Amado Carrillo Fuentes (December 17, 1956 – July 3, 1997) was a Mexican drug

lord who seized control of the Juárez Cartel after assassinating his boss

Rafael Aguilar Guajardo. Amado Carrillo became known as "El Señor de Los

Cielos" (Lord of the Skies) because of the large fleet of jets he used to

transport drugs. He was also known for laundering over US$20 million via

Colombia to finance his huge fleet of planes. The U.S. Drug Enforcement

Administration described Carrillo as the most powerful drug trafficker of his

era.

He died in a Mexican hospital after undergoing extensive plastic surgery to

change his appearance. He is regarded as one of the wealthiest criminals in

history, with an estimated net-worth of US$ 25 billion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amado_Carrillo_Fuentes

GQ magazine

April 1997

The Killer Across the River

By Charles Bowden

*Carrillo Fuentes died shortly after this article was written.

He may be the richest man who has ever walked the earth. He is a business

genius and a murdering sociopath. His income more than $10 billion per year

results from controlling the distribution of most of the cocaine that comes

into our country. He lives two miles from our southern border. His name is

Amado Carrillo Fuentes, and his story demonstrates that everything we've

been told about progress in the war on drugs is a lie.

Rocio Aguero Miranda went for a ride at about the same time the tiger broke

free. Juarez, check-by-jowl across the Rio Grande from El Paso, baked under

the sun, twisted in the withering winds and lost belief in rain. At 4:30

a.m. on July 20, 1996, two travel-all-type vehicles pulled up to a fine

house in one of the city's nicer districts. Fifteen men armed with AK-47s

got out. To the neighbors awake at that hour, they looked exactly like

federal police, right down to the black ski masks they sported. The large

dogs protecting the grounds backed off as the men entered. The maid fled

into the bathroom with Rocio's 8-week-old baby, and when the officers took

Rocio, 36 years old, she was wearing a bra and panties. Blood was found on

the

walls of her home. The maid's account was confused, and then, after a day or

so, she disappeared from the newspaper articles. The authorities said the

armed men were not really police but imposters. Next came something as

persistent as drought in the Mexican north: a vast silence. It was as if the

kidnapping had never occurred and an 8-week-old baby had not been left

wailing. No one in the media said who was suspected of this act.

Just about the same time, a tiger suddenly stalked the streets of the city.

Garrets has no public zoo, so officially the tiger's appearance was a

mystery. The beast was captured and supposedly sent to the state zoological

garden in the capital, Chihuahua. Across the river in the United States, in

El Paso, Garrets's sister city of 700,000, neither event received much

notice in the newspapers. Garrets, brooding on the border with around 2

Million souls, is the kind of place that does not exist for North Americans.

Nor does the man generally credited with offering Rocio Aguero Miranda a

ride and owning the tiger who broke free. His name is Amado Carrillo

Fuentes, and until very recently mention of him almost never occurred in the

newspapers of either city or on their radio or television. His primary

residence is in Garrets. In September 1995, when Ross Perot finished a

narcotics briefing at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) intelligence

center buried in the bowels of El Paso's Fort Bliss, an agent took Perot to

the installation's parking lot and pointed toward Carrillo's house, a few

miles away, hunkered near the Rio Grande. Perot said in disbelief, " You

mean he's right there and we can't do anything?" No one is certain what

Carrillo looks like or how old he is or how well educated. Only four

photographs exist, and they are

nearly a decade old at best. What we know is that he heads a business that

earns a profit of $200 million a week, a number that spins out to more than

$10 billion a year. He does not advertise his business: he makes no stock

offerings, floats no junk bonds, seeks no government subsidies. He is

publicity shy. He has never experienced a strike or a boycott. He has been

the cause of hundreds of murders in Garrets in the past two to three years

but, of course, that is his carnage in only one city.

Like any transnational businessman, he mocks the boundaries of

nation-states. He controls the cocaine coming into Mexico, and this makes up

50 to 80 percent of the cocaine coming into the United States. He is a huge

part of Mexico's drug industry, an economic activity that, at minimum, earns

that country $30 billion a year in profits, a sum more than quadruple the

revenues from its largest export, oil, and a sum sufficient to service the

entire $160 billion government and private foreign debt.

Carrillo thrives because of the consent of the Mexican government. He gives

the police and the highest government officials an estimated $500 million to

$800 million a year for protection. And he thrives with the knowledge and

tolerance of the United States government, though officially Washington

wants him on a drug-trafficking charges in Dallas and Miami. In Mexico he is

known as El Senor de los Cielos, " the Lord of the Skies," perhaps because

he is the silent owner of the largest charter-jet service in Latin America

and because he moves his coke from Columbia in ten-to fifteen-ton lots in

727s, which land at Mexican airports and are unloaded by the federal police.

In the United States, you have never heard of him until February, when his

profile was suddenly raised: It turns out that Carrillo had in his employ

the Mexican government's drug czar, General

Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo. As a result, after decades of massive Mexican

participation in drug trafficking, the Clinton administration and our

newspapers of record suddenly acknowledged that there was a problem. And

they gave that problem a name: Amado Carrillo Fuentes. But Carrillo is only

the current manifestation of a major, long-term problem called Mexico.

