U.S. drug warriors knock on heaven's door

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 21, 1997 | by Jamie Dettmer

An estimated $200 million a week in illicit-drug profits are being turned into NAFTA-related businesses on the U.S.-Mexico border by the world's most vicious narcotraffickers. While American lawmakers continue to pressure President Clinton to take the fight to Mexican drug cartels, Insight unmasks the criminal syndicate corrupting authorities on both sides of the Rio Grande.

Most tourist guidebooks about Mexico don't even mention the border city of Juarez. The few that do are scathing. "There's little doubt that the best thing to do on arriving in Ciudad Juarez is to leave," remarks one travel guide. Wise advice indeed. Originally a small settlement on the Santa Fe trail known as Paso del Norte, Juarez is Mexico's fourth-largest city but has few claims to historical fame and no architectural charm. Sprawling and ugly and dwarfing its cheek-by-jowl American neighbor El Paso, Juarez has a reputation for danger that is fully deserved.

Even hardened border Americans who flock to the Mexican city on weekends for the cheap booze and whores treat Juarez with caution: They party in the bars and brothels of the squalid main drag but steer clear of the dimly lit downtown side streets -- the preserve of los pandillas, vicious street gangs responsible for a couple of hundred murders every year.

Gang violence is but a stitch or two in the menace woven deeply into the city's fabric, for Juarez also enjoys two booming export economies. On the outskirts 350 mainly U.S.-owned modern factories, or maquilas, churn out electronic appliances and furniture for a consumption-hungry America. The other economy also pumps out products purchased north of the Rio Grande, but it remains mostly hidden, and inquiry by strangers can lead to barbaric violence and mysterious disappearances.

For Juarez is the town of the "Lord of Heaven," Amado Carillo Fuentes, the top Mexican narcotrafficker whose capture has become a major priority for a Clinton administration under intense congressional pressure to stop the flood of Mexican drugs into the United States. From mansions in the upmarket Juarez district of Condesa, Carillo oversees an international crime empire that employs thousands and is bigger and more powerful than even the Colombian narcoenterprises of the late 1980s. Last month on Capitol Hill, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA, head Tom Constantine described the Carillo Fuentes network as "staggering" and warned that the 41-year-old godfather is "attempting to consolidate control over drug trafficking along the entire Mexican northern border." Every week, the Juarez cartel generates an estimated $200 million in profit -- the ill-gotten reward for annually spiriting 100 tons of cocaine and large shipments of heroin and methamphetamines across the Southwest border.

Since April 1993 when he succeeded to the leadership of the Juarez cartel through "the evolution of violence," to quote a veteran U.S. lawman, Carillo and his cohorts have made El Paso's neighboring city their own in much the same way Colombian drug baron Pablo Escobar ruled Medellin as a personal fiefdom -- local Juarez newspapers don't write about him and police chiefs don't dare arrest him. "He's insulated," says Phil Jordan, a former top DEA agent. And in February, the scope of Carillo's influence elsewhere in Mexico was dramatized starkly when Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, the Mexican drug czar, was revealed to be one of the Lord of Heaven's paid retainers -- a discovery that prompted outrage on Capitol Hill and led the House of Representatives to declare Mexico a delinquent ally in the war against drugs.

Despite being the DEA's public enemy No. 1, having been indicted in absentia on drug charges in Texas and Florida, Carillo seems to be so confident of his ability to stay one step ahead of American law enforcement that he continues to slip cockily across the border on periodic business trips and shopping sprees to Las Vegas, Dallas, Houston and Los Angeles, though with less frequency than before. And in Mexico, where he's wanted on a mere firearms violation, he operates with an impunity that flows from bribery and brutal intimidation -- from pesos and bullets.

The tale of Carillo's rise is for some US. drug warriors a story wrapped up in an enigma. The puzzle? Why has the Lord of Heaven -- he earned the nickname because of his large fleet of drug-smuggling airliners -- become the 1990s border version of Chicago's Al Capone in such short time? "I've seen him shoot from an acorn into a tree," remarks a recently retired senior DEA agent.

The other, more pressing, conundrums for DEA agents are how to take him down and why there isn't more political backing from Washington to launch an all-out special-operations bid to nail Fuentes and his associates. Texas-based DEA agents recently were so concerned about the Clinton administration's softly-softly approach to Mexico and drugs that they refrained from informing superiors in Washington of an explosive investigation they've mounted into alleged links between Carillo and luminaries of the ruling Mexican PRI party. The agents have targeted a former personal secretary of ax-President Carlos Salinas and former Mexican Transport Secretary Emilio Gambao Patron, who also is a member of the current Mexican administration. "Upstairs in Washington there's a real fear about rocking the boat with Mexico," says a senior DEA agent.