The Guadalajara Cartel was not really a cartel at all, and it was not even called Guadalajara by the people who ran it. The name was invented for convenience by DEA agents who, in the 1980s, did not yet suspect the scale of the organization they were chasing.
The scientific definition of a cartel is collusion between businesses to control a market and set prices. In relation to Colombian and Mexican drug traffickers, the word has been in use since the 1970s, and the inaccurate label served a practical purpose: it is easier to prosecute an organization like the Guadalajara Cartel than to chase after disparate gangs.
As criminal lawyer Gustavo Salazar put it, there are no cartels, only groups of drug traffickers who sometimes work together and sometimes do not. Prosecutors called them cartels to make them easier to prosecute. Mexican organizations were in constant flux, with alliances made and broken, but it was in the 1980s that a certain system emerged on this map.
The story begins with Operation Condor, the anti-drug campaign conducted by the American and Mexican governments between 1976 and 1977. The United States supplied Mexico with agents and equipment to destroy marijuana and heroin crops and to capture traffickers.
By the end of 1977, the DEA reported that 22,000 acres of poppies had been destroyed, enough to produce eight tons of heroin. The purity of Mexican heroin retailing in the United States fell to its lowest level in seven years.
But that was only on paper. The same operation squeezed the key bosses of the Guadalajara organization out of their bases and pushed them toward Guadalajara, a city that was well suited for lying low, out of reach of the United States.
The move also highlighted the strong ties between drug traffickers, politicians, and the DFS, Mexico's equivalent of the FBI. According to a Mexican DEA informant and former DFS officer, the idea of moving south was suggested to leaders Félix Gallardo and Ernesto Fonseca by two high-ranking DFS commanders, Esteban Guzmán and Daniel Acuña, in a private meeting.
The DFS introduced the traffickers to influential people in Guadalajara, found them comfortable homes, and provided them with bodyguards. As Elaine Shannon wrote in her book "Desperados," the DFS provided intelligence, coordination, and protection from other government agencies.
The Guadalajara group controlled the largest marijuana and poppy production areas, from Oaxaca to Sonora, passing through Guerrero and Michoacán, plus two production strongholds in Durango and Chihuahua. They also operated major border crossings in Baja California, Tijuana, Tecate, Mexicali, Sonora, San Luis Río Colorado, and Nogales.
Once Operation Condor ceased, they began organizing drug operations on a scale larger than ever before. Instead of buying marijuana from small family farms in the Sierra Madre, they built huge plantations so large they were visible from the sky and required hundreds or thousands of people to maintain.
Such colossal quantities of marijuana meant colossal amounts of money. The most adaptable drug businessmen not only survived Operation Condor but thrived, thanks to a complex mechanism that included huge plantations in the Golden Triangle and a system of cash payments to major politicians and heads of ministries.
Among the traffickers of the late 1970s were Pedro Avilés Pérez, Ernesto Fonseca, Rafael Caro Quintero, and Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo. It was they who eventually shaped the situation that followed.
It all started in the late 1960s, when Pedro Avilés Pérez appeared on the Sinaloa scene. Born in 1940, he had been involved in his family's illegal business since childhood. Once in power, he smuggled heroin into Southern California and Arizona, then refocused on marijuana as it became fashionable.
Avilés transported marijuana in ten-ton shipments and introduced innovations such as airplane transportation and the bribery of high-ranking officials. He made connections in South America and took small quantities of cocaine for sale, though it was not his main source of income.
Many of the Sinaloa traffickers who became authorities in the 1980s learned the business from Avilés. Rafael Caro Quintero joined him at 16 and rose to the position of gang boss in Chihuahua. Ernesto Fonseca was Avilés's treasurer and managed the network's money and investments. Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, the future boss of bosses, began his criminal career as a corrupt policeman on Avilés's payroll, with duties that included blackmail and bribery.
In parallel, another important character built his career: Alberto Sicilia Falcón, a flamboyant Cuban who started as a street hooligan in Miami. A wealthy socialite took him under her wing, dressed him up, taught him etiquette, and introduced him to the right people. He later acquired a horse ranch and socialized with the elite from Acapulco to Madrid.
Sicilia Falcón organized the first major overland transportation of cocaine from South America via Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Tijuana to Los Angeles in late 1973. DEA agents in Los Angeles formed a unit called Centac to track his organization's tentacles from Mexico through the United States to Europe. By 1978, agents had arrested about 400 people connected to the distribution network.
Alberto Sicilia Falcón was arrested by Mexican police in July 1975 and became the last major drug trafficker to be imprisoned in Mexico for an extended period until 1985. He was not Mexican but Cuban, and the DEA pressured the Mexicans into holding him. Behind bars, he continued to run his organization, and in 1978 he escaped through a tunnel, was quickly caught, and was given another 20 years. He was released in 1999 after serving his entire sentence.
The man who ran Sicilia Falcón's business on his behalf and was based in Guadalajara was Manuel Salcido Uzeta, nicknamed El Cochiloco, meaning the Mad Pig, because of his cruelty and temper.
A new leader was rising in Sinaloa, and Salcido soon joined him. His name was Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, described as a shrewd, reserved, refined, and unusually strict man. He belonged to a new generation of traffickers from Sinaloa.
Félix Gallardo was born in 1946 in Badiraguato, Sinaloa, to a family of farmers not connected to the drug business. His parents worked in the local ejido, the system of shared land parcels. As a child, he sold chicken and sausage riding around the neighborhood on his bicycle.
His sister, interviewed in 1989, said the family came from a decent, well-mannered background and were not peasants in sandals. Miguel Ángel completed high school and enrolled in a local business college without graduating. He worked as a traveling salesman and, at 17 in 1963, became an officer in the Mexican National Police, where he began to receive money from his boss Pedro Avilés.
In the late 1960s, with the help of a village, Félix Gallardo got a job as a bodyguard for the governor of Sinaloa, Leopoldo Sánchez Celis. Despite his height of almost 190 centimeters, he weighed only about 70 kilograms, which earned him the nickname El Flaco, the skinny one.
The first warrant for Félix Gallardo's arrest for drug possession dates back to 1971, but the case went nowhere, and he kept his job as a bodyguard. He became so friendly with the governor that he became godfather to one of his sons. His friends also included Antonio Toledo Corro, who succeeded Sánchez Celis as governor in 1975.
When Avilés Pérez was killed in a shootout with the federal police in 1978, Félix Gallardo took over the organization along with Avilés's former bookkeeper Ernesto Fonseca, nicknamed Don Neto, and his childhood friend Rafael Caro Quintero.
Don Neto was born in Badiraguato in the early 1930s, the son of one of the first opium brokers. He was drawn into the business by his maternal uncle, Fidel Cio, with whom he was arrested in Tijuana in 1955. His uncle was sentenced to five years, but Don Neto got off scot-free and learned a lifelong lesson: always pay the cops.
By the early 1970s, he was smuggling cocaine from Ecuador through Mexico to the United States, and that is when he earned his nickname, which translates as Mr. Good Price, for his ability to negotiate. Sources report his arrest in Ecuador in 1978 while trying to transport 30 kilograms of cocaine.
Don Neto had four children, none of them known within the Guadalajara Cartel, but his nephew Amado Carrillo Fuentes became known as the Lord of the Heavens, a nickname he received for the airplane transportation method invented by his uncle. Amado would later become the boss of a very important territory for transportation known as Juárez and receive another nickname: the Vice President.
Rafael Caro Quintero was a third-generation Sinaloan drug prince. His exact age remains a mystery, with reports placing his birth between 1952 and 1956. Few members of his family were not involved in the trade: his father was a drug trafficker, his paternal aunt Manuela Caro was a heroin expert, his maternal uncle Lamberto Quintero was a famous 1970s drug dealer, and his siblings Miguel and Héctor were also in the business.
Being a drug dealer in Caro Quintero's childhood did not mean being fabulously rich. The eldest of 12 children, he finished only a couple of grades of school and had to work. As a teenager, he ended up in a gang where he quickly moved up the ranks.
In 1971, he was arrested while transporting marijuana to Avilés's warehouses in San Luis Río Colorado. After getting out of jail, he moved to the town of Caborca on the Sonora coast, where he bought over 80 acres of land and experimented with marijuana varieties.
It was Caro Quintero and his brothers who would become the kings of sinsemilla, which by the early 1980s would begin to bring in a lot of money. Sinsemilla, whose name translates as seedless, is a special way of growing two-meter-tall female bushes whose buds contain the highest concentration of THC. It is a costly and complex agronomic process for which the Guadalajara Cartel had the resources and capacity, and Caro Quintero was a true professor of its cultivation.
The story would be incomplete without Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo, though his name belongs more to the 1990s. He was born in a tiny village near Badiraguato on April 4, 1957. His entire family was employed on an opium poppy plantation and received good money per kilogram of raw material.
