The Guadalajara Cartel (Spanish: Cártel de Guadalajara), also known as The Federation (Spanish: La Federación) was a Mexican drug cartel founded in 1980 by Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, Rafael Caro Quintero, and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo to ship cocaine and marijuana to the United States. One of the first Mexican drug trafficking groups to work with the Colombian cocaine mafias, the Guadalajara Cartel thrived on the cocaine trade. Throughout the 1980s, the cartel controlled much of the drug trafficking in Mexico and the corridors along the Mexico-United States border. It had operations in several regions in Mexico, including the states of Jalisco, Baja California, Colima, Sonora, Chihuahua, and Sinaloa, among others. Several modern contemporary drug cartels (or their remnants), such as the Tijuana, Juárez, and Sinaloa cartels, originally began as affiliates or “plazas” of the Guadalajara Cartel before eventually disintegrating.
History
Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, a former federal police officer, began working for drug traffickers who mediated the corruption of state officials and his partners in the cartel, Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo (“Don Neto”), previously in the criminal organization Avilés, took control of the smuggling routes after Avilés was killed in a shootout with MFJP police officers. It is believed that Avilés was founded by Fonseca, the gang’s treasurer. After the implementation of “Operation Condor” (Spanish: Operación Cóndor), a Mexican anti-drug program implemented in the 1970s to stop the flow of drugs from Mexico to the United States, many drug traffickers from the state of Sinaloa regrouped in Guadalajara, Jalisco, to continue their activities. The realignment led to the formation of the Guadalajara Cartel, which would take place sometime in 1980. The cartel eventually managed to control almost all drug trafficking in Mexico in the 1980s.
Large marijuana plantations emerged from the early 1980s. Early plantations were usually located in remote mountain areas where they were difficult to spot and did not require borewells for irrigation. Yields were relatively low, quality varied and transport was expensive. However, these new plantations were seeded with an improved variety of marijuana originally developed by American cannabis breeders from California and Oregon. This new variety was referred to by Mexican breeders as “sinsemilla” (meaning seedless), marking the first time that marijuana grown without seeds were widely marketed. This higher quality, more potent variety brought much higher prices in North American markets. Seedless marijuana is known to come from female cannabis plants that have not been pollinated by male plants. Therefore, the plant puts more energy into promoting psychoactive cannabinoids such as THC instead of putting its energy into producing seeds.
These new plantations were located in remote desert areas, where transportation was much cheaper, but also faced a number of new problems. Production in the desert required well drilling for irrigation, and Mexico had strict well digging laws, a problem eventually solved by massive bribery. It was also easier to discover plantations in the arid deserts; the larger the farm, the easier to recognize. However, when solo flights over the US ended as part of the eradication program, money and intimidation allowed farms to grow dramatically without official notice.
During most of the 1970s and early 1980s, the majority of cocaine smuggled into the United States by the Colombian drug cartels was smuggled through Florida and the Caribbean Sea. However, as law enforcement measures expanded in these areas in the mid-1980s, Colombian drug lords moved their operations to Mexico. Juan Matta-Ballesteros was the Guadalajara Cartel’s main connection to the Colombian cocaine cartels. Matta had originally introduced Felix Gallardo’s predecessor, Alberto Sicilia-Falcon, to Santiago Ocampo of the Cali Cartel, one of the largest Colombian drug cartels. The Guadalajara Cartel managed to smuggle cocaine into the US in multi-ton shipments every month. Instead of accepting cash payments for their services, the Guadalajara Cartel smugglers took a 50% cut on the cocaine they transported from Colombia. This was extremely profitable for them, with some estimating that the human trafficking network, then run by Felix Gallardo, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, and Rafael Quintero, was raking in $5 billion annually. According to some writers, such as Peter Dale Scott, the organization thrived largely because it enjoyed the protection of the Mexican intelligence agency DFS, led by Miguel Nazar Haro. Several members of the agency were directly involved in organized crime by actively participating in murder and drug trafficking on behalf of the cartel.
However, the Guadalajara Cartel suffered a major blow in 1985 when the group’s co-founder, Rafael Caro Quintero, was captured and later convicted of the torture and murder of American DEA agent Enrique Camarena. Camarena was an undercover field agent suspected by the cartel of providing information to the DEA that led to the destruction of the organization’s 2,500-acre marijuana crop, known as Rancho Búfalo (English: “Buffalo Ranch”) in the state Chihuahua . in November 1984. Authorities reportedly burned more than 10,000 tons of marijuana, causing a total loss of approximately $160 million. This is said to have prompted Caro Quintero and other high-ranking members of the Guadalajara Cartel to seek revenge against the DEA and Camarena. In retaliation, Camarena and his pilot Alfredo Zavala Avelar were kidnapped in broad daylight on February 7, 1985 in Guadalajara by several DFS officers, taken to a residence owned by Quintero, located at 881 Lope de Vega in the colonia of Jardines del Bosque, in the western part of the city, brutally tortured and murdered.
