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Welcome to Real Narcos, the series from Noiser Podcast that takes you undercover with the real agents who hunted down the world's most notorious drug lords. The drug lords in this series tend to be larger than life. The guy in this episode is a little different. He's a boogeyman for the agents on his tail, a faceless, placeless phantom, flitting seamlessly between jurisdictions, crossing borders, and breaking laws at will.
Always tantalizingly out of reach, the war on drugs is his to win. Unless the DEA can hunt him down first. This is the story of Mata Ballesteros. And this is Real Narcos. It's 1985 and the Drug Enforcement Administration had their work cut out pursuing the Honduran cocaine trafficking mastermind, Mata Ballesteros. He's wanted in connection with the kidnap and murder of DEA agent Kiki Camarena.
Matta's capture is now a top DEA priority. Agent Mike Vigil knows he's going to be harder to find than ever. Informants initially report sightings of the drug kingpin in both Honduras and Spain. Matta Ballesteros was astute enough to know that when Kiki Camarena was killed, that we would be coming for him. And initially he fled into Central America and then into Europe.
But then, two months into the hunt, Vigil gets a hot tip through wire intercepts that Ballesteros is, in fact, hiding out in Colombia. The informant also delivers the telephone number of a Colombian cocaine dealer named Jaime Garcia. Jaime is suspected of being in business with Ballesteros. Vigil puts a wiretap on Garcia's phone.
We had the Columbia National Police start a wire intercept on that number, and we immediately started getting some relevant conversations, primarily between Garcia and his maid at his house.
He would call the maid and say, "El Señor, sir, is coming. Make sure everything is ready. Make sure you have food." And he would always check, almost on a daily basis, "Is everything ready?"
When they mentioned El Señor, he actually mentioned it with great reverence. Here's a good level drug trafficker in his own right, but he's talking about this individual like he's God. Right then and there, I knew that there was a very strong possibility that Mata Ballesteros was coming to that residence.
This fresh intel is enough for Vigil to take a chance and set up surveillance outside Jaime Garcia's house. I get a call from my agents in Cartagena and they said there's some unusual activity
When I get there, I see a SUV leave the residence with one individual. They go to a hotel there in Cartagena, pick up two individuals, and then they drive them to a restaurant and drop them there.
Then we see the vehicle return to Garcia's residence and pick up somebody else. Then go back to pick up the two at the restaurant and then they drove into alleyways and we just couldn't keep up so we lose them.
All this to-ing and fro-ing between Garcia's residents, hotels and restaurants is confusing. Vigil and his team must stay patient if they're going to pick out any discernible pattern of activity. I know that whoever's in the residence obviously doesn't want anybody to know that he's there. That is the reason that they pick up the two at the hotel, drop them off and then come back for him. My personal opinion, based on everything that I knew that he was meeting,
with other drug traffickers probably establishing a drug transaction of some sort. Vigil is now convinced that this shifty behavior is because MATA is hiding out at the property. It's certainly cause enough to sanction a raid. On April 30th, 1985, that's exactly what happens.
I went to the colonel of the Colombian National Police and I said, you know, I need some men because we're going to go to this house and I'm almost sure that Matabe Esteros is there. So we drove to the house with about 15 Colombian National Police officers. A stiff breeze blows off the Caribbean Sea. Down the road in Cartagena's old town, tourists stroll leisurely around the walled city.
This mild spring day is about to heat up. The police surround Jaime Garcia's house. If Ballesteros isn't here, the raid will have blown their cover. I walked to the front door with the colonel, knocked on the door, and there was a little side window, and the maid opens the window, and I identified myself as the Columbia National Police officer.
And I said, you know, we're looking for weapons. I didn't want to make it, you know, give the appearance that we're there for Mata. We're looking for weapons. And she was very nervous and didn't want to open the door. So a few seconds later, who shows up at the window if not Mata Ballesteros immediately recognized him. Just the man Vigil is after. The guy who's led the DEA on a merry dance all around Latin America.
So I recognize him and, you know, I maintain my calm and I repeated what I had told the maid, you know, we're Colombian National Police, we're looking for weapons in Spanish. And he looks at both me and the colonel and says, "Wait a minute, un momento, por favor." And he starts to move away from the window and I told the colonel, I said, "He's gonna, we gotta kick down the door."
