The World's Most Evil Gangs (20 page)

T
he heart of the worldwide cocaine industry has, since the 1970s, been the once-lawless South American country of Colombia. It is still home to some of the most violent yet sophisticated drug trafficking organisations in the world. Their enormous multi-national cocaine empire provides enough capital to buy ships, planes and even a submarine to smuggle large quantities of cocaine to the United States.

The Colombian drugs industry started modestly. In the mid-Seventies marijuana smugglers began exporting small quantities of cocaine to the US hidden in suitcases. At that point, cocaine could be processed for $1,000 per kilo in jungle labs and sold on the streets for between $50,000 and $100,000. A violent thief named Pablo Escobar had grander plans and masterminded the criminal enterprise that became known as the Medellín Cartel, hiring pilots to fly light planes directly into the
US. The vast profits allowed the cartel to reinvest in high-tech laboratories, swifter boats, larger airplanes and even an island in the Caribbean, where they could refuel. Astonishingly, the Colombian National Police discovered that traffickers had hired engineers from Russia to supply and refit a former military submarine as a sure way of crossing the Caribbean to the American mainland undetected.

Southern Florida, and Miami in particular, became the main import centre for South American narcotics. Distribution networks were highly sophisticated, using electronic homing devices to keep track of shipments while monitors tapped into the radio frequencies of federal and state law enforcement agencies. Much of Miami’s economic boom came from the drug trade as legitimate businesses, mainly in construction, were bought to disguise operations. The so-called ‘Cocaine Cowboy Wars’ between rival gangs inspired the 1983 film
Scarface
, starring Al Pacino.

When, under pressure from the US, the Colombian government tried to sweep the town of Medellín clean of drugs, the megalomaniac Escobar declared war on the authorities. His renegade army was responsible for the murder of hundreds of government officials, police, prosecutors, judges, journalists and innocent bystanders. By the early Nineties the cartel had split into factions and many of its leaders were caught and jailed. Pablo Escobar was hunted down and killed after a long series of jungle battles.

The drugs industry switched to the west Colombian city of Cali, controlled by Escobar’s main rivals, the Rodriguez Orejuala brothers, who had started out as kidnappers, once demanding a £500,000 ransom. This sum launched their drugs empire – but instead of killing politicians and police, they
bribed them. The Cali Cartel funded politicians, hired top international lawyers and invested their drugs profits in legitimate businesses. But in 1995 their leaders were also hauled into jail – though with relatively soft sentences allowing them to continue running their empire from behind bars.

In the late Nineties, after the Cali and Medellín Cartels had fragmented, a third major group came to prominence. The Norte del Valle Cartel, based in the southwest of the country, became the most powerful organisation in the Colombian drugs trade.

According to a US government investigation, in the 15 years from 1990, the Norte del Valle cartel exported more than 500 metric tons of cocaine worth in excess of $10 billion from Colombia to Mexico and ultimately to the United States for resale. The cartel paid a right-wing paramilitary group to protect its members, its laboratories and its drug routes. The 2004 US investigation revealed how the cartel bribed and corrupted Colombian police and legislators to foil raids on its supply chains. Through wiretaps, gang members were able to listen in to communications between Colombian and American law enforcement agencies. So powerful was the cartel that it even bribed politicians to delay the extradition of Colombian narcotics traffickers to the US.

The Norte del Valle Cartel was run by the Montoya Sanchez family, whose leader Diego was on the FBI’s list of the world’s ‘Ten Most Wanted Fugitives’. In September 2007 an elite Colombian force mounted a strike on a gang hideout, a ranch in the forested Valle del Cauca and captured Diego Montoya Sanchez, hiding in a creek-bed. He was extradited from Colombia to Miami a year later, the fourth Montoya family member to end up in American custody. All were subsequently convicted of conspiring to import cocaine and two of them
convicted of ‘obstruction of justice by murder’, the sentences handed down in October 2009 ranging from 19 to 45 years.

