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The Hunt for El Chapo [1]
['Condé Nast', 'Patrick Radden Keefe']
Date: 2014-05-05
Guzmán was gruff but respectful with his captors. He had been planning to leave for the mountains that day, he told them. If the marines had arrived just a few hours later, he would have been gone. “I can’t believe you got me,” he said.
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At eleven-forty-two that morning, Peña Nieto announced the capture on Twitter: “I acknowledge the work of the security agencies of the Mexican state in pulling off the apprehension of Joaquín Guzmán Loera in Mazatlán.” U.S. officials had already leaked the news to the Associated Press, but Peña Nieto wanted to be certain that his troops had the right man. In the summer of 2012, Mexican authorities announced that they had captured Guzmán’s son Alfredo, and held a press conference in which they paraded before the cameras a sullen, pudgy young man in a red polo shirt. A lawyer representing the man then revealed that he was not Guzmán’s son but a local car dealer named Félix Beltrán. Guzmán’s family chimed in, with barely suppressed glee, that the young man in custody was not Alfredo. In another recent case, officials in Michoacán announced that they had killed the infamous kingpin Nazario Moreno, a triumph that was somewhat undercut by the fact that Moreno—who was known as El Más Loco, or the Craziest One—had supposedly perished in a showdown with government forces in 2010. (D.E.A. agents now joke that El Más Loco is the only Mexican kingpin to have died twice.)
Fingerprints and a DNA swab confirmed that the man captured at the Miramar was indeed Guzmán. It was a huge victory for Peña Nieto and for the D.E.A., if largely a symbolic one. Nobody had any illusions that the arrest would slow down the drug trade. “If you kill the C.E.O. of General Motors, General Motors will not go out of business,” a Mexican official told me. Guzmán’s genius was always architectural, and the infrastructure that he created will almost certainly survive him. Earlier this month, five weeks after Guzmán’s apprehension, two new drug tunnels were discovered in Sinaloa territory, starting in Tijuana and emerging in the industrial outskirts of San Diego. Some believe that, even before Guzmán’s capture, his role in the organization had become largely symbolic. “He was a non-executive chairman,” Ambassador Mora told me. “An emblematic figure.”
Even so, the arrest signified a powerful reassertion of the rule of law in Mexico. Alejandro Hope, a former senior official in Mexican intelligence, told me that the message of Operation Gargoyle is simple and resounding: “No one is beyond sanction.” Yet, almost as soon as Peña Nieto’s government took Guzmán into custody, questions arose about its ability to hold him. According to a memo sent to Attorney General Eric Holder a few hours after the Mazatlán raid, Guzmán is the subject of indictments in Arizona, California, Texas, Illinois, New York, Florida, and New Hampshire. The morning after his capture, Michael McCaul, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Homeland Security committee, announced that Guzmán should be extradited to America, telling ABC, “There is a history here—he escaped from a prison in 2001.” A federal prosecutor in New York declared that Guzmán should be tried in New York. The head of the D.E.A. office in Chicago vowed, “I fully intend for us to have him tried here.” But Mexico’s attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, was quick to object. Guzmán still needed to complete his original twenty-year sentence, and then face multiple new charges, before the Mexican government would consider turning him over to the U.S. Earlier this month, he announced that Mexico has “no intention” of extraditing Guzmán, citing a concern that other Mexican officials raised with me: that American authorities might flip Guzmán and grant him a reduced sentence, in exchange for his coöperation. The U.S. has a history of “reaching deals with criminals,” Karam noted. The opposition to extradition, however, could be driven by less noble concerns: flipping Guzmán might provide the American government with evidence against top Mexican officials.
In a story that aired on the Televisa network, the Mexican journalist Carlos Loret de Mola reported that, during the flight from Mazatlán to Mexico City, Guzmán told the marines that he had killed between two and three thousand people. If this figure includes not just individuals he murdered personally but people he authorized subordinates to kill, it is surely a gross underestimate. Nobody knows exactly how many people have been killed in Mexico’s drug wars over the past decade, but between the dead and the disappeared the number likely exceeds eighty thousand. As both the instigator and the victor of some of the bloodiest battles on the border, Guzmán bears responsibility for an appalling proportion of these atrocities. His victims were overwhelmingly Mexican; one reason that the drug war has been so easy for most Americans to ignore is that very little of the violence visited upon Mexico has spilled into the U.S. During the years when Juárez was the most dangerous city on the planet—and a resident there had a greater statistical likelihood of being murdered than someone living in the war zones of Afghanistan or Iraq—El Paso, just across the border, was one of the safest cities in America. Given this record, it makes intuitive sense that Guzmán should answer for his crimes where the worst of them were committed.
