Bowden - Blood On The Corn

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium
11/19/14, 9:58 AM
In 1985, a murky alliance of drug lords and government

officials tortured and killed a DEA agent named
Enrique Camarena. In a three-part series, legendary
journalist Charles Bowden finally digs into the terrible
mystery behind a heros murder.
By Charles Bowden and Molly Molloy
Illustrations by Matt Rota
https://medium.com/matter/blood-on-the-corn-52ac13f7e643
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Chapter One
ABSOLUTION
He curls up in the oxblood leather
chair and stares off to the side. He
is speaking softly as faces and
screams rise up from the past. He
seems gone now to some other
place. His eyes are way off in
Sinaloa, Mexico. The reght has
taken hours, later they will
calculate that 20 thousand rounds are red.
A man goes down.
He crawls to him.
He is safe now, a man speaking softly about the time when the guns red. He is
in a nice house now. Out the window, the horses feed beside the Shetland pony
he keeps for the grandkids. When someone jumps too fast from one corpse in
his past to another, he says, Whoa, pony, whoa. The big thoroughbred is 17
hands high, the brown body glistens with sheets of muscle. Sometimes, when
the nights are bad, he walks down to the paddock
Did you know they sleep standing up? They really do.
But the cries and screams dont go away. The trials do not go away. The man in
the dark leather chair is suddenly crawling to the Mexican federal police ocer.
The raid on a drug ranch with the cooperation of Mexican federal police turned
up a ton of coke and tons of marijuana, but now three federales are wounded.
There is blood on the corn leaves. He stares at the red blood and remembers his
mothers warning. When she was 15, her own mother had cast her from the
house for being with child and she lived with the gypsies in Mexico. They taught
her to see the future in palms, read the cards, to stare into a crystal ball. So she
tells her son who is now a DEA agent in Mexico that she sees danger, there is
blood on the corn in the elds. Thats all she can say.
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And he remembers it as he crawls to get the wounded Mexican federal cop.
Things string together in a way that is hard to see at rst. When the reght
endsbecause the Mexican army nally comes after a three-hour delay
Hector Berrellez is alive. He manages to pull the federal policeman to safety and
has him own up to a hospital in San Diego. A man named Guillermo Gonzlez
Calderoni, a Mexican federal police comandante who works at the beck and call
of the elite and does their killings, is impressed by these actions and befriends
Berrellez. The ght is celebrated by Berrellezs agency, the DEA, and soon he is
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in Washington having a medal pinned on him by the attorney general. Berrellez

continues his tour in Mexico and that leads to threats against his life and his
familys lives and so they are all pulled out and brought back to the U.S.
His higher-ups in Washington think of Berrellez when a high-prole murder
investigation of a DEA agent named Enrique Camarena seems to stall, and put
him in charge. After all, he had been in that reght, hed shown in his work
that he knew Mexicowhy else would he get death threats? And when his hard
work on the Camarena investigation leads him back from Mexico to D.C., he
gets a real warning, one he could not dismiss: that hed better back off because
his own government was behind this particular killing.
On February 7, 1985, Special Agent Enrique Camarena was abducted in
Guadalajara, tortured, and by the morning of February 9, he was dead. The
initial investigation led to arrests and convictions in Mexico and the U.S. but
never determined exactly who killed him. Or why he was killed. On January 3,
1989, Special Agent Hector Berrellez was assigned to the case. By September
1989, he learned from witnesses of CIA involvement. By April 1994, Berrellez
was removed from the case. Two years later he retired with his career in ruins.
In October 2013, he goes public with his allegations about the CIA.
The blood is on the corn.
The big at screen is blank at the moment. Sometimes, Berrellez watches news
and things but he cant make it through a movie. He has a treadmill and
stationary bicycle in the garage. He hits the weight room. Takes supplements.
Got the horses, plans on adding chickens to his suburban ranch. He will feed
them grain like his grandmother did. He will plant a garden. Things will feel
clean again.
I get depressed when I talk about the Camarena case. I was not a hero in DEA,
maybe they thought I was not a team player.
He grows wistful as he remembers the distance between what he became and
what he hoped he would be.
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He comes from the barrio of South Tucson, Arizona. His father lays bricks, his
mother tells fortunes. Two brothers go into law enforcement, one works
construction, one becomes a teacher, and the other brother nds heroin and is
in and out of prison for decades.
Hectors rst job is as a small-town cop. He ends up arresting people he came
up with in his neighborhood. Someone in their family gets cancer, or they get
hooked on the needle and then they take to robbing and petty drug dealing.
Hector believes in the law but hes not blind to the hard choices people face. He
moves up to the highway patrol. Then DEA.
He explains that in the DEA there are the suits, and the gunslingers. He is not a
suit.
In Mazatln, he is working with the federal police force and the DFS, the
Mexican Directorate of Federal Security, an investigative agency patterned on
the FBI and trained by the CIA. They pick up three drug trackers and y out
over the ocean. There is a ranch with a load of marijuana and the three know
where it is. He thinks they are going to scare them.
One of the Mexican cops says, We are not joking. If you dont know, were
going to throw you out of the plane.
Berrellez gures they will take a guy to the edge of the open door and lean him
out.
The cop gets up, takes the bound prisoner to the door, and boots him out.
Then he says to the other two prisoners, You guys want to go out or you want
to talk?
They give up the half-ton load.
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Berrellez had seen guys murdered, but the airplane toss felt much colder.
This is the DEA that formed him.
He is not a suit.
Now it is a different world. When Berrellez was in DEA, the new guys out of the
academy would show off their weaponsHey, look at my Sig, and they gave
me this machine gun. Now guys come out of the academy bragging about their
laptops.
I loved being undercover. I loved being an actor and playing the part.
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But then, something changed.

