July 6, 2020 • 53 mins
Episode 7 - Uncovering who is behind the murders of women begins to suggest a much larger conspiracy. But how far does it reach? And does it stop at the border? Alfredo keeps digging, and we look for answers in Júarez's past.
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unest dot CEO. Forgotten is a production of IHNT media
and unusual productions before we start. This podcast contains accounts
which some listeners will find disturbing, but without them, the
story can't be fully understood. Please take care while listening.
(01:49):
Last time on Forgotten, when they like a girl, they
find her, no matter the cost. The men that I
study mostly they operate alone. So I started thinking, how
could all of these men trust each other? Well. Our
speculation was that when you don't want a crime to
(02:11):
be solved, it's because the resolution of it is going
to be extremely either embarrassing to somebody in power, or
it's going to come back to you. I had a
night witness who alleged that he had been at these
parties and eventually the women would be killed because they
knew too much. Alfredo Coucado was leaving the prison in
(02:36):
Juarez in two thousand and three, having finally been introduced
by Dante Almas to an eyewitness to the murders of women.
This drug dealer had just told Alfredo the police were
kidnapping women to be raped and killed by the cartel
as a full of celebration. After the prison interview, Dante
drove Alfredo back to the bridge to al Passo, but
(02:59):
he had one final tip to share, and that's when
Dante said, there's a name for this group, cartel. There's
a small sort of division. There are the gatekeepers. They're
the ones who controlled around and make sure that the
drugs give into the United States. La Linea. At the time,
la lina was from what you describe it. It's like
(03:21):
an unspeakable term. Nobody knows about lallna. Nobody says anything
about La linea. Why because La lina is really when
we talk about the power. They are the heart and
soul of the juist cartel. La ligna means the line
and Dante told Alfredo that the group of policemen involved
(03:44):
in abducting the women were also the enforcement arm for
the Juires cartel, and the world of organized crime was
one that the Devil's lawyer knew all too well. He
didn't get his nickname for nothing. He'd represented people from
the Juires Underworld and Eagle cases, and he had this
drug dealer stashed in the city jail under a false name.
(04:05):
And Alfredo still didn't know if his source was playing him.
So to corroborate what he was hearing, he went to
see Phil Jordan, the former head of the DA and
El Passo. We called Phil ourselves, and he didn't mince
his words. First and foremost, the cartels control the police.
A lot of the killings that occurred in the Hoire's
(04:28):
court were done by members of law enforcement. Mexican law enforcement,
according to Phil La Ligna, often killed to enforce silence.
Who's according to the intelligence that we have. The police
would pick up informants and then they would execute them,
sometimes burying them alive. Phil also corroborated the involvement of
(04:51):
this group in the abduction and murder of women. He
knew them as the gatekeepers, but with the help us
some DA documents, he and Alfredo pieced together that this
was another name for the same organization. Once we got
those documents of the gatekeepers from the US the EA,
we could finally go to the Mexican side. We met
(05:13):
with Luis Vasconcelos. The drugs are in Mexico City for
the AG's office. When I brought up La Lina, he
did not want to talk about it and just kind
of pushed us away. He didn't really deny La Lina me.
He just kind of say, no thing. You know, They're
kind of very careful. They very careful. Jose Luis Vasconcelos
(05:34):
was an Assistant Attorney General in Mexico whose mandate was
to attack organized crime, and Alfredo was perplexed by the
response to his questions about La Lina, so he kept going.
I think in one way it was good that I
was so inexperience and so naive. When that happens, you
(05:56):
just keep going, and you keep pushing and you push.
I think some colleagues, my own mother would say that stupidity.
I would say, I didn't know what I was getting into.
In response to this pushing, Vasconcelos introduced Alfredo to the
local anti drug prosecutor in Huarez. We're having lunch and again,
you know, it's the same idea, what can you talk
(06:18):
about La Linea? And suddenly he just I mean he
just got really uncomfortable, really awkward, and he says, you know,
I have to leave. Something else just happened, and I
had to follow him outside and he just said, stay
away from them? What made the Mexican drugs are and
(06:41):
his man in Houire is so uncomfortable. What does it
say about La Lina and its influence? How high up
did the corruption go? And what did all this have
to do with the murders of women almos Voloshin And
I'm this is forgotten, the women ncando Baramo lasciv you
(07:10):
know not si do you know? Masque hala feliciva. So
(07:37):
by this point Monica Alfredo had all the confirmation he
needed that La Lina did exist. But who are they?
They are the enforcement wing of the cartel. They kidnap,
they kill, they dispose of bodies. La Lina is comprised
primarily of state and local cops. And these state and
(07:59):
local cops are pulling a double duty. And how do
these cops end up getting corrupted by the cartel? The
simplest way to put this is with the phrase plato
or plomo, which means silver or lead. Either you take
a bribe or we put a bullet in your head.
And this goes for anyone, not just a cop. It
(08:22):
goes for a politician, street vendor, even a journalist. But
sometimes this ultimatum isn't even necessary. Some people are willingly
corrupted in exchange for some of the spoils of drug trafficking.
And you told me about a word that's used in
Juarez to describe this kind of complicity metito so medido
(08:44):
can mean involved or implicated, and in Mexico and in
Huatz it's often used to describe someone that's involved or
implicated in the drug trade. Just like Alfredo walked into
his story and the under world naively, so do many
of the people who become methidos. By the time they
(09:06):
realize just what they've gotten themselves into, it's too late.
And it's through the process of methido that La Lina
is able to exert its power. And Alfredo's reporting revealed
that some of the cops in Huarez were matido in
the most horrific way. They were involved in the murders
of the women. How shocking was Alfredo's story at the time. Well,
(09:31):
other reporters before Alfredo had also reported on this theory
that the police may be involved in the murders of women,
including Diana. The difference with Alfredo is he's able to
get confirmation from top federal sources, and he's able to
get a name La Lina, indicating that it's not just
(09:55):
one or two or three corrupt cops. No, no, this
is a four normal organization and that that is scary.
La Lina translates as the line, and you mentioned the
name might have some connection to the border, but I
was very struck by the fact that it's unspeakable. Well,
(10:15):
La Lina exerted its power through terror. It mercilessly went
after enemies and snitches. And so this pact of silence
is far reaching, to the point where even Mexico's top
drugs are and his men in Wattas are hesitant to
talk about La Lina. And if you have the authorities
(10:39):
in collusion with the drug traffickers, achieving justice is impossible.
These men, they had so much power they could pick
a woman off the streets, do unthinkable things to her,
dump her in a vacant lot and not suffer for
(11:00):
any consequences for it. They would be protected by law enforcement.
Alfredo had returned to Juarez to answer what he thought
was a straightforward question, who is killing the women? But
the answer to that question seemed to involve a level
of conspiracy and corruption that he never believed was possible.
(11:23):
And the deeper Alfredo dug, the more complicity in the
murders he discovered. It's not here are the bad guys
and you are the good guys. There were no good guys.
Everybody was involved. You have very powerful groups who, in
order to have power, they share the profits. And then
suddenly it becomes sol vicious that you never know who
(11:45):
is the government and the words are criminals, the one
and the same. Alfredo's mother had made him promise that
he'd never report un organized crime, but he was finding
that miss hard to keep. His reporting on the murders
of women had exposed to him why so many investigators
(12:06):
had failed to unmask the killers, and he was cleaning
a new understanding of how power worked in Mexico. But
Alfredo maintained some degree of optimism. He believed that if
he exposed what was happening, things might change, So he
accepts an invitation to Juarez shortly after his story was
published to discuss the findings with some Mexican colleagues, but
(12:31):
he didn't get the response he was expecting. One colleague
came out to me and says, there is no La Linea.
And this is someone I knew and someone I trusted,
a Mexican reporter. And I said, listen, if there is
no La Linea, we will write a correction and we
will understand. We don't want to give quite as a
bad name, but I'm telling you, we got documents, we
(12:53):
have people on the record. And he just kind of
looked at me like, than guil, be careful. Exactly what
the drugs are in Mexico City, had told Alfredo. But
was it a friendly warning or a veiled threat? Was
the trusted colleague himself Matido? Well, Alfredo had all the
(13:15):
DA documentation about La line but even so he started
to doubt himself. Then within minutes of leaving the panel,
he got all the confirmation he'd ever't need. Now I'm
walking away and there's a number comes in and there's
not a number is just unknown. It says unknown on
the phone, and person says a keyboy or Lazzi says,
(13:39):
I'm right behind you. On the sixteenth of September, Avenue,
I was being watched and I hung up the phone,
and I'm looking at everything with this paranoia. It goes
from one minute you're doubting you're reporting to the next
moment you're like, holy shit, they do exist, and they're here,
(14:01):
and they may be right next to me, or the
car may be right here, or the guy walking behind
me may be the person. I am scared shitless. What
do I do now? So I just made a bee line.
