YOUR correspondent cannot claim to have met Alberto Carrillo Fuentes, or “Ugly Betty”, the 47-year-old alleged head of the Juárez cartel, whose capture by Mexican authorities was announced on September 1st. But he has probably been in the same house as a much younger (and perhaps less ugly) Mr Carillo Fuentes.
That happened in 1997, at the funeral, attended by a handful of hacks, of his eldest brother Amado, known back then as “The Lord of the Skies”, one of Mexico’s most successful and entrepreneurial kingpins until he died during a botched liposuction operation in Mexico City. One of the things that stood out even more than the snakeskin boots, hats and gold chains of the mourners was the immense size of the Carrillo Fuentes family: their black-clad mother “Doña Aurora”, whom your correspondent interviewed sitting amid Louis XV-style furniture, had at least six sons and five daughters. Since then, none has been as good a steward of the family business as her beloved eldest son, who used jets to fly cocaine from Colombia, via Mexico, to the United States, earning him his sobriquet.
At the funeral, the brothers looked so menacing that interviewing them seemed unwise. But a dark-eyed sister, Alicia (a student at a New York university at the time, if memory serves), was quite friendly—at least until the questions became too intrusive. She recalled of her brother Amado: “He always said they’d never get him alive. When I asked about him, Mama said: ‘That’s what he does and God will look after him.’” Whether God has looked after him or not in the afterlife, the “cartel” that he built into one of the world’s most fearsome enterprises has fallen on hard times since his death. That has been good news for the border city of Ciudad Juárez, cradle of its empire, which appears to be safer than it was a few years ago, when it ranked among the most violent cities in the world.
The Carillo Fuentes family are blue bloods of the Mexican drugs trade. Their uncle is Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, alias “Don Neto”, one of the godfather’s of the notorious Guadalajara gang in the 1980s. But at times they appear half-hearted drug barons. Vicente, the first brother to succeed Amado as head of the Juárez cartel, is said to have recently bowed out because of poor health. (In a priceless turn of phrase, Proceso, a Mexican news magazine, said that he now remains merely “moral leader” of the Juárez group.) Amado reportedly wanted his eldest son to stay out of the family business. It is said that Amado’s liposuction itself was part of an attempt to change his appearance so he could disappear from the trade—as well as the law enforcers breathing down his neck.
Yet the family’s ill fortune has left terrible bloodshed in its wake. A month after Amado died, a mafia-style murder of six people in a restaurant in Ciudad Juárez marked the start of a bloody turf war. Over the next decade and a half the city became the battleground for drug gangs representing Mexico’s Pacific and Gulf coasts. Raúl Benítez, a security expert at the UNAM, Mexico’s largest public university, says that one of the reasons the violence in Ciudad Juárez hit such depths of depravity a few years ago is that three gangs were fighting for it: the Carrillos' Juárez group; the Zetas, known for their grisliness; and the Sinaloa gang, led by Joaquín “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzmán. That’s violence cubed.
Such multiplying violence tends to temper any jubilation over the capture of a capo in Mexico. It may be that the removal of the latest head of the Juárez gang leads to more violence (Amado’s younger sons, for example, may fight to take it over). Yet there are also reasons to be upbeat this time. It follows the capture of Miguel Ángel Treviño Morales, alias Z-40, alleged head of the Zetas in July, and Mario Ramírez Treviño, suspected head of the Gulf cartel, in August. Such crime bosses are, indeed, falling like kingpins.
Mexicans increasingly criticise their president, Enrique Peña Nieto, for following the same strategy as his predecessor, Felipe Calderón, whose war on drugs was widely blamed for the violence that mushroomed every time a druglord was seized. Yet the strategy may at last be bearing fruit. That said, however much the government plays down the talk of drug violence in Mexico, it has not abated. The only real proof of a decisive turn in the drug war would be if the Sinaloa gang’s Mr Guzmán, who has evaded capture for so long that many people suspect he enjoys official protection, is also apprehened. But don't hold your breath.
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