THE BORDER REPORT

Take a look at this video interview of José Vázquez  Villagrana, El Jabáli, for a moment.

Captured last month in Mexico City, Mexico’s Ministry of Public Safety presented the clean-cut 40-year-old Jábali, a drug lord from Santa Ana, Sonora, sporting a turtleneck sweater. The interview bothers me for many reasons, not the least of which are his wild admittances about what exactly he did for a living and for whom. Jábali claims to work for the Sinaloa Federation, but some people I had an opportunity to speak with over the past few days say he actually worked for the Juárez Cartel, not Sinaloa. Yet, in his interview, not only does Jábali portend to work for Sinaloa, he gives an astonishing amount of detail about what he did, how much he charged, and, most interestingly, that his bosses sought to protect northern Mexico. Looking down at the ground and rarely meeting the camera’s eye, Vázquez said he was the Sinaloa Cartel’s lead man in northern Sonora. Every month, he announced, two tons of cocaine came up from Central America and were delivered into the U.S. through his ranch, La Cebolla. The details he alleges about the cartel’s figurehead principle, Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán, are interesting. “Have you spoken with El Chapo?” an officer off camera asks. “Yes, I spoke to him by telephone one day.” “And what does he say?” Even the question is put to him oddly. "Que te dice?" as if Guzmán is some estranged and well-regarded uncle living far away whom nobody has heard from and everybody wants news of. “He says that everything is at peace, that everyone must behave, that in this area, nobody is permitted to rob or to kidnap or to assault others. That anyone who does these types of things needs to be removed.” Really? How ... ingenuous. Guzmán wants the area to remain tranquil and under control, Vázquez said. Last year, the Mexican government said Vázquez worked for Arturo Beltrán Leyva. Last spring, when Mexican federal police arrested Cynthia Anahí Beltrán Cabrera with a M2 Browning .50-cal machine gun mounted on the back of a Ford pickup truck, she was identified as being in the service of Vázquez, and he, in turn, of the Beltrán Leyva family. The Mexican Federal Attorney General’s Office claims that Vázquez worked for both, the Sinaloa Cartel and Beltrán Leyva’s organization until the Beltráns joined with the Zetas, at which point he broke away because they were too violent. Yet people invested in northern Sonora's drug trafficking families say Vázquez never worked for either the Beltráns or Sinaloa. He worked for Juárez, they say. A minor corroboration; Jábali had feuded with Los Numeros for a long time and Los Numeros were the Beltrán's brazo armado in Sonora. A minor refute: Jábali had associated himself with Geovanni Páez, the Caborca cowboy who worked for Sinaloa. Sort of a micro-merger between Juárez and Sinaloa that didn't seem affected by the rivalry in Cd. Juárez. This leads me to a few questions on this fine, cold Monday morning: 1. Who did Vázquez really work for? If, in fact, he worked for Juárez, why claim Sinaloa? 2. Why was he in Mexico City and only then arrested? Why  not take him in Santa Ana when they've known for at least a year that he lived and worked here? 3. From the questions posed to Jábali, I ascertain that the federal interviewers knew what answers he would give. Was he told what to say? 4. The interview sure makes Chapo look good. It paints a picture of a security benefactor who will protect the Mexican people from the deranged Zetas. I wonder a little if that wasn't the point of the video; a manufactured public relations image of Chapo. Anyway.

THE BORDER REPORT Vicente Zambada Niebla's extradition went off without a hitch through Brownsville-Matamoros, yesterday, surprising some of us that the son of El Mayo, Ismael Zambada Garcia would be tossed to the Americans so easily. But it's his charges that interest me. El Mayito is wanted in the United States in two separate federal court cases, one in Illinois, where he was sent yesterday; and the second in Washington D.C. That case is sealed but in short, it is the beginning of the case against the present-day Sinaloa Federation, Operation Trifecta. An old copy of the indictment in my files points to Niebla as a lieutenant for his father's smuggling enterprise; trafficking more than a ton of cocaine into New York and New Jersey in '01 and '02; 2.4 tons of cocaine into Chicago and 45 (!!) pounds to California. The Illinois case pegs him on two counts of trafficking "five or more kilograms" of cocaine on two separate occasions. Don't let the small numbers here fool ya'. American drug laws don't differentiate between five keys and five tons when it comes to possession with intent to distribute charges. Then there's the final charge in the Illinois indictment: a forfeiture allegation of half a billion dollars "representing the estimated proceeds of defendant Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla's narcotics distribution organization." I wonder if they really expect him to surrender that amount of money. When the Trifecta investigation first emerged, El Mayito was implicated in at least 15 murders in Mexico, including that of Alfredo de la Torre Marquez, Tijuana's police chief in February 2000. It is significant that up until Trifecta, everyone had presumed the  Arellano Felix family had ordered the chief's killing. The Trifecta operation started with the Macel tunaboat off the Pacific Coast, nine tons of cocaine in December 2001. It was the first time a connection had been established between the Norte del Valle Cartel in Colombia, controlled by Juan Diego Espinoza and his wife, the Sinaloan, Sandra Avila Beltrán. Both of them were arrested in late 2007. I wonder at times, if the birds aren't singing in prison. From what I understand, speaking to a colleague in Mexico City, the PGR is opposing Mexico's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and fighting her extradition to the U.S., a sealed case in Miami. Let's wait and see.

THE BORDER REPORT

Nogales, Sonora, is becoming the testing ground for our power restructuring theory in Mexico's cartel wars. The Sinaloans started making their move on the city Monday, amidst concentrated gunbattles and two grenade attacks that have left at least eight dead and 24 wounded. Will Chapo Guzmán be able to take the town?

Mexican law enforcement sources in Hermosillo say the Sinaloans have finally come north to take back a city they had held only tenuously for the past two years. They're using a local northern Sonora gang, Los Jabalí, to do it.

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THE BORDER REPORT

Okay, so El Muletas, Raydel López Uriarte goes down. The top figure of the Sinaloa-backed crime family in Baja California was arrested this morning in La Paz, Baja California Sur.

Last Thursday, his sister, Diana Lopez Uriarte, was kidnapped as she left a supermarket in Tijuana. News reports from the area observed that it was a heavily armed commando that took her down around noon. In keeping with our seemingly shared rampant cynicism, I wonder a little if her kidnapping didn't lead to Muletas' arrest today. Actually, I wonder a lot.

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THE BORDER REPORT

Maybe. And, being Mexico, maybe not. The interview looks clean, blaming El Viceroy, Vicente Carrillo Fuentes for the massacre of 16 youth in Juárez last Saturday.

As many of you already noticed, this transciption from juarezpress.com lays the blame solely at the feet of Joaquín Chapo Guzmán. And, as many of you have also noticed, it just seems too simple.

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