Original subtitles

He was the king

of narco-political law enforcement corruption in Mexico.

Carrillo was famous for the idea that if a load's lost,

you kill everyone connected with it.

That way you get the traitor.

He said that someone had to get their hands dirty

for the sake of Mexico,

and if that meant moving drugs, well let's move them.

♪ Oh

September 29th, 1989.

It was the largest seizure of cocaine

the world had ever seen.

Over 21 tons with a potential street value

in excess of $7 billion,

discovered in a warehouse in Sylmar, California.

Boxes of the narcotic had been stacked eight feet high

alongside bags filled with over $10 million in cash.

Investigators soon discovered that the drugs

had entered the United States

via the bridge that connects El Paso, Texas

with the Mexican border community of Juarez.

And while most law enforcement officials

wouldn't learn his name for several more years,

they were already experiencing the influence

of a mysterious Mexican drug lord

named Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

His rise to power and ultimate demise

offers a rare glimpse into the narco-political underworld

of Mexican organized crime.

He says, "I want to tell you a name"

and I go, "Okay."

He says, "Amado Carrillo Fuentes."

And he said, "I want to tell you one other thing:

never say that name out loud."

He was the king

of narco-political law enforcement corruption in Mexico.

There was a time when Amado was moving drugs

in old commercial airliners, moving it by the ton.

You know, 10 tons of coke,

pure Colombian coke in a passenger airline.

That's how he got his nickname El Senior de Los Cielos,

Lord of the Skies.

The 2000-mile expanse of the Mexican-US border

has been attracting smugglers since before prohibition

when men delivered whiskey to the thirsty patrons

of Texas and Arizona.

Marijuana was the drug of choice in the '30s

and after World War II, recovering GIs addicted to morphine

created an enormous demand for heroin.

For more than a century, Mexico's traficantes

have catered to America's changing appetite.

Smuggling activities are often coordinated

from the state of Sinaloa,

long recognized as Mexico's marijuana and heroin heartland.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration

has even given the region a special nickname.

A lot of the drug guys come out of that area.

It's very poor, you know, it's a lot of ranchos,

and so DEA calls it Jurassic Park

'cause that's where the prehistoric monsters come from.

Charles Bowden is a journalist and author.

His book, "Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future"

takes a critical look at the forces shaping modern Mexico.

You have to understand Sinaloa

has always had a bandit culture, hereditary.

It's an entire state with a Jesse James ethic.

Indeed, the tradition of smuggling is so strong

that the region has its own patron saint.

Jesus Malverde was a bandit at the turn of the century

with a Zorro-like reputation for helping the poor.

After his execution by government forces in 1909,

villagers began to attribute miracles to the bandit martyr.

Traffickers often visit his shrine to have bullets blessed

or to thank the narco saint for their good fortune.

It was into this environment that Amado Carrillo Fuentes

was born in the early 1950s.

We know little of his childhood, but in the early 1970s,

his uncle, Ernesto Fonseca,

gave him a job harvesting marijuana.

Carrillo was starting his career at the very bottom.

Fonseca was a powerful smuggler

and original member of the influential Guadalajara Cartel,

under the tough Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo.

A former Sinaloa state police officer,

Miguel campaigned for cooperation

among the competing traffickers,

a philosophy Carrillo himself would adopt many years later.

This spirit of cooperation put the cartel

in the unique position to benefit

from another organization's misfortune.

They've hit shore, and they're running,

three people.

- Four people total. - Four people total.

In 1982, US anti-drug forces

deployed throughout South Florida

and crippled the distribution network

of Columbia's cocaine king pins.

Stung by the losses, the Colombians needed a reliable way

to move their product into the US.

Miguel Angel jumped at the opportunity.

The cartel had ferried cocaine through Mexico before,

but this new arrangement would encompass much larger loads

and bring much greater profits up to $2,000 per kilo.

It wasn't long before the Sinaloa drug lords

were making more money than ever before.

Here in the Sierra Madre, where there's no electricity

and people have stash groves, you start seeing nightclubs

with lavish marble and things in the middle of nowhere.

And then you notice that people that are barefoot have Uzis.

And what are you supposed to think?

They had a good corn crop?