Colonel tells me, "Wait a minute, wait a minute." I said, "No, I'm not waiting a minute." So I kicked down the door.
And I didn't know what was behind that door. You know, he could have had bodyguards with AK-47s. It is the most dangerous part of an entry into a residence when you move through that door because, you know, you obviously have no idea who's behind it. The Colombian police officers burst into different rooms in twos and threes, executing a textbook raid. But Vigil has only one thing on his mind.
He treads lightly on the floorboards as he moves from room to room, his breath shallow, whole body tensed. Suddenly, a figure darts across his line of vision. It's Mata, making a run for it. Vigil charges forwards. Mata crashes through the back door and out into the open air. Vigil follows.
Mata Ballesteros is running through the open courtyard carrying a semi-automatic pistol. Your adrenaline is really rushing
through your bloodstream. And the only thing that I saw and that I focused on, nothing else mattered except Mata Ballesteros. It became like the hunter and the hunted. And I knew that he was going to try to kill me or I was going to kill him. And he jumps over a tall wall. Vigil scrambles over the wall.
Matta is getting away. He's ahead in the next courtyard, halfway up another wall. But at this critical moment, Matta falters. He falls between both walls, and I come up, and I do a quick peek over the wall, and he's laying on his back, pointing his weapon up. And at that point in time, I was just going to shoot him. Vigil has finally got his man cornered.
He cocks his pistol. I started to point my gun at him and that's when he yelled, "Don't shoot. I can get out of prison, but I can't get out of a tomb." Vigil kicks Mata's pistol away and applies handcuffs. The two men, pursuer and pursued, are still breathing heavily by the time backup arrives. As Mata is hauled away by the Colombian police, Vigil staggers to his feet.
After a year-long international manhunt, Matta Ballesteros is in custody. Matta is under close watch as the DEA and Colombian police search his hideout for evidence. Matta's got his breath back, as well as his calm demeanor. Watching the officers turn the house upside down, he realizes he's quickly running out of options.
He makes Vigil an extraordinary offer. I was standing there and he was surrounded by about three Colombian national police officers sitting in a chair. And then he says, "Can I speak to you?" He then proceeds to offer a $3 million bribe if we were to release him. He said, "I can have the money to you in less than 20 minutes."
I told Matabe Asteros to shove it. I said, you know, even if he gave a bribe of a billion dollars, you know, there was no way that he was going to be released. And he was a murderer and drug trafficker and a scourge on mankind. And he looked at me, you know, with pensive eyes and I told him to sit down. Vigil isn't corruptible. He hasn't chased Mata all the way to the Caribbean coast just to let him go. Mata's not going to get out of it that easily.
Instead, he'll stand trial for a long list of drug trafficking offenses in Colombia. That evening at Cartagena Airport, Ballesteros is strong-armed onto a plane bound for the capital city Bogota and is date with justice. The Colombian National Police, along with the Colombian military, sealed off the entire Cartagena Airport. There must have been about 400 to 500 people
out there, you know, just providing security because they knew that Mata Ballesteros had the capability of generating a rescue attempt. So we put him on the plane and I'm sitting right across the aisle from him and he starts to stare at me.
And then he reaches across the aisle and shakes my hand and he says, "Congratulations." He says, "People have been after me for over 20 years and you're the first one that has been able to capture me."
I felt good in that he was going to prison and finally he was going to be paying for his transgressions to humankind. You know, we captured a very significant drug trafficker who was actually involved in the killing of one of our own. And, you know, he was going to be put forward.
to the rule of law and to justice. After the plane touches down in Bogota, Ballesteros is taken to La Picada Penitentiary, where he's held pending trial. But even with Mata behind bars, Agent Vigil can't rest on his laurels. He knows that if the DEA is to secure a conviction against Mata that's long-lasting, it probably needs to be in the U.S. And to get Mata to the U.S., he needs to be formally extradited. And that could take a very long time.
