Turning Up the Heat on Alleged Drug Lord

TIJUANA —  Years before he became one of the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted, alleged Mexican drug lord Ramon Arellano Felix--with his motorcycle, leather pants and flowing champagne--was the toast of the Tijuana disco scene.

He and his brothers moved into elegant homes, married into established families and cultivated an array of Baja California businessmen and judicial authorities.

And when the Arellanos’ enemies were executed, many looked the other way.

Today, Arellano, at 33, is a symbol of the seductive force of a powerful billion-dollar trade that has fueled a shadowy business empire, co-opted law enforcement, questioned the incorruptability of a Mexican opposition party and touched even the Catholic Church.

“The quantities of money are enormous,” said former Baja governor Ernesto Ruffo Appel. “There are families here taking advantage of all this easy money. There are powerful men in business and politics who are influenced by it.”

Now U.S. authorities are targeting this protective web.

Last month, a grand jury in the United States returned an indictment on drug conspiracy charges against Arellano. U.S. law enforcement officials said they hoped to use the indictment to turn up the heat on Arellano and “break the bubble” of protection that has prevented his capture in Baja California. They have officially baptized Arellano their drug lord du jour and compared the Tijuana drug cartel to the notoriously bloody underworld of Cali, Colombia. There is a $2-million U.S. reward, a toll-free tip line and hopes that some jaded cartel foot soldier will turn him in.

“In view of how safely ensconced they are in Baja . . . you either scare them out, or peel away the layers of protection,” a senior U.S. drug prosecutor said.

The indictment is a public relations disaster for this cosmopolitan city, whose leaders have grown so image-sensitive they squelched plans to name a Mexican soap opera “Tijuana” (fearing it would end up a “Tijuana Vice” cop series) and tried in vain to rename the drug syndicate the “Cartel del Pacifico.” Mayor Jose Guadalupe Osuna Millan wants the Tijuana reference erased from the FBI poster.

But the FBI’s portrayal of a lifestyle built on guns and cocaine was hardly a shock in Tijuana, where narcocultura is as evident as Arellano “most wanted” posters are conspicuously absent.

It has popularized a repetitive glossary of terms--narcopolice, narcopoliticians, narcomilitary--that give name to widely suspected alliances.

And, experts say, it has created a narcoeconomia.

A brief electronic stroll through Tijuana records yields the names of dozens of upstanding Tijuana businessmen listed as co-owners of properties along with alleged Arellano associates wanted on U.S. drug charges. Mexican federal agents rattle off business names--tourist hotels, pharmacy chains, food markets and money-changing houses--that they say are part of the Arellano money-laundering machine. Tijuana officials privately lament the open use of drug cash to bail out overtaxed banks.

“The only one in Tijuana who doesn’t know [the Arellanos] is me,” said Alejandro Hodoyan, a Tijuana businessman whose family has been shattered by allegations, which they reject, that one of his sons was an Arellano gunman. “The people who hung around the discos knew them. They saw them involved in an illicit business, yet roaming around free, getting all the French champagne and good-looking girls, and they said, ‘Hey, why can’t I be part of this elite?’ ”

The belief that some did join that elite grows every time fresh scandal spotlights evidence of back-room Faustian pacts.

There was the time in March 1994 when corrupt Baja police rescued Javier Arellano from Mexican federal agents. The discovery the Arellanos possessed police ID cards. The accusations that well-born young men work as Arellano gunmen with local police backing.

“It’s Kafkaesque,” said Ruffo, whose 1989 election broke six decades of domination by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. His National Action Party, or PAN, vowed to break with corruption and thuggery.

But analysts say the fact that the Arellanos have flourished just as well in PAN strongholds like Tijuana and Guadalajara demonstrates that drug corruption is a nonpartisan vice.

“One secret leads to another,” Ruffo said. “It’s like dirt swept under the rug until the rug reaches the ceiling.”

To many, it’s an open secret, known in Tijuana as plata o plomo--silver or lead--which means “bribes or bullets.”

“These people buy governments,” Hodoyan said. “Imagine if someone said, ‘Here’s a million dollars to look the other way. And if you don’t, we will kill you.’ I think most people go for the money.”

But at first, by all accounts, most of their associations were voluntary.

