Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers (5 page)

The friends of his I spoke to had different theories about how Andrade got hold of the information for his book, but all agree on one thing: everything he wrote about Carrillo Fuentes was true—so true that, one friend claimed, Carrillo’s own mother was up in arms over the publication. She was very upset with him.

Nothing more was known of Andrade’s whereabouts. His acquaintances think he is dead.

Carrillo Olea denied in the interview that he, Coello, and Álvarez del Castillo were ever involved in drug trafficking.

The prisoner on the 727

On the way back to Mexico City, with his explosive cargo on board, General Carrillo Olea ordered four paratroopers to guard the cabin. Two others kept El Chapo handcuffed in a seat at the back. The rest of the battalion guarded the exits, while General Guillermo Álvarez Nahara, head of the military police, sat next to Carrillo.

The Boeing 727 landed at 7 p.m. at Toluca airport, in the State of Mexico. The head of security was there to meet it. El Chapo got off the plane with a hood over his head.

“Here is your prisoner,” said Carrillo.

“Quite a responsibility you have there, sir.”

“Don’t say a word … and don’t mention my name.”

Carrillo got into the waiting car and phoned the attorney general, Jorge Carpizo: “The plane is on its way back to base, and our friend is on his way to his cell.” The operation was finally over.

There are some, like José Antonio Ortega, lawyer for the Guadalajara archdioceses, who say the murder of Cardinal Posadas was the work of the state, with Carrillo Olea presumably taking part as the brains behind the logistics. Although the Arellano Félix brothers and El Chapo do appear to have been at Guadalajara airport that day, summoned by the head of the Federal Judicial Police, Rodolfo León, none of them took part in the shoot-out. According to this account, the cardinal’s death happened just as Carrillo Fuentes told his people it did.

Eighteen years later, Benjamín Arellano Félix would provide a different account of the cardinal’s death. In testimony given on April 15, 2011, to the PGR at the Altiplano prison in Almoloya de Juárez, the former leader of the Tijuana Cartel made the following declaration: “Rodolfo León Aragón told me he and a federal police commando unit killed Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo because he was supplying weapons to the guerrillas.”

On May 25, 1993, Benjamín Arellano Félix received a disturbing phone call in Tijuana. The previous day, an old family friend had died: Cardinal Posadas. The Salinas government was blaming him and his brothers for the crime, along with their former partner, Guzmán. Their mother was furious and refusing to speak to them, a very serious matter for any self-respecting drug baron, who regards his mother as sacred.

The phone call was from the federal police chief, León Aragón, El Chino. He told Benjamín they needed to meet urgently at Tijuana airport, and the drug trafficker promptly agreed.

The Arellano Félix family had a long-standing relationship with León. Carrillo Fuentes introduced him to Ramón Arellano Félix at one of his houses in Mexico City in 1991, just a few months after Carrillo Olea had appointed León head of the Federal Judicial Police. By 1993, the police chief and Ramón were close friends. Amado had recommended León highly. He told the Arellano Félixes they could rely on him whenever they wanted to travel somewhere in the country unmolested. So Benjamín trusted his brother’s friend, enough to decide to attend the meeting at the border airport. It was 4 p.m. when he met León, who told him flatly:

“You’re in big trouble: they’re blaming you for the cardinal’s murder.”

“It wasn’t us. I was here in Tijuana, and my brother Ramón had already boarded his plane when it happened,” answered Benjamín.

“I know it wasn’t you,” replied the police chief. “The perpetrators were members of a federal police commando under my command at Guadalajara airport. If I’m to help you, you have to give me ten million dollars and six addresses we can raid, because I have apprehended two of your men who traveled with Ramón to Guadalajara.”

“All right, let me see what I can do. I’ll look for the addresses, just give me time for the money.”

“Ok,” said León, and immediately made a call. “Done. All well,” he said into the phone.

León told him he’d been calling the attorney general, Jorge Carpizo, who instructed him to “go ahead with the plan.”

