Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers Read Free Page B

a rifle squad in a security ring a hundred meters across. Closer by, there was a smaller circle of paratroopers. All were armed to the teeth.
    The minutes seemed to last forever. They’d already heard on the radio that the convoy had crossed the Mexican border without problems. The handover had been perfectly planned and agreed. But there was always the possibility an ambush might damage the package before it arrived.
    Standing on a mound of earth beside the road, General Jorge Carrillo Olea finally made out a small dust cloud in the distance. They were all astonished when an old pickup truck drove up, flanked by two more in an equally battered state. In the lead truck there was just the driver, a young co-driver, and in the back the valuable cargo.
    A young Guatemalan army captain, aged no more than twenty-six, got out of the old wreck and greeted them with elaborate gallantry: “My general, I have been entrusted with a sensitive consignment that may only be delivered to you in person,” he announced ceremoniously to General Carrillo, who was overall coordinator of the Fight Against the Drug Trade for the government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and the man responsible for this important mission.
    Looking at the captain, Carrillo Olea couldn’t help feeling a little ridiculous. The Mexican government had sent two generals—Guillermo Álvarez Nahara, head of the Military Police, and himself—plus two battalions to support the operation. 1 Guatemala, on the other hand, had made do with a young officer to hand over someone who was still practically unknown, but who was being accused, along with the Arellano Félix brothers, of killing Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, in the course of an alleged shoot-out between the two sides. Less than a month earlier, on May 24, 1993, the cardinal had died in a spectacular hail of bullets in the parking lot of Guadalajara International Airport.
    Without more ado, the Guatemalan captain opened the back of the pickup and pointed to his precious cargo. On the blistering metal deck, tied hand and foot like a pig, lay Joaquín Guzmán Loera. His body had been bouncing around like a bale of hay during the three-hour trip from Guatemala to Mexico.
    At the time, El Chapo Guzmán—a member of the criminal gang led by Amado Carrillo Fuentes, better known as El Señor de los Cielos, the Lord of the Skies—was pretty much a nobody in the drugs world. He’d been just fleetingly in the limelight after a shoot-out at the Christine Discotheque in Puerto Vallarta in 1992, when he tried to kill one of the Arellano Félix family, former friends and partners with whom he’d fallen out.
    The disputes between the Arellano Félix family, El Chapo Guzmán, and his friend Héctor El Güero Palma were like schoolboy squabbles with machine guns. They’d already featured on the crime pages of Mexican newspapers, but without much prominence. Guzmán had a lot of money, like any other drug trafficker of his ranking, but little power of his own. What power he did have came by using the name of Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Maybe that is why the Guatemalan government had sent him back to Mexico not as a high-risk prisoner. Nonetheless, El Chapo seemed to offer a vital political opportunity to the Mexican government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. That bruised figure in the back of the pickup provided an excellent pretext to explain the murder of Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo.
    Supposedly, the Arellano Félix brothers and El Chapo Guzmán had had a shoot-out, and the cardinal had been killed in the crossfire. Thestory, as already reported in the press, was undoubtedly plausible, but a later post-mortem of what happened at Guadalajara airport cast doubt on this version. Forensic experts reported that there had been no crossfire, and that the cardinal had been hit by fourteen bullets at close range.
    To look at him in that sorry, helpless state on June 9, 1993, nobody would have imagined that