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$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. September 24th, 1981. In the early hours of the morning, a convoy of police vehicles snakes through the suburban streets of Van Nuys in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley. The vehicles pull up outside a poorly maintained apartment block. Disturbed by the flashing emergency lights, residents in the surrounding condos twitch their curtains.
Peering out to get a look, they see a team of Drug Enforcement Administration agents in their trademark black jackets file out of the cars and begin surrounding the building. Three officers cautiously approach the entrance, their weapons drawn. The officers kick down the door and file in. Nobody's home, but this raid is more than worth their while. Inside, the agents find 174 kilos of cocaine, along with $1.9 million.
It's already a good night, but the raid throws up something else. The owners of the property have left behind a collection of ledgers. Flipping through these papers, the agents soon realize they're the accounts for a vast drug trafficking operation. They indicate that in the last nine months alone, nearly one and a half tons of cocaine worth $73 million have been smuggled into the US and stored right here in this apartment. There's more. Buried in the ledgers is the nickname of the supplier.
El Negro, the black one. This codename refers to its owner's African heritage. It's a light bulb moment. El Negro is already on the DEA's radar. His real name is Juan Ramon Lara Ballesteros. For years, they've known him as a low-level smuggler, hardly worth investigating. But now, he's part of a different conversation. The business ledgers shine a spotlight on a figure who up to now has been an enigma.
They reveal that Mara Ballesteros is in fact a criminal mastermind, sat atop a million-dollar cocaine smuggling and distribution network. Eight million dollars worth of cocaine a month. That's who they're dealing with. Welcome to Real Narcos, the series from Noiser Podcasts 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. Mata was suspected of more than a dozen murders in Colombia, as well as multiple murders in Honduras, the United States. He's a boogeyman for the agents on his tail. A faceless, placeless phantom, flitting seamlessly between jurisdictions, crossing borders, breaking laws at will, always tantalizingly out of reach.
They were shipping tons of cocaine on a monthly basis, probably five to ten million dollars every week. The war on drugs is his to win.
Unless the DEA can hunt him down first. There's this old saying that fugitive hunters like to use. It's been used a thousand times, but it's true. You can run, but you can't hide. 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. This is the story of Mata Ballesteros. And this is Real Narcos. Real Narcos.
It's the early 1980s, and the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA, are locked in an unending war against the cocaine trade. It's no longer a party drug for the rich. The powder is being transformed into the toxic and addictive cocktail, crack cocaine. Crime and gang warfare are skyrocketing, and civilians are being caught in the crossfire. But the nighttime raid in Van Nuys, California is a huge breakthrough.
The discovery of the business ledgers has opened the eyes of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Informants have whispered the name of El Negro before. He's on the DEA's radar, but they had no idea he was operating on such a vast international scale. These business papers put him at the top of an enormous network of drug transportation. He used to be way down the most wanted leaderboard. Now, he's going straight to the top. He was a very elusive drug trafficker.
And he was elusive because he had all the resources in the world. This is a man who had hundreds of millions of dollars, so he could travel, hide any place, be able to obtain fictitious passports. He had tremendous infrastructure that would help him, that would protect him. He wanted to buy protection, and he bought protection by giving people money. That's DEA agent Mike Vigel.
He knows the name Matta Ballesteros well, because he's the agent tasked with hunting him down. Matta is known for operating in the shadows. His whereabouts are a mystery, but Agent Mike Vigil has had a spectacular track record. Across his career, he's seized over 100 tons of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin in countries as far-ranging as Colombia, Mexico, and Afghanistan. If anyone can bring Ballesteros to justice,
It's him. We were coming after Mata Ballesteros, no question. If you engage, you can engage for a while, you can run, but you're not going to hide. And Justice may be blind, but, you know, she has a very long reach. Grilling informants and trawling through archives, Vigil and his team start to unpick Mata's backstory. It's hard going.