That night Benjamín met his brother Ramón, who told him he’d already given the money to León. The following day the police chief called Benjamín just to tell him that he was searching some addresses and that he’d received the money from Ramón. Ramón had told Benjamín that while he was in Guadalajara, before the cardinal’s murder, León had called to tell him that he could travel without a care on the 24
^th
. So, at the police chief’s suggestion, Ramón arrived at Guadalajara airport at almost the same time as the archbishop.

The Arellano Félix brothers and El Chapo Guzmán had fallen into a trap carefully set by the PGR.

After making his statement in April 2011, Benjamín Arellano Félix asked the witnesses from the Guadalajara archdioceses to pray for him, because he would soon be killed.
⁵
On April 29, however, Benjamín was suddenly extradited to the United States without his lawyers apparently knowing that this was about to happen.

In Mexico, the murder of Cardinal Posadas remains one of the most controversial episodes of recent decades, and one that has marked the country’s history.

Days before El Chapo Guzmán was captured, Attorney General Carpizo announced a $1 million reward for information leading to his arrest. Officially, it was Drug Control Center (Cendro) staff and authorities in El Salvador and Guatemala that supplied the information.

Carrillo Olea proposed sending some of the money to the foreign authorities who had participated in the capture. In El Salvador, $300,000 in cash was delivered to the then president Alfredo Cristiani, to be shared out among those who had forced El Chapo to flee from there to Guatemala.

General Carrillo himself took another $300,000 to the new president of Guatemala, Ramiro de León Carpio, and that young captain who had made such an impression on him.

By 2010, the reward on Guzmán’s head had increased sevenfold. The US government was offering $5 million for information on his whereabouts, and since 2009 the Mexican government had been offering $2.5 million. El Chapo had ceased to be a two-bit trafficker and convenient fall guy, to become the CEO of a global business. Today he is the best-known face of Mexico’s crime industry.

On that two-hour flight from Chiapas to the State of Mexico, El Chapo Guzmán learned the first big lesson of his prodigious criminal career. A few minutes after the 727 took off, the head of the military police and two other officers sat down beside him.

“Well?” said General Álvarez to El Chapo.

The time had come to confess.

CHAPTER TWO
Life or Death

W
hen General Guillermo Álvarez Nahara, head of the Military Judicial Police, joined the operation to capture El Chapo Guzmán, he had one precise brief: to interrogate him.

At fifty-four years old, Álvarez was used to dealing with obdurate criminals. He would never have expected the reaction he got from the drug trafficker when he went to the back of the plane and sat down beside him to begin the session.

“Do you mind if I question the prisoner?” Álvarez asked Carrillo Olea, soon after the plane took off from Tapachula on its way to Toluca.

“Let’s see,” thought Carrillo to himself. “He’s expected to deliver a report. On what, on how the journey went? He deserves a bit of meat.” Even so, being formally responsible for the prisoner, Carrillo couldn’t ignore Álvarez’s past history and the methods he’d used in the 1970s to interrogate left-wing guerrillas.

“Remember that whatever you say he can use as evidence,” warned Carrillo. “If he detects any sort of threat, the least mistreatment or bad language, he’ll use it to his advantage. He’ll say anything you want, but it could mean that tomorrow you have to resign. So take it easy.”

“Thanks for the advice!”

About an hour later, the military police chief returned to his seat next to Carrillo.

“I’ve spoken to him.”

“Good.”

If he felt at all nervous, Carrillo never mentioned it. Nonetheless, he must have been pretty concerned over the amount of information
El Chapo possessed about his protectors. Among them were senior officials in the PGR who were very close to Jorge Carrillo Olea.

The general of the White Brigade

Guillermo Álvarez Nahara is from Mexico City. He’s a tough man, strongly built with dark skin and prominent cheeks. At first sight, his CV is misleading. He seems to have been just another bureaucrat in Mexico’s Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena).

His last post, in 2004, was as Sedena’s head of human resources. Since then he’s been retired.

But Álvarez is much more than this. In the 1970s he was part of the so-called White Brigade, which gained notoriety for its role in the Mexican government’s “dirty war” against left-wing opposition groups. The White Brigade was credited with exterminating several armed social movements of the day, such as the Revolutionary Armed Movement, the People’s Armed Revolutionary Front, and the Peasants’ Brigade Against Injustice.

