Pubdate: Sun, 03 Dec 2000 Source: Proceso (Mexico) Copyright: 2000 Proceso Email: http://www.proceso.com.mx/ THE LOST BATTLE AGAINST DRUGS The death of Pablo Escobar and the imprisonment or death of the main bosses of the Cali cartel during the past decade have not put an end to drug trafficking. Never before has so much cocaine from Colombia been entering the European and North American markets. A new type of heroin from South America, which is purer and can be smoked or inhaled, is displacing the Asian variety. "Made in Mexico" amphetamines are invading the raves and technotheques of Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, Paris, Sao Paulo, and Mexico City. The numbers are staggering: 1,000 tons of cocaine and 6 tons of heroin sold in the northern hemisphere every year; $57 billion spent in 1999 by American consumers alone; $500 billion in dirty money recycled annually in the world's above-ground economy. This is the picture that French journalist Jean-Francois Boyer paints in his book "La bataille perdue contre la drogue' [The Lost Battle Against Drugs], which is to appear soon in France. The crackdown, devised in Washington and aimed mainly at the Colombian kingpins, has had disastrous consequences, Boyer argues. Local gangs have reorganized into smaller, more flexible units and have had to yield a growing proportion of the drug trade to new and powerful drug gangs from Mexico, Chile, Nigeria, and the Dominican Republic. Even more worrisome, the gangs from the industrialized north that import and distribute the narcotics on the market are doing more business than all of the Latin American gangs put together. Drug money is making gangs in the consuming north richer today than those in the producer south. In addition, the profits are being reinvested much more in the banking systems of Europe and the United States than in the systems of the southern hemisphere. Among other episodes, the book relates how one of the leading banks in the United States, Citibank, closed its eyes to suspicious movements of funds by Raul Salinas, the Hank family, the people who financed Amado Carrillo, and the Chilean drug gangs, and how traffickers from Ciudad Juarez, Tijuana, and Matamoros, with their political alter egos, have managed to control the Mexican Government, an objective that their Colombian counterparts never achieved despite what the world press may say. The book is the fruit of 15 years of special reports, research, and studies, and its sole purpose, according to its author, is to reveal to the public at large that the truth has been hidden from it. It also disputes the widely accepted theory that drug trafficking can be defeated merely by removing the heads of criminal organizations in the southern hemisphere. Jean-Francois Boyer has been living in Mexico since 1993. He was an international affairs reporter for French television in the 1980s, covering the Middle East and Latin America, and a correspondent for the French newspaper Liberation. He is the author of "L'Empire Moon" (1986), a work that has been translated into Spanish and other languages. "The Lost Battle Against Drugs" will be in French bookstores on 15 January 2001. Proceso reproduces below excerpts from the second part of the book, entitled "The Mexican Drug State and the Alternative Mafias." It is, of course, just part of the story of what has been happening with drug trafficking in our country in recent years. - --- Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo is not just another general in Mexico. He was commander of two of the country's most important military regions and had serious support in the ruling party. Shortly before being placed at the head of the INCD [National Institute for Combating Drugs], he was seriously considering the possibility of running for governor of the state of Morelos. In spite of all this, General Gutierrez Rebollo was arrested by his comrades in arms on 6 February 1997 and quickly convicted, thanks to an informant inside the military itself. The arrest of Mexico's drug czar in 1997 came as a shock to the DEA and the US Government, which had been gratified by his appointment. It was a surprise to Mexicans. His apprehension and conviction suggested that the president had decided to suddenly end 30 years of complicity between the State and organized crime. The latter years of his term would prove otherwise. The attorney general of the republic again revamped his office's counter-drug services after the general was arrested. He divided the INCD in two and named jurists from academia as their heads. Jose Tomas Colsa McGregor, the jeweler who was a buddy of Amado Carrillo, was nabbed in 1996. Before his final arrest, he was with his boss at several meetings in the state of Jalisco with politicians and military personnel who were collaborating with "The Lord of the Heavens." After his arrest he decided to talk in an effort to get his sentence reduced. A new law on organized crime in Mexico had just established the category of "protected witness," inspired by the US system. Colsa McGregor gave investigators more leads into Amado Carrillo's networks than any other trafficker in the past. The jeweler emphasized in particular that Amado had excellent relations with governors who until then had escaped the notice of the PGR [Office of the Attorney General of the Republic], in Quintana Roo, Yucatan, Campeche, and Chihuahua... The Special Prosecutor's Office for Crimes Against Health (FEADS) and the Special Unit Against Organized Crime (UEDO), the PGR's two new counter-drug units, were thus able to start piecing together a concise organizational chart of the Juarez Cartel. Starting in 1998, the UEDO launched a full-speed-ahead investigation into the southeastern cell of the Juarez Cartel. Under the command of Samuel Gonzalez, its