Here is the gist of the problem: We can't stop drugs from entering the

United States, because our border with Mexico is the most heavily crossed

one on earth and, at 1,995 miles in length, unpoliceable. We can't stop

Mexicans from illegally entering the United States, because that nation is

poor , overpopulated and growing, and if the poor do not come north, Mexico

implodes. We can't force the Mexican government to seriously crack down on

the drug trade, because the country is dependent on drug money for its

survival.. And we can't stop money laundering or the transfer of billions of

narco-dollars back and forth across the border because of the North American

Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and because of the sheer velocity of modern

capital flows. And we can't discuss any of these matters, because for years

both parties have made it an act of faith that the war on drugs, the 1986

Immigration Reform Bill, NAFTA and a steel wall here and there on the border

are taking care of the problem. And you cannot believe what I have just

written, because, well, you haven't read it before. We're left with a very

strange world where a man we'd never heard of makes more than General Motors

and where a man we cannot officially find lives in plain view of our largest

drug-intelligence center.

I first encountered Carrillo's name at the drunken wedding of a

narcotraficante in May 1993. The groom had a warm smile, and I became the

court historian of his fiesta. I was leaning against a wall, drinking a

Tecate on the second or third day of a five day bender, when a Mexican

friend whispered three words: Amado Carrillo Fuentes," and then added,

"never repeat this name out loud." The groom had just come from a meeting

with Carrillo in Mexico City. I recall clearly that when the man mentioned

his name the parrots in a nearby cage screamed. Carrillo is a kind of

management genius. Just about the time Ross Perot stood in the parking lot

at Fort Bliss and stared in disbelief toward Carrillo’s mansion across the

river in Garrets, El Senor appeared in one of that city's most favored and

public venues for a meeting with the local head of the Mexican federal

police. When Carrillo arrived for his social belt with the authorities, he

naturally came with his customary bodyguards: twelve federal police. The

public appearance was simply to show he was still in charge. To survive in

the drug world, one must make a public appearance from time to time, a

reality understood by monarchs everywhere.

His story is not simply a tale of Mexican corruption. He is also a creation

of the United States. What I mean is simple: We tolerate the drug world

because a serious attack on it would destroy the economy of Mexico and the

stability of its government, and by this tolerance we make an Amado Carrillo

Fuentes inevitable. His real, singular achievement is that he is far better

at his job than we could have imagined in our worst nightmares. According to

U.S. intelligence and to the man who was in charge of Mexico's

drug-enforcement effort for a year and a half under president Carlos Salinas

Gortari, Carrillo has organized the

various gangs and cartels of Mexico into a business federation, much as the

five families in New York once found that peace was good for business. He is

the managerial talent who was inevitable, and now he has arrived.

Periodically, the U.S. government leans on the Mexican government and the

Mexicans offer us a prize, such as the deportation of Juan Garcia Abrego,

the head of the Gulf cartel, in early 1996. But such arrests do not change

the drug world; they merely create an opening in top management. So for the

moment, Amado Carrillo Fuentes flourishes, and he is probably one of the

richest men who has ever walked on this earth. Amado Carrillo is our guy,

and we don't know what to make of him. Rocio Aguero

Miranda can answer that question. No doubt the tiger can also. Now it is our

turn.

I carry a coded number I am to use to reach the agent. He will get back to

me that is the way it must be done. He is a DEA agent, and we rendezvous in

a saloon. He heads instinctively for a chair under a purring television. Our

talk must always be drowned out. He sits with his back to the wall you can

never be too careful. His eyes never cease scanning the room you must never

feel safe. He puts a leather pouch on the table in front of him the gun must

always be within reach. He speaks softly and when he says something he

considers confidential, he unconsciously speaks out of the corner of his

mouth. He has been with Carrillo in the past. And that is why I am talking

with him. Despite the $15 billion we throw at the war on drugs each

year, despite the massive police presence we have created to battle drugs,

we have very little information from people who have spent time with Amado

Carrillo. He lives barricaded behind family members, and he kills anyone who

arouses his suspicion. We drink light beers as we talk blood, and I brush my

fingers against the dark wood of the tabletop as the agent's purrs next to

me. There are things he and I both know, details our government has

collected. Carrillo sometimes disappears into coke and freebasing. When he

parties, he'll rent a floor or two at a hotel and invite a crowd, and nobody

leaves until he does and he may roar for five or six days straight. He likes

to fuck American beauty queens and is no doubt grateful that we

have fifty states.

ALL this the agent and I skip over lightly, like the notes of a familiar

piano composition. Amado (the name means "loved one") was born in !950, 1954

or 1955 to a dirt poor farmer in Sinaloa. He was one of eight or nine

children, according to his mother. He was formed in and by a geographic

triangle where the states of Chihuahua, Sinaloa and Durango meet, an area

American narcs call Jurassic Park. His uncle, Ernesto Rafael Fonseca

Carrillo, known as Don Neto, was A key figure in the drug cartel based in

Culiacan and Guadalajara. In the '70s, Don Neto sent his nephew to tend a

marijuana field in Zacatecas. The young Amado was successful at agriculture,

so next his uncle sent him to Ojinaga, Chihuahua, a mere dot on the Texas

border, to work with a man called Pablo Acosta Villarreal. Acosta was a

charismatic wizard at dope smuggling, and for a short while in the '80s

Ojinaga became the major bridge between the coke laboratories of Columbia

and the noses of North Americans.

Carrillo thrived as Acostas lieutenant; he built a church in the community.

