Blood+Death: The Secret History of Santa Muerte and the Mexican Drug Cartels

By John Lee Brook

The White Sister… The Bony Lady… The Godmother… The Pretty Girl… This is Santa Muerte, personification of death. A veiled skeleton with an unquenchable thirst for destruction, Santa Muerte is Mexico’s grim and vengeful goddess. She is worshipped by outcasts and sinners, those for whom the traditional Christian deities of Jesus and the Virgin Mary have no place. For the notorious drug cartels, Santa Muerte is venerated as the saint who does not judge. She provides divine protection against authority and from rival gangs, demanding human sacrifice in return. The cult of Santa Muerte has become inextricably linked to the Mexican cartels over the past decade, resulting in barbaric rituals that have escalated the tide of violence across the streets. Bodies of cartel members are executed en masse at Santa Muerte shrines, and rumors abound of even worse atrocities in the name of magical protection. This book is the story of unholy alliance, of drug gangs and Santa Muerte, and a galvanic passion for blood and death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Headpress
• Release date: Mar 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781909394223

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INTRODUCTION

The Beginning of the Cartels

THE SOUTHERN STATES of Mexico include Chiapas, Campeche, Quintana Roo, Yucatan, Morelos, Tabasco, Guerrero, Michoacán, Veracruz and Oaxaca. Yucatan, Campeche and Quintana Roo profit from tourism, while the rest of the southern states, because of vast tracts of arable land, depend upon agriculture for their economic health. For the most part, the people of this region are hardworking and poor, despite the fact that they live on some of the most fertile soil in the world.

Corn is the primary crop grown in the drier regions. The regions with more water grow avocados, citrus fruits, coffee and melons. In the years leading up to World War One, enterprising individuals in the southern states of Mexico recognized a simple economic truth: they could make more money growing a more desirable crop: Marijuana.

Marijuana originated in southern and central Asia. It arrived in North America with the influx of Chinese migrant workers, who were hired by the railroad companies as common laborers. The workers not only brought marijuana with them, but opium, too. Like most immigrants, the Chinese established enclaves, Chinese communities inside the cities in which they resided. These enclaves were called Chinatown. Each Chinatown had its own rules, customs and system of government. Outsiders traveled to Chinatown to obtain opium. Once there, they were introduced to marijuana, which was readily available.

At first, marijuana was not popular with Americans—its reputation was that it made users lazy and, consequently, Canada and the United States passed laws restricting its use. However, these laws were not rigidly enforced, and, for the most part, authorities simply looked the other way. Mexican immigrants fleeing the Mexican Revolution entered the US, bringing with them their habitual use of marijuana. Chinese immigrants used marijuana extensively as did many African-Americans in the southern cities of the US.

During the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover established the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which later became the Drug Enforcement Agency. So-called recreational drugs were becoming more of a problem. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics was Hoover’s response to what he believed was an insidious disaster looming on the horizon. The Director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics was Harry Anslinger, a hardcore reactionary who ran the Bureau with an iron hand and pressed for draconian laws against drug users. To this end, Anslinger supported a bill called the Marihuana Tax Act. (The government’s preferred spelling — marihuana as opposed to marijuana.) The bill imposed a tax on the sale of marijuana. Violation of the law carried a fine of $2,000 or five years in prison. Legal sale or possession of marijuana required the purchase of a Marihuana Tax Stamp from the state government. Purchasing a Tax Stamp was next to impossible. Anyone making such an application was viewed as a potential criminal and could undergo criminal investigation.

Most people didn’t use marijuana, and middle-class and upper-class whites in America perceived marijuana use as a trivial matter. This perception changed drastically in 1948. Hollywood was an habitual user, with Mexican marijuana being prevalent among actors and actresses and easily obtainable. Movie star Robert Mitchum was arrested, along with his girlfriend, Lila Leeds, for using marijuana. He was sentenced to fifty days in jail, and she sixty days.

Subsequent to arrest, her budding career destroyed, Lila Leeds abandoned the glamour of Hollywood and became a heroin addict. Mitchum’s career, on the other hand, profited nicely. His unrepentant attitude was just the ticket and gave him a bad-boy image that Hollywood loved. His career skyrocketed. Mitchum was cool and the publicity surrounding his arrest brought marijuana to the attention of the general public. Marijuana use, just like Robert Mitchum, soared in popularity. Everyone wanted to try it.

