Leaked emails from the private U.S. security firm Stratfor cite a Mexican diplomat who says the U.S. government works with Mexican cartels to traffic drugs into the United States and has sided with the Sinaloa cartel in an attempt to limit the violence in Mexico.
Many people have doubted the quality of Stratfor's intelligence, but the information from MX1—a Mexican foreign service officer who doubled as a confidential source for Stratfor—seems to corroborate recent claims about U.S. involvement in the drug war in Mexico. Most notably, the reports from MX1 line up with assertions by a Sinaloa cartel insider that cartel boss Joaquin Guzman is a U.S. informant, the Sinaloa cartel was "given carte blanche to continue to smuggle tons of illicit drugs into Chicago," and Operation Fast and Furious was part of an agreement to finance and arm the Sinaloa cartel in exchange for information used to take down rival cartels.
An email with the subject "Re: From MX1 -- 2" sent Monday, April 19, 2010, to Stratfor vice president of intelligence Fred Burton says: I think the US sent a signal that could be construed as follows:
"To the[Juárez]and Sinaloa cartels: Thank you for providing our market with drugs over the years. We are now concerned about your perpetration of violence, and would like to see you stop that. In this regard, please know that Sinaloa is bigger and better than [the Juárez cartel]. Also note that [Ciudad Juárez] is very important to us, as is the whole border. In this light, please talk amongst yourselves and lets all get back to business. Again, we recognize that Sinaloa is bigger and better, so either [the Juárez cartel] gets in line or we will mess you up." In sum, I have a gut feeling that the US agencies tried to send a signal telling the cartels to negotiate themselves. They unilaterally declared a winner, and this is unprecedented, and deserves analysis.
Bill Conroy of Narco News reports that MX1's description matches the publicly available information on Fernando de la Mora Salcedo — a Mexican foreign service officer who studied law at the University of New Mexico and served at the Mexican Consulates in El Paso, Texas, and Phoenix. In a June 13, 2010, email with the subject "Re: Get follow up from mx1? Thx," MX1 states that U.S. and Mexican law enforcement sent their "signal" by discretely brokering a deal with cartels in Tijuana, just south of San Diego, Calif., which reduced the violence in the area considerably.
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| Mexican Diplomat Fernando de la Mora |
It is not so much a message for the Mexican government as it is for the Sinaloa cartel and [the Juárez cartel] themselves. Basically, the message they want to send out is that Sinaloa is winning and that the violence is unacceptable. They want the CARTELS to negotiate with EACH OTHER. The idea is that if they can do this, violence will drop and the governments will allow controlled drug trades.
The email went on to say that "the major routes and methods for bulk shipping into the US" from Ciudad Juárez, right across the border from El Paso, Texas, "have already been negotiated with US authorities" and that large shipments of drugs from the Sinaloa cartel "are OK with the Americans."
In July a Mexican state government spokesman told Al Jazeera that the CIA and other international security forces "don't fight drug traffickers" as much as "try to manage the drug trade." A mid-level Mexican official told Al Jazeera that based on discussions he's had with U.S. officials working in Ciudad Juárez, the allegations were true.
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| Fred Burton |
WikiLeaks has published 2,878 out of what it says is a cache of 5 million internal Stratfor emails (dated between July 2004 and December 2011) obtained by the hacker collective Anonymous around Christmas. The accused LulzSec hacker Jeremy Hammond, a 27-year-old Chicago man was told by the court that he could be sentenced to life in prison for compromising the computers of Stratfor. Judge Loretta Preska told Hammond in a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday that he could be sentenced to serve anywhere from 360 months-to-life if convicted on all charges relating to last year’s hack of Strategic Forecasting. Hammond is not likely to take the stand until next year, but so far has been imprisoned for eight months without trial. Legal proceedings in the case might soon be called into question, however, after it’s been revealed that Judge Preska’s husband was a victim of the Stratfor hack.
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| Jeremy Hammond |
There are usually just three ways for a trafficker to leave a Mexican drug cartel: go to prison, get killed, or become a government informant. Most criminals who become informants do so because they've been arrested and squeezed, encouraged to betray their criminal employers in exchange for leniency. But this Sinaloa insider had an unusual story to tell about his first encounter with U.S. federal agents. It was his boss, a top manager at the Sinaloa cartel, who encouraged him to help the Americans.
