La Ptaza

TnnnnNcn Poppe
from Drug Lord: A True story. The Life 6 Death of a Mexican Kingpin, 199g
' ottons' Norp: In the early part of his book DrugTord, which is a case study of pablo Acosta,s the druglord of the ojinaga "plaza," Terrince poppa details th, ,roiuiio, of drug ry :'rtuggling along the Texqs/Chihuahua section of the t-t.i.)tuexico Border. poppa dlcussis the .ception and the gradual ascendancy of ojinaga-a dusty little town on thiither side of the :'-io Grande from the equally smail and dusty town of rreiidio-as a primary hub thi

-:ign

of a large percentage of drugs llowing into the Uniteci States. The book folliws the : 'i-'sing of the plaza from Manual carrasco to shorty Lopez to pablo Acosta. An element of the 'ltxican army-traveling by helicopter across [J.s. soil ind supportecl by the (J.s. gorrrr*rr, and killed Acosta in Santa Elena, a tiny communiiy within walking diitance of a -tttacked ":'trying area and store in Big Bend National Park. Fuentes Carrillo, the infaious.Lordly the ii'its," then assumed management of the plaza and moved its headeluarters to Judrez, '-:1,,,^L,.tt tr tD",^--t^uc IttLr vut -^-...:tt t tttu utl(\euty utea on an operafxng table m Mexico City undergoing t';tic surgery. As of this writing, no one person hai yet been identified as *aniiando li plaza. 1:: editors chose this early section of the bookDrugiord becquse ii delnes a,,piaza,, as a mu:"rcss franchise that is subservient to authority eitrenched within the Mexican government. i;':: concept of a centralized power controlling operations is essential to understaicling the trade ".-egal drugs in Mexico.
:

for

"issage

,;.:ien est6 manejando la plaza?,, -r Mexico this question is generally understood to mean,,who,s in
i: r's running the show?"

charge?',

or

-:i its most literal sense, the word "plaza" refers to a place of gathering_a town square, a 'j'.tplace, a bullring. Thus "la plaza de armas" is the parade giound, ,,la plazad" toior,, i, : :iiring and so forth. colloquially, howe ver,la plazirefers t a police authority and a r-. .ommander's jurisdiction. And so the question "who,s in charge here?,,would bring i-:s\rer, "Comandante So-and-So.,,

r,

f;rng world asks who has the plaza,the

rr,*slon to run the narcotics racket?,,

drug underworld, however, a question about who is in charge has ::=: meaning, avery precise and well-understood meaning. \A/tren someone in the drug
question is interpletea ,o

the Mexican

-.ur,

l*t1o h;, ,h.

:-:

decades, Mexican

informants tried to explain the idea to their law enforcement

-srA MaNrJaNDo rA Preze?.

93

the plaza,rtmeant that he was paying an contacts in the united States. when somebody had that he would not be bothered by authority or authorities with sufficient powel to ensure money went up the ladder' with state or fecleral police or by the military. The protection the Grand off at each level up the chain of command until reaching

p.r..rtug.,

shaved

Protector or the Grand Protectors in the scheme' the plaza holder had a dual obligation: To stay in the good graces of his patrons in power, intelligence-gathering abilities by finto generate money fo, fri, protectors and to te"a nit and drug growers who trjed gering the independent op;rators-those narcotics traffickers u'ere th-e ones who got busted by to avoid paying the necessary tribute. The independents of the FBI' or by the army' prothe Mexican Federal Judiciai Police, the Mexican equivalent drug enforcement' That viding Mexico with statistics to show it was involved in authentic groups or outtrafficking fhvored most;f the seized narcotics were then recycled-so1d to made and ther; fact in by police groups-was irrelevant. The seizures were

rightly smuggled

were headlines and photos to prove

rivals; other times they would Usually, the authorities would protect their man irom rvho should run the plaza' If the not, preferring a variety of natural selection to determine usuallr'because he had stopped making authorities arrested o, iiit.d the plaza holder, it rvas in the press too frequently and the payments, or because his name had started to apPeal pressure became so strong that trafficker had become a liability. Sometimes inteinational specific individual-regardless of how the government was forced to take action against a much money he was generating for the s\-stem' structures to keep a lid on It was a system th"at enabled the Nleliican polrtical and police drugs and profit handsomelv from it at the same time'

it'

in late 1976, the Ojinaga unWhen pablo Acosta fled Nerv \legco ior Oiinaga, Chihuahua, derworld lvas in a state of llux. and the drug trafficker who Manuel Carrasco, Pablo',s source of marijuana and heroin was on the run' The Ojinaga had converted Ojinaga into an important hub for narcotics,
plaza was up for grabs. accidental shooting that later These changes came as a result of a relatively insignificant caleer to an end' at least in Ojinaga flared up i.rto ahil-s.a1e gun battle, bringing Carrasco's