The FBI celebrated that ‘a brutal chapter in the history of drug trafficking has come to an end’ thanks to unprecedented cooperation between the US and the Colombian government. Acting US Attorney Jeffrey H. Sloman claimed: ‘This milestone prosecution effectively dismantled the violent and prolific Norte Valle Cartel. Nonetheless, we in law enforcement understand full well that today’s victory is not the end of the war on drugs. We remain poised and committed to continue to fight the flow of illegal narcotics into our communities.’

A ‘milestone’ or just a stepping stone? It did not take long for another gang to take up where the Norte del Valle Cartel left off. Based in Colombia’s eastern plains, the El Dorado Cartel, also known as ‘The Junta’, was run by Luis ‘Don Lucho’ Caicedo and Daniel ‘El Loco’ (The Madman) Barrera. According to 2010 US indictments, Caicedo and Barrera had overseen hundreds of tons of cocaine exports every month, with an average sale of $11 million in cocaine per shipment. Over the years, the ill-gotten proceeds added up to hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly even billions. To ensure that their drugs could be produced without interference and make it out of the country securely, the cartel paid protection money to the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, a notorious right-wing paramilitary group.

It seemed that the cartel unravelled in 2010 after Caicedo was arrested in Argentina and quickly extradited to Florida. In exchange for a reduced ten-year sentence, he reportedly revealed the identities of 246 associates in the cocaine business. It is suspected that one of those he snitched on was his partner, ‘El Loco’ Barrera, who was arrested in Venezuela in September 2012 as the result of a complex four-nation
endeavour. The operation that swooped on him while chatting on a payphone involved everything from wiretaps to a broad coalition of Venezuelan police, Colombian intelligence officials, the British MI6, and agents from the CIA and the US Drug Enforcement Administration.

Barrera was a legend in the cocaine business, noted for torture and murder of those who crossed him. Marking him as Colombia’s ‘Public Enemy Number One’, President Juan Manuel Santos said: ‘He dedicated 20 years to doing bad things to Colombia and the world – all types of crime and perverse alliances with paramilitaries.’ While on the run, Barrera had undergone plastic surgery and burnt his fingertips. The reward offered for his capture by the US was $5 million – the same as for Osama Bin Laden. Colombia added $2.7 million to that. President Santos, who called him ‘the last of the great kingpins’, heralded his arrest as a major victory in the drugs war.

Barrera’s arrest was the third detention of a Colombian drug baron over the course of a year of successful international cooperation. In June 2011, Venezuelan authorities captured the head of the Los Rajostros Cartel, Diego Perez Henao. His gang, a major exporter of cocaine to the US via Mexico, is said to have controlled half the members of the paramilitary criminal organisations involved in drug trafficking in Colombia. The cartel’s previous leader, Javier Antonio Calle Serna, surrendered to US authorities on the island of Aruba in May 2012. He was charged with the 2008 murder of Wilber Varela, a Colombian drugs baron whose smuggling routes he supposedly took over.

The destruction of the Medellín, Cali, Norte del Valle and El Dorado Cartels means that the drugs industry in Colombia is now fragmented, with different gangs along the manufacturing and supply chain making it more difficult to
stamp out the trade. Also, worryingly, with cocaine use in the United States dropping, the gangs are increasingly heading shipments towards Europe and Asia.

The US Drugs Enforcement Agency and the Colombian National Police believe there are more than 300 active drug smuggling organisations in Colombia today. Cocaine is shipped to every industrialised nation in the world and profits remain incredibly high. And the trade is spreading. Colombian crooks’ profits from cocaine have encouraged gangsters to open laboratories in other countries, including Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Trinidad and Tobago and, of course, Mexico.

General Oscar Naranjo, the retired commander of the Colombian national police who became security adviser to the new Mexican government, has claimed that cartels such as the most recently busted Caicedo-Barrera organisation ended up working as no more than suppliers to Mexican Syndicates. If that is the case, then it’s also a sign of how far the Colombian cartels have fallen and been supplanted by the larger and more dangerous Mexican cartels, with the Colombian gangs playing only a supporting role.

