Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
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Some people got killed. You know, there's a saying that we have, we have to sometimes dance with the devil. And that's what we were doing. We just had to be very careful. So it was the ultimate chess game where you were actually playing with your life. Quite frankly, it's probably the greatest adrenaline rush that anybody can have is working in an undercover role.
They were very flamboyant. They were very violent. It was like the wild, wild west. I'll shoot first and ask questions later. He was controlling the vast amount of drugs that were coming in the United States from cocaine to marijuana to even heroin. It's 1981, and in Mexico, the Guadalajara cartel has become the most powerful force in the world of narcotics. They hold a virtual monopoly on trafficking. From where they're standing, it couldn't get much better.
Guadalajara dominates the drugs trade. Its leaders have more money than they could ever need, while countless officials have been bribed to keep the top brass out of jail. But the cartel have just made one hire that will elevate their business into the stratosphere. Welcome to Real Narcos. In this episode, we'll pick up the story of Joaquin Guzman, the impoverished boy from Sinaloa who became the most violent and merciless criminal in North America. From Noiser Podcasts, this is the story of El Chapo.
And this is Real Narcos. In the early 1980s, Chapo Guzman is still in his mid-20s. But he's already done more than enough to grab the attention of the Guadalajara kingpin. Felix Gallardo can't fail to notice that this young man from Sinaloa State is a devastatingly effective trafficker. Gallardo recruits Chapo personally. DEA agent Mike Fijo.
But pretty soon, he's promoted into Gallardo's inner circle of enforcers.
Agent Herberto Gonzalez. When you're an enforcer for the cartel, your job description is you'll do whatever it takes to maintain order, to collect money that needs to be collected. And if it means eliminating someone in the process, well, that's part of your vocation, unfortunately, as a sicario.
An assassin, basically. An enforcer is a nice way of saying assassin. Someone that'll do the acts of violence that are commonplace in the drug world. Chapo's temperament, his capacity for violence, is tailor-made for this career. He's put in charge of logistics. Vital parts of the cartel's cocaine operation now fall under Chapo's purview.
Miguel Felix Gallardo took a liking to him and started getting him more involved, particularly in the logistics side of the cartel. So he would coordinate drug loads coming from Colombia, huge quantities of cocaine. He was very good at it. So he received a lot of mentoring from many, many significant drug traffickers in Mexico.
When it comes to transporting the product into Mexico, Chapo is ruthlessly efficient. Jim Dinkins, former head of the U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, remembers how Chapo and his cronies seized control of the Mexican ports and shipping lanes.
In years past, the cartels, if Mexico became too successful in their law enforcement, then the cartels would kidnap port directors, they'd kidnap individuals and torture them and gain their coercion or kill them and target their families. So it's a very, very big challenge.
He knew how to bring in the cocaine from Colombia. He started to enhance that knowledge and he started to buy all kinds of single and twin engine aircraft. He started to buy fishing boats to smuggle cocaine from Colombia.
primarily from Colombia, and then they started to go into submarines. And they were probably the most reliable means to get tons of cocaine from South America into Mexico. Getting drugs into Mexico is the easier part. Getting them out again is a little more difficult. That's where El Chapo comes into his own.
In 1987, Felix Gallardo gifts Chapo Guzman personal control of Sinaloa State and the Pacific Coast. This is a huge deal. The US government is cracking down on drug smuggling through its seaports and airports. Land corridors into the United States are now more important than ever. With the drugs safely imported from South America, Chapo digs tunnels under the US border. Some of the product is smuggled underground.
At the same time, up on the surface, he packs cocaine into chili pepper cans and has it driven through border checkpoints.
Diana Washington Valdez explains. Chapo Guzman is credited with creating the idea of using tunnels to smuggle drugs along the border. Of course, the Tijuana drug cartel also took credit for that. But at least 90 tunnels have been attributed to Chapo Guzman. Very expensive tunnels, you know, logistically. A million dollars, two million dollars for one tunnel was not unusual. It gets discovered, closed down, you go to another one, hand out the money to pay for that work, and so on. DEA agent Joe Bond.
