Turf War Crosses the Line

Parking lot attendant Juan Mayorquin was reaching for a tip when the shooting broke out.

In broad daylight at a shopping center where dozens of people were emerging from a movie theater, at least 10 assassins fired 500 large-caliber rounds at drug trafficker Rodolfo Carrillo Fuentes and his entourage Sept. 11.

Mayorquin was killed along with Carrillo Fuentes and his girlfriend.

“Juan didn’t deserve it. He was dedicated to making an honorable living, to making enough to keep our two daughters in school. And this happens,” said Mayorquin’s wife, Avelina, in shock days after the funeral.

The bloodshed has forced residents of Sinaloa state to confront once again the lawlessness that has taken root here.

There have been more than 3,000 drug-related killings in Sinaloa since early 1999. Criminals are often indistinguishable from police: One of Carrillo Fuentes’ bodyguards, wounded in the shooting, turned out to be a moonlighting state police commander.

Considered the cradle of Mexican drug cultivation and smuggling, Sinaloa has produced the majority of the nation’s big-name drug lords, including the Arellano Felix, Carrillo Fuentes and Caro Quintero clans and capos Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada. Violent squabbles over turf, women and business connections have been frequent.

But the brazen killing of a member of narco royalty amid afternoon moviegoers and shoppers seemed to push the savagery to a new level.

“We’re accustomed to the murders, one every day, if not more. But they used to happen out in the countryside, never right at home like this,” accountant Antonio Ramirez said as he and his three daughters inspected the bullet holes in the walls of the Cinepolis mall, now a lurid tourist attraction. “Where will the next one be? Who will get in the way?”

“This was not business as usual,” state Atty. Gen. Oscar Fidel Gonzalez said in an interview. “These surpassed what you might have considered everyday homicides. Not for the number of killings, but who and where it happened. And there has been more than the usual public outcry.”

Perhaps more than at any time since drug trafficking became the economic mainstay here two decades ago, residents are questioning the lawless depths to which their state has sunk. The smuggling subculture of flashy cars, clothes and jewelry that has been so conspicuous in this mainly agricultural region is starting to lose its appeal.

“Twenty years ago, if your daughter told you she was marrying a narco, you were happy for her. No more,” said Elmer Mendoza, a novelist and university professor. “People are fed up.”

In the late 19th century, in the rugged Sierra Madre mountains east of here, Chinese immigrants grew poppy plants to supply opium dens that were then legal. In the early 1900s, the immigrants legally exported a significant portion of their opium to San Francisco and other cities in California.

The United States outlawed opium and heroin in 1914, but the Mexican government continued to permit production, which kept the smuggling pipeline to California full, said Luis Astorga, a researcher at Mexico’s National Autonomous University.

Mexico outlawed poppy cultivation in 1926, but farmers and smugglers continued their trade. Sinaloans began to take over the industry, helped by the know-how gleaned from the Chinese, the railroad line that passed through Culiacan, the state capital, on the way to Arizona, and the exports of legal Sinaloan crops that were used to camouflage the drugs.

“There was always a highly developed entrepreneurial motive in Sinaloa that you didn’t see in the other states,” said Astorga, author of many books on Mexican narcotics trafficking.

In the mid-1980s, when the United States all but shut down Colombian drug routes to Florida via the Caribbean, smugglers were forced to use land routes through Mexico into Texas, Arizona and California.

With Mexico becoming the chief entrepot for Colombian cocaine, Sinaloan mafias took control of most of the flow and exploited the situation. Previously, they had charged a commission on each kilogram of cocaine delivered. Now they claimed a one-third share of the drugs to sell themselves, one former Mexican law enforcement official said. Almost overnight, the economic benefit for the traffickers and for states like Sinaloa increased twentyfold.

“Sinaloa has logistical advantages over other Mexican states,” said one U.S. law enforcement official. “You’ve got the Pacific Ocean, good highways going up to Sonora and the U.S. border and, let’s face it, the traffickers own the state and local police. So they do operate with impunity, unless the Mexican army or the federal attorney general sends in people.”

The first Sinaloan godfather of Mexican drug smuggling was Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, a former policeman who in the 1960s was a bodyguard for Sinaloan Gov. Leopoldo Sanchez Celis. He used his police connections and enormous sums of cash to suborn law enforcement all along the smuggling routes, Mexican and U.S. law enforcement officials said.