Mata isn't the kind of guy who's going to wait around for that to happen. Well, I was always very concerned about him escaping simply because he had so much wealth and the ability to generate bribes. And not only providing thousands of dollars, but he had the ability to provide millions of dollars. I was always very suspicious of
Because of that capability that he had, you know, given his economic resources, given the fact that he was being taken to Bogota and the close ties that he had with both the Cali and the Medellin cartels.
knowing that they had broken a lot of their members out of the penitentiary. So yes, I was very concerned that he would try to escape from the penitentiary there in Bogota. The director of the prison starts to get suspicious. He orders an inspection of Mataselle and places him under heavy guard. Two weeks later, the same prison director is dead, gunned down by hitmen in a motorcycle drive-by shooting.
Mata's route out of jail is now clear. Michael Fowler is an author and expert on Ballesteros. It happened two weeks after the inspection of Mata's cell. Mata then pulled off perhaps his most audacious escape ever. He bribed with more than $2 million, 18 prison employees.
disguised himself as a prison guard, shaved off his beard and walked through seven security checkpoints in the Colombian prison. Matas' associates took him to an airstrip north of Bogota. He flew to Guatemala and then he crossed into Honduras and arrived in Tegucigalpa with his defense lawyer, Carlos Lorenzana.
and publicly turned himself in to face charges related to the murder of the Honduran couple who had assaulted his wife years earlier. He was thinking that he had Honduras so covered that he would never be convicted and then he could live freely because the Hondurans would never extradite him, there being a constitutional provision against the extradition of national citizens. After chasing Ballesteros all over Latin America,
This breakout is a crushing blow for DEA agent Mike Vigil. I heard that Matabe Asteros had escaped the following day because news traveled very quickly, especially when it came to him. I thought that his words about being able to escape from prison and not from a tomb had come true. Suspicion immediately falls on the guards who stepped aside to allow him to walk free.
When asked about the escape later, Mata will simply reply that, "As I was walking, the doors kept opening." Later, there was a full investigation that was conducted relative to Mata Ballesteros' escape from La Picota Penitentiary. And they started to interrogate a lot of the prison guards. They eventually started executing search warrants at their residences, and they found
you know, literally bulk currency
that they had been paid, you know, in stoves, in refrigerators, in secret compartments in their houses, and they were all taken into custody and arrested for allowing him to escape from Colombia. It goes back to the old saying of the mafia, you know, "Plata or plomo," you know, you either take silver or we're going to fill you with lead.
Now, the prison guards in Colombian penitentiaries are lucky if they make about three, four, five hundred dollars a month. So when you're offering them thousands and thousands of dollars, which would take them probably 10 or 20 years to make,
they're going to take the money. And quite frankly, I'm sure that they were threatened that if you don't take the money, we're either going to kill you, and if we can't get to you, we're certainly going to kill your family.
I was very disappointed because I knew that we had expended a lot of time and energy pursuing him, capturing him, and then putting him behind bars. But at the same time, I knew that, you know, he had so much wealth that, you know, he had an easy time either threatening or paying off prison guards that didn't make a lot of money. In the coming weeks, the DEA learned their suspicions are correct.
Mata is back home among his people in Honduras. The mission to get Mata extradited to the US is back to square one. The DEA know that it's going to be virtually impossible within the parameters of existing international agreements to get Mata turned over to the US authorities. Tasked with bringing in the Honduran kingpin, Mike Vigil can only watch from afar as Mata embeds himself back in Honduran life.
We knew that he probably had fled to Honduras. They didn't have an extradition treaty. And we were getting a lot of information that he had moved into a palatial home there.
And he immediately started paying money to the poor people, to government officials. And he went there knowing that he was charged or had been charged with a double homicide of Mario and Mary Ferrari that actually worked in the drug trade and at one time had worked with them.
He was confident, I'm sure, that he would again be able to bribe his way out of that double homicide charge, which he did. You know, very quickly he paid bribes and the charges were summarily dismissed.
He begins to live in a large house in Tegucigalpa, throws opulent parties and presumably continues to run his drug trafficking network, but now from a Honduran base. So he had been a man on the move in Colombia, in Mexico, in Spain. He's decided now he will make Honduras his headquarters. He cannot be
extradited from Honduras in his mind because there is a provision in the Honduran constitution forbidding that. He feels as though he is safest in his home of Honduras. The DEA refused to give up the chase, but they know they need to think outside the box if they're going to bring him in once and for all. They decide to expand the team hunting by Asteros.
