Word: gallardo
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Scrawled on whatever material he could find, the memoirs offer valuable insight into the history and thinking of kingpins even as Mexico suffers unprecedented levels of drug-related bloodshed. Félix Gallardo, now 63 and in poor health, does not deny that he trafficked cocaine and heroin into the United States. Indeed, in one passage, he nostalgically referred to himself as one of the "old capos." However, he also pointed a finger at Mexican politicians for failing to provide for the poor, making them turn to crime. He also reiterated the point - already conceded by the Mexican government - that...
After himself joining the police at 17 in his native state of Sinaloa, Félix Gallardo began his run from the law in 1971 when he was first indicted for drug-smuggling. Over the next 18 years he built what federal officials described as Mexico's biggest drug-trafficking empire, one that dealt directly with Colombian kingpin Pablo Escobar to move cocaine. Félix Gallardo also began to grow marijuana and opium - the raw ingredient for heroin - on Mexican soil. There were 15 arrest warrants with his name on them in Mexico and others in the United States...
...Gallardo dedicates a large chunk of his writings to describing this detention in minute detail. He unleashes particular scorn on his arresting officer Guillermo Gonzalez Calderoni, a "supercop" who shot down or nabbed several top drug lords in the 1980s. Félix Gallardo claimed that he had been a friend of Gonzalez Calderoni who, he said, once gave him a present of macaws, endangered birds. But, Félix Gallardo recalled, when he went to meet the policeman in a Guadalajara restaurant, some of his officers jumped him. "Three of them came at me and knocked...
...Gallardo went on to describe being questioned by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which asked him about the 1985 murder of its agent Enrique Camarena. The drug kingpin denied that he had any involvement in that slaying, which had created a furor in Washington and led to pressure to round up top traffickers. "I was taken to the DEA," recalled the capo. "I greeted them and they wanted to talk. I only answered that I had no involvement in the Camarena case and I said, 'You said a madman would...
Following Félix Gallardo's arrest, some observers and journalists expressed hopes that Mexican drug gangs would be obliterated. But in the two decades of his incarceration, bigger and bloodier cartels have emerged, unleashing decapitations, massacres and pitched battles in town centers. Since President Felipe Calderón took office in December 2006, there have been more than 10,000 drug-related slayings. In his prison scrawlings, Félix Gallardo argued that fighting poverty would be the best way to stop young people from joining the ranks of cartel foot soldiers. "Today, the violence in the cities needs...