Posted by Gitano on April 09, 2001 at 15:30:28:
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Conspiculosly absent in here is any mention of los hermanos Arrellano-Felix y Tijuana. Quien sabe ?
April 9, 2001
They were Mexico's drug lords, who control half of the drugs smuggled to the United States, along with their bodyguards, associates and contacts in government. A participant in the three-day meeting, as well as associates of the smugglers, government officials and others familiar with the drug trade, gave independent accounts of the summit, speaking on condition of anonymity. Their descriptions differed in detail but agreed on what the purpose of the meeting was: to join forces after 12 years of bloody wars and form a cartel that would unite operations, cut costs, and streamline drug exports to the United States. The alliance has been in the works for three years, but was made more urgent by a tough line from Mexico's new president, Vicente Fox, by a court decision making it easier to extradite drug smugglers to the United States, and by a proposed U.S.-Mexican crackdown on money laundering. Although nobody has a good estimate of how much money Mexico makes from drug smuggling, the White House estimates that about half of the $65 billion in drugs that Americans buy each year come through Mexico. By any estimate, drug trafficking is one of Mexico's top sources of income, rivaling the top legal industries of oil, tourism and assembly-for-export plants. The industry is so pervasive that it has corrupted law enforcement from top to bottom. Police assigned to drug duty are routinely arrested for collaborating with the smugglers, and in 1996 Mexico's newly appointed drug czar was found to be on the payroll of Carrillo Fuentes. The last major drug cartel in Mexico collapsed in 1989 when its boss, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, was arrested. The new alliance would end the war of succession that has killed hundreds of people and mean a major shift in the drug trade in the Western Hemisphere, creating a syndicate better equipped to evade law enforcement. Rafael Macedo de la Concha, Fox's new attorney general, said his agents investigated tips about such a meeting and found no evidence that it had occurred. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration refused comment. But the sources said the meeting took place Jan. 26-28 around a long wooden table in a restaurant's back room. They talked as waiters in tuxedos served steaks, roast goat and dried beef soup, a regional specialty. According to the accounts, the guest list of 60 read like a who's who of Mexican drug smugglers: * Juan Esparragosa Moreno, who Mexican authorities say is a veteran drug boss known as "El Azul" for his dark, almost blue-toned skin. With others, he represented the Juarez drug-smuggling organization, which operates along Mexico's Caribbean coast, central Mexico and the west Texas border. * Humberto Garcia Abrego, accused by Mexican authorities of running the Gulf drug gang of his brother Juan, who is serving 11 life sentences in a U.S. prison. The Gulf gang operates along Mexico's Gulf of Mexico coast. * Ignacio "Nacho" Coronel, reputed leader of the Colima gang, which operates in the Pacific coast state of Colima and along the far eastern border with Texas. * Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, wanted by Mexican authorities, and representatives of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who recently escaped from a Mexican maximum-security prison in a laundry bin. The two men work along Mexico's Pacific coast and north to the Arizona border. * Gilberto Valdes, a businessman who sources said represents smugglers in the southern state of Chiapas. * Two men in military uniforms with generals' stars, to whom the others referred as "representatives of the attorney general's office," the participant and associates said. Analysts who study the drug trade confirmed an apparent alliance, although they didn't know about the meeting. However, Eduardo Valle, a former drug official at the attorney general's office, said colleagues told him there was "a lot of movement" in the agency's office in Monterrey, just a few miles from Apodaca, at the time of the meeting. "Certainly something major was happening." A drug expert, Jorge Chabat of Mexico City's Center for Investigation of Economic Development, said there are signs of a new union. "This seems like a normal process to me. This occurs in all legal businesses and there's no reason it shouldn't in the illegal ones, too," he said. The smugglers opened their books to one another, discussed how much each paid in bribes, and shared contacts, informants and the names of corrupt officials, the associates said. The participants agreed that members of the new cartel would--for now at least--respect each other's territory. They decided to pool their bribes in one larger payment to each corrupt official, the sources said, and the generals agreed to accept the new form of payment. Associated Press |
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