El Capo Quotes

El semanario reveló que en un cateo realizado a las propiedades de El Mexicano, las autoridades de Colombia encontraron un convenio por 60 millones de dólares que familiares del narcotraficante habrían pagado al gobierno de Estados Unidos a cambio de no ser involucrados en actividades ilícitas y mantener a salvo el resto del dinero del capo. La pregunta obligada es si Rodríguez Gacha realmente está muerto o fue el pago de su jubilación por los servicios prestados: dinero a cambio de impunidad y silencio.

—Si creyera en el amor... Tú serías la perfecta excusa para enamorarme.

Cuando el llamado Divo de Juárez estaba en uno de sus mejores momentos lo contrataron para una fiesta de Don Neto. Una muy especial. Eran los tiempos cuando en todas partes sonaba su canción “Querida”, una de las más populares en su historia discográfica. “Querida, cada momento de mi vida, yo pienso en ti más cada día, mira mi soledad…” La fiesta fue en el rancho La Herradura ubicado por la carretera que conduce al Aeropuerto Internacional de Guadalajara, en el pueblo de Atequiza. El invitado de honor de Don Neto era el tristemente célebre colombiano Pablo Escobar. Uno de los acompañantes de Escobar que tenía la confianza para jugarle bromas pesadas se acercó a Juan Gabriel y le ofreció un millón de dólares si le daba un beso al capo colombiano. —No, me va a matar —respondió temeroso el Divo. —No te mata. —No me vas a dar el dinero. —Sí te lo doy. El cantante, seguramente más por intimidación que por dinero, fue y sorpresivamente le plantó un beso en los labios a Escobar. Lira vio la escena con los ojos abiertos como plato, estupefacto. Instantáneamente Escobar sacó su pistola, Don Neto también. El compañero de Escobar se levantó de inmediato y le explicó que era una broma orquestada por él. Don Neto soltó la carcajada, a Escobar no le causó ninguna gracia, pero tuvo que aguantar y también rio para no sentirse más ridículo. Juan Gabriel ya no continuó el show y se esfumó antes de que Escobar cambiara de opinión.

More such deals are likely to mark the future of the Mexican Drug War. Bargains could be waiting for other Mexican traffickers wanted in the United States, such as Benjamin Arellano Félix or Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, or—if he is ever caught—even Chapo Guzmán himself. This system has some obvious flaws. When major criminals make deals to get out early, it can be seen as a bad example. It is not such a deterrent when a criminal career ends with the villain dating beautiful soap-opera stars. A long list of drug traffickers have ended up as celebrities. Asset seizure is also controversial. American agents get to spend dirty drug dollars. They say they are making money for Uncle Sam, but then again, they are also paradoxically reaping the benefits of cocaine and heroin being sold. When agents make money busting traffickers, there is an added incentive to sustain the whole war on drugs. Nevertheless, once these capos have been extradited and made deals, they are truly out of the game. The greater good, agents argue, is to use them to nail more crooks. That is the central imperative of drug warriors: keep seizing, keep arresting.

But the dynamics of Mexican cartels have also developed in distinct ways from Colombia. Mexico has seven major cartels—Sinaloa, Juárez, Tijuana, La Familia, Beltrán Leyva, the Gulf, and the Zetas—so it is hard to decapitate them all at once. When leaders such as Osiel Cárdenas are taken out, their organizations have only become more violent, as rival lieutenants fight to become top dog. Groups such as the Zetas and Familia have also become powerful because of their brand names rather than the reputation of their capos. Even if Zetas leader Heriberto Lazcano, the Executioner, is arrested, the Zetas will likely continue as a fearsome militia. Whether the cartels will get weaker or not, everybody agrees that Mexico needs to clean up its police to move forward. Different corrupt cops firing at each other and working for rival capos is nobody’s vision of progress. Such police reform is of course easier said than done. Mexican presidents have talked about it for years, going through numerous cleanups and reorganization of forces, only to create new rotten units. A central problem is the sheer number of different agencies. Mexico has several federal law enforcement departments, thirty-one state authorities, and 2,438 municipal police forces. However, in October 2010, Calderón sent a bill to be approved by Congress that could make a real difference to the police. His controversial proposal was to absorb all Mexico’s numerous police forces into one unified authority like the Colombians have. It is a colossal reform with a huge amount of technical problems. But such a reform could be a key factor in pulling Mexico away from the brink. Even if drugs are eventually legalized, a single police force would be a better mechanism to fight other elements of organized crime, such as kidnapping. The approach has many critics. Some argue it would only streamline corruption. But even that would be a better thing for peace. At least corrupt cops could be on the same side instead of actively gunning each other down. Others argue an all-powerful force would be authoritarian. Maybe. But any such force would still be controlled by democratic government. The spiderweb of different police forces only worked because one party ran everything. In democracy, this arrangement needs reform. If a crucial cause of the breakdown in Mexico has been the fragmentation of government power, then a way forward could be to unify its police under one command. Some of the fundamental problems and core solutions lie in Mexico’s institutions.

The export of cartel power into the USA is a sensitive issue. The discussion about Mexican cartels’ northward push gets pulled, often unfairly, into the flaming American immigration debate. The anti-immigrant brigade talk about Mexican laborers as an invading army; and they see all undocumented workers as potential cartel emissaries, using migrant communities to hide undercover ops. The Mexican Drug War, they say, is a reason to militarize the border. Residents of border states vex about the danger of spillover. If thugs are decapitating in Juárez, they fret, how long before they cut off heads in El Paso? Is the Mexican disease contagious? Down in Mexico, the argument is reversed. A common complaint by politicians and journalists is that there aren’t enough arrests of big players in El Norte. Why haven’t we heard of the capos in the United States? they ask. How come some Mexican fugitives live unharmed north of the border? Why has Mexico been goaded into a drug war while narcotics move freely around the fifty states of the union?

