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

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

From hundreds of pages of top-secret U.S. and Mexican intelligence documents and interviews with dozens of current and former lawmen and informants on both sides of the Southwest border, Insight has pieced together an exclusive profile of the highly clandestine Juarez cartel. It is the story of Carillo himself and of one of the cartel's five main families, the Zaragoza Fuentes family of El Paso and Juarez, who allegedly transport drugs and launder money for the Lord of Heaven and who alone control a byzantine network of hundreds of real and sham companies stretching from Mexico City and Guadalajara to New York and the Bahamas.

What emerges from informed law-enforcement sources and intelligence reports is a ruthless trafficking organization that has managed to enmesh itself insidiously with the post-North American Free Trade Agreement economies of the southern states of America and the northern states of Mexico. "To appreciate the cartel's scale you should think of it as the criminal equivalent of General Motors," advises a DEA agent. "Juarez is a company town every bit as much as Detroit."

From Juarez the tentacles of the cartel stretch far and wide -- from the coca-producing countries to the south of Bolivia and Peru, through the cocaine-shipment nations of Colombia and Guatemala and then on up north to American cities such as Houston, Little Rock and Chicago and deep into Canada. The cartel's money-laundering network unwinds even further afield: Eastward, this time to hundreds of banks in the Bahamas, London, Frankfurt, Switzerland and Hong Kong, only to loop back to Juarez in the form of "clean" investment in some of the border maquilas and to Texas, New Mexico and other southern U.S. states, where Carillo and his lieutenants and associates are purchasing businesses and vast tracts of land. The extent of their "legitimate" business holdings is enormous. Civil associations, sports clubs, shopping malls, nightclubs, luxury hotels, restaurants and ranches all are included in the cartel's property portfolio.

Senior DEA agents even allege the Juarez traffickers wield ultimate behind-the-scenes ownership of one of Mexico's major private airlines, Taesa, which Insight can reveal is the focus of a secret Texas-based U.S. probe. Cartel associates, in this case the Zaragoza Fuentes family, run one of the world's largest propane gas import-and-export businesses, which during the 1980s inexplicably escaped punishment when it defied American embargo regulations and shipped Texas propane to Nicaragua, according to U.S. Customs database reports in the Treasury, Enforcement and Control System, or TECS. The Zaragoza Fuentes also are Mexico's main milk suppliers, and the current head of the clan, Tomas, has a major interest in at least one Texas bank.

For all of Mexico's top traffickers -- the Arellano Felixes in Tijuana, the Meraz family in San Luis, the Quinteros of Mexicali, the Amezcua of Guadalajara and the Esparragoza-Moreno organization -- the last four years have been boom time. From being diligent junior partners of Colombia's Cali and Medellin cartels they have emerged as the Western Hemisphere's undisputed drug kingpins, and in passing have brought Mexico to the very brink of becoming a narcostate. But it is Carillo's network that has benefited the most. Much of the Lord of Heaven's present success is a harvest of the past. The Juarez cartel is no new underworld growth. It has been rooting itself in the Mexican state of Chihuahua and in the northern towns of Hermosillo, Torreon and Durango since 1980 when it was formed by legendary marijuana-smugglers Rafael Aguilar Fajardo and Baldomero Fuentes Garcia. In 1987, the Juarez traffickers branched out into the even more lucrative cocaine trade. Only then did the Mexican attorney general's office, or PGR, start paying them much heed.