From: "arline farrell" Newsgroups: alt.california.illegals,alt.california,alt.obituaries,alt.drugs,alt.mexico, soc.culture.mexican.american,soc.culture.mexico,talk.politics.drugs, alt.law-enforcement,alt.drugs.hard Subject: Re: RIP Amado Carrillo Fuentes ? - carrillo.htm [1/1] Date: 6 Jul 1997 19:50:12 GMT Posted by Joseph M. Pena on June 27, 1997 at 13:45:32: In Reply to: Re: GQ article -Mexico's pseudo-drug war ! posted by W. J Carlton on June 18, 1997 at 23:23:21: This article appeared in the April 1997 edition of GQ magazine,written by Charles Bowden. The Killer Across the River By Charles Bowden He may be the richest man who has ever walked the earth. He is a business genius and a murdering sociopath. His incom___more than $10 billion per year___results from controlling the distribution of most of the cocaine that comes into our country. He lives two miles from our southern border. His name is Amado Carrillo Fuentes, and his story demonstrates that everything we've been told about progress in the war on drugs is a lie. Rocio Aguero Miranda went for a ride at about the same time the tiger broke free. Juarez,check-by-jowl across the Rio Grande from El Paso, baked under the sun,twisted in the withering winds and lost belief in rain. At 4:30 a.m. on July 20,1996,two travel-all-type vehicals pulled up to a fine house in one of the city's nicer districts. Fifteen men armed with AK-47s got out. To the neighbors awake at that hour, they looked exactly like federal police, right down to the black ski masks they sported. The large dogs protecting the grounds backed off as the men entered. The maid fled into the bathroom with Rocio's 8-week-old baby, and when the officers took Rocio, 36 years old, she was wearing a bra and panties. Blood was found on the walls of her home. The maid's account was confused, and then, after a day or so, she disappeared from the newspaper articles. The authorities said the armed men were not really police but imposters. Next came something as persistent as drought in the Mexican north: a vast silence. It was as if the kidnapping had never occured and an 8-week-old baby had not been left wailing. No one in the media said who was suspected of this act. Just about the same time, a tiger suddenly stalked the sr5treets of the city. Juarez has no public zoo, so officially the tiger's appearence was a mystery. The beast was captured and supposedly sent to the state zoological garden in the capital, Chihuahua. Across the river in the United States, in El Paso, Juarez's sister city of 700,000, neither event recieved much notice in the newspapers. Juarez, brooding on the border with around 2 Million souls, is the kind of place that does not exist for North Americans. Nor does the man generally credited with offering Rocio Aguero Miranda a ride and owning the tiger who broke free. Hios name is Amado Carrillo Fuentes, and until verty recently mention of him almost never occured in the newspapers of either city or on their radio or television. His primary residence is in Juarez. In September 1995, when Ross Perot finished a narcotics briefing at the Drug Enforcement Administration(DEA) intelligence center buried in the bowels of of El Paso's Fort Bliss, an agent took Perot to the installation's parking lot and pointed toward Carrillo's house, a few miles away, hunkered near the Rio Grande. Perot said in disbelief, " You mean he's right there and we can't do anything?" No one is certain what Carrillo looks like or how old he is or how well educated. Only four photografhs exist, and they are nearly a decade old at best. What we know is that he heads a business that earns a profit of $200 million a week, a number that spins out to more than $10 billion a year. He does not advertise his business: he makes no stock offerings, floats no junk bonds, seeks no government subsidies. He is publicity shy. He has never experienced a strike or a boycott. He has been the cause of hundreds of murders in Juarez in the past two to three years___but,of course, that is his carnage in only one city. Like any transnational businessman, he mocks the boundries of nation-states. He controls the cocaine coming into Mexico, and this makes up50 to 80 percent of the cocaine coming into the United States. He is a huge part of Mexoco's drug industry, an economic activity that, at minimum, earns that country $30 billion a year in profits, a sum more than quadruple the revenues from its largest export, oil, and a sum sufficient to service the entire $160 billion government and private foreign debt. Carrillo thrives because of the consent of the Mexican government. He gives the police and the highest government officials an estimated $500 million to $800 million a year for protection. And he thrives with the knowledge and tolerence of the United States government, though officially Washington wants him on a drug-trafficing charges in Dallas and Miami. In Mexico he is known as El Senor de los Cielos, " the Lord of the Skies," perhaps because he is the silent