He says, I was no hero.
In the living room hangs an oil painting of his failure. It is a painting of his
grandchildren and his son, who shot himself.
I thought the case would make my career but it destroyed my career. When I got
the case I thought I was going to be a shooting star. Other agents were jealous
of me because I was meeting with the attorney general.
He pauses.
He remembers listening to the tapes of Camarenas torture over and over
tapes collected after the murder, which eventually passed from Mexican
authorities to the CIA and, eventually, to DEA.
Lines ring in Berrellezs head.
Please comandante dont burn me anymore.
Berrellez rst took me into the Camarena case one evening in 1998, but he
insisted then that everything was off the record.
He says, I was very afraid.
He says, I was a coward.
Now he is ready to talk.
Chapter Two
OPERATION LEYENDA
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Interrogator:
No, you arent telling me anything, you son of a bitch! (Blow)
Camarena:
No, that is what I am reading, what I remember from the report.
The head of DEA in 1989 is Jack
Lawn; he came out of the FBI to
become acting deputy and then the
boss. Lawn grows frustrated with
the lack of progress in the
Camarena murder case. After his
death, Camarena morphed into a
hero. He was awarded the
Administrators Award of Honorthe DEAs highestand his picture was on
the cover of Time magazine. A national commemoration , Red Ribbon week , is
established in his memory, and elementary schools across the country hold
events to warn children about the dangers of drugs.
Berrellez had caught the eye of some of his higher-ups when he was asked to
kidnap a cousin of Rafael Caro Quintero, one of the founders of the Guadalajara
drug business along with Miguel ngel Flix Gallardo. It was to be a black
operation without the knowledge or consent of the Mexican government or of
DEA in Mexico City. Berrellez set up the abduction through his contacts in the
Mexican military. But then it was blocked by Washington. Berrellez noted this
intervention by his superiors. His bosses noted his initiative. Then came the call
from Jack Lawn, head of DEA.
Lawn says, Hector, weve been running this case for four years. I need
witnesses who were actually at the torture house. That is your rst priority.
Berrellez tells Lawn the big people involved are Mexican federal agents. He says
that hed seen meetings for example in Mazatln between the governor of
Sinaloa and the tracker El Cochiloco (the crazy pig), which were attended by
20 military men in uniform plus members of the federal police and of DFS.
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I need Spanish speakers who have worked in Mexico and know the culture and
the corruption.
Pick your team.
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Ill need 20 agents. And a snitch budget of $3 million a year.