It is unknown how Carrillo made the transition

from harvesting marijuana to full out trafficking.

Most believe that Carrillo had completed his apprenticeship

and was ready for a larger role in the organization.

That larger role may well have included a five-year stint

as a member of Mexico's secret police, the DFS.

DFS stands for the Director of Federal Security

and it was the secret police agency of Gobernacion

which is the Interior Government Ministry of Mexico.

Amado had one of those badges, he was an agent.

At the time of the bust of the Buffalo marijuana complex

in Chihuahua, Mexico, a vast multi-billion dollar operation,

which at the time employed 7,000 farm workers

on the marijuana fields.

The biggest drug plantation ever created on Earth.

One so large it could be seen by American satellites.

The drug complex was exposed

by DEA agent Enrique Camarena,

who was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered

by leaders of the Guadalajara Cartel,

Carrillo's uncle among them.

In the investigations that came out later,

it turned out that the DFS was deeply involved

in the protection of this operation along with the MFJP,

the Mexican Federal Police and the Mexican Army.

The cowardly murder of Enrique Kiki Camarena,

Special Agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration

was carried out by the Mexican government

in conjunction, in cooperation, in partnership

with the godfathers of the drug trade.

Phil Jordan retired from the DEA

after 30 years of service, including 10 years

as Special Agent in charge of the Dallas office,

and one year is head of EPIC,

DEA's El Paso Intelligence Center, the largest database

of drug trafficking information in the world.

He and Camarena were good friends.

To this day, Mexico has never apologized

for having captured

and delivered Kiki Camarena to the traffickers.

Because of the international pressures that resulted

mainly from the United States,

the DFS dismissed 400 of its agents,

and I have to assume that Amado was one of those 400

who were dismissed at that time.

In 1985, Carrillo made his way

to the border town of Ojinaga,

ideally situated near the Big Bend region of Texas

that was rapidly becoming a major distribution center

for narcotics in northern Mexico.

It had always been very important

for marijuana and heroin, but after the cocaine smuggling

shifted from the Caribbean into Mexico,

Ojinaga became cocaine central.

At the time, Pablo Acosta

was the undisputed crime boss of Ojinaga.

Having smuggled heroin and marijuana in the region

for close to 15 years, he had finally taken control

of the region, or plaza, three years previous.

In a process known as piggybacking,

the Guadalajara Cartel had added cocaine

to Acosta's well-respected operations.

Pablo's strength was that he had the protection sewed up

for that whole region,

and so the cocaine coming in was secure.

Nobody had to about it.

If it was in Pablo's hands, it was safe.

Proof that Carrillo

was in Ojinaga came in 1985.

A US customs agent detained him

for carrying an automatic rifle into Mexico.

This was Carrillo's first and only run-in

with US law enforcement, and it produced the oldest known

photograph of the man who had become

Mexico's most powerful drug lord.

Carrillo spoke freely with the customs officials,

giving them a great deal of personal information.

And even though US intelligence

had already identified Carrillo as a powerful trafficker,

they did not know how the Sinaloan

fit into Pablo Acosta's organization.

They seemed at least to have had a good friendship.

Pablo when I was with him, was very proud

of the ingot around his neck.

I asked him about that.

It was a one ounce gold ingot

and he said it was a gift of Amado,

and then he showed his watch, it was a solid gold Rolex

that also, according to him, had been a gift of Amado.

He wore it everywhere.

He was, like I said, very proud of that.

In fact, when he died,

he had the same watch around his wrist.

Carrillo's arrival coincided

with a sudden upswing in the amount of cocaine

being flown into Ojinaga.

Experts now believe that Carrillo's role at the border

was a dual one: to coordinate his uncle's

Colombian shipments, and to apprentice some of Mexico's

most experienced drug lords.

♪ Oh

♪ Oh

Pablo Acosta was an expert at getting drugs across.

He knew how to do it and he taught Amado everything he knew.

Amado was a little bit smarter, though.

Pablo Acosta used to freebase cocaine

and do all this stuff.

I mean, he was, even if he hadn't gotten killed

in a shootout, he was on his way to an early grave.

Aging and addicted, Acosta was losing his grip

on the plaza.

Carrillo by contrast, was coming into his own.