I ran. Alfredo is only a mile from the bridge
(14:23):
to the US and he needs to get to the
border to safety. But as he runs through the streets,
he's suspicious of every person who looks his way, and
he's starting to attract notice. He knows he might not
make it all the way, So, with his life on
the line and in desperation, Alfredo makes a bee line
towards someone he doesn't even know if he can trust.
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running through the very streets west so many women disappeared
without witnesses. He's realizing that in hunting the story, he
(17:05):
himself has become the prey. Because La Lina, the organization
responsible for the abduction and murder of so many young women,
won't tolerate any more revelations about us in the workings.
But silencing journalists and murdering women is not the reason
that La Lina exists, although both do play a role
(17:26):
in protecting their real business, drug trafficking. So ALFREDA receives
this call Monica on his cell phone, and it's not
exactly like the Dallas Morning News would have given his
number out. So it's kind of crazy because not only
does this person on the other end of the line
know where he is, they've managed to get his cell
(17:47):
phone number. How's that possible? Jeez, wouldn't we all like
to know that? Wouldn't Alfredo like to know that? But
the fact that they've got it is very concerning. That
means that someone he thinks he can trust is betraying him.
I mean, it just proves how far their tentacles reach
that even an American journalist for a major US newspaper
(18:12):
can be threatened by them. You can imagine this phone
called Alfredo receives was exactly what his mother was fearing
when she made him promise not to cover these kinds
of stories. Do you know anything about the conversation between them,
But I imagine that it was no different from the
interaction I had with my own mother. Leave them alone,
(18:35):
because if you don't, they're going to come after you.
And I don't want to be one of those grieving
mothers I see sobbing into the news cameras on a
regular basis. How do we get here? Where mothers from
Paulaflores to Alfreda's mother to your mother so scared about
that children Hourez. The drug cartels in Mexico are like
(19:00):
a cancer, and it's a cancer that's been metastasizing ever
since the nineteen eighties. And why is it so severe
in Huarez. Well, honestly, it comes down to simple geography.
I mean, there's a reason why the Spaniards called my
hometown the Pass. Four hundred years ago, bal Paso Hottest
(19:23):
region was the midsection of one of the most important
trade routes in the Americas, the Camino Real. It went
from Mexico City all the way to Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Now fast forward a few centuries, people in goods are
still moving in droves across this region. Only now there's
(19:47):
an international border restricting that movement. And those restrictions created
a golden opportunity for the black market. And with help
from Laalna, the hottest hotel, was one of the groups
that exploited this black market opportunity. So Miami had this
(20:07):
reputation of being the place to smuggle drugs into the US,
which is why movies like Scarface were set there. But
basically the government got wise to that and traffickers started
looking for alternate roots. Yes, this is when Colombian drug
traffickers discover the US Mexico border, which turns out to
(20:30):
be a far superior route, and the Feds they didn't
catch up until nineteen eighty nine. In that year, they
busted a warehouse in North Los Angeles and found twenty
one tons of cocaine, reportedly worth six point five billion dollars. Wow,
(20:50):
still the largest seizure of cocaine in American history. And
guess where those twenty one tons came from? El Paso, howires,
this was now the new hot spot. By the late nineties,
the estimate was that seventy percent of all drug shipments
(21:11):
to the US were coming through the US Mexico border.
But the reason that these drug cartels are so powerful
is because of demand on the American side, and that
demand is worth billions of dollars every single year, and
that's the money that goes to corrupting the state and
(21:35):
local police who are kidnapping and raping and dumping these
women in the desert. El Paso and Huires have been
smuggling cities for a hundred years, but Juires has only
been what Diana Washington Valdez schools a killing field for
women since the nineteen nineties. So what changed? How did
(21:58):
La Ligna come into existence and become so brutal. To
help answer these questions, we spoke with Howard Campbell the
statement about the He's an anthropologist at the University of
Texas El Paso. In two thousand and nine, the Senate
Committee on Foreign Relations asked him to testify about how
(22:20):
the US might respond to escalating violence in Mexico. I
don't think that in a long term we're ever going
to stop drug cartels exactly. For thirty five years we've
been doing this, but we don't see much change in
the supply or demand. The most effective ways the US
can help Mexico with a drug problem are by first
of all, cutting our demand for illegal drugs. Second, slowing
(22:43):
the flow of guns from the US to Mexico. Third
fighting drug organization. Howard believes that the nature of the
murders of women in Huirez, the patterns in the selection,
and the sexual violence that goes hand in hand with
the killings, has meant that many outside investigators have focused
on the wrong leads. I think, to some extent, the
understanding of this femicide issue was seen through the filter
(23:06):
of the American phenomenon of serial killers Ted Bundy and
John Wayne Gacy. If you think the problem as serial
killers and the problem is catching the serial killers. But
if your other interpretation is that the problem is the
lack of a functioning police system and judicial system in Mexico,
corrupt politicians, drug cartels, and gangs, if you think that's
(23:29):
the source of the violence, and that's what you need
to attack first. As far as how it is concerned,
no matter how many memoilios are taken off the streets
of Juarez, or even how many El Chapo Guzman's extradited
to the US, the sums of money involved in drug
trafficking means that corruption is endemic on both sides of
the border. It's a multibillion dollar industry in these two cities.
(23:52):
I mean El Pasohuas are probably some of the most
important places in the entire world for narcotics trafficking. That's
another misnomer about drug trafficking is that it's Mexican groups invading,
and i'd stay it's no, it's it's Mexicans and Americans
working together to produce, to transport, to smuggle, to sell drugs.
You're talking about at least one hundred years of history.
(24:16):
In fact, up until eighteen fifty, El Paso and Juarez
were one community. Both were in Mexico. It was only
after the Mexican American War that El Paso became part
of Texas, with Juarez Romania in Mexico, but the two
cities stayed deeply connected, and by the nineteen twenties the
area was as smugg as paradise, from bootleg liquor to
(24:39):
illegal narcotics, with the business in Juarez run by an
unlikely figure. Starting around the time of prohibition, the smuggling
of marijuana and heroin was largely monopolized by one person,
a woman called lad Nacha. She had a career that
lasted forty year, fifty years. That's quite a long time.
(25:02):
That's quite a long time, and so Lanacha died of
natural causes in her seventies, and so every drug traffickers
heaven or something like. So Lanacha was a genius. She
was uneducated, grew up as a poor woman, and eventually
somehow figured out how to make this drug business work.
(25:22):
What protected her for that long so she was well
protected by a vast extended family, but also her accomplices
in the municipal police surely was in the municipal government
of Juarez, but also even at the federal level. From
the beginning, in Hoare's illegal business thrived with the complicity
of the police and government, but this didn't include the
(25:44):
abduction and murder of young women who had nothing to
do with drugs. In fact, for a while, drug smuggly
in Houarres operated like the old school Italian mafia, violent
to its enemies, but woven into the fabric of the community.
Things began to shift when America's consumption habit shifted. People
(26:05):
started to use cocaine. It was sort of the passing
of the hippie era into the disco era, and the
Mexican trafficking organizations adapted to that. In the nineteen eighties,
there was an enterprising Huara's local who was more than
happy to help meet this new demand, even if that
meant taking on the second job. Raphael Aguilaruahard, though, was
(26:25):
head of the federal police in the Chihuahua area, so
he formed the First Waters Cartel and they began the
smuggle cocaine. That's when things changed. There wasn't that much
violence in Juadas in the nineteen eighties, and so you
had this very impressive drug trafficking organization that was making
hundreds of millions of dollars, but not that many people
were getting killed. Huaras remained a city that Lanaco would
(26:49):
have recognized, but the sums of money pouring in because
of cocaine began to attract notice from outsiders, not least
from a man from the west in Mexican state of
Sina Looa. He too was a federal policeman called Amalo
Kario Fuentes. Carrio Fuentes was the great innovator in Mexican
(27:10):
drug trafficking of bringing seven forty seven airplanes was a
seats removed filled with cocaine from Colombia all the way
up to the northern Mexican border and then smuggling them
into the United States, sometimes in eighteen wheel trucks right
across the free bridge Central El Paso and quads, many
times with paid off US customs agents or US Immigration officers.