Why so much money?
So we can recruit army generals, federal agents, and drug people. And once we
use up an informant we must move them to the U.S. or they will be killed.
He is told to go to the DEA oce in Los Angeles and set it up. He will report
directly to Washington.
Soon Berrellez has his agents and his snitches. The rst year he exceeds his $3
million budget.
I was getting more information than the CIA.
Hes rolling.
Chapter Three
WITNESS IN THE KILLING ROOM
Interrogator:
Stand up!
Camarena:
I dont know, I dont know, I dont know.
Interrogator:
Do you want me to make you remember?
Camarena:
Hay! Hay!
As the case rises up from the shadows in Mexico, Berrellez leans on a DEA
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informant, comandante Antonio

Grate Bustamante of the Jalisco
State Police. Grate knows
everyone, especially those in the
drug business. Ernesto Fonseca
Carrillo, one of the other founders
of the Guadalajara cartel, ociates
as padrino de bodasbest manat
his wedding. Grate becomes a factory for recruiting witnesses in the Camarena
case.
But he is not enough. To get the answers he needs, Berrellez must nd people
who were in the torture room, he has to get inside the killing ground. He hears
about a man who owns a string of brothels in Guadalajara and regularly supplies
women for the many parties thrown by drug capos of the area, including
Fonseca Carrillo, Felix Gallardo, Caro Quintero, and Manuel Salcido Uzueta, El
Cochiloco. He has this man recruit informants, which Berrellez to Jorge Godoy,
who worked for Fonseca Carrillo, as a bodyguard and body servant.
Berrllez calls Godoy from Los Angeles. He asks Godoy if he believes in God,
says that he is a very religious person and he promises Godoy that if he comes
up to the United States he will be paid and will not be arrested. Godoy comes.
While Berrellez is driving him to the safe house at Big Bear in the mountains
east of Los Angeles, Godoy assumes he is being taken into the woods to be
executed. Berrellez tries to calm him. Twenty years later, Godoy trembles as he
recalls his fear during that ride.
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Godoy is part of a small army of witnesses who are kept isolated from one
another and who usually have no idea that others are stashed in the U.S. and
have also become informants. They will be fresh, they will not have a chance to
compare stories. They know little of the investigation because it asks questions
that hardly matter to them. Enrique Camarena was a foreign agent in their
country poking into their business. His torture is not signicant. In Mexico, it is
well known by everyone that if you are picked up by the police, you will be
tortured. If you are picked up by the drug trackers, you will be tortured. And
often the same person works for the police and for the trackers. Godoy is a
perfect example: He is a policeman for the state of Jalisco who is assigned by his
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comandante to be Ernesto Fonsecas personal bodyguard. He is on ocial

assignment, on a good career track with bonuses, because Fonseca is a caring
boss. And this DEA agent Enrique Camarena fell into his life like a live grenade
and blew it up.
Berrellez understood that there is only one way to get to the actual killersthe
powerful men who live in safety and who order their murders done for them
and that is through people like Jorge Godoy.
Years later, Godoy leans forward, his breath on my face, his eyes bulging.
Look at me, look at my eyeshe points two ngers at his eyesdo they look
like the eyes of a man who shoots someone in the back of the head? No, no, I
only shoot in the front, not in the back.
He is standing, leaning forward. This matters, whether it is true or not. Only in
the front, not the back. Such assertions allow these men to hang on to shreds of
conscience.
The informants, over 200 of them, the witnesses produced by recruiters
Berrellez paid in Mexico, they are unsavory to most people because they have
made careers out of crime. And some of the key witnesses had killed U.S.
citizens without regrets. Prosecutors hesitate to put a man on the stand who
had been part of a team that tortured and murdered two American couples,
raping the wives in front of their husbands rst. None of this is unusual in a
criminal justice system that makes deals with the devil every day.
Berrellez nally decides out of a hundred informants maybe 10 could be used as
witnesses. The others are simply too compromised to withstand crossexamination. But when the Camarena case began to rupture, it was not because
of the crimes of the witnesses. The case ran into trouble because of what the
witnesses said and the people they talked about.
They take the investigation into that room where Enrique Camarena is
screaming. Because they were in the room.
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Chapter Four
KIKI
Hector Berrellez and Enrique