You had the people that brought the drugs into Mexico, store the drugs into Mexico, and then a different cell moved the drugs from Mexico to the United States. The Colombians, they called him el rapido, which means the fast one. He can move a load of cocaine from Mexico to the United States in one day. And I'm talking large loads of cocaine. We're talking tons. We're talking tons of cocaine moving into the United States.
By now, Chapo is smuggling around $9 billion worth of cocaine into the US every year. El Rapido is well on his way to fame and fortune with the Guadalajara Cartel. But then, the train hits the buffers. By kidnapping and murdering the DEA agent Kiki Camarena, the Guadalajara Cartel have stepped way over the line. And as we know, the consequences for the cartel's overlord, Felix Gallardo, will be severe.
When Kiki Camarena was kidnapped and killed in February of 1985, we started to go after Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo and the other leaders of the Guadalajara Quartel, Rafael Caro Quintero, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, and
We initially captured Rafael Caro Quintero and then Ernesto Fonseca. And then we captured Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo in a house in Guadalajara. That was in 1989. The three leaders of the Guadalajara cartel are all out of the game. This is a huge blow. But even if you cut off three heads, a hydra still has plenty more to take their place.
The takedown of the cartel leadership creates a power vacuum and a huge opportunity for young and ambitious traffickers to step up to the plate. And that's exactly what happens. El Chapo has been an understudy to one of the most powerful drug lords in history. Learning at the knee of Felix Gallardo has set him up in the industry. But it's now, with three godfathers in jail, that Chapo's career really takes off. But Guzman is not the only young gun looking for a piece of the action. Gallardo dominated the Mexican drug stride,
Now, as he languishes in a maximum security penitentiary in the United States, the industry needs restructuring. Gallardo had the strength of personality and respect to rule as a monarch. By uniting the drugs trade behind himself, Gallardo kept a lid on disputes between different factions. But with Gallardo gone, there's a risk factional interests will rise to the surface once more, driving a wedge between traffickers. It turns out cartel members have become wiser over the years.
Their pockets bulged under Gallardo. They want to keep money flowing in with minimum disruption. So they decide to take a leaf right out of the mafia playbook. In the 1930s in New York City, Charles "Lucky" Luciano formed the commission. He was an executive board of mafia bosses. The biggest crime families in the city decided not to fight each other. They came together. They submitted to a set of rules and standards, with clear borders for their criminal territories.
Safety in numbers, more than enough money to go around. That was the general idea. Even today, in name at least, the Cosa Nostra is governed by this commission. Something similar emerges in Mexico in the late 80s and early 90s. After Felix Gallardo's fall, Mexican drug traffickers travel from far and wide, converging on the resort of Acapulco for a sit-down to end all sit-downs. There was a summit.
in the early 90s in Acapulco, where a lot of the most notorious drug lords met to decide what geographical areas they were going to be responsible for.
For example, they gave the Arellano Felix brothers the Tijuana Corridor, which included Baja California, the San Diego area. Then you had the Carrillo Fuentes brothers that were given Chihuahua, which included the Juarez-El Paso Corridor. And Chapo Guzman...
Juan Esparragosa Moreno and then Hector Güero Palma were given Sinaloa and then also the southern part of Mexico. They decided, you know, responsibilities, the areas, and they would try to cooperate with one another and try to minimize, you know, the violence and the conflict. Just like the Mafia's commission, this cartel summit divides Mexico into spheres of influence.
In theory at least, it ensures cooperation between different groups for the years to come. It's a blow to law enforcement agents. They'd hoped Gallardo's demise might create internal divisions, which in turn might bring down the drugs trade from within. But the cartels know they need to act like any other industry. They need to move with the times.
In the early years, even before drugs, when you were looking at smugglers that were moving cattle, horses, liquor, tobacco, they were very flamboyant. They were very violent. It was like the wild, wild west. I'll shoot first and ask questions later. I would flaunt whatever money I had, whatever power. I would make everyone around me know that I was the man, that I was the one in control, that I was a smuggler, and I was ruler of all I surveyed.
So they were very out there and they brought a lot of attention to themselves. Now, once you start seeing the market itself, the product itself move into cocaine, marijuana, heroin, you need to expand your mind. You need to stop thinking so provincial. You are in a perfect position not only to control what happens in Sinaloa, but to control the entire country.
