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On Drug Lord’s Mexican Turf, Lines Blur Among Cops, Pols, Cartel
By Tim Johnson, McClatchy Foreign Staff
CULIACAN, Mexico — Walk into the command center of Culiacan’s municipal police department, and you see a huge bank of monitors showing closed-circuit images of street corners, captured by 190 or so all-seeing cameras that rotate and zoom.
Yet in this city of a million or so inhabitants, home turf of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the recently captured crime boss of the Sinaloa Cartel, the cameras and the 1,460 or so transit and street cops seem to miss a lot.
Despite multiple sightings of Guzman and other cartel bosses, police never could spot him. Some residents deem it willful blindness, a sign that lines blur easily among organized crime, police and politicians.
Guzman was captured when naval commandos deployed from faraway Mexico City descended with hot intelligence that the fugitive drug baron was moving from safe house to safe house within the city. As commandos gave chase, they discovered a municipal Dodge Charger police cruiser in a garage at one of his homes.
The Culiacan secretary for public security, Hector Raul Benitez Verdugo, said in an interview that the blue patrol car was a fake. Its call numbers, 19-21, didn’t match any in the city police fleet, he said.
Guzman and bodyguards later fled through a series of tunnels and drainage canals, leaving behind grenades and part of a municipal police uniform.
The commandos finally snared Guzman at dawn on Feb. 22 in an oceanfront condominium in Mazatlan, a two-hour drive from this city.
A local lawyer said it was no surprise that bosses in the Sinaloa Cartel would either co-opt city police or use fake police units to protect themselves.
“It’s a way to camouflage yourself,” said Jesus Cerda Lugo. “If you see a police cruiser, it’s very difficult to know if it’s real or fake. After all, you don’t know all the police in the city.”
If an officer in uniform gives you orders, “and he has a badge, you imagine that he’s real,” Cerda said.
Guzman’s capture has brought new attention to the municipal police forces in Cualican and Mazatlan.
Sunday night, the newspaper El Noroeste in Mazatlan received two telephoned threats minutes after a reporter called police to follow up on a story in a national newspaper, Reforma, that said city police had been protecting Guzman.
“Look, (moron), tell that (jerk) … that we don’t want him talking about the municipal police because we are going to (mess) him up, and you, too, if you (mess) with the police,” the newspaper said a journalist was told. The language was stronger than the revised quotation here.
The facade of El Noroeste was hit with 17 rounds of automatic weapons fire in late 2010, and a headless body was dumped outside the newspaper in July 2011, so such threats are taken seriously.
Mazatlan serves as the playground for the Sinaloa Cartel, while Culiacan, the inland capital, surrounded by fertile agricultural land, is ground zero for bosses under Guzman’s command.
Even if the U.S. Treasury Department listed Guzman as “the world’s No. 1 crime lord,” he didn’t seem to feel the need to stay hidden in Sinaloa’s Sierra Madre range. He regularly came down into the city.
The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Guzman had lunched earlier this month at the Mar & Sea restaurant on the leafy banks of the Humaya River, not far from central Culiacan. A former state governor owns the restaurant.
It wouldn’t have been the first time Guzman came into the Sinaloa capital to satisfy his craving for haute cuisine. Many city residents have heard similar stories.
One of the deans at the Autonomous University of Sinaloa, who declined to be further identified for his own safety, said a close friend was in a restaurant when either Guzman or Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a co-leader of the Sinaloa Cartel, entered the restaurant.
“He arrived with his security team, which cordoned off the restaurant. They told everyone there to keep eating and drink all that they wanted, that their boss would pay for all meals. But the order was that nobody was to touch their cellphones,” the dean said. “The restaurant stayed sealed up for hours.
“This wasn’t any more than a year ago.”
Corruption among city police is far from unique to Sinaloa state. It’s a problem that has long nettled federal authorities, who want city police under a unified command structure at the federal and state level. Authorities have removed tens of thousands of corrupt municipal police officers in recent years in states such as Baja California, Chihuahua, Michoacan, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas and Veracruz.
In Culiacan, drug lords move about in late-model armored SUVs, but city police don’t seem to spot or stop them.
Asked whether municipal police had ever gotten into a gunfight with traffickers from the Sinaloa Cartel, Benitez Verdugo, Culiacan’s security chief, said, “There has not existed any clash of this kind.”