But over time, they piece together a basic outline. They discover Mada has led a life of crime ever since he was a kid on the poverty-stricken streets of Tegucigalpa, the capital city of Honduras in the 1950s and 60s. His mother was very poor. We don't know what happened to his father. You know, he either died or abandoned the family.
But the mother sold fruit, small amounts of vegetables, penny candy. And Mata Ballesteros began his career as a delinquent by committing petty crimes like auto theft, burglaries, stealing. So he started at a very young age and then gradually became one of the most notorious drug lords in the world.
Honduras is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. Surviving in Tegucigalpa is tough. Ballesteros learns to live by his wits.
Julie Bunk is an author and expert on drug trafficking through Central America. She studied Madabae Asteros closely. He was born in Tegucigalpa. He lived on the streets as a child. He basically made his living as a kid picking pockets.
making deals with local Honduran businessmen, doing odd jobs for them, robbing, you know, theft was one of his specialties, harassing tourists. So he became very savvy very early on. He became very intelligent, very street smart, knew who to do the deals with, where the money was from a very early age.
By the time Mata was 20, he was already doing deals. He was already dealing in gems and jewels and probably drugs, arms possibly. So he started early and he became very good at it. And in that sense, he's different from other traffickers, other major traffickers, other big kingpin traffickers, because he started on the streets and he worked his way up from the very, very bottom. And so in that sense, he's very distinct.
Even at a young age, Mata has a similar profile to the man who will later become a key ally, the Colombian king of cocaine, Pablo Escobar. Both men will rise from obscurity on the street to the very top of the international narco-trafficking trade.
The only other trafficker who's kind of comparable to that would be Pablo Escobar, who was one of the big kingpins with the Medellin cartel, also started kind of at the bottom. Really, all the other major traffickers in Latin America started at the top. They were already wealthy and well-placed when they came into the drug business. Mata moves to Colombia to escape the poverty of his home country. He embeds himself in the criminal underworld and starts to get a name for himself.
He was smuggling gems, primarily emeralds, because the best emeralds in the world come out of Colombia. So he was getting emeralds, selling anything that he could, stealing anything that he could, until he found his big break that propelled him through the ionosphere of the criminal world. Smuggling across Latin American borders is dangerous work.
There are plenty of bandits and crooked cops looking to trip you up. But Mata Ballesteros has nerves of steel. He earns a reputation for getting the job done. He starts smuggling drugs into the US. At this stage, he's really just testing the water. It's a pretty low-key operation, with Mata himself acting as the drug mule. But then he gets into some hot water.
Michael Fowler is an author and expert on Ballesteros. We do know in the 1960s and early 1970s, Mata did make illegal entry into the United States on several occasions. In 1970, Mata Ballesteros flew into Dulles Airport carrying two dozen kilos of cocaine in his luggage, according to authorities. Mata denied that the drugs were linked to him.
Clearly, he was using false documents to get into the United States, but the prosecution was unable to prove that the drugs were his. At trial, Ballesteros claims the drugs were put in his luggage by someone else. He dodges the smuggling charges, but he's found guilty of another crime, illegal entry into the United States using false documents. He's sent to Eglin Air Force Base, a minimum security prison in Florida, to serve five years.
Five months later, he's escaped and returned to South America. Even today, no one really knows how he did it. It's sleights of hand like this that create the Matabaiasteros myth. He's like smoke. You reach out to grab him, but he's gone. After a short period of time, he escaped from that minimum security prison.
and returned to Latin America. This is significant because it was one of many escapes in his career. That was one aspect of the criminal drug business that he knew very well. He escaped in different ways, from different prisons in different countries. Here was a first instance out of the United States.
it may also have given him some standing in the Latin American drug trade to have been imprisoned in the United States and to have escaped and come back to Latin America.
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At night, the city of Cali in Colombia is a hive of bars, clubs, and salsa tegas. If you want salsa music in nightlife, this is the place: Colombia's Party Town. How does this place stay up all night? One thing helps. Cali is a global center of cocaine trafficking. A fearsome local cartel calls the shots. A slither of their product stays here in Cali, finding its way to the nightclubs and bars.