After his uncle's arrest for the murder

of Special Agent Camarena, it is possible to assume

that Carrillo inherited his uncle's operation.

In late 1986, Terrence Poppa met both men

and found the contrast memorable.

We were sitting there in an apartment

above a radio station.

There was a long table there

and there was ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts.

There were machine gun clips,

there was this AR 15 right behind him.

He had a .45 in his belt.

At some point, he pulled out a little bag of cocaine

and then a box of baking soda and he mixed the two up

and then cooked it over a flame

and it melted, and it bubbled up and then fused together.

And for the rest of the night,

he was either scraping that stuff into a powder,

making packs of cigarettes

to smoke that he kept in his pocket or smoking the stuff.

Everybody I've talked to about him

attributes his decline and fall to cocaine.

And then Amado came over.

He walks into the room, he was dressed in Western, I recall.

You know, a little bit pudgy, friendly,

a little bit overly friendly, in fact.

There was one thing I remember though

that really stands out,

and that was a sort of a glint in his eyes.

And I think he knew the fact that Pablo

was talking to an American reporter spelled his doom.

I think Amado knew that.

He was aiming to take over

and taking over meant getting rid of Pablo.

We will never know if Carrillo

ever challenged Acosta's authority directly.

In 1986, the two man exchanged heated world

in a restaurant in Ojinaga.

Pablo and Amado's operation included a ranch

not too far out of town, maybe 20 miles,

where there was an underground storage tank.

It's like, you know, an old gasoline tank, you know,

next to a runway.

So they'd be fly in propane, 1800-pound loads,

and then offload it and bury it in the tank.

And only the traffickers knew about this tank.

Somehow or other the DEA found out about this tank.

Somehow or other Amado found out that the DEA knew about it.

Now independently of Pablo, Amado had six people rounded up

who had knowledge of that underground tank

and he had each one of them tortured to death

to find out if there was a leak

or if they knew anything about a leak.

None of them did, but they were all dead.

Acosta confronted Carrillo

asking him what he had accomplished

by killing six innocent men.

Carrillo replied coolly

"It is better for six innocent men to die

than for one guilty man to go unpunished."

I think that Amado learned some lessons from Pablo.

He didn't learn the crack cocaine lesson very well

because he appeared to do that for the rest of his career.

But he did learn that a high profile

had some real strong drawbacks.

During his interview with Terrence Poppa,

Pablo had revealed part of a protection scheme

unique to Mexico's organized crime groups.

That in order to control the plaza,

he had to make regular payments to both the army

and the Mexican federal police.

As soon as the interview was published,

the order came from Mexico City to arrest Pablo Acosta.

For the next five months, they chased him all over Mexico.

He ended up hiding out in a river village on the Rio Grande

and he was trapped in an adobe hut for about an hour.

They had a tenacious gun battle,

and he was killed, he refused to give up.

When Acosta went on the lam,

Carrillo disappeared.

Some believe he was involved in Acosta's death.

I can't speak for the DEA.

I can speak for the intelligence that was known.

And the intelligence was that Amado Carrillo Fuentes

paid the Mexican federal police $1 million

to have Pablo Acosta killed.

Never have a high profile, don't talk to reporters,

don't let anyone know your name.

Kill people that publicize your name

because that's what killed Acosta.

He became too well known, thereby becoming an embarrassment

to the Mexican government that employed him, which they did.

The police and the government in Mexico

get a cut of everything, including crime.

So if you want to be a criminal, the head criminal,

you have to establish that you're in charge of the plaza,

that you represent the criminal element.

Then you can go to the comandante and cut a deal

and the comandante will tell you

you can do anything you want, but if it gets to be trouble,

I'm gonna kill you, arrest you, jail you.

But if that doesn't happen,

you just give me my bite and you can do business.

That was the way the plaza system functioned.

Over time, it was natural for individual plazas

to band together into larger alliances.

Carrillo's original man, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo,

expanded his operations north to the border,

forming the Tijuana Cartel.

Juan Garcia Abrego consolidated coastal smuggling

with prohibition roots across the mountains

to create the Gulf Cartel.

The Juarez Cartel was under the control

of Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, a former commander of the DFS,

Carrillo's alma mater.

