Drugs Seep Into Texas Despite Kingpin’s Fall

Reflecting on last week’s guilty verdict against the drug lord who has both tantalized and terrorized this gritty border town, Virginia Castillo thought immediately of Norma Moreno.

Castillo and Moreno were reporters in Matamoros when Juan Garcia Abrego, a cookie-factory worker turned drug dealer, was building the foundation here for what became his multibillion-dollar smuggling cartel.

Outraged, Moreno, 24, wrote a series of crusading columns against members of the Garcia Abrego family, the budding drug trade and the corruption that both fostered and grew from it. After a particularly scathing column about Garcia Abrego’s uncle appeared, gunmen approached Moreno outside the newspaper office and shot her 17 times; then they shot the paper’s owner 10 times.

That was July 17, 1986.

On Friday, as Castillo thumbed through the yellowed clippings bearing Moreno’s last printed words, she shook her head: “No. I don’t think this verdict is sufficient justice. . . . And no, I don’t think it will change anything here.

“It’s not just Juan Garcia Abrego. He is guilty of many things. But there are still many others--in Mexico and in the United States.”

Two days after the verdict in Houston federal court that U.S. officials called “the final chapter” in Garcia Abrego’s rise and fall, Mexican and U.S. officials said the cross-border flow of illegal drugs is as enduring as Castillo’s painful memories in the town that was Abrego’s imperial seat.

A U.S. Border Patrol supervisor in Brownsville, Texas, just across the international bridge from Matamoros, told reporters Thursday that trafficking in illegal immigrants is down locally but that the drug trade is still booming. On average, more than half a ton of marijuana is confiscated along the 50-mile-wide stretch of border in and near Matamoros every month, federal authorities say. But they estimate that they seize only 10% of the illegal drugs coming through, a figure unchanged from before Garcia Abrego’s arrest.

The same day Garcia Abrego was convicted on 22 counts of using bribes and brutality to smuggle more than $1 billion worth of cocaine and marijuana into the United States between 1980 and 1996, an American police officer testified in another trial in Texas that as recently as this year, one U.S. Border Patrol agent took more than $1 million in bribes to protect Mexican drug shipments.

“Drug trafficking is continuing here as before,” said Gustavo Amador, a senior Matamoros police officer.

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And the drug-related death toll here has taken a worrisome jump, recalling the days in 1991 when scores of people were killed in a war between Garcia Abrego and his rivals. Within days of Mexico’s dramatic January arrest and extradition of Garcia Abrego, the first accused drug baron ever placed on the FBI’s most-wanted list, police found two men in an abandoned car, handcuffed and shot through the head--a characteristic, authorities said, of drug hits.

In the months since, a Garcia Abrego bodyguard and another member of his Gulf cartel have been gunned down in assassinations that police suspect were part of the latest battle for control of this strategic area. North of the border, at least eight corpses have turned up during the last six months in and near the sleepy town of Brownsville. All of the victims had been tortured and shot in the head, with metal wire tying their hands.

“They have this uncanny ability to regroup,” Don Ferrarone, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s chief for Texas, said of the Mexican cartels. His agency estimates that those organizations still supply up to three-fourths of the cocaine sold in the United States.

Ferrarone and Mexican drug experts said much of Garcia Abrego’s turf has been absorbed by Amado Carrillo Fuentes, whose powerful Juarez cartel operates from the border city of Ciudad Juarez about 700 miles northwest of here. Carrillo and the Tijuana-based Arellano Felix brothers, whom officials have accused of recently murdering two Mexican drug agents as part of a fierce assault on the government, now dominate the entire border through a loose-knit “federation,” authorities said.

Meanwhile, Garcia Abrego’s name and reputation endure in Matamoros. The troubadours in Plaza Allende in the heart of this poor town still celebrate the organization and its leader in song: A “narco-ballad” called “The Soapy Fish” is still among the top requests, the performers say. The song glorifies the life of a renegade drug kingpin so elusive that “it would be easier to catch a soapy fish.”

