The Mexican Zelig, the covert netherworld and the war on drugs (Copy)
Who the fuck was Antonio Garate Bustamante?
He doesn’t appear in any of your standard Mexican history books. Mentions in newspapers are scattershot and contradictory. And even the Americans who relied on him now seem keen to write him out of history.
The only picture we have of Antonio Gárate Bustamante shows what appears to be a rather down-on-his-luck salesman, or an accountant who has just lost the annual performance award for the twelfth year running. The cheap grey suit, the tinted aviator specs, the jowly face, the luxuriant sweep of hair (a last desperate nod to youth) and the plywood hotel wardrobe all speak to a life frustrated.
Antonio Garate Bustamante
Yet pictures can be deceptive. (Or at least this historian’s quick reads of them). And Gárate’s life was anything but frustrated. In fact it runs like a thread through some of the most mysterious and controversial episodes in the last four decades of Mexican history. At times he is playing cop, at times a snitch, at times an arms dealer, and at times a south-of-the border James Bond. But mostly he resembles some kind of enigmatic Mexican Zelig flitting in and out of political disputes and scandals, often leaving even more chaos, confusion and rumor in his wake.
I’ll leave my various thoughts and theories until the end of the post. But to start off, what do we know about Gárate.
Early Years
According to a few newspaper reports, Gárate was probably born in 1939. We have no idea where. It could be Tijuana, where one of his childhood friends certainly lived. But I suspect it was Sinaloa. There is a large Gárate clan in Mazatlán and this is where he first turns up on the public record. In 1971 federal cops raided a holiday bungalow in the seaside resort. Gárate was working, he claimed, as the administrator of the property. He thought that the cops were actually attempting to assault the place (not an unfair assumption even if they were cops). And so he came out firing. He was disarmed together with Miguel Ángel Rico and two others. Inside the bungalow the cops discovered 2 million pesos worth of cocaine and heroin.
This bust seemed to have little if any consequences. And a year later in November 1972 Gárate was caught yet again. This time the charges were arms smuggling from the United States to Mexico. His house contained over 100 guns including 30-M1, R-15, 5/18s which he would get by exchanging for heroin and cocaine. The ring comprised Gárate, the chief of the state judicial police, Tomás González Verdugo and the second in command of the military district, a lieutenant Arias. This time Gárate claimed to be a former state judicial policeman, who had been recently fired for corruption. He also claimed to be working for the Mexican Ministry of the Interior.
What Gárate did next is somewhat unclear. In J. Jesús Esquivel’s La Cia, Camarena Y Caro Quintero one of the witnesses to the Camarena murders claimed that he and Gárate had been sent to Nicaragua in 1974 to learn guerrilla tactics from the left-wing insurgent, Edén Pastora. Another DEA agent that I interviewed asserted that at the time Gárate was training in the School of the Americas.
The Camarena Case
Gárate appears next in Guadalajara in the early 1980s. According to Lawrence Victor Harrison, a suspected CIA spook, by 1981 Gárate had acquired the title lieutenant colonel and was head of the state judicial police of Jalisco. (At the time, this didn’t necessarily denote any real military experience. President López Portillo’s school friend and Mexico City chief of police, Arturo “el Negro” Durazo was made a “General” despite never working in the military). Gárate employed Harrison to do electronics work including setting up electric gates, electric fences, TV repair and closed circuit TV. And Gárate mixed his police work with working as a de facto bodyguard for the Sinaloa trafficker, Ernesto “Don Neto” Fonseca Carrillo. The trafficker and the cop were close; they were compadres. And Gárate even lived in one of “Don Neto’s” houses called “Las Fuentes”.
Harrison’s testiomny. Click on the page for the full document.
The accusation fits what we know. From the late 1970s until 1985, the state judicial police of Jalisco acted as bodyguards for members of the so-called “Guadalajara cartel”.
Sometime in 1982, it seems that Gárate was dismissed from his position in the state judicial police allegedly for extortion. Yet he still seemed to move in the same circles as the cops and the traffickers. In late 1984 several Jalisco cops mention that Gárate was involved in planning the kidnapping of DEA agent, Enrique “Kiki” Camarena. And though Gárate does not seem to have been involved in the kidnapping himself, he was one of the first people Don Neto turned to after Camarena’s death. He told Gárate that he had committed a “pendejada”; Gárate also found out that someone had made interrogations of the Camarena interrogation. And he was also involved in the DFS raid on the Mareno ranch where Camarena’s body was eventually found.
You might assume that Gárate’s story would make him a rather dubious DEA ally. But this was not the case. A year after the Camarena murder, he was acting as a liason or an informant for the American agents in Guadalajara. He formed part of the Operation Leyenda group on the trail of the Camarena murderers that were not dead or in jail. It was in this role that he was stopped by Jalisco state judicial policemen in August 1986 together with DEA agent, Victor Cortez. They were ordered out of their car, kidnapped, beaten and then released. At this point Gárate fled to the United States, either as a protected witness or as a de facto DEA employee.