(Kiki) Camarena never met in
person, but they knew each other.
They would talk on the phone
about mutual cases; they shared
certain things. Both were
hyphenated Americans who were
going to prove they were red white
and blue, determined to rise in the newly minted DEA. President Richard M.
Nixon had just declared the war on drugs, and the agency suddenly bloomed
from several hundred to several thousand.
The DEA was the perfect arena for the ambitions of agents like Berrellez and
Camarena. Mexico was a natural for them because of their language skills and
because Anglo agents could hardly go undercover. Camarena was born in
Mexicali, did two years in the Marines, worked as a reghter and cop, and in
1974 he joined DEA. In 1980, he was assigned to Guadalajara. In DEA, a foreign
tour was essential for advancement. His ticket was punched.
Kiki Camarena was not a gunslinger. There are rules for DEA agents in Mexico.
They can carry a weapon, but only during the day. And they cant re unless
red upon. In the fall of 1984 two men are assigned to help in Guadalajara. They
are warned by Camarena and by the head of the station to avoid La Langosta
restaurant. The place was known to be a hangout for the drug capos and it was
dangerous. So the two new agents go to La Langosta for lunch every day for a
couple of months, just to see if they can provoke the narcotracantes into a
shoot-out.
Camarena was brave but he would never have done anything so stupid as
taunting the drug people.
He favors a lot of street work, building a case informant by informant. He learns
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of huge marijuana plantations growing in the state of Zacatecas, this at the very
same time in 1984 that the United States is touting the success of its marijuana
eradication program in Mexico.
Rafael Caro Quintero, one of the heads of the Guadalajara business, gives a
comandante in the Mexican military 50 million pesos to buy some ranches and
provide protection. He plans in one operation to produce 1.5 tons per hectare,
about 2.5 acres. The supervisors on the ranches make $290 to $580 a month,
laborers get triple their normal wages. Three different types of marijuana are
grown. Camarena starts off slowly, gathering information and reporting
everything on inner-agency DEA-6 reports. The documents from those spring
months in 1984 relate endless details on the booming marijuana operation.
Except the actual location of the elds. That remains a secret. But this much is
known: Caro Quintero is still in his 20s, and hes worth possibly a billion; he
uses two or three choppers up near the border to ferry his crops into the States.
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Camarena learns that at least 10 groups are putting in big growing operations
including one organization that is cultivating 11,250 acres. The investors are
drilling water wells everywhere for $100,000 each. One farm just brought in 16
tractors. The reports become an inventory of elds and equipment as Camarena
records an economic boom out on the landa beehive of activity denied by two
governments. Caro Quintero sends 60 tons of fertilizer for his elds, and racks
of AK-47s for protecting the crop. Five hundred laborers arrive from Culiacn in
Sinaloa. The DEA-6s become lists of names, cars, acreages. Small notes appear:
Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo had a ton of cocaine stashed in Caborca, Sonora,
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Mexico. The maids in Hotel El Camino in Caborca saw automatic weapons

when they cleaned the rooms. Once the marijuana trackers left a 150,000peso tip for the hotel cook, close to $900 U.S.
The detail collected by Camarena in the spring of 1984 is the driving wheel
within the world of cartels, drug lords, and the War on Drugs, details of the toil
and calculation necessary to bring in the crop, any crop. There are always the
cherished storiesfor example, one about when Caro Quintero bought a
Learjet in Tucson, Arizona. When he was told the price, he wrote the rst two
numbers on a check and then handed it over to the Learjet salespeople with
instructions to ll in the right amount of zeros. But beneath this folklore is the
cold calculation of how many tons of fertilizer is required, what seeds should be
bought and how many, where the wells must be dug and how wide apart the
rows should bethree feetfor proper cultivation and harvest. And there is
work and risk.
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On May 11, 1984, Camarena learns that Caro Quintero has arrived in Fresnillo,
Zacatecas. He comes with 60 DFS agents traveling in nine vans and 15 Mercury
Gran Marquis. He brings with him 360 million pesos and starts handing out
bonuses to the staff.
The party ends in late May when DEA in Mexico pressures the Mexican
authorities to take action against the operation in Zacatecas. Camarena and a
Mexican pilot, Alfredo Zavala Avelar, have made over-ights to locate the elds.
The head of Interpol in Mexico leads the raid. He will later be indicted for the
murder of Enrique Camarena and Mexican authorities will claim he was found
with a kilo of cocaine in his desk. Actually, at the time of his arrest in March
1990, he was talking with Berrellez about coming north to testify for Operation
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Leyenda and tell all about the kidnapping and murder, something he could
surely do since he attended the meetings that planned the crime. Comandante
Guillermo Gonzalez Calderoni, who Berrellez befriended after the raid in the
corneld of Sinaloa, had planted the cocaine. He had wiretapped his phone,
heard the conversations with Berrellez and, as he later told Hector, he could
hardly allow an agency chief to come north and spell out the direct links
between the Mexican state and the drug organizations. The head of Interpol
vanishes for years into the silence of the Mexican prison system.
This digression is not a digression. It is the turf that Kiki Camarena wanders
while making drug cases in Mexico and it is the treacherous ground that gets
him killed.
During the raid, 20 tons of marijuana are seized and enough seed conscated to
plant 6,500 acres. About 177 people are arrested, but a tip from Mexican police
enables almost everyone of consequence to get away.
Chapter Five
FOLLOW THE MONEY
After the Zacatecas raid,