Benitez Verdugo might seem an unusual pick to lead the police. His wife is the daughter of Pedro Aviles, a legendary marijuana trafficker in Sinaloa in the 1960s and 1970s who was eventually slain.
But then politicians, state prosecutors and senior security officials in Sinaloa frequently must fend off accusations that they’re linked to drug traffickers.
Last June, a longtime police escort for Gov. Mario Lopez Valdez went missing. Weeks later, he appeared in a video uploaded to YouTube alleging, in a calm voice, that he’d accompanied Lopez Valdez shortly after his inauguration in 2011 to a meeting in the mountains with Guzman.
On the video, the escort, Frank Armenta, played wiretapped telephone conversations between the governor and other senior officials, including the state attorney general. The conversations indicated that Lopez Valdez was instructing officials to protect the Sinaloa Cartel and go after its rivals, the Beltran Leyva and Los Zetas trafficking groups, in the northern part of Sinaloa.
In a second videotape released in July, Armenta showed flight logs that indicated that a helicopter — presumably the governor’s — had made at least four trips to La Tuna, the village where Guzman grew up high in the Sierra Madre.
Armenta’s decapitated body appeared on a roadside Aug. 9.
Lopez Valdez has said repeatedly that the videos contain doctored and spliced conversations and that Armenta was forced by his captors to make the tapes.
The governor has spoken little since Guzman’s capture. His spokeswoman didn’t return multiple telephone calls over three days.
When reached by Adela Micha of Radio Imagen earlier this week, the governor stumbled for words about the impact of the capture of such a renowned crime lord in his state.
“What can I say? Congratulations,” Lopez Valdez said.
Photo: Tim Johnson/MCT
U.S. Considers Seeking Extradition Of Mexican Drug Lord
By Richard A. Serrano, Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — As Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman sits locked in the basement of a Mexican prison, the U.S. Department of Justice is debating whether to seek the drug lord’s extradition to face prosecution in one of several American communities that have indicted the violent Sinaloa cartel on charges of pushing millions of dollars of heroin and cocaine.
Federal prosecutors in at least four U.S. cities would like to bring the cartel leader to trial.
In Chicago, Guzman and 10 others have been indicted by a federal grand jury in the most sweeping case, accusing the cartel of shipping tons of drugs and threatening to behead the agent in charge of the local Drug Enforcement Administration office. City officials declared Guzman “Public Enemy No. 1,” a move not seen since Al Capone.
In San Diego, U.S. District Judge Larry Burns has established a track record for handling Mexican mob cases. Burns has approved guilty pleas for 14 other top members of cartel hierarchies, including the infamous Arellano Felix brothers, sending many leaders away for lengthy prison sentences.
Another potential U.S. jurisdiction is El Paso, Texas, where several American citizens have been kidnapped and killed across the U.S.-Mexico border in Ciudad Juarez, and the head of the DEA office in El Paso has branded the Sinaloans “assassins and hit-squad leaders.”
Even as far away as Brooklyn, N.Y., the U.S. attorney’s office took the unusual step of announcing over the weekend that, pending official word from Washington, they want to directly request Guzman’s appearance on Long Island for a litany of drug charges there.
“Right now, the (Department of Justice) is sitting down with U.S. attorneys and deciding where the strongest case is, where he could get the most time, where best to move him,” said Michael S. Vigil, a former top DEA official who has been briefed on Guzman’s capture and was authorized to speak publicly about the case.
Vigil said many of the charges involve racketeering and other offenses generally brought against mobsters in the U.S., making them “criminal enterprises.”
Guzman, whose nickname “El Chapo” means “Shorty,” allegedly pocketed millions of dollars, if not billions, by ruling his illegal network with brutal force. He was found by Mexican marines and U.S. law enforcement agents at a seaside resort in Mazatlan. Despite a network of escape tunnels and a phalanx of bodyguards, one of the world’s most wanted fugitives — the U.S. offered a $5 million reward for his capture — was finally caught at dawn Saturday.
Like the U.S., Mexico has also charged the kingpin with violating drug trafficking laws. For Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto’s administration, Guzman’s arrest was seen as a coup, especially because tens of thousands of Mexicans have been killed in the cartel wars and previous governments had failed to stop the violence.
It remains unclear whether any U.S. courts will have the chance to bring Guzman to trial, because Mexico may decide to keep him.
In addition, the extradition process with Mexico is fraught with controversy. Other cartel leaders have filed legal appeals and delayed attempts to move them to the U.S. for years.
