by Ioan Grillo
The year Félix was killed, Mexico elected a new president. As the big day approached it looked like the unthinkable could happen—leftist contender Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas could actually oust the PRI. Cárdenas wasn’t really a revolutionary. His dad had been the iconic PRI president Lázaro Cárdenas in the 1930s, and he himself had been in the ruling party for many years. But feeling that the government had lost touch with the people, he had broken away and was now challenging the PRI in the first genuine two-horse race since 1929.
On election day, Mexicans couldn’t believe their eyes; Cárdenas was ahead on the vote count. It seemed the election had not been rigged. It was too good to be true. Votes piled up in favor of Cárdenas. And then, crash. There was a sudden computer failure. It had really been too good to be true. A month later it was declared that PRI candidate Carlos Salinas had won. Nothing had changed. Cárdenas told his supporters to stay off the streets. He didn’t want bloodshed, and he didn’t really want a revolution. There was bloodshed anyway, as gunmen killed dozens of lefitist militants who supported Cárdenas. Within two years, they had murdered hundreds.
But despite a rigged election, PRI winner Salinas got good press in the United States. A short man with a trademark bald head, big ears, and straight-line mustache, President Salinas wooed American politicians with his perfect English and Ph.D. from Harvard. This was a new kind of PRI and a new Mexico. This PRI embraced free trade and modern capitalism even if it did carry out the odd electoral shenanigan to keep the communists out. Companies and assets long owned by the Mexican state were sold at bargain prices—telephone lines, railways, a TV network.
Suddenly, a new class of Mexican tycoons buzzed around in private jets. In 1987, when Forbes began its billionaire list, one Mexican was on it. In 1994, when Salinas left office, there were twenty-four Forbes billionaires. Where had this money come from? Salinas also negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement with Bill Clinton, which produced some equally dramatic results. In 1989, cross-border trade between the United States and Mexico was at $49 billion; in 2000, it was at $247 billion!3 Mexicans flocked from country shacks to work in assembly plants on the border. Throughout the nineties, Tijuana and Juárez grew by a block a day, with new slums spreading over surrounding hills—slums that would later be the center of the drug war.
Salinas also went about reorganizing the narcotics trade. When he came into office, the undisputed godfather of Mexico was Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, the Sinaloan who partnered with Matta Ballesteros to traffic cocaine. In 1989, under orders from Salinas, police commander Guillermo González Calderoni nabbed the forty-three-year-old kingpin Félix Gallardo sitting quietly in a Guadalajara restaurant. Not a shot was fired.
Félix Gallardo later wrote in his prison diary how he had met with the commander Calderoni five times leading up to the arrest, and the officer had even given him some rare guacamaya birds as a present. On the day of his detention, Félix Gallardo wrote, he actually went to the restaurant to meet Calderoni to talk business.4
Whether or not the capo’s account is true, that the Mexican government could take down the biggest gangster in the country without firing a shot was telling. In 1989, mobsters still relied on the police to operate, and these officers could take out narcos when they needed to. The detention of the head honcho reminded traffickers who was boss.
Following the arrest, Mexican capos held a gangster summit in the resort of Acapulco. It sounds like a scene from The Godfather. But these narco conferences really do happen. Journalist Blancornelas broke the news about the meeting, and it was later confirmed by a number of sources. Blancornelas said head honcho Félix Gallardo organized it from behind bars. However, Félix Gallardo wrote that police commander Calderoni set up the cozy get-together. Maybe it was both. Blancornelas describes the scene:
“They rented a chalet in Las Brisas. From it, you could see the beautiful Acapulco bay in cinemascope and bright colors, away from the relentless traffic of the seafront. No hawkers came up to the chalets, which were away from the annoyance of the blear of discos and the glare of the police. They managed to get the house sometimes used by the Shah of Iran. Who knows how they did it?”5
During a week’s summit, the holidaying capos discussed the future of the Mexican underworld. Almost all guests were from the old Sinaloan narco tribe, a sprawl of families intertwined by marriages, friendships, and drug deals. At the meeting were several players who would be crucial in shaping trafficking over the next two decades. Among them was the Sierra Madre villain Joaquin “Chapo” Guzmán and his older friend Ismael “the Mayo” Zambada. Each capo was awarded a plaza where he could move his own drugs and tax any other smugglers on his turf.