director, it set up its headquarters in Cancun in a large home seized from the crime rings of local kingpin Alcides Magana, a former policeman whom Governor Mario Villanueva was protecting. Gonzalez's right-hand man in this investigation was a military officer from army intelligence, Colonel Froylan Cruz. The two men, backed by a large team from the Public Prosecutor's Office, intelligence officers, and a detachment of special army forces (GAFES), seized more than 20 homes and offices belonging to the traffickers and several luxury hotels financed by dirty money. They discovered that the airport in Cancun was being guarded by a security firm that the drug traffickers had "bought." They also took apart the system of protection that Alcides Magana had put together inside the Quintana Roo government, a system revolving around the local government secretary, the governor's personal secretary, and the state's police chief... All that remained was to put the handcuffs on Mario Villanueva Madrid, a man who had boasted of his friendship with Presidents Salinas and Zedillo. But the powerlessness of the State vis-a-vis this other drug State was soon going to be made starkly clear... As the investigations moved forward in Cancun and the rest of the country, Samuel Gonzalez and Froylan Cruz became convinced that the southeastern cell of the Juarez Cartel (and, in fact, the entire organization) had accomplices in the army. The two men had testimony from several people about the complicit relations between Amado Carrillo and Generals Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro and Francisco Quiros Hermosillo, who were present back in December 1990 at the famous "summit meeting" in Las Mendocinas. This information came mainly from the confessions of the Guadalajara jeweler, Jose Tomas McGregor; the former chief of the Federal Judicial Police, Adrian Carrera Fuentes, and traffickers Michael Batista and Margarita Ruiz Pelayo, who had once been Raul Salinas Lozano's secretary. They also learned that the two generals had been questioned personally by the secretary of defense on at least two occasions, in 1997 and 1998, after Colsa McGregor had reported them to the PGR. In addition, aside from this testimony, the two men had accumulated material evidence against General Quiros. The UEDO actually seized two cars that Amado Carrillo had given the general as gifts: a white armored Mercedes and a luxury, four-wheel drive station wagon. The UEDO managed to demonstrate that the general's son had taken possession of the two vehicles. In spite of this body of evidence, however, the two generals were still in their posts as 1998 drew to a close. Within the Army Staff, Arturo Acosta Chaparro and Francisco Quiros Hermosillo seemed untouchable. The PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party] and the Mexican State owed them a great deal: they were the ones who had broken up the guerrillas in Guerrero in the 1970s. Back then they headed the "White Brigade," a paramilitary unit responsible for hundreds of murders and atrocities. They both worked closely at the time with the future secretaries of defense under Presidents Salinas and Zedillo. Involved in military intelligence from the beginning of their careers, they represented the army in the Federal Directorate of Security in the 1980s. Acosta Chaparro also headed the Guerrero State Police, serving one of the system's most fearsome "dinosaurs," Governor Figueroa. In spite of the suspicions hanging over their heads, Acosta was still discreetly in charge of security and counterinsurgency in the Army Staff, while General Quiros, who until 1998 headed the Army Staff Transportation Directorate, had just been named director of Armed Forces Social Security. He was among the few members of the Staff whom Defense Secretary General Cervantes Aguirre treated as a close friend. Until late 1998, the two officers had not been disturbed. The UEDO was on the verge of indicting them, however. The file on them was almost complete. Quiros's son was interrogated for hours by Samuel Gonzalez's men and provided new and valuable information. On 10 December 1998, the newspaper Reforma revealed that the two generals had been taken discreetly to a large home in the residential district of Pedregal in Mexico City that had been seized from the Juarez Cartel. According to the paper, they were interrogated there for four weeks by a very small group of people. The heads of the UEDO so mistrusted their colleagues from the Public Prosecutor's Office and the police at that time that they preferred to work far from their official offices, almost clandestinely. The article angered the defense secretary. The secretariat's services categorically denied the article. General Cervantes let the nation's attorney general and the president know that he did not appreciate the behavior of the UEDO chief, who he said was responsible for leaking information to the press. The fact is that Samuel Gonzalez confided almost nothing to Reforma's reporters. It was the DEA that gave them the heart of their story. Just a few days after this episode, the head of the UEDO suddenly resigned and had to travel to Seville, where he had been named consul...No one doubted that he was paying the price for his rash investigation of the military officers: he had moved too quickly and too vigorously. One of his friends later admitted to this author that Samuel Gonzalez told him before he left for Spain that he had become "a danger to the national security of Mexico and the United States." The pertinence of this remark would become starkly clear in the ensuing months. In January 1999, Mario Villanueva fled before the PGR was able to arrest him. He admitted to the reporters who found him living in hiding (while all of the country's policemen were