Most of it is packaged up in warehouses across the city, then sent north toward the United States. After escaping from jail in Florida, Mata heads to Cali. He meets Nancy Vasquez, a young woman whose family is part of the cartel. Mata is already married, but he falls in love with Nancy. They get married. Through his second wife, he's now a member of the cartel family. His new relatives are impressed by this cool-headed Honduran. He seems to take everything in his stride.
and he has a knack for the product, which they discover as they put him to work as a cocaine chemist. Mata was looking for ways to escape the poverty trap he was in and move to different countries and explore different criminal
careers. Chemist is a grandiose title for a producer, a refiner of cocaine. You have to get the cocaine from the plant, from the leaf, into the refined stage of cocaine that can be sniffed by consumers. The process of making cocaine is
is not terribly complicated, though some chemists are better than others at producing a refined, pure form of the drug. It is something that a person like Mata, who had very little formal education, could become skilled at, but it was an essential part of the trade and therefore useful to him to know that part of the international drug trade so well.
Calm, collected, reasonable to deal with, Mata quickly becomes a prized asset for the Cali cartel. I think he forged early on also a reputation for playing by the rules. He was trustworthy. He didn't have a reputation for seeing someone who was going to squeal, right? Or he wasn't going to be a snitch.
He carried through on his obligations. You know, it is amazing that he got all the way to the top, that there were these meetings where you'd have top, top kingpins from the Medellín or the Cali or the Guadalajara, which at that time had already become a pretty big cartel, or the Sonora cartels, which were the big up-and-coming Mexican cartels, that he would attend these meetings with these guys. And he didn't appear to be threatened. He was in a position of decision-making.
In some decisions, some witnesses said that he was the one who was the decision maker. Little by little, he built a reputation for being very, very trustworthy. The Cali bosses are eager to expand their cocaine network into the U.S. To do that, they need the cooperation of the rival cartel in Medellin and its formidable boss, Pablo Escobar. Who better to broker an agreement than Mata? He's a diplomat of sorts. They send him north to negotiate.
It's a risky move. Kali and Medellin are mortal enemies. But if anyone can clinch a deal, it's the Honduran chemist. Of all of Mata's attributes, of all of his genius as a criminal, what stands out most is his ability to work with different drug organizations, even rival organizations.
to retain their trust, to work with them, to orchestrate deals among them. I know of no other drug kingpin who had the knack that Mata Ballesteros had to work with so many different organizations over such a long period of time, not to be killed while doing it and to make large sums of money as he did so. Mata sits down with the Medellin kingpins and comes up with an arrangement that suits everyone.
From now on, Kali and Medellin will work together to smuggle their illicit product across the USA's borders. Ballesteros is now in a unique position. He's popular with two rival cartels, the middleman between two cocaine superpowers. Mata was successful because he was Honduran. It's very important. He was a Central American and he was the only one. He was smart, even though he was not formally educated.
He was street smart. He was savvy. And he became savvy and smart at a very, very early age. He became very good at deal-making. He was good with people. He developed a lot of charisma. He knew how to use that charisma to get what he wanted and to work his way up the scale. And he was also very comfortable with using his charisma to wield authority. It's time to seize his moment. Mata is often on the move, traveling between Medellin and Cali.
The more he travels, the more his network of contacts grows. And the more his eyes are opened to the huge financial rewards smuggling can bring, he decides to set up his own smuggling operation. He saw an opportunity. He knew that cocaine fetched very high profits.
and started as a chemist, worked his way up through cunning and being trustworthy to his sources of supply. And they liked him because like most psychopaths, he was very charming. Mata has half an eye on Mexico as a possible conduit to get the product into the United States. Smuggling by land is the future. But for now, why not make the most of the lax security at U.S. airports?
He links up with two small-time Honduran smugglers, Mary and Mario Ferrari. It's a small operation, and Ballesteros often has to carry the drugs himself. But he barely blinks an eye as he crosses borders time and time again with kilos of cocaine stashed in his luggage. But then, on a trip to Colombia, Ballesteros receives troubling news. It seems that the Ferraris have stolen $500,000 from him. He immediately cuts all ties with his business partners.