Now in jail for the 1985 slaying of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration operative Enrique S. Camarena, Felix Gallardo is said to have divided his turf between the Carrillo Fuentes clan and his relatives, the notorious Arellano Felix brothers, who took over the Baja California routes. A rival Mexican drug mafia based in Matamoros, called the Gulf cartel, also gathered strength.

As the dollars flooded in, Sinaloan drug lords were viewed with a mixture of awe and envy, as counterculture heroes in the mold of Jesus Malverde, a turn-of-the-century bandit likened to Robin Hood. A secular chapel was built in honor of Malverde, known as the patron saint of smugglers, near the Culiacan railroad station, where drug traffickers leave votive offerings after successful runs.

The cartels scored points with the community by paying for roads, clinics and schools. The bodies of three men thought to be linked to the attack on Rodolfo Carrillo Fuentes were found in a field near a seminary that his brother Amado is said to have financed. Five of the alleged assailants had been killed in a shootout at a police checkpoint after they fled the scene.

Traffickers laundered their cash by buying car dealerships, building motels and developing shrimp farms and housing tracts.

Mexican law enforcement officials say that the ex-wife and daughters of drug lord Zambada own the area’s largest and most modern dairy farm.

“The narcos conferred jobs, then respectability and even honor,” said novelist Mendoza. “They became community pillars, financing saint day celebrations, paying for the bands and the beers. There was the aspect of the antihero about them.”

Some built monuments to themselves -- enormous tombs in a hilltop cemetery above the village of Santiago de Los Caballeros, about 90 miles north of Culiacan. The largest vault, modeled after a Greek temple, is reserved for Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, uncle of Rodolfo Carrillo Fuentes. He is currently in federal prison.

Drug lords all over Mexico but especially Sinaloa are immortalized in a special kind of ballad, the narco-corrido, that glorifies the wily smugglers for eluding capture -- or eulogizes them when their luck runs out.

One corrido titled “El Aguila Blanca,” or “The White Eagle,” alludes to Rodolfo’s brother Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, head of the Juarez cartel. The song describes a checkpoint where police have stopped a group of drug smugglers. They are released only after a smuggler gives the password: “Carrillo Tours.”

“Why didn’t you say so?....

Go with care

And tell the White Eagle,

May he live for 100 years.”

But for many, the benefits of the narcotics trade are now outweighed by the attendant mayhem and social problems, including rising drug addiction.

“You learn to live with the violence -- with fear and caution and by not going out much. When I kiss my daughters goodbye every morning, it’s as if I’ll never see them again,” homemaker Ordencia Lopez said as she inspected the fist-sized pockmarks on the pink walls of the Cinepolis mall.

The state has unusually high average bank accounts as well as conspicuous consumption of real estate, cars and jewelry. But low investment in business and industry has left economic growth stunted.

“Would you want to invest in Iraq?” said human rights attorney Mercedes Murillo, comparing Sinaloa’s business climate to that of a war zone.

An estimated 20,000 Sinaloans emigrate illegally to “El Norte” each year in search of jobs. Countless others join the ranks of the drug traffickers.

“Sinaloa’s modern facade has masked an unstable, hardscrabble subsistence economy for small farmers and fishermen that drives tens of thousands of them to the United States each year,” said Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego.

Murillo, who heads the Sinaloan Civic Front, said any comprehensive effort to eradicate trafficking, such as the Italian government’s anti-mafia campaign in Sicily, would take 10 years to bear fruit. There is no sign that a concerted effort is underway in Sinaloa.

“Just look at who they put in jail. It’s never the capos, only the last links in the chain, the poor, the idiots and the fools caught growing and transporting,” Murillo said. “The government lets it happen.”

State Atty. Gen. Gonzalez said the key to enforcement was cracking the money-laundering schemes that keep traffickers in business: “We are like plumbers fixing leaks by catching water with our bare hands.”

The Mexican government last week sent 1,200 army troops here to try to capture leading traffickers.

Although President Vicente Fox’s administration is lauded by U.S. officials for high-profile arrests and drug-eradication efforts, people at ground zero don’t seem impressed.

“There is no government here,” said Santana Duran Mayorquin, brother of the slain parking attendant. “What can it do anyway against the narcos. I don’t see an answer.”