At the time of the White Brigade, Álvarez was a colonel in the Federal Military Judicial Police. By the time he took El Chapo’s statement, he was head of that same police force.
¹
They say you never forget a lesson well learned, but on this occasion Álvarez was in luck: El Chapo Guzmán, very inexperienced in the ways of police detention—it seems this was his first time—proved to be highly cooperative, without the general having to apply the least pressure.

One of the passengers on the Boeing 727 noted that the Guatemalan military had not only stolen $1.5 million from El Chapo
—
as he himself complained in his first statement to the military police—they had also given him a good beating. According to this account, El Chapo was so grateful for the treatment he received, compared with what he got in Guatemala, that he offered no resistance to General Álvarez’s questions.

“On the contrary, we had to kick him to shut him up, he wouldn’t stop, he wanted to spill all the beans,” recalled the passenger.

El Chapo spilled rather too many. It was undoubtedly the most spontaneous declaration of his whole criminal career. He wouldn’t be so indiscreet again until fifteen years later, in 2008, when he had
another conversation with a general, this time at the pinnacle of his power as Mexico’s top drug baron.

El Chapo’s confessions

The declarations made by El Chapo Guzmán on June 9, 1993, were recorded in dossier 1387 of the Military Attorney General’s Operational Subdivision, under the title “Report on the interrogation of Joaquín Guzmán Loera (alias) El Chapo Guzmán.”

Four pages long, it was addressed to the then military attorney general, Brigadier General Mario Fromow García, written by General Guillermo Álvarez Nahara and witnessed by the two cavalry officers present.

As he listened to what Guzmán had to say, Álvarez understood that this testimony was pure dynamite and would send shock waves through the government. Guzmán began with the story of what happened on May 24, 1993, at Guadalajara International Airport, and ended up telling on all his accomplices.

El Chapo said that on that day he went to the airport with his bags packed to go to Puerto Vallarta, one of his favorite towns to party in.
²
In the airport parking lot his blue Century stopped, blocking the way of other cars, while he calmly alighted. Suddenly, the accountant Martín Moreno, who was traveling with him, warned that there were armed men getting out of various vehicles. With extraordinary presence of mind, Guzmán threw himself to the ground and crawled all the way into the terminal building.

Of the eight people with El Chapo, two were killed, two were arrested in Guatemala, and four others were captured by the Federal Judicial Police a few days after the incident. “None of my men fired because their weapons were in the bags that had already been checked in,” El Chapo explained to Álvarez. With this account, the trafficker blew apart the story that Carpizo and Carrillo Olea had tried to sell to the public, namely that Cardinal Posadas had been the victim of crossfire between the Arellano Félix gang and that of El Chapo Guzmán.

A few days after the murder, the evening news on Televisa—which always toes the official line—showed a reconstruction of the events
by way of a slick animation prepared by Cisen and Cendro. Those involved in this production were all close to Jorge Carrillo Olea.

According to the account given by Guzmán in the Boeing 727, after escaping from the airport he went to Mexico City and lay low in Martín Moreno’s house. There a certain commander “Gómez” fixed him up with a false passport and drove him to San Cristóbal de las Casas, capital of the southern state of Chiapas, where a contact “put me in touch with Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Rosales of the Guatemalan army, who was going to help us there.” However, El Chapo continued, the Guatemalan officer didn’t help him but instead handed him over to the Mexican authorities, after relieving him of $1.5 million.

In his confession to General Álvarez, El Chapo Guzmán admitted working for the Colombian Cali Cartel, then led by the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers—even though his real links were with Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel in the same country. He also stated that he and Héctor El Güero Palma had been responsible for the shooting at Puerto Vallarta’s Christine Discotheque in November 1992, as well as the Iguala killings, “but I had nothing to do with the other things the press accuse me of.” It seems that the apprentice drug baron felt a moment’s reticence. Yes, he was a bit of a murderer, but not
that
bad. A little later this reticence would evaporate, like water on a stove.