He and Acosta whiled away hours freebasing. He gave Acosta a gold Rolex

watch and a small gold ingot, which his boss wore around his neck. In April

1987, choppers took off from Fort Bliss, Texas, ferrying FBI agents and

Mexican federal police to Acostas hideout across the Rio Grande from Big

Bend National Park. The troop was led by Comandante Guillermo Calderoni, a

sophisticated man who spoke French and English and the most renowned

enforcer in the employ of the Mexican government. Pablo Acosta, wearing his

little gold ingot, was slaughtered, Amado Carrillo had earlier departed with

Acosta's Columbian connections etched in his head. American intelligence now

believes Carrillo paid the comandante $1 million to perform the operation.

The FBI took credit for wiping out Acosta, the American press headlined

another victory in the war on drugs, and the drug business continues to

thrive. And nobody paid much attention to this punk named Amado Carrillo.

Next he popped up in Torreon, Coahuila, working with the Herrera

organization, a family business based in Durango that provides heroin,

marijuana and cocaine and that had deep Columbian connections. The Herreras

had a lock on drugs in Chicago and Buffalo. The organization totaled more

than 3,000 members (at the time, a force greater than all of DEA), and

almost everyone in the outfit was kin. That was the point, in 1987, when the

agent talking to me in the bar entered Carrillo's life. He and his colleague

had been trailing Carrillo for two and a half weeks in Mexico. "We're after

Jaime Herrera," he says with a smirk. "This punk [Carrillo] didn't have

shit. Jaime had the Colombians. We asked ourselves, "who the fuck is this

fat fucker?" In part Carrillo turned out to be the owner of a one-story

house where he lived and which also functioned as a stash pad. One night

they were watching the house. Three women came out with kids, got in a car

and left. OK. that doesn't matter. Then three guys came out and got in a

truck. This does matter. Carrillo also came out and drove away by himself,

but, fuck him, he's nothing. They followed the men in the pickup. The U.S.

agents were accompanying Comandante Calderoni and his team of federales. The

truck was pulled over, and a federale walked up to the driver's side. He was

immediately killed by a blast from the driver's AK-47. Another federale

crept up undetected on the other side of the truck. He capped two of the

occupants with a .45 . The driver took off running. Calderoni's assistant

dropped the man with a .45 . When they rolled him over, they discovered he

was the local army commander, there for his payment. Then they all went for

Jaime Herrera, the custodian of Columbian connections in the Mexican drug

world, and busted him.

Carrillo once again escaped. In those few months of 1987, Carrillo managed

to make two great Rivals disappear, and he scampered off with their

Rolodexes to the Columbian cartels. The rest is arithmetic.

Carrillo, in his quiet, nondescript way, advanced through this world of

violence and deception. There were bumps in the road: one of his brothers is

said to have committed suicide in Sonora in 1989. The DEA notes this suicide

was accomplished with fifteen or so rounds from an AK-47 into his mouth. It

is said that at his wedding in the late '80s, Carrillo lost his temper and

slaughtered a relative. In 1989 he was arrested and briefly detained in

Guadalajara on a minor weapons charge and lost a million dollar mansion when

the government confiscated it. Sometime in the early '90s , Carrillo showed

up in Garrets, a city nominally under the command of Rafael Aguilar

Guajardo, a former Mexican official in internal security who had married

into a fine family, built a hotel and given it his wife's name. It was a

place where, it is said, he maintained a torture chamber for moments of

leisure. Aguilar owned the Shah of Iran's former estate

in Acapulco, plus $800 million more in gewgaws. He was murdered in Cancun in

April 1993, on a day when his bodyguard happened to skip work. The same

bodyguard subsequently showed up in Carrillo's employ, and the DEA assumes

Carrillo was behind the killing, for Garrets is now his.

In November 1993, while Carrillo and his wife and children dined in a fancy

Mexico city restaurant, gunmen entered and raked the place with

automatic-weapons fire. Carrillo and his family dove under the table, but

several of his people perished , including his number two man, who was

sitting next to him. The DEA believes he survived because none of the

killers knew what he looked like. As the gunmen fled the place, a cop tried

to stop the car. They ran him over. Carrillo stormed out of the restaurant

and pumped the downed officer full of rounds. No one has gotten close to him

since that date. Where earlier drug leaders Acostaa in Ojinaga; Caro

Quintero in Sonora, Sinaloa and Guadalajara; Aguilar in Garrets sought fame

and press clippings, Carrillo seeks the shadows. He no longer carries a gun.

He owns banks, television stations, newspapers, this and that. And though

the man is unrecognizable, he does have one signature flourish. When he

loses a load, he has everyone connected with that load killed to make sure

he gets the weak link, the snitch. I asked the DEA agent I'm drinking with

what one thing I should know about Amado Carrillo.

Everybody wants to be ruthless," he finally responds," but Carrillo has the

balls to be ruthless."

In October 1996, an odd thing happened. El Paso has a relatively low

homicide rate because it has been the local custom to take people into

Garrets, where their slaughter will attract little attention. But there were

signals that this decorum was coming to an end. There was an unseemly

contract on a DEA agent stationed inside the United States. Then an American

electronics and communications expert who was doing some consulting in

Garrets (and was also believed to be handling a few chores for the American

agencies) disappeared, along with his wife. Then, in late September, an El

Paso stash house with more than two tons

of coke was discovered by American authorities. It was Carrillo's, and the

coke was awaiting sale through his people in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Shortly After that, the odd thing happened, the bad moment at El Kumbala. El

Kumbala is a working-class bar in El Paso. In early October, some guys

drilled five guys in the chest there. A number of them from Alberquerque,

with alleged narcotics connections. What was striking about these

assassinations was that they could easily have been done out in the big

emptiness of the West Texas desert and no one would have been the wiser.