After medical researchers declared marijuana non-addictive, conservative politicians were stymied, if only for a moment. Director Anslinger came up with a unique solution to the problem, declaring marijuana to be a ‘gateway drug.’ In other words, use of marijuana inevitably led to more addictive drugs such as heroin and cocaine. Conservative politicians jumped on the bandwagon. They passed the Boggs Act in 1952, making the sale and possession of marijuana a felony that carried stringent mandatory sentencing. Four years later, in 1956, the Narcotics Control Act enacted even more rigid penalties for the sale and possession of marijuana.

During the 1960s, marijuana was associated with students on college campuses, along with hippies and flower children. Middle-class white Americans discovered ‘getting high.’ The National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse published a report in 1971 recommending that marijuana be legalized. President Richard Nixon thought the Commission was wrong, however, and considered illicit drugs a subtle evil. The government of the United States, he declared, was embarking on a ‘War on Drugs." Nixon spent billions of taxpayers’ dollars attempting to seal the borders of the United States. Halting the flow of drugs into the country was his answer to the problem.

It didn’t work. According to the nonprofit think tank, the R AND Corporation, drugs continued to flow into the US unabated. Nixon’s War on Drugs actually benefited drug traffickers by driving prices up, concluded R AND. The drug traffickers were making bank.

Most of the marijuana entering the US and Canada came from Mexico, whereas most of the cocaine came from Cuba, Chile and Colombia. During the early 1980s, the Medellin gangsters who monopolized the smuggling of cocaine came to be known as the Medellin Cartel. Thus these federations of gangsters were suddenly perceived as a unified entity, with the designation ‘cartel’ implying a new, almost majestic status. For traffickers, theirs was now a kingdom. In truth, the cocaine cartels were so powerful and influential they rivaled the legitimate national government, nations within nations.

Law enforcement and the media embraced the label; the media because it implied a vast conspiracy, while for government prosecutors it proved useful to refer to bad guys as members of a unit, opening the door to RICO laws and the prosecution of organized racketeering activity. The cartel terminology implied organization and conspiracy, and carried the flavor of menace.

During the early 1980s, the Medellin Cartel ran the bulk of its cocaine into North America through Florida. Aircraft would travel 900 miles from Colombia to drop waterproof loads into the ocean off Florida, which were met by fast boats. Sometimes, the drop would be inland and collected by truck.

Violence erupted in Miami-Dade County as local distributors competed with one another. Griselda Blanco was one such distributor. Hailing from Colombia, she began her criminal career as a child prostitute and graduated to kidnapping, before moving to Florida for a slice of the billion dollar cocaine industry. A tendency for murder secured Griselda the nickname, the Black Widow.

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan approved the South Florida Task Force, which was a means to address the escalating violence. Comprising the FBI and elements of the army and navy, the Task Force employed surveillance aircraft and boots on the ground. The Medellin Cartel lost millions of dollars as seizures of shipments began to increase. Something had to be done. Forced to find another way to move cocaine into the US, the Medellin Cartel contacted Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo. Born in Culiacán, Sinaloa, Gallardo began his career hawking chickens and sausages as a young boy. Later, he joined the Federales, the Mexican national police. As a bodyguard for Leopoldo Sánchez Celis, the governor of Sinaloa, Gallardo met Pedro Aviles Perez. Perez was another of the governor’s bodyguards, but one moonlighting as a smuggler controlling most of the marijuana and heroin coming into the US. Perez was an innovator, whose pioneering use of planes and liberal bribes for the transportation of drugs earned him the name the Mexican Godfather. Perez liked Gallardo and took the young man under his wing.

When Perez was killed in a shootout with the Federales in 1978, Gallardo inherited his mentor’s operation, controlling his kingdom with an iron fist. The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was aware of the new godfather, but not until 1984 did they realize how powerful he had become. Intel eventually led to a major offensive being launched against Gallardo. A force comprising 450 Mexican soldiers supported by armed helicopters hit Rancho Búfalo, a 2,500 acre marijuana farm in remote Chihuahua, owned and operated by Gallardo. Following the decimation of Rancho Buffalo, Gallardo convened with his key men. All evidence of the attack pointed to one Enrique ‘Kike’ Camarena, a cartel member who turned out to be a DEA infiltrator feeding Intel to the government.