Mario Ferrari is furious. He vows to settle the score. In Honduras, Mario invites Mata's ex-wife to a nightclub. The drinks are flowing. The music's pumping. Before long, the former Miss Mata is drunk and high, just what Mario Ferrari intended. He pimps her around his friends. In Colombia, Mata gets the devastating news that his ex has been sexually assaulted. He plots immediate revenge.
By the time this all came together, he had already divorced his wife. He wasn't with his wife anymore. But he still felt that they had a debt to pay him. So Mata, he has a vendetta. And the Farraris were brought to Colombia to meet face to face with Mata. And then he instructs his underlings to take them back to Honduras and to go ahead and to kill them both and to bury them in Honduras because he believed that everyone should die on their native land.
The Ferraris were in way over their heads. This was only ever going to end one way for them. On June 15th, 1978, workers on the San Jorge farm just outside Tegucigalpa are gearing up for another day working to land under the blistering summer sun. They trudge across the cracked, dusty fields of the estate to collect their daily water. But today, the water is no good for drinking. Two rotting corpses are floating at the bottom of the artesian well.
Newspaper reports in Honduras are full of speculation that the army helped kidnap the Ferraris. But it's clear which shady figure was pulling the strings. Mata is now a household name. He's made his point that he's not someone to be underestimated. He'll make sure that over the next decade, anyone who stands in his way is exterminated. His period in Colombia was a period in which he learned many different facets of the drug trade, one of them being hitman.
We know that eventually Mata was suspected of more than a dozen murders in Colombia, as well as multiple murders in Honduras, the United States. Mata Ballesteros was a psychopath because he had no regard for human life. If he had to kill you or kill someone that was a threat to his drug empire, he would do it without flinching.
And he knew that his business was in tandem with horrific violence because drug traffickers
will go to great lengths to make examples of people that have violated their trust or have stolen money or drugs from them because if they don't make a huge example of them, then others are going to start stealing from them. So that is why the drug trade generates such horrific violence.
He was the perfect example of an individual that would exterminate anybody that he felt or perceived was a threat to him. In the 1970s, the cocaine supply route into the U.S. is through the Caribbean into Miami. But by the late 1970s, the DEA are using Navy and Coast Guard radar. They've become pretty good at trafficking aircraft and ships carrying South American cocaine.
At the same time, the Mexican Guadalajara cartel wants to partner with the Colombians. They want reliable access to large quantities of cocaine that they can move across the U.S. border.
The single most significant evolutionary step in the international drug trade in the 1970s to 1980s to 1990s is the shift from trafficking through the Caribbean into Miami. The shift from that route to routes through Central America into Mexico and up into the United States.
Mata was one of the first drug traffickers to use that latter approach of moving drugs through Central America. A new opportunity has opened up: the smuggled cocaine by road through Mexico. Enter Ballesteros and his Overland operation. He's the perfect man for the occasion, from the perfect country. The fact that he was Honduran was significant because
A very large percentage of the drugs went through Honduras. Honduras was stable in the 1980s. Nicaragua was in the middle of a civil war in the 1980s. Salvador was in the middle of a civil war in the 1980s. Guatemala was in the middle of a civil war in the 1980s. Honduras was the perfect country. It was perfectly well situated, vis-a-vis Mexico and Colombia.
It was very underdeveloped, very, very poor law enforcement, very, very weak administration of justice system, very high levels of corruption across the board in all areas of the government. Almost all officials were probably going to be corruptible, some more so than others.
And you had a lot of uninhabited areas in Honduras that if you could put an airstrip in, find some very jungly kind of area and pay off a couple of local guards, it'd be a good place to come in, land with a little Cessna loaded with drugs. Honduras became one of the central, maybe the most important trafficking state in the region. And Mata was the king. He
He made it all happen. So they relied on him. He was positioned at exactly the right place at the right time. Since the 1960s, the Mexican cartels have made billions of dollars smuggling marijuana and heroin into the U.S. But they've been watching cocaine profits skyrocket from a distance. One Mexican in particular is hungry to get in on the action. His name is Felix Gallardo, boss of the Guadalajara cartel.