If the ultimate control of the international drugs industry is gradually switching away from Colombia to Mexico (as will be seen in the next chapter), the change of power base will be of no comfort to the hard-pressed US agencies who have had so much success in smashing the South American cartels. The problem still lies on their own doorstep.

One final case history reflects the lawlessness and almost casual slayings that have marked the near-half century of Colombia’s drugs trade with the United States. It’s the saga of Griselda Blanco, the most ruthless female gangster of recent
years, who was shot dead by two motorcycle assassins as she was out shopping in the city of Medellín in 2012.

It was a suitably dramatic ending for the 69-year-old cocaine trafficker, who was an insatiable fan of the movie
The Godfather
. Blanco was known as ‘La Madrina’, Spanish for ‘Godmother’, and even named her youngest son Michael Corleone after the main character in the film trilogy. Her other nicknames were the ‘Cocaine Queen’ and the ‘Black Widow’. ‘We don’t know why they killed her,’ said the local police chief, ‘but the first hypothesis would be revenge or a settling of accounts.’

Blanco had certainly gained enough enemies in her murderous lifetime. Born in a shanty town in the Colombian coastal city of Cartagena in 1943, she began her criminal career as a 12-year-old pickpocket and prostitute, eventually commanding a billion-dollar empire that exported 1,500 kilograms of cocaine per month by boat and plane. She established many of the smuggling routes used by the Medellín Cartel and solidified her place in Colombian criminal legend as the mentor to drugs king Pablo Escobar.

Blanco had a reputation for ruthlessness, ordering the killing of dozens of rivals to get to the top of the drug smuggling business in the Seventies and Eighties. Prosecutors believe she was responsible for at least 40 murders, though some police put the number closer to 250. Her nickname ‘Black Widow’ arose from the claim that she had killed a couple of her husbands. It was also said that she slit the throats of some of her lovers after she had slept with them.

The title ‘Cocaine Queen’ came after she launched her drug operations in Florida in the Seventies. She eliminated other drugs gangs by having machine-gun assassins spray bullets indiscriminately at her rivals and their families. One infamous
attack took place at a Miami mall in 1979, when screaming shoppers ran for their lives as two hitmen riddled a store with bullets, leaving two dead and two wounded shop workers. Blanco ordered the killing of a Colombian drug dealer in the busy concourse of Miami Airport. Because he was nicknamed ‘The Pig’, she ordered that he be carved up with a bayonet. One less violent legacy of her reign as drugs Godmother was that she is said to have revolutionised smuggling by developing her own line of underwear with secret compartments for drugs.

Griselda Blanco’s fall from power began when a Colombian drugs Syndicate put a $4 million price on her head, forcing her into hiding. Back in Colombia, three of her four sons were murdered. Only Michael Corleone survived. Blanco was seized by police in California and in 1985 was jailed for cocaine trafficking. Three years later she was further sentenced to 20 years for three murders – the 1982 contract killings of two drug dealers and a toddler. The two-year-old died when bullets meant for his father hit the boy instead. Blanco was deported back to Colombia in 2004, where she earned warped fame through the film documentary
Cocaine Cowboys
and its sequel,
Hustlin’ With The Godmother
.

The podgy 69-year-old was gunned down on 3 September 2012 as she left her local butcher’s shop. Her assassins escaped by motorbike and Blanco died on her way to hospital. A former Florida homicide detective who had helped put her behind bars commented: ‘It’s surprising to all of us that she had not been killed sooner. When you hurt so many people like she did, it’s only a matter of time before they find you and try to even the score.’

S
hamed by its inability to control the violent crime lords who terrorised the country with seeming impunity, the Mexican government in December 2006 declared full-scale war on its drug gangs. The result was that Mexico became a battleground. The official death toll since President Felipe Calderón launched his military offensive against the cartels soared to more than 70,000 police, traffickers and civilians. The true figure is believed to be even higher.

