The rise of the Cartels

Part 16 - Colombian criminal organizations are expanding their wings into North America

Medellin — In Medellin, Colombia, dying once is not enough. Here, the dead are killed over and over again. Luis Alfredo Zea, for instance, some years ago was killed three times. The first time when he was attacked in a street of his barrio, the uptown neighbourhoods with dirt roads. They fired 28 shots at him; as many as the years of his life. Somewhere else this could have been a coincidence. In Medellin, only the naive would believe that.
The second time came as a surprise, not to him (who was dead) but to his father who saw a group of hit-men enter his house during the wake. And Luis Alfredo Zea’s body was again used for target practice.
As if this was not enough, the following day it was the turn of the burial motorcade. A car blocked the road and two killers on a motorcycle machine-gunned poor Zea’s coffin. And after three deaths, two coffins and almost a hundred shots to his body, Luis Alfredo was finally buried in a rush. No prayers, nor ceremonies of any kind. Maybe the fastest burial in Medellin’s history.
Police could only conjecture about the reasons for all this fury against Luis Alfredo. It appears that he was a killer belonging to a group of drug dealers and had tried to become independent and form a gang of his own. This excess of initiative procured him the first 28 shots. The other two "deaths" were a warning issued to his friends and colleagues, as if to say: who betrays us will not rest in peace.
A story like many others in Colombia, a land that the State finds difficult to seize back from drug dealers’ control. A country famous for its sad records, like those of kidnappings and murders, which have become a part of everyday life during the past years.
The first criminal organizations were created in the early Seventies and consolidated in the following decade through cocaine production and export. They got their names according to their areas of operation: La Costena, along the Atlantic coast, also specialized in marijuana production and sales, those of the Antioquia State and of the Valle del Cauca, as well as the Central and Eastern organizations.
Later, when the DEA (the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency) began to call them "cartels", they were identified as: Medellin Cartel (in a tight spot after the death of his leader, Pablo Escobar, during a clash with police in 1993); Calì Cartel (also in difficulty after the conviction of Gilberto and Gustavo Rodriguez Orejuela); Coastal Cartel (still specialized in marijuana); Coffee Axis Cartel (operating in the Risaralda and Quindio Departments and specialized in amphetamines); Norte del Valle Cartel (poppy production for heroin); Igabuè Cartel (central Olima Department, poppy production); Santander Cartel (on the Venezuelan border). And the most mysterious of them all, the Bogotà Cartel, apparently with top-level connections and specialized in money-laundering.
Rather than real cartels, however, they are autonomous organizations operating, depending on the area, like the Sicilian Mafia or the more modern U.S. criminal syndicates. They’ve infiltrated most of the political structures, especially at the local level, but also law enforcement agencies, the armed forces and the business establishment, since they invest in banks, construction, land (it is told that 30 percent of all productive land is the property of drug dealers), tourism and sports, especially soccer. In some areas, furthermore, they get the support of guerrillas who impose fees for protecting clandestine laboratories and poppy and Indian hemp plantations.
"The members of Colombian organizations are called narcotraficantes," explains Ben Soave, the chief of the Greater Toronto Area Task Force Against Organized Crime. "And the different organizations, each commanding hundreds of men, have rigidly pyramidal and hierarchical structures."
"The bosses of the different clans," Soave continues, "join in the so-called cartels, composed of the group of ‘families’ based in the same geographical area, that decide about all activities and the preparation of the technical and logistical means needed to achieve illicit profit."
In a sense, the Colombian cartels are unique. While the other criminal organizations tend to expand the range of their activities, the Colombian organizations have begun and still continue only with international drug dealing, in marijuana, cocaine, and recently also heroin.
"Their organization is the result of a merge between criminal culture and entrepreneurial culture," explains Soave. "The work of members of the Colombian cartels is, in fact, based on a sort of ‘assembly line’: from production of coca leaves to peddling around the world."
In practice, the cartels include some nuclei having their own bosses, whom they entrust the different tasks to: purchasing raw materials, refining, security service protecting the laboratories and the marshalling yards, money cashing-in and investment selection, organization of goods logistics. In addition to these activities, the narcotraficantes play the role of defenders of the campesinos engaged in cultivating and refining coca. This task is carried out by several guerrilla groups, including the "Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces" (FARC) and the "April 19 Movement".
Until mid-1991 some Colombian public structures were strongly influenced by drug terrorism carried out by the Medellin Cartel to impose its will on the authorities. But the Colombian government, with U.S. help, increased its investigative and military pressure on the members of the Colombian cartels, also passing laws on collaboration with justice that put several groups in dire straits. Many drug dealers tried to ‘recycle’ themselves, pretending to be clean and respectable businessmen, investing a lot of money in lawful businesses. Others ended up behind bars.