town's outlying zona de The shooting took plu.. o"rr. er.ening in March 1976,inthe Pablo Acosta fled to Mexico' Carrasco tolerancia, tie red light district, eighl months before shooting their pistols in the air in and several drug assiciates had been getting drunk and hitting one of the girls in the revelry with several bar girls. One of th. .o.rrrdt ricocheted,

foot. Carrasco was in the bar According to informed accounts given of this pivotal incident' a powerful drug kingpin in Parral in the company of Heraclio Rodriguez Avilez, ,r.ph.* of chief suppliers' Heraclio had-flown some 150 miles south of Ojinaga und orre of Cariasco's that week with three gunmen to discuss money that into town in a iight airplane

"uili",

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way, a logical assumption due to Ojinaga's growing importance as a transit point for narcotics.

State police in New Mexico, however, Iater picked up a scenario that American narcotics officers thought was more likely: Manuel Carrasco took advantage of the unexpected confusion to shoot Heraclio to clear the drug debt. Manuel could then claim that he had aiready paid off the big debt he owed in Parral and did not know what Heraclio or his men had

done with the money. But then Manuel got shot too. According to accounts later picked up by the New Mexico State Police, the older Avilez, then in his seventies, called the hospital in Chihuahua City where Manuel was getting patched up and asked him what happened to Heraclio. Manuel reportedly said in a saddened voice, "There's been a problem, Seflor Avilez. Heraclio has been killed." After Manuel gave an edited account of the shooting, the older Avilez asked, "And what about the money?" "I don't know; I gave it to him earlier that day. I don't know what he did with it." But Heraclio's pistoleros had a different story to tell. They had eluded the army and made it back to Parral about five days later. One of them, a pilot named Huitaro, supposedly said, "That's bullshit. I saw Manuel shoot Heraclio." None of the survivors could remember any money being handed over to Heraclio. Old man Avllez not only put a price on Manuel Carrasco's head, he also put out a contract for every one of the municipal cops in Ojinaga. They were all tobe killed. Rumors flashed around town that two airplanes full of Avilez men armed with machetes and machine guns were on the way with orders to butcher the policemen. To the last man, the Ojinaga police force fled to the United States. Some of them went to towns in New Mexico, others to communities in Oklahoma where they had relatiyes. U.S. Immigration and Customs authorities in Presidio proved very understanding. They obtained special pcrmito for thc policc chicf and thc deputy police chief and their families. And they looked the other way as the remainder of the Ojinaga police force came to the United States, bringing their families with them. Manuel Carrasco disappeared too, and his vanishing act left the Ojinaga underworld in disarray. Treacherous himsell he suspected eyeryone else of sinister intent and did not say a word of his whereabouts even to his closest associates. He simply abandoned a lucrative plaza.lt was as if the proprietor of a multimillion-dollar firm walked out the door one day without saying goodbye to any of his employees and never came back. Rumors later circulated that "higher-ups" had decided to promote Carrasco to a bigger, more challenging plaza in the state of Sinoloa. Other stories circulated that he was able to buy his way into the military and was now the general of an army unit in the state of Durango. Other rumors had him hiding out from old man Avilez'vengeance in the port city

ofVeracruz.
For a short time one of Manuel Carrasco's cousins was thought to be runnin gthe plaza, but he was soon arrested in the United States.

96

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Manuel Carrasco's Ojinaga plaza.But it was always Manuel Carrasco who dealt with the authorities, jealously guarding his official contacts. That changed after Manuel disappeared. When Carrasco could not be located for the plaza money, his protectors began investigating who was left in charge. Manuel Carrasco reputedly had been paying a $100,000 on the tenth of every month. The unpaid balance began climbing as the months went by. Several months after Manuel vanished, Shorty started getting official visits from Chihuahua City. Manuel was not making his pavments and was falling behind, Shorty was informed. Someone named Shorty Lopez had better come up with the money. Shorty protested the amount. He had been priry to much of Manuel's dealings, sure, but not all of his dealings. A hundred thousand dollars a month was predicated upon the total volume of Manuel's drug movement. For Shorty', just starting to pick up the pieces of an organization abandoned b,v its chiet, the sum rvould be ruinous. Ultimately, Shorty struck a deal and was 1eft in peace to rvork the plaza. Former underlvorid associates of Shorty Lopez said that Shorty at first made the payments in Manuel's name) but as the months ivent by he began to consider the plaza his own. After all, he was the one generating the money for the plazapayments now not Manuel. Manuel had left him in an ambiguous situation and had not tried to contact him, not the other way around. Adding to his self-importance, Shorty quickly got big in his own right. He soon had all the trappings of a drug lord-his own ranch equipped with a runway, a warehouse for marijuana storage and his own pilots and runners. The focal point of the smuggling operations shifted away from Manuel's property to his own. "So what am I supposed to do?" Shorty once asked an American friend. "If Manuel's not here to pay the plazafee and they make me pay instead, that means I have the plaza and not Manuel. I don't owe him nothing."
By the time Pablo Acosta reached Ojinaga-the day after his close call with the police outside of Eunicel-shorty had been making the plaza payments for five or six months. Their

