El Narco (38 page)

“I like things that have an adrenaline rush and that is one of them. Undercover is a rush because you don’t know what is going to happen, whether you are going to come back or not.”

Daniel was getting close. But the work was taking a toll on him. He began to lose his own identity, to get lost in the world of flash Colombian traffickers with their entourages of beautiful women. Who was he really? The undercover cop or the trafficker? Before going out to meets, he got scared. What if he messed up and let on who he really was? One thing that kept him grounded, he said, was a record by New York producer Moby that contained tracks with deep, melancholy beats.

“I would listen to this song and get extremely hyped up. This is how I found the motivation inside of me to get all my energy and my adrenaline to do what I needed to do. I would take a cab from the hotel room to go and meet with the bad guys, and I knew that I had to go there and win. That is all I had to do. I had to go there and confuse them and convince them that I was who I said I was.

“I never took my eyes off them; never looked down. I was very positive and affirmative with the things that I said. When I looked how I looked then, I would believe me too. I had a very dry look. I spoke very sharp and to the point. I had a look that said, ‘If you fuck me, you know we are going to go toe-to-toe.’”

That was when
Miami Vice
hit the cinema; with the same scam he was selling. Watching it, he was tempted to run for his life. But he stuck at it. And thankfully, it seemed the Colombians didn’t see the movie.

Finally came the day for the deal. The Colombians bought his story and handed over nearly four tons of cocaine and a suitcase of money. The drugs were put onto a thirty-five-foot cargo vessel used to lay cable on the seabed. It had enough fuel to get to Spain. The Colombians put one guy out to sea with the stash, plus Daniel and the crew. The boat hit the waves. Then—
bang
—the navy seized it. Daniel had taken down drugs worth hundreds of millions on the street.

Panama was hard. But another job left a deeper scar in Daniel—when he pulled the same scam on Mexican drug traffickers.

The sting was set up in a city on the U.S.-Mexico border. Daniel gradually built up connections with a major smuggling operation. He offered them a truck to move drugs into the United States. The idea was to seize the drugs, the money, and to get all the crooks in the warehouse where the truck was going.

Daniel’s main contact with the smugglers was a legal student in his midtwenties. The young man was taking part in the trafficking to pay his way through the law school. In six more months, he would receive his credentials. The student fell for Daniel’s story and bought the transport services. He had inadvertently put the drugs of his bosses into the hands of the DEA.

The movement of cargo went down, and Daniel got a call from the student. The cartel had taken the student hostage in a house as a ransom for the delivery of the drugs.

“He called me and begged for his life through a phone in a room where I could hear him getting beaten down to his very last breath. We took everything down: we delivered the goods; we arrested the people who were receiving it. But I never saw him [the student] again. They found his car and his wallet on the street.”

A few days later, Daniel got a call from the student’s parents. They had found their son’s phone and seen Daniel’s number in it. They were asking for any information to recover their son’s body.

“The parents asked if I knew where their kid was so they could give him a decent burial. That really sends it home. It really makes you feel like shit, because what if that was your kid? You have so much love for your kid that you would drag them out of the ground. I think that really set the tone for me, like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ You are killing people. You are setting up people to fail.”

Daniel started to feel doubts. He asked for permission to leave undercover and become a regular agent, at least for the short term. It was a few months after this that I met him for beer and pizza.

“I cut all my hair. I wanted a break. I wanted to change who I was.”

DEA agents including Daniel train their Mexican counterparts in antidrug work. It is part of the Mérida Initiative. Washington has concluded that the key to restoring order in Mexico is to build up the country’s law enforcement institutions. The United States can offer decades of drug-fighting experience that has culminated in undercover agents such as Daniel. With help from these American cops, it is hoped, Mexico will be able to hammer the drug cartels.

Within this thinking, Colombia is held up as a success story for Mexico to follow. Colombia had weak, corrupt law enforcement in the early 1990s when drug violence and civil war made it the most violent country in the world. However, under Plan Colombia, American money and know-how helped Colombia build a fearsome police and military. The Colombian National Police now boasts 143,000 officers and dozens of planes, helicopters, and heavy armaments in a single force. Its antinarcotics division has a considerable success rate in busting traffickers. To see the future of Mexican law enforcement, you want to turn to Colombia.

The Colombian National Police bases its antidrug strategy on the DEA’s trusted use of informants. In fact, they have enhanced the technique. Large resources are given over to paying informants major rewards so they can become rich for their rest of their lives from a tip-off. The government also works to persuade the community that ratting out the bad guys is an honorable rather than dishonorable activity. Following arrests, officials declare, “the government congratulates the brave men who gave information leading to this detention,” or a similar line. Snitches are heroes, it argues, not toads.

I wanted to take a closer look at how Colombia’s use of informants works. So on one of my visits to Bogotá, German photographer Oliver Schmieg introduces me to his trusted narc contact in the Colombian National Police, an agent who goes by the code name Richard. When we call Richard, he says he is actually meeting an informant at that very moment. But don’t worry, he says, we can come along and talk to his snitch as well!

We go to the meeting at a police and military club in an upscale Bogotá neighborhood. Such clubs are all over the country and are a perk that helps build morale in the security services. One of the key problems for Mexican police forces is low morale, as well as the bad pay and disastrous casualty rate. In contrast, the Colombian police clubs include swimming pools, soccer grounds, and restaurants. We find Richard sitting at a table drinking coffee. On his right-hand side is a fellow officer; on his left are two informants. We sit down for a cozy get-together: two journalists, two narcs, and two snitches.