(27:38):
When you spend time in El Paso, you can't help
but notice the steel fence that bisects it from Juarez
and the militarization of the border. But no amount of
infrastructure can protect an organization from an inside job. And
Careo Fuentes, the police officer turned trafficker, understood this better
than most. He recognized that the big as organization got,
(28:01):
the more money it could bring in. The more money,
the more corrupt officials on both sides of the border,
and so it went on. But he also recognized that
he was operating far from his home turf, so he
brought in some associates from Sinaloa. Kario Frentes brought in
a whole bunch of Scario's dead man. He had a
(28:22):
very complex organization involving people guarding safe houses. You have drivers,
you have gunmen, you have accountants. You have essentially an
informal criminal corporation, and that's what Kario Fuentes created. At first,
the two former policemen Aguilar and Curio Fuentes worked together,
(28:44):
solidifying an empire of cocaine trafficking. But after a while,
the outsider saw his opportunity to go to Loane. Now
this isn't the same way as when you have a
big American corporation buys up another corporation. It isn't as
neat and clean. Carrio Fuentes had Aguilar, the original founder
(29:04):
of the Juadis cartel, murdered in nineteen ninety three. That's
when all the violence, That's when the ship hit the fan,
was when the Carrio Fuentes cartel took over in Juadas.
Despite the loss of their leader, the local cartel weren't
going to roll over for the man from Sina Looa,
So Carria Fuentes began a reign of terror. So in
(29:24):
the early nineteen nineties, Quadas becomes part of this kind
of globalized, multi national, extremely violent drug cartel. You say
nineteen ninety three as the takeover of Amalo Carrillo Fuentes
of the Juaas Plaza, nineteen ninety three is also when
these brutal, horrific women's murders began to happen in the city.
(29:48):
So if you're saying it's not a coincidence. No, I
would say that it's not a coincidence. I'm not saying
it's a conspiracy. I'm not saying the cartel game and
they said, Okay, we're gonna start committing femicides. What I'm
saying is I think it's an ex hypothesis to think
that many women that were raped, kidnapped, murdered in quarters
were killed and mistreated by ciccardios hitmen for the drug cartels.
(30:10):
Outsiders who don't feel connected to the local population, whose
job is to brutalize and kill, would see women walking
on the streets as pieces of meat, just like the
people they would kidnap and murder who were enemies of
their drug organization. Alfredo's reporting had already revealed the hand
organized crime in the murders of women, but Howard was
(30:33):
helping us piece together how a hostile takeover of the
Hawire's cartel had turned the women who lived in the
city into targets as FBI special agents in charge of
El Paso, Heredrik Crawford had called them antelopes at the
water hole. So Laalina was an organization that exerted total
control and whose policy if Plato Plomo left their victims
(30:57):
with nowhere to turn, and Alfredo was experiencing this firsthand
as he ran through the streets of downtown Juarez, hoping
to make it back to the bridge. The one person
he could think to turn to for help was Dantown Maras,
but as he got closer to the lawyer's office, he
realized that he was running towards the very people he
was trying so hard to escape. I'm just pushing forward.
(31:20):
I realized where Danta's office is, and I'm just pushing
and looking all around me, and I've noticed that right
next to Danta's and just forgan there was a police station,
and I'm thinking, oh my god, you know the caps
are was La Lina? What am I doing? I ran,
I come in and I just went straight to his office.
(31:43):
Paula Flores and so many other mothers had learned that
there was no point in going to the police, and
as far as Alfreda was concerned, doing so would further
endanger his life, So he put his fate into the
hands of the very lawyer He'd been told by so
many people was not to be trusted as a source,
let alone a savior. So I explained to Dante, what's
(32:07):
you know, this is what's going on. I think the
first time I saw Dante and he looked worried, and
then he finally says, yeah, the chaste you're fucked. I
said why. He says, they're anti Laalinia's Aunto and he says,
you know, the only good thing is a year American
And I said, yeah, by my cousin is a cup
(32:28):
Aquitis Cup, and I have family in Quiis And he says, well,
then you're really fucked. Something may happen to them because
of you. Alfredo doesn't have time to dwell on the
consequences of his reporting. As far as he's concerned, his
own life depends on getting back to the US as
fast as possible. So I tell Dante, so, look, how
(32:49):
do I get across? And he basically says, why don't
I drive you back? Because I don't think you should watch.
I'll just drive you the N SUV and basically just
put me in the back, crossing the bag and I'm
looking through the windows, and I'm looking at all these
places that I grew up may Sky, you know again,
(33:10):
the marches. At one point I wanted to be a
songwriter and a singer, and we had a little studio.
But in that area, you know, all these things are
going through my mind. And I'm also thinking, what if
Dante is in on us. What if he's not taking
me to the bridge, what if he's taking me somewhere,
but he's taking me to the cop And then I
see him on the phone and he's he just sounds
(33:30):
so nonchalant, it's just another normal day. I'm trying to
sort of get Dante to tell me everything's gonna be okay,
But the whole time he's on the damn phone, Alfred
it was panicking. He wasn't sure whether he could trust
the Devil's lawyer, whether Dante might still be me Tito
or on La Linea's payroll. In fact, Alfred it wasn't
(33:54):
even sure if he'd make it out of quarre as alive.
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(34:59):
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(35:20):
a trail of blood behind me, and I was one sign. Now.
Of course, prior to I was excessively gaining weight. I
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(35:42):
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Listen to Health Discovered on the iHeartRadio app or wherever
you get your podcasts. Alfredo was in the back of
(36:10):
Dante's suv trying to make out where they were going.
It was just a quick, little dry but to me
it just felt like forever. Finally it became clear that
the lawyer was taking him back to the border, and
as they arrived at the bridge that would allow Alfredo
to escape to the safety of El Paso, the lawyer
got off the phone and once again he had some
(36:32):
final words for the journalist. I think he saw how
scared I was, and he's trying to tell me how
important it was what I did. But he says, I
get the metal where wars, it's who acquits you have
to have boss. Don't be afraid. So basically he's downing you,
don't be intimidated, continue your work. I think one of
(36:53):
his lands was its qui as chained out. This is
swhides damn it, you know, don't be intimidated. Keep searching,
keep asking us, keep digging. In the moment that Dante
dropped him off at the bridge, Alfredo realized once and
for all that he could trust him. In fact, it
was the lawyer who helped him get to El Paso,
(37:14):
beyond the reach of La Lina and perhaps saved his
life in the process. So Monica that moment where Alfredo
gets back to the bridge and he's able to cross
into El Paso. You told me you understood exactly how
he's feeling. Yeah. Certainly, when I was reporting on the
drug war in Huadis, once I crossed over the bridge
(37:38):
and drove underneath the sign that said Welcome to the
United States, I would feel this rush of relief come
over me, and I would recognize just how stressed I
had been on the other side. But I knew where
to draw the line. As long as I reported on
the victims of the violence that the car tell exacts
(38:01):
on the city of Watts, I was unlikely to be bothered.
They don't care about the victims. It did involve going
into a dangerous city where being in the wrong place
at the wrong time could get you killed. But the
kind of reporting I tried to do was reporting that
wouldn't result in me being specifically targeted. Nonetheless, you told
(38:26):
me about those cowboy boots and about thinking about what
it might be like to be stuffed in the back
of someone's car. And it's kind of astonishing to me
how much risk Alfredo took and you took to cover
this story. But also that both of you get to
come home, And that's something I found very striking about
that exchange between Dante and Alfredo. When Dante says to him,
(38:50):
keep digging, it's almost as though he's passing the torch
because Alfredo can go back to safety and Dante has
to turn around back to the city where friend Mario
Escobado was assassinated not that long ago. It's a very
poignant moment in a sense, Dante sees Alfredo as this
beacon of hope. Maybe if the Americans can call out
(39:14):
what's truly happening in Juarez, something will change. The fact
that this conversation takes place at the foot of the
international bridge that connects what is to Alpasso. The bridge,
to Dante, might have symbolized the bridge between impunity and justice.