It was very problematic for an ordinary peasant to sell what was grown, but if that peasant was a distant relative of Pedro Avilés Pérez, there was no problem. By the age of 20, El Chapo was already experienced in business matters and had earned a reputation for being indispensable when delicate problems needed to be settled. In a few years of hard work, he went from being a distant relative of Avilés to one of Félix Gallardo's cronies, learning all the skills of the business from him.
The Sinaloa organization also included Ismael El Mayo Zambada, Héctor Luis Palma Salazar, Juan José Esparragoza, Jaime Herrera, the brothers Pedro and Óscar Lupercio, and the Díaz Parada family. On the border of Ojinaga, the legendary Pablo Acosta reigned supreme.
All of these people and their families were responsible for strategic locations in the business and were loyal to the Sinaloans. Family ties provided the right level of trust, greatly reducing the possibility of betrayal. Héctor Luis Palma Salazar, for example, was married to El Chapo Guzmán's cousin.
By the early 1980s, the Mexicans had created a powerful drug distribution network. But the organization's bosses had to move to Guadalajara in 1978, when government troops arrived in Sinaloa. In a way, Operation Condor did the Sinaloans a great favor by weeding out the competition.
The Americans' goal in the operation was to reduce opium poppy crops, and later the focus shifted to marijuana. At first, the fields were sprayed with pesticide that had no effect on the grass crops but destroyed the poppies. The share of Mexican diluted tar, as Mexican heroin was called, fell to 30 percent, and the market was flooded with pure white goods from Afghanistan, which had just had a good year.
Then the Americans started destroying marijuana using a poison called paraquat, with unexpected consequences. Farmers continued to harvest the poisoned crops, dry them, and send them north. By conservative estimates, one-fifth of all Mexican weed shipped was poisoned with this highly toxic substance. Congress decided to stop the spraying, and addicts switched their supplies to Colombia.
By 1978, almost three-quarters of the US marijuana market was imported from Colombia. Cultivation had spread inland and was generating a billion dollars a year. The country was in political chaos after a 20-year massacre between political factions, allowing traffickers to set up their own distribution networks.
In October 1978, Colombia's new president, Turbay, declared that the drug economy was a threat to national security and tried to fight it until March 1980, but without success. In the time it took to fight the cultivation and transportation of marijuana, a powerful new organization was being set up in Medellín with an eye on the cocaine trade.
In the early 1970s, traffickers in Miami controlled a relatively small wholesale cocaine market in the United States, with customers who were mostly other Cuban immigrants. Then Colombians came into the business and organized what would go down in history as the Cocaine Cowboy war. Thanks to marijuana, the Medellín gangs had access to a vast network of middle-class distributors along the US East Coast.
DEA agents later concluded that the temporary destruction of the Mexican marijuana industry due to Operation Condor was the direct cause of the birth of the Colombian cocaine industry. By 1982, DEA agents learned that the Medellín drug dealers had formed a cartel, with four men behind it: Pablo Escobar, Carlos Lehder, and José Rodríguez Gacha, who controlled 80 percent of the cocaine produced in Colombia.
On June 24, 1982, President Reagan ordered a renewed War on Drugs. Hundreds of FBI and DEA agents rushed to Florida, the main distribution point for the Colombian product, and the so-called Caribbean drug transportation route began to collapse. As the Colombians felt the pressure and the percentage of seized shipments increased, they began looking for new ways to get cocaine into North America. The most obvious route was through Central America and Mexico.
The key figure here was Ramón Matta Ballesteros, a Honduran born in Tegucigalpa in 1945 who would become the largest employer in his country and one of the protagonists of the golden age of cocaine. In 1961, at 16, he immigrated to New York, where he worked as a cashier in a supermarket. He later married a Colombian woman and went to prison, which as usual was a place to make useful connections.
One of his drug distribution contacts was Alberto Sicilia Falcón, who was just starting to supply Colombian cocaine. After establishing trade networks, Matta decided it was safer to operate from Honduras and moved to Tegucigalpa. It was there that Colombians from the Medellín cartel tracked him down, asking him to help with transportation issues through Mexico.
For Matta Ballesteros, who personally knew Rafael Caro Quintero and Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, it was not difficult. Such mediation was also an opportunity to expand his business, making him a member of both the Medellín cartel and the Guadalajara Cartel.
According to DEA regional director Jay Bergman, the negotiations looked something like this: the tough Colombians came to the Mexicans and said they owned the product and could distribute it themselves in the United States, while the Mexicans only had marijuana and heroin. They proposed an agreement: the Colombians would bring their product to Mexican territory, and the Mexicans would bring it across the border and give it to their people.
For the newborn Guadalajara Cartel, it would have been foolish not to agree. The result was a radical change in the composition, structure, and profitability of Mexican organized crime.
The Mexican drug business had gone through several phases related to substance use booms in the United States. The first was the demand for opium during World War II and in the 1950s, followed by the marijuana boom in the 1960s and 1970s. A third upsurge began in the 1980s with the arrival of cocaine.
By about 1984, cocaine had become the main source of income for Mexican drug businessmen. Marijuana export revenues were declining, and heroin exports, while stable, were not making much money. Turning the Colombian cartels into a parcel delivery service to serve the six million cocaine addicts in the US compensated for the decline and made the business more profitable.
As profits grew, so did their influence. Criminals complicated their organizational structure, including the emergence of paramilitary forces to protect business interests and the bribery of high-level officials. Operations involving the transportation of huge amounts of cocaine required more and more state protection and the involvement of all levels of government, from local police to deputies.
Pablo Acosta's interviewer recounted a vivid episode related to the integration of the cocaine business into the Mexican logistical system. Ojinaga, Chihuahua, was an important border transportation point where Pablo Acosta, a Sinaloan loyalist, was the undisputed leader. When the Colombians contacted Guadalajara leaders, Don Neto sent his nephew Amado Carrillo Fuentes to Ojinaga as a guarantor for the purity of the deal.
As early as the end of 1984, the first direct flights from Colombia to Ojinaga on long-range twin-turbine airplanes were recorded. Acosta was responsible for ensuring that shipments were protected through liaison with the army, so that the authorities would not seize them and would assist in transportation. A small portion of the cocaine was destined for Acosta, and the rest for other organizations that transported it through British Columbia, Sonora, and Tijuana.
They paid Pablo Acosta between $1,000 and $1,500 per kilogram for the use of space, storage, and transportation services, and he provided top-shelf service. A DEA informant gave information about the arrival of a plane carrying 8,816 kilograms of cocaine at Ojinaga in May 1985. The plane landed on a ranch 50 kilometers south of Ojinaga.
The cocaine was packaged in bricks of one kilogram each, round or rectangular, which according to a witness looked like cheese wafers. The shipment was lowered and transported into an underground cylindrical metal system about a meter underground near the landing strip. After the cocaine was placed in the tank, the hole was covered with earth, and no one from the outside would have guessed the existence of such a deposit.
A 1,500-liter tanker truck would arrive, fill the plane with jet fuel, and it would return to Colombia. A few days later, the goods would be transported from the ranch to a warehouse on the outskirts of Ojinaga in two pickup trucks guarded by the army. At the end of the maneuver, Acosta gave $20 to each soldier of the Ojinaga garrison involved in escorting the goods.
The cargo was then divided into seven pieces and stashed in the propane tanks of trucks that had already delivered them to the United States via the Loma de Arena intersection. Reports later emerged of direct meetings in Colombia between Pablo Acosta and Carlos Lehder, in which they organized ever larger shipments of cocaine through Ojinaga.
The DEA informant claimed that between 1985 and 1986, Pablo Acosta imported five tons of cocaine per month into the United States. If the fee for each kilogram transported was $1,250, then a simple calculation reveals that Acosta received $6,250,000 a month, or $75 million a year, just for the Colombian use of his infrastructure.
That was just one gateway into the US through which the Guadalajara Cartel operated, alongside Tijuana, Tecate, Mexicali, San Luis Río Colorado, Nogales, and Ciudad Juárez. According to the DEA's best estimates, several times more goods passed through Tijuana than Pablo Acosta shipped through Ojinaga.
Diego Osorno, for his book on the history of the Sinaloa Cartel, interviewed the lawyer Miguel Félix Gallardo. The lawyer assured that the leaders of the two largest gangs, Félix Gallardo and Escobar, had developed not only a business relationship but also a friendship. They were still friends, very good friends. Escobar was a pro in his field, and Miguel had a lot of influence in his, and they saw each other several times in both Colombia and Mexico.
The trust born of friendship and mutual sympathy between the two bosses reduced the risk of breach of contract and the need for punitive measures. Friendship strengthened the business relationship, and mutual respect for the power each possessed within their territories meant no open clashes between Mexicans and Colombians were recorded during the entire time.
The back door in Mexico proved far more convenient and productive than the front door in Florida, and Mexican drug traffickers were more than satisfied. Over time, the terms of the original arrangements changed in Guadalajara's favor. The Colombians usually paid cash for each load: first in pesos, later in dollars.
After a while, Félix Gallardo sensed that money could depreciate and that it was more convenient to deal directly with the goods. Distributing it directly to the North American market was a gamble, so when the Colombian cartel began to deliver more cargo, he demanded payment in goods. Escobar agreed and even found it convenient.