It is from Juarez that Carrillo resumed his air shipments

from Columbia mere days after Pablo Acosta's funeral.

Aguilar's former role as a federal secret policeman

gave him unique access to the workings of traffickers

throughout the region.

The information most likely turned to his advantage

in growing his cartel's influence.

It is believed that Aguilar had an existing cocaine deal

with Columbia's Cali Cartel before Carrillo came to Juarez.

Carrillo's connection to the Medellin traffickers

was a welcome addition to the business.

Then in August of 1989, Carrillo was arrested in Guadalajara

charged with trafficking for the Colombians.

The military confiscated six of his aircraft,

four of them jets.

He was released a few months later.

He was arrested, though.

A photograph was taken of him that was distinctly different

from the photograph taken off him

in Ojinaga when he applied for a border crossing card.

The only way that I could think of for a person

to radically alter his appearance

like that is through plastic surgery.

Carrillo was in prison

when authorities discovered the 21 tons of cocaine

in Sylmar, California.

It is likely that the young drug lord

had helped transport the narcotics into northern Mexico.

I was in charge of the El Paso office

at the time this had happened.

We had an idea

that there was a lot of narcotics coming across.

We did not know the tonnage

which came all through the El Paso corridor.

It was all through the Amado Carrillo Fuentes organization.

DEA in an intercept heard a conversation

between a known drug guy in LA and a drug guy in Columbia,

and the Colombian said,

"They didn't get the other 20 tons, did they?"

Sylmar terrified the American drug community

because it blew the whistle

on how big the volume of the traffic was.

And secondly, because they took it down

and it never affected the price of coke on the street.

By the spring of 1990,

Carrillo was out of prison and the Juarez's Cartel

was experiencing a period of relative calm.

In contrast, Western Mexico was becoming a war zone.

Shortly after the arrest of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo,

Tijuana Cartel split.

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman and Hector Luis Palma

formed the rival Sinaloa Cartel.

Miguel Angel's nephews, the Arellano brothers,

arranged the revenge murder of Palma's wife and children.

The Sinaloa Cartel retaliated by sending 40 armed gunman

to attack a discotheque

where one of the Arellano's was partying.

The bloodbath culminated in the 1993 assassination

of Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo,

killed a firefight at Guadalajara Airport.

What that killing did, it outraged Mexican society

and it showed just how brazen traffickers had become.

It showed the horrible possibilities

of Mexico becoming another Columbia.

The Juarez Cartel took tremendous advantage

of this uncivil war, expanding their territory

and offering asylum to several traffickers

caught in the crossfire.

Even the Colombians found themselves

having to make compromises.

When Carrillo decided Mexicans wouldn't simply take a fee

to ferry Colombian coke but would move it for half the load,

because then when they took half the load,

they started displacing Colombians in the United States

in the distribution system

and that's when the roar of money hit Mexico.

And that happened between '85 and '90,

depending whose account and where.

But the real architect was Amado Carrillo.

The kid had a head for business and he had a cold heart.

♪ Oh

♪ Oh

Carrillo streamlined the operation

almost immediately, bringing the loose-knit cartel

into the modern corporate era.

He used cargo planes and passenger jets

to transport 10 to 15 tons of cocaine at a time.

His Python file flight plans had blended the contraband

into legitimate commercial air traffic.

If the flights were detected at all,

Mexico's anti-drug aircraft

would be left breathing jet fumes.

It wasn't long before Carrillo was given

his most famous alias, Lord of the Skies.

Carrillo's growing legend made it impossible

for him to remain hidden.

In November of 1993, he survived the only serious attempt

ever known to have been made on his life.

Amado Carrillo and his wife and children

were eating in the evening at a fish joint, nice one.

Suddenly a bunch of guys stormed and started shooting.

Carrillo escaped.

It's believed by DEA that the reason Carrillo survived

was he'd been careful enough that even his assassins

didn't know what he looked like and shot the wrong man.

It is still unknown who ordered the hit.

Some experts say it was Gulf Cartel leader

Juan Garcia Abrego who tried to eliminate

his main competition.

Others point to the Arellano brothers of Tijuana,

who were upset because Carrillo

had fronted money to their bitter rival,

Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

They have a saying in Spanish [speaks Spanish],

that means silver or lead.