Meet with the U.S. investigators, he was told. See how we can help them with information.The Sinaloa insider, acting with the full approval of his cartel, strolled into the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office for an appointment with federal investigators. He walked through a metal detector and past the portrait of the American president on the wall, then into a room with a one-way mirror. The agents he met were very polite. He was surprised by what they had to say. “One of the ICE agents said they were here to help [the Sinaloa cartel]. And to fuck the Vicente Carrillocartel. Sorry for the language. That’s exactly what they said.”
So began another small chapter in one of the most secretive aspects of the drug war: an extensive operation by Chapo Guzmán’s forces to manipulate American law enforcement to their own benefit. Guzmán’s broad strategy has been to knock off rivals and build his own cartel into the dominant criminal force south of the border. One of his tactics for achieving that has been to place his drug-dealing lieutenants as informants for the DEA and ICE. According to sources and court records, he has been carefully feeding intelligence to the Americans. Now, Newsweek has learned, there is a federal investigation into how ICE agents handled some Sinaloa informants near the border.
The implications are sobering: the Sinoloa cartel “is duping U.S. agencies into fighting its enemies,” says Prof. Tony Payan of the University of Texas at El Paso, who studies the cartel wars in Juárez. “Typical counter intelligence stuff. It’s smart. It’s so smart.” Humberto Loya- Castro, a charming and erudite Mexican lawyer who served as Guzmán’s adviser, may have been his most intriguing agent. He became a key informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration during the last decade. A former DEA official describes Loya-Castro as “astute, witty. He was extremely charismatic.” His tips led to arrests, seizures, and headlines. Many of those law-enforcement victories, though, were also triumphs for the Sinaloa cartel.
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| Humberto Loya- Castro |
Loya-Castro was indicted by the United States in 1995, along with Guzmán. Back then, the lawyer was known by the alias “Licenciado Perez”—Lawyer Perez. The charges say he “protected the drugs and money of the Guzmán organization in Mexico by paying money to Mexican authorities” and “ensured that if key members of the Guzmán organization were arrested they did not remain in custody.”
Five years after the indictment, while Guzmán was still locked up, Loya-Castro first approached American officials, offering to feed them information. To appreciate his potential value, imagine if the leader of North Korea or Iran had a lawyer who offered to become an undercover U.S. operative. As a compadre of the Sinaloa boss, Loya-Castro had information that most investigators could only fantasize about. In 2005 he made it formal, signing paperwork that made him an official confidential informant for the DEA. Because he was a fugitive from justice, facing an outstanding warrant, a special DEA committee had to sign off on the whole operation.
He was a productive spy, handing over what seemed like ever more vital information, mostly about the Sinaloa cartel’s enemies. The DEA agent assigned to handle him was a relatively new investigator named Manuel Castanon. He had spent five years working for the Border Patrol, then joined the DEA in 1999. He was assigned to a special task force based out of San Diego—a unit that wasn't focused on the Sinaloa cartel. Rather, Castanon and his group were tasked with fighting one of Guzmán’s closest rivals, the Tijuana cartel, headed by the notoriously brutal Arellano Félix brothers.
The Tijuana cartel was small, but it was important because it controlled the vital smuggling routes through Baja California and San Diego. Both the DEA and Chapo Guzmán had an interest in its demise. One day Loya-Castro called Castanon to set up an urgent meeting. At a briefing with DEA officials, Loya-Castro warned them of a grave threat to their agents coming from one of Chapo’s enemies. He explained he had been dining with a former Mexican official when the official’s Nextel radio beeped. The caller was a member of the embattled Tijuana cartel who proceeded to outline a series of illegal plans. Loya-Castro could hear the whole conversation as if it were on a speaker phone The Tijuana cartel was hiring a trained sniper nicknamed “the Monster,” Loya-Castro said, to shoot DEA agents and frighten them into leaving Tijuana. (A WikiLeaks cable describes the incident, and while Loya-Castro is not named in it, Newsweek has learned that he was the confidential source called “CS-01-013562.”)
The intended effect of such a tip was almost surely to focus the DEA on Guzmán’s rivals. It apparently worked: the Tijuana cartel has been mostly dismantled, and Chapo Guzmán has taken over lucrative territory. All along, Loya-Castro apparently insisted to his handlers that he had Guzmán wrapped around his finger. Guzmán, he said, was gulled into thinking that Loya-Castro was loyal to him. “His point to us,” says David Gaddis, a former top DEA official who oversaw operations in Mexico, Central America, and Canada, “was that ‘because of my position, Chapo has absolute, unfettered confidence in who I am and what I'm doing.’”
“I do think he was telling Chapo, ‘Hey, I'm meeting these guys,’” Gaddis tells Newsweek, “and Chapo allowed him to do it.”
