Zetas founder sent back to Mexico
One of Mexico’s most feared and notorious drug traffickers — 57-year-old Osiel Cárdenas Guillén — was deported back to his home country Monday. To what degree he’s still in the drug trade, handing down edicts from a prison cell, is open to debate.
If you compare the photo of Cardenas on this front page, taken over the weekend, courtesy of ICE, just prior to his deportation back to Mexico, with that of his former self, pictured on his Wikipedia page, it looks like the guy has mellowed during the approximate 17.5 years he’s spent behind bars, but who can ever be sure?
He’s lost some hair, while the remaining strands on his head are now grey, which makes him look more like your everyday aging businessman, but the fixed cold stare looks the same in both photos. Not the kind of guy you’d want to cross.
His Way to the Top
Cárdenas Guillén, the former car mechanic, a Matamoros native, started out at the bottom rung of the infamous Gulf Cartel when he started to run drugs in the late 1980s, early 1990s, before getting nabbed on this side of the border in August 1992 at the age of 25 in possession of approximately two kilos of coke, charged with intent to distribute.
In January of 1993, Cárdenas was convicted in a Brownsville federal court of possession with intent to distribute more than 500 grams of cocaine, which landed him a sentence of just over five years.
Less than a year later, December of 1993, the U.S. handed Cardenas back over to the Mexican government under a specious treaty between the two countries called the “Execution of Penal Sentences.”
Mexico said he was wanted there for drug offenses as well, so send him back home because the “Penal Sentences” deal allows citizens of either country to serve their sentences in their home country if they were convicted in the other country's courts.
Over the subsequent 30 years, the U.S. has learned that Mexican drug traffickers are better off held in a U.S. prison than a Mexican prison, where bribes and threats often shorten a sentence or release the prisoner altogether. Conjugal visits are also a big plus south of the border.
In the case of Cardenas, his return to Mexico didn’t seem to serve as any deterrent, because it wasn’t long before he was not only back in the drug-trafficking business, but moving up the power ranks as well.
By 2000, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Houston filed an indictment against Cardenas for 13 counts of possession with intent to distribute cocaine and marijuana, six counts of assault on a federal officer, one count of laundering monetary instruments, one count of conspiracy to import into the United States from Mexico cocaine and marijuana, and one count continuing criminal enterprise.
Apparently, the time spent behind bars on this side of the border, prior to his return to Mexico in ’93, hadn’t convinced him to go back to work as a car mechanic.
Fed Agent Stand-Off
In an ironic twist, Cardenas’s run-in with U.S. federal agents in Matamoros in 1999 was what led to his downfall.
For some reason, in November 1999, an FBI agent and a DEA agent thought it might be a good idea to stick an informant in the back of their SUV and drive around Matamoros during the day to collect intel on the Gulf Cartel.
Take a drive past Cárdenas’s house. What could possibly go wrong?
It didn’t take long before Gulf Cartel gunmen had them surrounded, and who should step out to confront them, but the man himself, Cárdenas Guillén. And he wasn’t happy.
Known to have a quick temper even on the best of days, the drug trafficker, only 32 at the time, demanded they exit their vehicle, which the federal agents refused to do while the informant quaked in the back seat.
Threats followed, profanity tossed their way, either semi-auto rifles or full autos leveled their way, based on which account of the faceoff you read, before one of the agents reminded Cardenas of “Kiki” Camarena, the DEA agent tortured and killed in Guadalajara in 1985.
Shortly before his abduction, a marijuana plantation in the state of Chihuahua with an estimated annual yield of $8 billion had been destroyed by the Mexican military, and the traffickers believed that Camarena was the source of the info.
After his body, and that of his pilot, were discovered in the state of Michoacan a month after their disappearance, the U.S. government, with the help of Mexico, unleashed a holy hell on the heads of the top drug traffickers at the time.
It was considered to be the largest DEA homicide investigation ever undertaken. (Source: BBC.)