meeting in Ojinaga was like a slaphappy reunion of boyhood chums. Shorty handed Pablo a machine gun and a semiautomatic pistol and put him to work. At first Pablo worked as Shorty's chauffeur and bodyguard and escorted his friend and boss here and there in the dusty border town or to Shorty's desert ranch east of San Carlos, La Hacienda Oriental. It r,vas barely 40 miles from Ojinaga, but it took six hours to get there along a bumpy and frequently washed-out dirt road. Pablo, meanwhile, worked his own drug deals, supplying the American networks he had left behind from his Mexican sanctuary. \A4ren the indictment against him for the

From 1974-L976,Pab1o Acosta, an American citizen, owned a roofing company in Eunice, New Mexico. The company was a front for his drug distribution business. In November, he narrowly escaped a DEA sting operation and fled to Mexico.

98

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Driving Shorty to his ranch or while with friends out in the desert, he would suddenly slam on the brakes if he saw a rabbit or a quail, leap out with his .45 already drawn and Bam! Bam! Bam! let offround after round until he had either killed the scurrying animal or run out of ammunition. He got to the point where he could hit a quail at 40 yards with his .45
semiautomatic. He and Shorty liked to draw on each other for practice, but Pablo took the roughhousing even further. Many of the drug mafiosos gathered in the morning or afternoons to water, feed and exercise their quarter horses at stables owned by Fermin Arevalo, one of Manuel Carrasco's former associates. Like the other dopers, Pablo had acquired horses and went about his chores at the stables just like eyeryone else. But he had a habit of drawing on everybody, a quirk that made his victims neryous. He would appear out of nowhere, his chrome-plated semiautomatic flashing into his hands. Or he would spin around to aim at someone behind him, or draw face-to-face like an old-time gunslinger. some just waved him offas a trigger-happy punk. "Ah, go stick it up your ass," they

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One day, he was certain, a fast draw would make the crucial difference between his life and someone else's. Like many of the campesino-traffickers, Shorty was detached from the effects of the substances he dealt. He could sell a pound of black-tar heroin, his mind whizzingand clicking as he tallied up the profit, yet perhaps never once give any thought to the thousands of doses of chemical enslavement his profits represented. Then he could turn around and give much of the money to the poor in the Ojinaga area. It was the tradition of a drug lord to take care of people in need, of course. For one thing, it was good for business. Give a peasant food for his malnourished children, he will become a loyal pair of eyes and ears in the sinister desert. A lot of small-time welfare added up to a big-time intelligence network. But with Shorty, generosity was not mere pragmatism. He enjoyed helping the underfed campesinos who scrounged for a marginal living on the harsh land. Stories were told of how Shorty would filI his pickup truck with groceries in Ojinaga before making a trip to his ranch. On the way he would stop at this adobe hovel and that, distributing the food and supplies, having nothing left by the time he got to his ranch. One of the beneficiaries of Shorty's generosity was an invalid with the nickname Pegleg, a one-legged man who had a big family and lived in a village outside Ojinaga. One of Shorty's former associates recalled how Shorty drove up to Pegleg's primitive adobe one day and tooted his horn to rouse the man from the shack. "Goddammit, you lazy old fart, I'm going to put you to work," Shorty said, slapping the astonished man on the back.