owner of the largest charter-jet service in Latin America and because he moves his coke from Columbia in ten-to fifteen-ton lots in 727s, which land at Mexican airports and are unloaded by the federal police. In the United States, you have never heard of him until February, when his profile was suddenly raised: It turns out that Carrillo had in his employ the Mexican government's drug czar, General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo. As a result, after decades of massive Mexican participation in drug trafficing, the Clinton administration and our newspapers of record suddenly acknowledged that there was a problem. And they gave that problem a name: Amado Carrillo Fuentes. But Carrillo is only the current manifestation of a major, long-term problem called Mexico. Here is the gist of the problem: We can't stop drugs from entering the United States, because our border with Mexico is the most heavily crossed one on earth and, at 1,995 miles in length, unpoliceable. We can't stop Mexicans from illegally entering the United States, because that nationis poor , overpopulated and growing, and if the poor do not come north, Mexico implodes. We can't force the Mexican government to seriously crack down on the drug trade, because the country is dependent on drug money for its survival.. And we can't stop money laundering or the transfer of billions of narco-dollers back and forth across the border because of the North American Free Trade Agreement(NAFTA) and because of the sheer velocity of modern capital flows. And we can't discuss any of these matters, because for years both parties have made it an act of faith that the war on drugs , the 1986 Immigration Reform Bill, NAFTA and a steel wall here and there on the border are taking care of the problem. And you cannot believe what I have just written, because,well, you haven't read it before. We're left with a very strange world where a man we'd never heard of makes more than General Moters and where a man we cannot officilly find lives in plain view of our largest drug-intellegence center. I first encountered Carrillo's name at the drunken wedding of a narcotraficante in May 1993. The groom had a warm smile, and I became the court historian of his fiesta. I was leaning against a wall, drinking a Tecate on the second or third day of a five day bender, when a Mexican friend whispered three words<:Amado Carrillo Fuentes," and then added,"never repeat this name out loud." The groom had just come from a meeting with Carrillo in Mexico City. I recall clearly that when the man mentioned his name the parrots in a nearby cage screamed. Carrillo is a kind of management genius. Just about the time Ross Perot stood in the parking lot at Fort Bliss and stared in disbelief toward Carrillos mansion across the river in Juarez, El Senor appeared in one of that city's most favored and public venues for a meeting with the local head of the Mexican federal police. When Carrillo arrived for his social belt with the authorities, he naturally came with his customary bodyguards: twelve federal police. The public appearance was simply to show he was still in charge. To survive in the drug world, one must make a public appearence from time to time___a reality understood by monarchs everywhere. His story is not simply a tale of Mexican corruption. He is also a creation of the United States. What I mean is simple: We tolerate the drug world because a serious attack on it would destroy the economy of Mexico and the stability of its government, and by this tolerance we make an Amado Carrillo Fuentes inevitable. His real, singular achievement is that he is far better at his job than we could have imagined in our worst nightmares. According to U.S. intellegence and to the man who was in charge of Mexico's drug-enforcement effoert for a year and a half under president Carlos Salinas Gortari, Carrillo has organized the various gangs and cartels of Mexico into a business federation, much as the five families in New York once found that peace was good for business. He is the managerial talent who was inevitable, and now he has arrived. Periodically, the the U.S.government leans on the Mexican governmant and the Mexicans offer us a prize, such as the deportation of Juan Garcia Abrego, the head of the Gulf cartel, in early 1996. But such arrests do not change the drug world; they merely create an opening in top management. So for the moment, Amado Carrillo Fuentes flourishes, and he is probably one of the richest men who has ever walked on this earth. Amado Carrillo is our guy, and we don't know what to make of him. Rocio Aguero Miranda can answer that question. No doubt the tiger can also. Now it is our turn. I carry a coded number I am to use to reach the agent. He will get back to me___that is the way it must be done. He is a DEA agent, and we rendevous in a saloon. He heads instinctively for a chair under a purring television. Our talk must always be drowned out. He sits with his back to the wall___yuo can never