If Gárate’s career had been strange up to 1986, it soon got weirder. In 1989 DEA agent, Hector Berrellez was the new head of Operation Leyenda. A tough Vietnam vet with 15 years field experience, Berrellez had returned to his home state of Arizona to attend the wedding. of his best friend, Arturo. At the wedding he thought he recognised one of the men on the top table, sitting next to Arturo’s mother. It was Gárate.
Gárate was not only Arturo’s maternal uncle, he was also still working for the DEA, this time out of their Phoenix office. Gárate and Berrellez soon became firm friends. And Gárate agreed to introduce Berrellez to a Guadalajara pimp and informant called Rafa. Between Rafa and Gárate they managed to persuade half a dozen Jalisco cops to turn state witnesses. Their statements formed the basis of the cases against other Camarena suspects including Javier Vásquez Velasco, Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros, Juan José Bernabé Ramírez, and Rubén Zuno Arce.
Over the years these same witnesses would go on to make accusations against other high-up officials in the Mexican and U.S. government. Their targets included Manuel Bartlett (former Minister of the Interior), Juan Arévalo Gardoqui (Minister of Defense) and a Max Gómez/Félix Rodríguez (a CIA operative).
Gárate’s role in the Camarena case was still not over. And on 2 April 1990 he teamed up with Berrellez to organize the kidnapping of Guadalajara doctor Humberto Alvarez Marchaín. Alvarez was drug trafficker, Rafael Caro Quintero’s doctor and was accused of having fed Camarena a cocktail of drugs to keep him alive during the torture.
The kidnapping was treated as a daring piece of police work in the United States. The federal cops that Gárate employed to secure the doctor were dubbed “the Wild Geese”. And the shadowy Gárate briefly put his head above the parapet to defend his actions.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times at the end of April 1990 Gárate didn’t really hide his background. He held the interview in his office, a converted hotel suite littered with automatic weapons. He wore a blue work shirt, black jeans, white tennis shoes, a gold chain and a diamond encrusted gold bracelet. Work had bought him luxuries. The DEA, he claimed, was paying him $4000 dollars a month plus a one-off $100,000 fee for the Alvarez Marchain kidnapping.
In the interview, Gárate claimed that he and Berrellez had received orders from the top tier of the DEA to kidnap the doctor after two prisoner exchanges had fallen through. He then employed a handful of former federal judicial police to bag Alvarez Marchain. They took him to an airfield in Silao. And they then flew the captive to El Paso, Texas where he was arrested.
In the interview Gárate refused to reveal the name of the federal cops (“I won’t stab my friends in the back,”). He denied torturing the doctor with a stun gun. (“We photographed him all over, in the nude, to show that he wasn’t hurt.”) And he reiterated again that no DEA agent was actually in on the kidnapping. He even played the injured party, claiming that the DEA’s fee had barely covered costs and his federal police friends had yet to be paid. But Gárate, the honorable cop would see them reimbursed. ““If I have to, I’ll sell my house in Arizona to pay them,”
The kidnapping proved to be a major international incident. At the time, the United States and Mexican governments were in a delicate stage of their negotiations over the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The treaty had ample opposition particularly on the left. And in Mexico the kidnapping went down extremely badly. The president at the time, Carlos Salinas, even threatened to kick the DEA out of Mexico. So Alvarez was acquitted and released. And the DEA put as much distance as it could between the institution and the kidnapping. The Salinas administration even put in an application to have Berrellez and Gárate extradited back to Mexico.
You might imagine that that was that for the trafficker-turned cop-turned-bounty hunter. He had betrayed the Mexican cartel and the Mexican state. And now he himself had been betrayed by the United States authorities that he claimed to serve. Yet somehow he clung on. In fact he maintained relevance.
In 1993, he was involved in suppressing Mexican accusations against the former head of the PJF, Guillermo González Calderoni. Calderoni had fled Mexico the year before, accused of corruption. Gárate allegedly approached witnesses against Calderoni on behalf of the DEA and asked them to shut up. For some reason they had dutifully obeyed. (The President, Carlos Salinas, seemed particularly upset at this).
The Colosio Case
Then the following year, it was Gárate’s last dance. Or at least his last lurch into the limelight.
1994 was a strange year even for those inured to Mexican politics. It sometimes seemed as if all the suppressed tensions, scandals, and social pressures were being released at the same time. There was the introduction of NAFTA (and the beginning of the end of Mexican heavy industry); there was one guerrilla uprising, and then soon after another; there was the abduction and murder of the PRI general secretary; and there was the public assasination of the PRI presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio.
