El Narco (11 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.

U.S. agents tracked cowboy Rafael Caro Quintero down to Costa Rica, where he was busted by special forces and deported to Mexico. He has been in prison since. DEA agents then thought they had struck gold when they tracked Matta himself by a telephone wiretap to a house in Mexico City. “I have paid my taxes,” Matta was heard saying, a presumed reference to paying off police. They passed the information to Mexican investigators, but the Mexicans stalled on going in. As DEA agents furiously watched the house on a Saturday night, four men drove off in a car. When the federal police finally kicked the door down Sunday morning, they found a lone woman. Matta had gone the night before, she said. DEA agents were livid.
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The curly-haired Matta next surfaced in the beach resort of Cartagena, Colombia. The DEA passed information to Colombian national police, and this time a unit was in time to catch him. But not even prison could stop Matta. The kingpin walked out of the Colombian jail through seven locked doors after reportedly spreading millions of dollars round the guards. “The doors opened for me, and I went through them,” he was later quoted as saying in a Honduran newspaper. Matta went back to his homeland to live in a palatial home in the center of Tegucigalpa. Honduras had no extradition treaty with the United States.

As the Camarena case dragged on, America’s war on drugs shot up to fifth gear. First in 1986, two American sports stars, Len Bias and Don Rogers, died of cocaine overdoses. Oh, God, cried newspapers, maybe cocaine can kill after all. Then the media discovered crack. It wasn’t a new story. Use of cocaine freebase had been rising under a number of names since it was developed in the Bahamas in the 1970s. But
Time
and
Newsweek
ran cover stories, and CBS unleashed its special report “48 Hours on Crack Street” to one of the highest ratings for any documentary in TV history. Crack definitely sold.

Ronald Reagan jumped on the issue just as the 1986 midterm election came up. “My generation will remember how Americans swung into action when we were attacked in World War Two,” he cried. “Now we’re in another war for our freedom.”
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His war talk turned to a shooting gun in the Anti Drug Abuse Act the same year. The law fought traffickers at the beaches and the landing bays by making it easier to seize assets while introducing mandatory minimum sentences, especially for crack dealers. The administration also hiked resources for DEA and Customs. The war on drugs went on steroids.

However, DEA still faced a major obstacle in Central America: the Cold War. Throughout the eighties, the region served as a front line in the fight on communism, an arena where spooks and conservatives believed they battled the Soviet threat at America’s doorstep. Within this conflict, the CIA invested most in the right-wing contra rebels of Nicaragua, who were armed and trained in neighboring Honduras. Both contra guerrillas and Honduran officers made money from cocaine.

CIA support of right-wing Central Americans linked to drug traffickers has since been well documented and should be moved from conspiracy theory to proven fact. However, some patriotic Americans still find it hard to swallow. The connections are complicated. And to confuse the debate, some writers make other unproven accusations against the CIA, while others misrepresent the charges.

One can follow various strands but the most notorious was exposed by journalist Gary Webb in his 1996 series
Dark Alliance
published in the
San Jose Mercury News
.
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Webb showed that a prominent Los Angeles crack dealer brought his product from two Nicaraguans, who in turn funded the contras. The story set off an atomic reaction. Suddenly, African-Americans were marching in Watts and shouting that the CIA was involved in the crack epidemic.