Someone wanted the act known, just as someone wanted the DEA to know that it

was no longer immune and just as someone wanted the American intelligence

world to know that its electronic snoops were no longer welcome. Someone

clearly no longer gave a fuck about making waves or drawing attention.

The man is trying to explain something simple to me: why the government of

the United States ignores the fact that Mexico is collapsing, that

narco-dollars are propping up its staggering economy, why illegal

immigration will grow, and why no major party or official in the United

States will talk about it. His voice is even, his words exact. He says, "

We're like a deer paralyzed in the headlights. Mexico is our biggest

foreign-policy problem, but no one has a solution to it. It begins with a

political problem: The last three presidents of the United States have sold

us on the proposition that Mexico is a developed, stable country and the way

we should relate to it is by opening our borders and developing trade. Now

they find it difficult to come back and describe the reality. The reality of

the moment is, serious questions as to whether democracy even exists in

Mexico; the question of corruption going to the very top of the government;

that we have a next-door neighbor whose principal export is narcotics. Once

you accept the problem, you wind up saying that you can't do anything about

it. You can't solve it."

His name is Jack A. Blum, and he is one of the uncelebrated people who make

Congress hum and hearings happen. He worked with the Senate Judiciary

Committee 1965 to 1972, and with William Fulbright at the Senate Foreign

Relations Committee from 1972 to 1976, and then returned for another bout at

Foreign Relations from 1987 to 1989; he ran the committee's hearings on

drug-law enforcement and foreign policy, which meant Manuel Noriega, the

Contra War and the flood of dope coursing through each. Since then he has

had a private Washington law practice specializing in ferreting out money

laundering and has been a consultant on laundering for various clients,

including the government of Columbia. For him Amado Carrillo Fuentes is the

current name on a long-term condition. Blum is a harsh critic of U.S. policy

and a passionate defender of U.S. policy makers: " What do you do? What is

the solution? Every time you want to criticize someone in the government for

not acting, the question is, OK, smart guy, what would you do?"

Mexico's drug economy is untouchable because it runs $30 billion a year

("conservatively," Blum notes) into a cash-short nation. Intervening in

Mexican politics by demanding action against the drug cartels blows up in

our faces and fuels Mexican nationalism. Money laundering cannot really be

contained because the same avenues used by criminal organizations are used

and protected by U.S. corporations for tax evasion.

He rolls on and on, ticking off forgotten efforts, as when during Richard

Nixon's administration the border was shut for sixteen days and all hell

broke loose because of the economic losses; and the spraying program of the

'80s, when CIA reports allegedly revealed that the Mexican government's drug

eradication program was using U.S. helicopters to spray fertilizer instead

of herbicide on fields of marijuana, which kept getting greener and bigger.

" We are married to Mexico," he finally explains. "You can't sever a head

from a body." His account of the seeming hopelessness is like a tonic for my

system. One of the experiences of trying to explain the drug economy is that

everyone you talk to acts as if you are crazy or, in Blum's words, " from

Mars." He remembers drinking with DEA agents in Florida when he was

investigating Noriega and marveling that they could still risk their lives

in a cause that was "hopeless."

"All the options are bad," he states flatly. "Everything you want to do

doesn't work. How do you live in a world like that?" His words are familiar

to me. And his question how do you live in a world like that? feels like a

slap in the face. Since, that is precisely the world we do live in.

Two poor boys were walking along the sewage canal in Garrets on July

30,1996, when they saw a barrel floating in the filth. They thought, We can

fish that barrel out and sell it for a few dollars. So they fished it out.

When they pried off the lid, a leg floated up. The police arrived and poked

the fifty gallons of acid with poles. Rocio Aguero Miranda was finally

identified by her surgeon from the registration numbers on her breast

implants. A day later, the physician had second thoughts and recanted his

identification. She was a successful woman who had allegedly done some drug

deals and taken a professional car thief and killer as a lover. In the fall

of 1995, Rocio leased nice quarters for nightclub, a place she named "Top

Capos", "Top Bosses." The children of the rich came to the club to buy

drugs, and on the weekend Rocio had major entertainers up from Mexico City

at a reported $20,000 to $30,000 a night. Things began to go bad on May 3,

1996, when her two key employees, one the father of her unborn child, were

kidnapped. Their bodies turned up a day later, tortured, bound hand and foot

and bleeding from the anus. She closed the club, went off, had the baby and

returned. Then she was kidnapped on July 20, only to reappear on July 30 in

fifty gallons of acid. In the spring of 1996, the DEA had shared the names

of some of its informants with Mexican Authorities. the list had evidently

made it to Carrillo. No one in the DEA officially places Rocio's name on

this list or officially denies that it was there. For months executions

clogged the streets of Garrets, and by August somewhere between forty and

sixty people had been dispatched. Sometimes the bodies would be found bound

with gray tape, the heads wrapped in bandages or gauze, with paper stuffed

in their mouths. Sometimes a cheap wall tapestry of, say, a tiger would be

draped over the face. Styles change. For a while a few years ago, Carrillo

was having the bodies of informants tied up with yellow ribbon and a bow.