Beginning his law enforcement career in 1965 with the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Howard Safir rises through the ranks to become Assistant Director of the DEA in 1977, before joining the U.S. Marshal Service as Assistant Director of Operations. Safir's reputation for extracting the most elusive fugitives from countries all over the world is second to none.
I was Associate Director of Operations for the United States Marshal Service. I was at the United States Department of Justice building. I was walking down the hall, in fact, I believe it was on the same floor as the Attorney General, when Jack Lawn, who was the administrator of DEA, and an old friend, somebody I've known for a long time, approached me and said,
"We'd like you to look for Juan Matabalasteros. We want you to make it a priority." And I said, "Why, Jack?" He says, "Because he was involved in the torture and murder of Kiki Camarena, and we really want him."
I was certainly aware of the torture and murder of Kiki Camarena, and it was something that was on the mind of everybody in law enforcement, and especially myself, having been a DEA agent for 13 years and having worked in Mexico. So I was very much aware of it and very much concerned that the perpetrators would be brought to justice. But at that point, Marta Ballesteros was not on my radar screen as one of the perpetrators.
Howard Safir is all in and gears up his own team of U.S. Marshals to work alongside the DEA. The first thing we wanted to do was get an idea of where he was, what kind of protection bodyguards he had, what kind of weapons he may have. It's basically doing an out-front threat assessment of who you're dealing with, what you're dealing with, so that when you do put a plan together, you've taken all the contingencies into account.
Ballesteros compound in Honduras is well protected, guarded by a private militia. And there's another major obstacle. The marshals have no jurisdiction in Honduras. So if they're going to extract Ballesteros, they'll need the assistance of the Honduran military. But with Mata's political and military connections, that's going to be near impossible. They need to work with someone within the Honduran law enforcement who is incorruptible. The search begins for the right individual.
The Marshals approached the commander of the Honduran Forces, General Humberto Regalado. Flattery is key. I went down there a number of times myself to assess who we thought would be the most reliable, who could not be corrupted. And we focused on the commander of the Honduran Armed Forces, General Regalado. And I met with his underlings.
and one of them was a colonel, and the colonel told me that it was very important that General Regalado believe that I was an important American official. I think that their view was that law enforcement people were important,
but that there were politicians above law enforcement people who might change the agreements. And he wanted to know he was dealing with somebody of substance in the U.S. government. So Safir comes up with a plan. The U.S. Marshal Service at the time had a 727, the aircraft that was used to transport prisoners.
I think it held about 120 passengers. And we decided that if I flew down in that 727 to Tegucigalpa and got off that airplane and it was just myself and maybe one or two staff members, that General Regalado would say, "If he can fly this major aircraft from the U.S. to Honduras just to meet with me, he must be an important person." We landed this 120-seat aircraft at the commercial airport of Tegucigalpa.
And I remember thinking, you know, like it was a movie because standing on the tarmac was General Regalado and his staff all in dress uniforms. And they rolled the ramp up to the aircraft, opened the door, and I got out. And Jose Lopez and Ralph Zorita followed behind me. And General Regalado in Spanish said, who else is on the airplane?
And Jose Lopez said to him, "This is the jefe's airplane, the chief's airplane." And immediately General Regalado shook my hand and said, "Let's go to lunch." Just as Safir suspected, the big plane works its magic. General Regalado agrees to work with the marshals on one condition. In our planning sessions, it was clear to us that in order to get Matabalisteros, we needed the help of either the Honduran police or the Honduran military.
And we needed to assure them that if they helped us, that Mata Balasteros would be put in jail for the rest of his life and wouldn't be able to come back to Honduras and either harm them or their families. Mata had become so powerful that the upper echelons of Honduran society feared him and they no longer wanted him to be in the country and felt as though his expulsion to the United States would solve a problem for them.
That suits the American authorities. If they get their hands on Matta, they have no intention of letting him see the light of day ever again. The General provides the Marshals with access to his elite strike force, the Cobras. They put Matta's luxury compound in Tegucigalpa under intense surveillance. Protected by his private army, Ballesteros is, for the moment, untouchable. But the Cobras have spotted a moment in his routine where he could be vulnerable. That's when they'll go in for the kill.