You take the money or you get a bullet.

And that's how these guys operate.

Carrillo paid his loyal followers well.

Conversely, he showed little mercy for the disobedient.

And security leaks, intentional or accidental,

were treated with the same swift surgical response.

Carrillo was famous for the idea that if a load's lost,

you kill everyone connected with it.

That way you get the traitor.

And he did.

Carrillo took in '93 and '94 to killing people

where he wanted the bodies found

and they were tying them with yellow ribbons as a message.

Gradually, Amado progressed.

He apparently owned the only tiger in Juarez.

There's a history among drug guys

of liking to own big predators.

In '96, the tiger escaped, actually,

and ran around in the streets there.

It was captured

and sent to Ciudad Chihuahua, the capital,

to be placed in that zoo.

About that time, drug killings started appearing

where the people would be dead, executed, hands tied,

shot through the head, but would be delicately draped

with these cheap tapestries with tigers on them.

If you're found in this fashion, it's to send a message.

It's a form of policing and it was rigorous

and Carrillo was very good at it.

Under Carrillo's reign,

Juarez was a city under siege,

choking on the violence of its ruler.

In contrast, the drug lord's hometown of Guamuchilito

benefited from the drug lord's largesse.

He was very good with all of the people.

What did he do here for example?

The main thing he did was build the church.

The locals there love him.

For people who live in that area, poor farmers,

he's money, he's wealth, and he's a father figure.

Late December of 1994,

the value of Mexico's currency on the open market plummets.

Like most drug traffickers, Carrillo kept his fortune

in US dollars and soon found himself 30% richer.

In 1995, however, events conspire

to make Carrillo's empire even more profitable.

Columbian police arrested the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers,

Carrillo's primary contacts in the Cali Cartel.

With the Medellin Cartel in similar disarray,

Carrillo arranged for the direct purchase of cocaine

from farmers in Bolivia and Peru.

What Carrillo really did was become

almost the single broker of cocaine.

And he held two meetings

with the other capos, heads of cartels,

"And here's the offer: I'll broker the cocaine,

and we don't fight over territory.

And you just come to me, I'll sell it to you wholesale.

I won't try and hog it.

And then we just all have our little thing

as far as distribution in the United States,

and we live at peace."

Because Amado Carrillo was smart enough

to know that wars expensive than peace is.

Now Colombians recognized the threat for what it was.

Carrillo had both the resources and power

to significantly cut them out of the United States market,

a market that consumes an estimated

400 tons of cocaine every year.

In the end, the Colombians relinquished

part of their distribution network in New York City

to the Mexican drug lord.

There was a point in the mid '90s

in which Amado could traffic cocaine

all along the entire nearly 2000-mile long border.

He could even go through Tijuana

up into San Diego and Los Angeles,

even though some of his bitter rivals were there,

the Arellano-Felix gang, notorious for violence.

But Amado was always a peacemaker.

He believed, you know,

as Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo taught him,

that it's much better to work with your brother trafficker

and make money than to kill him.

If you gotta kill him, you gotta kill him.

But work together and you can just make a min,

and that's what he did for many years.

He created a monster, I think.

Before that, Mexico had always had

four, five, six, seven, 10 cartels.

Who the hell knows?

And essentially the government could always stay on top

by playing one against the other.

He consolidated and became as big as the government.

At every turn, DEA and other agencies

were stymied by a lack of support

from their Mexican counterparts.

Carrillo's protection extended

high into the echelons of power.

Dramatic evidence of Carrillo's top level collusion

surfaced a few years later in US federal court.

Raul Macias, formerly of the Mexican Federal

Judicial Police, testified that the local highway patrol

had intercepted one of Carrillo's infamous air shipments

in the northern state of Zacatecas.

The huge full body jet put down on a dirt runway.

It was like a 727 or 707.

No seats, full of cocaine.

Typical Carrillo operation.

He had a fleet of them.

Macias testified

that when he and the other Federales

arrived on the scene, his commanding officer

ordered the highway patrolmen to stand down.

Macias then helped load the contraband onto waiting trucks.

Macias also testified that inside police headquarters

he was ordered to replace the cocaine

with wood and other combustibles.

