Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (13 page)

When El Chapo was admitted to the penitentiary, the PGR carried out a thorough analysis of his criminal profile. Guzmán was found to be “egocentric, narcissistic, shrewd, persistent, tenacious, meticulous, discriminating, and secretive,” with a “high level of criminal capacity,” and a “medium to high level of social adaptability” which had enabled him to develop networks of loyalty and complicity. Of all his character features, three single him out from the run-of-the-mill drug trafficker: he is ingenious, manipulative, and charming. Those who know him admit to falling prey to one or more of these. Who could forget his resourcefulness in sending cocaine to the United States in cans of jalapeño peppers at the beginning of the 1990s? Furthermore, Guzmán differs from his predecessors by being a master in the art of seduction.

Yet behind this amiable exterior, and the supposedly charitable works undertaken in the communities where he lives or does
business, lies a ruthless egotist. His generosity is a mask. According to the prison’s analysis, Guzmán is driven entirely by self-interest, with no concern for how this affects others. His personal relationships are superficial and “exploitative.” He is capable of inflicting physical harm casually, without a thought, because other people’s needs and feelings have no real meaning for him. “Only his own desires are important and absolute.”

In 1993, El Chapo was a man who had difficulty controlling his sexual and aggressive impulses, and could not deal with frustration. During his eight years in various prisons, the drug baron from La Tuna committed countless excesses, all as a result of his limitless power to corrupt. And like any self-respecting mafia boss, he was big-hearted: at the time of his arrest, he had relationships with four women.

In 1977 El Chapo contracted his one legal matrimony, with María Alejandrina Guadalupe Salazar, the mother of his five acknowledged children. There is a saying among drug barons’ partners: “Once you marry a drug trafficker, you stay married to him, even when you don’t want to be.” These women can go for months without seeing their husbands, and have to put up with them having one or twenty lovers in the meantime, from those they pay for to those they fall for. Alejandrina could never have had another partner herself, but their marriage was no obstacle to El Chapo pursuing other women.

One girlfriend was Griselda Guadalupe López, alias Silvia Escoto, with whom he had another four children: Joaquín or Quiquín, Edgar, Ovidio or Ovi (a tribute to one of his brothers who died in a car crash in 1991), and Grisel Guadalupe. In 1993 they were seven, six, five and three years old; but in his statement to prosecutors, El Chapo denied knowing either Griselda or Ovidio.

In May 2010, just before President Felipe Calderón began a trip to Washington where there was expected to be criticism of his failure to arrest El Chapo, the Mexican government tried to give the impression it was out to get Guzmán with a high-profile operation involving agents from the Federal Public Prosecutor’s office supported by the Federal Police, the army, and the navy. They carried out seven searches of properties linked to Guzmán in Culiacán. Many of these locations had been known to the security services since 2007. In the course of the operation they arrested Griselda López.

The DEA had been waiting for the drug baron’s ex-partner to be arrested to investigate her for suspected money laundering. The agreement with the Calderón government was that she would be kept in custody. Griselda arrived handcuffed and hooded at the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) in Mexico City, but then unexpectedly walked out again, free as air. When the DEA discovered that she’d been released on orders from the Mexican government, it leaked the information to the
New York Times
: “[Felipe Calderón] played a role last week in the quick release of the wife of one of Mexico’s top traffickers because of concern that her detention would prompt a round of reprisal attacks, said officials briefed on the matter,” wrote Marc Lacey for the New York broadsheet.
¹

In 1993 Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán was also seeing a woman called Estela López. And when he was arrested in Guatemala, he was accompanied by María del Rocío del Villar Becerra, from Aguamilpa in Nayarit, where he has an operations center.

And yet, Guzmán is a solitary man. People in his profession get few opportunities to spend time with their families. Perhaps once or twice a year they manage to meet up at a hotel or a ranch. A few minutes, a few words, and
adiós
. That is why, over the course of their criminal careers, drug traffickers tend to acquire a lover in every town. Some such relationships are purely physical, but when they involve children, these are never forgotten. Fatherhood is another symbol of power.

