"Sol Prendido" for Borderland Beat
Former DEA agent Hector Berrellez discussed the motivations and actions of drug lords Rafael Quintero and El Chapo, shedding light on their roles within the Sinaloa cartel. Contrary to popular belief, Berrellez revealed that El Chapo was not the ultimate boss of the cartel, but rather worked under Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada.
He also stated that El Chapo was known for his violence, acting as an executioner for another cartel member, Pacho Herrera. Berrellez further claimed that El Chapo was involved in the kidnapping, torture, and burial of DEA agent "Kiki" Camarena, and criticized the fact that El Chapo was not charged with murder when he was eventually captured.
Berrellez expressed frustration with the CIA's role in drug trafficking and the negative consequences it had on communities affected by crack cocaine. He also discussed the dangers he has faced for speaking out against corruption in the Mexican government and his own government's potential plans to hand him over to Mexican authorities.
Thats what it looks like …. Zamabada family seems to have really good political connections in the USA but especially in Mexico.
ReplyDeleteAnd Cuba!
DeleteSupposedly there are zambada family members in atherton
Delete@6:54 - dang! like next to Redwood City Atherton?? I believe it!
DeleteYea, let's listen to U.S. agents? 😂 as if they don't have a long track record of lies and deceit.
ReplyDeleteExcept this one is calling out the system and fellow agents…
DeleteAd hominem.
DeleteHe's not wrong on who was a figurehead and who is the head of the organization
DeleteI mean he literally called out the CIA and admitted they killed Camarena lmfao why would he give a shit if chapo was the one in charge or not at that point
Delete@2.18. Bellerez understands as well as anybody that those men all had their different share of power, for different reasons, but Chapo was absolutely indispensable in ways that others weren't. If he was just a figurehead why would his ''boss'' risk everything (his protection, which was and is the first and most important thing for a man like Mayo) to get him out of prison, not once but twice? Which they all knew would force the Mexican Governments hand under US pressure? Pretending Chapo was a puppet who worked for Mayo is as naive as saying he was a Mexican Robin Hood trying to free his people from oppression. Chapo and Mayo were genuine partners. Vicente obviously said his dad was the boss because that was the deal. Ivan would have been told to say the same thing about his father if Mayo was on the stand in the US. That whole ''cartel'' bullshit is annoying, but for a long time Chapo was the most powerful trafficker in Mexico.
DeleteI think mayo broke him out of prison twice to make him seem like this powerful boss and keep the attention off his family
Delete@7:32, He said Chapo was a Boss but not at the level of Mayo Zambada. Mayo allegedly helped with Money and nothing else. Remember, Chapo was nicknamed El Rapido because he could cross them faster than anyone else. That was his gift and is what made him Special.
Delete7:32 I got good friends and a compadre from Sinaloa. And the way they talked about Mayo and the things thet said and certain incidents that happened, most definitely Mayo was the dominant one and the one with more power and influence. It seemed that Mayo was the boss. And all this was spoken of and I had that impression before his second to last incarceration. They never said Mayo was the main and real boss, but they didn't really have to. They already knew that and spoke of it as if it was a known fact. Growing up you wouldn't keep stipulating if your father was the head of the house hold, you already knew that and spoke as if everyone else did as well. Same thing with Mayo.
DeleteSinaloa Cartel never had a leader. It was always a federation of famlies, primarily from Sinaloa. Every has their own distribution network, sicarios, etc but they just team up with bribing the right people, distribution, and certain routes into USA/Europe/Australia
ReplyDeleteExactly it is still made up if different families who work together to create the Sinaloa cartel this guy is complete bullshit
DeleteLike a true cartel…
DeleteIt still is do you know any of the elite family’s in culiacan or in Sinaloa for that matter ? These are the real bosses businessmen and women. Saludos Al señor de las vacas.
Delete👆🏽👍🏽
DeleteIdk about the other cartels but I'm most affiliated with the juarez cartel because of family members that been involved not myself and right now that's how they function as well. No main leader but different plaza bosses working together
DeleteMayo controls most of the federation.
Delete@1.27. The definition of ''cartel'' isn't a bunch of mountain clans who spend half their time squabbling and the rest of the time sharing their protection (political protection to avoid prosecution, and police protection to provide gunmen).
Delete@7:37, OPEC is a true Cartel.
DeleteIt's true he was originally a bodyguard for Rafa, but he did eventually become a boss... however Mayo was always bigger than him..
