El Chapo Guzmán, the informant who never was

Chivis Martinez Borderland Beat republished from Nexos

Excellent read by one of my most respected and trusted authors

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hey are everywhere."

Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo, looked at the three men in the room with him. For a few minutes he had been babbling incoherently until they entered, and little by little he changed his tone of voice to a normal one. He told them he would be honest with them - he was afraid of his rivals, the Arellano Felix brothers. He offered a deal to the three men: I will give you Arellano Felix and you eliminate the accusations against me and against my brother Arturo.

The two agents of the DEA, the Drug Control Administration of the United States, were accompanied by an agent of the Attorney General of the Republic of Mexico, PGR. None gave way. There is no deal, they said.

For more than a decade and a half, the 1998 meeting between Guzmán and DEA agents Joe Bond and Larry Villalobos, along with José Pepe Patiño Moreno of the PGR in Puente Grande prison, was a US national security secret. But with Guzman now sentenced to life imprisonment without parole ]in the U.S.], more details of that meeting - and the capo's desperate effort to become a DEA informant - have come to light. After the trial, Judge Brian Cogan made public a summary of the classified report; earlier this year, former agent Bond taught him who writes an unaltered copy of the report he and his colleague Villalobos wrote days after his meeting with Guzman in Puente Grande.

The DEA has been criticized for a long time for the relationship it has with its informants. Since the 1970s, the US government - the DEA and the CIA in particular - has been accused several times of entering the territory of money laundering and drug trafficking, but the damage that has lasted the longest, the real one, has occurred through its informants and other criminals who have denounced that the government helps the cartels. Reports in the press since the beginning of this century, which allege collusion between the DEA and the Mexican cartels, which are based on testimonies of drug traffickers, have damaged the efforts of both the DEA and the Mexican authorities to win supporters in what is has turned into a national media war, which includes narcomantas, the internet and public relations offensives in media, very well calculated by the cartels themselves.

A DEA agent who worked in Mexico City at the end of the last decade says without a doubt that "there was no agreement" between the DEA and the Sinaloa Cartel, but admits, under anonymity, that the DEA used information that they provided.

"We take information from where we can get it," he says. "Does a high-level person come from an organization and we're not going to use it?" The main problem: by law, anti-drug agents in Mexico are obliged to deliver this type of information to their Mexican counterparts, which they did not do for lack of confidence. A second problem: what happens when a high-level trafficker tries to become an informant to manipulate the DEA himself?

The day is March 6, 1998. Bond and Villalobos looked at prisoner number 516, freshly shaved and wearing a khaki uniform. The two agents had managed to enter the maximum security prison by posing as social workers; they had false credentials that the PGR had given them. They told the director of the prison that they were going to make personality profiles to the most important prisoners in the prison. The director warned them that there was no guarantee that a group of prisoners wouldn’t kidnap them.

Patiño turned to see Guzmán. Guzmán looked at him angrily. He asked Patiño what he was doing there and told him that he did not trust the PGR. He had already given her information about the Arellano Felix brothers, he told her. The PGR had not acted, and only did it a week after the Arellano Felix had fled. There were other cases that made his lack of confidence even greater, he said. Patiño reassured him by telling him that, nothing he said at the meeting in Puente Grande would be used against him. The DEA agents did not join the pledges.

But this is not Tito, said Guzmán. He wanted only Tito, the man with whom he had negotiated to meet. The man from the DEA, Tito. Tito was the name that Guzmán had given the emissary before he even met Bond or Villalobos.

DEA agent Bond had reached Mexico City in late 1997. He was born and raised in the city, then moved to Mississippi and become state police and subsequently joining the DEA. Only a few months after his arrival in the capital he had already entered into strategic alliances with his counterparts in the PGR. His knowledge of the language helped him a lot, as well as his understanding of the culture. He had read Guzman's files, as did Villalobos, a DEA intelligence analyst.

Guzmán was in jail, but even so nobody had as much knowledge of the operations of the Sinaloa Cartel as he did. The DEA knew that he handled everything from jail, in particular through his lawyer and Arturo, one of his brothers.

Shortly after landing in Mexico, Bond received a visitor who had no appointment with him. A possible informant, perhaps, a few blocks from the US embassy. Guzmán had sent a relative, whose name will not be revealed for his own protection, to meet with the DEA. Given his relationship with Guzmán - the man said to be his brother-in-law - the man could have been what the DEA calls "the goose that lays the golden eggs."