The cocaine meanwhile was loaded onto a large truck,

presumably for delivery to one of Carrillo's underlings.

The wood was then burned, masquerading as cocaine

in a public ceremony of destruction.

This exemplifies the type of operations

that Amado Carrillo Fuentes had.

I can guarantee you that none

of the 10 tons were destroyed, okay?

Eventually, they found themselves

back into the American market.

Everything we shared with the Mexican government

through the drug czar

would immediately be reported to Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

In the spring of '96, somebody in DEA

shared informants with somebody in the Mexican war on drugs.

And for three months after that,

bodies littered the streets of Juarez.

They're instantly translating the names given to the cartel.

US customs agents intercept

close to a million pounds of narcotics every year.

The agency has had great success

with its domestic air interdiction division

which monitors air traffic across the nation.

When customs identifies an illegal airborne shipment,

agents go on the offensive,

tracking and chasing suspects until they are forced to land.

Ah the guy's jumping.

He's thrown something out.

Drop a load.

At the border crossing,

gamma ray and backscatter X-ray imaging devices

peer deep into the vehicles

to expose expertly hidden narcotics.

Even with the latest technologies employed to stem the flow

of drugs into the United States, weak links remain.

The border with the most traffic on earth

is the United States and Mexico.

1/4 of a billion human beings cross it every year.

There's no way to police it.

US customs doesn't inspect 10% of the vehicles coming in.

What that means is if you just threw the dope in the trunk

and said, "The hell with it,' 90% would get through.

At the border, the odds favor the trafficker.

When cocaine first enters Mexico,

its wholesale price is approximately $2,000 per kilo,

equal to about 2.2 pounds.

By the time it reaches the border,

that same cocaine is worth approximately $5,000.

Once it crosses a border,

the cocaine can fetch up to $20,000 wholesale

with a street price that is potentially much higher.

Even if you assume a remarkable confiscation rate of 50%,

the cartel still closed 200 to 500% profit.

And when you factor in the potential

for corruption of US officials,

the odds improved even further.

There is documentation, there's cases where inspectors

have been paid up to $ 1 million to look the other way

as a load of cocaine goes through the port.

If you look at a checkpoint on the border

and there's 30 guys working there,

you'd have to be a fool to buy 30.

You only need one.

Just run it when he's on or she's on.

You don't have to corrupt many.

And I'll tell you what to do next then.

To protect your boy, you throw that guy a load.

You say, "There's a Buick coming through

with 200 pounds of coke in the trunk," so he looks clean.

That's done all the time.

That's 'cause the money's too big in drugs.

Drugs corrupts everything and everyone.

♪ Oh

♪ Oh

The Juarez Cartel had only one consistent

vulnerability: its cash flow.

Until the gargantuan profits have been laundered

into legitimate-looking dollars,

Carrillo couldn't touch them.

Drug money is not hiding in the ground in 55 gallon drums.

Drug money is in commerce with the rest of the money.

It gets there because money launderers

use the same facilities

that legitimate corporations use who earn money.

The laundering process was surprisingly simple.

By secret arrangement between trafficker and banker,

cash generated from drug sales in the US

was smuggled back into Mexico

and deposited in any one of several Mexican banks.

The bank would then issue the trafficker

or his representative bank drafts in US dollars

drawn on the Mexican bank's accounts at major US banks.

The cash itself would then make its way

back across the border by armored car

and be deposited in the US.

The bank drafts were then free to be laundered

into legitimate business

and real estate holdings around the world.

San Antonio, Texas has a $3 billion surplus

every year in its banking system that cannot be accounted

by any calculus in the legitimate economy.

Miami's 20 billion, El Paso is 750 million.

But if you wanted to hurt drugs by hurting money,

you'd hurt it on both sides.

But one side can bite you, meaning banking in this country.

The biggest lobby for the NAFTA treaty

didn't exist in Mexico.

It existed in the US financial institutions

because they were the beneficiaries

of all the money the Mexican banks

and corporations would bring to the United States.

They're investing it overnight and earning from it.

At his peak, Carrillo was making

an estimated $10 billion a year.

In that same time, it is belief he was paying

500 to $800 million in bribes.