There is an attitude that what happens over there does not concern people

over here. I travel a lot, and you can go to any small town anywhere in the

United States and find drugs. Our banking system slops over with

inexplicable money $50 million to $70 million a month in El Paso, $3 billion

a year in Dallas, and so forth. It is an article of faith that the United

States is immune to Mexican corruption. It is not our thing. Every day of

the year, there is enough cocaine stored in northern Mexico to supply a line

for every man, woman and child on earth. It all comes here. We are 5 percent

of the planet's population and consume 50%

of the planets illicit drugs. I remember standing in El Paso and looking

across the river at Carrillo's house with a DEA agent who said to himself as

much as to me, " He's sitting over there laughing at us." On another day,

I'm standing with a big official in the DEA and looking out at Mexico from

El Paso. Garrets's international airport lurks in the dust smudge of the

horizon. I say, " You know, Carrillo has a compound at the airport, and he's

landing full-body jets full of coke. The federales have a compound there

also and help unload the planes." The man stares ahead and says without

looking at me: You think I don't know that?"

I've become a bit petulant about secret agents nodding yes, then shrugging

about matters of state. I'm losing my tolerance for talk of drug lords, as

if these men were some kind of new gentry. I'm sick of official government

analysis of the state of the Mexican economy and of our own that never

mention drug money. Imagine a business in the United States that generates

tens of billions of dollars a year in profits. Now imagine that this

business has no hand in our banks, owns no one in Congress, influences no

policies. Imagine it simply operates largely out of sight and never touches

your life or mine and never exercises any

power except in its own dank corners of the world. Oh yes, one more thing

you must master. Every time some awkward moment occurs a particular horrific

killing or embarrassment in the banking community occasioned by the brother

of the president of a neighboring country or a foreign official who seems

swell but turns out to be deep into the drug world you must sigh and say,"

Well, yes, there are exceptions, but look at the big picture." We can do it.

We've been doing it for a long time.

Phil Jorden knows the big picture. Phil Jorden gave thirty years to DEA,

rose from the streets to a top position in the bureaucracy: head of the El

Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC). the DEA's 350-agent bunker, gathering dope

secrets from around the world. He made his early bones in the '70s, doing

raids with Comandante Calderoni in Mexico. He has watched the gangs mutate

into cartels and the cartels fuse into the machine they call the Federation,

which is largely dominated by Amado Carrillo Fuentes.

On January 20, 1995, Jorden's brother Bruno, 27 years old, was murdered

during a carjacking in the parking lot of an El Paso K-Mart about two miles

from the barrio home where he and Phil had been raised. this was the first

carjacking death in the history of El Paso. Two days later, Jorden

officially took over command of EPIC. To this day, Jorden tortures himself

over whether Amado Carrillo orchestrated his brother's death. He is a large

man, a former college basketball star, who seems invisible. He is a quick

study who likes to appear befuddled. He is the man you never notice until he

slaps the cuffs on you. And he is a man with his brother's blood pooled

around his life. In January 1996, he retired, and he now runs a

private-security venture in Dallas. But he cannot leave the drug world any

more than he can he can escape the crack of the nine-millimeter cutting down

his brother in the K-MART parking lot. I have talked long with Phil Jordan.

I have wandered the tomb of EPIC, peered down at the room full of computer

monitors

churning endlessly through the intelligence files of the DEA, the CIA, the

FBI, the IRS and the Department of Defense and the narcotics reports of

twenty nations. I've heard Jordan tell of briefing Attorney General Janet

Reno, Senator Phil Gramm, Ross Perot and other visiting firemen. I've looked

out with him at Amado Carrillo Fuentes's house and practically heard his

teeth grind I've sat late at night with his aged father while the old man

explained how he would gladly go to prison for it, listened to this flat

statement of the hunger of vengeance as we sat in the family home not far

from thee Rio Grande and a few miles from where Amado Carrillo likely sat

and talked at that very moment. I have seen Phil Jordan enter rooms and

dominate them with a natural air of authority and the confidence of a star

athlete. But I have not seen any movement on the murder of his brother or

any ability to force the U.S. government to act. I have heard him snap at me

when I asked him why the DEA does not say what it knows about Carrillo,

about his brothers murder, about the war on drugs " They've told us not to

talk." By "they" he means the executive branch of the United States

government.

And I have to wonder: If a man of such force and a man with a brother's

blood splattered across his conscience can not act, who will and who can? So

I know this man who knows more than I do, and I know this man who said in

court that his brother's murder killed his whole family, and I know this man

who leaned over his brother's open casket and said before his family, "

Bruno, I promise I'll get whoever

did this to you." And I know that just across the muddy river a man is

making at least $10 billion a year, and no one and nothing stops him. And I

have sat in the house of Phil Jordan"s parents in the barrio by the river in

El Paso and listened helplessly as his mother wept. And I know that when

Bill Cosby's son was murdered in January, a local television crew descended

on Phil Jordan's parents who also had lost a son in an apparently

meaningless death.

And I know that making death meaningless is a way to make us all feel safe.