supposedly hunting him down) that he had been tipped off just before his imminent arrest. On 28 July 1999, in the thick of the election campaign, the PGR discreetly forwarded the Acosta Chaparro/Quiros Hermosillo file to General Rafael Macedo de la Concha, the judge advocate general. This information was not reported to the press. A year later, on 30 August 2000, two months after the presidential election in which opposition candidate Vicente Fox defeated PRI candidate Francisco Labastida, a judge in the First Military Region indicted them. The next day they were imprisoned in Military Camp Number One in the capital. In his last message to the country on 1 September, however, President Ernesto Zedillo was careful not to mention corruption in government and paid emphatic homage to the Armed Forces. Why didn't the PGR send the case file to the military justice system in early 1999 and why did General Macedo de la Concha wait so long to indict the two "narco-officers"? The military authorities have not answered the first question. As for the second, the judge advocate general intimated that it took the investigators a long time to gather evidence of the two officers' guilt and cited the argument that his services had to interrogate new traffickers who were turning State's evidence. This is an unconvincing explanation. The witness list shown to the press to justify the indictment of the two generals offered no surprises. It consists of well known figures who had fallen into the hands of the police over the past three years and more: jeweler Jose Tomas Colsa McGregor, Jose Jaime Olvera Olvera (Amado Carrillo's driver), Adrian Carrera Fuentes (the head of the Federal Judicial Police in the days of Mario Ruiz Massieu), Carlos Colin Padilla (Amado's financier), Michael Batista (a trafficker whose job it was to bribe politicians), etc. There were almost 20 on the list. Macedo said that the military courts had to conduct new interrogations of these individuals in order to become convinced of the case. Yet we know that all of these witnesses had already been thoroughly interrogated by the UEDO under Samuel Gonzalez. They had "spilled the beans" long ago. We are talking in particular here about Michael Batista, whom the US courts sent back to Mexico in the knowledge that he could furnish fresh evidence against the drug State (the UEDO has been very tight-lipped about his return to Mexico and his interrogations), and Adrian Carrera Fuentes, who was the first to provide details about the military officers. Without their testimony for the prosecution, Samuel Gonzalez would not have taken the risk of challenging the generals. Let us not lose sight of the fact that the UEDO was on the verge of indicting the generals when Samuel Gonzalez and Froylan Cruz were removed from their posts. It is not very plausible either that General Macedo would have had to wait for the outcome of the presidential election to become convinced of the generals' guilt. Indeed, the names of Acosta Chaparro and Quiros Hemosillo have been mentioned for quite some time in military intelligence reports (probably since the DEA and FBI first made charges against the former Guerrero police chief in 1993 in the wake of testimony from Margarita Pelayo, Raul Salinas Lozano's former secretary). The army also knew since 1997 that the two generals were meeting with The Lord of the Heavens at the Jalisco home of a former PR leader, the son of a former defense secretary. Finally, Froylan Cruz, Samuel Gonzalez's right-hand man in 1997 and 1998, was in the military, and all of the UEDO's investigations were also based on military intelligence case files. Froylan Cruz regularly kept his colleagues up to date on the progress of his investigations. The fact is that the Defense Secretariat had for several years been protecting two officers whom it knew to be guilty. It then asked the Office of President of the Republic to slow the pace of the investigations so that the Armed Forces could prepare to cope with a bigger scandal. In addition to the two famous generals, some 15 superior officers had been in Samuel Gonzalez's and Froylan Cruz's crosshairs since 1997. By turning the case file over to the judge advocate general, the president took the PGR and civilian authorities out of the limelight in the case of the narco-generals. This reduced the danger that any future attorney general from the opposition might restart the diabolical machinery of the judicial system some day. Merely by sacrificing a few scapegoats the Army Staff would finally be able to shelve the case ... The belated indictment of Generals Acosta and Quiros, whom the Army Staff had publicly defended two years before, prompts us to pose another question: Are the charges that President Zedillo and his circle were in collusion with drug trafficking during the final years of the administration, charges that the PGR quickly dismissed, really as groundless as the government says? >From his jail cell, General Gutierrez Rebollo has said that he was arrested because he had uncovered complicity with drug traffickers in the president's family. The low ethical standing of this individual and, above all, the circumstances under which he leveled these attacks enabled the Office of President to easily brush aside the charges. It had more of a problem squelching the rumors threatening Ernesto Zedillo's closest aide, Jose Liebano Saenz, his private secretary. Liebano, who in practice was his right-hand man, shared all secrets and was part of all difficult negotiations. Discreet, very tactful, intelligent, and likeable, he was held in wide esteem. He was, successively, the coordinator of Luis Donaldo Colosio's and Ernesto Zedillo's election campaigns. The fact that the second presidential candidate kept the manager of his predecessor's campaign