Mike Vigil and his fellow agents at the DEA have been keeping a beady eye on him. We were investigating the high-ranking members of that cartel, which was based out of Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico. The cartel was headed by an individual by the name of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, who was known as the godfather of Mexican drug trafficking at the time. He controlled
All of Mexico, unlike today where you have different cartels operating in Mexico, his was the single dominant organization operating in Mexico. He had politicians in his pocket. He had many officials that he was paying off for protection. And he had tremendous pipelines into the United States that could be used.
Matabe Asteros offers to become the middleman between the Colombian and Guadalajara cartels. He's got this role down to a fine art. He's mastered the techniques of crossing international borders and striking deals between players in different countries. He comes and goes as he pleases.
On a trip to Mexico, he agrees to try out a small test shipment of cocaine with Gallardo. Ballesteros will smuggle it from Colombia through Honduras to Mexico. Then using his elaborate network of trucks, cars and tunnels, Gallardo will get the drugs across the border into the US.
They negotiated for a small quantity of cocaine initially, you know, just to test the waters. And obviously the Colombian sources of supply wanted to ensure that everything was established in terms of the logistics and the way it was going to work, how the route was going to work. If there were any kinks to it, you know, let's fix them before we start shipping tons. The plan goes off without a hitch.
And the new allies immediately scale up their operation. They were shipping tons of cocaine on a monthly basis. We estimated that both Felix Gallardo and Matan Ballesteros were averaging probably five to ten million dollars every week. The traffickers are endlessly creative in the ways they get their wares to market.
Oh, millions of ways of doing it. I mean, they would pack it in wood. They would bring it into small planes, bring them in very, very low into the Everglades, just below radar, bring them in that way. They'd pack them in armadillos. They'd pack them in raw meat. They would put them in soda pop. I mean, they would bring them in mostly on ships, but also on even commercial airlines. We even read a case where drugs came in from Honduras that were packed in a corpse.
The only problem for Ballesteros now is how to launder the millions of dollars he's making. He started to create businesses in Honduras. You know, he started tobacco plantation construction companies. He had a huge cattle industry.
And at the same time, just like most drug traffickers, you know, he was using a lot of his money to pay bribes because as he was rising with, you know, in the underbelly of the criminal underworld, you know, he was having to pay a lot of individuals money, particularly a lot of the military people in Honduras that ran that country up until about 1982.
He put his money in lots of places. He invested heavily in Spain, he invested in real estate, he invested in tourism, gems. He was involved in the shipping of armaments. He had accounts in foreign countries. The slice of his earnings trickles down to ordinary Hondurans. If he can keep the people happy, that's a pretty effective insurance policy.
In all of these businesses in which Mata was investing money and laundering drug proceeds in Honduras, he was employing as many as 5,000 people, making him the largest single private employer in the country. He was popular at home. He was a major businessman. He made a lot of money, but he invested a lot of it in Honduras.
People knew that and they appreciated that. He had a lot of Honduran businesses and he hired a lot of Hondurans. He was such a large businessman and he had so many ventures all over the world, much of which was linked to Honduras in some way, that he actually made a difference on the Honduras GDP. You know, he was a major contributor to Honduran development. At least that's how he was certainly perceived.
As his empire grows, Ballesteros permanently seals his relationship with Gallardo, the king of Guadalajara.
He immediately wanted to become the go-to guy for moving those drugs into the United States. But not only to the United States, but he was already opening up corridors into Europe, primarily Spain. He began to establish that link with the Guadalajara cartel, primarily Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo.
The key there is that like feudal kings that wanted to ensure loyalty, he had Felix Gallardo baptize his son, Ramon Jr., to solidify that nexus with the Guadalajara cartel and then work to his advantage.
