Alleged Drug Lord’s Arrest to Bring More Violence, Not Fewer Drugs

In the days since the dramatic arrest and expulsion of North America’s most-wanted accused drug trafficker, Juan Garcia Abrego, just 15 pounds of cocaine have been confiscated throughout Mexico.

Two days after Garcia Abrego’s capture by 15 drug agents outside Monterrey, 50 heavily armed officers tried to capture a wanted mid-level drug dealer inside the city. But the dealer escaped in a blizzard of gunfire.

And just 72 hours after Garcia Abrego’s arrest, which U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno called “a breakthrough in the struggle to disrupt and dismantle a major drug-trafficking organization,” an unknown gunman strolled into a Monterrey cafe and executed a lawyer with known ties to drug traffickers. He was dining with the state’s chief of police at the time.

Analysts, academics and counter-narcotics officials say there is a flip side to the arrest of the first alleged drug dealer ever on the FBI’s most-wanted list: Capturing the leaders of Mexico’s drug mafias has little impact on the multibillion-dollar flow of South American cocaine onto the streets of America.

In fact, they say, it fuels drug-related violence as rival mafias fight for the territory of the leaderless cartel. And it strengthens one or more of the established drug gangs, which simply expand their operations into what one Mexican prosecutor this week called “the vacuum of power Garcia Abrego’s arrest has left behind.”

“These kinds of actions don’t stop the cocaine flow,” concluded Celia Toro, a professor at Mexico City’s Colegio de Mexico who specializes in counter-narcotics policy. “It causes a new fight for territory. You will see more violence, I’m absolutely sure. You will see more violence against the police and between the traffickers.”

Garcia Abrego was charged in Houston on Wednesday with smuggling tens of thousands of pounds of cocaine into the United States every year. Many in Mexico view his capture as a political victory for President Ernesto Zedillo, who has publicly declared war on the cartels that supply up to three-fourths of the cocaine in America.

But as political analyst Sergio Sarmiento put it Friday: “Winning the war against narcotics traffickers is very different from winning the war against narcotics trafficking. . . . The arrest of the nation’s principal drug barons, in fact, could bring exactly the opposite result.”

Already last year, U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials had concluded that Garcia Abrego--on the run from the law and with his organization in disarray--had by default ceded much of his alleged multibillion-dollar enterprise to a rival, Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

Carrillo, known here as “Lord of the Skies” because of his impressive fleet of smuggling planes, emerged months ago from his base in the gritty border town of Ciudad Juarez as Mexico’s top narcotics boss, the officials said. In a single weekend in November, U.S. officials said, Carrillo’s organization imported up to 20 tons of South American cocaine destined for the U.S. in two clandestine cargo-jet shipments.

Garcia Abrego’s arrest and deportation “will raise [Carrillo’s] profile for a while--perhaps make him a little nervous,” said Peter Lupsha, a University of New Mexico professor who has studied Mexican cartels. “But at the same time, it opens up lots of territory for him. . . . Someone has to fill the gap.”

As for the impact on the flow of cocaine, marijuana and heroin across America’s southern border, Lupsha agreed: “I don’t expect any in the long term.”

He added that, in recent years, as U.S. prosecutors arrested, tried and convicted more than 60 members of Garcia Abrego’s Gulf of Mexico cartel in more than a dozen federal trials, “Garcia Abrego’s market share was shrinking. Amado [Carrillo] is really the premier drug trafficker. . . . There could be small dislocations in the short term, especially in the Houston area, but everything will be back to normal in a few months.”

Among the reasons: a cash flow huge enough to have corrupted many of the officials responsible for policing the drug flow on both sides of the border.

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Moises Moreno Hernandez, an analyst in the counter-narcotics unit under Mexican Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano, estimated that the illicit drug trade generated about $30 billion in Mexico alone in 1994 and that the cartels’ profits are growing exponentially.

“One must emphasize that the advance of organized crime is related to the corruption in Mexico’s public security forces,” Moreno said in a recent speech assessing the reasons for the growth of the cartels at the same time the government is cracking down on their leaders.

“The institutions in charge of combating this organized crime suffer from . . . the lack of specialization, administrative inefficiency, impunity, the lack of professionalization, corruption and the absence of coordination and a national information system.”

Garcia Abrego’s organization is emblematic of that corruption.

According to testimony in the U.S. from some of his former lieutenants now serving time in federal prison, Garcia Abrego handed out millions of dollars to buy protection in Mexico and the U.S.

One former cartel member--a cousin of Garcia Abrego--told U.S. prosecutors the bribe money sometimes totaled $50 million a month. Documents filed in U.S. District Court show the alleged cartel chief even bribed an FBI agent posing as a corrupt law-enforcement official in the undercover investigation that built the U.S. case against him.

Analysts say that, if Garcia Abrego--who struggled against his captors once he discovered they were sending him to the United States--cooperates with Mexican investigators probing corruption, the result could well be the greatest product of his arrest.

Even the government’s harshest critics gave Zedillo good political marks for going after Garcia Abrego despite his reported links to men who were high officials in the government of Zedillo’s predecessor, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

Politically, “this is a very important blow,” said Eduardo Valle, a former Mexican prosecutor who left for exile in the U.S. alleging that Garcia Abrego had bought off key members of Salinas’ cabinet. “And Zedillo did the right thing in deporting Garcia Abrego. If they attempted to try him in Mexico, every witness who testified against [him] would die; all the proof would disappear.”