It all sounded like a good idea. But the cozy arrangement didn’t play out. Without the leadership of the imprisoned godfather, Félix Gallardo, the capos plotted and backstabbed to get a bigger piece of the pie. As Blancornelas wrote:
“Never in the history of Mexican drug trafficking could someone like Félix Gallardo operate again. He was a man of his word, of deals before shots, of convincing arguments before executions …
“If the capos had followed his instructions, then the most powerful cartel in the world would exist now. But the absence of a leader and the presence of several bosses, all feeling more superior than the next, caused a disorganized mess.”6
Within this mess, three cartels rose to supremacy, in Tijuana, Juárez, and by the Gulf. While these cartels had their own hierarchies, trafficking from east of Juárez along a thousand miles of border to the Pacific was all controlled by Sinaloans. The Arellano Félix brothers who ran the Tijuana cartel, and Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who ran Juárez, were all from the Culiacán area and were deeply embedded in the old narco scene. Different bosses moved round the Sinaloan empire, chipping in together on loads, sharing corrupt cops, and passing around operatives. It is crucial to understand the links within this Sinaloan realm to make sense of the current Mexican Drug War.
The assassin Gonzalo, whom I interviewed in prison in Juárez, worked throughout the empire in the 1990s. He said he did jobs in Durango, Culiacán, Tijuana, Juárez, and other cities controlled by different cartels. He would simply be given recommendations by capos, who all knew each other. DEA agents also recognized the cooperation among all kinds of gangsters in northwest Mexico. A classified operational intelligence report back in the 1990s made the following observations about this system:
“The cartel scheme is widely accepted but distorts the real power and strength of Mexican drug traffickers. Recent examples of individuals who have the ability to transcend these ‘cartel’ boundaries include Amado Carrillo Fuentes.
“Joaquin Guzmán-Loera and Carrillo Fuentes jointly brokered multi-ton cocaine shipments from Bolivia and Colombia into Sonora, Mexico, and then into the United States through Arizona. During this time Carrillo Fuentes was also working closely with Ismael Zambada Garcia, establishing smuggling routes through Tijuana, Baja California.”7
While the Sinaloan clan worked together, it was still quarrelsome. The biggest beef in the early nineties erupted between the Arellano Félix brothers and Joaquin “Chapo” Guzmán over traffic into California. The war was not as violent as those of the twenty-first century, fought with paramilitary hit squads. But thugs did clash in a series of shoot-outs and assassinations, leaving dozens of bodies.
Looking back, we can see the first signs that the Mexican government would prove unable to contain the beast of El Narco, that the bloodshed would spiral out of hand. But such an observation comes with the benefit of hindsight, knowing the bloodbath that would later drown Mexico. As professional historians say, it is always dangerous to read history backward. At the time, no one in the Mexican government seemed worried. “There is violence, but it is narcos killing narcos,” politicians sighed. In any case, traffickers were not attacking the system, but rather competing with each other to see who could get the best of those to be bribed. The government could sit back and get paid, whoever won.
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Amid this conflict, one particular murder shook Mexico, the killing of Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo in May 1993. The official explanation is familiar to many—the sixty-six-year-old man of the cloth went to Guadalajara airport to catch a plane when he drove into a firefight between Arellano Félix and Chapo Guzmán thugs. When Cardinal Posadas arrived in his white Grand Marquis car, gunmen attacked, thinking he was Chapo Guzmán himself. However, this explanation never washed with the robed men of Rome, who asked, how could hit men possibly confuse an elderly, tall cleric in a dog collar for a five-foot-six-inch gangster? Conspiracy theories emerged on how the cleric was assassinated because he had some explosive information on government corruption.