It takes time for him to open the door, what with the lock, the chain, the

dead bolts, all securing his entryway. Finally, the door swings open to the

night, and he appears, shirtless, a generous beer gut spilling over his

belt, and waves us inside. A red sign with a circle and a slash is fastened

to the door of the downstairs bathroom: NO FIREARMS PERMITTED IN THIS

ESTABLISHMENT. Evidently, even in exile, Eduardo Valle has kept a sense of

humor. He is finishing a bottle of Jack Daniel's, smoking Camel filters and,

a traditionalist at heart,

using a Zippo lighter. He looks to be around 50, has a grizzled three-day

beard, a black shock of hair and the trademark glasses that when he was a

boy earned him the nickname El Buho, "the owl."

Eduardo Valle, El Buho, is a survivor of the night of October 2, 1968. That

evening 10,000 students gathered in a square in Mexico city to hear speeches

in favor of democracy and human rights. The Mexican

army opened fire and killed at least 325 of them. Ten days later, the

Olympic games opened, and Mexico City and the world acted as if nothing had

happened. El Buho was a leader of the protest and got out of

prison two and a half years later. In the early '90s, after a career in

journalism, he was made the special advisor to two successive Mexican

attorneys general, a post from which he commanded an elite counter-narcotics

force and read all the secret reports on drugs and the capos created by his

government and ours. In 1994 he fled Mexico with documents that spell out

the ties between the government of President Carlos Salinas and the drug

capos and the cartels in Mexico. At that time as Salinas' six-year term was

ending, the American government was trying to peddle Salinas as its

candidate to head the World Trade Organization, the Vatican of global free

trade. Imagine the U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey fleeing the country and

proclaiming that our president was in cahoots with drug cartels and you get

the feel of El Buho's situation.

El Buho is the living body through which the violence of Carrillo, the

corruption of the Salinas presidency and the impotence of U.S. policy have

coursed. He is the man who has seen the connection between the drug world

and the official world and lived to tell the tale. El Buho and Carlos

Salinas go back a long way. They met in 1966, when both were studying

economics in Mexico City. Salinas was the scion of a wealthy and powerful

family; his father was a member of the president's cabinet in the '60s. Back

in their students

days, Salinas was marginal in El Buho's circle, a small, intense man plowing

through Mao Tse-tung, the architects of the budding European Community and

the theorists of American free trade. To El Buho, Salinas was a man " with

a dark face."

When Salinas became president in 1988,El Buho met with him as a leader of

the journalists' union. This was all very normal. Mexico is a nation of 100

million ruled by a small and incestuous set of the educated and the rich and

the powerful. In 1992, when Salinas was four years into his term, he had to

placate the United States if he was to ensure the success of NAFTA, and

drugs were always an official flash point in dealing with the gringos. So

he placed El Buho, A dissident known to be independent of the government, in

the Mexican justice department and put in charge of fighting drug

traffickers but warned him, El Buho recalls, that he wanted " no

adventures."

Much like the DEA, El Buho largely ignored Amado Carrillo at first. He

focused on other men who he believed were more important. El Buho targeted

the Gulf cartel, then headed by Juan Garcia Abrego, a man who had amassed

$15 billion moving cocaine from Columbia to the United States through the

northeast sector of Mexico, the home ground of the Salinas family. At that

time, Carrillo was a blip on El Buho's radar screen. El Buho's second

research he kept to himself: the investigation of La familia Salinas.

In the matter of Juan Garcia Abrego, who was on the FBI's Most Wanted List,

President Salinas thwarted all of Buho's efforts to capture him. The bribe

offers from drug traffickers came to El Buho quickly $2 million to release

an Abrego brother-in-law from prison, then $400,000 " for a little, little,

little man. For a nothing." Documents crossed El Buho's desk showing that

Abrego was often in the United States, that the FBI and the DEA knew when he

was there and where, and that they did nothing. "You think your government

didn't know? " El Buho asks. I am not surprised. DEA agents had told me of

staking out Abrego in Chicago and other places and then doing nothing.

Abrego had been wanted on U.S. warrents since 1989. But then agents have

also told me that Carrillo comes and goes in the United States. Once, I told

them I had stood in front of a house in the United States while Carrillo

was staying there. They didn't ask for the address. They simply said,

"Doesn't sound surprising." El Buho arrested a bunch of Abrego's smaller

capos, but what he really relished was his research into the Salinas family.

He found the president's chief of staff and the man's beautiful lover

functioning as the Salinas administration's connection to the Colombian

cartels. he discovered the president's brother hobnobbing with Abrego. He

saw a Salinas cabinet studded with men known to have narcotics links going

back to the previous presidency of Miguel de la Madrid. (In 1982 the Mexican

economy collapsed, and it was widely believed in Mexico that de la Madrid

cut a deal with the narcotrafficantes to bail the nation out. Carlos Salinas

was de la Madrid's fair-haired boy, and in the eyes of many Mexicans he took

over real control of the country beginning in 1985. " De la Madrid," El Buho

says," took the drug money for his country Salinas took the drug money for

himself.")

We have been talking for hours now, shifting to beer and then wine. El Buho

is on a roll. "A week or ten days before I crossed the border in June of

1994," he explains, "the press adviser to Salinas tells me to come to Los

Pinos. I go, and he asks, 'Buho, what's happening with your life?" "I say,

'I have my notes."

The adviser replied by handing him a book, Chronicles of the Dead. El Buho

said," Thank you." He under-

stood the warning: They are going to kill you. "I began to move fast then,

rapidly, rapidly, rapidly," he remembers. "I drove during the day and made

it to the border in eleven hours."