Our team would go out when they were down there every day and they would watch the compound if they saw him come out. Sometimes they would follow him in a car. Sometimes they would place people in strategic locations so he would pass them. I remember seeing photographs of him jogging, photographs of the compound. And, you know, just normal techniques that we would use to get as much information as possible about somebody's routine so that we could plan the apprehension.
And we basically came up with a plan where the Cobras would grab Madabal Asteros while he was jogging. There are still two big problems. Even if the Cobra is captured by Asteros, there is no extradition treaty between Honduras and the U.S. And he's still got the loyalty of many ordinary Hondurans. Somehow, the Marshal must plot a way of legally getting by Asteros out of Honduras and into the U.S. without triggering a popular uprising. Frustrated, Zafir plays hardball.
For DEA agent Mike Vigil, this is a welcome bit of impetus. The United States went to Honduras and they said, "Do you want matabeasteros or do you want USAID?" So they said, "Take matabeasteros."
The idea there was if you decide that you're not going to expel Mata Ballesteros to stand trial on these charges, then we're not going to give you U.S. aid or drop the aid that you're currently receiving.
So they knew that U.S. aid to their country was critical. So, you know, at the same time, they didn't want a criminal there. So they decided that they would give him up. Faced with his ultimatum, the Honduran government finally makes the call.
The Cobras would grab Matabal Asteros while he was jogging, take him to Palmera Air Force Base, where our two private citizens in their private jet would be waiting. They would fly him to the Dominican Republic, where I would be waiting with General Imbert Pereira, who would declare him an illegal alien and expel him to Puerto Rico in the United States. April 5th, 1988. The operation to capture Ballesteros is on.
The Honduran cobras assemble, ready to snatch by a steros while he takes his morning jog, preferably before his guards realize what's going on. During our surveillance, we thought that he would run about six miles every morning. Sometimes he would run by himself. Sometimes he would run with some bodyguards. At least we believed them to be bodyguards. On the morning of the takedown, there were about 50 cobras there. Our people were there as well. As normal, Matta leaves his house.
He limbers up for his morning six miles. As he begins to jog, the cobras strike. A hood was put over his head and he was put in a van and taken to Las Palmaras Air Force Base where he was put on our Citation III jet. From the air base, he's smuggled straight to the Dominican Republic. Mata is still in his jogging gear. The grab happened so quickly, his bodyguards back in Honduras must assume he's still exercising.
Stood at a window in the airfield's main building, Howard Safir watches the plane descend through the clouds and touch down on the tarmac. After months of hard work, this will be the first time he's seen the drug lord face to face. So I'm waiting with General Lambert at the airport in the Dominican Republic. We get a heads up that the plane is 30 minutes out. There's a VIP room there. Matabal Asteros is brought into the VIP room. He looks very disoriented.
He's looking around. He's asking people where he is, why he's there, how come people have kidnapped him. And I just looked at him and said, "You're going to the United States." I don't know whether he understood me or not, but it made me feel really good. Next, General Lambert declared him an illegal alien. He had no papers and no passport. He had no documents. And there was a DEA aircraft which flew him to Puerto Rico.
We formally arrested him in Puerto Rico. He was put on an aircraft with our folks, flown to the US and then directly to Marion, which was a maximum security prison. You know, there's this old saying that fugitive hunters like to use. It's been used a thousand times, but it's true. You have to send them the message that you can run, but you can't hide.
And that's the message that we were sending, that you harm a U.S. law enforcement officer, we're going to use everything in our power, every resource, and you're never going to be free. We're going to get you. Mata has been formally arrested in Puerto Rico by the time news breaks out in Honduras of his arrest and extradition. As word filters through the streets of Tegucigalpa, the atmosphere builds. It's not long before things turn nasty.
There were riots that lasted for several days. They burned an annex of the U.S. Embassy. There were like about five people killed because again, Mata Ballesteros gave all these people money and they were now losing their benefactor.
