It was an autumn day in Mexico City; dense, yellow smog hung in the thin mountain air, waiting for the afternoon rain to rinse it away. As always, the streets of the enormous metropolis were jam-packed with urban hipsters, foreign tourists, and children selling pineapples, mangoes, chewing gum. In one restaurant, a group of men ate, drank, and talked through most of the day. They wore clothes that marked them as coming from Mexico’s dusty frontier region, more than a thousand miles to the north. In their cowboy boots, blue jeans, and ten-gallon hats, they stuck out like Texas ranchers in Manhattan.
When another set of men came in, the waiters and busboys dove for cover. Automatic weapons were drawn, and fired,. After several minutes of carnage, seven men were dead and several more wounded. Mexico’s City’s tabloids feasted on the bloodbath for weeks. The police could only speculate what everyone in the restaurant already knew: The shootout was part of an escalating war between two of Mexico’s most powerful drug cartels.
One man walked out of that restaurant without a scratch: a man who has spent much of the last ten years traveling between Mexico and the U.S. via a series of aliases and forged documents, visiting Albuquerque, Houston, and Tucson to check on his multibillion-dollar business. He is known under various assumed identities in the most expensive restaurants and clothing stores on both sides of the border. In the Sierra Madre mountains where he was born, 200 miles south of El Paso, Texas, in the town of Huerta de los Carrillo, he is known as a saint. He has brought the poor ranching village an airport, a medical clinic, and school supplies, IN Ciudad Juarez, his corporate headquarters, he is known as "Lord of the Heavens," for his fleet of 727 and DC-3 jets that fly in cocaine directly from Colombia and Bolivia.
On that November day in 1993, the Guadalajara gang members who burst into that Mexico City
restaurantmade a fatal mistake. They failed to kill Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the most wanted drug lord on both sides of theborder. Then again, the way some people talk about Carrillo it’s no wonder the hitmen missed him. He almost seems able to move around invisibly, like aspecter. No law-enforcement agency has reported seeing him in almost adecade.
When you drive over the cement canal that carries the Rio Grande between El Paso and Juarez, the image that sticks in your mind is not the dirty trickle of river beneath you but the barbed wire on both sides. A corridor of barbed wire, steel walls, and desolate wasteland stretches for almost 2,000 miles from San Diego to Brownsville, Texas, separating the southwestern U.S. from Mexico. If the U.S. government can do little to stop the flow of illegal immigrants across the this border, so far it can do almost nothing to stop the torrent of cocaine, heroin, speed and pot.
In fact, the rise of the cartels has thrown Mexico into chaos, and even threatens its existence as a civil society. With every passing month, Mexico is developing into a narco-democracy where the drug cartels wield increasing control over the banking, judicial and political institutions. Ordinary citizens, and especially the 12 million Indians, are no longer part of the day-to-day concerns of the state.
Many Mexicans fear that if their government cannot control the rising violence and increasing flow of drugs, especially along the American border, then the U.S. military will intervene. Recently the U.S. gave Mexican authorities 73 helicopters for antidrug operations; perhaps the underlying message was, Take care of your problem, or we will. Reactionaries like Pat Buchanan and Rep. Bob Dornan (R. Calif.) dream of building a Berlin
Wall along the south-western border, patrolled by an ultra-high-tech military force. For their part, Mexicans have never totally trusted their own military. They have to wonder what the army, facing guerrilla insurrections in Chiapas, Guerrero, and other southern states, might do with this new deadly hardware.
Carrillo’s Juarez organization alone is believed to gross some $200 million in drug money every week , a significant chunk of the annual U.S. drug trade, which is estimated at more than $100 billion. Seventy percent of the cocaine consumed in the U.S. comes across the Mexican border, along with a third of the heroin, 80 percent of the imported marijuana, and perhaps as many as the 24 billion doses of methamphetamine last year.
Almost all of these drugs are imported by what is called the Mexican Federation, a loose coalition of four major cartels based in Juarez, Sonora, Tijuana, and along the Gulf of Mexico. "The Mexican Federation makes previous organized-crime syndicates that operated in the U.S. look like school-children," says Thomas Constantine of the Drug Enforcement Agency. "They can rival legitimate governments for influence and control."
Although it’s cocaine that links Carrillo’s cartel-the largest of the four-to the most powerful international traffickers, perhaps his best profit ratio comes from the homegrown opium and marijuana harvested in the Sierra Madre, his home country. He buys drugs from numerous local bosses, who intimidate the Indians into planting and harvesting the crop.
It’s almost a textbook business model. Sierra Madre Indians generally don’t use drugs and often don’t even know what they are planting, so there is no product skimming. The weather is hot, making the region perfect for multiple crops. The local police force often moonlights as intimidation squads for the narcos. And best of all, while the cartel only serves as a high-priced transport company for Colombian coke, it controls all the marijuana and heroin grown in the narco-villages of the Sierra, from planting to processing to transportation, warehousing, and distribution in the United States.