Cocaine distribution from the sunny shores of Los Angeles to the mean streets of Baltimore, that is our territory. That is what we do. What we are going to do for you is we want to negotiate with you. We are going to provide you cocaine and you are going to deliver it from somewhere in Mexico to somewhere in the United States, and you are going to turn it back over to us, to our cartel emissaries.’ That is the way it started out.”
The historical importance of this deal cannot be overstated. Once billions of cocaine dollars poured into Mexico, its drug trafficking would become bigger and bloodier than anyone imagined. The Mexicans started off as paid couriers. But after they got a sniff, they would take the whole pie.
Matta’s Mexican friends were old hands from the Sinaloan narco scene, many with blood connections to the earliest smugglers. Among them was Rafael Caro Quintero, a mountain cowboy who had been an outlaw since he was a teenager. Three of his uncles and one of his cousins had been heroin and marijuana traffickers. Caro Quintero outdid them all.
Above Caro Quintero and other hillbillies in belt buckles was a Culiacán native who wore slick white pants and designer-label shirts. Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo became the most important connection for Matta and the Colombian drug lords. Many in Sinaloa consider Félix Gallardo to be Mexico’s greatest capo ever—the unchallenged king of the Mexican underworld in his era. DEA also rated him as one of the biggest traffickers in the western hemisphere. It is widely believed that the song “Jefe de Jefes,” or “Boss of Bosses,” by the Tigres del Norte, perhaps the most celebrated drug ballad of all time, is about Félix Gallardo. However, as always in the murky world of Mexican gangsters, it is unclear if his real power and wealth were as great as his name.
Born in Culiacán in 1946, Félix Gallardo followed the path of many enterprising Sinaloan villains and joined the police force. An early photo of Félix Gallardo shows him slick and polished in a broad-topped officer’s hat. A later photo shows him fresh out of the force, a smooth-looking mobster wearing fat 1970s sunglasses and sitting on a brand-new Honda motorcycle.9 He is slim with sharp features and at six foot two is tall by Mexican standards.
When Operation Condor smashed Sinaloa, Félix Gallardo and other villains relocated to Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city. A pretty stretch of colonial plazas packed with mariachis and folkloric cantinas, Guadalajara was an ideal place for narcos to escape the heat and buy up nice villas. Once Operation Condor petered out, they were soon organizing drugloads more ambitious than anything before.
To maximize profits, they did what any good businessmen do: went for economy of scale. Instead of buying marijuana from small family farms, they built enormous plantations. The DEA got wind of one such operation out of the Chihuahuan desert and pressured the Mexican army to take it down. The bust set a worldwide record for marijuana farms that hasn’t been beaten since. Crops spread out across miles of desert and were dried in more than twenty-five sheds, most bigger than football fields. In total there was more than five thousand tons of psychedelic weed. Thousands of campesinos had worked on the plantation for wages of $6 a day. When the army stormed in, the bosses had all disappeared, but the campesinos were still wandering the desert, without food or water.10
Such colossal quantities of marijuana meant big bucks. But cocaine profits were even bigger. Court documents allege Matta and his partner Félix Gallardo were personally raking in $5 million every single week pumping cocaine through the Mexican pipeline. After Mexican mobsters delivered the blow into the United States, documents say, Matta was moving it though a network of distributors in Arizona, California, and New York. The capo continued to use Anglo-Americans to get the cocaine out to disco-dancing customers. Running the Arizona ring was John Drummond, who eventually turned into a protected witness to rat out the kingpin.11
It is likely Matta, Félix Gallardo, and the others never called themselves a cartel or gave their operations any particular name. In a later prison diary Félix Gallardo wrote, “In 1989, the cartels didn’t exist … there started to be talk about ‘cartels’ from the authorities assigned to combat them.”12
But whatever the gangsters themselves said, DEA agents in Mexico started to call the federation of gangsters the Guadalajara Cartel in dispatches back to Washington from 1984. As stated, it is much easier to prosecute an organization if it has a name. Furthermore, DEA agents in Mexico were desperate to grab the attention of their bosses, who seemed to have let the country drift off their radar to focus on Colombia and Florida. Agents shouted that there were also kingpins in Mexico. To say there was “a cartel” was to sum up an omnipotent threat just as in Medellín.