There were protests that broke out over several days in Honduras, primarily Tegucigalpa, but there were protests in many cities, San Pedro Sula, for example, but the major protests were in Tegucigalpa. They broke into the U.S. Embassy and burned some of the outbuildings, one of the annexes, for example, burned, and there were a number of people killed in the protests. I don't believe there were any Americans, but there were
five or six killed on the streets and dozens injured. So it turned out to be a pretty bloody, they had to bring out the army, kind of a major protest in response to his expulsion.
The fact that Mata could walk among the big drug kings, hold his own, call the shots, make decisions, throw his weight around, get other people, powerful people, to do what he wanted them to do, and to come back and forth in and out of Honduras to Colombia to Mexico pretty freely, and the DEA really couldn't get him, it's pretty amazing. And the Hondurans took pride in that. Mata is the only major drug trafficker that came from Central America.
Hondurans are furious that the imperialist U.S. has robbed them of a hero. All U.S. personnel in the capital can do is hunker down in the embassy and ride out the storm. Fifteen months after his arrest, in July 1989 in Los Angeles, California, Ballesteros finally stands trial. After all the years of pain and sacrifice, this should be a pretty open and shut case. The next time I saw Mata Ballesteros was in a federal courtroom.
And I traveled there to testify against him and other drug traffickers. At that point in time, you know, he was done. He knew it. Everybody knew it because so many witnesses testified against him that the evidence was totally overwhelming.
He saw me when I was sworn in and took the witness stand. You know, he stared at me, you know, kind of a glaring look, like if I could kill you, I would. At one point, it seems like that's exactly what might happen. Federal prosecutor Jimmy Giroux works in the United States Attorney's Office in Los Angeles. At the time of Ballesteros' trial, he is deputy chief of the major narcotics section.
During the trial, one of the most eventful occurrences involved a bomb threat. The U.S. Marshals Service, among other responsibilities, is responsible for providing security to the federal courthouse, to the federal judges and the federal prosecutors. And they had received credible evidence that a bomb had been planted in the courthouse, and apparently in an attempt to facilitate Montevideo's escape.
And so the proceedings, the trial proceedings were postponed, they were delayed. Basically, they shut down the courthouse for at least 24 hours, where they conducted a bomb sweep of the building with both electronic equipment with the bomb docks that would sniff out explosives. Fortunately, no bomb is found, but security remains tight as the trial continues.
Matta is guilty as sin, but building the case against him is a fraught, tricky process. The indictment was returned maybe six years, seven years before Mata Ballesteros was arrested. So it wasn't kind of the typical case where the defendant commits a crime, he's arrested immediately after the commission of the crime, and then immediately after criminal charges are brought. This was a case where he commits a crime, criminal charges are brought,
He disappears, he flees the United States, he's gone for five years or so, and then he's captured, and then the trial begins. So we had to go back and reconstruct the evidence in the case that again had its genesis at least five years before his apprehension. Mike Vigil is a key witness. In his testimony, his priority is to do justice to the memory of his murdered colleague, Kiki Camarena.
I testified against Mata Ballesteros in the killing and abduction of Kiki Camarena. I testified as to everything that had occurred in Cartagena, other pieces of information, evidence that we were presenting. We presented his briefcase that we had seized in Cartagena that had all kinds of documents.
where he owned, you know, multimillion-dollar properties. He had telephone records to associates. So I presented a lot of that key evidence against Matabeasteros. Six weeks later, the judge reads out the verdict.
Matavai Aceros and his defense lawyer certainly feared that the judge would impose a maximum sentence. And so it was a very dramatic moment in the courtroom as both sides waited for the judge to speak and announce his sentence.
And when that happened, I looked over at Matlavaer-Steros and you could see his head fall, his chin fall to his chest as he realized the kind of impact of that moment. It meant that he would spend the rest of his natural life in prison, that he would never see liberty. He'd never live another day as a free man. And I think that's one of the reasons why a lot of international drug
Cartel leaders fear the U.S. justice system because, again, it's not a justice system that's corrupt. The judges can be bought off, as is the case in some countries. So they fear that they will be held accountable and be held liable to the full extent of the law. Matabayos-Darros is convicted of racketeering and sentenced to three concurrent life sentences plus 175 years.