Now El Buho lives by his wits a column he faxes to a Mexican newspaper and a

book he publishes in Spanish that is stuffed with revelations of government

corruption and which sold 65,000 copies in Mexico, a very big sale.

Meanwhile, Amado Carrillo, El Buho, notes, has not been wasting time. El

Senor de los Cielos has expanded his reach beyond Colombia, into Peru,

Bolivia and Equador. He has recently begun to handle Golden Triangle heroin

from Asia. And for the last few years, the man with free access to Mexico's

international airports has been trying to reduce the combat of the drug

world. Just before he left Mexico, El Buho learned that Carrillo had hosted

a meeting of all the major capos. It took place in Puerto Morales, Oaxaca,

in June 1994. A second meeting took place near Cuernavaca that November. His

policy proposal was simple: Carrillo would import the drugs and wholesale

them to anyone who wanted to move them into the United States. To hell with

this fighting and killing over territory, to this old-fashioned vertical

structure with soldiers, chiefs, branch offices and the like. Amigos, we're

going to downsize, get lean and mean, be flexible. Carrillo would retain his

retail here, his routes there, but he was shifting into a higher sphere. It

was a reasonable plan.

I have seen organizational charts of this new beast of commerce, which the

US agencies call the federation, and I have had them explained to me, at

length, by DEA analysts. I have gone over the endless nuances

of this structure how it is not like G.M. or the Pentagon, how it is more

fluid and how it almost always wins. It is like Mexico itself, an apparent

shambles it does not die and, despite our disbelief keeps going.

Even as an outcast, a man on the run from a date with his own violent death,

El Buho is not tough enough to be cynical. The rebel of '68 who did two and

half still casts off flickers of hope in the room full of cigarette smoke.

El Buho survived the night the Mexican Government machined gunned hundreds

of students in a public square in Mexico City, and then he disappeared into

the secret jails of the rulers.

His mother used all her family connections and found him two weeks later

stumbling down a staircase "like a mole," she later recalled. El Buho had

been beaten almost to death. Naturally, his glasses had perished in the

experience, so he blindly staggered toward his Mother guided by a voice, and

she looked into a face she could hardly recognize and believe he was her son

only when she heard his voice. I keep this moment in my mind when I listen

to El Buho, because deep within his hustle and his loud talk and a sense of

drama, there is this man who saw the naked face of power and survived and

who carries that memory with him always as a bleeding wound.

"The shit" El Buho suddenly roars, "is not only in Mexico; the shit is in

the US too. We need respect for the US we need, both of us, for the shit to

be the light. "If you don't clean the shit you eat the shit".

Later, as I prepared to leave, El Buho says, Almost by way of apology, "It's

a dirty world. I'm sorry." I have lived in two worlds for several years. One

world goes like this: In 1993 the Economist calls Carlos Salinas "one of the

great men of the twentieth century" Time Magazine had him as one of the five

finalist for "man of the year" in 1992. Henry Kissinger, in 1993, wrote that

Salinas "quelled corruption and brought into office and extraordinary group

of young, highly trained technocrats. I know of no government anywhere that

is more competent"

The other world I live in goes like this: In the election for the President

of Mexico in 1994, the one anointed by American observers, and celebrated by

the American government as the cleanest ever, the one that elected Ernest

Zedillo a man hailed by President Clinton as a reformer, (all Mexican

Presidents are reformers to American Presidents), there was a new twist in

campaign financing. Beginning in 1993, and allegedly at the direction of

President Carlos Salinas, fifty secret bank accounts were set up around

Mexico. Accounts were slush funds for the candidates of the ruling party.

The fifty secret bank accounts were nourished by drug cartels in Columbia

and Mexico, and when the election falderal ended in late August, 1994, as

much as three-quarters of a billion had cascaded through the slush fund. In

early 1996, Alvaro Cepeda Neri, a Mexican lawyer and civil rights advocate,

published an account of the buying of the election. In May of that year, he

was severely beaten and hospitalized.

I have a photograph of the first world, the official world. It's of

President Clinton at the El Paso airport. During the tail end of his recent

presidential campaign. He was in the city for 17 and 1/2 minutes. He

expressed his friendship for the Mexican people. And he did tackle drugs. He

said we have to marshal our forces against the enemy: the tobacco interests.

The other world I have lived in goes like this: I'm am in a rooms with

government analysts, and they say I cannot mention their names. They foist

an analysis on me so that the drug world will have the look of order and

reason. They sketch this beast in Mexico called the Federation. A thing

pouring at least $30 Billion dollars of profit into Mexico. ($10 Billion

more than the U.S. gave in 1995 to bail out the collapsing Mexican economy).