The terms were as follows: if the cargo was easy to transport and hide in a train or truck, 35 percent of the cocaine went to the Mexicans. If it was more complicated and had to use, for example, underground tunnels, they got 50 percent of the shipment. By about the end of 1984, the Mexicans had become not only transporters but also distributors.
Félix Gallardo was well aware that as profits increased, he and his associates would become more visible. He realized he needed to keep a low profile, especially at a time when public attention was focused on Escobar and Colombia. He led a modest life, more like a manager than an emperor.
He kept a close eye on deliveries because he knew that everything had to go right, that payment must be made at every roadblock, every officer in charge of a certain neighborhood, every mayor of every village. He understood that you have to pay to make your luck, to be seen as universal, to pay before someone talks, betrays, or offers more.
The source of the drug traffickers' power was not intelligence but money, tens of billions of dollars, sums that ten years earlier were unthinkable. Money bought weapons, safe haven, and the ability to command provincial and even central governments. No criminal enterprise had ever had the kind of money available to drug traffickers in Latin America and North America.
DEA agents based in Guadalajara knew very little about Félix Gallardo's current operations, although the agency had known about him since 1975. By 1979, he was listed in DEA files as a middleman specializing in small cocaine shipments to Arizona from Los Angeles.
The US government was more interested in criminals who crossed the border and were actually apprehended. As shipments were regularly intercepted, the newspapers constantly covered the fight against drug traffickers: 200 kilos in Miami, 100 kilos in Arizona. But the flow did not stop, and the whole picture did not emerge.
In 1982, the Mexicans banned US reconnaissance flights over their territory. In addition, DEA agents had no diplomatic immunity. The Mexican government granted diplomatic status only to DEA agents in Mexico City but refused similar privileges to agents in local offices. Since the 1920s, there had been an unwritten agreement that DEA agents could carry personal firearms, but when they did so they were violating Mexican law and therefore at the mercy of local officials.
Ronald Reagan, upon assuming the presidency, declared at his first press conference in 1981 that he would not be at war with the drug trade but would take customers away from drug dealers. His domestic anti-drug program did not do much good, and neither did his foreign program.
The fight against Latin drug lords was inevitably intertwined with politics and diplomacy. Latin American countries owed billions of dollars to US creditors, and the open fight against narcos posed a direct threat to transnational corporations, big banks, and their representatives in the Treasury Department. Reagan himself was obsessed with Soviet and Cuban activism, and suppressing leftist guerrilla movements in Central and South America was more important than all the drug lords.
Reagan zealously pursued the narcotics issue in only one instance: when leftist guerrillas or Marxist governments were believed to be trading drugs for arms. When DEA agents found evidence of corruption in non-communist countries willing to cooperate in resisting Cuban and Soviet intervention, Reagan showed angelic tolerance.
The six agents in the DEA's Guadalajara office were not particularly happy about the home-country policy and the deteriorating work conditions. The US government's line was unequivocal: Mexico's campaign against drugs was a model program, relations between the DEA and the Mexican police were excellent, and the situation was under control.
In reality, nothing was under control. Félix Gallardo was a respected man in the community, a hotelier who regularly appeared in the press, whether sponsoring a university or being best man at the wedding of his godson, the governor's son. Caro Quintero owned a garage of luxury cars the size of a decent house, which in Guadalajara was known to everyone, and was effectively the shadow governor of the town of Caborca.
The Guadalajara DEA office consisted of at best seven agents, including James Kuykendall, Pete Hernandez, Butch Sears, Roger Knapp, Victor Wallace, Victor Cortez, and Enrique Camarena. They all arrived in the early 1980s and began to observe.
In 1982, Félix Gallardo's cocaine organization became the focus of an intelligence project led by Butch Sears. The project, dubbed Operation Padrino, baffled everyone in the office, and the flowchart on the corkboard looked like a spider's web. Eventually they concluded that Félix Gallardo was not only the largest cocaine trafficker in Mexico but one of the largest drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere.
His organization had grown to the point where he was shipping one and a half to two tons of cocaine a month, making him as powerful as the drug traffickers of Medellín. A startling fact was beginning to dawn on them: although more DEA agents were based in Mexico than in any other foreign country, not a single member of the new generation of narcos had ever been indicted in the United States.
If Caro Quintero or Félix Gallardo showed up at DEA headquarters, the American agents would have no choice but to buy them a beer. Kuykendall, the chief of staff, told his agents he wanted them to learn everything they could about the cartel leaders and their silent partners in the political and economic establishment. It went against the requirements of their headquarters, but he did not care.
Among the few agents, Enrique Camarena, nicknamed Kiki, particularly stood out. He was born on July 26, 1946, in Mexicali, Mexico, and his parents then moved to the United States, where Kiki graduated from high school in Calexico, California, in 1966. He enlisted in the United States Marine Corps in 1968.
After two years of distinguished service, Kiki worked as a firefighter, police officer, and county deputy sheriff in his hometown. He joined the DEA in June 1974. In 1977, after three years in Calexico, he was transferred to the Fresno County office in Northern California, and four years later he was ordered to Guadalajara.
By 1980, when he was assigned to Guadalajara, he was an experienced undercover agent who had made more than one arrest, had a wife named Mika and two children, and could not imagine what was going on in Mexico. His job in America had mostly involved tracking down small-time dealers and sometimes confiscating drug shipments.
In Guadalajara, Kiki plunged headlong into his projects, concentrating on Rafael Caro Quintero. Unlike Félix Gallardo and Don Neto, Rafa led an open lifestyle. Of the three Guadalajara bosses, he was the only one who was popular with the people and was not shy about driving around the city in his cool cars.
In May 1982, one of Camarena's informants told an outlandish story: marijuana was growing on 220 acres in the state of San Luis Potosí, about 200 miles northeast of Guadalajara. The agents were skeptical, because the plantation the man described would have been visible from anywhere, in the middle of the vast central Mexican desert.
The informant insisted that the plantation existed and that the grass was irrigated by a clever modern system of underground wells. The marijuana stalks, he said, were already sprouting a meter and a half high. The plantation, he said, belonged to Rafa, Don Neto, and El Azul.
The agents realized that if the informant's words were confirmed, it would completely discredit the Mexican eradication campaign, according to which there had been no giant fields since Operation Condor. In 1982, the Mexican Attorney General's office divided the country into zones, and airplanes provided by the US government were to fly over these zones at regular intervals.
It was difficult to spot a marijuana field on the wooded western slopes of the Sierra Madre or in the jungles of Veracruz and Oaxaca, but a field in the desert would stand out like a green neon square at any time of day. It turned out that Rafa and El Azul's group had planted a third of a square mile in the San Luis desert, and absolutely no one had noticed.
This meant one of two things: either the Mexican decision-makers knew about it but did not tell, or they did not know because they had not done the reconnaissance. In the first case, the officers were likely bribed. In the second, they were moving American money and airplanes under false pretenses. Either way, it was a slap in the face to Uncle Sam, and it meant someone was making a lot of money.
Marijuana sites in the Sierra Madre made a modest profit because of the high cost of transportation and handling. Marijuana is difficult to transport, unlike cocaine or heroin. It has a strong odor and cannot be compressed into logistically convenient kilogram bricks. Small amounts take up a lot of space, and the only way to get rich from marijuana is to grow and sell it on a large scale, as the Colombians did.
That was hard to achieve in the rugged Sierra Madre, but if the flat arid central highlands of Mexico were turned into an agribusiness with intensive irrigation and tons of fertilizer, as they did in the central valleys of California, the potential profits would be huge.
The easiest way to find out what was going on was to fly over the place, but DEA agents needed an official escort to do that, and they were not prepared to tell the Mexican federales what they knew. Kiki began looking for more informants.
According to the Camarena case file, informants said that a federal commandant was guarding the plantation and delivering weapons there. They revealed that El Azul's aide had given the army lieutenants a new Ford pickup truck. The DEA agents became more and more convinced that the information about the giant plantation was not fiction.
Kuykendall tried to influence State Department officials in Mexico City with the significance of the plantation. In August 1982, he went to a meeting of embassy officials and presented evidence collected by Camarena. The diplomats ignored him because they simply could not believe such a plantation existed, as confirmed by the Mexicans.
It was a catch-22: Camarena had no evidence because he could not fly over the area, and he could not fly over the area because he had no evidence. The Mexican Attorney General's office would not send a DEA agent into the area without a request from the embassy, and the embassy did not want to bring it up without hard evidence.
Camarena went back to work. He obtained a photograph of the area and enough details to convince the embassy that plantations existed. In early September 1982, his testimony was presented to the Mexican Attorney General's office. It was so convincing that Mexican authorities ordered a search-and-destroy operation.
Seven helicopters took to the air with a group of soldiers and agents from Mexico's Federal Judicial Police on board, including Camarena and Kuykendall. Despite what they had heard, the DEA agents were stunned when the helicopters broke through the cloud cover and an emerald marijuana plantation came into view.
