Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (48 page)

The privileges and obligations of traffickers who agree to become informants are set out in documents amounting to contracts signed with the PGR; privileges include protection of the witness’s immediate family. For his part, El Grande undertook to reveal everything about the Beltrán Leyvas’ organizational structure and activities in various states.
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The President of death

Felipe Calderón stepped down as president of Mexico in December 2012. His time in office will be engraved in collective memory as an era of death and corruption. Josefina Vázquez Mota, the valiant PAN member who sought to succeed him, lost the election to the PRI’s Peña Nieto. Calderón’s trusted confidant, Genaro García Luna, the tainted secretary of public security, did not after all run for president. And he may not remain immune for ever. In December 2012, an anonymous DEA agent told
Proceso
magazine that they had only kept quiet about García Luna “out of respect for Mexican institutions and because he was the direct contact with the United States, assigned by the Mexican president. No other reason.”
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Diplomatic sources say that he sold up his many assets in Mexico before joining his family in Florida—with a time bomb in his luggage.

The future, however, is uncertain, and the present is complex. The United States government is on red alert at the possibility the mounting violence might spill over its border. In 2011 the former Mexican president Vicente Fox spoke up in favor of “dialogue” with the criminal organizations, and legalization of the production, distribution, and sale of currently illegal drugs. Maybe this is one of the promises made to organized crime during his time in office.

President Calderón’s popularity plummeted well before his departure. Thousands protested against the absurd strategy of “war” and its non-existent victories. For although some drug barons opposed to El Chapo have been captured, many of the groups they controlled continue to grow, and could themselves become new cartels. It is estimated that over 80,000 people were killed by drug-related
violence during Calderón’s sexennial. By comparison, during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, some 40,000 people died. And that is seen as one of the most bloody and shameful periods in Latin American history. How will Mexico’s president of death go down in history?

The only clear winners in this disaster are El Chapo Guzmán and El Mayo Zambada, who grow more powerful by the day. El Chapo’s reign will last as long as he wants it to. Inside his clan some say he is already preparing his retirement, so no one should be surprised if he were to turn up “dead” in some “successful” operation, like his friend Nacho Coronel. On the other hand, like it or not, business might demand he stay on a little longer, while any successor gains the trust of partners and accomplices on both sides of the border.

Among the ranks of organized crime they say the rules of the game are getting stricter. Nowadays the drug barons kill their own henchmen at the least sign of hesitation, ever fearful they might be betrayed. And as some frighteningly prescient criminal sources pointed out in August 2010, many of the dead will be public officials.

The men who feed on blood and pain are redeploying. The indictment of the State made by Edgardo Buscaglia in 2010 is as pertinent as ever, while we await the policies of the new president:

I have no proof that [Calderón] personally protects El Chapo Guzmán, but the system he presides over certainly does. Nobody is accusing the president of criminal responsibility for the protection of El Chapo Guzmán. But his system, the SSP, and sectors of an Army that remains contaminated by this ill-conceived battle, do indeed adopt a position that shields some groups and attacks others.

One way or another, the president and his policies are causing, by omission, the deaths of soldiers, policemen, and ordinary citizens. All as a result of failing to follow the best practices exemplified by Colombia and Italy. There is no excuse for such neglect. History, and the Mexican people, will never forgive him.

It has got to stop, and the only ones who can stop it are ordinary citizens. As the lords of the drug trade—callous traffickers, ambitious politicians, greedy businessmen—continue to bump up their
profits in the midst of this desolate, deathly landscape that is slowly replacing Mexico’s beautiful scenery, someone has got to tell them that they are not invincible. What makes them invincible are their networks of political and business protection. It will only end when Mexican society unites against this immense mafia. That means overcoming fear and apathy, and above all the tacit assumption that things cannot be any different.

Similarly, those countries with more developed economic and political systems than Mexico, that look on in horror as if it were all a third-world movie, must not be indifferent. If the Mexican drug cartels are able to export their drugs, their money, and their corruption, what makes anyone think they might not do the same with their violence? According to an official US report published in 2011, the war between El Chapo Guzmán and the Beltrán Leyva brothers has already pushed the latter into expanding their operations in Spain.

To the south, the violence from Mexico’s drug wars has spilled into Central America. At the same time, a dirty secret is beginning to come out across Mexico’s border to the north, where there are also lords of the drugs trade, and hands that feed them.

During Calderón’s sexennial, in what he called his “war on drugs,” more than 80,000 people were killed, over 20,000 disappeared, and 200,000 thousand people were driven from their homes. Calderón himself is off to Harvard, to give classes at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, leaving a wake of blood, corruption, and impunity. Genaro García Luna has taken refuge in Miami Beach. And the PRI, the party that launched the Mexican model of corruption and protection for drug traffickers, is back in power.

The Drug Lords are getting ready for the next era. Some are reorganizing their narcotics business, while others retire from the public stage for a rest. As long as they go unpunished, Mexico will continue to be Narcoland.

EPILOGUE
La Barbie Strikes Back

F
our days before the end of President Felipe Calderón’s presidency, drug trafficker Edgar Valdez Villarreal, alias La Barbie, decided to break his silence. The thirty-six-year-old US citizen is accused in Mexico of being part of the Beltrán Leyva cartel, and of managing groups of professional killers like Los Números and Los Maras. He faces three indictments in the United States, filed in Texas, Louisiana, and Georgia.

From the Altiplano maximum-security prison in the State of Mexico, where he was being held, he dropped a real bombshell for the Calderón government. Mexico’s violent drug barons have embraced the new fashion for car bombs. La Barbie preferred something more subtle: a letter.