There was an evolution of the drug cartels because in the early days, you had a bunch of other drug traffickers and they would run their operations like a feudal monarch. They controlled every aspect. As the cartels started to evolve, they started to take advantage of modern technology. They started to look at creating more efficient operation.
They compartmentalize their operations where if an individual was arrested within their organization, they won't be able to provide details of the entire organization. And then they started to insulate themselves by giving orders to just a few underlings. And then they would give the orders to the remaining members of the drug cartel. The city of Guadalajara continues to be at the center of the Mexican narcotics trade.
But at the same time, power is now devolved right across the land. There are lots of regional hubs that the authorities must keep an eye on. The main goal is to create profit and to protect that profit.
And if you take the organizational structure of the early federation and you compare it to other structures, whether they're government or law enforcement, they're very similar. When you use the term cellular, that it's divided up into what in the business world would be referred to as conglomerates or small businesses that operate independent of the main structure. But they all
have the same purpose in the sense that they're moving the same product. - This restructuring of the drugs trade confirms what the US Drug Enforcement Administration already feared. Power has shifted decisively from Colombia to Mexico when it comes to marijuana and cocaine. - Over time, with more effective policing in Colombia and the more pressure being put on Colombia, it causes a shift
And we saw that shift in the early 90s quite dramatically, where Colombia simply got out of the entire transportation distribution network in the United States and just really outsourced that to the Mexican cartels.
The power did indeed shift from the Colombians to the Mexican cartels. It was exaggerated when the United States and the Colombian government went hammer and tongue after the Colombian cartels. The Mexicans, however, the Mexican power establishment didn't go after the Mexican cartels. They let the cartels' power proliferate, grow, metastasize.
So you had a pretty asymmetrical situation. Weak cartels in Colombia, strong cartels in Mexico, pretty strong government in Colombia, very weak government in Mexico. A Mexican establishment had tended to look the other way and say, "Well, it's the United States that's the problem. We're not going to do anything about it." They bought bodyguards, they bought fortresses and hoped it would go away, but it just got bigger and bigger and worse and worse.
For now, the Mexican cartels are careful not to tread on each other's toes. But as time goes on, some will fare better in this new landscape than others. As he assumes control of the new Sinaloa cartel, it's remarkable how far El Chapo has come in so little time. But what is it that sets this drug boss apart?
If you hear him talk, you know, you can immediately tell that he's not very sophisticated, not very educated, but he was very intelligent in the fact that he surrounded himself with experts in money laundering, security experts, people that, you know, knew technology. He surrounded himself with exceptional people, and as a result of that, he built a global government
drug trafficking corporation that will rival any legitimate company that currently exists in the world. The other thing about Chapo Guzman is that he started to diversify his criminal portfolio to include, you know, not only marijuana, heroin, but kidnappings, extortion, and
many enterprises. So if something went wrong with one of those enterprises, the other ones would basically satisfy the financial requirements. He was a very intimidating force, but at the same time, he was fair to a lot of his employees as long as they told the company line of the Sinaloa cartel. The Sinaloa cartel soon starts to rise toward the top of the pile.
Chapo Guzman knows how to use violence. It's about being surgical, only deploying violence when it's really needed. Being too trigger-happy might make the people fear you, but it also attracts unwanted attention. The cops have limited resources. They're gonna focus their efforts where there's the most bloodshed.
He tried to minimize it. Any security force or law enforcement entity to include those in the United States and other countries are going to go after the groups that generate the most violence. That is the norm, and it's always been the norm, and it will continue to be the norm. The Arellano Felix brothers, the heads of the Tijuana cartel, were being assaulted.
You know, Chapo Guzman was trying to minimize the violence. You know, obviously he had to generate the violence to protect his cartel from, you know, rival drug lords and what have you. But he didn't go out of his way to become just a prolific assassin like some of the other drug lords. The Mexican cops and the DEA have to pick their targets carefully. Otherwise, all hell will break loose.
When the violence between the Juarez and cartel was raging, I had an opportunity to ask a question of a well-placed Mexican SSP source, a federal source in the enforcement field. And I asked him, I said, "Why don't you just go after both Chapo and Vicente and take them down simultaneously?" And he looked at me and he smiled, he almost smirked, and he says, "If we do that,
it would create such a vacuum that the violence would increase because people would be fighting for those positions and there would be less order instead of more order. There'd be more chaos. I have found it difficult to wrap my mind around that, but it is food for thought. Day by day, Chapo Guzman grows his empire. He stays largely under the radar until by the early 1990s, he's simply too big to ignore.
