Don Winslow - The Power of the Dog

Adan walked into the little tomb and, again at Nora’s urging, knelt beneath the little dome that held the pictures of Pilar, Claudia and Guerito and prayed to God for their souls. He lit a candle for each of them, then bowed his head and prayed in deep piety.

The shabby little piece of theater wasn’t lost on the people outside. They understood it-they were used to death and murder and, in a strange way, reconciliation. By the time Adan emerged from the mausoleum they seemed to have almost forgotten that he was the one who’d filled it with bodies in the first place.

The memories were buried with Guero in his tomb.

This was a repeat of the process Adan and Nora had gone through for the funerals of El Verde and Garcia Abrego, and everywhere they went it was the same. With Nora at his side, Adan endowed schools, clinics, playgrounds-all in the names of the deceased. Privately, he met with the dead men’s former associates and offered them an extension of the Baja Revolution-peace, amnesty, protection and a lowered rate of taxation.

The word had gone out-you could meet with Adan or you could meet with Raul. The wise majority met with Adan; the foolish few had funerals of their own.

The Federacion was back, with Adan as its patron.

Peace reigned, and with it, prosperity.

The new Mexican president took office on December 1, 1994. The very next day, two brokerage houses controlled by the Federacion started to buy up tesobonos-government bonds. The next week, the drug cartels withdrew their capital from the Mexican national bank, forcing the new president to devalue the peso by 50 percent. Then the Federacion cashed in its tesobonos and collapsed the Mexican economy.

Feliz Navidad.

As Christmas presents to themselves, the Federacion bought up property, businesses, raw real estate and pesos and put them under the tree and waited.

The Mexican government didn’t have the cash to honor the outstanding tesobonos. In fact, it was about $50 billion short. Capital was flying out of the country faster than preachers from a raided cathouse.

The country ofMexico was days away from declaring bankruptcy when the American cavalry rode in with $50 billion in loans to prop up the Mexican economy. The American president had no choice: He and every congressman on the Hill were getting frantic phone calls from major campaign contributors at Citicorp, and they came up with that $50 billion like it was lunch money.

The new Mexican president had to literally invite the narco lords back into the country with their millions of narco-dollars to reinvigorate the economy to pay back the loan. And the narcos now had billions more dollars than they did before the “Peso Crisis” because in the time between cashing in the pesos for dollars and the American bailout, they used the dollars to buy devalued pesos, which in turn rose again when the Americans issued the massive loan.

What the Federacion basically did was buy the country, sell it back high, buy it again low, then reinvest in it and watch the investments grow.

Adan graciously accepted El Presidente’s invitation. But the price he demanded for bringing his narco-dollars back into the country was a “favorable trade environment.”

Meaning that El Presidente could shoot his mouth off all he wanted about “breaking the backs of the drug cartels,” but he’d better not do anything about it. He could talk the talk but he couldn’t walk the walk, because that stroll would be right off the gangplank.

The Americans knew it. They gave El Presidente a list of PRI bigwigs who were on the Federacion’s payroll, and suddenly three of these guys were appointed state governors. Another one became the transportation secretary, and another guy who made the list was appointed the drug czar himself-the head of the National Institute to Combat Drugs.

It was back to business as usual.

Better than usual because one thing Adan did with his windfall profits from the Peso Crisis was start buying Boeing 727s.

Within two years he has twenty-three of them, a fleet of jet aircraft larger than that of mostThird World countries. He loads them full of cocaine inCali and flies them to civilian airports, military airstrips and even highways that are closed down and guarded by the army until the plane is safely off-loaded.

The coke is packed into refrigerator trucks and driven to warehouses near the border, where it’s broken down into smaller units and loaded into trucks and cars that are works of innovative genius. A whole new industry has been created in Baja, of “chop artists” who refit vehicles with hidden compartments called “stash holds.” They have false roofs, fake floors and phony bumpers that are hollowed out and filled with dope. As in any industry, specialists have developed-you have guys who are known as great choppers and others who are sanders and painters. You have some guys who do things with Bondo that a Venetian plasterer could only dream of. Once the cars are prepared they’re driven across the border into theUnited States and delivered to safe houses, usually inSan Diego orLos Angeles, then earmarked for various destinations: L.A., Seattle, Chicago, Detroit , Cleveland, Philadelphia, Newark, New York andBoston.

The dope also goes by sea. It’s delivered from its landing in Mexico to towns on the Baja coast, where it’s vacuum-wrapped and then loaded into private and commercial fishing boats, which cruise up the coast to the waters off California and dump the dope into the water, where it floats until it’s picked up by speedboats or sometimes even scuba divers who take it to shore and drive it to the safe houses.

It also goes by foot. Lower-end smugglers simply stuff it into packs and send it on the backs of mujados or coyotes who make the run across the border in the hope of making a fortune-say $5,000-for delivering it to a pre-arranged point somewhere in the countryside east ofSan Diego. Some of this countryside is remote desert or high mountains, and it’s not unusual for the Border Patrol to find the corpse of a mujado who died from dehydration in the desert or exposure in the mountains because he wasn’t carrying the water or blankets that might have saved his life, but was humping a load of dope instead.

The dope goes north and the money comes south. And both legs of this round-trip are a lot easier because border security has been relaxed by NAFTA, which assures, among other things, a smooth flow of traffic betweenMexico and theUnited States. And with it, a smooth flow of drug traffic.

And the traffic is more profitable than ever because Adan uses his new power to leverage a better deal with the Colombians, which is basically “We’ll buy your cocaine wholesale and do the retail ourselves, thank you.” No more $1,000-a-kilo delivery charge; we’re in business for ourselves.

The North American Free (Drug) Trade Agreement, Adan thinks.

God bless free trade.

Adan’s making the old Mexican Trampoline look like a little kid bouncing on his bed. Hey, why bounce when you can fly?

And Adan can fly.

He’s The Lord of the Skies.

Not that life has returned to the status quo ante bellum.

It hasn’t; ever the realist, Adan knows that nothing can be the same after the murder of Parada. Technically he’s still a wanted man: their new “friends” in Los Pinos have put a $5 million reward on the Barrera brothers, the American FBI has put them on the Most Wanted list, their photos hang on walls at border checkpoints and government offices.

It’s a sham, of course. All lip service to the Americans. Mexican law enforcement is no more trying to hunt down the Barreras than it’s trying to shut down the drug trade as a whole.

Still, the Barreras can’t rub it in their faces, can’t show them up. That’s the unspoken understanding. So the old days are over-no more parties at big restaurants, no more discos, racetracks, ringside seats at big boxing matches. The Barreras have to give the government plausible deniability, allow them to shrug their shoulders to the Americans and claim that they would gladly arrest the Barreras if only they knew where to find them.