Bond was very interested. The nickname of the informant, chosen by Guzmán, would be Elektra. "He wants to talk to you," Elektra told Bond. "Guzman wanted to meet with the DEA at Puente Grande. Bond immediately requested permission from his Mexican counterparts, while also holding frequent meetings with Elektra. Bond thought about all the variables. Were they using it? How could El Chapo use it?

Why would he want to use Bond, to get closer to his enemy?

The Sinaloa Cartel, according to former DEA agents who worked in Mexico during the 1990s, probably already had its tentacles around Mexico's law enforcement agencies. "These guys have informants in every agency," says DEA's former head of International Operations, Mike Vigil. "They know how the government thinks. Guzmán knew this. I thought: 'The United States is the same and is interested in my importance'. Guzmán studied the DEA. “What he wanted from the DEA was not clear, according to Bond, and Elektra could not give any detail. Guzman perhaps thought that the "empty suits" of the DEA in Washington - bureaucrats with the minimum understanding of street-level operations - would believe that he was a big shot they needed to bring back, says Vigil. Bond told his superiors and received the green light, although he remained skeptical.

On March 5, Bond sent a message to Guzmán through Elektra: we have the authorization of the Mexican government to enter Puente Grande. Bond did not give him more details, neither date nor time. The agents of the DEA would call him to the mission Operation Apocalypse. It was a breakthrough of enormous proportions: no US agent had stepped inside a maximum security prison in Mexico; much less had he interviewed an inmate.

Guzmán received the message. But he never thought they would arrive the next day, Bond says 20 years later.

When the agents arrived and gave the password, Guzmán threw himself to the floor to check that they were not being eavesdropped. There was a one-sided mirror in the room; Bond thought that agents were being recorded for his protection rather than his motives.

Bond knew that the DEA already had informants inside the Arellano Felix cartel, but Guzman surely knew more. Bond also knew that he was in danger of crossing an important line. "Who else would help him [Guzman] eliminate his main rivals but the DEA?" he thought. He reflected on the consequences.

Guzmán remained firm: he wanted to give information to the DEA, but he also insisted that he move to a lower security prison to be able to give orders to his people more easily. In order to be transferred to another prison, El Chapo told the agents that he would face accusations of the murder of Francisco Rodolfo Álvarez Fáber, attorney general of Sinaloa, in April 1993. If that judicial process was respected, he suggested, there would be no greater media interest in his transfer to another prison, which would undoubtedly be interpreted by his rivals as having revealed information about them. If he did not fulfill his promise to the DEA -intelligence to stop his enemies- he told them that he "had no problem returning" to the maximum security prison to purge his sentence.

Guzmán spoke for three hours. He told some of his story to DEA agents, as well as one of his predecessors. It was true that there had been a meeting of the new generation of capos, but it had only happened after the arrest of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, and it had happened in Mexico City, not Acapulco. The meeting was held in the early nineties. Benjamín Arellano Félix, Rafael Aguilar-Guajardo, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Emilio Quintero-Payán and Guzmán had created "The Federation", according to the report that Bond and Villalobos wrote.

Guzmán admitted that he killed some "bad people." "We did not start the war," he added, referring to what was happening in Tijuana at that time. "They" wanted to blame him for that, just as "they" had blamed him for the murder of Cardinal Jesus Posadas Ocampo in 1993. Guzmán insisted that Ramón Arellano Félix was the one who broke the agreement in Mexico City. Guzmán gave information to the agents about the hierarchy of the Arellano Felix cartel and some details about drug trafficking and a tunnel. He added that Héctor Güero Palma, also in Puente Grande, was now his enemy and that he also had information about him and his group.

Guzmán had already spoken to the authorities before, but in a more discreet way and in such a way that what he said could not be used as testimony, not even under Mexican law, where he was guilty until proven otherwise. In 1993, after his capture in Guatemala, the DEA and its Mexican counterparts had laughed, when hearing that the Guatemalan army took Guzmán to the Mexicans, tied up and gagged, lying in the back of a pickup truck in which turned like a log while they were traveling  along a dirt road, recalls the former Chief Vigil, who at the time was in Mexico City, "it was hilarious." But in the military helicopter that transported him to the capital, Guzmán was already negotiating, supposedly telling the soldiers that he was guilty of drug trafficking but not of killing the cardinal.

During the meeting in Puente Grande with Bond and Villalobos, Guzmán emphasized that he wanted to eliminate the accusations against his brother Arturo, who had been arrested in Arizona with 1.26 million dollars in cash in 1989, adding that he was worried the safety of your family. At the end of the interview, and to demonstrate his value as an informant, Guzmán told the agents that the Mexican ambassador to France and the attorney general would be assassinated soon.