While the Posadas case is unlikely ever to be resolved, it is important as a landmark in bringing the drug mafia to public attention. For most Mexicans, it was the first time that they had ever heard of “drug cartels,” and certainly the first time the Arellano Félix mafia and Chapo Guzmán got much mention. That these organizations could take out a top member of the age-old Catholic Church suggested that they were very powerful. However, many cynical Mexicans still thought these “cartels” were some imaginary scapegoat for government crimes. When one lives with a conspiratorial one-party state for seven decades, it easy to believe its hand is in every act. And a lot of the time, it is.
The media attention put pressure on the Mexican government to round up some capos. Then, as if by magic, two weeks after the cardinal killing, police in Guatemala nabbed Chapo Guzmán and swiftly deported him to Mexico, where he was locked up in a top-security prison. The Arellano Félix brothers had decisively outgunned and outbribed their rival.
A clan of seven brothers and four sisters, the Arellano Félix mob reinvented themselves in Tijuana like many others on the border; back in Sinaloa and Guadalajara, they had been employees; now they were capos. At the head of the mob were two of the brothers—Ramón Arellano Félix, a baby-faced psychotic who became the chief enforcer—and Benjamin Arellano Félix, the second-eldest brother, who was the brains of the operation. Blancornelas compared them all to brothers in the Godfather movies. Ramón, he said, was like the impulsive, violent Sonny Corleone, played by James Caan. Benjamin was the cold and calculating Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino. Another brother, Francisco, was Fredo Corleone, weak in business and an incessant womanizer.
Blancornelas showed me an old family video of the Arellano Félixes at a Tijuana barbecue in their early days. They look a happy, festive bunch, the men with black hair molded into their own version of mullets and colorful Hawaian shirts tucked into their pants. They sip Tecate beer out of tins while a horde of young babies jump around on a trampoline. But on the streets they gained a grisly reputation.
Ramón Arellano Félix formed a notorious regiment of killers, recruiting Chicano gangbangers from San Diego and the bored sons of Tijuana’s wealthy families—a cadre that became known as narco juniors. It was a funny mix: poor kids from America and rich kids from Mexico. But their victims were not laughing. The thugs were set on anyone who got in their bosses’ way, not only killing but also devouring bodies in acid. The punishment was less about destroying evidence and more about devastating the victim’s family psychologically. Ramón was even famed for throwing victims’ corpses onto a fire, grilling up some steaks over it, and standing around with his goons, enjoying beef, beer, and cocaine. Who knows if that really went down. But on the street, word of such cruelty was a powerful deterrent.
Ramón also introduced a new bloody tactic—the encobijado. The word describes the practice of wrapping up a corpse in sheets and dumping it in a public place, often with a threatening note. Murder was on display for all the city to see. Ramón had created the first army of enforcers and pioneered Mexico’s first gangster terror, an ominous development in the history of El Narco.
In modern capitalism, big corporations keep getting bigger, using their vast profits to expand their empires and eat up smaller competitors. In this way, Mexico’s border cartels expanded in the nineties. Their wealth and power pushed them to the point where they could even usurp the original cartels in Colombia. By taking over from the Colombians, Mexican gangs would become the dominant criminal organizations in the whole of Latin America.
To get a better grasp on how Mexican traffickers got the upper hand over the Colombians, I talked to the DEA’s Andean regional director, Jay Bergman. The agent followed the seismic shift while working on dozens of huge busts and probes across the Americas. But Bergman didn’t come across as the typical DEA agent trying to sell the company line or impress with stories of drug-busting bravado. In fact, Bergman appeared to be quite an intellectual who had read widely on economic theory to understand the smuggling mafias. When I sat down with him, he unleashed a tirade about the shift in power with the vigor of a writer with a book inside him struggling to get out. He explained, “What is interesting is that there was no hostile takeover or violence. At each progression, the Colombian cartels made a conscious decision to allocate more share to the Mexicans. And then it got to a time when the Mexicans started calling the shots.”