The raid set a record: 200 tons of high-grade sinsemilla marijuana had been harvested. The plantation was cultivated with the latest agricultural technology. The fields were irrigated by three deep wells, and 20 tons of chemical fertilizers were stored in a barn. Nearby were barracks with bunks for 100 men and fresh food in the kitchen, but there was not a living soul within a radius of several miles.
According to Camarena's informants, a police officer with knowledge of the action reported it shortly before the raid, giving the workers time to escape. The San Luis Potosí community ministry gave Camarena evasive answers when he tried to obtain documents regarding ownership of the field. Camarena gave the feds information from informants about the alleged owner, Antonio Pérez Paga, but Pérez was never arrested.
It was there in the field, among sturdy marijuana bushes of the most expensive variety, that the agents realized that only the fight against corruption would solve the problem of drug trafficking, and at the highest levels. The Federal Judicial Police, the army, and government officials at many levels were all in on the case.
A few weeks later, news reached Camarena of a second large plantation owned by Rafael Caro Quintero in the state of Sonora. Kuykendall relayed the information to the DEA office in Mexico City, which convinced Mexico's federal police headquarters and the army to send a raiding party. Roger Knapp, who had recently joined the DEA group, traveled to Sinaloa to join the feds in the raid.
The fields were exactly where the informant had indicated: 170 acres of marijuana swaying in the wind in the open air. Knapp and the federals traveled to Ciudad Obregón and spent the night intending to begin the sweep at dawn. Rising at 6:00 in the morning, they found the Federal Judicial Police commander from Sinaloa waiting for them.
This commander, said to be a close friend of El Azul, was deliberately excluded from the raid. Apparently he learned of the raid at night and arrived through the mountains in Sonora just in time for morning. The command for a postponement was issued. After waiting all day, Knapp decided the situation was hopeless and headed back to Guadalajara. An informant later told him that the feds had confiscated some of the marijuana but allowed him to harvest other fields the same day.
Guadalajara's DEA agents understood the scale of the Mexican operation and why it was happening. High-level government was giving drug businessmen tacit approval for many maneuvers, a true social contract in which everyone understood each other at a glance. But the government still represented the interests of the state, not those of the drug dealers, which meant it could still be persuaded or pressured to take drastic measures.
That kind of persuasion had to be done by the president of the United States, the top officials of his administration, and Congress. It certainly could not be done by a couple dozen agents who were not even authorized to make arrests overseas or carry weapons.
In early 1983, Kuykendall went to a meeting of DEA officials in San Antonio armed with a stack of photographs showing Camarena posing in fields of one-and-a-half-foot-tall sinsemilla bushes. When asked to explain what they were, he replied: corruption. The photos had no wow effect on anyone, and he simply drove back to Guadalajara.
The DEA agents continued their usual routine of gathering information on their own as best they could and only at the last minute did they contact the Mexican Federal Judicial Police. There were some brave local cops who were not averse to making arrests, but only if two factors coincided: they had to be found and properly negotiated, and the superior officer did not have to be on the payroll of the trafficker he was being asked about.
Basically, information on every move the DEA agents made was instantly available to the cartel. Camarena spent a lot of time at the Federal Judicial Police office trying to gather useful information. For a while he even thought he had a couple of buddies, until he learned that these were men on the payroll of Caro Quintero and Don Neto.
Eventually the Guadalajara office staff concluded that the Federal Judicial Police was such an untrustworthy authority that they stopped sharing confidential information with them, even with employees who seemed eager to help. DEA agents could never be sure that the people they thought were allies were not playing a double game.
Neither DEA headquarters nor the US attorney's office showed any interest in charging Caro Quintero, Félix Gallardo, and the other bosses. Federal prosecutors did not want to waste time and energy developing conspiracy charges against foreigners who rarely traveled to the United States. Local DEA officers tended to focus on smugglers and distributors who operated on the US side, where evidence was easier to obtain.
The only cartel member who had been indicted by then was Don Neto, and that case was prosecuted by Customs agents in San Diego but was stymied because of inter-agency squabbles between the DA's office, the DEA, and Customs. The investigation began in December 1982, when Customs agents working on a money laundering case were tipped off about a group of Mexicans smuggling large sums of cash from San Diego to Tijuana.
The trail led to a house in Rancho Santa Fe, an exclusive suburb perched high on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Don Neto and Rafa's relatives lived in the house. They used a paging service to control the delivery of large shipments of marijuana, heroin, and cocaine to Los Angeles and to transfer millions of dollars back to Mexico.
Customs officials asked the US attorney's office to apply for a court order to wiretap the house. The local DEA office agreed, but mid-level managers at DEA headquarters objected on the grounds that Customs agents were supposed to be involved in anti-smuggling investigations and had no jurisdiction to administer the wiretap under the nation's drug trafficking laws. After a month of bureaucratic battles, permission was granted, but on January 28, 1983, Don Neto left town. When Customs officials arrived at the house, they found clothes in the closet and food on the table.
By mid-1983, Kiki Camarena was convinced that Caro Quintero was making huge plantations of elite and lucrative sinsemilla throughout the central highlands. He was eager to fly around the Sierra Madre on his own terms and came up with a plan to charter an airplane, hire a pilot, and conduct his own aerial reconnaissance without Mexican government pilots. It was a radical idea, and Camarena knew it. He called his plan Operation Milagro, meaning Operation Miracle, because as he told Kuykendall with a sad smile, it would be a miracle if anyone approved it.
Over the next few months, in meetings with DEA leadership in Mexico City, Kuykendall promoted the idea of aerial monitoring. He insisted that the State Department had purposefully underestimated marijuana production to account for the sensitivity of the diplomatic situation with Mexico.
Tensions between Mexico City and the Guadalajara office became particularly acute after Ed Heath, who was completely out of touch with the situation, was appointed DEA attaché in Mexico City in mid-1983. According to Kuykendall, Heath had the worst version of sci-fi fancy imaginable. Heath allegedly befriended officials at the Mexican Attorney General's office and headquarters of the Federal Judicial Police, particularly its director, Manuel Ibarra.
His unhurried and caring approach to his flashy Mexican counterparts satisfied many US embassy political officials but led to clashes with field agents. Diplomacy has always been the art of compromise, but most DEA field agents saw compromise as a slippery slope because they understood how the system worked and what greased its gears.
Ed Heath's new friend Manuel Ibarra would go on trial in 1990 in the US murder trial of Kiki Camarena. The issues of antagonism between center and field were not matters of personal attitude; they were literally matters of life and death for agents not protected, unlike Ed Heath, by diplomatic immunity.
In the summer of 1983, after Camarena and his colleagues had spent months identifying members of the Sinaloan network in Guadalajara, Heath ordered Kuykendall to send the names and addresses he had obtained. Heath assured that he would personally arrange for a reliable task force of federales from Mexico City to come to Guadalajara for the searches.
Kuykendall did not like the idea, but he had no choice; it was a direct order. So the untainted feds arrived in Guadalajara and checked into the Las Américas Motel, which belonged to Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo. By the time they had started searching, all the addresses were empty.
Camarena and his partners spent months trying to find new addresses and phone numbers of gang members. In May 1983, agent Pete Hernandez asked to be transferred back to Texas. He told his comrades in the Guadalajara office that he wanted to put someone in jail who would stay there, and that he was tired of being bullied by the Mexican feds.
A few months later, Butch Sears learned there was a job opening in Bolivia and applied. He said he thought Bolivia might be corrupt and backward, but at least the American embassy staff and the DEA agents were on the same page. He was referring to his unsuccessful attempts to reach the government to demand access to Félix Gallardo's bank statements, which could shed light on the inner workings of the cocaine trafficking organization.
Camarena, Hernandez, and Knapp were able to get informants into the Caro Quintero operation with relative ease, but only because the marijuana trade required thousands of growers, overseers, engineers, truck drivers, and security guards. This branch of the Guadalajara Cartel's business was prominent, just as Rafa himself was prominent.
But they never even came close to Félix Gallardo's business. Trafficking in finished cocaine was capital intensive but not labor intensive at all. A man like El Padrino, as Félix Gallardo was also known, needed only a small group of trusted associates to run his business, but he had to be able to transfer millions of dollars to many countries to pay for cocaine, airplanes, trucks, and bribes.
Sears believed that the best way to get into the cocaine business was to analyze the financial transactions. As early as 1982, during Operation Padrino, Sears suspected that Félix Gallardo had acquired a stake in a Guadalajara bank. He requested the Mexican government for the drug businessman's bank details but was flatly declined.
Later that year, DEA agents in Lima came across a cashier's check from Bank of America in San Diego. The agents were surprised to find that Félix Gallardo's organization had transferred $20 million through a single account at Bank of America in one month. At that rate, agents calculated, the gang could be making $200 million a year or even more.