ReplyDeletehttps://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1978/11/07/drug-smuggling-gambling-and-the-shadowland-of-vegas/8d228e0d-ecf1-4c9f-8e54-e30036755ed6/
@12.57 No. Mayo was more powerful when Chapo was arrested in Guatemala, but his power grew exponentially while Mayo, with his political backers to appease and his government contracts worth millions as a legitimate businessman to protect had to play a different game. They depended on each-other equally, but Chapo overtook him, in terms of his power in Mexico. Mayo backed him when he went for TJ and Nuevo Laredo and Juarez, so some people pretend that Chapo was Mayos attack dog, taking over areas that he could exploit if the routes and protection were taken, but disown if they lost. Mayo always hedged his bets, but for years he needed Chapo more than Chapo needed him. Then it was the opposite. They were mutually dependent in so many ways.
Delete@4:30, but which one is in ADX?
Deleteit was always his own faction, that's what media and others fundamentally misunderstand and constantly refer to a top down Sinaloa Cartel, when there are three or 4 separate groups who work together, but not under the same leadership
ReplyDeleteAzul
Chapo
Mayo
Nacho Coronel
Beltran Leyvas
Mayo and the Beltran Leyvas brothers helped him when he was inside until 2001
and after, Mayo said I'm 100% with you, and half of every kilo profit I'm giving to you, until you are back on your feet
Vicente detailed that part, I think, in his plea agreement
I think the issue here is a misunderstand of the word Cartel. A cartel by definition shouldn't have a leader, perhaps a most influential member, but the way that any criminal group in Mexico gets labelled a cartel is very unhelpful.
ReplyDeleteI've written about this exact issue almost exhaustively in other comments. The closest Mexico had to a "cartel" was what Felix was trying to set up. IMO there isn't a cartel now in all of Mexico. They are drug trafficking organizations - not "cartels" as the word and such an organization (alliance really) is properly defined.
Delete@1.29. That is it, absolutely. It confuses and muddles instead of making things clearer. 4 kids selling cheap meth left dead on the side of a road are ''Cartel Members'' when they never even met their supplier. Most gunmen don't even know which ''cartel'' they work for. If they live in Culiacan or Guadalajara they can guess, or if they've been sent to Zacatecas they've been told who the enemy is, but the rest is just so depressing. I understand why the term is used as a tool by prosecutors in the US, but I wish more people would explain how meaningless the term is in the Mexican economy.
DeleteJaja well why fucking A person in Mexico has to pay CJNG and CDS and CDG and CNLFM their power bills?
DeleteIn Mexico the Cartel is the authority of a state and the people have to pay and play.
Now there might not be a central leader in every cartel everywhere.
@645 I live in Mx. Your comment makes no sense. It's not about some central leader or who's in charge. These organizations are not "cartels" as the word is properly defined. Not a single one of them are a "cartel." They are drug trafficking organizations. No more, no less. Now, if CDG and two others came together in the spirit of cooperation to control price, etc, - THAT would be a "cartel." As they exist now, they are not "cartels."
Delete@10:41 I ponder this all the time. The U.S government continues to play off semantics and use hyperbole. We have a true oil cartel in the world like OPEC but it is never stated as such. I think they just weaponize the word to fight the traffickers. I also think the closest operation to a "cartel" was the Guadalajara cartel. There was such a massive alliance of drug traffickers in place to control the supply and price. The ability to stop and freeze cocaine flow in some U.S. regions. That scale of partnerships is long gone. I have noticed the word is heavily used in Mexico to define groups that control small towns or municipalities. I suppose if you control a small market then you can be called the local cartel? Is it all scale? It's difficult to say as the word cartel can fall under economic theory too. I have also seen news sources in Mexico (probably owned by narcos or the government) use the term as a way to demonize rivals. All U.S. conglomerates come close to the definition too.
Delete@1:48 the first use of the word “cartel” pertained to Guadalajara and as I said, that org was short lived and alliances came and went and were mostly based on family. No Mexican media used that term prior and it was definitely used by the US as leverage in their campaign against drugs etc. Medellin and Cali were true cartels. OPEC IS a cartel by definition. None of the groups currently or ever operate as a “cartel.”
Delete@4.07. The word ''cartel'' in Mexico was being used by the media to describe drug dealers as far back as the beginning of the previous century, and it's been used ever since. Newspapers wrote about ''Cartels'' paying street healers and promoting marijuana use in the 1910s, mainly on the US side, but it was a moral panic in Mexico and under pressure from the authorities Mexican papers spread the same bullshit. The word has been chucked around ever since. El Paso Times headline from 1932- ''Mexican Cartel Threatens to Drown El Paso In Dope''. Sounds familiar almost 100 years later.