And Mexico, which does not have capital punishment, will not turn over anyone to a country where the death penalty is a possibility. For that reason alone, the Justice Department would have to convince Mexico that U.S. authorities would be satisfied with life in prison without parole for Guzman.
On Monday, sources in the Mexican federal judiciary told the Los Angeles Times that attorneys for Guzman filed papers opposing the drug lord’s potential extradition to the U.S.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said that no official position has been reached on extradition.
“We’re obviously appreciative of the fact that El Chapo was captured and we congratulate the Mexican government,” he said.
If convicted in the U.S., Guzman probably will serve out his life in Colorado’s federal “supermax” prison, home to dangerous, high-profile prisoners.
AFP Photo/Ronaldo Schemidt
Will Mexican Cartels Go The Way Of Colombia’s Crime Syndicates?
By Tim Johnson, McClatchy Foreign Staff
CULIACAN, Mexico — Almost as soon as Sinaloa Cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, reputedly the head of one of the world’s largest crime syndicates, was captured after a 13-year manhunt, young drug dealers began campaigns to take his place — a sign that the group, responsible for 25 percent of all illegal drugs smuggled into the United States, might not be headless for long.
But even as the internal jockeying intensified, experts predicted that the arrest of the legendary crime boss over the weekend would prove to be a watershed event likely to usher in the breakup of Mexico’s huge crime syndicates.
“The fragmentation we’ve seen here in Colombia will be replicated in Mexico,” said Jeremy McDermott, a former British army officer based in Medellin, Colombia, who’s a co-director of InSightCrime, a research group. “The capture of Chapo will accelerate that process in Mexico of criminal fragmentation. The days of big cartels are gone.”
Considered the world’s No. 1 crime lord, Guzman was snared in a messy bedroom in an oceanfront condo in Mazatlan early Saturday. Mexican and U.S. counter-drug agents had tracked him over several weeks, tracing him to safe houses in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state, and then staying on his trail to Mazatlan when he disappeared through a series of tunnels and drainage pipes.
Guzman, whose Spanish nickname means “Shorty,” built the Sinaloa Cartel into one of the world’s biggest narcotics-trafficking groups, with a reach deep into Latin America, across the Atlantic to Africa and Europe, and into major U.S. cities.
He operated the cartel with the help of at least two other reputed crime chieftains, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and Juan Jose “El Azul” Esparragoza, both in their 60s and allegedly with decades of experience in smuggling narcotics to the United States. Guzman has worked with Zambada since an earlier drug gang, the Guadalajara Cartel, was divided up in the late 1980s, and shared management with Esparragoza of the Sinaloa Cartel, which sometimes is called a federation because of its loose organization.
Potential rivals are watching closely to see whether they might make a move on Sinaloa Cartel turf or on its leadership, said Sylvia Longmire, a security consultant who’s the author of the 2011 book “Cartel: The Coming Invasion of Mexico’s Drug War.”
“There will be a lot of wait-and-see going on by a lot of groups: rivals like Los Zetas, smaller trafficking groups that are members of the federation who are weighing their options, and cocaine suppliers who want to make sure the federation is a stable client,” Longmire said.
“El Mayo and El Azul need to work fast to exude confidence and power to friends and foes alike,” she added.
If the two aging leaders don’t move fast, the criminal underworld that the Sinaloa Cartel controlled may begin to crumble.
“When there’s no control, what was organized crime becomes disorganized crime,” McDermott said.
The cartel’s biggest rival in Mexico, Los Zetas, fractured after the killing in October 2012 of its undisputed leader, Heriberto Lazcano, and the arrest last July of his successor, Miguel Trevino Morales.
In significant ways, Mexico might be following the course of Colombia, which was the epicenter of the global cocaine trade in the 1980s and 1990s under the Medellin and Cali cartels but began to take a lesser place as a crime headquarters after the leaders of those cartels were slain or imprisoned. A plethora of weaker successor groups with names such as the Urabenos, the Rastrojos and La Oficina became wholesale suppliers to the more powerful Mexican groups, Los Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel.
How the Sinaloa cartel will cope with Guzman’s capture may depend on whether he can maintain any semblance of control from within prison walls. During a previous stint in prison, from 1993 until he escaped in 2001, Guzman didn’t appear to be weakened as a drug lord.
AFP Photo/Ronaldo Schemidt
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