Kike and his pilot, Alfredo Zavala Avelar, were leaving the American consulate building in Guadalajara, when five men attacked them, threw jackets over their heads, and tossed them into a waiting Volkswagen van. One month later, their decomposing bodies were discovered hundreds of miles away, in Michoacán, hands and legs still bound. Both men had been tortured and mercilessly beaten. Autopsy revealed that Kike had died from a blow to the skull.

An intensive investigation revealed to the DEA the identities of the five men responsible for Kike’s abduction. They were not gangsters, but Jalisco police officers. Following arrest and interrogation, the five officers confessed to their part in the kidnapping, leading to the arrest of eleven more individuals. Warrants were issued for Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Carrillo. Rumor had it that Quintero was behind the killing of Aviles Perez, whose death allowed Félix Gallardo to take control of Perez’s drug kingdom. The DEA pursued Quintero to Costa Rica, resulting in his arrest and extradition to Mexico. An interrogation didn’t last long; Quintero soon admitted to having planned the kidnappings.

Ernesto Carrillo on the other hand was in Acapulco. He was arrested and also confessed to the kidnappings, but denied participation in Kike’s torture and murder. If nothing else, the entire episode exposed to the DEA the level of corruption facing them in Mexico. Evidence had been deliberately destroyed, obscured and withheld.

After the destruction of Rancho Búfalo, his revenue flow all but stopped, Gallardo hooked up with Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros, a drug lord from Honduras. Matta was cozy with Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin Cartel, who, like Gallardo, had a revenue problem caused by the South Florida Task Force. For Escobar it had been simple: drugs go out, money comes in. But with the South Florida Task Force the plan was perverted. Now, drugs go out; drugs are confiscated; no money comes in. The charismatic Matta had the job of finding a new business model for the Medellin Cartel.

His solution was Gallardo’s Sinaloan gang. The Medellin Cartel knew how to move drugs across the border into the US, the smuggling methods and routes having been established. The Sinaloans on the other hand had the men and experience in moving product. Matta brokered a deal. On their part, the Colombians would provide cocaine to the Sinaloans, who in turn would transfer it north of the border. Once in the US, the Colombian distributors would collect it and sell it. It was a win-win business deal, and the process worked like a charm.

So much cocaine was being moved by the Mexicans they had difficulty storing the cash. They literally had boxcars of money. Gallardo decided that rather than being paid cash, he should demand payment in product. The Colombians had no choice in the matter. Florida was too risky without Gallardo.

Overnight, Félix Gallardo and the Sinaloan gang became cocaine kings. No longer simply couriers, they were now major league players, moving their own product as well as that of the Colombians. The DEA started keeping even close tabs on Gallardo. He was far from stupid. He knew the DEA lusted for him and attempted to lower his exposure by relocating his family to Culiacán. On arrival, he called a meeting between all the big wheels of the various gangs in Guadalajara and informed them he was stepping out of the limelight. He was still the Boss of Bosses, of course, and they still had to pay tithes, but day-to-day operations would be handled by territorial leaders. In other words, Gallardo was the CEO whose door was locked and hidden.

Nepotism was standard operating procedure among the gangs. Thus, Gallardo’s nephews, the Arellano Félix brothers, were given control to operate out of Tijuana, considered the crème de la crème of the territories. This operation took the name the Tijuana Cartel. What would become the Juárez Cartel was given to Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who owned and operated twenty-seven Boeing 727s, flying drugs into Mexico and flying out cash for laundering.

Miguel Caro Quintero was given Sonora, just south of Arizona. Thus was born the Sonora Cartel. And the Gulf Cartel, the territory around Matamoros, was given to Juan García Abrego. The territory between Tijuana and Sonora, called the Sinaloa Cartel, was inherited by Joaquín ‘Shorty’ Guzmán Loera and Ismael Zambada García.

All of the assigned cartels would be subservient to the Guadalajara Cartel, which would function as Gallardo’s administrative organization. The administrator was Héctor ‘The Blond’ Palma Salazar. Félix Gallardo would be the intermediary between the Colombian cartels and the Mexican cartels.