"Do not tell me mamadas,[in this context meaning useless]" Bond told him closely. "Give me more evidence." "Ok, Tito , no problem." "If you tell me mamadas, this is over. You want me to work this for you, then you have to work with me. "

"I think nobody has ever talked to him like that," says Bond. He left the meeting with the impression that Guzmán felt he was losing control. "I was already trying to leave everything behind," he said.

Guzmán's predictions never happened.

Bond and Villalobos left Puente Grande by the main gate, just as Guzmán would do a few years later. They would never meet again-Patiño appeared dead in the summer of 2000, run over by a cement mixer outside of Tijuana, moments after meeting with DEA ​​agents across the border. But Guzmán would try again to negotiate with the DEA. A few months after the meeting in Puente Grande, Bond received another visit at the US embassy - Guzmán's second wife, Griselda López Pérez. She wanted US visas for herself and her two children; her name was on a list, and embassy staff alerted Bond as soon as the alerts went off. They talked near the embassy for no more than 15 minutes, and Bond asked her to get him an informant, someone close to Guzmán. Elektra was not good enough, he said; I needed a blood relative, someone from his inner circle.

Griselda agreed to hand him over to Arturo. Not in exchange for visas; this was a deal only of information. The implicit agreement was that Guzman would quietly purge his sentence in a Mexican jail, off the radar of the DEA, if Arturo provided information.

Despite the new agreement, which still did not bear fruit, Elektra and Bond continued to talk on the phone during 2001, after Guzmán's brash escape from Puente Grande. Bond knew that the US federal prosecutor's office had Arturo arrested in Arizona on a lesser charge - the transfer of proceeds from the sale of drugs involved a 10-year sentence, and he would leave in seven with good behavior. If he could get Arturo to work with the DEA, he could use that information against the other cartels and eventually against the other members of the Guzman family, if they could survive all this.

Griselda arranged a meeting. It would take place at the Bristol Hotel, a few blocks from the US embassy. Griselda would not attend. Arturo would go with his bodyguard, who would wait in an adjoining room while Bond and Arturo talked.

By then, Bond had been in Mexico City for three years, and had a close relationship with Genaro García Luna, then head of the AFI. They shared information and intelligence very often, but not always.

Bond called Elektra for the last time. He was worried about his informant, whom he considered "the best". With the Guzmán fugitive, Elektra was no longer such a good emissary. He was an informant of the DEA. "You already burned yourself. They're going to kill you, "Bond told Elektra, and warned him that they would have to end their relationship. García Luna intercepted the call and hid Elektra in El Pedregal, in a house that had belonged to Amado Carrillo Fuentes before being confiscated by the Mexican government. He called Bond.

Bond told him what he was doing and what he was planning. They agreed that the meeting with Arturo would stand, but García Luna would attend, disguised as Bond's driver. He would sit in the other room with Arturo's bodyguard.

The meeting went as planned - luckily Arturo did not identify García Luna when they met in the corridor. They talked but shared little information. Bond gave Arturo a cell phone, and a number that would only be used for calls between them. Arturo told Bond that he "could fix" a meeting between him and Guzmán.

Hours later, while he was leaving the capital by car, Arturo was arrested by members of García Luna's police. He would be murdered in jail in 2004. Bond would never again approach Guzmán. "He was my best informant," Bond says of Elektra.

Bond was furious with García Luna. Garcia Luna told him that he could not let Arturo run away because he could get him a meeting with Guzmán. But Bond understood why he told him. His bosses carried the guilt of having let Guzmán escape from Puente Grande. They could not let their brother, also a fugitive, escape.

The information that Guzmán gave to the DEA directly, or through Arturo, or Griselda or Elektra never led to anything, according to Bond. Elektra received a reward for the information given and now lives a new life under the supervision of the United States government. Arturo's charges were never obliterated, and during Guzman's trial in Brooklyn the money that was seized from his car was the key piece of evidence from the prosecution for the charge of money laundering.

If Guzman had reached a deal with the authorities and had given them useful intelligence from Puente Grande, he might have received a lower sentence. He might even be out of jail today, 26 years after his arrest. Instead, the informant who never was will spend the rest of his days in the United States. "It was a fishing rod without a hook," says Vigil. "I wanted to catch fish with just one hook."

By Malcolm Beith