(39:34):
Dante had taken enormous risk in exposing to Alfredo who
was complicit in the murders of women in Huarez, and
it was because of him that the systematic involvement of
the police was confirmed and that the name La Lina
was published, disturbing their culture of silence. But as nochelant
As Dante was talking on the phone as he drove
(39:55):
Alfredo back to the border, he was well aware that
they would likely be a price for into a journalist
let's learn, saving his life. After publishing his story, Alfredo
moved on to Mexico City as he planned, and Dante
stayed in Juarez, but they stayed in touch. We talked
several times, but every time he caused it was like
(40:16):
a sense of urgency. It was like he was scared.
So I would just say Dante, okay and kept I
saw what's going on. I came back to Squas because
he wanted to meet me. He said, look, I have
things I want to share with your things I want
to tell you. But I thought he's got something big,
and we decided to meet somewhere near the bridge. I
(40:37):
wasn't the Kentucky Club. I was there for an hour
than two hours, never showed up. Like a few days later,
I saw it in the news. He had been killed
right near the same area where I had run to
his office to scun down by hitmen with a car
(41:01):
with new Mexico plates. Conveniently, the cameras were not working
at day Dante was gone. Was his murder ever solved?
Murder was never saw. Do you have any ideas why
he was killed? I think oftentimes when people get killed
(41:24):
in mexico's because they know too much. I think it's
something I've learned. It's not always maybe smart to try
to know so much. But again, you know, we were young,
we were hopeful. You were certainly played a role in
(41:44):
my trying to steer away from covering the drug cartels.
Because I'll never forget a voicemail you left on my phone.
This is about ten years ago now for y'all. I mean,
I don't tell your mom. Mean something like Monica, we
(42:08):
we like our soup cold or hot. And I was like,
that's some dark humor, Alfred, Why did you get from
of the cartels? You know, this is like the cartels
saying they liked the soup color hot. You know it
maybe five years, it maybe ten years. They might forgive you,
but they're never going to forget, and they might catch
(42:29):
up with you someday. Equally, So I got the gist
of Alfredo's joke about the soup monica, But what exactly
does it mean? In other words, you were their soup,
and sooner or later they're gonna eat you hot or cold.
Sooner or later they'll take their revenge, perhaps when you
(42:49):
least expect it. So Alfredo came to learn this, but
Dante knew it all along, but nonetheless he kept going.
Remember Dante told Alfredo, this is what is damn it.
You've got to have guts, and Dante did. In the end,
he died, living up to his own saying he suffered
(43:11):
the same fate as his friend Mario Escobedo, gunned down
in the typical drive by execution favored by La Lina.
Dante may have started out as the devil's lawyer, but
in the end you could say he and Mario gave
their lives in the name of justice. La Lina the
(43:35):
line Dante had knowingly crossed it, and he paid the
ultimate price. He did live long enough to see one
of the bus drivers exonerated and the truth of what
was happening to the women in Juarez exposed in the
American press. But the other bus driver died in prison
in mysterious circumstances after a botched operation. Mario Escobedo's father,
(43:57):
who led the protest in front of the juire As
Attorney General's office carrying his son's casket, was assassinated in
two thousand and nine at his office, along with his
other son, Edgar. There were eight women's bodies discovered in
the cotton fields in two thousand and one, and in
some sense that was just the beginning of the crime.
Within the space of a few years, at least four
(44:19):
people seeking to reveal the truth of those women's murders
had themselves been assassinated, and several others caught up in
the story also died prematurely. Even Vasconcelos, the drugs are
in Mexico City, who Alfredo met died in a plane
crash in two thousand and eight, and some suspected foul play.
(44:40):
Demanding justice in Juarez is a deadly business, which makes
that other line, the one that separates it from al Passo,
all the more significant. Alfredo could cross the bridge back
to safety, and he lived. Dante could drive Alfredo up
to the bridge, but he'd die in Huirez. But as
(45:03):
how it, Kempbell told us they called Tel's reach. It
doesn't stop at the Buddha. Elpas was a dormitory for
drug traffickers, high level drug traffickers, hitmen from the cartels,
hundreds of drug smugglers, probably hundreds of stash houses where
drugs are stored, trucking businesses that are dedicated to drug trafficking,
(45:25):
and so the economy of elpas was completely saturated with
drugs and illegal money. And we consider this here normal
and not particularly a problem. As long as you don't
get hurt or you don't get in trouble, people just
kind of turn a blind eye. Even to this day,
there's dramatic inequality and unfairness in the relationship between the
(45:48):
two cities, even though it has made a living off
of drug smuggling. Elpass is incredibly safe where I see
Lahuata is where half the population of Elpaso has relatives
and friends. Is one of the most violent cities in
the world and dangerous cities in the world. And I
don't think most people in El Paso really care about
changing that. There's a kind of way in which people
(46:10):
accept this inequality and this exploitation of Mexico as a
source for legal drugs that we enjoy consuming and we
farm out the risk to the Mexicans who are the
ones that die by the thousands and the drug violence,
and so it isn't right. It's hypocritical, it's unjust, it's unfair.
But whether you like it or not, it's just everyday
(46:31):
life here on the border. Howard got an insight into
the depths of this hypocrisy from one of his students
at the University of Texas, El Paso. I believe he
was an immigration officer, and in the class we would
debate she's related to Mexico, and he would always stand
up for the US government and the other students, many
of them were Mexican Americans, hated the US Immigration Service
(46:53):
and so they didn't like him, and he would come
to class in uniform. But I found it interesting that
he would wear a golden neckla around his neck with
a gold anchor, very expensive piece of jewelry. And then
one time I saw him at a very fancy mall
in West El Paso and he came out with huge
bags of expensive clothing that he had just purchased. Well
(47:14):
soon after he was my student, he was arrested for
being a corrupt immigration officer and allowing large amounts of
cocaine with the Huades cartel to cross into Alpaso from
Juarez on the bridge. According to court documents, Howard's student,
the immigration officer was charging the cartel ten thousand dollars
(47:35):
for each cocaine laden car that he waved through. This
was la ligne in action, except in Olpaso. They weren't
murdering young women or people who dared to ask questions,
but their money was just as capable of corrupting US officials.
And I was beginning to understand the deep irony of
the fence that divided the two cities. I would say
(47:58):
that it's a very contradictory place because even though you
have thousands of people that are involved in drug trafficking,
drug smuggling, drug dealing, and you also have thousands of
federal law agents, d EA, Customs, you name the agency.
You have one of the largest military bases in the world,
Fort Bliss, So there's soldiers everywhere. There's municipals, you know,
city cops, you know, state cops, any number of law
(48:20):
enforcement agencies, the FBI in El Paso. So it's a
simultaneously it's this kind of zoo of criminals and the
law living together and even marrying each other. Alfredo was
talking about Juarez when he said, everybody's involved metito. But
the thing about metito is it's never really clear just
(48:43):
how compromised a person is. And that brings us back
to an American law enforcement official whose name is lightly
familiar by now, Hardrid Crawford, who was head of the FBI,
started to go over there a lot and god associated
with high ranking businessman in quarters. Hardrick was the most
(49:04):
outspoken American official on the killings of women in Juarez.
He even gave a quote to a Mexican newspaper where
he called the murders crimes against humanity. I had a
moral mission that I felt that I was empowered on
a different level than the US Constitution. That mission would
give Hardrick a first hand understanding of the word metito,
(49:27):
and it would unleash a series of events that called
his own life into question. So I was in the
house by myself and my brother said directly, did you
ever think about eating your gun, I said, I did,
I did seriously consider killing myself. I'm as Velashen and
(49:55):
see you next time. Stella Felicia Forgotten. The Women of
(50:41):
Juarez is co hosted by Me Monica and me Oswal Loshen.
Forgotten is executive produced by Me and Mangesh Hatigia. Our
producers are Julian Weller and Katrina Norvell. Sound editing by
Julian Weller, Jacopo Penzo and Aaron Coran. Lucas Riley is
(51:01):
our story editor. Caitlin Thompson is our consulting producer. Recording
assistance this episode from Michael Perez. Production support from Emily
Maronoff and Aaron Kaufman. Our theme tune is the Richel
Nacimiento as performed by Natalie Lae. Music by Leonardo Hablum
(51:22):
and Hakkabo Libermann. Additional music by Aaron Kaufman. Hello beautiful,
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unest dot CEO. Forgotten is a production of IHNT media
and unusual productions before we start. This podcast contains accounts
which some listeners will find disturbing, but without them, the
story can't be fully understood. Please take care while listening.