DeleteLOL @6:23 provide your reference/source that "the word ''cartel'' in Mexico was being used by the media to describe drug dealers as far back as the beginning of the previous century..." Your headline is cherry picked from a "book" called "The Dope." However, they provide no such reference for the headline. There are also no historical matches from archives for such a headline. And I repeat, the first use of the word "cartel" in Mexican media was for the Guadalajara "cartel." if you have an instance of it being used prior by MEXICAN media, reference it please. To the extent the word was used in the US, it was used for social and political leverage.
DeleteAnd I will add the following excerpt (more has been written on this issue via other sources), "It was around this time that the DEA started talking about cartels. The agency claimed that one trafficker said, “Let’s put it all in one place, deal with one person and set a price,” and that “it was like the OPEC cartel.” Smith writes that this change likely had “more to do with the DEA’s desire to create an obvious public enemy than with any wholesale restructuring of the drug business.” On the face of it, the word “cartel” doesn’t make any sense for the drug business in Mexico, then or now. Even if, pace Zavala, you believe that drug traffickers do control extensive territory and supply chains, they shouldn’t be called cartels. If there were a true cartel, operations would be centralized, and there would be less violence. In Los Zetas Inc., the political scientist Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera explains why she doesn’t use the term. “The formation of a cartel requires an agreement between competing firms or corporations with the aim of controlling prices and production or excluding the entrance of new competitors in a specific industry,” she writes. “Because cartel formation requires cooperation between different firms, the term ‘cartel’ should not be used to refer to drug-trafficking organizations in contemporary Mexico.” In other words, there are no cartels." - https://harpers.org/archive/2023/07/do-cartels-exist-revisionist-view-of-the-drug-wars/
DeleteThey are NOT "cartels." Period. It's a misuse of the term, and it's awfully like claiming you're a man when you're a woman. The use of, or claims made, do not make something true.
@9.31. You are kind of right. I exaggerated when I said theWhenever I hear people say that the first example of the use of the word ''cartel'' as I've read it, can't find it. That was The El Paso Times and can be corroborated, and it is sourced in the book, I'm told. Just because you can't google it doesn't mean the writer of that ''book'' as you call it (why the made it up, he didn't. There are dozens of other examples, all of them from border towns in Mexico that were being influenced and trying to compete with the newspapers over the border, during a time when the border was way more porous than it is now, then the word fell out of fashion. Pretending the word first appeared in the 1980s is just not true. The original Gulf organization was called a ''cartel'' between the wars. I don't have my folders with me on this continent so you'll just have to LOL again, but you're wrong dude, confusing a legal strategy fed to the press with casual usage of a word that has always been misunderstood. I exaggerated when I said 1910s, that was when the US papers took funding from local politicos for campaigns and made Mexicans and Chinese and the drugs they sold a key component of their push for power (and land). It wasn't used as early as that.
Delete@9.31. I can't show you old yellow newspaper from between the wars from border towns when the border was porous and pretty much irrelevant. I use that Benjamin T Smith, El Paso Times example because it's something I assume other people will have read. But it is true. The term fell out of fashion for decades because the government controlled the protection and it was no longer a word that helped them, for obvious reasons. I exaggerated when I said it had been used in since the beginning of the last century. I should have said that it first cropped up between the wars in Mexican Border towns. You can LOL as much as you like, but if you think the word first gained currency in the 80s you rely too much on Google.
Delete@9.31. You know that Mexican newspapers 100 years ago, papers that came and went, got bought up and sold on, don't tend to have somebody uploading their ''Legacy'', or theand a pitiful amount you can access, for example. You're right to put the onus on me, since I was calling bull, but sometimes there is no way to back shit up.
DeleteThe academic mistake is one cartel and not many cartels, single one out and it will fit. They control the price, its a connection of different “companies (families) and they control territories. And the single cartel the academics are talking about in their classrooms would be the government of mexico.
DeleteIt fits all together, just get out of your classrooms and go into the streets
Haha what a clown trying to be famous off chapo. Stfu. You litterly let him go many times and prolly took bribe s like every one else. Just retire and stfu.
ReplyDeleteA clown? He’s DEA he knows more about the drug cartel world more than you will ever know. Plus he straight up called out the CIA he’s not fkking around
Delete@5:27 Never do brain surgery on a monkey amigo. They live in their own fabricated world view to make sense of things
DeleteChapo and Mayo always had their own factions. Chapo just wanted to be infamous and was more bloodthirsty, so Mayo let him take all the press and government attention.
