Guadalajara Cartel

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Guadalajara on the map of Jalisco

The Guadalajara Cartel ( Spanish: Cártel de Guadalajara ) was a Mexican drug cartel that was founded in the early 1980s by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo , Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo . Among the first Mexican drug trafficking groups to work with Colombian cocaine traffickers, the Guadalajara cartel thrived from the cocaine trade. It is estimated that the smugglers network had annual sales of $ 5 billion.

history

  • Miguel Angel Felix "El Padrino" Gallardo: A former police officer and bodyguard of Governor Leopoldo Sánchez Celis . He built his own empire in his native Sinaloa and later moved his headquarters to Guadalajara .
  • Ernesto Fonseca “Don Neto” Carrillo: Has been involved in smuggling mainly in Ecuador since the early 1970s and later moved to Mexico. He is the uncle of the founder of the Juárez cartel named Amado Carrillo Fuentes .
  • Rafael Caro Quintero: Born in Badiraguato in 1952 , he was already producing six tons of marijuana a year at the age of 24. Quintero temporarily forced more than 4,000 people to work on his drug plantations in Chihuahua , in the north of the country, during the 1980s. He is the brother of Miguel Caro Quintero , who later became the head of the Sonora cartel .

This trio took over the entire control of the drug trade in Sinaloa from 1978. For a long time, cocaine was transported to and from Mexico in close cooperation with the Honduran drug trafficker Juan Matta-Ballesteros . They created an empire and soon they dominated the entire drug trade in Mexico. Together they began smuggling drugs from South America into the United States, and a few years later the cartel began circulating Colombian cocaine. While in the past it was predominantly Colombian cartels such as the Cali cartel and the Medellín cartel that ensured that cocaine, marijuana and heroin reached the USA, the Guadalajara cartel now also increasingly profited from these export transactions.

Enrique Camarena aka "Kiki" was a Mexican with US citizenship and has been investigating undercover for the DEA since 1981 . He had succeeded in serving his way up in Quintero's organization. On February 7, 1985, Quintero-bribed police arrested Camarena as he was leaving the US consulate in Guadalajara, and he succumbed to torture three days after his abduction. When the body was found in a field in March 1985, Quintero fled. Anti-terrorist units picked him up in a finca in Costa Rica and he was handed over to the Mexican authorities. Investigators confiscated villas, shops and luxury cars all over the country. Quintero's estimated net worth was $ 2 billion.

Under the leadership of Félix Gallardo, the Guadalajara Cartel handled most of the cocaine trade and controlled 70 percent of the opium and marijuana cultivation in northern Mexico. Although he was the most wanted drug boss at the time, Gallardo was able to move unmolested in Sinaloa during the tenure of President Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado (1982-1988). In 1987 he decided to reorganize drug smuggling and at the same time renounce part of his power. With other drug dealers, he divided his area of ​​influence, the plazas (drug routes or transhipment points), into six new districts:

At the time, the Guadalajara cartel was arguably the most influential and powerful drug cartel in Mexican history.

In 1988 a commission of inquiry headed by Senator John Kerry produced a report. Accordingly, the CIA had close ties with the Guadalajara cartel in the course of the so-called Iran-Contra affair . The drug lords are said to have supported the Contra rebels in Nicaragua and were given access to the American market in return. According to this report, the key figure had been Quintero. The contra guerrillas had been trained on his ranches in Mexico, and planes took off from his airfields to take drugs to the USA and weapons to Nicaragua.

Gallardo was arrested four months after President Carlos Salinas de Gortari took office on April 8, 1989 in Guadalajara by police officer Guillermo González Calderoni. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison. Carrillo was also arrested the day before and given a 40-year prison term. In December 1989, Quintero, who had long been arrested, was also sentenced to a maximum of 40 years for murder, kidnapping, forming a criminal organization, cultivating and trafficking marijuana and cocaine.

After Gallardo was arrested, disputes broke out among the padróns. Since each of the five remaining drug lords wanted to secure increased influence, the Federación finally broke up and several small groups emerged, some of which still exist today: the Sinaloa cartel, the Gulf cartel, the Tijuana cartel, and the Juárez cartel.

Movie and TV

  • 2017: Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo is played by Ricardo Lorenzana in 2 episodes of the first season of the series El Chapo .
  • 2018: The companion series Narcos: Mexico , originally intended as the fourth season of Narcos, revolves around the Guadalajara cartel, among other things.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ OÖ Nachrichten - War apart from the general public: 50,000 dead in Mexico
  2. ↑ Berliner Kurier - Free again after 28 years The drug lord who wanted to pay Mexico's debts
  3. ↑ Schattenblick - USA-336 Trial of member of the Sinaloa cartel brings USA into trouble
  4. ↑ Spiegel Online - Rafael Caro Quintero How the drug lord got on with the USA
  5. ^ The New York Times - Mexicans arrest top drug figure and 80 policemen
  6. ↑ Latin America News - Accursed Inheritance
  7. ↑ Series Fox - "Narcos" Season 4: Teaser announces Diego Luna and Michael Peña