Loya-Castro’s material was so rich—so helpful in various cases—that in 2008 the U.S. attorney’s office in San Diego had the indictment against him thrown out. And the intelligence kept coming. In December 2009, in an operation trumpeted around the world, Mexican Marines encircled and killed Arturo Beltrán Leyva, a leading drug lord who had splintered away from the Sinaloa group. In Chapo territory in Nogales, Sonora, residents fired pistols in the air to celebrate, according to Malcolm Beith’s book on Guzmán, The Last Narco.
It’s been reported that the Americans provided intelligence that led to Beltrán’s death. They even coordinated the signal intercepts that allowed the Mexican Marines to move in, according to a source who was involved. A source close to the cartel leadership says intelligence for the operation also came from Loya-Castro. In essence, it seems he had helped the Americans put a feather in their cap, while killing off one of his master’s worst enemies.
By this time, some people in DEA management were beginning to ask questions. The top target for the DEA was supposed to be Chapo Guzmán, and Loya-Castro wasn't doing anything at all on that front. Gaddis, who left the agency in 2011, says he spoke to the agents who handled Loya-Castro and pushed them to get information that would lead to Guzmán. The conversations went like this, Gaddis recalls: “I want you guys to turn up the heat and start having him work more effectively against the No. 1 guy.” But according to Gaddis, “that never came to fruition.”
Double- and triple-dealing is a danger in any spy operation, something to be guarded against. “You should not allow the informant to control you,” says John Fernandes, a 27-year veteran of the DEA whose last job was running the San Diego division. “That doesn't mean they won’t try. Manipulation is part of life.” Still, Fernandes maintains, in general “the DEA does an outstanding job of applying stringent standards.”
Gaddis says Loya-Castro did occasionally provide intelligence about the Sinaloa cartel, but not about its top rungs. And at least one internal DEA exchange cited in court documents indicates he was chiefly providing intelligence about the Sinaloa’s opposition. Gaddis, who now runs a security company called G-Global Protection Solutions, says he had believed Loya-Castro was a “double agent” the DEA used against Guzmán, but he’s now convinced he was more like a “triple agent.”
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| Jesus Manuel Fierro-Mendez |
Like most cops in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, Jesus Manuel Fierro-Mendez was dirty. In fact, soon after being promoted to the position of captain, he was smuggling enormous quantities of cocaine into the United States. And when Fierro-Mendez quit his job in the spring of 2007, after someone tried to kill him, he went to work for the Sinaloa drug cartel, the 47-year-old Fierro-Mendez testified in an El Paso court against Fernando Ontiveros-Arambula, his former boss in the Sinaloa cartel in Juarez – and one of Chapo Guzman’s top lieutenants. And Fierro-Mendez’s testimony contained some unexpected bombshells.
Nevertheless, when drug dealer and former police captain Fierro-Mendez testified in an El Paso court this winter, he explained that when he was smuggling kilos of cocaine into the U.S., he was also working as an informant for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) service – which investigates drug smuggling.
“And was Chapo Guzman aware that you and others were giving information to ICE?” he was asked by the prosecutor. “Yes.”
Chapo Guzmán made his move to wrest control of Ciudad Juárez from the local cartel roughly six years ago, and he did so with help. He eventually hired local police captain Manuel Fierro Méndez, who has since been sentenced to 27 years in a U.S. prison. Fierro Méndez was also one of the informants Guzmán planted in U.S. law enforcement. We know this because Fierro Méndez would later testify in U.S. federal court, as a prosecution witness, that he was sent by the cartel to the ICE office in El Paso to give up specific intelligence about the men Guzmán was trying to eliminate.
“You were on a mission from Chapo to come provide information, correct?” he was asked in court in 2010. “Yes,” he replied. Fierro Méndez said he was like a “spokesperson,” passing information to ICE from Chapo, “information we would, obviously, get from the levels high up.”
“Was the Sinaloa cartel trying to use ICE to eliminate its rivals in La Linea?” a prosecutor asked. “That’s right,” Fierro Méndez replied. “And was Chapo Guzmán aware?” came the question. “That’s right,” said the former police officer.
He made it plain that that the cartel strictly forbade him to give up anything about the Sinaloa cartel, however. “Were you allowed to give information about Chapo?” “It wasn't allowed,” the dirty cop said, “and it wasn't asked of me.” In other words, he testified, the ICE agents he spoke to never required him to provide intelligence about the boss of his own criminal organization.