Unfortunately, the reorganization of his drug empire didn’t work out quite as well as Gallardo had envisioned. For one thing, Gallardo didn’t know how to maintain a low profile. He doled out vast amounts of cash to local charities and hung out with well-known politicians, with whom he was frequently photographed at glittering festivals and parties covered by national media outlets. Gallardo became the subject of many popular songs—narcocorridas—that served to increase his notoriety. Add to this the fact the cartels, especially the Sinaloa Cartel, thought they could do anything: most of the police were taking bribes to look the other way, allowing cases of kidnapping, rape and murder to rise through the ceiling. The government couldn’t help but take notice.

Appalled at the atrocities committed by the cartels, the Mexican government conducted an investigation, confirming what it already knew: their police were corrupt. Corruption was a cancer, spreading everywhere. Pressured by the DEA, the Mexican government decided to clean house, beginning with the arrest of Gallardo in 1989 by the Mexican Army, followed by the interrogation of 300 members of the Culiacán police force. Seven officers were indicted for accepting bribes, with almost one-third of rank and file police officers quitting thereafter.

Mexico would not extradite criminals to any nation where they could face the death penalty. Therefore, Gallardo was tried in a Mexican court. Sentenced to forty years in prison, he continued to run his empire from behind bars, where he was allowed to use a cell phone. Nonetheless, Gallardo’s organization soon sank into a state of rivalry, with the Mexican cartels eyeing each other with suspicion and jealousy over territories.

The Sinaloa Cartel didn’t like the hand they had been dealt. In effect, they had only two ways to move drugs into the US, through Tecate and Mexicali, neither leading to lucrative markets, such as southern California or Arizona. The Sinaloa Cartel considered its options. To the east was Sonora, where stood the Sonora Cartel with lots of men and guns. Tijuana, on the other hand, controlled by the Arellano Félix brothers, was comparatively easier pickings and so the Sinaloa Cartel went to war with the Tijuana Cartel.

Benjamin Arellano Félix ran the Tijuana Cartel. He had brothers: Eduardo ran the financial side of the business, taking care of the money laundering, while Ramón, a younger brother, functioned as the Tijuana Cartel’s enforcer. The oldest brother, Francisco, an ostentatious crossdresser who owned five houses and a discotheque called Frankie O’s, paid off politicians and police officers. In his heyday, Francisco was greasing palms to the tune of six million dollars per month. The Tijuana Cartel was atypical in that many of their gang members were from affluent middle-class families. They dressed in expensive, stylish clothing, spoke English, and were educated. Most of them eschewed tattoos. They transported heavy weapons into Mexico and drugs into the US.

The Tijuana Cartel employed a take no prisoner policy. They murdered indiscriminately. Their enforcer, brother Ramón, believed that terror kept people in line. His favorite methods of intimidation included the Colombian Necktie, where he slit the person’s throat, and then pulled the tongue out through the slit; using plastic bags to suffocate the enemy; cutting off heads; immersing people in acid baths; and what was called carne asada, where people were immolated on piles of burning tires.

When the Sinaloa Cartel tried to move in on Tijuana territory, they discovered the pickings weren’t as easy as they thought. Things got bloody real fast. Shorty Guzmán, head of the Sinaloa Cartel, called for a meeting with the Arellano Félix brothers. But the brothers held the winning hand and knew it, permitting the Sinaloa Cartel to move product through Tijuana only on the condition they pay a hefty tariff for the privilege. The brothers also insisted on total access to the Mexicali smuggling route into the US.

Shorty Guzmán didn’t like the deal, and retaliated with a hit on a disco in Puerto Vallarta, owned and operated by a close friend of the Arellano Felixes. Shorty had reliable information that the brothers would be there. Sinaloa gangsters dressed as Federales and armed with automatic assault rifles, rushed into the building, their weapons blazing. Nineteen people were killed, eight of which were members of the Tijuana Cartel. But the Arellano Félix brothers themselves had managed to escape through a bathroom skylight and fled into the night.

In May 1993, the Arellano Félix brothers put a plan for revenge into action. Learning that Shorty Guzmán would be at Guadalajara International Airport, hit men from the Tijuana Cartel went out to greet him. As a white Mercury Grand Marquis rolled into view, automatic weapons opened fire, killing the two occupants of the vehicle and five other travelers having the misfortune to be in the field of fire. Shorty Guzmán was not among them, however. The man traveling in the vehicle whom the hit men believed to be Guzmán was none other than Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo. His murder shocked and horrified the people of a devoutly Catholic Mexico. The news media ran feature stories on the tragedy, along with stories about the Arellano Félix brothers and Shorty Guzmán. This was the first time many members of the public heard the term ‘drug cartel.’ The fact that these men could ruthlessly murder a Cardinal of the Catholic Church spoke volumes about the power of the cartels and their lack of morality. The people of Mexico demanded justice.