They say it is invincible, but they do not say where all the money goes. I

sit with one analyst who has spent nearly two decades devouring everything

thing there is to know about the Mexican drug war. For an hour or two, he

talks on a global scale, for all that cash being used to buy up industries,

of shopping for cheap steel mills in the fire sale atmosphere of Eastern

Europe, of the penetration and purchase of legitimate corporations in

Mexico. He mentions one Mexican financier who bought a big chunk of the Del

Monte corporation and was negotiating for the rest when he disappeared in

1994. He is widely believed by U.S. intelligence to have been a front for

drug money. I doubt that anyone will ever conclusively prove this, because

under the new ways of global capitalism it is hard to determine who exactly

owns any particular thing. So the man simply shrugs after all his years of

research, "It's too late." We have a major international economic force

whose public face is a crack addict we believe must be busted or

exterminated to ensure our safety. We never see

the billions of dollars, the huge international banking system, the silent

collusion of nations, the utter dependence of Mexico, or a barrel

containing a woman floating in a sewage canal. We flounder with rhetoric

about a war on drugs and present pie charts and analysis about some

federation of thugs even as we willfully ignore the scale, the nature and

the vitality of the thing we are confronting. And this is true whether we

think we should legalize drugs or toughen prison sentences, whether we use

the stuff and love it or know nothing about the stuff and dread it.

Imagine it is night and we have poor jobs and little money and we are

walking down a lonely city street with garbage strewn about the sidewalk and

suddenly out of nowhere a huge fleet of limousines races past, the long

stretch bodies gleaming, the windows tinted and the occupants obscured. The

tires slash through puddles and splash us. And then they are gone, and

instantly we forget it ever happened. Later, we feel our

wet clothing and think there must have been a light shower we did not

notice. That is the walk we all now make each evening. When you finish this

story, everything you have read will cease to exist. Then the vast silence

will return again and sucker each and every one of us.

In the gray light of morning, I do not believe in the existence of a Amado

Carrillo Fuentes. I stand on a porch near the border in El Paso and listen

to the traffic hum of the two cities. The air is a brown paste of pollution,

and until I take that first sip of coffee, Carrillo has no reality for me.

This happens every dawn.

In December six tons of coke was found in a warehouse in Tucson within a

mile of my home. The newspapers played the story for two days and then

dropped it, never identifying where the coke

had come from. I checked with the DEA, and they said it had come from

Juarez. A few weeks after

this load was lost, the executions began in Juarez. During the time this

fist full of murders took place,

Amado Carrillo's name never came up. On any given day, I'd check with

friends and be told matter of

factly that Carrillo was in Juarez or not in Juarez. And yet he could not be

found. Sometimes I pretend to live inside Carrillo's mind. He is in a trap.

He cannot retire with his billions; he is too notorious. But if he stays in

the life, he will eventually be slaughtered. He cannot ratchet back the

volume of his business because if he tries to do this, he will be replaced.

He cannot stop buying the Mexican government he

needs its assistance to run his business but this very act makes him a

threat to the ruling elite, an inevitable target. So he must continue

moving, killing and gathering power. He is intelligent, ruthless and

exacting in his plans. These traits cannot save him. So I think of him and

wander through his mind. He is much like the

U.S. government, the agents of the DEA he shares an understanding with Phil

Jordan. He can know everything but still not control the outcome.

Amado Carrillo came into my life not as a subject, a man to be researched

and written about, but as violence. I still remember the wide smile and the

quick happy eyes of the groom at the wedding where the parrots screamed. In

April 1995, the groom at that wedding was slaughtered in front of this

family. In a

resort on a Sonoran coast. I remember standing there several days later and

looking at his blood on the pavement. Then, in September 1995, a DEA told

me that the groom was believed to have been murdered on the order of Amado

Carrillo for losing a load.

Carrillo has taken up residence in my mind, and I need to comfort myself

with the knowledge that

he is human, a man, and not as El Senor De los Cielos.

I am drunk in the midnight hour when I arrive at what is said to be the

private club of Amado Carrillo in Juarez. Inside glows an exact copy of a

section of Michelangelo's mural in the Sistine Chapel, the detail where God

reaches out to an all but comatose Adam and gives him a hit of the new drug,

life.

The outside of the club is marble, the doors are brass, and the gatekeepers

loom before me as the standard human refrigerators. The club has been opened

since December 1995 a bevy of rich, light skinned women and powerful, light

skinned men attending that inaugural was celebrated in a full page of color

coverage in the Juarez morning paper. But there was no mention of the man who

spent the night at a table, front and center, snorting coke and being his

wonderful self Amado Carrillo Fuentes. In fact, the newspapers never

mentioned who really owned the place.

So I wield down to this finer district, where Carrillo's club gleams,

literally as bold as brass. I'm a bit testy about the air of mystery

cloaking the man. Where is he? What does he look like? What's he up to?

Across the river in El Paso is a big bank, and, according to the DEA, he

owns it. No one mentions this. He owns factories in this city. No one

mentions this either. I'm stuffed with the lore of my government's research.

There are hundreds of pages of files on Carrillo, but they still leave him a

ghostly presence. Cops like tactical information license plates, business

fronts and the like and don't concern themselves much with the intellect or

personality pulsing behind these artifacts. Well, Carrillo's sitting in his

club right now, and I aim

to pay a visit.

I know he's in there, twenty feet away, his face a blank, nostrils twitching

from the coke the man no one knows, the man no one can find. Inside the

club, he exists. Outside, on the street where I now stand, he is name never

mentioned, an invisible ten billion dollar man.

But as usual, I fucked up. The doorman says the club is closed. I pointed

out there are loud and merry voices coming from within. The doorman says

yes, but this is a special club, a very refined place,

and I failed to measure up to the dress code. My shirt he explains has

pockets, and this is a violation of the standards.

Charles Bowden is the author of "Blood Orchid: an unnatural history of

America", which was recently

awarded the Lannan Literary Award, which came with a big check.