Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (6 page)

As the minutes passed, El Chapo’s confessions stepped up a gear.

El Chapo’s first payroll

On board the plane, Guzmán revealed that he enjoyed protection from the Mexican government’s Attorney General’s Office (PGR) at the highest level. He confessed that about three years earlier, in 1990, during one of his visits to Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo in Mexico City’s Reclusorio Sur prison, he met a “gentleman” who was now working in the PGR. El Chapo said it was through this gentleman’s contacts that he obtained the false passport to enter Guatemala.

When Guzmán got cozy with this gentleman, whose name was Federico Ponce Rojas, the latter was in charge of the Initial Inquiries department at the Mexico City Attorney General’s Office (PGJDF),
which was headed at the time by Ignacio Morales Lechuga. Ponce was one of Morales’s most trusted assistants.

“I gave Federico Ponce $1.5 million every couple of months, when there were cocaine or marijuana deliveries, for him to protect me,” declared Guzmán. At the Reclusorio Sur, according to El Chapo, Ponce also introduced him to the commander “Gómez” who would become his contact. In the report drawn up by General Álvarez, the drug trafficker didn’t say how long he continued to pay bribes to Federico Ponce, nor exactly what kind of “protection” was provided.

Ignacio Morales was attorney general of the Federal District (or Mexico City) from 1988 to 1991. In May 1991, after the departure of Enrique Álvarez del Castillo, President Salinas appointed him attorney general of the Republic, a post he held until January 1993. When Morales moved to the PGR, Ponce moved with him.

Carrillo Olea and Morales never got along. The former Mexico City attorney general has stated publicly that all drug control issues were dealt with directly between Carrillo and President Salinas—so he had very little to do with it. There is little doubt that Ponce’s rapid exit from the PGR (after a bloody and still unclear confrontation between police and army on a secret airstrip in 1991) did nothing to smooth the relationship between Carrillo and Morales.

At the time when El Chapo Guzmán made his statement, Federico Ponce was no longer officially working for the PGR but for one of the country’s main banks, Banamex, privatized by Salinas in 1991. However, according to El Chapo, Ponce was not his only contact in the PGR.

“I had dealings with the head of the Federal Judicial Police in Sonora. On one occasion I gave him $500,000 to let me grow a marijuana crop.” El Chapo also told Álvarez that he had paid for protection from federal police commander Guillermo Salazar Ramos, who was posted in Guadalajara at the end of the 1980s.

El Chapo’s last significant revelation during the flight was that the first-ever state governor from the PAN,
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Ernesto Ruffo Appel of Baja California, was living proof that a change in the party in power didn’t imply any change in the well-oiled machinery of complicity with the
drugs trade: “The Arellano Félix brothers get protection from the governor and the attorney general of Baja California state. One of the governor’s brothers is their partner in a business,” declared El Chapo indignantly at the end of his statement.

It took him some time to realize that, with this fulsome confession on the long journey from Tapachula to Toluca, he had been gambling not with his freedom but with his life.

El Chapo from top to bottom

Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera—his full name, although he only likes to use his first given name—was born on April 4, 1957, in the hamlet of La Tuna in Badiraguato, Sinaloa. It’s a place deep in the Sierra Madre Occidental, in an area known as the “Golden Triangle,” made up of a group of municipalities spanning the borders between Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua states. Around there, the most popular profession is that of drug trafficker.

Joaquín is the son of Emilio Guzmán Bustillos and Consuelo Loera Pérez, the oldest of seven children with barely a year between each of them: Armida, Bernarda, Miguel Ángel, Aureliano, Arturo, and Emiliano. He had three older siblings, but they died of the diseases of poverty when he was very young; he cannot even remember their names. For generations, his family have lived and died in La Tuna.

El Chapo, as they affectionately call the more stunted boys in those parts, is five and a half feet tall, shorter than average for the local men. He attended school only as far as the third grade of elementary, something he’s always been ashamed of. In some of his formal statements he claimed to have completed high school in prison, but that is not true.

It is not surprising that Guzmán never managed to finish elementary school. Every year, hundreds of children in the region drop out when their parents send them to work on the marijuana and poppy harvests. When they go back, they repeat the year until they get fed up and decide there is only one certainty about the future: “Either you become a narco, or you get killed.”

