By Alan Feuer
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It
is no secret that Mexico’s drug cartels have, for decades, corrupted
the authorities with dirty money. But as bad as the graft has been, the
New York trial of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug lord known as El Chapo,
has suggested that the swamp of bribery runs even deeper than thought.
In
two months of testimony, nearly every level of the Mexican government
has been depicted as being on the take: Prison guards, airport
officials, police officers, prosecutors, tax assessors and military
personnel are all said to have been compromised.
One
former army general, Gilberto Toledano, was recently accused of
routinely getting payoffs of $100,000 to permit the flow of drugs
through his district.
Even the architect of the government’s war on Mr. Guzmán and his allies — Genaro García Luna, the former public security director — was suspected to have taken briefcases stuffed with cartel cash.
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Federal
prosecutors have charged Mr. Guzmán, a longtime leader of the Sinaloa
drug cartel, with taking part in a continuing criminal enterprise by
shipping more than 200 tons of heroin, cocaine and marijuana across the
United States border from the 1980s until his arrest in Mexico two years
ago.
To prove its case, the
government plans to call as witnesses at least 16 of the kingpin’s
underlings and allies, some of whom served as cartel bag men.
While tales of violence have been common at the trial (which is on hiatus for the holidays), the accounts of graft have been even more extensive.
The
jurors have been told that Mr. Guzmán was practiced in the business of
corruption from the earliest days of his career. In the late 1980s,
witnesses have said, he started funneling millions of dollars to the
first official on his payroll: Guillermo González Calderoni, the chief
of Mexico City’s federal police.
Mr.
Calderoni, who was partly raised in Texas, eventually became a legendary
officer in Mexico, perhaps best known for having helped the American
authorities crack the case of Enrique Camarena Salazar, an agent for the
Drug Enforcement Administration who was captured, tortured and killed by traffickers in 1985. But within two years, according to evidence at Mr. Guzmán’s trial, the lawman was already accepting cartel bribes.
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One
witness, Miguel Angel Martínez, told the jurors that Mr. Calderoni
provided Mr. Guzmán with secret information on an almost daily basis,
including an invaluable tip in the early 1990s that the United States
government had built a radar installation on the Yucatán Peninsula to
track his drug flights from Colombia.
Mr.
Martínez also testified that Mr. Calderoni once informed Mr. Guzmán
that the Mexican authorities had discovered a smuggling tunnel he had
dug beneath the Arizona border. Before the police could raid the tunnel,
Mr. Guzmán was able to make off with a huge supply of cocaine.
But as useful as he was to the kingpin’s operation, Mr. Calderoni met a violent end.
In 2003, a gunman approached his silver Mercedes, as it sat parked on a
street in McAllen, Tex., and shot him in the head. The authorities have
never identified his killer.
Mexico is not the only country to emerge from the trial with its reputation stained. Last month, Juan Carlos Ramírez Abadía,
one of Mr. Guzmán’s Colombian suppliers, appeared in Federal District
Court in Brooklyn and admitted to having paid off everyone from
journalists to tax officials in his country.
A
former chief of the North Valley drug cartel, Mr. Ramírez calmly told
the jurors that an entire wing of his organization was devoted to doling
out payments. “It’s impossible to be the leader of a drug cartel in
Colombia without having corruption,” he explained. “They go hand in
hand.”
The list of those who took his
money was impressive: prison guards, border agents, lawyers and several
officers with Colombia’s national police.
Mr.
Ramírez boasted from the stand that in 1997, he spent more than $10
million bribing what amounted to the entire Colombian Congress to change
the country’s extradition laws in his favor. He also claimed to have
paid as much as $500,000 to Ernesto Samper, the former president of
Colombia, when he was running for office.
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Even people in the private sector, witnesses have said, took cash from the cartels.
A
few weeks ago, the jurors learned that Mr. Guzmán had once reached a
deal with a Colombian catering firm to sneak cocaine past security
officials at the Bogotá airport onto planes owned by a Venezuelan
airline, Aeropostal. When the planes arrived in Mexico City, the jurors
were informed, a crew of corrupt employees would move the drugs onto
trucks for the cartel.
Jorge Cifuentes Villa,
a Colombian trafficker who also shipped cocaine to Mr. Guzmán, recently
testified that, during his career, he laundered up to $15 million in
drug-trade profits through a crooked debit card company.
Mr.
Cifuentes also said he once paid off a professional gemologist to
fraudulently certify that there were emeralds in a mine he had invested
in and was using as a drug front.
Some of the most egregious evidence of corruption has not been heard by the jury, and likely never will be.
In
November, for example, one of Mr. Guzmán’s former operations chiefs,
Jesus Zambada García, was poised to reveal that two Mexican presidents —
neither of whom was named — had taken massive bribes from the cartel. But the testimony was shut down before it could be heard by Judge Brian M. Cogan, who ruled that it would needlessly embarrass certain “individuals and entities.”
But further tales of payoffs may be coming.
In
his opening statement, Jeffrey Lichtman, one of Mr. Guzmán’s lawyers,
promised jurors that a witness who has not yet appeared at the trial,
Cesar Gastelum Serrano, could — if asked — talk about bribing
presidential candidates in Guatemala and buying off a president of
Honduras.
Then there was another
potential witness, Dámaso López Núñez, one of Mr. Guzmán’s top
lieutenants, who allegedly had Mexican Marines, intelligence officers
and local politicians on his payroll.
“There is no part of the Mexican government or law enforcement apparatus,” Mr. Lichtman said, “that Dámaso did not control.”
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: El Chapo Trial Reveals An Abyss of Corruption. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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