Nearby, at a protest rally outside City Hall a day after the Garcia Abrego verdict, critics described the state of their city with a single word: “anarchy.” Police--short on resources and responsible for a population of more than 300,000--concede they’re outgunned by the drug gangs. Few drug-related murders are solved. And many residents decline even to publicly discuss Garcia Abrego or the drug trade for fear of retribution.

Reaction to the drug lord’s conviction was mixed here, where some families have been destroyed by the drug trade and others have come to depend on it.

“Some people here were happy, because [they believe] he killed their relatives,” said Amador. “But other people were sad, because they’re afraid it could mean the big money will stop flowing.”

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Adelina Ramirez’s son Albert, 18, disappeared without a trace after he was kidnapped in 1989 in Brownsville. Ramirez, who in February won a $6-million wrongful-death judgment against Garcia Abrego in Texas in connection with Albert’s disappearance, said she was happy about last week’s verdict. “But we still don’t know about our son,” she said.

Matamoros was a natural base for Garcia Abrego, a U.S. citizen whose papers show his birthplace as the nearby Texas town of La Paloma. Matamoros is wedged against the southern tip of Texas and beside the Rio Grande, on what traditionally has been one of the most porous smuggling routes between Mexico and the United States.

The route was forged with hooch during Prohibition by the drug lord’s uncle, Juan N. Guerra, witnesses against Garcia Abrego have testified. The witnesses stated that Garcia Abrego--who was first arrested on U.S. soil in 1972 for car theft--used the route for marijuana as he started his empire in the late 1970s.

Officials say that in the mid-1980s, when intensified U.S. patrols interrupted the Colombian cartels’ cocaine shipments to southern Florida, Garcia Abrego pioneered ties to the cocaine producers, who gave the Mexican cartels up to 50% of each shipment in exchange for their transporting it by land into the United States.

“He went from being a car thief in 1972 to being one of the biggest drug dealers in the country,” a senior FBI agent said of Garcia Abrego. The Houston jury determined that he had amassed illegal wealth of at least $350 million in the United States alone.

Basic economics drove many in Matamoros, where the minimum wage is about a tenth of what it is in the United States, into a drug-smuggling industry that Mexican investigators say generated $30 billion in profit in Mexico last year. And Garcia Abrego had even more available manpower after Mexico’s economy plunged into crisis nearly two years ago, say church officials, local police and others.

“Because of the crisis, there are now many people here who have dedicated their lives to the drug trade,” explained Armando Gutierrez of Matamoros’ most popular radio station, XEWS, who, echoing the troubadours, said “The Soapy Fish” is the most popular request in town.

“These are young people who have no options. . . . They want to become heroes--like Juan Garcia Abrego. . . . For some, yes, he was a hero. The people with little education, they were excited by the fact that he made so much money and nobody could catch him. Others, no. Because they know how much damage drugs can do.”

Local police have long felt helpless against the Gulf cartel’s firepower, brutality and riches.

“We don’t even have bulletproof vests,” Amador said during an interview some months ago. “All we have are .38-caliber [pistols]. We don’t have rifles. We don’t even have [enough] patrol cars.”

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On Friday, the police fleet grew by 25% when neighboring Brownsville donated seven used patrol cars to the force. Alarmed by the drug violence on its border, the Texas town also gave the Matamoros police 70 bulletproof vests and 120 rifles and shotguns.

But Garcia Abrego’s organization operated with impunity in and around Matamoros largely because it paid tens of millions of dollars in bribes to officials on both sides of the border, witnesses have testified. Along with the continuing drug crime, said Matamoros’ deputy police commander, Jose Manuel Meguizo, the town has suffered from an enduring fear.

“I don’t want to say anything,” he added, when asked his opinion of the Garcia Abrego case. Echoing the sentiments of many residents, he added: “He has people inside and outside [prison]. It’s not that I respect him. I just don’t want any problems.”