Word: carillo
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...murders remain unsolved. But Kuykendall, who has served more than 30 years and is considered the dean of the "border rats," as Texas DEA agents call themselves, thinks he knows who sent the present -- Amado Carillo Fuentes. As the purported head of the Chihuahua drug cartel, Carillo is reputed to have littered the streets of Juarez with the bodies of informants each time one of his drug shipments is seized by U.S. agents. Although DEA officials are not exactly sure where Carillo lives (somewhere in Chihuahua, they think), when he was born (perhaps 1955), or what he looks like (they...
...down a bishop in Guadalajara. (The real target of the shooting is thought to have been Joaquin Guzman, another suspected drug lord, whose power base is in Sonora.) With the Garcia Abregos and the Arrellano Felixes lying low, the field has been left open to the low-key, efficient Carillo...
...Carillo acts as a liaison between Mexican drug traffickers and the Cali cartel of Colombia, which in recent years has come to dominate the cocaine trade worldwide. Following a U.S. clampdown in the 1980s on their shipping routes through Panama and the Caribbean, the Cali bosses began contracting their transportation to Mexican contrabandista families, bootleggers who for generations have specialized in running goods -- whiskey, heroin, blue jeans -- into the U.S. In the system that eventually evolved, the Colombians flew planeloads of cocaine from Colombia into Mexico, then paid the Mexicans to move the goods across the border...
...Carillo's cool competence appeals to the Cali traffickers. The Cali dons "don't want to deal with some jerk that's running around shooting everybody," says a veteran DEA agent specializing in the cartel. The Colombian bosses allegedly employ Carillo as a kind of nuncio for communicating information to the Mexican federation, keeping peace among rival Mafias along the border and subcontracting Cali business to them. "He has the ability to form alliances," says one U.S. analyst. "He's been the pacifier. If you're going to have power, you have to be able to make alliances...
...Carillo and his colleagues may be partners with the Colombians, but when it comes to smuggling, the two groups operate in distinctly different styles. While the Colombians have used elaborate devices such as custom-made yachts, high-tech communication decoders and even submarines, the Mexicans prefer a cruder methodology: stuffing the drugs into the trunks of cars, then relying on a combination of speed, scattershot runs and sheer bravado. Sometimes they blitz the border posts, sending eight or 10 vehicles through at a time, betting that U.S. Customs will search at most one vehicle in the convoy. A group...