But the Mexican officials I spoke with acknowledge that the criminal-justice system in their country is fragile, and that corruption remains endemic. Last summer, an old friend of Guzmán’s, Rafael Caro Quintero, was released in the middle of the night from the prison where he had been serving a forty-year sentence for murdering a D.E.A. agent. He was sprung on a technicality by a panel of Mexican judges, under circumstances that struck many observers as suspicious. The U.S. Justice Department furiously objected that Caro Quintero still faced charges in America and declared that the Mexicans should extradite him. But he had already disappeared into the mountains.
The prospect of a similar dead-of-night release for Chapo may not be far-fetched. The level of distrust between U.S. and Mexican officials on this issue is pronounced; indeed, one theory I heard for the Americans’ decision to leak the news of Guzmán’s capture to the Associated Press was that going public would foreclose any possibility of Mexican authorities quietly letting him go.
“Once bitten, twice shy,” Ambassador Mora told me, maintaining there was no possibility that his country would risk the political embarrassment of allowing its most notorious convict to escape a second time. But there are plausible scenarios short of actual escape that would be troubling. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, Caro Quintero continued to operate his drug business during his years in prison, much as Guzmán did while he was at Puente Grande. Guzmán is ostensibly being held “in isolation,” at Mexico’s most secure prison, Altiplano, about fifty miles west of Mexico City. He is permitted visits not just with his lawyer but also with members of his family, many of whom have been implicated in the activities of his cartel. Shortly after the arrest in Mazatlán, Guzmán’s son Alfredo lashed out on Twitter. “The Government is going to pay for this betrayal—it shouldn’t have bitten the hand that feeds it,” he wrote. “I just want to say that we are not beaten. The cartel is my father’s and will always be my father’s. GUZMÁN LOERA FOREVER.” His brother, Iván, vowed revenge: “Those dogs that dared to lay a hand on my father are going to pay.”
One curious feature of Guzmán’s capture was the fact that he was betrayed, in rapid succession, by at least two of his closest aides: Nariz and Picudo. Had either one refused to coöperate, Guzmán would likely remain free today. I was impressed, initially, by the speed with which the marines had elicited leads from these subordinates, both of them ex-members of Mexico’s special forces who had been hardened by years in the cartel. One U.S. law-enforcement official told me that it is not unusual for cartel members to start coöperating as soon as they are captured. “There’s very little allegiance once they’re taken into custody,” he said.
But when I raised the subject with a former D.E.A. agent who has spoken to Mexican counterparts involved in the operation, he had a different explanation. “The marines tortured these guys,” he told me, matter-of-factly. “They would never have given it up, if not for that.” The D.E.A. refused to comment on the torture allegation. However, two senior U.S. law-enforcement officials told me that, though they had no specific knowledge of the Mexican authorities using torture in the operation, they “wouldn’t be surprised.” Eduardo Sánchez, the spokesman for the Mexican government, denied the allegation, and maintained that, in this and other operations, “federal officials, agents, and officers perform their duties strictly within the applicable legal framework and with utmost respect for human rights.” But the Mexican armed forces have been implicated before in the use of torture as an interrogation technique in the pursuit of drug traffickers. A 2011 Human Rights Watch report found that members of Mexico’s security services “systematically use torture to obtain forced confessions and information about criminal groups,” and documented the use of such techniques as “beatings, asphyxiation with plastic bags, waterboarding, electric shocks, sexual torture, and death threats.” The broad employment of brutal techniques, coupled with the high profile and the urgency of the hunt for Guzmán, makes it seem all the more plausible that Mexican authorities used unsavory, and illegal, means to pursue him.
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What will become of the Sinaloa cartel remains unclear. Chapo’s top associates, Ismael Zambada and Juan José Esparragoza, are both older than he is, and seem unlikely to assume day-to-day management. Guzmán’s sons would appear to be candidates, but, as the coddled children of a wealthy trafficker, they may be more enamored of the narco life style than of the business itself. “The drug trade is one of the few really meritocratic sectors in the Mexican economy,” Alejandro Hope said. “Being the son of Chapo Guzmán doesn’t necessarily guarantee you’ll be his successor.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/05/the-hunt-for-el-chapo
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