Never before in the history of Mexico had a drug trafficker publicly broken the pact of complicity. With the end of Calderón’s deadly administration just days away, and his own extradition to the US also imminent, the time was right for La Barbie’s unexpected confession.

On November 26, I received an unusual call from his lawyer, Eréndira Joselyn Guerra. She wanted to see me regarding a matter of public interest which her client had instructed her to raise with me. It was the first time I had spoken to her, and, for obvious journalistic reasons, I accepted.

As the time of our meeting approached, my heart was racing. I had waited seven years for this moment. In the course of my research I had spoken to many people inside and outside of the law, but never had a drug baron or one of their employees wanted to make a direct, public confession—apart from those who had made statements to
public prosecutors which were then kept secret, to avoid implicating public figures and businessmen.

The reason the lawyer, Guerra, wanted to see me was to hand over a letter that her client had dictated to her in prison. They had worked on the text together for several weeks before settling on the final document, just one page long, that he signed and wanted me to publish. The letter was handed to me on November 27, 2012.

In it he accused Felipe Calderón of personally presiding over several meetings with criminal groups to reach a deal with them. He said he had been singled out for persecution because he had refused to make a pact with the other organizations. And he stated that the US government was informed of these events.

“Subsequently there were various meetings with General Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro who had orders from the president and Juan Camilo Mouriño to meet with two of the leaders of the Michoacán Family.
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After that the general met with Heriberto Lazcano and Miguel Ángel Treviño, Z40, in Matamoros. And later Acosta Chaparro and Mouriño spoke to Arturo Beltrán Leyva, El Barbas, and the general also spoke to El Chapo Guzmán, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel. Calderón wanted an agreement with all the cartels: the Zetas, the Gulf Cartel, myself, the Juárez Cartel with Vicente, as well as Mayo and Chapo,” Valdez writes.

“Because I didn’t respond to this and didn’t want to have links with any of the criminal organizations, an intense persecution began against me, to the point where several of my homes were raided without a warrant, from which they stole money, valuables, cars, and other belongings,” the letter continues.

The drug baron revealed the bribes he said Calderón’s secretary of public security, Genaro García Luna, had received from the drug cartels and from himself since 2002, when García Luna was director of the Federal Investigations Agency (AFI) during the Fox administration. The payments the traffickers made to the policemen also bought access to DEA information.

“Genaro García Luna, the head of the Secretariat of Public Security (SSP), has since 2002, first in the AFI and later in the PFP, I know received money from me, from drug trafficking, and from organized crime, along with a select group of corrupt policemen that includes
Armando Espinosa de Benito who worked for the DEA and passed information on to me.

“Among other things they were given the task of ‘arresting me in some operation,’ although in fact they had orders to kill me, so that when I was arrested in the house that was mentioned in the media, where I was alone, they say that no shots were reported, but in fact there was shooting. A federal police officer who brought me to the place where I am now, tried to get me to run away so he could shoot me. Then they could say I had been killed resisting arrest,” La Barbie wrote in his letter.

He went on to denounce the impunity of García Luna:

“It is worth mentioning that in spite of Genaro García Luna’s record, which is contained in various case files, of which the American government is well aware, and which even came up in the Merida Initiative, and which I have had access to, most recently in the testimony of the witness known as Mateo (Sergio Villarreal), still President Felipe Calderón keeps him in his post and no legal action is taken against him.

“Another fact worth noting is that however many arrests the Federal Police make, they do not confiscate anything, everything gets lost (money, watches, vehicles, drugs, etc.). On the other hand it should be pointed out that both the Mexican Army and the Navy are more honest, they arrest people and hand them over with all their possessions,” alleges Valdez in the letter his lawyer handed to me.

The last lines of the letter demolish anything still standing: “I may have done whatever I have done, but the public servants I mention, they too are part of the criminal structure in this country.”

This letter was published in
Reforma
, Mexico’s most prestigious newspaper, on November 28, 2012, two days before Felipe Calderón left office.

Throughout Calderón’s sexennial, the main cases against drug traffickers and public officials who protected groups other than El Chapo’s were based on the testimony of other criminals. Such testimony was treated as entirely credible, as long as it served the right political interests. Now that the accusations of a drug trafficker are directed at the president himself and his police chief, this approach has blown up in their faces. García Luna immediately responded that
the accusations were false, and that a judge should rule on their admissibility. The president’s office maintained a deafening silence. They did not deny what La Barbie said.

The drug baron’s lawyer says that when her client is extradited to the United States, he will testify further, and provide proof of the accusations made in his letter.

FULL TEXT OF LETTER:

I wish to state firstly that I have not joined any protected witness program, and I categorically deny the account given by those who apprehended me of how my arrest happened. The truth of the matter is as follows:

My arrest was the result of political persecution by C. Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, who began to harass me because the undersigned refused to be party to an agreement that Calderón Hinojosa wanted to make with all the organized crime groups, for the purpose of which he personally convened various meetings in order to hold talks with the criminal organizations.

Subsequently there were various meetings with General Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro who had orders from the president and Juan Camilo Mouriño to meet with two of the leaders of the Michoacán Family. After that the general met Heriberto Lazcano and Miguel Ángel Treviño, Z40, in Matamoros. And later Acosta Chaparro and Mouriño spoke to Arturo Beltrán Leyva, El Barbas, and the general also spoke to El Chapo Guzmán, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel.

Calderón wanted an agreement with all the cartels: the Zetas, the Gulf Cartel, myself, the Juárez Cartel with Vicente, as well as Mayo and Chapo (Sinaloa Cartel). Because I didn’t respond to this and didn’t want to have links with any of the criminal organizations, an intense persecution began against me, to the point where several of my homes were raided without any warrant, from which they stole money, valuables, cars, and other belongings.