Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers by Roberto Saviano Page A

peasant family. He began his rise in the midst of a violent conflict in the emerald-producing region of Colombia. He was only just twenty-nine when he joined the organization being set up by Pablo Escobar Gaviria, along with Carlos Lehder and the Ochoa brothers Fabio, Juan David, and Jorge Luis. When he met Félix Gallardo, he was thirty. At that time, the Guadalajara Cartel was simply a well-organized operation ferrying marijuana and heroin into the United States. Rodríguez opened Félix Gallardo’s eyes to a more appealing business: cocaine. For much smaller volumes, the profits were vastly higher.
    Rodríguez Gacha felt so at home with the “Mexican model” that his taste for mariachi culture soon earned him the nickname of El Mexicano. He developed the eccentric habit of naming his Colombian ranches after Mexican states and cities, like Cuernavaca, Chihuahua, Sonora, or Mazatlán. The fake “war on drugs” begun by Reagan did not mean the Medellín Cartel distanced itself from US territory; on the contrary, it helped it get closer.

The biggest narco of them all was CIA
    In 1981, a curious character entered the story of the Medellín and Guadalajara cartels, and of the Matta Ballesteros group: the multi-faceted Adler Berriman Seal, better known as Barry Seal. Seal became the perfect combination. “The biggest drug smuggler in American history was a CIA agent,” wrote Daniel Hopsicker in the Washington Weekly in August 1997. In fact, Seal, with his sparkling eyes and knowing expression, had a triple personality: in addition to flying planes for the Medellín Cartel, he was an undercover agent for the CIA and later for the DEA. 5
    Like El Negro Matta, Barry Seal worked for the CIA supporting the Nicaraguan Contras. 6 The connection between these two, and between both of them and the Medellín and Guadalajara cartels, was by no means fortuitous.
    Seal’s wife, Deborah, stated that he had begun to do occasional jobs for the CIA in the 1950s. 7 In 1972 he was arrested in New Orleans in a DC4, accused of trying to fly explosives to anti-Castro Cubans operating in Mexico. Thirteen years later, this same plane was the link between Seal and El Negro. The aircraft was used by a company called Hondu Carib to carry aid for the Contras to Honduras, before being loaded up with drugs destined for the United States. The owner of the company was one Frank Moss. Previously, Moss had worked as a pilot for El Negro’s airline, Setco, which like Hondu Carib received funds from the CIA.
    Moss flew from Florida with the weapons for the Contras; on the way back from Honduras with the drugs, he would make a stopover in Mérida and load some frozen fish to distract the US customs.
    Barry Seal began to work officially as a pilot for the Medellín Cartel in 1981. He soon moved on from flying light aircraft with 100 kgs of cocaine to flying a plane that could carry a ton. It is said this miracle was achieved by the CIA, spurred by its impatience to get more resources to the Contras. Being so productive, Seal became very important to Pablo Escobar and his organization. And they paid him well for his services: $1.5 million per round journey, according to his own account.
    Barry Seal began to land his main drug flights for the Medellín Cartel at Mena airport, in Arkansas—whose Democratic Party governor was then Bill Clinton, before he became the country’s forty-second president in 1993. From 1981 to 1985, Mena was a foremost center for international smuggling. According to estimates by the Internal Revenue Service and the DEA, as well as to sworn testimonies, the volume of cocaine and heroin being trafficked at that time was several thousand kilograms, and the profits reached hundreds of millions of dollars.
    In exchange for an open door for its drug shipments, the Medellín Cartel gave cash to the Contras. In essence it was the same agreement as with the Guadalajara Cartel in Mexico. Since the Medellín and Guadalajara cartels had been