Camarena was interrogated and tortured to obtain information about his knowledge of law enforcement operations targeting the cartel; as well as any information the DEA may have on Mexican politicians involved in drug trafficking. Over the course of the more than thirty-hour torture session, Camarena’s skull, jaw, nose, cheekbones, trachea, and ribs were broken; the kidnappers called in a doctor to administer drugs to the officer to keep him conscious for the entire session. The kidnappers made audio recordings of some parts of Camarena’s interrogation. The final blow was apparently delivered when the torturers crushed his skull with a piece of rebar or other similar piece of metal. About a month later, Camarena and Zavala’s bodies were taken to the neighboring state of Michoacán and dumped in a roadside ditch, to be discovered on March 5, 1985. Caro Quintero then left Mexico on March 9, 1985, with his associates and his girlfriend Sara Cristina Cosío Gaona. Former Mexican Judicial Police chief Armando Pavón Reyes, after receiving a $300,000 bribe, reportedly allowed Caro Quintero to flee from the airport in Guadalajara in a private jet to seek refuge in Costa Rica . The police chief was fired shortly afterwards and charged with bribery and complicity in Camarena’s murder.
It was also alleged that just eight days prior to Camarena’s kidnapping, Caro Quintero ordered the kidnapping, torture and murder of writer John Clay Walker and dental student Albert Radelat on January 30, 1985. According to the allegations, the two Americans were dining at a restaurant in Guadalajara when they encountered Caro Quintero and his men as they accidentally walked into one of Quintero’s private parties. Caro Quintero then allegedly ordered his men to seize the Americans and take them to a storage facility, where they were tortured with ice picks and interrogated. John Walker died at the scene from blunt force trauma to the head. Albert Radelat was still alive when he was wrapped in tablecloths, taken to a park near the city and buried. The men’s bodies were found six months later, buried in San Isidro Mazatepec Park in Zapopan. Authorities believe that Caro Quintero had mistaken Walker and Radelat for U.S. undercover agents.
Officer Camarena’s murder outraged the U.S. government and put pressure on Mexico to arrest all major players involved in the incident, resulting in a four-year law enforcement manhunt that took down several Guadalajara Cartel leaders. The US exerted heavy political pressure on the Mexican government throughout the investigation, even going so far as to close several US-Mexican ports of entry for a period of several days. After the arrest of Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo in April 1985 for the murder of Camarena, Félix Gallardo kept a low profile and in 1987 he moved with his family to the city of Guadalajara. Félix “The Godfather” Gallardo then decided to divide the trade he controlled, as it would be more efficient and less likely to be destroyed in one go by law enforcement. In a sense, he privatized the Mexican drug trade while sending it back underground, to be run by bosses less or not yet known to the DEA. Félix Gallardo gathered the country’s top drug narcos in a house in the seaside resort of Acapulco, where he designated the plazas (lawns) or territories. Several drug lords were given a certain region where they could smuggle drugs into the US and tax smugglers who wanted to transport merchandise into their territory. The Tijuana route would go to his cousins, the Arellano Félix brothers. The Ciudad Juárez route would go to the Carrillo Fuentes family, led by Fonseca Carrillo’s cousin, Amado Carrillo Fuentes. Miguel Caro Quintero would manage the Sonora Corridor. Control of the Matamoros and Tamaulipas corridor – which then became the Gulf Cartel – would be left undisturbed to Juan García Abrego. Meanwhile, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera and Ismael Zambada García would take over operations on the Pacific coast, becoming the Sinaloa Cartel. Guzmán and Zambada brought veteran Héctor Luis Palma Salazar back into the team. Félix Gallardo still intended to oversee national operations. He had the contacts, so he was still the top executive, but he would no longer control all the details of the company; he was arrested on April 8, 1989.
It is also believed that Amado Carrillo Fuentes was once part of the Guadalajara Cartel, but he was sent to Ojinaga, Chihuahua to monitor the cocaine shipments of his uncle, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, and to learn about border operations of Pablo Acosta Villarreal . El Zorro de Ojinaga” (The Ojinaga Fox). Amado was a socio- or partner of Acosta for a long time. In the mid and late 1980s, Amado accompanied Pablo Acosta, Marco DeHaro and Becky Garcia in many of their smuggling activities, including the “rescue” of a broken down marijuana truck near Lomas de Arena. Through a protection program with Mexican federal and state police and with the Mexican military, Acosta was able to guarantee the safety of five tons of cocaine flown every month by turboprop from Colombia to Ojinaga, sometimes landing at the municipal airport, sometimes on dirt runways on farms upstream from Ojinaga. Traditionally, Acosta trafficked mainly marijuana and heroin, but toward the end of his life he focused more on cocaine. Once, Pablo Acosta was assassinated in 1987 during a joint cross-border raid by the FBI and Mexican Federal Police in the Rio Grande village of Santa Elena (Chihuahua), and Carillo’s other successor Rafael Aguilar Guajardo was assassinated by Amado Carrillo himself in Cancún in 1993. Amado Carrillo Fuentes subsequently took full control of the Juárez Cartel.
In 1989, Amado was imprisoned in Mexico for several weeks. By then, he had already undergone plastic surgery at least once to change his appearance.
Currently, these aforementioned cartels/factions, or remnants thereof, are battling each other for control of smuggling routes, influence over the Mexican government, and in retaliation for past transgressions and betrayals. This conflict is known as the Mexican Drug War.