When El Chapo was arrested, many thought his criminal career was over. However, drug trafficking is a business where you make money quickly and by the fistful; and Guzmán was a businessman whose potential was far from exhausted. At the time, even though he was only a secondary player, he already owned eleven properties, three private planes, twenty-seven bank accounts, four companies in different Mexican states, and hundreds of millions of dollars.

He had gone to live in Guadalajara in 1988, to work alongside other Sinaloa colleagues like Héctor Palma under the orders of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, and Amado Carrillo Fuentes. He left the city in 1992, after his car was sprayed with bullets by the Arellano Félix brothers, and moved back to Sinaloa with Alejandrina and the children, where he continued to prosper.

Between 1985 and 1990 Guzmán Loera shifted scores of tons of cocaine for Amado Carrillo Fuentes, linked with the Medellín Cartel, from a base in El Tonino, near Compostela in Nayarit state. This tiny village of no more than 100 souls lies on the Pacific coast, not far from the lush resorts of Guayabitos, Paraíso Escondido, and Playa Hermosa. Here El Chapo used a clandestine airstrip and the beach itself to receive the merchandise arriving from Colombia by plane or by boat, and ensured that it proceeded safely towards the buoyant US market.

Here he could also rely on the help of a local politician, Julián Venegas Guzmán, in tasks such as bribing members of Nayarit’s armed forces to work with him. The partnership between El Chapo and the strongman of Compostela was sealed when Julián made them compadre
s
by inviting him to be godfather to his daughter Brenda; in Narcoland, this “co-parent” relationship is the equivalent of a blood covenant. At El Tonino, Venegas and Lieutenant Adrián Pérez welcomed numerous planeloads of cocaine guarded by Mexican soldiers, according to the testimony given in late 2001 by Marcelo Peña García, brother of one of El Chapo’s girlfriends, speaking under the pseudonym Julio as a protected witness for the PGR.

According to Julio’s expert testimony, El Chapo knew that the Mexican government was after him and was provident enough to prepare two bundles of dollars that would ensure the operation could continue functioning. He gave one to his compadre Julián and the other, consisting of $200 million, was entrusted to a cousin, Ignacio Burgos Araujo.

Although in 1993 Guzmán acknowledged his connection with Burgos, and gave his interrogators many details of the latter’s activities, including arms trafficking, the authorities made no move to capture either him or Venegas. They only got around to it after the scandal of Guzmán’s jailbreak in January 2001, in order to look as if they were cracking down on El Chapo. On September 21 of that year, Venegas was apprehended at his well-known residence in Compostela, Nayarit, and charged with felonies against public health and belonging to an organized crime group.

Straight after El Chapo escaped from the Puente Grande prison, he was hidden by Venegas on one of his properties. Had the
authorities arrested Venegas before, El Chapo could never have found refuge in Nayarit, since the other members of his gang preferred to keep their distance until things calmed down.

Most of the Compostela team has now been dispersed, killed, or arrested—some, like the renegade Lieutenant Antonio Mendoza Cruz, were arrested as late as 2009, when the
Forbes
list placing Guzmán among the world’s richest men shamed Calderón’s government into a performance of pursuit. The municipality of Compostela is still frequently visited by the invisible man (invisible to the forces of law and order, at least): Guzmán owns at least eight properties in the area. They are registered in the name of Socorro García Ocegueda, Julio’s mother.

In 1993, the PGR had recorded only two high-profile crimes involving El Chapo Guzmán: the first was the homicide of nine members of Félix Gallardo’s family, whose bodies were found on September 3, 1992, in Iguala, Guerrero, with signs of having been tortured; the second was the failed attempt to kill the Arellano Félix brothers a few months later at the Christine Discotheque in Puerto Vallarta, an incident in which eight others did die.

Of these two events, it is the first that yields most clues as to who are El Chapo’s protectors. In 1993, on that flight from Tapachula to Toluca, he had revealed the protection he received from Deputy Attorney General Federico Ponce, as well as from commanders José Luis Larrazolo and Guillermo Salazar. Still more disturbing, however, were the names he left out. The tentacles of organized crime reached everywhere.