When the Arellanos came to Tijuana from Sinaloa in the mid-1980s, the clan--seven brothers, several sisters--seemed more benign. There were whispers about their relatives, like famed Mexican godfather Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, who was jailed in 1989.

But Benjamin Arellano, 43, the alleged leader of the Tijuana cartel, presented himself as a suave businessman. And Ramon Arellano was the host of a movable fiesta he was always willing to bankroll.

“He was a party boy. He was fun,” said Agustin Hodoyan, a brother of the alleged gunman. “But I never wanted to ask him a favor, because nothing is free.”

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But the Arellanos had something unusual to offer: easy credit.

Small business loans are difficult to obtain in crisis-ridden Mexico, and interest rates can be usurious.

Once beholden to the Arellanos, it was hard for entrepreneurs to extricate themselves. Some experts think narcotics accounts for as much as 20% of the local economy.

“My guess is that the line between legitimate and illegitimate business is very blurry,” said Peter Smith, head of Latin American Studies at UC San Diego. “Disentangling the two would be very difficult.”

To Father Salvador Cisneros, a 20-year Tijuana church veteran, the resulting web was no accident, but part of a shrewd “comprehensive strategy.”

“They used businessmen,” he said. “They offered established political leaders great quantities of money. Some took it, and some didn’t.”

And at the time, he said, the Arellanos attended church regularly, sponsored baptisms and held lavish parties. “The city was theirs,” Cisneros said.

The ostentation came to a shuddering halt with the gangland killing of Guadalajara Archbishop Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo in that city’s international airport in May 1993, by a commando team of Mexican gunmen and American gang members allegedly led by Ramon Arellano.

In the fallout, federal agents confiscated Arellano properties in Tijuana and announced a manhunt. They arrested the oldest brother--Francisco, 48, a Mazatlan disco owner--in Tijuana’s upscale Lomas Hipodromo neighborhood in December 1993.

Yet even then, Ramon and Benjamin Arellano, both fugitives, managed a secret meeting with the papal nuncio in Mexico City, set up by a Tijuana priest, Cisneros said.

Cisneros believes local police, and some of the army, still support the Arellanos. And “they still show up in discos every now and then.”

But few who have partied with the Arellanos admit it now. A number of wealthy Tijuana business families have already been deeply stigmatized by allegations their sons were Arellano hit men. Many who once viewed Ramon as a wild but amusing party boy now see him as a dark Pied Piper.

Said one U.S. prosecutor of the Arellanos: “Everything they touch withers.”

It is the string of brutal murders--perhaps as many as 200, including six in California--by gunmen allegedly led by Ramon Arellano that is his Achilles’ heel, U.S. officials say.

U.S. court files are littered with victims and their perceived offenses--snitching, dissing a cartel punk, running off with an Arellano sister for a two-week romantic tryst.

Among their suspected victims are most of the 10 senior Baja law enforcement officers gunned down since 1994, according to law enforcement officers from both countries.

One doomed prosecutor helped move cocaine and marijuana loads, U.S. court files allege. But the rich-kid gunmen believed the prosecutor was preparing to betray them.

“After all we’ve given him . . . the house, the cars, those watches, the money,” one young gunman said.

So a youth known to the prosecutor since childhood knocked on his door one night in 1996, yelling out an endearment, U.S. court papers say. The prosecutor disarmed his security system, opened the door and was shot.

U.S. officials believe the bloody barrage has earned Ramon tremendous ill will, which, combined with the reward offer and U.S. pressure, could persuade someone to turn him in.

They are encouraged by the fact that past U.S. bete noires have met messy ends. Pablo Escobar was shot running barefoot across a rooftop in Colombia. Mexico’s Juan Garcia Abrego is serving wall-to-wall U.S. prison terms. Amado Carrillo died following plastic surgery to disguise his hunted identity.

Still, not everyone thinks the U.S. strategy of pressuring alleged drug lords like Ramon Arellano will dent cocaine traffic, or put an end to narcocultura.

Critics say it fails to acknowledge the $49-billion U.S. market for illegal drugs. And that fallen drug lords--and cartels--can be replaced. Even if drug transshipment from Mexico could be halted, critics say, drugs will be sent by another route, such as the Caribbean.

“This strategy looks like more of a political gesture,” said Smith, of UC San Diego. “This kind of enforcement strategy does very little to reduce the flow of cocaine into the United States.”