(01:49):
Last time on Forgotten, when they like a girl, they
find her, no matter the cost. The men that I
study mostly they operate alone. So I started thinking, how
could all of these men trust each other? Well. Our
speculation was that when you don't want a crime to
(02:11):
be solved, it's because the resolution of it is going
to be extremely either embarrassing to somebody in power, or
it's going to come back to you. I had a
night witness who alleged that he had been at these
parties and eventually the women would be killed because they
knew too much. Alfredo Coucado was leaving the prison in
(02:36):
Juarez in two thousand and three, having finally been introduced
by Dante Almas to an eyewitness to the murders of women.
This drug dealer had just told Alfredo the police were
kidnapping women to be raped and killed by the cartel
as a full of celebration. After the prison interview, Dante
drove Alfredo back to the bridge to al Passo, but
(02:59):
he had one final tip to share, and that's when
Dante said, there's a name for this group, cartel. There's
a small sort of division. There are the gatekeepers. They're
the ones who controlled around and make sure that the
drugs give into the United States. La Linea. At the time,
la lina was from what you describe it. It's like
(03:21):
an unspeakable term. Nobody knows about lallna. Nobody says anything
about La linea. Why because La lina is really when
we talk about the power. They are the heart and
soul of the juist cartel. La ligna means the line
and Dante told Alfredo that the group of policemen involved
(03:44):
in abducting the women were also the enforcement arm for
the Juires cartel, and the world of organized crime was
one that the Devil's lawyer knew all too well. He
didn't get his nickname for nothing. He'd represented people from
the Juires Underworld and Eagle cases, and he had this
drug dealer stashed in the city jail under a false name.
(04:05):
And Alfredo still didn't know if his source was playing him.
So to corroborate what he was hearing, he went to
see Phil Jordan, the former head of the DA and
El Passo. We called Phil ourselves, and he didn't mince
his words. First and foremost, the cartels control the police.
A lot of the killings that occurred in the Hoire's
(04:28):
court were done by members of law enforcement. Mexican law enforcement,
according to Phil La Ligna, often killed to enforce silence.
Who's according to the intelligence that we have. The police
would pick up informants and then they would execute them,
sometimes burying them alive. Phil also corroborated the involvement of
(04:51):
this group in the abduction and murder of women. He
knew them as the gatekeepers, but with the help us
some DA documents, he and Alfredo pieced together that this
was another name for the same organization. Once we got
those documents of the gatekeepers from the US the EA,
we could finally go to the Mexican side. We met
(05:13):
with Luis Vasconcelos. The drugs are in Mexico City for
the AG's office. When I brought up La Lina, he
did not want to talk about it and just kind
of pushed us away. He didn't really deny La Lina me.
He just kind of say, no thing. You know, They're
kind of very careful. They very careful. Jose Luis Vasconcelos
(05:34):
was an Assistant Attorney General in Mexico whose mandate was
to attack organized crime, and Alfredo was perplexed by the
response to his questions about La Lina, so he kept going.
I think in one way it was good that I
was so inexperience and so naive. When that happens, you
(05:56):
just keep going, and you keep pushing and you push.
I think some colleagues, my own mother would say that stupidity.
I would say, I didn't know what I was getting into.
In response to this pushing, Vasconcelos introduced Alfredo to the
local anti drug prosecutor in Huarez. We're having lunch and again,
you know, it's the same idea, what can you talk
(06:18):
about La Linea? And suddenly he just I mean he
just got really uncomfortable, really awkward, and he says, you know,
I have to leave. Something else just happened, and I
had to follow him outside and he just said, stay
away from them? What made the Mexican drugs are and
(06:41):
his man in Houire is so uncomfortable. What does it
say about La Lina and its influence? How high up
did the corruption go? And what did all this have
to do with the murders of women almos Voloshin And
I'm this is forgotten, the women ncando Baramo lasciv you
(07:10):
know not si do you know? Masque hala feliciva. So
(07:37):
by this point Monica Alfredo had all the confirmation he
needed that La Lina did exist. But who are they?
They are the enforcement wing of the cartel. They kidnap,
they kill, they dispose of bodies. La Lina is comprised
primarily of state and local cops. And these state and
(07:59):
local cops are pulling a double duty. And how do
these cops end up getting corrupted by the cartel? The
simplest way to put this is with the phrase plato
or plomo, which means silver or lead. Either you take
a bribe or we put a bullet in your head.
And this goes for anyone, not just a cop. It
(08:22):
goes for a politician, street vendor, even a journalist. But
sometimes this ultimatum isn't even necessary. Some people are willingly
corrupted in exchange for some of the spoils of drug trafficking.
And you told me about a word that's used in
Juarez to describe this kind of complicity metito so medido
(08:44):
can mean involved or implicated, and in Mexico and in
Huatz it's often used to describe someone that's involved or
implicated in the drug trade. Just like Alfredo walked into
his story and the under world naively, so do many
of the people who become methidos. By the time they
(09:06):
realize just what they've gotten themselves into, it's too late.
And it's through the process of methido that La Lina
is able to exert its power. And Alfredo's reporting revealed
that some of the cops in Huarez were matido in
the most horrific way. They were involved in the murders
of the women. How shocking was Alfredo's story at the time. Well,
(09:31):
other reporters before Alfredo had also reported on this theory
that the police may be involved in the murders of women,
including Diana. The difference with Alfredo is he's able to
get confirmation from top federal sources, and he's able to
get a name La Lina, indicating that it's not just
(09:55):
one or two or three corrupt cops. No, no, this
is a four normal organization and that that is scary.
La Lina translates as the line, and you mentioned the
name might have some connection to the border, but I
was very struck by the fact that it's unspeakable. Well,
(10:15):
La Lina exerted its power through terror. It mercilessly went
after enemies and snitches. And so this pact of silence
is far reaching, to the point where even Mexico's top
drugs are and his men in Wattas are hesitant to
talk about La Lina. And if you have the authorities
(10:39):
in collusion with the drug traffickers, achieving justice is impossible.
These men, they had so much power they could pick
a woman off the streets, do unthinkable things to her,
dump her in a vacant lot and not suffer for
(11:00):
any consequences for it. They would be protected by law enforcement.
Alfredo had returned to Juarez to answer what he thought
was a straightforward question, who is killing the women? But
the answer to that question seemed to involve a level
of conspiracy and corruption that he never believed was possible.
(11:23):
And the deeper Alfredo dug, the more complicity in the
murders he discovered. It's not here are the bad guys
and you are the good guys. There were no good guys.
Everybody was involved. You have very powerful groups who, in
order to have power, they share the profits. And then
suddenly it becomes sol vicious that you never know who
(11:45):
is the government and the words are criminals, the one
and the same. Alfredo's mother had made him promise that
he'd never report un organized crime, but he was finding
that miss hard to keep. His reporting on the murders
of women had exposed to him why so many investigators
(12:06):
had failed to unmask the killers, and he was cleaning
a new understanding of how power worked in Mexico. But
Alfredo maintained some degree of optimism. He believed that if
he exposed what was happening, things might change, So he
accepts an invitation to Juarez shortly after his story was
published to discuss the findings with some Mexican colleagues, but
(12:31):
he didn't get the response he was expecting. One colleague
came out to me and says, there is no La Linea.
And this is someone I knew and someone I trusted,
a Mexican reporter. And I said, listen, if there is
no La Linea, we will write a correction and we
will understand. We don't want to give quite as a
bad name, but I'm telling you, we got documents, we
(12:53):
have people on the record. And he just kind of
looked at me like, than guil, be careful. Exactly what
the drugs are in Mexico City, had told Alfredo. But
was it a friendly warning or a veiled threat? Was
the trusted colleague himself Matido? Well, Alfredo had all the
(13:15):
DA documentation about La line but even so he started
to doubt himself. Then within minutes of leaving the panel,
he got all the confirmation he'd ever't need. Now I'm
walking away and there's a number comes in and there's
not a number is just unknown. It says unknown on
the phone, and person says a keyboy or Lazzi says,
(13:39):
I'm right behind you. On the sixteenth of September, Avenue,
I was being watched and I hung up the phone,
and I'm looking at everything with this paranoia. It goes
from one minute you're doubting you're reporting to the next
moment you're like, holy shit, they do exist, and they're here,
(14:01):
and they may be right next to me, or the
car may be right here, or the guy walking behind
me may be the person. I am scared shitless. What
do I do now? So I just made a bee line.