ReplyDelete@1.43. Chapo was discreet and extremely wary of calling attention to himself for decades. It's how he built his power. This whole myth that Mayo was the real stealthy boss while Chapo was the bloodthirsty loudmouth who craved fame is such bullshit. Fuck em both, but Mayo gave an interview to bloody Julio Scherer for Proceso.
DeleteChapo , Azul, mayo where all heads of the Cartel but had a lot of families underneath them. They are wholesalers with their own businesses. Chapo was definitely a boss. As soon as he was deported Mexico went to shits. All the infighting and betrayal started. Mayo has power but not the leadership and enforcement chapo had
ReplyDeleteYea but after chapo got sent north the cds cartel went south, meaning they lost people and influence around mexico.
ReplyDeleteLol to say he wasn’t a boss when he escaped two prisons, was on the run for over a decade, and his sons have been charged with $10 million bounties.
ReplyDeleteEl mayo has old sku CiA connections
ReplyDelete@Connor. What good would those contacts have been to him when CIA abandoned any loyalties to central America a couple of decades ago? That old CIA compromise was cold war politics. Mayo might have ridden in the slipstream of traffickers who could provide solid intelligence, but he has fuck all to provide now since he is living in the mountains, and the old economies have been flipped on their head since then. CIA has nothing to do with it.
Delete07:01. Are you in the Central intelligence agency? Do you work for the department of defense? Are you an American citizen? Are you an investigative journalist? How the hell do you know what the fuck is going on?
Delete@6.46. No, I dont work for CIA though I have interviewed a few people who do for lots of stupid reasons. Nope to Department of Defence. I'm not an American citizen, which a pointless question considering this is about Mexico. And Yes, I am an investigative journalist who lived and worked in Mexico for years.
DeleteEl chapo was a cartel boss with his own faction that worked alongside of the other factions like the zambada or adrian gomez or el guero palma factions. Once in a while the cartel re shapes itself like when the coronel faction or the beltran factions popped up. Or right now el guano is a boss of his own faction. The chapitos have theirs too. But it seems like el mayo zambada was and is the most respected member withing the cartel.
ReplyDeleteAt the time chapo was no body
DeleteIf they are so powerful how come they can't eliminate their enemies like jalisco? All you guys are just kissing ass to them and the other cartels look what happened to Cardenas at supermax since you guys always waving your pompons when you hear about them.
ReplyDeleteIf they are so powerful how come they can't eliminate their enemies like jalisco? All you guys are just kissing ass to them and the other cartels look what happened to Cardenas at supermax since you guys always waving your pompons when you hear about them.
ReplyDeleteJalisco can’t eliminate its rivals either
DeleteChapo is crying like a girl at supermax he should move in with Cardenas so they kiss and makeup.
ReplyDeleteThis agent knows what he's talking about don't you cheerleaders get mad if he's saying the truth.la.verdad.duele.
ReplyDeleteI think Berrellez is confusing chapo Guzmán with chapo caro. Who’s actually related to rafa
ReplyDeleteHe reminds me of another self-styled "Mexican cartel expert" and I think they are both full of it. I also think the US government pays him zero attention. If he was an issue, he'd have been indicted and arrested already. He's trying to get clicks/views.
ReplyDeletePacho was with Cali I thought. How was Chapo his Sicario. This dude doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
ReplyDeleteI think this guy is just another one of El Chapos jilted lovers ! I bet he hasn't been able to fart right for many years .
ReplyDeleteI like this guy, he speaks from the heart. I believe him
ReplyDeleteBlah blah blah and more blah blah blah. I have read drug related articles since 1993 and since then Chapo was a cartel boss figure. Was he the supreme leader ? No. Absolutely not. There were several cartel groups with their own bosses but Chapo was a boss with his own powerful group and good enough to fight anyone at any time. This guy is probably using drugs nowadays.
ReplyDeleteDude what is is that you dont understand el Mayo is above him????
DeleteThe underlings are the first ones that get arrested so yeah .... Then after they arrest all the underlings they wait for one of em to snitch on the boss so if el mayo is still alive wjen they are ready to get him thtll get him eventually
ReplyDeleteChapo was a stupid as he thought he was God now he crying in lockdown
ReplyDeleteMost of the zambada family live in Long Island New York did a dig a while ago when I found the nephew of mayo’s sister that passed and most of his relatives live on the rich side of Long Island
ReplyDelete