The violence is horrific but is now an everyday event. Over a three-year span ending in January 2013, more than 20 sitting mayors were killed by cartels and many other politicians were murdered or simply disappeared. One such victim whose assassination made worldwide headlines was a politician who had been hailed as a heroine for standing up to the cartels. Dr Maria Santos Gorrostieta, 36-year-old ex-mayor of Tiquicheo,
west of Mexico City, survived two assassination attempts in 2009, firstly when gunmen raked her car with bullets, killing her first husband, and secondly when she was again ambushed and suffered even more serious injuries. In a famous act of defiance, Dr Gorrostieta posed for pictures showing the extent of her wounds and subsequently ran for the Mexican Congress, although she failed to win a seat. In November 2012 the mother of three and her second husband were abducted. Her body was found at a roadside near San Juan Tararameo three weeks later. She had been killed by a blow to the head. But she had also been stabbed, her arms and legs bound and her waist and chest covered in burns, indicating that she had been tortured. Her husband remained missing.

Massacres of civilians, beheadings and mass graves have also become increasingly common. For instance, on one Sunday in September 2012 as Mexicans celebrated their Independence Day, the dismembered corpses of 17 men were found dumped beside a highway in Jalisco, a part of central Mexico disputed by drug cartels. The bodies were naked, mutilated and stacked with chains around their necks. Only a week earlier, a shoot-out between local police and an armed convoy left two people dead and two injured in the same municipality. And in May of that year, police found 18 human heads and remains packed into two abandoned cars along a Jalisco highway. Even those figures pale into insignificance when compared with the 74 dead migrants found near the town of San Fernando in August 2010. Mexico’s crime groups regularly leave behind such grisly remains as they battle for control of trafficking routes and markets.

In this chaotically administered, crime-ridden country, no one can be certain about the true value and cost of the narcotics
trade. Analysts have estimated that wholesale earnings from illicit drug sales range from £10 billion to £30 billion a year. And the government figure for the cost in lives of its six-year war on the trade was put at 72,000. In 2013, however, a civil rights group said this was a ‘wild under-estimate of the slaughter’. Propuesta Cívica (Civic Proposal) published the grim statistic that an additional 20,851 victims had simply disappeared. This possible death toll put Mexico far ahead of other Latin American nations ravaged by organised crime. In Colombia, where drug barons have torn the country apart for decades, it is estimated that 50,000 people have gone missing, but this figure is over the past 40 years.

The Propuesta Cívica report listed 138 soldiers, 1,300 police officers and 58 journalists who were known to have been assassinated by cartel hitmen. Tragically, it also included missing women and children – many of whom were believed still to be alive, kidnapped by the cartels from remote villages and put to use as sex slaves. The group’s director Pilar Talavera said: ‘We published our results so the public, and the world, can begin to understand the scale of violence. We also want to pressure the authorities to disclose official information on the disappeared. What the relatives need most is to learn what may have happened to their loved ones.’

The civil rights report sent those desperate to learn the fate of loved ones onto the streets carrying placards with photos of the missing. But it also triggered a wider wave of anger in Mexico, where President Enrique Peña Nieto, who assumed office in December 2012, promised ‘greater transparency’ than his predecessor Felipe Calderón, who declared war on the six cartels battling for control of trafficking routes into the US.

Although Mexican drug trafficking organisations have existed
for decades, they have become more powerful since the demise of Colombia’s Medellín and Cali cartels in the 1990s and the more recent fragmentation of the Norte del Valle and El Dorado cartels. Their influence further grew as the US stepped up
anti-narcotics
operations in the Caribbean and Florida.

The ties between Mexican and Colombian gangs were forged by a bent policeman. The birth of all Mexican drug cartels is traced to former Mexican Judicial Federal Police agent Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, known as ‘the Godfather’, who founded the Guadalajara Cartel in 1980 and controlled all the smuggling corridors across the Mexico-USA border throughout that decade. He started by exporting marijuana and opium into the US and was the first Mexican drug chief to organise an international alliance with the South American cartels in the 1980s.