I ran. Alfredo is only a mile from the bridge
(14:23):
to the US and he needs to get to the
border to safety. But as he runs through the streets,
he's suspicious of every person who looks his way, and
he's starting to attract notice. He knows he might not
make it all the way, So, with his life on
the line and in desperation, Alfredo makes a bee line
towards someone he doesn't even know if he can trust.
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running through the very streets west so many women disappeared
without witnesses. He's realizing that in hunting the story, he
(17:05):
himself has become the prey. Because La Lina, the organization
responsible for the abduction and murder of so many young women,
won't tolerate any more revelations about us in the workings.
But silencing journalists and murdering women is not the reason
that La Lina exists, although both do play a role
(17:26):
in protecting their real business, drug trafficking. So ALFREDA receives
this call Monica on his cell phone, and it's not
exactly like the Dallas Morning News would have given his
number out. So it's kind of crazy because not only
does this person on the other end of the line
know where he is, they've managed to get his cell
(17:47):
phone number. How's that possible? Jeez, wouldn't we all like
to know that? Wouldn't Alfredo like to know that? But
the fact that they've got it is very concerning. That
means that someone he thinks he can trust is betraying him.
I mean, it just proves how far their tentacles reach
that even an American journalist for a major US newspaper
(18:12):
can be threatened by them. You can imagine this phone
called Alfredo receives was exactly what his mother was fearing
when she made him promise not to cover these kinds
of stories. Do you know anything about the conversation between them,
But I imagine that it was no different from the
interaction I had with my own mother. Leave them alone,
(18:35):
because if you don't, they're going to come after you.
And I don't want to be one of those grieving
mothers I see sobbing into the news cameras on a
regular basis. How do we get here? Where mothers from
Paulaflores to Alfreda's mother to your mother so scared about
that children Hourez. The drug cartels in Mexico are like
(19:00):
a cancer, and it's a cancer that's been metastasizing ever
since the nineteen eighties. And why is it so severe
in Huarez. Well, honestly, it comes down to simple geography.
I mean, there's a reason why the Spaniards called my
hometown the Pass. Four hundred years ago, bal Paso Hottest
(19:23):
region was the midsection of one of the most important
trade routes in the Americas, the Camino Real. It went
from Mexico City all the way to Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Now fast forward a few centuries, people in goods are
still moving in droves across this region. Only now there's
(19:47):
an international border restricting that movement. And those restrictions created
a golden opportunity for the black market. And with help
from Laalna, the hottest hotel, was one of the groups
that exploited this black market opportunity. So Miami had this
(20:07):
reputation of being the place to smuggle drugs into the US,
which is why movies like Scarface were set there. But
basically the government got wise to that and traffickers started
looking for alternate roots. Yes, this is when Colombian drug
traffickers discover the US Mexico border, which turns out to
(20:30):
be a far superior route, and the Feds they didn't
catch up until nineteen eighty nine. In that year, they
busted a warehouse in North Los Angeles and found twenty
one tons of cocaine, reportedly worth six point five billion dollars. Wow,
(20:50):
still the largest seizure of cocaine in American history. And
guess where those twenty one tons came from? El Paso, howires,
this was now the new hot spot. By the late nineties,
the estimate was that seventy percent of all drug shipments
(21:11):
to the US were coming through the US Mexico border.
But the reason that these drug cartels are so powerful
is because of demand on the American side, and that
demand is worth billions of dollars every single year, and
that's the money that goes to corrupting the state and
(21:35):
local police who are kidnapping and raping and dumping these
women in the desert. El Paso and Huires have been
smuggling cities for a hundred years, but Juires has only
been what Diana Washington Valdez schools a killing field for
women since the nineteen nineties. So what changed? How did
(21:58):
La Ligna come into existence and become so brutal. To
help answer these questions, we spoke with Howard Campbell the
statement about the He's an anthropologist at the University of
Texas El Paso. In two thousand and nine, the Senate
Committee on Foreign Relations asked him to testify about how
(22:20):
the US might respond to escalating violence in Mexico. I
don't think that in a long term we're ever going
to stop drug cartels exactly. For thirty five years we've
been doing this, but we don't see much change in
the supply or demand. The most effective ways the US
can help Mexico with a drug problem are by first
of all, cutting our demand for illegal drugs. Second, slowing
(22:43):
the flow of guns from the US to Mexico. Third
fighting drug organization. Howard believes that the nature of the
murders of women in Huirez, the patterns in the selection,
and the sexual violence that goes hand in hand with
the killings, has meant that many outside investigators have focused
on the wrong leads. I think, to some extent, the
understanding of this femicide issue was seen through the filter
(23:06):
of the American phenomenon of serial killers Ted Bundy and
John Wayne Gacy. If you think the problem as serial
killers and the problem is catching the serial killers. But
if your other interpretation is that the problem is the
lack of a functioning police system and judicial system in Mexico,
corrupt politicians, drug cartels, and gangs, if you think that's
(23:29):
the source of the violence, and that's what you need
to attack first. As far as how it is concerned,
no matter how many memoilios are taken off the streets
of Juarez, or even how many El Chapo Guzman's extradited
to the US, the sums of money involved in drug
trafficking means that corruption is endemic on both sides of
the border. It's a multibillion dollar industry in these two cities.
(23:52):
I mean El Pasohuas are probably some of the most
important places in the entire world for narcotics trafficking. That's
another misnomer about drug trafficking is that it's Mexican groups invading,
and i'd stay it's no, it's it's Mexicans and Americans
working together to produce, to transport, to smuggle, to sell drugs.
You're talking about at least one hundred years of history.
(24:16):
In fact, up until eighteen fifty, El Paso and Juarez
were one community. Both were in Mexico. It was only
after the Mexican American War that El Paso became part
of Texas, with Juarez Romania in Mexico, but the two
cities stayed deeply connected, and by the nineteen twenties the
area was as smugg as paradise, from bootleg liquor to
(24:39):
illegal narcotics, with the business in Juarez run by an
unlikely figure. Starting around the time of prohibition, the smuggling
of marijuana and heroin was largely monopolized by one person,
a woman called lad Nacha. She had a career that
lasted forty year, fifty years. That's quite a long time.
(25:02):
That's quite a long time, and so Lanacha died of
natural causes in her seventies, and so every drug traffickers
heaven or something like. So Lanacha was a genius. She
was uneducated, grew up as a poor woman, and eventually
somehow figured out how to make this drug business work.
(25:22):
What protected her for that long so she was well
protected by a vast extended family, but also her accomplices
in the municipal police surely was in the municipal government
of Juarez, but also even at the federal level. From
the beginning, in Hoare's illegal business thrived with the complicity
of the police and government, but this didn't include the
(25:44):
abduction and murder of young women who had nothing to
do with drugs. In fact, for a while, drug smuggly
in Houarres operated like the old school Italian mafia, violent
to its enemies, but woven into the fabric of the community.
Things began to shift when America's consumption habit shifted. People
(26:05):
started to use cocaine. It was sort of the passing
of the hippie era into the disco era, and the
Mexican trafficking organizations adapted to that. In the nineteen eighties,
there was an enterprising Huara's local who was more than
happy to help meet this new demand, even if that
meant taking on the second job. Raphael Aguilaruahard, though, was
(26:25):
head of the federal police in the Chihuahua area, so
he formed the First Waters Cartel and they began the
smuggle cocaine. That's when things changed. There wasn't that much
violence in Juadas in the nineteen eighties, and so you
had this very impressive drug trafficking organization that was making
hundreds of millions of dollars, but not that many people
were getting killed. Huaras remained a city that Lanaco would
(26:49):
have recognized, but the sums of money pouring in because
of cocaine began to attract notice from outsiders, not least
from a man from the west in Mexican state of
Sina Looa. He too was a federal policeman called Amalo
Kario Fuentes. Carrio Fuentes was the great innovator in Mexican
(27:10):
drug trafficking of bringing seven forty seven airplanes was a
seats removed filled with cocaine from Colombia all the way
up to the northern Mexican border and then smuggling them
into the United States, sometimes in eighteen wheel trucks right
across the free bridge Central El Paso and quads, many
times with paid off US customs agents or US Immigration officers.