El Chapo's activities have knock-on effects far beyond the drugs trade itself.
He's involved in forced labor, waylaying and kidnapping immigrants traveling from Central America up toward the Texas border. At the same time, Chapo is going international. His business reaches far beyond the shores of North America.
He started to send the emissaries to other countries and he created semi-autonomous subsidiaries, for example, in Europe, in Australia, where even if he suffered a major impact in Mexico, the subsidiaries would consider to operate and generate profits. If it sounds like it's a multinational corporation, it's because that's exactly what it is. The Mexican cartels are a mishmash of illicit profits and legitimate investments.
This makes them hard to untangle. Analysts, bankers, accountants, board of directors. Chapo has them all working toward his own enrichment. Back in 89, when Felix Gallardo's empire was divided amongst his heirs, the aim was to keep everyone happy, to give everyone a slice of the action. But it was never going to last.
What happened is initially there was harmony, they worked together, but then like with all criminal organizations, they started to enter into conflict over territory and drug trafficking routes.
The violence between the different cartels in Mexico has been extensive and it costs a lot of lives and that's a fight over territory. And those different cartels wanted to control and take over more and more territory. For four years, murder and mayhem dominate the streets of Mexico's major cities. This period will become known as the Cartel Wars.
The cartel wars developed out of a series of territorial rivalries and personal acts of revenge. We had Mexican drug trafficking godfathers who, as they aged, then parceled out the territories to their children. In some cases, they were nephews. And so what happened is, you will take care of the Tijuana corridor, you can have the Guayasal Paso corridor, and you can have the Gulf Cartel corridor over here.
then rivalries developed among those groups. There were mountains of bodies that were piled up on the outskirts of a lot of these towns, dismemberments, beheadings, just brutal killings. And the problem was that there was a lot of collateral damage because a lot of innocent people within Mexico were getting killed, you know, as a result of the hostilities between the cartels.
As soon as these cartel rivalries are out in the open, the situation starts to spin out of control. In the minds of narco criminals desperate to maintain fearsome reputations, each act of violence they suffer demands a more powerful response. Teach them a lesson. This is what's going to happen to you if you come into my territory. I will cut your head. I will cut your arms. I'll throw you into a gas tank and I'll leave a note. Do not come into my territory. And that's what will happen to you.
So the cartels were aware through their own informants that were embedded in the different organizations who was trying to move into their areas of operation. And they would get caught and would send a signal to the other cartels, "This is what is going to happen if you try to move into my area." Violent reprisal follows violent reprisal. Rivalries become vendettas.
Sometimes there are arrangements that take place that may help in that process some type of truce, some type of agreement. But when violence escalates, the normal pattern of aggression is escalation. The acts that are so, so heinous, like the beheadings, the
the cooking people alive in oils, the burying them alive, the dismantling of human beings, cutting them up into bits and parts. When you get to the point where you find heads of cartel people in school grounds, then you have to ask the question, how can this level of violence in a society get to that point?
That's a very difficult question to answer. I'm sure that there is a whole bunch of sociologists and psychologists that are looking at this as an area of particular interest. It's not any longer just about business. It becomes personal. And those personal acts of revenge then begin to envelop everyone else.
And we have these drug cartel wars, the pressure on the Mexican government to start reining in the cartels, the pressure from the U.S. government. All of those things converged here, and we have this situation, these conditions that led to these battles on different fronts and to the murders of thousands and thousands of Mexicans and the disappearances of thousands of Mexican citizens.
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It hasn't taken long for Chapo Guzman to establish himself as the dominant force in the Mexican drug strain. And not everyone is happy about this. As the 1990s continue, a brutal and bloody power struggle erupts between El Chapo's Sinaloa Cartel and the Tijuana Cartel, run by the Arellano Felix brothers. For his part, Chapo has chosen his moment to strike. Amidst the chaos of the cartel wars, he spies an opportunity to seize territory from the Tijuana Cartel.