Despite the groans of these agents, the Mexican trampoline confounded the Reagan administration. While the task force showed off gunboats in the Florida Keys, the price of cocaine on American streets actually went down. DEA agents complained that Reagan’s war handed too much money to the military and not enough to seasoned operators who could really wound the cocaine cowboys.
By the mideighties, Matta and the Guadalajara gangsters felt invincible. The cocaine market was on fire, the Mexican trampoline pumped like the Trans Alaska Pipeline, and the Reagan administration was tied up in three Central American wars. It seemed as if nothing could go wrong. Then they overplayed their hand: in February 1985, thugs in Guadalajara kidnapped DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, tortured him, raped him, and beat him to death.
For DEA agents, the murder of Camarena is the darkest chapter in the history of their work in Mexico. His photograph adorns DEA offices worldwide as a fallen hero, a muscular Hispanic in his late thirties with a smiling face that shows street smarts but perhaps a little naive optimism.
His story is told in most detail by Elaine Shannon in the 1988 book Desperados. Born in Mexicali and raised in California, Camarena had been a high school football star and marine before joining the DEA. After making major drug busts in the United States, he gained the nickname the Dark Rooster for his charisma and fight. On the Mexican streets, he was more of a sitting duck.
Arriving in Guadalajara in 1980, Camarena watched frustrated as traffickers grew in strength and power. To hit back, he wandered the rowdiest cantinas and grimiest back streets, sewing a web of informants. He followed their leads to the industrial marijuana-growing operations and took the brash move of going personally on Mexican army raids. His face started to get recognized. But he was still not happy. He and colleagues sent messages back to Washington complaining the Guadalajara gangsters had a network of police protection. Surely, the United States could not stand back and tolerate such corruption? He was seriously ruffling feathers. And he was seriously exposed.
Tension reached a boiling point in late 1984 when Mexican and U.S. authorities carried out several busts on the Guadalajara mob. Among them was the seizure of the record-breaking ganja farm. But there were also
hits on the cocaine pipeline on the U.S. side of the border. In Yucca, Arizona, a vacationing detective spotted some fresh plane tracks on a World War II–era airstrip. When he called it in, the police set up a desert roadblock and promptly netted seven hundred kilo bricks of cocaine in brightly colored Christmas tinfoil packets.13
The detective’s luck had nothing to do with Kiki Camarena. But the mobsters didn’t know that. To frustrated kingpins losing tens of millions of dollars, the DEA looked clever. And the gangsters got angry. According to court testimony, the major players, including Matta, the slickly dressed Félix Gallardo, and the cowboy gunslinger Caro Quintero, held meetings to decide what to do. The court documents state:
“Members of the enterprise, including Matta-Ballesteros, met and discussed the DEA seizures as well as a police report file covering one of the major marijuana seizures at Zacatecas, Mexico. The DEA agent responsible for the seizures was again discussed. The enterprise held yet another meeting [in which they] suggested that the DEA agent should be ‘picked up’ when his identity was discovered.”14
As Kiki Camarena walked from the American consulate in Guadalajara one evening, five men jumped him, threw a jacket over his head, and shoved him into a Volkswagen van. A month later his body was dumped on a road hundreds of miles away. The decomposing corpse was in jockey shorts with his hands and legs bound. He had been beaten all over and had a stick forced into his rectum. The cause of death was a blow from a blunt instrument that caved in his skull.
American officials furiously called for justice. But the investigation descended into a tangle of botched crime scenes and scapegoats. Mexican police stormed a ranch of suspects and shot everyone dead—then charged the police on the raid for murder. Audiocassettes emerged of Camarena being tortured and interrogated. He was asked about corrupt police and politicians as well as drug deals.