(27:38):
When you spend time in El Paso, you can't help
but notice the steel fence that bisects it from Juarez
and the militarization of the border. But no amount of
infrastructure can protect an organization from an inside job. And
Careo Fuentes, the police officer turned trafficker, understood this better
than most. He recognized that the big as organization got,
(28:01):
the more money it could bring in. The more money,
the more corrupt officials on both sides of the border,
and so it went on. But he also recognized that
he was operating far from his home turf, so he
brought in some associates from Sinaloa. Kario Frentes brought in
a whole bunch of Scario's dead man. He had a
(28:22):
very complex organization involving people guarding safe houses. You have drivers,
you have gunmen, you have accountants. You have essentially an
informal criminal corporation, and that's what Kario Fuentes created. At first,
the two former policemen Aguilar and Curio Fuentes worked together,
(28:44):
solidifying an empire of cocaine trafficking. But after a while,
the outsider saw his opportunity to go to Loane. Now
this isn't the same way as when you have a
big American corporation buys up another corporation. It isn't as
neat and clean. Carrio Fuentes had Aguilar, the original founder
(29:04):
of the Juadis cartel, murdered in nineteen ninety three. That's
when all the violence, That's when the ship hit the fan,
was when the Carrio Fuentes cartel took over in Juadas.
Despite the loss of their leader, the local cartel weren't
going to roll over for the man from Sina Looa,
So Carria Fuentes began a reign of terror. So in
(29:24):
the early nineteen nineties, Quadas becomes part of this kind
of globalized, multi national, extremely violent drug cartel. You say
nineteen ninety three as the takeover of Amalo Carrillo Fuentes
of the Juaas Plaza, nineteen ninety three is also when
these brutal, horrific women's murders began to happen in the city.
(29:48):
So if you're saying it's not a coincidence. No, I
would say that it's not a coincidence. I'm not saying
it's a conspiracy. I'm not saying the cartel game and
they said, Okay, we're gonna start committing femicides. What I'm
saying is I think it's an ex hypothesis to think
that many women that were raped, kidnapped, murdered in quarters
were killed and mistreated by ciccardios hitmen for the drug cartels.
(30:10):
Outsiders who don't feel connected to the local population, whose
job is to brutalize and kill, would see women walking
on the streets as pieces of meat, just like the
people they would kidnap and murder who were enemies of
their drug organization. Alfredo's reporting had already revealed the hand
organized crime in the murders of women, but Howard was
(30:33):
helping us piece together how a hostile takeover of the
Hawire's cartel had turned the women who lived in the
city into targets as FBI special agents in charge of
El Paso, Heredrik Crawford had called them antelopes at the
water hole. So Laalina was an organization that exerted total
control and whose policy if Plato Plomo left their victims
(30:57):
with nowhere to turn, and Alfredo was experiencing this firsthand
as he ran through the streets of downtown Juarez, hoping
to make it back to the bridge. The one person
he could think to turn to for help was Dantown Maras,
but as he got closer to the lawyer's office, he
realized that he was running towards the very people he
was trying so hard to escape. I'm just pushing forward.
(31:20):
I realized where Danta's office is, and I'm just pushing
and looking all around me, and I've noticed that right
next to Danta's and just forgan there was a police station,
and I'm thinking, oh my god, you know the caps
are was La Lina? What am I doing? I ran,
I come in and I just went straight to his office.
(31:43):
Paula Flores and so many other mothers had learned that
there was no point in going to the police, and
as far as Alfreda was concerned, doing so would further
endanger his life, So he put his fate into the
hands of the very lawyer He'd been told by so
many people was not to be trusted as a source,
let alone a savior. So I explained to Dante, what's
(32:07):
you know, this is what's going on. I think the
first time I saw Dante and he looked worried, and
then he finally says, yeah, the chaste you're fucked. I
said why. He says, they're anti Laalinia's Aunto and he says,
you know, the only good thing is a year American
And I said, yeah, by my cousin is a cup
(32:28):
Aquitis Cup, and I have family in Quiis And he says, well,
then you're really fucked. Something may happen to them because
of you. Alfredo doesn't have time to dwell on the
consequences of his reporting. As far as he's concerned, his
own life depends on getting back to the US as
fast as possible. So I tell Dante, so, look, how
(32:49):
do I get across? And he basically says, why don't
I drive you back? Because I don't think you should watch.
I'll just drive you the N SUV and basically just
put me in the back, crossing the bag and I'm
looking through the windows, and I'm looking at all these
places that I grew up may Sky, you know again,
(33:10):
the marches. At one point I wanted to be a
songwriter and a singer, and we had a little studio.
But in that area, you know, all these things are
going through my mind. And I'm also thinking, what if
Dante is in on us. What if he's not taking
me to the bridge, what if he's taking me somewhere,
but he's taking me to the cop And then I
see him on the phone and he's he just sounds
(33:30):
so nonchalant, it's just another normal day. I'm trying to
sort of get Dante to tell me everything's gonna be okay,
But the whole time he's on the damn phone, Alfred
it was panicking. He wasn't sure whether he could trust
the Devil's lawyer, whether Dante might still be me Tito
or on La Linea's payroll. In fact, Alfred it wasn't
(33:54):
even sure if he'd make it out of quarre as alive.
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(34:59):
chief medical officer and host of the spotlight On series
from Our Health Discovered podcast. In this special episode, we'll
hear about living a fulfilling life with chronic cart failure,
a condition that doesn't have to be as scary as
it sounds. I was outside shoveling snow and I noticed
I was coughing up flim Unbeknownst to me, I left
(35:20):
a trail of blood behind me, and I was one sign. Now.
Of course, prior to I was excessively gaining weight. I
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(35:42):
when that occurred that I thought something was seriously wrong.
Listen to Health Discovered on the iHeartRadio app or wherever
you get your podcasts. Alfredo was in the back of
(36:10):
Dante's suv trying to make out where they were going.
It was just a quick, little dry but to me
it just felt like forever. Finally it became clear that
the lawyer was taking him back to the border, and
as they arrived at the bridge that would allow Alfredo
to escape to the safety of El Paso, the lawyer
got off the phone and once again he had some
(36:32):
final words for the journalist. I think he saw how
scared I was, and he's trying to tell me how
important it was what I did. But he says, I
get the metal where wars, it's who acquits you have
to have boss. Don't be afraid. So basically he's downing you,
don't be intimidated, continue your work. I think one of
(36:53):
his lands was its qui as chained out. This is
swhides damn it, you know, don't be intimidated. Keep searching,
keep asking us, keep digging. In the moment that Dante
dropped him off at the bridge, Alfredo realized once and
for all that he could trust him. In fact, it
was the lawyer who helped him get to El Paso,
(37:14):
beyond the reach of La Lina and perhaps saved his
life in the process. So Monica that moment where Alfredo
gets back to the bridge and he's able to cross
into El Paso. You told me you understood exactly how
he's feeling. Yeah. Certainly, when I was reporting on the
drug war in Huadis, once I crossed over the bridge
(37:38):
and drove underneath the sign that said Welcome to the
United States, I would feel this rush of relief come
over me, and I would recognize just how stressed I
had been on the other side. But I knew where
to draw the line. As long as I reported on
the victims of the violence that the car tell exacts
(38:01):
on the city of Watts, I was unlikely to be bothered.
They don't care about the victims. It did involve going
into a dangerous city where being in the wrong place
at the wrong time could get you killed. But the
kind of reporting I tried to do was reporting that
wouldn't result in me being specifically targeted. Nonetheless, you told
(38:26):
me about those cowboy boots and about thinking about what
it might be like to be stuffed in the back
of someone's car. And it's kind of astonishing to me
how much risk Alfredo took and you took to cover
this story. But also that both of you get to
come home, And that's something I found very striking about
that exchange between Dante and Alfredo. When Dante says to him,
(38:50):
keep digging, it's almost as though he's passing the torch
because Alfredo can go back to safety and Dante has
to turn around back to the city where friend Mario
Escobado was assassinated not that long ago. It's a very
poignant moment in a sense, Dante sees Alfredo as this
beacon of hope. Maybe if the Americans can call out
(39:14):
what's truly happening in Juarez, something will change. The fact
that this conversation takes place at the foot of the
international bridge that connects what is to Alpasso. The bridge,
to Dante, might have symbolized the bridge between impunity and justice.