For decades, drug trafficking organisations used Mexico’s entrenched political system to create what the US Council on Foreign Relations in a 2011 report described as ‘a system-wide network of corruption that ensured distribution rights, market access, and even official government protection for drug traffickers in exchange for lucrative bribes’. However, it was not until the late Eighties that Mexican gangs rose to their current prominence, in the wake of the successful dismantling of Colombia’s drug cartels. As the Colombian route was disrupted, Mexican gangs shifted from being mere couriers for Colombia to wholesalers. Thus, with the Colombians losing their monopoly position, the Mexican cartels quickly came to dominate the trade, controlling 90 per cent of all the drugs that cross the border into the United States.

By the time Calderón took office in 2006 with a pledge to eradicate trafficking organisations, drug violence was already
on the rise. In fairness to the ex-president, his six-year campaign did break up most of the cartels. He deployed more than 50,000 troops and federal police against them and many of the main gang leaders were either arrested or killed. The Calderón administration argued that the violence proved that this aggressive strategy was forcing gangs to split and take on one another – though often in increasingly brutal and gruesome fashion. The principal cartels were the Sinaloa, Beltran Leyva, Arellano Felix, Carillo Fuentes, La Familia, The Gulf Cartel (also known as New Federation) and Los Zetas.

At the start of Calderón’s crackdown, violence was concentrated in Mexico’s northern border regions, especially Chihuahua, as well as Pacific states like Sinaloa, Michoacán and Guerrero. Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, was the most violent city, blighted by a gang-related death toll of more than 3,000 in 2010. Violence has dropped markedly since. However, Guerrero, home to the resort of Acapulco, as well as Sinaloa and Nuevo León remains among some of the most violent regions. One of the focal points for violence since 2010 has been Mexico’s third-largest city, Monterrey.

In a 2012 report by the US security firm Stratfor, experts argued that the proliferation of cartels had by then been reduced to two main players: the Sinaloa and the Los Zetas, with the latter being the biggest cartel in terms of geographic presence. The US government has described Los Zetas as ‘the most technologically advanced, sophisticated, and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico’.

The Los Zetas Cartel originated in the Mexican Army, when several commandos joined forces to form a drug trafficking organisation under brothers Osiel and Antonio Cárdenas Guillén. Los Zetas is based in the industrial hub of Monterrey, once touted
as Latin America’s safest city but now plagued by gang-related violence as rivals battle for control of drug distribution and other rackets. In May 2012 horrified citizens awoke to find nine bodies, four of them women, hanging from an overpass leading to a main highway in Nuevo Laredo. Hours later, police found 14 human heads inside coolers outside the city hall along with a threatening note. Shortly afterwards, a Zetas killer, described as Mexico’s deadliest female assasin, was arrested in Monterrey. Maria Jimenez, a 26-year-old widow nicknamed ‘La Tosca’, confessed to 20 killings and several other violent crimes. She had personally gunned down rival drug traffickers and a police officer.

The arrest of ‘La Tosca’ failed to stem the violence, however. A week later, 18 people were found decapitated and dismembered near Mexico’s second largest city, Guadalajara. Within days, a further 49 bodies, decapitated and mutilated, were found dumped on a roadside near Monterrey. The victims, six of them women, had their heads, feet, and hands cut off to make identification difficult. Police suspected the dead were members of the opposition Gulf Cartel but were certain that the perpetrators were Zetas gangsters.

There were a few immediate victories in Mexico’s federal police war against Los Zetas. In late May 2012 Daniel Jesus Elizondo Ramírez, nicknamed ‘El Loco’, was arrested in Monterrey after throwing a hand grenade at pursuing cops and was charged with the dumping of the 49 decapitated bodies. A month later, another Zetas member, Gregorio Villanueva Salas, known as the ‘Piracy Czar’ because of his control of the pirated music industry, was also charged with several grenade attacks. The pair admitted they were acting on orders from their leader, Miguel Angel Trevino Morales, but it would be another year before this cartel kingpin was caged.