Guzmán began his criminal career at the bottom, following the
family tradition of growing cannabis and opium poppies in the gullies and hillsides of the Sierra Madre Occidental. At that point he embodied the most vulnerable link in the criminal chain.

Some say that he went on to join the police, where he met Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo—whose job was to guard the then governor of Sinaloa, Leopoldo Sánchez Celis, a political patron to drug traffickers. Félix Gallardo went into the business in the mid 1970s. We first hear about Guzmán as his driver, in the period when Félix Gallardo, Pedro Avilés, Manuel Salcido, Emilio Quintero Payán, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, and Rafael Caro Quintero were running the Guadalajara-based gang later called the Sinaloa Cartel.

Guzmán obtained rapid promotion because he was full of ideas for expanding the business. At the same time, as we’ve seen, he was distrusted for being violent and impulsive, and too fond of living it up. When Félix Gallardo was arrested in April 1989, Guzmán teamed up with El Güero Palma. Carrillo Fuentes was arrested the same year, and when he came out in 1990, El Chapo and El Güero joined him. Of the three, Guzmán was the weakest: he was thirty-three, physically less than imposing, and almost illiterate.

Amado Carrillo Fuentes was born in Guamuchilito, Sinaloa. He, by contrast, was an impressive figure, tall and fit, charismatic, methodical, and smart. At thirty-four, a long delinquent life stretched ahead of him. With an uncle like the legendary Don Neto, Amado was never going to be a bottom feeder in the crime world.

Héctor Palma was twenty-eight, tall and blue-eyed, and he had finished high school. Despite his youth, he outranked El Chapo in the hierarchy.

El Chapo was only protected as long as Carrillo Fuentes willed it. Upon arrival at Almoloya de Juárez maximum security prison, in the State of Mexico, he realized that the protection had come to an end.

Under threat

Once the Boeing 727 landed at Toluca airport, Álvarez Nahara immediately got in touch with the secretary of defense, Antonio Riviello, and gave him a summary of El Chapo’s statement, which a few hours later he formally recorded in document number 1387.
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The secretary of defense rushed to tell the president—fast enough for El Chapo Guzmán to find an unexpected welcome as soon as he arrived at the prison. A senior government official was there, who threatened Guzmán with death unless he altered the statement he’d made in the plane. El Chapo was given no other option: cooperate or die.

At 8 p.m., the start of the long night of June 9, 1993, shaven-headed, dressed in the regulation khaki, and visibly exhausted, Guzmán gave his first formal statement to Leticia Gutiérrez, from the federal public prosecutor’s office. Henceforth, for the Mexican justice system, this new statement was the only one that would count.

“My name is Joaquín Guzmán Loera, I am thirty-six years old and they call me El Chapo,” began the trafficker’s agreed confession. He spoke with the strong northern accent he never lost. “I am married, I studied to third grade, I am from Culiacán, Sinaloa, I am Mexican and I make my living from farming and commerce,” he went on. I am a Catholic and the father of four children,” and “my monthly income is 20 thousand new pesos [$6,400 in 1993] without any extras.”

At the time, he was married to Alejandrina Salazar Hernández, although the incorrigible womanizer was picked up in Guatemala not with her but with a “girlfriend,” María del Villar. His children with Alejandrina were César, Giselle, Iván (El Chapito), and Alfredo, respectively aged fourteen, eleven, ten, and seven years old. It was also established that when apprehended El Chapo was carrying a passport in the name of Jorge Ramos Pérez, his travel name, while the name he used as a farmer and tradesman was Raúl Guzmán Ruiz—that of a partner of his who was shot coming out of a grocery store in 1992.

El Chapo wasn’t educated enough to ensure that his statement made consistent sense. He said that one of those arrested with him in Guatemala, Antonio Mendoza Cruz, was his bodyguard and driver, and that he paid him 10,000 new pesos a month. Math wasn’t his strong point. If he really made 20,000 pesos a month clear, how could he be paying his employee half of his entire income? Guzmán continued his statement to the public prosecutor:

“I have spent my whole life as a farmer. I always lived in Culiacán, Sinaloa, until I moved to Guadalajara in 1984. I lived there until 1992, when I returned to Culiacán because a family by the name of Arellano Félix had tried to kill me.”