The cross-dressing Francisco Rafael Arellano Félix was arrested and charged with illegal possession of a weapon and accessory to murder. But jail time for Francisco didn’t last very long. Ten million dollars in bribe money from the Tijuana Cartel lubricated his release, along with two of their hit men who took the prison rap on Francisco’s behalf.

Two weeks after the Cardinal’s murder, the Guatemalan police arrested Shorty Guzmán, found hiding in Guatemala. Shorty was summarily deported back to Mexico, where he was tossed into prison.

The drug business for the cartels had another momentary hiccup in 1994, with the election of a new President of Mexico. Zedillo Ponce de León didn’t waste much time in setting wheels in motion against the cartels. He appointed Fernando Antonio Lozano Gracia as Attorney General, who was equally swift to arrest the brother of the outgoing President, found to have $160 million in drug money in a Swiss bank account. Gracia then went after the Federales, investigating 4,400 federal officers for corruption and firing 1,200 of them for accepting bribes from the cartels.

Next Lozano Gracia appointed Ernesto de Ibarra Santes as head of the Tijuana Police. But de Ibarra Santes and his bodyguards were murdered two days later, leaving Mexico City airport. His vehicle was boxed-in by men who opened fire with AK-47s, making Swiss cheese of it.

There was still too much violence, the cartels killing indiscriminately whenever it suited them. Lozano Gracia was fired and Jorge Madrazo Cuellar duly appointed in his place. Cuellar named General José de Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo to be Mexico’s Drug Czar. But Rebollo lasted only two weeks, when it was discovered he had accepted cash, real estate, and expensive automobiles from the Juárez Cartel.

The leader of the Juárez Cartel, Amado Carrillo Fuentes aka ‘The Lord of the Skies,’ whose twenty-seven Boeing 727s transported cocaine from Colombia, was worth a cool $25 billion. Calm and collected, he often formed alliances with the other cartels, avoiding violence as much as was humanly possible in his line of work. He died not under a hail of bullets, but under the surgeon’s knife, while undergoing plastic surgery as a consequence of Rebollo’s indiscretion. Fuentes’ death left the Juárez Cartel in chaos, allowing room for the Sinaloa Cartel to make a move, absorbing much of its territory and recruiting its gang members.

Vincente Fox was elected President of Mexico in 2000. Soon after taking office, he got lucky with the Arellano Félix brothers. Ramón Arellano Félix, stopped for a minor traffic violation, died in a shootout with police in Mazatlán. A few weeks later, Benjamin Arellano Félix was arrested in a safe house in Puebla. The army raided the house, finding Benjamin still in his pajamas. Millions of dollars in cash were found in the safe house. Arrested and tossed into a maximum security prison cell, the kingpin of the Tijuana Cartel could do nothing but wait as his attorneys fought his extradition to the US.

In 2001, Shorty Guzmán broke out of prison in Guadalajara, having spread money around like candy, bribing prison guards and officials into letting him bring hookers into the building. According to popular rumor, two prison guards helped Shorty in what many perceived was a daring and audacious break, smuggled in the prison laundry. The reality of the matter was much less dramatic. Shorty had greased so many palms that he didn’t need to do anything as elaborate as hiding in a laundry cart. He simply put on the uniform of the Judicial Police, provided by well-wishing guards, and walked out the front door.

Shorty was back, and into his elliptical trajectory came five brothers—Marcos, Carlos, Alfredo, Arturo and Héctor Beltran Leyva—permitted by the Sinaloa Cartel to establish their own mini-cartel, kind of a cartel within a cartel. The rationale was that the Beltran Leyva Cartel would keep the Tijuana Cartel off-balance, and shoulder the brunt of any hostile moves from them. It

Reviews for Blood+Death

[YSORA MK · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Trash writin by someone who is narrow minded and ignorant.

[Bree Tanner · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Ignorant and uneducated people should not write about subjects of which they know nothing. This garbage is only good for wiping one's ass with.