New Bosses Taking Over Cocaine Traffic : Mexico: With many ‘Desperados’ in prison or dead, drug agents shift their sights in the effort to curb the flow from South America to U.S.

When nine mutilated bodies of relatives and employees of jailed drug lord Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo turned up near a highway in Guerrero state last fall, Mexican officials faced two ugly facts: Despite his imprisonment, the onetime godfather of cocaine trafficking was still a power, and someone was challenging his power in a big way.

Officials first suspected that the killings were the personal revenge of Hector Luis (El Guero) Palma, a notoriously violent trafficker who had blamed Felix Gallardo for the 1989 murders of his wife and two small children.

But as police looked deeper into the Guerrero killings, they discovered several safehouses that belonged, it turned out, not to Palma, but to Joaquin (El Chapo) Guzman. Palma, they discovered, had a senior partner, and he was fighting to take over Felix Gallardo’s business. Two of Felix Gallardo’s lawyers and a half-brother who oversaw his investments were among the dead.

“Felix Gallardo’s in jail, Guzman is trying to cut him off at the roots,” a Mexican official said.

Today, Mexican officials place the 42-year-old Guzman among Mexico’s top traffickers, a small group of outlaws whose organizations move the majority of South American cocaine through Mexico to the United States. The coca plant from which cocaine is derived does not grow in Mexico, but U.S. officials estimate that the country is used to transship about 70% of the cocaine that is consumed in the United States.

Mexican mafias historically have divided up control of the country, but with the jailing of some mafia chiefs in recent years and the deaths of others, control is shifting to new traffickers or, in some cases, to a new generation of old trafficking families.

Of the so-called Desperados who were most powerful in the 1980s, Felix Gallardo, Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo are in prison. Honduran-born Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, who introduced Felix Gallardo to his Colombian sources, is in prison in the United States. Manuel (Cochi Loco) Salcido is dead.

Following the Guerrero murders, officials hunted Guzman and Palma, but they moved against Felix Gallardo, too, transferring him from Mexico City’s Southern Prison--where he had operated with cellular telephones, a fax machine and bodyguards--to a new high-security prison in Mexico state without office equipment.

They say that Felix Gallardo, once the principal cocaine supplier to the West Coast of the United States, is now an investment banker for traffickers, handling money-laundering and international relations, but moving less cocaine himself.

“He’s handling financial affairs,” said the Mexican official, who like most people interviewed for this story spoke on condition of anonymity. “He’s a Mexican banker to pay for Mexican services. He moves money between the United States and the Caribbean.”

Officials believe that Felix Gallardo has been weakened by the murders and the prison move because he apparently has not been able to avenge the deaths of his people.

Mexican police say Guzman is taking control of Felix Gallardo’s old territory in western Mexico, from Sinaloa to the western end of the U.S.-Mexico border. They describe him as discreet, preferring to cede the limelight to his green-eyed cohort Palma, who fancies cowboy boots made of exotic skins and travels with a host of bodyguards in heavy-duty Chevrolet Suburban wagons without license plates. While Palma, 38, has a reputation as one of the most violent traffickers on the loose, officials say Guzman is just as bad.

“He’s violent. He’s protected. And he doesn’t appear in public,” a Mexican official said. “He manages everything through front men. Nothing appears in his name.”

Yet, in recent months officials have confiscated an air-taxi firm and three jets, a construction company and six houses--four in Mexico City and two in Acapulco--that they say belong to Guzman.

The central border area is controlled by Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, a former federal police commander in his mid-40s who has been based in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. Aguilar’s organization, the so-called Juarez Cartel, had smuggled through Mexico the 21 tons of cocaine confiscated from a Sylmar, Calif., warehouse in 1989. At the time, U.S. and Mexican authorities believed that the cartel was run by Rafael and Eduardo Munoz Talavera, but since their arrest in 1991, Mexican officials have come to believe that Aguilar--Rafael Munoz Talavera’s brother-in-law--was the capo all along.

Unlike Guzman, Aguilar is outgoing, free-spending and flamboyant. A house that police confiscated from him in Acapulco had 20 suites, several salt-water and fresh-water swimming pools and a dock with two 60-foot yachts. At his daughter’s birthday party last February, entertainment was provided by his good friend, the popular Mexican singer Juan Gabriel.

The eastern border and Gulf region is run by Juan Garcia Abrego, a 30s nephew of jailed drug trafficker Juan N. Guerra. The dark, mustachioed Garcia Abrego has an affinity for Rolexes, airplanes and women, police say. “Garcia Abrego probably moves anything that goes through northeastern Mexico--or at least it’s cleared with him,” one U.S. source said. “That’s a big entry point.”

U.S. drug enforcement officials suspect that the trafficking business is slightly more diversified than Mexican officials believe. They say that with about 100 identified traffickers in Mexico, six groups move about two-thirds of the cocaine that passes through the country. And they say that while traffickers are territorial, the mafia chiefs also work together when it suits their business interests.

“Some are violent and stupid enough to fight over territory, but they are fluid, too,” said a U.S. source. “Even groups that go to war will cooperate and use common facilities. They operate on targets of opportunity.”