The ultra-brutal Morales regularly ordered beheadings, hanging and massacres of rivals. His trademark was the use of ice picks to pin warning signs on the chests of his victims’ bodies but his favoured technique was the ‘guiso’, or stew, in which enemies would be placed in 55-gallon oil drums and cooked alive. Among crimes for which the 40-year-old Zetas leader was wanted was the murder of more than 260 migrants who were dumped in mass graves after being kidnapped in two separate incidents in 2010 and 2011. They are believed to have refused to work for him as drugs mules. Morales was seized on a dirt road outside Nuevo Laredo while heading for the US border in a pick-up laden with eight guns and $2million in cash. His arrest, along with his bodyguard and his accountant, was a much needed boost to President Nieto, under criticism for failing to take a tough enough stance against the cartels.

The Sinaloa Cartel, based on the Pacific coast, is no less violent than the Zetas. They operate in Mexico’s ‘Golden Triangle’, covering the states of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua. Through mergers with other gangs, by the mid-1990s, the Sinaloa Syndicate was believed to have reached the size of Colombia’s Medellín Cartel during its prime. In 2008 the cartel split into a number of warring factions, which became a major cause of the epidemic of drug violence Mexico has since suffered. Murders by the cartel often involve beheadings or bodies dissolved in vats of alkali and are sometimes filmed and posted on the Internet as a warning to rival gangs.

In 2008, 12 decapitated bodies were found piled up outside the Yucatán state capital of Merida. The same year, nine headless men were found in the Guerrero state capital of Chilpancingo. In 2011 the bodies of 15 men, all but one of
them headless, were found on a street outside a shopping centre in the resort city of Acapulco. Handwritten signs were left on the corpses signed by ‘El Chapo’s People’ – a reference to Sinaloa leader Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán. His cartel is thought to have killed the men for trying to intrude on the gang’s turf. The executions were particularly gory even for Acapulco – a city where 27 people had been killed on the streets over the previous weekend alone. Those victims included two police officers cut down on a main road in front of tourists and locals, six people who were shot dead and stuffed in a taxi, their hands and feet bound, and four others elsewhere in the city.

The most sickening Sinaloa act of violence occurred in September 2011 when the cartel put a ‘warning’ video on the Web showing the execution of two of their own members – beheaded with a chainsaw while still alive. Both men, a drug runner and his uncle who had somehow upset the cartel leadership, were seated shirtless against a wall as they answered questions posed to them by their executioners. The older man, who mentions ‘El Chapo’, says resignedly: ‘Think next time you decide to “give the finger” [to cheat], think about it very carefully, because it’s not easy being here, and you never return back. With these people you don’t play around.’

‘El Chapo’ himself has been on the run since 2001 when he escaped from a Mexican prison in a laundry truck. There has been a $7 million bounty on his head ever since. Joaquin Guzmán, whose fortune was estimated by
Forbes
magazine at more than $1 billion, was named by the US Treasury Department in 2012 as the ‘world’s most powerful drugs trafficker’. Authorities said his cartel has recently been expanding its drug business abroad, building international
operations in Central and South America and the Pacific. In 2013 Guzmán formally received the title of Chicago’s ‘Public Enemy Number One’ because of his cartel’s control of narcotics supply to the city – the first time the Chicago Crime Commission had used the infamous label since Al Capone in the 1920s. Shortly afterwards, there was speculation that the kingpin had been killed in a jungle shootout with a rival gang in Guatemala’s Petén province, near the border with Mexico.

So, after six years of ex-President Calderón’s military onslaught against the cartels and the subsequent more measured approach of his successor President Nieto, who is winning the Mexican drugs war? A gloomy verdict on Calderón’s campaign came from the US Department of Justice which reported that Mexico remained a major supplier of heroin to the American market, and the largest foreign supplier of methamphetamine and marijuana. Mexican production of all three of these drugs had increased since 2006, as had the amount of drugs seized at the US-Mexican border. While assessments vary as to how much of the marijuana originates in Mexico, a 2010 report estimated it at anywhere from 40 to 67 per cent. An estimated 95 per cent of cocaine travels through Mexico into North America, up from 77 per cent a decade earlier. Overall, the US State Department found that its nation’s drug users send between $19 billion and $29 billion into the coffers of Mexican drug cartels.