so close to him does not fit in with Mexican tradition. It demands a very convincing explanation. Liebano Saenz, a close friend of the assassinated candidate, knew exactly what sort of relationship his former boss and friend had with the drug State. We will not know for some time whether it was marked by complicity with or an overt struggle against it. Shortly after General Gutierrez Rebollo was arrested, the PGR discovered some notes that he had taken during the interrogation of a pilot who worked for Amado Carrillo. The notes indicate that the flyer once heard The Lord of the Heavens speak of a home that the cartel had given Liebano Saenz. The president himself asked the PGR to investigate discreetly. Doubts mounted when the drug police gathered additional testimony from individuals linked to drug trafficking or money laundering. A jailed drug kingpin said that he had given Liebano Saenz a fleet of vehicles for the 1994 presidential campaign. A businessman who was a childhood friend of the president's private secretary said that he had stopped seeing him after discovering that the drug police had him in their sights. A driver of Amados's heard The Lord of the Heavens express delight over the pact he had made with the president's confidant, with the backing of 60 heads of Mexican gangs, for the modest sum of $60 million. Finally, the crooked attorney general of a Mexican state bordering the United States, who was suspected of money laundering, confided to an undercover agent of the US Customs Service that the president's secretary might be interested in recycling some of his income. On 5 February 1999, the PGR officially closed the file after a two-year investigation. None of the accusations could be taken seriously, it said. No trace could be found of the fleet of vehicles that the PRI had supposedly inherited. All of the testimony was "hearsay," it claimed. The psychological tests administered to the witnesses proved that at least one of them was lying. The PGR did not say which one and provided no details about the content of the confessions. In a bid to calm the uproar caused by the affair, it stressed the fact that Liebano Saenz himself had asked for an investigation into the matter so that he could be cleared of any suspicion. What the attorney general of the republic did not say at the time was that the president's private secretary was interrogated for seven hours by the directors of the UEDO and the FEADS, the two units in charge of the battle against drugs. That is a long time for a meeting that should have been no more than a formality, since the police cannot hold a major figure for that long unless it has a solid case. The substance of the interrogation has been kept completely confidential. On 2 June 1999, The New York Times published a lengthy front-page article that gave renewed life to the scandal. Its author, Tim Golden, was at the time the journalist with the best connections in counter-drug circles in the United States and Mexico. For years he spent time with the attorney general of the republic and his aides, Mariano Herran Salvatti and Samuel Gonzalez Ruiz. He was, of course, in constant contact with the DEA. In his article Tim Golden described in detail the progress of the DEA investigations, reported on the substance of the testimony, and revealed that Janet Reno, the US attormey general, and the DEA did not entirely share the Mexican Government's conclusions about the case. What is more, they told the Mexican Government as much and were pleased when President Zedillo did not appoint his private secretary to the post of interior secretary, as they had feared he would. Los Pinos and the PGR had nothing to say about the substance of the article. They did not deny the information that Golden presented. Mexico's foreign relations secretary merely accused "certain sectors" of trying to sabotage Mexican-US relations. The "shelving" of the Liebano Saenz case prompts a multitude of questions. Jorge Madrazo, the attorney general of the republic, told Tim Golden in September 1998 that he regarded one of the witnesses accusing the president's secretary as among the PGR's best informants. In another interview six months later, after the Saenz case had been closed, he described the same informant as "a guy with psychiatric problems." "His information is totally false," he told Golden at that point. Not much bothered by the contradiction, a year later the PGR again extracted from its files the testimony of the same informant, Jose Jaime Olvera Olvera, Amado Carrillo's former driver, to try and shed some light on the odd relationship that a famous TV announcer whom traffickers had murdered had developed with The Lord of the Heavens. And the Judge Advocate General's Office used Olvera as one of its main witnesses against Generals Acosta and Quiros. Another question: Did the police investigate the presidential adviser's past? In 1989 and 1990, Jose Liebano Saenz was the director of operations at Mexico's Customs Service. Back then, the general manager of Customs was Enrique Guinea, a man whom the counter-drug chief who is still guiding us through the labyrinth of the Mexican drug State described as the "dark side of Raul Salinas de Gortari, the man who did his dirty work." Our expert had no doubt that Guinea played a decisive role in protecting the Gulf cartel. Another coincidence: a fellow named Arturo Ruiz worked for the Mexican Customs Service during those years; this is the same money launderer that the US Customs Service nabbed and who accused Liebano Saenz of wanting to recycle his ill-gotten gains. The suspicions about the regime undoubtedly influenced the outcome of the presidential election on 2 July 2000...The candidate whom the PRI chose was himself unable to avoid accusations. - --- MAP posted-by: Don Beck