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Bernardo Arcila, fiduciary of the most important cartels, has been called the biggest Colombian drug dealer in Canada’s history. He emigrated in 1972 with his wife and son, settling down in Toronto where he began to pull the strings of a large drug peddling ring.
"He was on very good terms with Pablo Escobar, the boss of the Medellin Cartel," says James Leising, Crown Attorney in the most important trial against drug dealers held in Toronto. "He supplied cocaine for the Toronto and Montreal markets and with his organizations he had created connections even with Newfoundland dealers."
When in 1989, after a long and complicated investigation, the RCMP and the Metro Toronto Police managed to collect the evidence needed to arrest him, Arcila promptly vanished. He flew back to Colombia, thus avoiding being handcuffed. From 1989 to date, more than 100 people who had been connected to Arcila have been arrested in Canada. No trace of Arcila, however. "Too powerful," say some investigators who unsuccessfully tried to hunt him down.
Some years ago a Macleans magazine journalist found Arcila’s golden shelter in Colombia, between Medellin and Magdalena Valley, where he owned some ranches. A patrimony estimated at a one billion-dollar value.
The Mexican mob deserves a different treatment. For years the sombrero-wearing gangsters were thought of as the couriers of the Colombian narcos. They were charged with the task of evading the Yankees’ surveillance over the strip of land separating the United States from Mexico. Two thousand miles of border: a strainer with innumerable holes through which anything could pass.
Today, following the hard blows suffered by the Medellin and Calì cartels, the Mexican criminal organizations have gone their own way and, as DEA’s chief Thomas Costantine underscored recently, have become a real threat for North America.
They control the market of metamphetamines, once the domain of the biker gangs. But they also deal in cocaine, heroin and marijuana. Every year 70 percent of the cocaine and 50 percent of the marijuana sold in the U.S. pass through Mexico. These are mind-boggling figures, according to the estimates of the National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee. Corruption is also rampant.
The most typical organization, a sort of criminal syndicate, is the so-called Federation: we must add, anyway, that the Mexican mob alliances are formed and broken according to circumstances and interests. Clashes between rival gangs are frequent and bloody.
The most powerful organizations are four. The Tijuana clan, based in the town of the same name in the California Norte Bay, is the most violent. Its victims include Cardinal Juan Jesu Pocadas Ocampo, killed in 1993 at the Guadalajara airport. The Sonora cartel operates among Hermosillo, Agua Prieta, Guadalajara and Culiacan, with connections in the Mexican states of San Luis Potosi, Sinaloa and Sonora. This group’s zone of influence extends also to California, Arizona, Texas and Nevada. It maintains connections with the major Colombian organizations.
The Juarez cartel was led by Amado Carillo Fuentes, Mexico’s most powerful drug dealer, who died in 1997 during a plastic surgery operation. This group is connected to the Rodriguez Orejuela (Calì cartel) and through family relations to the Ochoa brothers (Medellin cartel). For years, the Juarez cartel smuggled drugs to the United States on behalf of the narcos, even using airplanes. In 1989 some couriers belonging to this cartel were arrested by the DEA, which in Sylmar (California) seized 21 tons of cocaine for a value of about $12 million.
The Gulf group has its base in Matamoros, in the state of Tamualipas. "Mexican drug dealers succeeded to make room for themselves in Canada in the past few years," says a DEA officer. "They managed to pass unobserved, and it’s not easy to identify them. It will take time, but then it may be too late."

(translated by Emanuele Oriano)

Publication Date: 2001-06-24
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=97