be too careful. His eyes never cease scanning the room___you must never feel safe. He puts a leather pouch on the table in front of him___the gun must always be within reach. He speaks softly and when he says something he considers confidential, he unconsciously speaks out of the corner of his mouth. He has been with Carrillo in the past. And that is why I am talking with him. Despite the $15 billion we throw at the war on drugs each year, despite the massive police presence we have created to battle drugs, we have very little information from people who have spent time with Amado Carerillo. He lives barricaded behind family members, and he kills anyone who arouses his suspicion. We drink light beers as we talk blood, and I brush my fingers against the dark wood of the tabletop as the agent's purrs next to me. There are things he and I both know, details our government has collected. Carrillo sometimes disappears into coke and freebasing. When he parties, he'll rent a floor or two at a hotel and invite a croud, and nobody leaves until he does___and he may roar for five or six days streight. He likes to fuck American beauty queens and is no doubt greatful that we have fifty states. AAll this the agent and I skip over lightly, like the notes of a familiar piano compostion. Amado(the name means "loved one") was born in !950,1954 or 1955 to a dirt poor farmer in Sinaloa. He was one of eight or nine children, according to his mother. He was formed in and by a geographic triangle where the states of Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Durango meet, an area American narcs call Jurassic Park. His uncle, Ernesto Rafael Fonseca Carrillo, known as Don Neto,was A key figure in the drug cartel based in Culiacan and Guadalajara. In the '70s, Don Neto sent his nephew to tend a marijuana field in Zacatecas. The young Amado was successful at agriculture,so next his uncle sent him to Ojinaga, Chihuahua, a mere dot on the Texas border, to work with a man called Pablo Acosta Villarreal. Acosta was a charismatic wizard at dope smuggling, and for a short while in the '80s Ojinaga became the major bridge between the coke laboratories of Columbia and the noses of North Americans. Carrillo thrived as Acostas lieutenant; he built a church in the community. He and Acosta whiled away hours freebasing. He gave Acosta a gold Rolex watch and a small gold ingot, which his boss wore around his neck. In April 1987, choppers took off from Fort Bliss,Texas,ferrying FBI agents and Mexican federal police to Acostas hideout across the rIO Grande from Big Bend National Park. The troop was led by Comandante Guillermo Calderoni, a sophisticated man who spoke French and English and the most renowned enforcer in the employ of the Mexican government. Pablo Acosta, wearing his little gold ingot, was slaughtered, Amado Carrillo had earlier departed with Acosta's Columbian connections etched in his head. American intelligence now believes Carrillo paid the comandante $1 million to perform the operation. The FBI took credit for wipeing out Acosta, the American press headlined another victory in the war on drugs, and the drug business continues to thrive. And nobody paid much attention to this punk named Amado Carrillo. Next he poped up in Torreon,Coahuila, working with the Herrea organization, a family business based in Durango thet provides heroin, marijuana and cocaine and that had deep Columbian connections. The Herreras had a lock on drugs in Chicago and Buffalo. The organization totaled more than 3,000 members( at the time, a force greater than all of DEA), and almost everyone in the outfit was kin. That was the point, in 1987, when the agent talking to me in the bar entered Carrillo's life. He and his collegue had been trailing Carrillo for two and a half weeks in Mexico. "We're after Jaime Herrera," he says with a smirk. "This punk [Carrillo] did't have shit. Jaime had the Columbians. We asked ourselves, "who the fuck is this fat fuckker?" In part Carrillo turned out to be the owner of a one-story house where he lived and which also functioned as a stash pad. One night they were watching the house. Three women came out with kids, got in a car and left. OK. that doesn't matter. Then three guys came out and got in a truck. This does matter. Carrillo also came out and drove away by himself, but, fuck him, he's nothing. They followed the men in the pickup. The U.S. agents were accompanying Comandante Calderoni and his team of federales. The truck was pulled over, and a federale walked up to the driver's side. He was immediately killed by a blast from the driver's AK-47. Another federale crept up undetected on the other side of the truck. He capped two of the occupents with a .45 . The driver took off running. Calderoni's assistent dropped the man with a .45 . When theyrolled him over, they discovered he was the local army commander, there for his payment. Then they all went for Jaime Herrera, the custodian of Columbian connections in the Mexican drug world, and