Camarena has an idea that he puts
into the hopper of possible DEA
tactics. He has busted huge loads
and this does not matter. He has
taken down big operations and this
does not matter. There is never a
shortage of people willing to run
the risk of moving a load to the U.S. There is never a shortage of product since
nothing can come close to the money to be made in growing marijuana or
poppies or moving cocaine. And prison matters not at all. Mexico offers such a
bleak future to so many of its citizens that a prison cell or a con are worth the
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risk if there is a chance, however slim, of nally getting ahead.

So Camarena suggests going after the money.
Let the capos raise their crops and harvest their product. Focus on the money.
Vacuum their bank accounts. This is the origin of Operation Padrino. Starting in
1983, there are sudden seizures of money from bank accounts belonging to the
Guadalajara drug bosses in cities across the U.S. and Europe. To justify the
seizures, the DEA court documents always cite an unnamed informant, the term
of art inside the agency is SOIsource of information. So, the drug guys had to
wonder: Who was this SOI tipping off DEA and enabling them to seize money
from their overseas accounts?
The leaders of the billion-dollar drug industry in Mexico had their own sources
inside DEA. So why couldnt they stop the leak that was draining off their hardearned prots? The drug bosses also knew that they paid for and worked under
the protection of Mexican DFS and that DFS was trained by and functioned as
an arm of the CIA in Mexico, and that CIA had people embedded within DEA. It
was into this murky worldthanks to the initiative of Kiki Camarenathat
Operation Padrino begins to drain millions from secret drug-fueled bank
accounts in the U.S. and Europe.
In April of 1984, a month before the raid on Zacatecas, Phil Jordan of DEA is
visiting Guadalajara to inspect the DEA station there. He spends most of his
time with Camarena. He soon notices that every time he and Kiki go out, they
are tailed. Camarena explains that the tail is DFS. He appears perfectly calm
about this reality.
Ten months later, he will be dead.
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Part II:
Blood on
the Corn
Part II
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The investigation of
a murdered DEA
agent plunges deep
into the drug world,
where power is
everything
medium.com and
death is one
Part III:
Blood on
the Corn
Part III
The final installment
of Charles Bowdens
true-life crime epic.
medium.com
Getting the story:
Chuck
Bowdens
Final Story
Took 16
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Years to
Write
Heres why it took
so long and meant
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Written by Charles Bowden and Molly Molloy
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Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

In 1985, a murky alliance of drug lords and government

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

And he remembers it as he crawls to get the wounded Mexican federal cop.

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

in Washington having a medal pinned on him by the attorney general. Berrellez

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

But then, something changed.

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

Ill need 20 agents. And a snitch budget of $3 million a year.

WITNESS IN THE KILLING ROOM

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

informant, comandante Antonio

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

comandante to be Ernesto Fonsecas personal bodyguard. He is on ocial

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

Hector Berrellez and Enrique

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

Mexico. The maids in Hotel El Camino in Caborca saw automatic weapons

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

FOLLOW THE MONEY

After the Zacatecas raid,

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

risk if there is a chance, however slim, of nally getting ahead.

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

Getting the story:

Blood on the Corn Matter Medium

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