Kidnapping in Las Lomas

It was 19:39 on the evening of September 4, 1992, when an anonymous call interrupted the peaceful routine at the duty office of the Judicial Police in Mexico City, whose boss was the corrupt Rodolfo León Aragón. The caller warned that in the exclusive district of Bosques de las Lomas, a cherry-colored Suburban van was driving around with no plates and carrying several armed men. The phone call rang alarm bells. The duty office already had reports that people
in a similar vehicle, posing as Federal Judicial Police, had kidnapped two bodyguards of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo.

The attorney general at the time was Ignacio Morales Lechuga. One of his responsibilities was the so-called Special Affairs Prosecution Service.

Immediately after the call reporting the mysterious Suburban, the Special Affairs team launched an operation led by public prosecution officers Óscar Lozano and Ignacio Sandoval, assisted by four commanders and three investigating officers. At 22:00 the SUV was detected traveling at high speed in Ahuehuetes Street in the same neighborhood. When the PJF officers ordered the driver to stop, he accelerated and tried to escape; the other occupants poked their guns out the rear windows and started shooting at the police, with wild inaccuracy.

The dark night and heavy rain made ideal conditions for an escape. The chase lasted several minutes. When they got as far as Limones, the Suburban made a turn and headed for Almendros, where it stopped at number 42. Luckily for the police, the electric gate was too slow and they managed to catch up with the car. Its five passengers leaped out and scattered, firing as they went at the police officers, who were unable to follow. The suspects left their vehicle with the engine running and the doors open on both sides. Lozano and Sandoval got out of the patrol car and went to look. They found an M2 .30-caliber rifle with no magazine, and a cream-colored valise containing the deeds to a number of properties in the name of Félix Gallardo and other members of his family.
²

The day before, on September 3, the sister of the head of the Guadalajara Cartel, Gloria Félix Gallardo, had reported to public prosecutors that a group of armed men had forced their way into their mother’s home at number 142, Cerrada de la Colina, in the Pedregal de San Ángel neighborhood. They had stolen an identical valise and kidnapped her son, her nephew, her brother, two lawyers who worked for the drug baron, and two others. It seemed obvious to the officers that the passengers in the Suburban were connected with the kidnapping of members of the family of the Boss of Bosses.

The police also found in the van a light brown leather jacket fitted with a bulletproof vest, various items of radio equipment, and
another case containing rifle magazines—two for an AR-15, an empty thirty-round magazine and a forty-round one with thirty-two cartridges left. In the rear of the vehicle they found two tickets for the toll road between Cuernavaca and Puente de Ixtla, three credit cards belonging to those kidnapped the day before, the remains of some marijuana, a rope, blindfolds, and a bloodied pocket tissue. The key exhibits found in the Suburban that night were two enormous oil paintings. They were separate portraits of two men: one, in a white shirt and light grey pants, was Martín Moreno, a friend and associate of Joaquín Guzmán; the other, with his unmistakable mustache and baby-face, was El Chapo himself.

Nobody moved from the place. The police officers decided to wait for the suspects to make the next move. At eight o’clock the next morning, twenty-one-year-old Cristina Sánchez arrived at the house. She was one of the domestic staff working there. The officers immediately got out of their car and intercepted her.

The cherry Suburban had indeed been used to kidnap the nine people connected to Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, who was then in prison at the Reclusorio Sur, from where he continued to run his empire. Two days before the police chase in Bosques de las Lomas, a group of men had kidnapped Marco Antonio Solórzano Félix—a half-brother of the Boss of Bosses—from a house in Coyoacán, in the south of Mexico City; the gunmen also stole some valuables. Around noon they had carried out a similar operation at the home of Félix Gallardo’s mother, as his sister had reported. The kidnappers burst into the house in Pedregal de San Ángel claiming to be federal agents; in the end it turns out they were, only they were acting on behalf of drug traffickers rather than the law. The group was led by Ramón Laija, El Coloche, from the General Anti-Narcotics Directorate, who would later become the brother-in-law of El Güero Palma. They snatched seven people from the house in Pedregal: Alberto Félix, Alfredo Carrillo, Ángel Gil, Federico Livas, Teodoro Ramírez, and two others. Livas and Ramírez were the lawyers who were seeking a writ of habeas corpus for José Luis Félix López, another relative of the Boss of Bosses who had been picked up twenty-four hours earlier in Guadalajara, also by supposed federal agents.