Ironically, as it would turn out, even though Cárdenas had spared the lives of the two federal agents, and the informant, the U.S. government went after him with both guns blazing. The charge that carried the most weight — threatening the lives of two federal agents.
The U.S. government pressured Mexico to cooperate in the capture of Cárdenas, which took place in 2006.
The charges stacked against him at the time, filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Houston: 13 counts of possession with intent to distribute cocaine and marijuana, six counts of assault on a federal officer, one count of laundering monetary instruments, one count of conspiracy to import into the United States from Mexico cocaine and marijuana, and one count continuing criminal enterprise.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of International Affairs worked with the Government of Mexico to secure his arrest and extradition. Subsequently, on Jan. 19, 2007, Mexico extradited Cárdenas to the United States to stand trial in the Southern District of Texas.
Time Behind Bars
On March 3, 2010, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas in Houston convicted Cardenas of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute more than five kilograms of cocaine and more than 1,000 kilograms of marijuana, conspiracy to launder monetary instruments, and threatening to assault and murder a federal agent.
Cardenas was sentenced to a total term of 25 years’ incarceration at USP Terre Haute. The case was investigated by Homeland Security Investigations Rio Grande Valley in coordination with other federal and local law enforcement partners.
Almost 15 years later, Cardenas is out of a U.S. federal prison but now he’s headed back to Mexico.
What his future holds there is anyone’s guess.
Does he still have the power to not only survive a Mexican prison but oversee operations of the Gulf Cartel from its confines, who knows.
After Cárdenas put together the ultra-violent Los Zetas in the late 1990s, early 2000s, courtesy of Mexican special forces who had deserted from their ranks, the Gulf Cartel is a former shell of its former self, with one inside faction battling the other for control, but despite his 17.5-year absence, around Matamoros, South Texas, Osiel Cárdenas Guillén is still known as “the boss,” according to at least two sources familiar with the world of the narcos.
Gossip had been tossed around over the past six months that Cardenas was trying to swing a deal with U.S. authorities to remain in the U.S. After all, he had done his time, paid the U.S. government millions in fines, so why not let him stay here with a special residence visa?
That might have worked, who knows, if not for the fact that Cardenas is still a wanted man in Mexico, charged with a homicide and illegal possession of a firearm.
There is also this feeling that Mexico is not about to change its stance against the drug cartels during the six-year presidency of the country’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, who was sworn into office Oct. 1.
Her predecessor, “AMLO,” AKA, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, spent his six years as president following a make love, not war mantra with his “Hugs, not bullets,” approach, as if the drug cartels may be reasoned within a civilized fashion with a cuddly bear and a cup of hot cocoa.
Instead of “standing down,” it seems that the Mexican drug traffickers, at all levels, are growing more brazen in their complete disregard for law and order, the rule of law, the right of Mexicans to live in peace and harmony.
Already this year, 37 Mexican politicians, either elected or running for office, have been assassinated across the country by alleged narcos.
Despite this statistic, immediately after her swearing-in as Mexico’s new president Oct. 1, Sheinbaum said that, “The war against el narco will not return.”
Instead, Mexico’s new president outlined a four-point strategy that emphasized intelligence-gathering, troop deployment, improved federal- state coordination, and providing opportunities to dissuade impoverished young people from joining organized crime (Source: LA Times).
Notwithstanding, the sexy gangster image, the narco songs that glamorize the life, the bling, the money, the cars, the women, even though female assassins have become a “thing” in Mexico, so include the Chippendale look-alikes.
Even as Claudia Sheinbaum spoke about her hands-off approach to the drug cartels, mourners could be heard in another part of the country chanting, “¡Justicia! ¡Justicia!” during the funeral cortege in Guerrero state for Chilpancingo Mayor Alejandro Arcos, who was assassinated less than a week after taking office.
Arcos’ severed head was placed on the roof of his white pickup truck, parked on a public street.