The proceeds from cocaine sales on the West Coast were collected and trucked to Guadalajara, deposited in Félix Gallardo's bank there, and transferred back to Bank of America in San Diego. Félix Gallardo's money agent, Tomás Valles Coral, would withdraw the money in the form of cashier's checks in denominations of $40,000 or $50,000 and send them to South America to be paid to cocaine producers.
The canceled checks became invaluable information to the DEA. They now knew where Félix Gallardo was getting his cocaine from. Some checks were cashed in little-known towns in the jungles of Colombia, some on the Peru-Bolivia border. Four $200,000 checks ended up in Switzerland with Roberto Suárez Jr. of a prominent Bolivian cocaine family.
Sears and Kelly took copies of the canceled checks to Mexico City to show them to bank regulators and Mexican customs officials. They again requested access to Mexican bank records that they believed might reveal information about Félix Gallardo's partners and investments. Again the request was denied. Sears had hoped that someone at the embassy would raise the issue in high-level meetings, but all remained silent.
By 1985, Mexican narcotics revenues from cocaine, sinsemilla, and opium were generating between $2 billion and $6 billion a year. The innovation of bank intermediation was not the last reason for this level of profit. Banks played a crucial role in the international expansion of Mexican trade, allowing the narcos to transfer money quickly and efficiently between countries, replacing the agonizing days of carrying suitcases full of cash.
Sears's mood briefly improved when an informant gave him the radio frequencies that Félix Gallardo's communications network used to control airplane and truck traffic. The DEA in Guadalajara asked the CIA station in Mexico City to help set up a system to monitor radio traffic, but there was no response. So the agents bought equipment with their own money from a Radio Shack store in the United States and put together their own monitoring system. Sears said it was the last straw and flew to Bolivia shortly before Easter 1984.
Agent Knapp, who had stepped into Sears's shoes, received a report that a large shipment of cocaine was coming into Guadalajara and that Félix Gallardo was to appear there in person. DEA headquarters in Mexico City agreed to send another reliable team of agents. Knapp waited for the feds to catch Félix Gallardo red-handed, but the delivery never arrived and Félix Gallardo never showed up.
Meanwhile, things were still going well in the United States. Congressmen and journalists had never heard of Félix Gallardo's expanding cocaine empire or the giant marijuana plantations that Rafa and Don Neto were financing. The Reagan administration was silent.
On June 22, 1983, Dominic DeCarlo, assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of International Narcotics Affairs, gave a rousing speech about Mexico's marijuana and opium eradication program. DeCarlo said the Mexican program had been so successful that growers had responded by planting tiny fields that were more isolated and difficult to access. There was nothing tiny or hard to find in the marijuana fields that Camarena and his partners found in the desert, but DeCarlo did not mention these large open plantations at all.
The position of the State Department's narcotics assistance division in Mexico City was that the desert fields were an aberration; their priority was opium and in Sinaloa, a region where poppy and marijuana cultivation was very difficult because of the topography and risk of aerial surveillance.
Meanwhile, DEA agents in Guadalajara learned of another large plantation in the desert: 200 acres of sinsemilla in Zacatecas. They alerted the feds, who sent a report with photographs of the complete destruction of the crops. Two informants later told DEA agents that the marijuana had actually been carefully harvested and packed by Mexican army soldiers.
By January 1984, marijuana seizures along the Southwest border had increased fivefold since 1980. The borders were woefully short of Customs agents, much less DEA agents, and requests to the center to beef up the border were never answered. A couple of months later, the Tucson office made its largest seizure in ten years: two truckloads of marijuana totaling nearly a ton.
Around the same time, in early 1984, Kiki Camarena's investigation saw a breakthrough. An informant reported that drug lords from Guadalajara had formed a syndicate to finance thousands of acres of sinsemilla marijuana plantations in Zacatecas, Durango, and Chihuahua. The list literally represented the top 30 in the Mexican drug industry: Rafael Caro Quintero, Ernesto Fonseca, Juan Esparragoza, and 21 other names, each of which Kiki knew.
Camarena began to dig further. In violation of an agreement between the United States and Mexico that prohibited airspace surveillance by US agents, Camarena had hired Captain Alfredo Zavala, a former Mexican military pilot, to fly to Zacatecas to see the marijuana fields in person. And there they were.
Back at the consulate, Camarena and Kuykendall wrote a mass of telegrams about their find. According to Camarena's case file, his informant reported that Filipe Aparicio Nunes, the DFS director, and Ángelo Gutiérrez, a federal police general, were not just taking money to turn a blind eye but were investing in a marijuana growing venture.
One informant claimed to have seen Aparicio Nunes personally pick up 50 million pesos from a transporter for Rafael Caro Quintero. Another informant recounted that Gutiérrez was ready to welcome the narcos to his territory and was willing to assist them in any way possible. When Camarena and Knapp spoke to General Gutiérrez about his relationship with the drug traffickers, he did not hesitate to tell the Americans: they will come and make you an offer. We will enrich you or kill you, so it is better to be rich than dead.
In late May, Walter White, deputy to the gullible Ed Heath at headquarters, informed Camarena and Kuykendall that the feds were aware of the Zacatecas plantations and were planning to raid them. From the telephone conversation, Kuykendall concluded that Heath, as usual, had informed Federal Judicial Police headquarters and his friend Ibarra.
Shortly thereafter, the federales, led by commandant Ibarra, invaded the plantations. A total of 150 acres of marijuana fields and 20 tons of marijuana were seized. According to Mexican newspapers, Ibarra announced that 177 people had been arrested, but as usual the arrests did not include any of the right names from the list.
The raid made Mexican headlines, but Camarena was discouraged. Twenty tons of marijuana was nothing compared to what he thought was there, and worse, the Guadalajara Cartel now knew who Kiki Camarena was and what he looked like. Having broken one rule against flying solo over plantations, Camarena had broken another by going undercover.
Tired of the feds' constant pranks, Kiki went undercover to the Zacatecas plantation, looked around, and asked an informant to introduce him to Rafa's buddy Manuel Chávez, who was later arrested but released a short time later. Chávez had seen Camarena with the feds at the time of his arrest and was likely the one who told Rafa who Kiki was.
But Kiki was no longer unstoppable. He found new informants among the traders and farmers associated with the fields, and by midsummer 1984, DEA agents knew that Caro Quintero and his comrades were establishing other large plantations in the desert states of Chihuahua, Sonora, and Baja California.
Rafa, meanwhile, did not limit himself in any way. Because of unwanted attention to his person from the pesky Americans, he acquired dozens of ranches and villas throughout northern and central Mexico. He bought 25 acres of land in a wealthy suburb of Guadalajara for $4 million in cash and erected a five-meter cement wall around the perimeter of the property, laying the foundation for a luxurious residence.
When this ostentatious mansion was being erected, everyone in Guadalajara could see that Rafael Caro Quintero was not a criminal. Criminals hide in holes, and Rafael Caro Quintero lived wherever he wanted.
Still, the newspaper article about the raid with the seizure of 20 tons in Zacatecas had some effect. But it was not the activities of the DEA's Guadalajara division that caused it; it was the steady, almost exponential increase in marijuana seizures along the US border. Mexican marijuana and brown heroin were available throughout the American Southwest, and prices were low.
This undeniable fact made the Mexican government's claims of massive crop eradication implausible. Flight logs of US spray helicopters compiled by the Mexican Attorney General's office showed that the helicopters flew only 25 percent of the time. For years they had not been properly maintained, the spare parts depot was empty, and informants who worked in several DEA offices in Mexico reported that herbicides were diluted with water or dumped in the desert.
Ed Heath began to promote the idea that Mexico's drug eradication program required DEA intervention. State Department officials in Washington also concluded that drastic action was necessary. Ambassador Gavin, on the other hand, who was concerned about Mexico's debt crisis and was trying to calm Mexico's relations with Washington, was opposed to radical changes in Mexico's drug campaign.
Eventually it was agreed between the agencies that the embassy would ask the Mexican government to allow DEA surveillance agents to fly over poppy or marijuana fields that were to be sprayed so they could verify claims of crop eradication. Ed Heath called the project Operation Vanguard.
At first glance, the Vanguard plan resembled Kiki Camarena's Operation Milagro, but Camarena advocated that DEA pilots fly in airplanes with flight control capabilities. In Heath's plan, on the other hand, the planes and pilots were Mexican and the DEA agents were passengers with no flight control capabilities. When Camarena heard about the Mexican pilots, according to Kuykendall, he wanted nothing to do with the project.
The planes took off on their maiden voyage around November 1, 1984. The DEA agents took to the air and confirmed the worst suspicions of agents in Guadalajara: more marijuana and opium was growing there than imagined. In the fall of that same year, a gang war erupted on the streets of Guadalajara, with competing drug traffickers ambushing each other and the police on avenues and in cafes.
For US agents, the course of events confirmed that the Mexican government was giving up any claim to control the narcos. Shaggy Wallace, replacing Butch Sears, who had left for Bolivia, arrived at the Guadalajara office in September 1984. When he arrived for duty, Kuykendall and Kiki sat him down and advised him to never relax. Guadalajara is not America, where every bar girl knows a cop killer and it gets hot.