busted him. Carrillo once again escaped. In those few months of 1987, Carrillo managed to make two great Rivals dissappear,and he scampered off with their Rolodexes to the Columbian cartels. The rest is arithmetic. Carrillo, in his quiet, nondescript way, advanced through this world of violence and deception. There were bumps in the road: one of his brothers is said to have commited suicide in Sonora in 1989. The DEA notes this suicide was accomplished with fifteen or so rounds from an AK-47 into his mouth. It is said that at his wedding in the late '80s, Carrillo lost his temper and slaughtered a relative. In 1989 he was arrested and briefly detained in Guadalajara on a minor weapons charge and lost a million doller mansionwhen the government confiscated it. Sometime in the early '90s , Carrillo showed up in Juarez, a city nominally under the command of Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, a former Mexican official in internal security who had married into a fine family, built a hotel and given it his wife's name. It was a place where, it is said, he maintained a torture chamber for moments of leisure. Aguilar owned the Shah of Iran's former estate inAcapulco, plus $800 million more in gewgaws. He was murdered in Cancun in April 1993, on a day when his bodyguard happened to skip work. The same bodyguard subsequently showed up in Carrillo's employ, and the DEA assumes Carrillo was behind the killing, for Juarez is now his. In November 1993,while Carrillo and his wife and children dined in a fancy Mexico city restaurant, gunmen entered and raked the place with automatic-weapons fire. Carrillo and his family dove under the table, but several of his people perished , including his number two man, who was sitting next to him. The DEA believes he survived because none of the killers knew what he looked like. As the gunmen fled the place, a cop tried to stop the car. They ran him over. Carrillo stormed out of the restaurant and pumped the downed officer full of rounds. No one has gotten close to him since that date. Where earlier drug leaders___Acostaa in Ojinaga; Caro Quintero in Sonora, Sinaloa and Guadalajara; Aguilar in Juarez___sought fame and press clippings, Carrillo seeks the shadows. He no longer carries a gun. He owns banks, television stations, newspapers, this and that. And though the man is unrecognizable, he does have one signature flourish. When he loses a load, he has everyone connected with that load killed to make sure he gets the weak link, the snitch. I asked the DEA agent I'm drinking with what one thing I shoud know about Amado Carrillo. Everybody wants to be ruthless," he finnally responds," but Carrillo has the balls to be ruthless." In October 1996, an odd thing happened. El Paso has a relatively low homicide rate because it has been the local custom to take people into Juarez, where their slaughter will attract little attention. But their were signals that this decorum was coming to an end. There was an unseemly contract on a DEA agent stationed inside the United States. Then an American electronics and communications expert who was doing some consulting in Juarez ) and was also believed to be handling a few chores for the American agencies) disappeared, along with his wife. Then, in late September, an El Paso stash house with more than two tons of coke was discovered by American authorities. It was Carrillo's, and the coke was awaiting sale through his people in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Shortly After that, the odd thing happened, the bad moment at El Kumbala. El Kumbala is a working-class bar in El Paso. In early October, some guys drilled five guys in the chest there. A number of them from Alberquerque, with alleged narcotics connections. What was striking about these assasinations was that they could easily have been done out in the big emptiness of the West Texas desert and no one would have been the wiser. Someone wanted the act known, just as someone wanted the DEA to know that it was no longer immune and just as someone wanted the American intellegence world to know that its electronic snoops were no longer welcome. Someone clearly no longer gave a fuck about making waves or drawing attention. The man is trying to explain something simple to me: why the government of the United States ignores the fact that Mexico is collapsing, that narco-dollers are proping up its staggering economy, why illegal immigration will grow, and why no major party or official in the United States will talk about it. His voice is even, his words exact. He says, " We're like a deer paralyzed in the headlights. Mexico is our biggest forign-policy problem, but no one has a solution to it. It begins with a political problem: The last three presidents of the United States have sold us on the proposition that Mexico is a developed, stable country and the way we should relate to it is by opening our borders and developing trade. Now they find it difficult to come back and describe the reality. The