Having risen to the top of his profession,

there is evidence that the Lord of the Skies

was looking for a way out.

In January of 1997, Amado Carrillo Fuentes

through an emissary, sent a message

to the President of Mexico, Ernesto Zedillo.

He said, "I want you to stop harassing me.

I want you to leave my business alone.

I want you to leave my family alone.

If you do that, I won't dump any dope in this country.

If you don't, I'll leave this country

and your economy will collapse."

And that's absolutely true, it would, because in 1997,

Pemex was the biggest legal export, petroleum in Mexico.

It earned 7 to 8 billion a year.

And in 1997, that same year, cocaine, marijuana, heroin,

was earning Mexico 30 to 32 billion.

The ultimatum may have been in response

to the January 6th raid on his family's compound in Sinaloa.

Carrillo's sister was getting married

and he had flown home for the occasion.

The police intended to capture the drug lord

while he was relatively unprotected.

But an anonymous phone call tipped Carrillo off

before the police could arrive.

Given how much money he was said

to be paying the government for protection,

it is likely Carrillo viewed the raid as an insult.

Amado, according to his lawyer and others,

was a real nationalist.

He said that someone had to get their hands dirty

for the sake of Mexico, and if that meant moving drugs,

well, let's move them if it helps the economy,

if it helps Mexico.

This wedding video is some of the only

known footage of Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

He looks like hell.

He looks like a CEO who spent three weeks

on a corporate merger and hasn't slept

and has been living off either whiskey or cocaine.

And you can tell he's a man under pressure

and that it's getting to him.

It's like watching "Scarface," the last reel.

In February of '97,

Carrillo's empire began to shatter.

General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo,

recently appointed Mexico's newest anti-drug czar,

was discovered to be living in a luxury apartment

paid for by Carrillo.

It was a scandal, a huge scandal.

You know, to have the head of your anti-drug agency

to be on the payroll

of the country's biggest drug trafficker.

It's kind of like having somebody working at Los Alamos

and giving all of our nuclear secrets to the Chinese.

The General's arrest came a mere two weeks

after having been in Washington DC

to meet with US drug czar, Barry McCaffrey,

and discuss confidential counter-narcotics operations.

To the press, McCaffrey even expressed his belief

that the General was an officer of highest integrity.

After he was appointed, General Gutierrez Rebollo

had a meeting with reporters.

He said, "You know, the problem isn't these big

drug cartels in Mexico.

You gotta be real concerned about

these little cartels, the cartelitos.

They're the ones that are really

much more important than the big guys

'cause if you add them all up, they're bigger."

He was telegraphing his message.

He was saying, "I'm not going after Amado."

♪ Oh

♪ Oh

Every year, the United States

scrutinizes cooperative anti-drug efforts around the world

in the process known as certification.

Countries that fail the review face trade penalties.

The government and the media

have unearthed new information

confirming previous suspicions

about the extent of narco corruption

within Mexican institutions.

This connection between Gutierrez and Amado was exposed

by the government of Mexico itself.

Mexico's failure to confront these cartels

does not protect a single child on any street of any city

in the United States of America.

We stand by the decision, obviously,

to have the United States certify Mexico

and we're very much opposed to the efforts in Congress

to reverse that decision

because we don't see how it helps the United States

to walk away from Mexico when both of us are together,

working together in a fight in the drug wars.

It's almost become a ritual now.

Every time certification comes up in February,

the Mexicans end up offering something, a sacrifice.

It was a tremendous shock to all of us

to have this General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo revealed,

alleged to be a criminal.

There's two things about certification,

I think everybody should know.

One, it's a total fraud.

It doesn't change anything in Mexico.

And two, it's a preposterous action.

The country that should be decertified is the United States

with 5% of the world's population

and it knows it sucks up half the world's cocaine.

It is just a damn lie to say the Mexicans

are ruining our country with drugs.

Any demand for drugs will create a market.

The drugs will be here as long as we want to buy them.

If it's not the Mexican, somebody else will bring them.

But this is our problem, not theirs.

After the General's arrest,

Carrillo went underground.

During this time, he was reportedly seen in Cuba,

in Europe, and as far away as Russia.

Officials eventually learned that he was preparing

to move his operations out of the country and down to Chile.