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Manuel Carrasco considered Shorty a traitor. Shorty had taken advantage of his selfimposed exile to grab what was rightfully Manuel's. It didn't matter that Manuel had not trusted Shorty enough to contact him and clarify the situation. It only mattered that Shorty now considered himself master of the plaza, that he was boasting about it and making money Manuel thought was his. Shorty was going to pay for it with his blood. Shorty kept a pistol and an American assault rifle on the floor of his truck, but he did not walk about town armed and he did not always have a bodyguard with him. In the early spring of L977, Shorty accidentally ran into Manuel Carrasco in Chihuahua City. He and a couple of his men had taken some Ojinaga girls to the state capital for an outing, spending several days shopping and partying. One afternoon they turned a corner in one of the quieter downtown side streets near the state government buildings. There was Manuel Carrasco, arm-in-arm with his wife, walking toward them! It was like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack, only they had not even been looking. Manuel Carrasco was tall in his cowboy boots, with a look of stolid dignity in his ranchero suit and hat. "You little son of a bitch;' Carrasco sneered when he recognized Shorty. "If I don't kill you right now, it's out of respect for my wife." It didn't take much to throw the 110-pound Shorry Lopez into a bantam-rooster flutter. He marched up to Manuel, who towered over him by about ten inches. "I'11 fight you any time you want," Shorty yelled. "You name the time and place." Manuel's wife nervously tugged on her husband's arm. Shorty's men pulled him away. Without another word, Manuel and his wife brushed past the small group from Ojinaga and disappeared around a corner. During the three-hour drive back, Shorty's men tried to reason with him. If Shorty hadn't been so goddamn cocky, he could have settled it with Manuel right then and there in Chihuahua City. A1l it would have taken was a fewwords explaining how Manuel had left him in the lurch. "Why don't you make a deal with him? You could still work it out with him," one of the
men said. "Oh, the hell with him!" Shorty said. Manuel Carrasco caught up with Shorty on May 1,1977, outside the river village of Santa Elena. Shorty had a load of marijuana to ship north that day and had his runners take it across the Rio Grande somewhere downstream from the tiny village. Following the smuggling operation, he returned to Santa Elena with his driver to party with the locals. Manuel Vald ez, the driver, was a young, eager campesino who worked on Shorty's ranch with two older brothers. The young Valdez occasionally chauffeured the drug lord around the desert, doubling as bodyguard. A week earlier Manuel Carrasco had spread the word from Chihuahua City that Shorty's end was imminent-the kind of psychological terrorism Manuel seemed to relish. Shorty kept on about his business.

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Shorty's blood began to boil; he wasn't about to run. He was going to show them what kind of stuff he was made of. He grabbed an assault rifle from the floor. He slapped an ammunition clip into it. "You drive on. I'm getting in the back," he shouted to Manuel Yaldez. Shorty grabbed some extra clips, shoved one of the semiautomatic pistols into his belt and jumped into the back of the truck. Valdez checked his own handguns and placed them-chambered and cocked-next to him on the seat. He put the truck in gear and moved on up the bumpy road. Shorty lay flat in the bed of the pickup, ready to spring up at the right moment. The ambush site was several miles away. The road dropped nearly 10 feet into a wide, flat-bottomed arroyo. One had to drive across the arroyo bed and climb the steep slope on the opposite side to get back onto the road. Carrasco's gunmen were waiting on both sides, on thelop of the rises. As soon as they knew it was Shorty in the middle of the arroyo they were going to gun him down. But the advance warning had allowed Shorty to prepare. When Yaldez drove down into the wash, the gunmen could see only one man-and it wasn't Shorty. They let Valdez drive through and up the other side. Once the truck had bounced up to the top of the wash, the

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man with steel-capped teeth walked into its path and shouted, "Iudicial!" lVhat happened next took place in the space of time it takes for about a dozen men firing simultaneously to shoot several hundred rounds of ammunition. Shorty jumped up from the bed of the truck, firing a burst from his AR-15 at SteelTooth, then turning his fire on the group of men that had started to emerge from the mesquite brush the moment Steel-Tooth halted the truck. Several of those men fell. Yaldez leaped from the pickup cab at the same moment, firing toward the other side of the road. The hammering of machine guns became thunderous. Bullets coming from three directions tore into the pickup. Manuel Valdez was hit and fell to the ground. Shorty jumped down from the truck and shot backward as he ran up the road. Steel-Tooth had only be en grazedby Shorty's initial spray of bullets, and had hugged the ground to keep out of the line of fire. When he saw Shorty running, he got to his knees and aimed. A .45-caliber bullet tore into Shorty's spine. He fell face forward to the ground. The marks people later saw in the dirt showed that Shorty crawled a short distance, scratching and clawing the ground, then writhed in the scorching sand. Tire tracks showed that a heary vehicle had driven again and again over his frail body before finally driving over his head. Shorty was probably already dead when someone stood over him, lifted a healy machete high and then brought it down with savage force that cut off the top of his skull at the

hairline. Only the bodies of Shorty Lopez and Manuel Yaldezwere found later. The assailants fled with their own dead and wounded. Reports later reached San Carlos that several men had checked into clinics in towns across the state line in Coahuila. One of the men had steelcapped teeth and claimed to be a judicial.

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