reality of the moment is, serious questions as to whether democracy even exists in Mexico; the question of corruption going to the very top of the government; that we have a next-door neighbor whose principal export is narcotics. Once you accept the problem, you wind up saying that you can't do anything about it. You can't solve it." His name is Jack A. Blum, and he is one of the uncelebrated people who make Congress hum and hearings happen. He worked with the Senate Judiciary Committee 1965 to 1972, and with William Fulbright at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1972 to 1976, and then returned for another bout at Foreign Relations from 1987 to 1989; he ran the committee's hearings on drug-law enforcement and froeign policy, which meant Manuel Noriega, the Contra War and the flood of dope coursing through each. Since then he has had a private Washington law practice specializing in ferreting out money laundering and has been a consultant on laundering for various clients, including the government of Columbia. For him Amado Carrillo Fuentes is the current name on a long-term condition. Blum is a harsh critic of U.S. policy and a passionate defender of U.S. policy makers: " Whaat do you do? What is the solution? Every time you want to criticise someone in the government for not acting, the question is,OK, smart guy, what would you do?" Mexico's drug economy is untouchable because it runs $30 billion a year("conservatively," Blum notes) into a cash-short nation. Intervening in Mexican politics by demanding action against the drug cartels blows up in our faces and fuels Mexican nationalism. Money laundering cannot really be contained because the same avenues used by criminal organizations are used and protected by U.S. corporations for tax evasion. He rolls on and on, ticking off forgoten efforts, as when during Richard Nixon's administration the border was shut for sixteen days and all hell broke loose because of the economic losses; and the spraying program of the '80s, when CIA reports allegedly revealed that the Mexican government's drug eradication program was using U.S. helicopters to spray firtilizer instead of herbicide on fields of marijuana, which kept getting greener and bigger. " We are married to Mexico," he finally explains. "You can't sever a head from a body." His account of the seeming hopelessness is like a tonic for my system. One of the experiences of trying to explain the drug economy is that everyone you talk to acts as if you are crazy or, in Blum's words, " from Mars." He remembers drinking with DEA agents in Florida when he was investigating Noriega and marveling that they could still risk their lives in a cause that was "hopeless." "All the options are bad," he states flatly. "Everything yuo want to do doesn't work. How do you live in a world like that?" His words are familiar to me. And his question___how do you live in a world like that?___feels like a slap in the face. Since, that is precicely the world we do live in. Two poor boys were walking along the sewage canal in Juarez on July 30,1996, when they saw a barrel floating in the filth. They thought,We can fish that barrel out and sell it for a few dollers. So they fished it out. When they pried off the lid, a leg floated up. The police arrived and poked the fifty gallons of acid with poles. Rocio Aguero Miranda was finally identified by her surgeon from the registration numbers on her breast inplants. A day later, the physician had second thoughts and recanted his identification. She was a successful woman who had allegedly done some drug deals and taken a professional car theif and killer as a lover. In the fall of 1995, Rocio leased nice quarters for nightclub, a place she named "Top Capos", "Top Bosses." The children of the rich came to the club to buy drugs, and on the weekend Rocio had major entertainers up from Mexico City at a reported $20,000 to $30,000 a night. Things began to go bad on May 3, 1996, when her two key employees, one the father of her unborn child, were kidnapped. Their bodies turned up a day later, tortured, bound hand and foot and bleeding from the anus. She closed the club, went off, had the baby and returned. Then she was kidnapped on July 20, only to reappear on July 30 in fifty gallons of acid. In the spring of 1996, the DEA had shared the names of some of its informants with Mexican Authorities. the list had evidently made it to Carrillo. No one in the DEA officially places Rocio's name on this list or officially denies that it was there. For months executions clogged the streets of Juarez, and by August somewhere between forty and sixty people had been dispatched. Sometimes the bodies would be found bound with gray tape, the heads whaped in bandages or gauze, with paper stuffed in their mouths. Sometimes a cheap wall tapestry of, say, a tiger would be draped over the face. Styles change. For a while a few years ago, Carrillo was having the bodies of informants tied up with yellow ribbon and a bow. There is an