Colombians first let Mexicans get their fingers into the cocaine pie after Reagan cracked down in Florida, which made cartels spread their smuggling risk along the Mexican-U.S. border. By 1990, Bergman explained, American agents had figured out how to shut down the Florida smuggling corridor completely, using naval vessels and aircraft to keep watch on a ninety-mile choke point. The Colombians were forced to hand almost all their merchandise to Mexican couriers, who would end up moving nine tenths of the cocaine that entered the United States. This shifted the white lady’s routes to the East Pacific, a vast stretch of water with no natural choke points and a lesser U.S. navy presence. Typical of drug enforcement, solving one problem had created another bigger one.
U.S. agents then turned on Colombian head honcho Pablo Escobar to stop the flow of blow. The end of the Cold War aided them in their mission. With no communists to hunt, American spooks and soldiers were eager to fight drug traffickers for a brief moment (until they discovered Islamic militants). Rather than tripping each other up, the Pentagon, CIA, and DEA all worked together, feeding data from street informants and spook satellites to the Colombian police.8
Escobar had drawn particular attention to himself by his terrorist tactics—he even bombed an airliner, killing 110 passengers, as pressure to stop his being extradited to the United States. His brutal violence against rivals also created so many enemies that victims formed a paramilitary group to get him. A curious alliance was formed of Colombian police, soldiers, and criminals, and American spies, drug agents, and troops, all after the big guy. Escobar was just waiting to die. Colombian police finally caught up with him in a residential Medellín house, shot him dead, and posed smiling with his corpse. Drug warriors learned a new modus operandi—sometimes it is better to forget about an arrest and go for the clean kill.
Under pressure from all sides, Colombians started paying Mexican couriers in cocaine rather than cash. The Colombians had a huge markup. While a kilo of cocaine was worth $25,000 wholesale in the United States, it only cost Colombians $2,000 from a lab. But the Mexican border tycoons could see the huge business advantage of having product rather than money. They could sell it on the street for greater gain and build up their own distribution networks.
The DEA soon hit the Colombians again, arresting their sellers in New York and Miami and using the cases to indict kingpins back home on conspiracy charges. Faced with American jail time, Colombians took their deal with the Mexicans to a third phase, getting out of the United States altogether and letting Mexicans sell it there. Bergman explains their reasoning:
“They were thinking, ‘How do I diminish my exposure to potential extradition? Why don’t I just hand this whole thing to the Mexicans? I still make a huge amount of money and I lower my exposure to potential extradition as it’s no longer my kilo. I get out of the business because it is getting too much pressure to do this in the United
States. And concurrently I’ve got the European market, I’m making hand-over-fist money in Europe, I’m making tons of money in Mexico. Let the Mexican cartels deal with the DEA and the FBI and the U.S. customs.’”
However, Bergman goes on, U.S. laws were later changed so prosecutors could extradite Colombians even if they weren’t directly connected to sellers in the United States. Someone selling drugs abroad could now be nailed just by knowing those drugs were headed to American soil. At the same time, the Colombian national police began to hammer the drug barons from behind.
“It completely backfired. Not only did the Colombians make less money, not only did the Mexicans take over, but the Colombians were being extradited left and right, and the cases being built against them were stronger and more powerful. The Colombians never quite got it. They always played checkers and never really played chess. They never really thought two steps ahead.”
Up in Mexico, this meant cartels were raking in more money than ever before. Reports ebbed out of huge fiestas from Tijuana to the Gulf of Mexico, with guests arriving on private jets, tigers displayed in cages, and beauty queens serving up cocaine. These were party years on the border. And in turn, bigger bribes than ever flowed into the system.
During seven decades of PRI rule, the loudest allegations of narco corruption at the top are shouted at President Salinas. Nothing has been conclusively proven. But investigations themselves highlight the depth of suspicion about the government’s role in organized crime at the end of the twentieth century.