At the time of his expulsion to the United States and his trial there, U.S. federal prosecutors estimated his wealth to exceed $2 billion. So he was clearly a drug trafficker of the first magnitude in terms of the wealth that he had accumulated through the 1970s and into the 1980s.
During Mata's sentencing, after his conviction in federal court, U.S. prosecutors claimed that he was the most significant narcotics trafficker in custody in the world.
Mata was significant because he had accumulated such large earnings in the drug trade and he was a historically significant figure for having cooperated with so many different cartels, having orchestrated so many drug deals over so many years and not gotten killed while doing it. The Ballesteros trial is a chance to reflect not just on this individual, but on the kind of society that spawned him.
It was a dog-eat-dog world. He was working in the state of nature, right? No rules. You either killed or would be killed yourself. Living in Latin America and functioning in business and out in the business world, there really were no rules. There was no really functioning rule of law.
Laws were not enforced. Everything and everyone was corruptible or negotiable. You know, you went out there and anything went. If you had to kill, if you had to cheat, if you had to corrupt,
if you had to use people and let them go, you did whatever you could do, whatever you needed to do to get ahead. And there's a certain amount of respect in that country, at least historically, in Latin America and Honduras, but throughout the region for that. The successful businessman, right, the guy who goes out there, makes a lot of money and is successful, he does whatever he has to do, and that is legitimate. The other thing that Mata did is he cultivated
very carefully, I think, a kind of reputation for the way he dealt with his private sphere. Because if we think of public-private, the dual, the two-dimensional life of
a Latin American society, which again, that's been discussed pretty extensively in the social science literature. Matta was very, very serious about making sure that people knew that he was a good family man, that he was a good church man, that he gave a lot of money to the poor.
that he respected the poor. So he was safe in Honduras. He was protected in Honduras, not because he paid everybody off, and partly because he paid everybody off, and he took care of, he covered his bases, but also because the people of Honduras really loved him.
In any case, the guilty verdict cements Matta's place in the pantheon of notorious narco-traffickers. — Mata Ballesteros is less well-known than many other kingpins because he was not a member of the Medellin cartel and the Cali cartel, which gained so much publicity. He was a Central American, he was a Honduran. He rose to the top echelons of the drug trade, but not in areas that gained a lot of public attention.
The public attention was focused on what was happening in Colombia and in Mexico within other cartels. But Mata was a very significant drug trafficker of a rank at the very top of the drug trade. Crucially, however, Mata is not directly convicted of the murder of DEA agent Kiki Camarena, only of his kidnapping, as Mike Fowler explains.
He is not found guilty of the murder of Camarena because he was so reticent at the meetings in October in which the murder was planned. All that the informant who was at the meeting and testified in court heard Mata say was the enigmatic phrase, "Silence is golden." And that saved him, perhaps, from a murder conviction.
For the DEA agents who've hunted Ballesteros for so many years, the trial is a significant victory, but one tinged with regret. They're still haunted by the losses they've suffered, and the colleagues that have been sacrificed. Mata Ballesteros remains to this day in a maximum security penitentiary in Pennsylvania. As Mata is taken away to begin his sentence, Agent Mike Vigil heads to a bar near the courtroom to reflect on the case with a quiet drink.
When I heard the outcome, I went out and had a shot of tequila as a toast to Kiki Camarena. The trial was a success. Mata Ballesteros, during his natural life, will never see daylight again.
In the next episode of Real Narcos, we'll delve deep into the Kiki Camarena story. We'll be embedded with Camarena and his DEA colleagues in their office in Guadalajara, Mexico. We'll follow Agent Camarena as he infiltrates the biggest marijuana plantation in Mexico.
And we'll discover who is really responsible for his murder. A very high-functioning psychopath. He knew that wholesale violence would be bad for business, but he was not above taking lives when he had to.
Real Narcos is a Noiser podcast and World Media Rights co-production hosted by me, John Cuban. The series is created by Pascal Hughes, produced by Joel Duddle. It's been edited by James Tindall and Katrina Hughes. Music by Oliver Baines from Flight Brigade. The sound mixer is Tom Pink. If you have a moment, please leave us a review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. ♪