attitude that what happens over there does not concern people over here. I travel a lot, and you can go to any small town anywhere in the United States and find drugs. Our banking system slops over with inexplicable money___$50 million to $70 million a month in El Paso, $3 billion a year in Dallas, and so forth. It is an article of faith that the United States is immune to Mexican corruption. It is not our thing. Every day of the year, there is enough cocaine stored in northern Mexico to supply a line for every man, woman and child on earth. It all comes here. We are 5 percent of the planet's population and consume 50% of the planet,s illicit drugs. I remember standing in El Paso and looking across the river at Carrillo's house with a DEA agent who said to himself as much as to me, " He's sitting over there laughing at us." On another day, I'm standing with a big official in the DEA and looking out at Mexico from El Paso. Juarez's international airport lurks in the dust smudge of the horizon. I say, " You know, Carrillo has a compound at the airport, and he's landing full-body jets ful of coke. The federales have a compound there also and help unload the planes." The man stares ahead and says without looking at me: You think I don't know that?" I've become a bit petulent about secret agents nodding yes, then shrugging about matters of state. I'm losing my tolerance for talk of drug lords, as if these men werte some kind of new gentry. I'm sick of official government analysis of the state of the Mexican economy and of our own that never mention drug money. Imagine a business in the United States that generates tens of billions of dollers a year in profits. Now imagine that this business has no hand in our banks, owns no one in Congress, influences no policies. Imagine it simply operates largely out of sight and never touches your life or mine and never exercises any power except in its own dank corners of the world. Oh yes, one more thing you must master. Every time some awkward moment occurs__ a particular horrific killing or embarrassment in the banking community occasioned by the brother of the president of a neighboring country or a forign official who seems swell but turns out to be deep into the drug world___you must sigh and say," Well, yes, there are exceptions, but look at the big picture." We can do it. We've been doing it for a long time. Phil Jorden knows the big picture. Phil Jorden gave thirty years to DEA, rose from the streets to a top position in the bureaucracy: head of the El Paso Intellegence Center(EPIC). the DEA's 350-agent bunker, gathering dope secrets from around the world. He made his early bones in the '70s, doing raids with Comandante Calderoni in Mexico. He has watched the gangs mutate into cartels and the cartels fuse into the machine they call the Federation, which is largely dominated by Amado Carrillo Fuentes. On January 20, 1995, Jorden's brother Bruno, 27 years old, was murdered during a carjacking in the parking lot of an El Paso K-Mart about two miles from the barrio home owhere he and Phil had been raised. thi9s was the first carjacking death in the history of El Paso. Two days later, Jorden officially took over command of EPIC. To this day, Jorden tortures himself over whether Amado Carrillo orchestrated his brother's death. He is a large man, a former college basketball star, who seems invisible. He is a quick study who likes to appear befuddled. He is the man you never notice until he slaps the cuffs on you. And he is a man with his brother's blood pooled around his life. In January 1996, he retired, and he now runs a private-security venture in Dallas. But he cannot leave the drug world any more than he can he can escape the crack of the nine-millimeter cutting down his brother in the K_Mart parking lot. I have talked long with Phil Jordan. I have wandered the tomb of EPIC, peered down at the room full of computer monitors churning endlessly through the intelligence files of the DEA, the CIA, the FBI, the IRS and the Department of Defense and the narcotics reports of twenty nations. I've heard Jordan tell of briefing Attorney General Janet Reno, Senator Phil Gramm, Ross Perot and other visiting firemen. I've looked out with him at Amado Carrillo Fuentes's house and practically heard his teeth grind I've sat late at night with his aged father while the old man explained how he would gladly go to prison for it, listened to this flat statement of the hunger of vengence as we sat in the family home not far from thee Rio Grande and a few miles from where Amado Carrillo likely sat and talked at that very moment. I have seen Phil Jordan enter rooms and dominate them with a natural air of authority and the confidence of a star athlete. But I have not seen any movement on the murder of his brother or any ability to force the U.S. government to act. I have heard him snap at me when I asked him why the DEA does not say what it knows about Carrillo, about his brothers murder, about the war on drugs:Continued