Such information did lead to significant drug busts, which helps explain why American agents were so eager to play along. The costs, however, are clear. “Now the Sinaloa cartel understands how you work, who your agents are, and what you want,” says the University of Texas’s Payan. “They are using you, and in the end that particular cartel is going to come out of it strong. The Sinaloa cartel is not only virtually untouched but it is magnified ... They don’t have any Mexican competition. At home, they are king.”
In all, at least five important figures in the Sinaloa cartel traipsed into the ICE offices in El Paso to relay information about the Juárez cartel. They provided tips about warehouses, drug routes, murders. They gave up information on who their enemies bribed and what their organizational charts were. And now, as Payan says, “the Juárez cartel is practically down to ashes, and to a large extent it was done with intelligence passed on by the Sinaloa cartel.”
A federal prosecutor based in San Antonio who has tried cases against some Sinaloa-cartel members, including those who helped ICE, concurs on that point. I asked him if the information campaign by Chapo Guzmán helped the Sinaloa cartel take over Juárez. “It did,” he said. “That’s what this was all about: because of the intensity of the struggle, they were trying to exploit every possible thing they could to get the upper hand.”
In a case ongoing in federal court in Chicago, lawyers for a top Sinaloa-cartel figure maintain that the DEA’s relationship with Guzmán’s lawyer was a virtual conspiracy to allow the Sinaloa cartel free rein. Arguing in front of the judge, one lawyer insisted that “this fellow Loya is not a normal informant. He’s an agent. He’s an agent for the Sinaloa cartel.”
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| Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla |
A high-ranking member of the Sinaloa drug cartel operative currently in U.S. custody alleges that Operation Fast and Furious was part of an agreement to finance and arm the Sinaloa cartel in exchange for information used to take down rival cartels, according to court documents. The statement was made by Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, the Sinaloa cartel’s “logistics coordinator” in charge of arranging massive drug shipments from Latin America to the United States as well as the son of cartel leader Ismael “Mayo” Zambada-Garcia and a close associate to kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. Zambada-Niebla was arrested by Mexican authorities in March 2009 and extradited to Chicago to face drug trafficking charges.
From the court document:
[T]he United States government at its highest levels entered into agreements with cartel leaders to act as informants against rival cartels and received benefits in return, including, but not limited to, access to thousands of weapons which helped them continue their business of smuggling drugs into Chicago and throughout the United States, and to continue wreaking havoc on the citizens and law enforcement in Mexico.
Zambada-Niebla believes that he, like the leadership of the Sinaloa cartel, was "immune from arrest or prosecution" because he also actively provided information to U.S. federal agents.
In its official response to the discovery motion, the government stated that there are “classified materials” regarding the case but argued they “do not support the defendant’s claim that he was promised immunity or public authority for his actions.”
Zambada-Niebla's lawyer is seeking government "documents, files, recordings, notes, and additional forms of evidence" that would support claims that federal agents personally assured Zambada-Niebla that "he would not be arrested, that the agents knew of his prior cooperation... that they just wanted to continue receiving information... [and] that the arrangements with him had been approved at the highest levels of the United States government."
Zambada-Niebla was allegedly arrested five hours after he met with the federal agents.
Jason Howerton of the Blaze reports that the documents detailing the relationship between the federal government and the Sinaloa Cartel "have still not been released or subjected to review — citing matters of national security."
The motion for discovery claims the agreement between the U.S. government and the Sinaloa cartel began sometime before 2004 and lasted at least until March 2009 as part of America's "Divide and Conquer" strategy against other cartels, in which the U.S. would use "one drug organization to help against others."
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| Ismael Zambada Garcia. El Mayo |
From the court document:
Under that agreement, the Sinaloa Cartel under the leadership of defendant’s father, Ismael Zambada-Niebla and “Chapo” Guzman, were given carte blanche to continue to smuggle tons of illicit drugs into Chicago and the rest of the United States and were also protected by the United States government from arrest and prosecution in return for providing information against rival cartels which helped Mexican and United States authorities capture or kill thousands of rival cartel members.
The Flores twins, 31-year-old Chicago drug traffickers, now in U.S. custody and acting as informants in a plea deal whose details remain secret, will be the star witnesses in the Chicago trial of Jesús Vicente Zambada-Niebla, a head of the Sinaloa cartel and the biggest Mexican drug kingpin ever to be prosecuted in a U.S. courtroom.