On October 10, agent Roger Knapp's parked car was fired upon. Knapp was sure it was the work of Félix Gallardo. It was the very same car that Knapp had used to conduct surveillance on Félix Gallardo's office a couple of months earlier, when he was forcibly removed from the car and questioned by El Padrino's bodyguards, who showed police credentials.
At the beginning of the year, Félix Gallardo demonstrated that he was aware of Operation Padrino and the increased scrutiny of his bank accounts, and that he did not like it. On March 28, the former commandant of the federal forces visited Camarena with a message from Félix Gallardo: the DEA agents would be wise to finally get behind Señor Félix, who was an honest businessman. They would have been better off going after Rafael Caro Quintero.
But the DEA only stepped up the investigation, and not only in Mexico but throughout the Southwest. In June 1984, the DEA office in Guadalajara received a tip that led their fellow agents in Los Angeles to a motel room in Anaheim. Inside were $4 million worth of bills with traces of cocaine. Scraps of documents found in the room led to bank accounts in San Diego, Laredo, and El Paso that were controlled by Tomás Valles Coral, Félix Gallardo's financier.
In total, DEA agents managed to get hold of $13 million tied to Félix Gallardo's organization. They had no illusions about what they had accomplished. As agent Scott Adams of the DEA's El Paso office put it, what we have here is pocket change.
In August, deputies of the Yavapai County Sheriff's Office in Arizona seized 1,600 pounds of cocaine traced to Félix Gallardo's network. This amount of cocaine would have brought in $30 million or more in the Los Angeles wholesale market. The DEA had nothing to do with the seizure; a tired state cop and his wife were chopping firewood, saw an airplane landing, suspected something amiss, and contacted law enforcement.
Félix Gallardo, however, seemed to blame the DEA. Roger Knapp heard rumors that the Guadalajara agents were in big trouble, as was anyone seen with them. When his car was fired upon, Knapp assumed that Félix Gallardo had coordinated the warning with high-ranking federal police officials in advance. First, uniform police arrived on the scene almost immediately, though it usually took them half an hour to arrive on a call. Commander Flores of the federal police also showed up, and Knapp figured he was checking to make sure no one was hurt.
After the police left, Knapp called Mexico City and reported the incident to Walter White. A short time later, White called back and said that headquarters wanted Knapp to return to the States as soon as possible. Knapp did not want to leave; he had done a tremendous job of investigating Félix Gallardo's organization, and it was finally starting to bear fruit. White had another talk with headquarters and secured a suspension.
But the next day, Knapp learned that the Los Angeles DEA office had seized 200 kilograms of cocaine. The seizure came just hours after Knapp's car was fired upon. It's time to go, Knapp told his wife. He had nothing to do with the seizure, but Félix Gallardo's goons did not know that.
Three agents remained in Guadalajara: Kiki Camarena, Kuykendall, and newcomer Shaggy Wallace. Ambassador Gavin visited Attorney General Sergio García Ramírez and Interior Secretary Manuel Bartlett Díaz. He delivered the message that if any unpleasant incidents like Knapp's happened to a DEA agent again, the US would consider this an extremely serious matter with very profound and very long-term consequences.
Kuykendall was furious. He felt that the ambassador should have made a scandal, but he did not. It turned out they were short of unleashing the narco traffickers; by their actions, a threat could be made and the agent would go home. Something bad has to happen, Kuykendall said. Kiki agreed with his pessimistic prediction, but no one was going to leave.
Especially since the Zavala pilot had recently told him about Rancho Búfalo, Rafael Caro Quintero's main project. According to rumors, it was an incredible investment project for the sake of which several of the biggest authorities had joined forces, and not only from the drug trade. It was forbidden to fly over the field without the owner's permission, and taking care of it required a huge number of servants who came from all over: from Sinaloa, Sonora, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Chiapas, and even Guatemala.
Kiki and Kuykendall reported the information to headquarters, and it turned out that at least three DEA officers from different parts of Mexico had also heard about Búfalo. Heath relayed this information to the Mexican Attorney General's office. A few days later came the official response that the information was untrue; there was nothing in the desert.
Then Heath pressed the Attorney General's office and the headquarters of the federales. Finally, Mexican authorities agreed to assemble a raiding party. Late in the evening of November 6, representatives of the federal police, the Attorney General's office, and the army met with a group of DEA agents and planned the attack. Early the next morning they would move the squads into the Chihuahua Desert. Commandant Alana Ibarra would lead the assault force.
At dawn, the raiders headed into the Chihuahua Desert near the village of Búfalo. Mexican and US law enforcement officers in helicopters saw irrigated fields, barracks, and drying sheds 30 to 50 feet wide and 300 to 400 feet long. It took the raiders two days to scout the area.
The scale of the project was staggering. The Mexican government confiscated and destroyed between 5,000 and 10,000 tons of high-quality sinsemilla. There were five crop sites and 25 to 30 drying facilities, most of which were the size of a soccer field. This takeover set a new world record; no one had ever seen so much marijuana in one place.
The fields were irrigated with water pumped from deep wells, well fertilized, and cultivated with the latest high-tech intensive farming techniques. There was far more marijuana at this location than could be grown in the fields, leading agents to conclude that the Chihuahua compound was a storage and processing center for marijuana grown throughout Mexico.
A number of informants told the agents that the compound belonged to a syndicate created by Rafael Caro Quintero. Caro Quintero later confirmed that he owned the compound and complained that he had invested $20 million in it. DEA officials estimated that if the marijuana was sold on the street, it would generate more than $2.5 billion.
About 7,000 frightened farmers were found at the three sites. They were hired by offering the huge sum of 250 pesos a day, about $6, to work in the fields. The unfortunates lived in appalling conditions. Armed guards made sure they did not escape, and those who tried were taken out by machine guns. The workers were fed potatoes, stale tortillas, hard beans, and coffee.
Some of them said that at about 1:00 a.m., about five hours before the government troops landed, their field supervisors received word of the approaching troops and ordered the workers to get out. But they could not go far; they had no transportation and very little food. Some wandered in the desert for three days without food or water before they were found.
According to DEA agents, among those arrested were five men who were members of the federal police. State Department officials were skeptical of that claim, but leaking information about the raid to drug traffickers was out of the question. After all, it meant that there was at least one double agent at the highest levels of the Mexican government.
The setup meeting for the raid concluded late in the evening of November 6. Many people were present: army officials, top officials of the Attorney General's office, and a number of intelligence commanders. According to testimony, the workers were told to disperse at 1:00 a.m. on November 7. The implication is that drug traffickers were notified of the planned event almost immediately after it was over.
Also disturbing, according to the congressional report, was the fact that the gasoline trucks that were supposed to fuel the helicopters were sent to the wrong location. This mistake nearly caused the raid to be cancelled.
The size of the compound in Chihuahua stumped US government statistics. In 1983, US analysts concluded that 12,000 to 15,000 tons of marijuana were consumed in the United States. Here in one place was at least a third of that amount.
DEA headquarters, the State Department, and the embassy finally heard what Camarena and his comrades had been trying to convey since 1982: the plantation existed. The photos from it created a sensation, first because of the horrific human drama of the workers, some of whom died of thirst, and second because it began to dawn on the government that intimidation and bribes, not secrecy, were the drug traffickers' main trump cards.
Ed Heath was reaping the rewards for organizing the raids in Chihuahua, but Kuykendall was upset that Camarena had not received the same honor for his early discovery of the Caro Quintero plantations in the desert states. He nominated Kiki for the award in March 1984, but months passed and the award was never presented. It would be presented posthumously.
Kuykendall also realized that they would have to take a beating from the narcos enraged by the heavy losses, simply because Caro Quintero knew they were the ones responsible for his previous losses in Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, and Sonora. Kuykendall again requested diplomatic passports and reinforcements, but he received none of these.
A little later, Félix Gallardo's cocaine operation suffered even greater losses at the hands of US law enforcement. On November 17, authorities in California seized $3.7 million in cash linked to Félix Gallardo's network. On November 26, a deputy sheriff in Mohave County, Arizona, happened upon a small airplane parked on a deserted runway and looked inside. The cargo hold was loaded with 700 boxes wrapped in red, white, and green foil for Christmas. The boxes contained about 1,100 to 1,200 pounds of cocaine. The plane was identified by informants as Félix Gallardo's plane.
The discovery of the cocaine went almost unnoticed by the American press, but Kuykendall, Camarena, and Wallace became very tense. The seizures also caused Félix Gallardo to lose $10 million worth of cocaine. They assumed he would send another warning, shoot up another car, or perhaps blow up the consulate. And they were right.
Although all of these seizures took place without the Guadalajara office being involved, the Sinaloans were very angry. According to testimony in court, Matta Ballesteros, Félix Gallardo, and Caro Quintero got together to decide what to do with these Americans. Court documents state that members of the organization, including Matta Ballesteros, met and discussed the DEA agent responsible for the seizures. The narcos then held another meeting at which they offered to scare the agent once his identity was established.
