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Mexican Drug Cartels: You Want Silver or Lead? Part 3
 Chad Deal - San Diego Reader
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September 23, 2010
"[Drug lords] rule by terror," said Errol Chavez, the special agent in charge of the DEA's San Diego office, in a 2001 Time magazine story. Ramón Arellano was said to keep his adversaries in fear by employing a handful of grim execution techniques, such as suffocating rivals with a clear plastic bag while a henchman named El Gordo bounced on their chests. The "Colombian necktie" was reserved for informants, who had their throats cut below the chin and their tongues pulled out through the wound. But Ramón's favorite ritual was said to be the carne asada — barbecuing adversaries on a bed of flaming tires while he and his men partied with tequila and cocaine.
Despite Ramón being on the FBI's top-ten fugitive list, next to Osama bin Laden at one point, and Janet Reno's $2 million reward for information about the capos, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported on March 8, 1994, that the Arellano brothers "have been sighted at Tijuana restaurants, accompanied by bodyguards, who included [Mexican] police officers."
A few months after his arrest, in a 2002 interview with the Washington Post at La Palma maximum security federal prison, Benjamín said, "I've lived simply, not in hiding. I wasn't calling attention to myself, but I wasn't running from them. I went to the movies, to restaurants just like you. If I wanted to go somewhere, I got on a plane."
Even so, the Arellano brothers remained untouchable for 13 years, famously distributing an estimated $1 million a week in bribes to Mexican politicians and police, according to extradition documents submitted by the government of Mexico. At one point, sources suggested that the state attorney general and almost 90 percent of the law-enforcement officers, prosecutors, and judges in Tijuana and the State of Baja California were on the payroll of the Arellano-Félix organization. The ubiquitous corruption went public in 1997, when President Ernesto Zedillo fired 1200 tainted officials who were believed to be on cartel payrolls nationwide.
Those who couldn't be bought were killed. The policy was plata o plomo: silver or lead. Get on the cartel payroll or die. Such was the case with the director of the federal police force in Tijuana, Ernest Ibarra, who was executed along with two police officers by machine-gun fire in Mexico City. Ibarra had become director just 29 days earlier. The murder took place two days after he scolded his men, saying the police had become so corrupt they weren't just friends with the traffickers, they were their servants. A Mexican Army officer was implicated in his murder.
Baja State Prosecutor Godin Gutiérrez was killed in front of his Tijuana home in January 1997. Gutiérrez had helped the DEA identify several assassins in the Arellano-Félix organization. He was shot over 100 times and then run over repeatedly by an automobile.
In another effort to discourage police corruption, President Zedillo sent a young police reformer, José Patiño, to clean up Tijuana's sideways ranks. A DEA agent who investigated the cartel for years once said that Patiño, who lived in San Diego for safety reasons, was the only Mexican police officer he had ever worked with who he felt was honest. However, in April 2000, Patiño and two aides, special prosecutor Oscar Pompa and army captain Rafael Torres, were lured into a trap by two Mexican federal police officers who were trained by the U.S. to be part of a new, "clean" antidrug unit. Patiño and his aides were found in a ditch the next day with almost every bone in their bodies broken and their heads crushed by an industrial press. One policeman grimly remarked that their remains resembled bags of ice cubes.
American citizens were also subject to the cartel's control. U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service inspector José Olvera at the Tijuana/San Ysidro border crossing pleaded guilty to taking nearly $90,000 in bribes to allow cartel shipments through. Olvera said he complied with the cartel because they had threatened to kidnap his five-year-old son, a tactic commonly employed by the organization.
"If relatively well paid U.S. agents aren't immune to [corruption]," one Mexican prosecutor is quoted as saying in the Time article, "how can we expect Mexican police to be?"
Journalists, too, fell in the crosshairs of the Arellanos' wrath. Editor of the Tijuana weekly Zeta, Jesús Blancornelas, was shot four times in broad daylight in 1997 by a group that included Logan Heights liaison Barrón. Blancornelas was severely wounded but survived. Barrón, however, took a stray bullet between the eyes and died on the scene. The editor was targeted for his extensive reporting on the cartel, which included publishing letters from mothers of Ramón's victims calling Ramón a coward. Cartel gunmen killed the paper's cofounder, Héctor "Gato" Félix, in April 1988, and chief editor Francisco Ortiz in June 2004. Reporters Without Borders, a nongovernment organization that defends the right of the press to report freely, called Mexico the most dangerous place in the world for journalists besides Iraq.