Mata Ballesteros has dragged himself up the streets of Honduras to become one of the most successful cocaine smugglers of all time, with the money, the muscle, and the brains to maintain his position. Mata was a go-between, an intermediary of the first rank, someone who organized and orchestrated aspects of the drug trade to a degree that was very, very unusual and that showed something of a criminal genius that he had. In short, he had the ability
to use bribes, bullets, and intimidation. He had the personality, he had a charisma that others within the drug trade valued and wanted to bring him into their deals and into their councils. By 1981, on the night of the watershed raid in Van Nuys, California, Matabayesteros is smuggling $8 million of cocaine a month into the U.S. The DEA assigns Agent Mike Vigil to their Guadalajara office.
He and his fellow agents know Ballesteros must travel regularly between Colombia, Honduras and Mexico. But Matt is an expert at staying hidden. Part of the difficulty law enforcement had in casting a net around Mata Ballesteros, a person of interest now for many years, is the fact that he is on the move so constantly, moving from Mexico to Colombia to Honduras and on occasion to Spain.
never being in one place too long while he runs his drug empire. The weeks turn into months as the agents exhaust their contacts, trying to pin down the elusive Honduran kingpin to no avail. Then in February 1985, there's a major development.
Enrique Camarena was an aggressive law enforcement officer, a DEA agent, one of the most promising DEA agents working at the time.
Camarena's investigations were having a major impact on the bottom line for some powerful Mexican kingpins who were concerned at losing money through the seizures that Camarena was orchestrating and the investigations that he had undertaken. Enrique Camarena, known as Kiki, is a thorn in the side of Gallardo in the Guadalajara cartel. Federal prosecutor Jimmy Garul remembers what happened next.
Kiki Camadana left the US consulate office that afternoon to join his wife, Mika, for lunch. His wife had agreed to meet him at a particular restaurant. And she went to the restaurant. He did not arrive. She waited and waited. She didn't hear from him. This sudden disappearance bears all the hallmarks of a cartel kidnapping. It's the first time in US history that a DEA agent has been abducted on foreign soil.
Risk is always there for DEA agents in the field, but drug lords tend to stop short of actually enacting violence against American citizens. 27 days later, the DEA discover Camarena's body dumped on the outskirts of Guadalajara. The DEA vowed to devote every possible resource to the hunt for Camarena's killers. They launch one of the organization's largest ever homicide investigations. The eyes of America are watching.
In November 1988, Camarena is even featured on the front cover of Time magazine. Two months into the search, agents locate the Guadalajara residence where Camarena was killed. When Kiki Camarena was abducted, he was taken to an address in Guadalajara on a street called Lope de Vega. It was a two-story house, had a small swimming pool in the back.
The FBI sent a forensic team there and they started to go through all of the evidence. Among the evidence are several strands of hair, which are tested against an international criminal database. Turns out some of them match the hair of a drug smuggler, still on file from his time in a Florida jail some years earlier. Mata Ballesteros.
The swimming pool was drained and they found a license plate there belonging to a vehicle. They also found hair that was consistent with that of Mata Ballesteros. Additionally, with some of the individuals that were arrested following the kidnapping of Kiki Camarena, we knew that Mata Ballesteros had been in Guadalajara at that point in time.
but had escaped through the southern border of Mexico, but we knew that he was staying at that residence. The Jerez tied him to the residence where Kiki Camarena was tortured, killed, but also tied him to the Guadalajara cartel. So we were coming after Mata Ballesteros, no question.
That focus on Mata Ballesteros ratcheted up a million times once Kiki Camarena was killed because at that point in time, we came after him with a vengeance.
Coming up next time on Real Narcos. Assistant Director of the U.S. Marshals Service Howard Safir hatches a plan to snatch Mata off the street during his morning jog. And Agent Mike Vigil finally comes face to face with the man he's chased halfway across Latin America. Mata Ballesteros is running through the open courtyard carrying a semi-automatic pistol.
It became like the hunter and the hunted. I knew that he was going to try to kill me or I was going to kill him.
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 Fly 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. ♪
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