The identity was established fairly quickly, not least because of those very plantation photos, which had come to them from their buddies in the police. In January 1985, two investigators from the House Foreign Affairs Committee traveled to Mexico. Kuykendall and Camarena hoped they could get through to them and that the government would finally take some action. But the investigators advised them to go to the press to report local corruption. No drastic action would be taken by the State Department because Mexico is strategically important.
What is going to happen, Camarena said sadly. Does someone have to die for them to start doing something?
On February 7, 1985, Kiki Camarena walked out of the US Consulate in Guadalajara to have lunch with his wife. He was walking toward his pickup truck when five men pointed guns at him. Kiki put his hands behind his head, and they put him in the car. His wife did not wait for him and called the station. Around the same time, pilot Alfredo Zavala disappeared, and according to witnesses he was similarly forced into a car by armed men.
Just as Kiki had predicted, his death had been the catalyst. On April 12, a press conference was held at which US ambassador to Mexico John Gavin announced that Enrique Camarena Salazar, an American DEA agent, had been kidnapped in Guadalajara. He also publicly stated that suspicion fell on 75 major drug traffickers who ran 18 gangs in Mexico and that Guadalajara was a center of operations for international drug trafficking.
Rafael Caro Quintero at the same time left Guadalajara for an unknown destination with the assistance of a high-ranking federal police officer. On February 16, a unilateral interdiction operation was launched on the US-Mexico border by order of the American government, with thorough searches of people and vehicles on the Mexican side. The Mexican government became aware of the measure and considered it unfair. The operation lasted until February 25, but Kiki was nowhere to be found.
Thus began a bitter confrontation between the two governments. The United States wanted the kidnapping of its agent investigated, since US officials knew of the corruption of many Mexican authorities and feared that the act would go unpunished. The Mexicans assured that Mexico was not a springboard for international drug trafficking and denied that their law enforcement officials had ties to the drug mafia, pressing the fact that their drug eradication policies had produced the recognized results that had so pleased US policymakers.
However, the names of the biggest drug traffickers were still announced on the Mexican side: Ramón Matta Ballesteros, a Honduran; the Mexicans Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Rafael Caro Quintero, Juan José Esparragoza Moreno, and Ernesto Fonseca.
On March 7, a month later, the bodies of Camarena and Zavala were found on a ranch in the state of Michoacán owned by a former local deputy. Kiki had lived for two more days after the kidnapping and was likely buried elsewhere before being planted on the ranch, where a group of people had previously been shot. His hands and feet were bound. There was not a single uninjured spot on his body, and a stick had been thrust into his rectum. The cause of death was blunt force trauma that fractured his skull.
The gruesome murder of Kiki Camarena was the last straw for United States patience, and they were ready to use all means to ensure that the murder of their agent would not go unpunished. Pressure would be brought to bear on the Mexican government to take action against the immediate perpetrators of the murder, the drug trafficking leaders, and the police and political network that protected them.
The long search for a scapegoat began with the most unexpected consequences. First, Ed Heath's former buddy Alana Ibarra was fired for personal reasons that were not disclosed. Then the general who had helped Caro Quintero escape came under criminal investigation and was replaced by Florencio Ventura, a man of crystal integrity who had once apprehended Sicilia Falcón and was one of the few people trusted by the Americans. The state was gradually turning against drug traffickers.
Rafael Caro Quintero fled Mexico with the complicity of Federal Judicial Police officers on March 12, five days after Camarena and Zavala's bodies turned up. He traveled to Costa Rica with his girlfriend Sara Cosío, the niece of an important Jalisco politician, Guillermo Cosío Vidaurri, who would later become governor of the state. With the help of Matta Ballesteros, Rafa settled in this Central American country, but the pleasure did not last long.
He was hunted by the entire DEA, and Sara was the reason they found him. She called her parents to inform them that she was with Rafa willingly, and the call was immediately intercepted. On April 4, 1985, he was apprehended by Costa Rican police and Commander Florencio Ventura.
As a result of the scandal, the Mexican press began to publicize Caro Quintero's activities and wealth. He was described as head of an army of armed drug traffickers estimated at 1,000 men, owner of 36 houses in Guadalajara and other property in Zacatecas, Sinaloa, and Sonora, and owner or shareholder of 300 companies in Guadalajara. His fortune was estimated at 100 billion pesos.
Rafa himself said that at the age of 28 he began his career as a drug trafficker, growing marijuana on small plots in Badiraguato, then moved to Guadalajara before moving the business to Chihuahua. He asked to be tried only as a drug trafficker, not a murderer. My first problem with the law happened when I was born, he said. I always worked in the mountains where there was no law.
Even Caro Quintero's personal life became public. He reportedly kidnapped 17-year-old Sara Cosío, whom he was trying to court, and forcibly took her to Costa Rica. He denied that it was a kidnapping and assured that her parents were aware of it, and he even gave them all a car each. Rumors circulated that he was tortured for this and forced to recant his words to the Cosío family.
On December 12, 1989, he was sentenced to 92 years in prison for the murder of Kiki Camarena and several other crimes whose involvement was proven through Kiki's investigation. In 2013, due to procedural inconsistencies, Rafa was released from prison and disappeared, ending up on Interpol's most wanted list. A $200 million reward was set for his capture.
On the run, Rafa would give two interviews to journalists, in 2016 and 2018, denying that he had anything to do with the modern-day Sinaloa Cartel and gang warfare, and saying he only wanted peace. In the nearly nine years he was at large, however, Caro Quintero was active in his historic homeland and figured in bitter disputes for control of various territories in Sonora, Sinaloa, and Baja California against the Los Chapitos group, sons of Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán. On July 15, 2022, he was captured again and sent to Altiplano, from where the US is currently trying to extradite him.
A few days later in 1985, the government dealt another precise blow to Guadalajara's managerial structure. In Puerto Vallarta, Don Neto was arrested in a house owned by Ana Candelaria Ramos, director of the municipal police. He claimed that it was Rafa who kidnapped Camarena to reach an agreement with him, that he watched the agent die as he was beaten by Rafa and two of his assistants, and that he became angry when he saw Camarena's breathless body and slapped Rafa. Don Neto was sentenced to 40 years and was released on house arrest in 2016 for health reasons. He is now 93 years old.
The cunning Matta Ballesteros was imprisoned until 1988 in Honduras, which did not extradite criminals. On April 5, 1988, he was illegally removed from his home in Tegucigalpa and flown to the United States in 24 hours. This caused unrest in his homeland, and for a time the authorities even had to impose martial law.
In the US judicial system he went through all the circles of hell. He was offered a deal to surrender the president of Panama, but he did not agree. The judges recognized that Matta had been illegally removed from his homeland but said it had absolutely no effect on the trial. Matta's case is now cited as a precedent justifying the kidnapping of suspects from abroad. The charges against him relied on the testimony of dubious witnesses who took a plea bargain. He was put in the worst prison in the US, and his case was used to intimidate drug traffickers: if you don't make a deal, the judge has said, you will end up like Matta Ballesteros.
Perhaps it is also because he cooperated with the CIA, and in March 1988 the Contras and the Sandinistas signed a truce, which meant that the services of the transporter and cocaine money were no longer needed by the CIA, which is why he was liquidated.
The CIA trace is also found in the case of Kiki Camarena, in which not everything is so unambiguous. There is a version that during the investigation a DEA agent discovered something he should not have known: the CIA sponsored the Contras with cocaine money, and there was a training camp in Caborca under the full authority of Caro Quintero, also sponsored by the CIA with its full knowledge and patronage. In this sense, the DEA and the CIA were competing organizations, and their interests were opposing.
In 2013, an investigation into the CIA's role in Kiki's murder was made public. Two informants who were present at those events independently identified CIA agent Félix Rodríguez, also known as Felix the Cat, Lázaro, Félix Ramos Medina, and Max Gómez. It is likely that the recording of Camarena's torture was made by him. Rodríguez appeared in all CIA operations in South America, and in 1967, undercover as a major in the Bolivian army, he participated in the capture and interrogation of Che Guevara and then ordered the execution.
In the documentary "The Last Narco," Don Neto, guards, former DEA agents, Kiki's widow, and many others involved in the case give testimony that adds up to a coherent picture: Rodríguez was directly involved in Kiki's torture and asked questions related to Guadalajara's activities, the final goal of which was to sponsor the Nicaraguan Contra ranch. Búfalo had nothing to do with it.
In fact, the order to eliminate Kiki came from his superiors, according to Jack Lawn, former head of the DEA, and retired special agent Jack Taylor, who investigated the assassination, has stated that the CIA was certainly not involved in Camarena's death. Lawn also stated that this is a fairy tale unworthy of the people serving in the DEA. A CIA spokesman told the press it is ludicrous to even suggest that the CIA had anything to do with the murder of a US federal agent or orchestrated the escape of his killer.