(39:34):
Dante had taken enormous risk in exposing to Alfredo who
was complicit in the murders of women in Huarez, and
it was because of him that the systematic involvement of
the police was confirmed and that the name La Lina
was published, disturbing their culture of silence. But as nochelant
As Dante was talking on the phone as he drove
(39:55):
Alfredo back to the border, he was well aware that
they would likely be a price for into a journalist
let's learn, saving his life. After publishing his story, Alfredo
moved on to Mexico City as he planned, and Dante
stayed in Juarez, but they stayed in touch. We talked
several times, but every time he caused it was like
(40:16):
a sense of urgency. It was like he was scared.
So I would just say Dante, okay and kept I
saw what's going on. I came back to Squas because
he wanted to meet me. He said, look, I have
things I want to share with your things I want
to tell you. But I thought he's got something big,
and we decided to meet somewhere near the bridge. I
(40:37):
wasn't the Kentucky Club. I was there for an hour
than two hours, never showed up. Like a few days later,
I saw it in the news. He had been killed
right near the same area where I had run to
his office to scun down by hitmen with a car
(41:01):
with new Mexico plates. Conveniently, the cameras were not working
at day Dante was gone. Was his murder ever solved?
Murder was never saw. Do you have any ideas why
he was killed? I think oftentimes when people get killed
(41:24):
in mexico's because they know too much. I think it's
something I've learned. It's not always maybe smart to try
to know so much. But again, you know, we were young,
we were hopeful. You were certainly played a role in
(41:44):
my trying to steer away from covering the drug cartels.
Because I'll never forget a voicemail you left on my phone.
This is about ten years ago now for y'all. I mean,
I don't tell your mom. Mean something like Monica, we
(42:08):
we like our soup cold or hot. And I was like,
that's some dark humor, Alfred, Why did you get from
of the cartels? You know, this is like the cartels
saying they liked the soup color hot. You know it
maybe five years, it maybe ten years. They might forgive you,
but they're never going to forget, and they might catch
(42:29):
up with you someday. Equally, So I got the gist
of Alfredo's joke about the soup monica, But what exactly
does it mean? In other words, you were their soup,
and sooner or later they're gonna eat you hot or cold.
Sooner or later they'll take their revenge, perhaps when you
(42:49):
least expect it. So Alfredo came to learn this, but
Dante knew it all along, but nonetheless he kept going.
Remember Dante told Alfredo, this is what is damn it.
You've got to have guts, and Dante did. In the end,
he died, living up to his own saying he suffered
(43:11):
the same fate as his friend Mario Escobedo, gunned down
in the typical drive by execution favored by La Lina.
Dante may have started out as the devil's lawyer, but
in the end you could say he and Mario gave
their lives in the name of justice. La Lina the
(43:35):
line Dante had knowingly crossed it, and he paid the
ultimate price. He did live long enough to see one
of the bus drivers exonerated and the truth of what
was happening to the women in Juarez exposed in the
American press. But the other bus driver died in prison
in mysterious circumstances after a botched operation. Mario Escobedo's father,
(43:57):
who led the protest in front of the juire As
Attorney General's office carrying his son's casket, was assassinated in
two thousand and nine at his office, along with his
other son, Edgar. There were eight women's bodies discovered in
the cotton fields in two thousand and one, and in
some sense that was just the beginning of the crime.
Within the space of a few years, at least four
(44:19):
people seeking to reveal the truth of those women's murders
had themselves been assassinated, and several others caught up in
the story also died prematurely. Even Vasconcelos, the drugs are
in Mexico City, who Alfredo met died in a plane
crash in two thousand and eight, and some suspected foul play.
(44:40):
Demanding justice in Juarez is a deadly business, which makes
that other line, the one that separates it from al Passo,
all the more significant. Alfredo could cross the bridge back
to safety, and he lived. Dante could drive Alfredo up
to the bridge, but he'd die in Huirez. But as
(45:03):
how it, Kempbell told us they called Tel's reach. It
doesn't stop at the Buddha. Elpas was a dormitory for
drug traffickers, high level drug traffickers, hitmen from the cartels,
hundreds of drug smugglers, probably hundreds of stash houses where
drugs are stored, trucking businesses that are dedicated to drug trafficking,
(45:25):
and so the economy of elpas was completely saturated with
drugs and illegal money. And we consider this here normal
and not particularly a problem. As long as you don't
get hurt or you don't get in trouble, people just
kind of turn a blind eye. Even to this day,
there's dramatic inequality and unfairness in the relationship between the
(45:48):
two cities, even though it has made a living off
of drug smuggling. Elpass is incredibly safe where I see
Lahuata is where half the population of Elpaso has relatives
and friends. Is one of the most violent cities in
the world and dangerous cities in the world. And I
don't think most people in El Paso really care about
changing that. There's a kind of way in which people
(46:10):
accept this inequality and this exploitation of Mexico as a
source for legal drugs that we enjoy consuming and we
farm out the risk to the Mexicans who are the
ones that die by the thousands and the drug violence,
and so it isn't right. It's hypocritical, it's unjust, it's unfair.
But whether you like it or not, it's just everyday
(46:31):
life here on the border. Howard got an insight into
the depths of this hypocrisy from one of his students
at the University of Texas, El Paso. I believe he
was an immigration officer, and in the class we would
debate she's related to Mexico, and he would always stand
up for the US government and the other students, many
of them were Mexican Americans, hated the US Immigration Service
(46:53):
and so they didn't like him, and he would come
to class in uniform. But I found it interesting that
he would wear a golden neckla around his neck with
a gold anchor, very expensive piece of jewelry. And then
one time I saw him at a very fancy mall
in West El Paso and he came out with huge
bags of expensive clothing that he had just purchased. Well
(47:14):
soon after he was my student, he was arrested for
being a corrupt immigration officer and allowing large amounts of
cocaine with the Huades cartel to cross into Alpaso from
Juarez on the bridge. According to court documents, Howard's student,
the immigration officer was charging the cartel ten thousand dollars
(47:35):
for each cocaine laden car that he waved through. This
was la ligne in action, except in Olpaso. They weren't
murdering young women or people who dared to ask questions,
but their money was just as capable of corrupting US officials.
And I was beginning to understand the deep irony of
the fence that divided the two cities. I would say
(47:58):
that it's a very contradictory place because even though you
have thousands of people that are involved in drug trafficking,
drug smuggling, drug dealing, and you also have thousands of
federal law agents, d EA, Customs, you name the agency.
You have one of the largest military bases in the world,
Fort Bliss, So there's soldiers everywhere. There's municipals, you know,
city cops, you know, state cops, any number of law
(48:20):
enforcement agencies, the FBI in El Paso. So it's a
simultaneously it's this kind of zoo of criminals and the
law living together and even marrying each other. Alfredo was
talking about Juarez when he said, everybody's involved metito. But
the thing about metito is it's never really clear just
(48:43):
how compromised a person is. And that brings us back
to an American law enforcement official whose name is lightly
familiar by now, Hardrid Crawford, who was head of the FBI,
started to go over there a lot and god associated
with high ranking businessman in quarters. Hardrick was the most
(49:04):
outspoken American official on the killings of women in Juarez.
He even gave a quote to a Mexican newspaper where
he called the murders crimes against humanity. I had a
moral mission that I felt that I was empowered on
a different level than the US Constitution. That mission would
give Hardrick a first hand understanding of the word metito,
(49:27):
and it would unleash a series of events that called
his own life into question. So I was in the
house by myself and my brother said directly, did you
ever think about eating your gun, I said, I did,
I did seriously consider killing myself. I'm as Velashen and
(49:55):
see you next time. Stella Felicia Forgotten. The Women of
(50:41):
Juarez is co hosted by Me Monica and me Oswal Loshen.
Forgotten is executive produced by Me and Mangesh Hatigia. Our
producers are Julian Weller and Katrina Norvell. Sound editing by
Julian Weller, Jacopo Penzo and Aaron Coran. Lucas Riley is
(51:01):
our story editor. Caitlin Thompson is our consulting producer. Recording
assistance this episode from Michael Perez. Production support from Emily
Maronoff and Aaron Kaufman. Our theme tune is the Richel
Nacimiento as performed by Natalie Lae. Music by Leonardo Hablum
(51:22):
and Hakkabo Libermann. Additional music by Aaron Kaufman. Hello beautiful,
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