If he was no longer welcome in Mexico, it was reasoned,

then Carrillo would then run his drug empire

from the very bottom of the world.

But Carrillo surprised everyone

when he returned to Mexico City in July of '97,

ready to undergo plastic surgery.

He checked into the hospital under an assumed name.

For over nine hours, a team of four doctors

operated on Carrillo.

Radical liposuction removed 20 pounds of fat.

Facial sculpting altered his appearance.

In the end, however, an overdose of the tranquilizer,

Dormicum, kept Carrillo from ever leaving the table.

When officials learned that Carrillo had died

under such bizarre circumstances,

few were willing to believe it.

After all, it wouldn't have been the first time

a fugitive had faked his own death

by leaving an unrecognizable corpse.

It so happens that the DEA or the FBI, I'm not sure,

but a couple of agents were allowed

to take fingerprints of the body

and a comparison was made with the fingerprint,

the thumbprint of Amado's border crossing card

that was issued to him in 1985.

This allowed Thomas Constantine,

who was DEA Director at the time,

to announce even before the Mexicans did,

that it was, in fact, Amado, and I think that's correct.

Four months later,

the bodies of Carrillo's doctors

were discovered stuffed inside oil drums

along the side of a deserted highway.

They had been extensively tortured.

It's widely believed that the family members

did this to the doctors.

That's very likely.

The family wanted to find out why Amado died

and so they tortured people to death

to try to find out what the truth is.

Through sources, I know of a person

who saw the body the night he died,

and he said the sutures weren't even stitched.

Well, plastic surgeons closed the sutures.

You're paying to not have scars.

That's the whole idea to change your appearance,

which would suggest somebody deliberately

killed him by injection.

The question there is, "Who injected the chemical?"

You know.

Did the government kill him?

Members of his own cartel?

Another cartel?

American law enforcement or the CIA?

Mexican authorities are convinced it was murder,

but they haven't offered any evidence.

My theory is that he really did die under plastic surgery.

He had been using crack cocaine for at least 10 years.

That has a tendency to degenerate your organs,

your heart, your liver.

What the truth is, probably the Carrillo family,

they're the only ones who will ever know.

♪ Oh

Carrillo's sudden death the power vacuum

in the Mexican underworld.

Within the Juarez Cartel itself,

no clear replacement for Carrillo has yet emerged.

After the death of Amado Carrillo Fuentes,

a drug war in the true sense

of narco traffickers fighting each other emerged.

We like to say Mexico has been relatively quiet.

The FBI figures there's been 1000 murders

in Mexico in the last 24 months.

I think that's low.

One of the emerging figures is a guy

by the name of Juan Jose Esparragoza Moreno.

His nickname is El Azul, Blue, that means.

He got that because his skin is so dark

it resembles the blue-black sheen of a polished gun barrel.

El Azul is one of the last old time traffickers

who really believes in peace and unity.

And according to the FBI and DEA,

he's back and he's big in the Juarez Cartel.

Frankly, I think when the new Amado arrives,

we'll never know his name

'cause he doesn't wanna become dead like Amado.

It has been said that if Amado Carrillo Fuentes

had been offered the presidency of Mexico,

you would've considered it a demotion.

And whether powerful drug lords hold sway

over the Mexican government

or the Mexican government holds sway over the drug lords,

in the end, the citizens of Mexico

are left with the same familiar question [speaks Spanish],

silver or lead?

Will they turn a blind eye to the corruption and complicity

or will they fight the Amado Carrillo Fuentes of the world?

We have in the past won major battles,

but we're still a long ways from winning the war.

Amado Carrillo died in July of 1997.

I haven't run into a single American who says,

"I can't find any coke and I can't afford it."

Heroin's so damn cheap now people won't inject it,

they just snort it.

No, no, his death meant nothing.

It was like the death of the head of General Motors.

The Chevys just keep rolling off the line.

But you have to give the devil his due.

You build something durable.

In Mexico, if you ask people about Amado Carrillo,

ordinary Joe Six-Pack on the street is gonna say,

"Well, he's still alive."

You know, there's such belief in his myth, his power,

his legend, that some Mexicans think he couldn't be dead.

He's the Lord of the Skies.

He can't die.