Anyway, three central players of the Guadalajara Cartel were taken into custody. In building their drug empire, it was not enough to buy everyone's escape from US prosecution; their visibility in the corruption zone played into the hands of the Americans. What had initially allowed them to remain invisible was now pushing them out of the system.
On April 18, the Mexican interior ministry ordered a restructuring of the ranks of the Federal Security Administration to arrest and imprison all those members of the corporation who were associated with drug traffickers, smugglers, or any other criminals. Press sources said the announcements had triggered a wave of defections among members of the agency. On August 22, the federal police as it was was restructured into the General Directorate of Investigations and National Security, which had no operational authority to counter drug trafficking. This left Guadalajara without its best friends in the government.
However, the above actions were not enough for the US authorities, who wanted to put behind bars all those who according to their own investigations were involved in the Camarena murder. Still at large was one of the bosses, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, who was hiding out in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, visiting Governor Antonio Toledo Corro.
Some details from Félix Gallardo's socially active life were also leaked to the press. He had his own bank in the state of Chihuahua, at least until 1982, with documents listing his last name. In January 1985 he opened an automobile business with his partner and godson. Facts surfaced about his work as an agent of the state judicial police in Sinaloa and bodyguard for Sánchez Celis, and his friendship with Toledo Corro.
Miguel Ángel was found not in his historic homeland where he was protected but in Guadalajara, four years after the murder of Kiki Camarena, when the protection provided by the federal police disappeared. He received the protection of the ruling party through his old acquaintance police chief González Caterón, and all indications were that the storm was subsiding.
Two years after Camarena's murder, Caterón assured Félix Gallardo that the Americans had no hard evidence against him and that they would continue to support him. Their friendship continued, and according to Félix Gallardo they met at least five more times.
In 1988, Carlos Salinas became president of Mexico and began a kind of restructuring. Salinas immediately set about not only economic reforms that would eventually lead Juárez and Tijuana into wars but also recognizing the drug trade. When he took office, Mexico's undisputed godfather was of course Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo.
In April 1989, Félix Gallardo came to meet Calderón at a Guadalajara restaurant to talk business, or maybe it was not so, because in different sources of information about the detention of El Padrino vary. Only one thing is clear: the order to detain Miguel Ángel was given from above. In fact, that is what he was told: there was nothing we could do, the order came from Mexico City.
Félix Gallardo himself states in his prison diaries that he was severely beaten and his ribs were broken during the detention. The new anti-drug director appointed by Salinas, Javier Coello Trejo, met Félix Gallardo at the airport in Guadalajara and began threatening him immediately. We don't have anything against you yet, but we're going to screw you, he said. Félix Gallardo claims he was tortured for the next 24 hours trying to get him to testify about his involvement in Camarena's death, but he never said anything.
Several important people from his entourage were taken in with Félix Gallardo, including his accountant, who detailed all of El Padrino's movable and immovable property. Everything was confiscated from his family, and the furniture from his mother's house was remembered even in his interview in 2022. All the valuable items, he said, were illegally taken by Coello Trejo and nothing has ever been returned to the Félix Gallardo family. They were forced to live in a rented house, and his youngest son needed expensive surgery for which there was now no money.
In 1989, drug traffickers still relied on the police and on their connections, but Salinas's order to arrest the boss of bosses suddenly showed who was in charge. This is how the established model of the relationship between the state and organized crime eventually broke down.
Four years after the murder of Enrique Camarena, under constant pressure from the DEA, Miguel Ángel was still at large, indicating the duality of the state's attitude at the time. On the one hand, the hunt for drugs was being intensified by new structures. On the other hand, the state sought to restore the old friendship that had been so badly interrupted by Camarena's murder, especially figures like Calderón.
The arrival of Salinas and his turn toward the United States changed everything. A new era of cooperation with the White House had begun, and in this context, the capture of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo was a powerful sign of the strength of the current government in the face of criminal organizations and police authorities. It was a clear signal of who was in charge of the country and at the same time a positive nod to the US government for its willingness to cooperate in the fight against drugs.
At the same time, Félix Gallardo's arrest set in motion irreversible processes, as Valdez Castellanos called them: fragmentation and violence. After the arrest of El Padrino, the Mexican capos held a gangster summit in the resort of Acapulco. According to some sources, it was not Miguel Ángel himself who gathered the bosses, as in the TV series, anticipating the fall of the empire, but they gathered to decide what to do. El Padrino himself states in his diaries that Calderón assembled the gathering. It is possible that both versions are true, because Calderón was then confident in the imminent release of Félix Gallardo.
Old buddies from Sinaloa gathered in a luxurious chalet by the sea and decided how they would build a business. They were all related to each other as relatives, as friends, as neighbors, as longtime business partners who had done hundreds of deals. All of them would play a crucial role in shaping the drug trade over the next two decades.
Each capo was given an area where he could transport his own drugs and tax any other smugglers in his territory. Tecate went to Chapo Guzmán. Ciudad Juárez and Nogales, Laredo went to Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, a former federal police agent. San Luis Río Colorado went to Héctor El Güero Palma Salazar. Nogales and Hermosillo went to Emilio Quintero Payán. Tijuana went to Jesús Labra and his nephews, the Arellano Félix brothers. Sinaloa went to Ismael El Mayo Zambada. Mexicali went to Rafael Chao, another former federal agent. In addition, Manuel Beltrán, Filiberto Campos, and Javier Caro, Rafa's brother, could move freely throughout the plazas without causing trouble, acting only as liaisons.
It all sounded like a good idea, but without the leadership of the imprisoned godfather Félix Gallardo, the capos began feuding to get bigger pieces of the pie. As famed researcher Elaine Shannon wrote, never in the history of the Mexican drug business has there been another man like Félix Gallardo. He was a man of his word. He prioritized deals over shots, persuasion over execution. If the capos had followed his instructions, there would now be the most powerful cartel in the world.
But the absence of a leader and the presence of several bosses, each feeling superior to the other, caused disorganization. In this confusion, three cartels came to power: Tijuana with the Arellano Félix brothers, Juárez with Amado Carrillo Fuentes, and Sinaloa with Joaquín Guzmán. A little later they were all Sinaloans and moved around the Sinaloan empire, discounting shipments and sharing contacts with corrupt police officers.
DEA agents also confirmed cooperation between the narcos in northwestern Mexico. A classified operational intelligence report back in the 1990s made the following observation about this system: the cartel scheme is widespread but distorts the real power and strength of Mexican drug traffickers. Recent examples of people able to transcend these cartel boundaries include Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who collaborated with both El Chapo in Sonora and El Mayo in Tijuana.
Although the Sinaloan clans still worked together, it was turbulent. The biggest skirmish in the early 1990s broke out between the Arellano Félix brothers and Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán over supplies in California. The war was not as brutal as the 21st century's near-professional squads fighting, but the thugs clashed in a series of shootings and murders, leaving dozens of bodies behind.
In retrospect, these were the first signs that the Mexican government would prove unable to contain the beast of narco that the bloodshed would spiral out of control. As professional historians say, it is always dangerous to read history backwards. At the time, no one in the Mexican government seemed worried. There is violence, but it's drug traffickers killing drug traffickers, politicians said. In any case, the drug traffickers were not attacking the system but rather competing with each other to see who would be the best. The government could just watch the carnage and get paid, whoever was the winner.
The 1980s were thus without a doubt the decisive decade in the formation of organized drug trafficking crime in Mexico. The impact of the US drug market on the Mexican market was heterogeneous: demand for marijuana and heroin plummeted, and Operation Condor put Colombians at the forefront of the pot market. On the other hand, it was the operation that catalyzed more massive cultivation in Mexican territories and formed the corridor for cocaine transportation between Mexico and Colombia.
It was a golden decade for the Sinaloa organization under the leadership of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Ernesto Fonseca, and Rafael Caro Quintero, and with the support of family clans such as Guzmán, Zambada, Arellano Félix, Carrillo Fuentes, Beltrán Leyva, and Lupercio, and alliances with political and regional heads. The Guadalajara Cartel consolidated its power throughout the western territory of the country, Oaxaca and Baja California, along the entire Pacific Coast, as well as Durango and Chihuahua.
Only a few organizations competed with it, such as Pablo Acosta's organization in Ojinaga, although the Sinaloan guarantor Amado Carrillo Fuentes came to him to deal with cocaine issues, and he ceased to be a competitor.
The model of coexistence between the state and drug traffickers, jointly regulating drug trafficking, had worn itself out by the 1980s and over time revealed fatal consequences: the expansion and intensification of organized crime, the transformation of police agencies into criminal ones, and consequently the weakening of the state and the defenselessness of citizens.
The imprisonment of the main leaders of the Sinaloa organization, Caro Quintero, Ernesto Fonseca, and Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, led to fragmentation into several locations that would later be merged into family organizations. The disappearance of the dominant company facilitated the entry of new organizations into the illicit drug market.
In short, from the quasi-monopoly of Sinaloa, the Mexican market moved to open competition and inevitably to a war between everyone for the biggest piece of the pie. The 1990s were coming, with new drugs, new players, and new rules.