Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers Read Online Free PDF

from the scene: he sent him north to Ojinaga, a border town in Chihuahua, to work with Pablo Acosta. Without realizing it, Don Neto was doing Carrillo Fuentes a favor.

The rise of Amado Carrillo Fuentes
    On April 24, 1987, a federal police officer called Guillermo González Calderoni arrived in Ojinaga. He was one of the most corrupt cops in Mexican history. His mission was to arrest Pablo Acosta, who as it happens had been paying him a fortune for protection. But the drug baron didn’t get out alive; they say he burned to death in his bunker. Some colleagues of the former policeman say the killer was González Calderoni himself. For drug traffickers there’s one thing worse than death, and that’s prison.
    After Acosta’s death, Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, another former DFS commander—the Federal Security Directorate was then the Mexican equivalent of the CIA—took over the regional franchise, still with the support of Carrillo Fuentes, who was steadily climbing the ladder of the drug hierarchy.
    Amado had a vision. In 1987 he left Ojinaga and moved to Torreón, where he began to assemble a fleet of aircraft, including Sabreliners, Learjets and Cessnas. His boyhood dreams of being a pilot were realized in the strangest of ways, but he still had a long way to go before becoming the legendary Lord of the Skies.
    On August 21, 1989, Carrillo Fuentes was arrested by officers from the Ninth Military Zone based in Culiacán, Sinaloa, under the command of Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, whose military career was just taking off. Years later, fate would again bring these two together, the drug dealer and the three-star general. Appointed to prepare the case against Carrillo Fuentes in the PGR was the deputy attorney general, Javier Coello Trejo—Amado’s loyal servant as a result of the money periodically showered on him.
    A few months earlier, in April, Commander Guillermo González Calderoni had arrested his own compadre, Félix Gallardo. Nobody could trust anyone.
    It was the first year of Carlos Salinas’s presidency. Given the publicly-known relationship between his father, Raúl Salinas Lozano, his uncle, Carlos, and Juan Nepomuceno, the veteran leader of the Gulf Cartel, some writers on the drug trade in Mexico have seen these arrests as an attempt to favour the criminal organization closest to the president’s family. But the events of later years were to show that, in spite of their good relations with the Gulf traffickers, Salinas’s family were more inclined to do business with those on the Pacific side.

Too fat to be a bad guy
    When in 1988 Salinas named Enrique Álvarez del Castillo as attorney general, he in turn appointed as deputy attorney general for drug control a man called Javier Coello Trejo. Coello’s most striking characteristic was his extreme corpulence, of similar dimensions to his corruption.
    During the first two years of Salinas’s mandate, Jorge Carrillo Olea was at the Secretariat of the Interior under Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, reorganizing the state intelligence systems according to direct instructions from the president. Carrillo was highly experienced in this field; indeed he could be called the father of Mexican “intelligence,” if such a thing exists. He and Miguel de la Madrid dismantled the Federal Security Directorate, and set up in its place the Research and National Security Directorate (Disen), later the Center for Research and National Security (Cisen).
    Carrillo was well placed to observe Coello’s chaotic mutations. In 1989, several of the deputy attorney’s bodyguards were arrested and charged with belonging to a gang that was plaguing the streets of southern Mexico City, snatching and raping young women. Only after intense pressure from Congress did the capital’s prosecution office, under Ignacio Morales Lechuga, find itself obliged to act, and finally some of Coello’s men were put behind bars.
    In the final months of the Salinas administration, Carrillo frequently