The assassination attempts

It was early November, 1992. At just after 3 p.m., Guzmán was driving peacefully through Guadalajara in a latest-model black Cutlass, with Mexico City license plates, when a white Ram pickup truck with five people in it crashed into the back of him. Three men jumped out and began to spray his car with bullets, in broad daylight. The noise of the AK-47s was deafening. Like a cat with nine lives, El Chapo survived the attack without a scratch, even though there were twelve bullet holes in his Cutlass. He managed to identify the attackers: Ramón Arellano Félix, Lino Portillo—his gunman—and Armando Portillo, the latter’s brother.

El Chapo sought refuge and later called Benjamín Arellano, Ramón’s brother, to angrily protest at the shooting. Benjamín denied having anything to do with it. That day a war began between the two that would claim dozens of lives.

“Before that, the Arellanos and I were good friends,” recalled El Chapo almost wistfully in his formal statement.

He also testified that the Arellanos had killed Manuel Salcido, El Cochiloco, his partner Armando López, El Chapo Caro, Onofre Landey, and Jaime Payán.

“My differences with the Arellanos and with Félix Gallardo came from their killing Armando López. He was like a brother to me.”

The second attack against him took place on May 24, 1993, at Guadalajara airport, said the drug trafficker, in keeping with the PGR’s official script. He was accompanied by his cousin, Héctor Guzmán Leyva and his friend, Pancho Beltrán.

“Everything that happened with that shooting occurred exactly as the PGR explained it on TV,” said the obedient drug baron, avoiding getting into knots over the details. Now at last his formal statement fitted perfectly with the Nintendo version provided by the government of Carlos Salinas.

Guzmán claimed to know Emilio Quintero Payán—the co-founder of the Juárez Cartel—and Rafael Caro Quintero—a big player in the Guadalajara organization—by sight, from restaurants and local fiestas. “I had no idea what they did for a living, until I read the news.” He recited these ludicrous lies with aplomb.

With regard to his relations with Héctor Palma, El Chapo did not repeat his confession on the plane to General Álvarez. This time he said: “I don’t know El Güero Palma. I know he lives in Culiacán, Sinaloa, but I don’t know what he does.”

And of course he denied his involvement in the narcotics business, as well as his first killings: “I do not have any connection with anyone in Colombia, and it’s not true that I’m a drug trafficker,” he repeated several times. “I do not know what happened in the Iguala massacre where nine people died; they say El Güero Palma was responsible, well that’s what the newspapers said, not me, but it made a big impression on me because so many people died,” he lamented hypocritically.

“I don’t know what happened at the Christine Discotheque either, I found out from the news, although people say El Güero Palma did it. I read the papers every day and that’s how I know what is going on.”

The most difficult part of his interrogation was still to come.

El Chapo caves in

When Defense Secretary Riviello told the president what Guzmán had revealed on the plane, alarm bells sounded not only in the Los Pinos presidential palace, but also in the PGR and the Federal Judicial Police (PJF). If El Chapo really wanted to tell all, the filth would splatter the white-collar participants too—especially the brothers who had begun their brilliant business career during the sexennial of President Luis Echeverría, and were now doing better than ever under Salinas, thanks to their proximity to the president’s family.

A study undertaken for the PGR had revealed, almost accidentally, the connection between these businessmen brothers and Carrillo Fuentes, Palma, and Guzmán. If El Chapo retracted the
statement he’d made en route from Tapachula to Toluca, it should help to whitewash all of them, once and for all.

At the end of a list of people, all of whom Guzmán denied knowing, the public prosecutor asked the questions that would exonerate the brothers who were so pally with the Salinas de Gortari family.

“Are you a shareholder in or owner of any of these companies: Galce Constructora, Aerobastos, or Servicios Aéreos Ejecutivos Poblanos?”

“No.”

“Do you know anyone by the names of Miguel, Carlos, and Laura Segoviano Barbosa [
sic
]?”

“No.”

El Chapo Guzmán had caved in completely. He no longer maintained any of the accusations he’d made against PGR officials, those he’d named on the Boeing 727 as receiving payments to protect him. Nor did he continue to affirm their participation in his front companies or others that provided him with services.