The Tijuana cartel and the Sinaloa cartel just did not see eye to eye on anything. They were rivals. They were enemies. They hated each other. They were killing each other. The Arellano Felix brothers, Ramon was the chief enforcer. He was a psychopathic killer. You know, he was standing at a street corner on one occasion and he's talking to members of his group
And he said, "Who's got problems with somebody so that we can go out there and kill them?" Because he loved killing. He loved to kill. The conflict between Sinaloa and Tijuana is bloody, but it does nothing to stem the tide of drugs flowing into the United States. Business is booming, even with the cartels at war. This sees the emergence of new American gangs, gangs who compete for the right to distribute the product on the streets of the U.S.
For example, the Arellano Felix brothers, they would contract the members of the Logan Heights gang, which was based in a poor neighborhood in San Diego. And they would hire them to come across into Mexico and provide them with security if they traveled someplace or they were going to meet with somebody.
They would provide them with radios, weapons, money. They also used them to go in and conduct homicides. Cartels do form alliances with gangs in major cities, not just for the distribution of the drugs themselves, but also sometimes to enforce certain orders that take place in Mexico.
They have gang operating on both sides and they're connected and they're communicating. And I know that for a fact because I was involved in a search warrant in a house in Juarez where when the warrant was executed, we went in and
and they were conducting a search of the residence for evidence. And amongst the evidence were letters that were being sent from major prisons in the United States with specific instructions as to what money should be placed into what account and giving marching orders. So you have gang individuals incarcerated in the United States sending instruction letters to gang members that were operating hits in Juarez, Mexico.
So there's a tie between gangs and cartels that was something that I witnessed firsthand. America is starting to feel the effects of the cartel wars. But still, it's nothing compared to the situation in Mexico. Which country you come from shapes your whole life. Take Juarez and El Paso, for example. Two cities right next to each other, but split by the border. One in Mexico, one in America. Life in the two towns could hardly be more different.
It is ironic that El Paso, which is the border town right across Juarez, Mexico, the only thing that divides it is the Rio Grande. It is a community that's united in culture and language, although in two different countries.
But El Paso was voted one of the safest cities in the United States. While Juarez, at the time of the height of the violence, was looked upon as one of the most dangerous cities in the world next to Baghdad during the height of the war in Baghdad. It is sad that the people in Juarez have to be subjected to that level of violence, while the people that are fortunate enough to be in the United States side are not living the same type of day-to-day atrocities that happen.
Carlos Spector is an El Paso immigration attorney who represents more than 100 families forced to flee Mexico. He observes the devastation of the drug violence up close and personal.
Organized crime is a fictitious definition of the problem which fits into the American narrative of good and bad, cowboy and Indian. What's happening cannot happen without the complicit involvement of the Mexican government, may it be the federal, state, or local government. And what we've seen over and over again
The mayor is in the hands of the local cartels. And to the degree that we're focusing on the hunt for individuals is to miss the boat. The corruption is within the state. It's a cancer that has grown throughout the body politic. And it doesn't matter who's elected. The same essential structure exists.
There's a symbiotic relationship. The drug money controls the politicians and the politicians permit to permit it. So it really, really is a very evil, nasty, brilliant, symbiotic relationship. Throughout Mexican law enforcement, there are plenty of people shocked and outraged by the rising tide of cartel violence. But in many ways, their hands are tied.
Corruption is so deep-rooted, so endemic, that investigations always seem to end up compromised. DEA agents on the ground in Mexico bear witness to cases of high-level corruption. Agent Gilberto Gonzalez remembers one such occasion.
I was involved in situations in Guadalajara where I actually worked undercover purchasing a kilo of heroin from Mexican traffickers, working with the local comandante. And when I met the individual in the lobby in a restaurant, in a hotel, one of the comandante's men was sitting there surveilling us, pretending to be reading a newspaper. So when the drug dealer comes in and I asked, do you have the heroin with you? He says, yeah, it's in the car. I said, great, we'll bring it in. We'll go up to my room and
and we'll exchange the money for the heroin then." And the plan was once we went up to the elevator, the Mex feds and the comandante would jump on him and game over. But as he was about to leave for his car, he stopped and he says to me, "You know what? Change of plans. We're not going to do this." I said, "Why?" He says, "You see that guy over there sitting at that table?" I said, "Yeah, he's a Mex fed."
