This Is How The Cocaine Shipments Arrived At El Chapo

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

Everyone knows Joaquín Guzmán Loera as El Chapo, but for Jorge Cifuentes Villa he was Don Joaquín. The first time he met him, more than 15 years ago, the Mexican kingpin received him at the foot of the plane that had taken him to his hideout in the mountains armed with a gold pistol and encrusted with diamonds on his waist and an AK rifle -47 hanging from the shoulder. There was no playing with that man.

The Colombian, a member of a well-known clan of drug traffickers and who was extradited to the United States in 2012, thus began more than six years of collaboration with El Chapo, who had all the details in this Wednesday in the Brooklyn federal court in which Guzmán has been on trial since last month.

Cifuentes arrived at El Chapo's hideout with the aim of doing business with the increasingly powerful Sinaloa cartel and to find out who had killed his partner Humberto Robachivas Ojeda in Mexico. "I wanted to know who it had been to find out if my life was at risk," said the witness, who gave him a modern American vintage helicopter to get on the right foot in the circle of his host. They are capable of carrying a load of up to 400 kilos of cocaine. "Those devices did not look like airplanes, they looked like rockets," he stressed. "You need very experienced pilots."

A first shipment of 350 kilos successfully takes off from the Colombian department of Chocó, where the Cifuentes family has a ranch, and successfully lands near Zihuatanejo, Guerrero. The Colombian assured that despite the completion of the mission, such "experimental" and difficult to pilot aircraft did not offer him assurances to entrust them with such a precious cargo. But El Chapo, he said, insisted on using them because "the radar doesn't detect it."

Until another shipment of 400 kilos in a Lancair never reaches its destination. The Mexicans initially think that the Colombians never sent the plane, until the news of a crashed aircraft in a mountainous area appears in the media. The pilot at his command was called the Wild Fool, he said.

Murder

The flights of the narcoaviones are canceled after the murder in 2007 of Fernando Cifuentes, brother of Jorge and ex-pilot of Pablo Escobar, who had been in charge of organizing them. The witness pointed out that he still does not know who killed him, but other Colombian drug traffickers have been identified as responsible.

As a consequence, Cifuentes explained that he moved to Mexico and met again with El Chapo in the hideout in the mountains, whom he now found with more men and more weapons, including "anti-aircraft weapons." They agree that Cifuentes continue to manage the infrastructure of his family, but from Ecuador, where he moves.

There, he buys warehouses, establishes routes and contacts a supplier in Colombia - Gilberto el Político García - who delivers the cocaine to an Ecuadorian border town, he explained. With this they organize a first shipment financed by "don Joaquín", who sends the money to the Colombian provider through a laundering network that involves the purchase of Visa debit cards in the United States and Canada, from which the cash at Colombian ATMs. "As Don Joaquín was giving me money, I bought the cocaine."

Military purchased

With Chapo's funds, Cifuentes buys 6 tons from the Colombian department of Putumayo, an area controlled by the FARC guerrillas, and the Politician takes them to the Ecuadorian towns of San Lázaro and Esmeraldas. In his testimony, he assured that the movement of the huge cargo was protected by Ecuadorian military men who had been bribed to transport them in their own trucks. "Army trucks are not checked, there is no danger that cocaine will be lost or seized," he explained. The soldiers sent by Captain Telmo Castro charged them rar and the cocaine was 6 tons.

The following year they try again, but El Chapo insists that he wants an 8-ton cargo. Cifuentes said they only had 6.5 barrels by the time the shark left for the encounter with the speedboats and wanted to continue the operation. "He had already made me lose 6 tons because he was capricious." Guzmán ignores and orders to wait to collect the 8 tons.

The wait results in a disaster when an anti-drug operation by the Ecuadorian authorities hits the Cifuentes warehouse in Guayaquil and the cargo is seized before it can be shipped. El Chapo, according to Cifuentes, blamed the Colombian supplier and asked him to help him kidnap him. But they never managed to locate him for the hitmen to find.

This would be their last job together, according to their testimony. The Colombian drug trafficker ended up being detained in Venezuela in 2012 and extradited to the United States, where he is serving a prison sentence.

Foiled plans

In his testimony, Cifuentes also spoke of various plans to get the drug to Mexico. In a meeting with El Chapo in 2007, he met an executive of the Mexican state oil company, Pemex, whom he identified as Alfonso Acosta, with whom they discussed the possibility of smuggling cocaine into oil tankers in Ecuador and unloading them in Mexican ports.

On another occasion, he recalled, a man from El Chapo in Central America proposed that the cartel acquire a cruise ship. In the end, they don't.

Bribes and murders

When asked by the prosecution, Cifuentes acknowledged having ordered the death of five people, of whom three were killed.

He also acknowledged having bribed an official from the Colombian National Tax and Customs Directorate (DIAN) to be able to evade taxes, other officials to change his fingerprints for others in the Colombian civil registry and to erase the documents of his time in prison. in 1984.