The cartel's reign of terror showed no signs of slowing down until the early 2000s, when a series of events precipitated the sudden collapse of the Arellano empire and the arrest of Benjamín thanks to, of all things, the shape of his daughter's chin.
The Fall of the Empire
"From 2000 to the present has been a process of gradual dismantling, not only of the Arellano-Félix organization but also all of the other major cartels," says Shirk.
In February 2000, two days after President Zedillo issued an ultimatum to the Arellano brothers, Tijuana police chief Alfredo de la Torre was gunned down as he drove along the Tijuana River Canal. On March 12, armed soldiers arrested Arellano-Félix organization cofounder and mentor Jesús "El Chuy" Labra as he watched his son play soccer in Tijuana. In May, in response to the Patiño murder, federal police raided the Ensenada beachfront home of Ismael Higuera while he partied drunk and naked with two Colombian women, which resulted in the arrest of the key cartel lieutenant and eight of his cohorts. Higuera has been blamed for 40 murders, including those of police chief de la Torre, federal police commander Federico Benítez, Patiño, and his aides.
On February 10, 2002, while on their way to kill rival Ismael "Mayo" Zambada of the Sinaloa cartel at the height of Mazatlán's Mardi Gras festival, Ramón and his Volkswagen Beetle full of narco-juniors were pulled over. The official version of the story says Ramón opened fire on the officer who flagged him for driving the wrong way down a one-way street. However, some investigators believe police officers on Zambada's payroll shot first. Regardless, the incident left Ramón dead with an identification card on his body reading Jorge Pérez López, a Mexican version of John Smith. Only later, as they examined photos from the crime scene, did police officially realize they had killed one of the FBI's ten most wanted fugitives. By then Ramón's body was nowhere to be found. "Family members" had appropriated it from the undertaker shortly after it arrived.
Thanks to a network of paid informants, a government task force obtained numbers from cell phones found at the scene of Ramón's shooting. Recent calls were traced back to Puebla, a small suburb 65 miles outside of Mexico City. Mexican agents had previously tracked a cartel money courier to the same town, where a young girl with a facial deformity was reported to have just moved with her family.
"Once we knew [Benjamín] was with his family, we could keep track of where he was by keeping track of his daughter with the very prominent chin," Mexican defense minister Ricardo Vega said in a television interview. Her distinct features allowed special forces to identify and follow her to the Arellano home in Puebla, where locals knew the drug lord as Manuel Treviño, a family man with a pleasant disposition and a penchant for cigars. After conducting surveillance, troops broke in at 1:00 a.m. on March 9, arresting Benjamín at his suburban home, where candles burned at a shrine to the late Ramón and stacks of money littered the floors.
A few days later, one of the cartel's top smugglers, Manuel "Tarzán" Herrera, was arrested in Tecate. The organization was further weakened the following month with the arrest of Tijuana police chief Carlos Otal, 20 Tijuana officers, and 20 state police officers who were believed to be on the cartel's payroll.
Edgardo Leyva Escandon and Arellano siblings Javier, Eduardo, and sister Enedina resumed control of the cartel after the fall of Benjamín and Ramón. However, they soon faced new challenges when, in 2006, a newly elected President Felipe Calderón declared war on Mexico's drug cartels and dispatched 6500 troops to dismantle the nation's drug-trafficking organizations: 1242 federal police and soldiers were deployed to Tijuana to restore order to the city; 2443 suspects were arrested. Within two years of Calderón's election, 178 suspects were extradited to the United States. Calderón's iron-fist strategy, which relied primarily on the movement of large numbers of troops to affected areas, was criticized by Proceso as being overly aggressive and was given the derisive title of "Calderón's Iraq."
In 2007, the Mexican military raised commandos' salaries to $1100 per month to dissuade soldiers from defecting to cartel payrolls. In response, cartels doubled the amount for their own troops, sweetening the pot for government officials to join the estimated 450,000 who made up Mexico's drug-trafficking network.
"Corruption so engulfs Mexico that the creation of an honest, professional national police — albeit a sound idea — shimmers like a mirage in the Sonoran desert," writes George W. Grayson in his book Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State?
A study published in 2004 by Mexico's National Autonomous University found that, in nine out of ten cases, families did not inform police of kidnappings because they believed that law-enforcement agents and government officials were complicit in the crimes.
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