In court filings, Zambada-Niebla's lawyers claim he, like the Flores brothers, was working with the Drug Enforcement Administration, and that in exchange for intel on rival cartels, the U.S. government turned a blind eye as "tons of illicit drugs continued to be smuggled into Chicago and other parts of the United States." In the months building up to the trial, a litany of court documents has been released that describe Chicago as a major distribution hub. The filings also suggest that damning details will be revealed about U.S. cooperation with some of the world's most powerful narcos.
Vicente Zambada-Niebla caught the attention of the Latin American press corps last March when he entered a plea of not guilty by reason of a pre-existing immunity agreement with the DEA. The two-pronged defense argued immunity and "public authority," a specific kind of immunity that claims he acted under the auspices of the U.S. government. Zambada-Niebla asserts that U.S. law enforcement gave him carte blanche to coordinate the cartel's smuggling operations into Chicago and throughout the U.S. and permitted the remittance of billions of dollars in cash back to Mexico. He further alleges that the U.S. was complicit in arming the Sinaloa cartel with semiautomatic weapons, which it used to wage war on its foes.
On September 9, federal prosecutors filed a motion in U.S. District Court in Chicago seeking to invoke the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), in the trial of Sinaloa cartel operative, Vicente Zambada-Niebla who alleges an agreement exists between the U.S. government and his bosses. The CIPA was enacted over 30 years ago to prevent public disclosure in criminal cases of classified information.
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| Vicente Zambada-Niebla Now |
Zambada-Niebla, his head now shaved and skin tightly drawn against his cheekbones, was transferred in October to a federal prison in Milan, Michigan. But his lawyers claim the conditions in prison have actually worsened, with new restrictions placed on his ability to see visitors and to receive his mail on time. The location of the prison, nearly five hours from Chicago, has brought accusations from the defence that the government is hampering his lawyers' ability to communicate with their client.
The breaks the Flores twins have received for cooperating with the government have made for contentious courtroom exchanges between the government prosecutors and the defense team, who have been filing competing motions dating back to July 2011. At the heart of the issue is the fight for government documents revealing communication between federal agents and cartel members, and the 32-year-old Classified Information Procedures Act the prosecution has cited in denying the release of the overwhelming bulk of these documents.
Alvin Michaelson, a lawyer for the defence complained at a pretrial hearing last December that the government was withholding information that impugned the credibility of the Flores twins as witnesses. "We know that there are witnesses that have been interviewed here in the Chicago area who...talk about the reputation of the Flores brothers as murderers, as thieves, liars," Michaelson said before Judge Castillo. "No one trusts the Flores brothers, no one, and...those are the two key witnesses in this case. We believe, we know, we've heard that the government gave enormous benefits to the Flores brothers' families, friends, including the ability to keep their ill-gotten gains while they were working with the government; that agents here in Chicago perhaps...knew about the situation.
By 2001, the Flores brothers had become the main connection to Chicago for several of the leading Mexican drug cartels. They were the principal link in a drug-supply chain that connected Colombian producers with Mexican smugglers and on to North American consumers. According to court documents, the drugs were delivered to the U.S. by a variety of means—on speedboats, fishing vessels, Boeing 747 cargo planes, container ships and tractor trailers, and even by submarine.
Court filings estimate their annual income at $700 million, according to a 2009 Washington Post article; the Flores crew reportedly shrink-wrapped the cash proceeds and hid them inside condominiums and brick split-levels in Chicago, Hinsdale, Palos Hills and Plainfield registered to relatives and girlfriends with no criminal records.
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| Flores twins |
To get an idea of just how large the Flores operation was, one only needs to compare their $700 million estimated annual income to the total street value of all drugs seized in Chicago: $208 million worth in 2009, $139 million in 2008, $118 million in 2007, $143 million in 2006 and $235 million in 2005, according to the Chicago Police Department. In any given year, drug seizures never reached a third of the value of what the Flores crew dealt annually. After the Flores empire was dismantled, cocaine prices surged on the streets of Chicago, from $18,000 per kilo to $29,000 in 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The Flores twins may be important enough to the government's case against Zambada-Niebla for the record of their once-vast criminal empire to be expunged, maybe they will be ghosted off to some tropical paradise under the witness protection programme. But by the end of what stands to be a long and drawn-out trial, what will likely prove most important is what sensitive details are revealed about the true nature of the relationship that federal agencies had with Zambada-Niebla and the Sinaloa cartel. Did the U.S. allow tons of illegal narcotics into its borders, as Zambada-Niebla asserts? His testimony versus the Flores twins will ultimately decide the outcome of the most important narco case to grace a Chicago federal courthouse.