I pretended like I was in shock. I said, oh my God, then let's not do it. I said, you know, I don't want to get arrested. And he says, you know why I know he's a Max Fett? I said, why? He says, because I pay him. I says, well, then you know who he is. So you know what? We'll try this some other time. Let's get out of here.
That was the climate at the time that we worked in where you really didn't know who was working for who. Everything I did in Mexico at that time, I operated under the assumption that anyone I spoke to or work with would betray me at the drop of a hat. And that I always kept in the back of my mind in all of the operations that we worked in in Mexico at the time. It's the same old story. Money talks.
Each time they get close to El Chapo or one of the other cartel leaders, someone tips them off and they disappear.
The PRI party at that time had been in control of the government for 72 years. And it was an establishment that was run by dinosaurs. And the way the corruption was so embedded into the different areas of the government brought more corruption. They had counter surveillance. They knew when Afi was going to do a raid in a particular place, they knew. When the military was going to do one, they knew. They knew ahead of time.
Every time an operation was going to take against one of the major members of the cartels, they knew it ahead of time, way ahead of time. Through their own people that are embedded in the police departments and the organized crime units, they had people embedded in those. The DEA seek to increase their efforts relative to scale of the problem. Special Agents Gonzales and Vigil adopt aliases as they attempt to unpick Chapo's complex network of distribution. This involves undercover work, a lot of undercover work.
I actually have a degree in theater. An undercover role is really 80% acting. Like any person in the movies or in theater, there's character development. And once you really are able to project that character and you're convincing, then you can become very, very effective. The only difference, of course, is an actor in a stage production will receive the applause of the audience. If you fail in an undercover capacity, it can cost you your life.
So it's a serious business. It was a fascinating lifestyle. It was like working, you know, James Bond. One day I'd be negotiating with drug traffickers in Mexico. The next day I'd be in Bolivia. You know, the following day I'd be negotiating with a very high level drug trafficker in Brazil. So it was the ultimate chess game where you were actually playing with your life.
So that motivated me. And quite frankly, it's probably the greatest adrenaline rush that anybody can have is working in an undercover role. The DEA has always worked closely with their Mexican counterparts. But even still, U.S. agents regularly find themselves isolated out in the field with few, if any, allies to turn to. In terms of backup in Mexico, I have a hell of a guardian angel who's a really badass angel that looks over my back.
But aside from my guardian angel, you have to rely on maybe my partner, another DEA guy. But you really have to go out there and trust that the MexFeds that are working with you are going to do the right thing. If all hell breaks loose, that's all you got. You and your partner and those individuals that are out there. Operations did get compromised. Some people got killed. You know, there's a saying that we have, we have to sometimes dance with the devil.
And that's what we were doing. We just had to be very careful. Different agencies obviously were monitoring our moves. Our own government and certain agencies were watching what we were doing for our protection. We had special devices in our vehicles that could track us from the United States, where were we at all times. And of course, the bulletproof vehicles that we had. But it was difficult, it was challenging, it was stressful, very stressful. But the Mexican feds and the DEA are not the only ones after the Sinaloa and Kingpin.
So are his business rivals, the Arellano-Felix brothers, leaders of the Tijuana cartel. The violence between these two criminal organizations has continued unabated for years. Now, Ramon and Javier Arellano-Felix hatch a plan to turn the tide of the war decisively in their favor. The Arellano brothers hired some gang bangers in San Diego to come to Guadalajara specifically to search out and assassinate Chapo Guzman Loera.
In the next episode of Real Narcos, Tijuana hitmen descend on Guadalajara Airport. Their mission is to take out El Chapo before he boards his flight. As the DEA scramble to respond to this sudden escalation, the Sinaloa boss finds himself staring into the abyss. With his life in the balance, it could go either way. That's next time on Real Narcos. Real Narcos is a Noiser Podcast and World Media Rights co-production hosted by me, John Cuban. The series was created by Pascal Hughes.
Produced by Joel Duddle. It's been edited by Katrina Hughes with music from Oliver Baines from Flight Brigade. The sound mixer is Tom Pink. If you have a moment, please leave us a review wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