Under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, U.S. and Mexican officials have been working closely in the anti-drug war. The Mexican government has captured a record 195 tons of cocaine during this administration and jailed several of the big-time traffickers.

Yet, there has been no visible impact on the cocaine market in the United States. Supply and prices remain about the same, U.S. officials say.

And so does demand.

Corruption still plagues the drug war in Mexico. Clearly, traffickers could not operate without police, political and judicial protection. But U.S. officials hesitate to point the finger at the Salinas administration, which has been far more cooperative in anti-drug efforts than have previous ones.

Salinas has twice replaced his attorney general, who oversees anti-narcotics police, because of problems of police corruption and human rights abuses. This month he named his human rights czar, Jorge Carpizo MacGregor, to the post, and Carpizo has vowed a two-pronged battle against traffickers and human rights abuses.

U.S.-Mexican anti-drug efforts have pushed traffickers into changing their tactics to avoid capture. Formerly, most drug-laden aircraft landed directly in northern Mexico to facilitate crossings into the United States.

Since the United States and Mexico formed the Northern Border Response Force in 1990--Mexican police working with U.S. intelligence--most cocaine is delivered first to southern Mexico or Central America; the Central America shipments then are brought across the border in low-flying planes that can avoid radar detection, or else they are moved overland by truck.

Traffickers also are using more airdrops to ground crews, rather than risk landings and possible confiscation of their aircraft. And they are moving more cocaine by sea than before.

Police are uncertain as to who controls the southern deliveries, but they believe that the same mafia chiefs who control the north are expanding their empires.

“Traffickers have the minds of strategists, a global vision of their businesses,” said a university professor familiar with Mexican mafias. “They are like a transnational company, but with their own security force. Felix Gallardo was the first in Mexico to have the mind of a strategist, to control the business. He had the organizational ability and knew how to cover himself politically.”

But other traffickers have since learned. Guzman is said to have the kind of police and political protection that Felix Gallardo enjoyed in his heyday.

Active and former police officers were among the six people arrested for the killings of Felix Gallardo’s associates. Federal police found the cap of a Sinaloa state police officer in one of the vehicles used to kidnap the victims. In a Mexico City safehouse, they found bulletproof vests with the Federal Judicial Police insignia.

Police blame Guzman’s organization for the commando-style attack on a Puerto Vallarta discotheque last November that left six people dead and three wounded. At 2 a.m. on Nov. 8, about 40 heavily armed men surrounded the Cristine discotheque, cut the telephone lines and burst inside, shouting that they were police.

At one of the disco’s tables, they found the man they were looking for--Tijuana trafficker Javier Arellano Felix, who was vacationing in Puerto Vallarta--and opened fire with submachine guns. Arellano survived, but four of his men did not. Two of Guzman’s gunmen also died; the rest escaped.

The 14 federal judicial police based in Puerto Vallarta were not around that night--conveniently, some say. Their commander, Adolfo Mondragan Aguirre, was arrested on suspicion of protecting the traffickers, but a local judge released him.

Officials believe that Guzman is trying to move into Tijuana and the Baja California border area.

Juarez Cartel leader Aguilar also is said to have good police and political connections. The federal judicial police commander in Juarez was fired in June for allegedly providing him protection.

Federal police just missed capturing Aguilar during a June raid on one of his Juarez homes. The $3-million house has an 18-foot security wall and lookout stations; the electronic steel doors of its driveway could accommodate an 18-wheel truck.

Aguilar had the neighborhood blanketed with lookouts, who spotted police approaching and warned him in time for him to escape.

“Aguilar probably has a lot more people working for him than the police have working for them,” said Travis Kuykendall, special agent in charge of the DEA’s El Paso office, across the border from Juarez.

The government has seized several other houses, restaurants, hotels, aircraft and cattle belonging to Aguilar, who has been in hiding since the raid.

Since Aguilar went on the lam, officials have noticed more activity in Juarez by another big-time trafficker, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the nephew of jailed drug lord Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo. They are uncertain whether Carrillo works with Aguilar or is taking advantage of his troubles.

Also among the large-scale traffickers is the Guadalajara-based family of jailed drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, the reputed ringleader in the 1985 torture-murder of U.S. DEA agent Enrique S. Camarena.

The family business is run by Caro Quintero’s uncle, Emilio Quintero Payan, and his brother, Miguel Angel Caro Quintero, who was jailed last year but released by a judge. Their Colombian contact, Javier Pardo, was arrested in a separate Mexico City raid last year and is still in custody.

The Sonora-based trafficker Clemente Soto Pena is also thought to do a big business. In his 50s, Soto Pena is said to own “the largest 18-wheel trucking company in all of Mexico.”

Some officials consider him to be “a division” of Felix Gallardo’s operation, while others say he is independent, a powerful trafficker in his own right. Soto Pena also was arrested last year and released by a judge.

“He can put a thousand trucks on the road on any given day,” said a U.S. official. “Then you figure out which one has the 10 tons of coke.”