Richard is a smooth-operating Colombian cop in his early forties with long black hair and a light brown leather jacket. He makes all of us round the table feel at ease with each other, as if it were an everyday situation. The informant singing like a bird is a skinny, light-skinned crook, wearing grubby jeans. He works in a cocaine laboratory in a part of the Colombian jungle controlled by right-wing paramilitaries. However, he explains, these same gangsters actually buy their cocaine from leftist guerrillas. Richard picks up on the point: “You see, all these bad guys are working together now. It is all about money.” Colombia is really fighting a criminal insurgency just like Mexico, he argues, not an ideological one.

Richard coaxes the snitch to describe the whole laboratory setup so that Colombian police can take it down. He asks the informant where the gunmen stand, where the weapons are stashed, where the generator is, what vehicles they have. He needs to know all the information so that there will be no surprises when a team goes in blasting. This is data that you can’t get from satellite images. You have to buy it.

The informant says that between sixty to eighty men are around the lab. They use Toyota pickups and have snipers with Kalashnikovs. Richard sketches down the details into a notepad and reports information into a cell phone. A few minutes later, he gets a call and a big smile spreads across his face. “The mission has been authorized,” he tells the snitch. “You are on.” If everything goes to plan, he says, the informant will get a reward of tens of thousands of dollars.

“In this business, the infomants need enough money to take their whole family and live in a different place. They need to be able to really make their life with what we give them. We can make them have some pride in their work. But the key incentive for them is going to be the money.”

But while it might be all about the bottom line, Richard has incredibly amiable relationships with his informants. He laughs and jokes and discusses intimate family matters. Turning round to me, he comments on this sociability.

“You have to be friends with each other in this business because you have to trust each other. If someone is loyal and works well, it is because they trust you. It can be hard for an informant to trust me and for me to trust them. So you have to build that trust.”

Richard comes from a rough village in the north of Colombia and joined the police as a way out of poverty. He has now spent twenty-one years on the force, mostly in the antinarcotics division. In this time, he has seen the turnaround in the Colombian security services. The methodical buying of information, he says, is a crucial part of the change. He is one of the best informant handlers in the force. He currently has contact with some two hundred sources.

“The most important thing is intelligence. If you have the sources, if you have the intelligence, then you can get any trafficker on the planet.”

The Colombian-style use of snitches is being imported into Mexico on a big scale. While paying informants was for a long time prohibited in Mexico, Calderón’s government introduced a major reward system. In 2010 and 2011 such payments were key in locating a string of major traffickers, who were arrested or shot down. This use of snitches is one of the main reasons that the Calderón government has been able to hit so many top targets—to the cheers of American agents. Looking at the future of the Mexican Drug War, the use of informants is likely to increase, making kingpins more vulnerable.

The people with most knowledge about drug operations are the high-level gangster operators: lieutenants, right-hand men, and the capos themselves. So when police arrest these big players, they bleed them for as much information as they can. Then they go ahead and seize more drugloads, labs, and gangsters.

Colombians decided in the 1990s that these arch-criminals posed less threat if they were extradited to the United States. So much of the bleeding of information is done there, in the form of negotiated deals. Top narco-lawyer Gustavo Salazar—who represented Pablo Escobar, some twenty other capos, and fifty of their lieutenants—explained the negotiations to me as we chatted in a Medellín café:

“I deal with these drug lords every day. They are these fearsome gangsters. And then they get arrested and they are like crying children. They are scared. They don’t want to be locked up in isolation for the rest of their lives. So they make deals.

“They let the agents know where some of their bank accounts and assets are. And they hand over names and routes of other traffickers. Then they get time in easier prisons or reduced sentences.”

Everybody knows that American courts love a plea bargain. And they love seizing assets of drug traffickers. The major players boast accounts with tens of millions of dollars or more.

The deals made by these traffickers have been documented for some time. Among the Colombian gangsters to make such a pact is Andrés López, a capo in the Norte del Valle Cartel. López snitched on other members of his criminal organization, who in turn also snitched. López then wrote a book about it all, called
The Cartel of the Toads
, which was made into a successful television series in Colombia.
²
Apparently released and living in Miami, López then went on to co-write another book and live in the glitzy world of Latin American TV stars, dating some famous Mexican soap beauties.

Mexico has also substantially increased extraditions of kingpins to the United States. The deals developed between Colombian kingpins and American courts are moving to the Mexican capos.

The most high-profile deal has been made by drug lord Osiel Cárdenas, the founder of the Zetas. Osiel was extradited in 2007 and participated in negotiations with American authorities over the following three years. Details of the resulting pact were initially held from the public. But reporting by Dane Schiller of the
Houston Chronicle
uncovered much of the deal. Osiel Cárdenas was not sent to the roasting Colorado desert and locked up with Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros, inventor of the Mexican trampoline. Instead, Osiel was sent to a medium-security facility in Atlanta, where he can go to meals, the library, and recreation time. Also unlike Matta, he is not serving centuries behind bars. Cárdenas has a release date of 2028. In return, agents seized $32 million in his assets and Cárdenas gave up information about his old drug-trafficking allies. That data is likely behind many major arrests of Zetas in 2010 and 2011.
³

More such deals are likely to mark the future of the Mexican Drug War. Bargains could be waiting for other Mexican traffickers wanted in the United States, such as Benjamin Arellano Félix or Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, or—if he is ever caught—even Chapo Guzmán himself.

This system has some obvious flaws. When major criminals make deals to get out early, it can be seen as a bad example. It is not such a deterrent when a criminal career ends with the villain dating beautiful soap-opera stars. A long list of drug traffickers have ended up as celebrities.

Asset seizure is also controversial. American agents get to spend dirty drug dollars. They say they are making money for Uncle Sam, but then again, they are also paradoxically reaping the benefits of cocaine and heroin being sold. When agents make money busting traffickers, there is an added incentive to sustain the whole war on drugs.