Evidence of police working for the insurgent Zetas was startling, but would soon become depressingly typical in Mexico. Time and time again, federal troops rolled into cities and accused local police of being deeply entwined with gangsters. Officers no longer just turned a blind eye on smuggling, but worked as kidnappers and assassins in their own right, a grave fragmentation of the state. To aggravate this problem, many federal officers were also found working for gangsters, normally different factions of the Sinaloa Cartel. So as federal troops rounded up Zetas, observers asked whom they were serving: the public or Sinaloan capos? These revelations underline a central problem in the Mexican Drug War. The PRI years featured a delicate dance of corruption; in the democratic years, it turned to a corrupt dance of death. In the old days, police officers were rotten, but at least they worked together. In democracy, police work for competing mafias and actively fight each other. Gangsters target both good police who get in their way and bad police who work for their rivals. For policy makers it becomes a Gordian knot. Added to this thorny issue of corruption is a more fundamental problem of drug-law enforcement. Every time you arrest one trafficker, you are helping his rival. In this way, when the federal police stormed Zetas safe houses, they were scoring victories for Sinaloans, whether they liked it or not. Arrests did not subdue violence, but only inflamed it.

Instead of hiding bodies in mass graves, corpses were triumphantly displayed, as when the Jalisco New Generation (while still part of El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel) dumped the thirty-five bodies on an avenue in Veracruz in September 2011. In reply, the Zetas scattered twenty-six corpses in Jalisco and a dozen in Sinaloa. On closer inspection, the bodies were those of ordinary citizens, not criminals: they were workers and students who had been abducted and murdered and displayed in order to strike fear in the heart of anyone who doubted the murderous resolve of the Zetas... In To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War, John Gibler writes about a related series of bizarre and violent episodes that took place in Torreón, in Coahuila state, bordering Texas: “Who would believe, for example, that the warden of a state prison would let convicted killers out at night and loan them official vehicles, automatic assault rifles, and bulletproof vests, so that they could gun down scores of innocent people in a neighboring state and then quickly hop back over the state line and into prison, behind bars, a perfect alibi. Who would believe that a paramilitary drug-trafficking organization formed by ex−Special Forces of the Mexican Army would kidnap a local cop and torture him into confessing all of the above details about the prisoners’ death squad, videotape the confession, execute the cop on camera with a shot to the heart, and then post the video on YouTube? Who could fathom that the federal attorney general would, within hours of the video-taped confession and execution being posted online, arrest the warden, and then a few days later hold a press conference fully acknowledging that the prisoners’ death squad had operated for months, killing ten people in a bar in January 2010, eight people in a bar in May 2010, and seventeen people at a birthday party in July?” Yet all of this actually happened. During April 2012, when El Chapo was at war with the Zetas, fourteen torsos — armless and legless bodies — were found in a car by the side of the road in Nuevo Laredo. Dead Zetas. Some of the torsos were in the trunk, for which there is a specific narco term: encajuelado (“trunked”; therefore, trunks trunked). Soon after, in Michoacán state, the Zetas met their match in the person of Nazario Moreno (called El Más Loco, the Craziest One), leader of the ruthless Templarios, the Knights Templar cartel, whose recruits were required to eat human flesh—their victims’— as part of their initiation rites. When Moreno was gunned down by the Mexican army in 2014, the Zetas flourished, and remain dominant. But there was a posthumous bonus for the Craziest One: he was promoted to sainthood. In and around his birthplace in Apatzingán, shrines and altars were erected to Saint Nazario, the dead capo represented as a holy figure in robes, venerated by credulous Michoacanos.

Ahora que lo pienso, se dijo, Castillo tenía razón: uno no puede pasarse la vida imitando la mala literatura. La mala literatura, explicaba Castillo, es un pantano del que no se puede salir si se ha caído en él a profundidad. Pero de golpe se le acrecentó el afecto hacia Turi Giuliano: nadie le ha devuelto una imagen de sí mismo tan humana como ese personaje

Contener la expansión del crimen organizado no se menciona siquiera como uno de los temas centrales de su agenda política. No lo hizo en su toma de protesta en el Zócalo, ni en su informe a un año de las elecciones, ni cuando presentó sus 50 puntos de austeridad y anticorrupción. Ha dicho, en cambio, que “no se han detenido a capos porque no es ésa nuestra estrategia. Ya no es la intención armar operativos contra capos, lo que queremos es reducir la inseguridad atendiendo las causas”.

En el queto vivíamos rodeados de alambras de púas... [...] En un banco frente a nuestro edificio estaban sentados un chico y una chica, y se besaban. A su alrededor no había más que masacres y fusilamientos. [...] En el otro extremo de nuestra calle, era una calle pequeña, apareció una patrulla alemana. También lo vieron todo, tenían un capo de visión perfecto. No me dio tiempo de comprender nada... Claro que no tuve... Un grito. Un gran estruendo. Unos disparos... Yo.., me quedé en blanco... El primer sentimiento fue de terror. Solo vi que el chico y la chica se levantaron y al instante estaban cayendo. [...] Querían morir así... Sabían que de todos modos morirían en el gueto y prefirieron morir de otra manera. Claro que era amor. [...] Estoy convencida de que fue su elección.