The subsequent inquiry into the Colosio murder laid out all the rivalry, dissatisfaction, paranoia or the era as well as the increasingly blurred lines between politics and organized crime. Given that there were 1200 interviews, 27 lines of inquiry and 300 initial suspects, perhaps this was unsurprising. There were claims, counterclaims, accusations of presidential complicity, bizarre coincidences, repeated claims of torture, patently drugged suspects being hauled in front of the camaras, and an almost hallucinatory litany of poor policing.
There were also so many theories that the final prosecutor compiled an entire file of the less believable versions. The file reads like a cultural history of a country going through a mental breakdown. Six decades of one-party rule, six decades of stability (or at least apparent stability); six decades during which Mexico had prided itself on not being like other “chaotic” Latin American countries with their guerilla insurgencies, political assassinations, and military coups. In 1994 it was as of Mexico was making up for lost time by suffering all of them at once.
The file consists of the speculations of thousands of Mexicans, who all wrote to the prosecuting attorney claiming that they had overheard politicians, policemen, guerillas and drug traffickers wishing Colosio dead. There was even a talk radio host who swore that the legendary drug trafficker, Amado Carrillo Fuentes “El Señor de los Cielos”, had phoned up his program pissed. He focused the host’s attention by naming the host’s family, their address and the car that they drove. He then proceeded to talk for 50 minutes about the state of Mexican politics and his theories on the Colosio killing.
But one of the theories that the prosecutor did actually take seriously came from a familiar source. In 1995 the newspaper, El Financiero, published a story which claimed that the DEA had warned the Mexican authorities two months before the murder that “something bad” was going to happen to Colosio either in Sonora or Baja California. The DEA informant in this case was none other than Gárate. “I thought that it might be some sniper or a car bomb. From then on we believed that they could get Colosio."
Asked to clarify, Gárate claimed that in January 1994 he and another DEA agent had met an informant in the San Isidro McDonalds, just over the border from Tijuana. The informant - Tino or Tuno Ceseño - said that he had heard rumors of a “pedo gordo” going down either in Tijuana or along the border in Nogales or San Luis Río Colorado. They were going to kill Colosio. Gárate took the informant seriously. He was close to those high up in the Tijuana trafficking business. So Gárate informed the Tijuana chief of police, the Sonora prosecutor, and even the presidential guard of his fears. They all ignored him because of his involvement in the Alvarez kidnapping.
By 1997 the Colosio inquiry was still getting nowhere. Around 1000 interviews down and still no clear theory. So the prosecutors finally interviewed Gárate. He revealed the name of a Nogales contact, who in turn revealed the name of the informant - Raúl Ceseño Mendoza. The prosecutors tracked down Raúl’s brother, who still lived in Tijuana. Then the coincidence, one more in a career that seemed to be comprised almost entirely of them. The brother had not seen Raúl for twenty years. But he did know Garáte. They had been childhood friends and they had grown up together.
What does it all mean?
So, what does it all mean? Who was Antonio Gárate Bustamante? And what was he? Mexican or American? Cop, informant, criminal, or spook? The grey eminence at the center of Mexico’s political scandals or just a man repeatedly in the wrong place at the wrong time, unwillingly swept along in the tides of significant events? Maybe we will never know. He died almost a decade ago now. And those like Berrellez, who were close to him, now seem to play down their connection to him. (In Berrellez’s Amazon series, The Last Narc, he cuts Gárate completely from the story).
But for the historian, the question is not so much who or what Gárate was, but rather what he represents. Here things may be a little clearer. Gárate is a window into what Alfred McCoy has termed “the covert netherworld”. This was a space where spooks, cops, and criminals met, allied, exchanged cash and guns, swapped information, and struggled for control.
This space was a Cold War construction. And it was not exclusive to Mexico. As both capitalist and communist forces sought to support local allies, they needed to find ways to move cash, arms, and people across borders. They also needed to find specialists in other forms of “violence work” including torture and murder. So throughout the globe spies turned to the experts - criminals, smugglers, drug traffickers, and cops.
Though Mexico’s “covert netherworld” had much in common with those of the Southern Cone and South-East Asia, it also had a distinct rhythm, geography, and composition. It came together in the early 1970s, in guerrilla hotspots of Sinaloa, Jalisco and Guerrero where Mexican secret service agents bumped up against federal cops, state policemen and drug traffickers. It seemed to have reached a peak during the brutal campaign against the urban guerrillas from the Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre.
But Mexico’s covert netherworld also outlasted its original use. And during the 1980s dozens of former Cold Warriors moved employed their skills and their contacts to start moving drugs. Some - it seems - did so with the support of the CIA, which was keen to find a way to get financial support to right-wing Contra rebels. Cold War torturer to drug trafficker. It was a career path that would become increasingly common not only in Mexico but throughout the USSR, Central and South America.
But others like Gárate clearly also moved sides and started working for the DEA. In quite what capacity, the public documents on Gárate are never clear. Full paid up agent? Informant? Ally? Or criminal-turned-cop in the manner of one of Mexico’s madrinas or police assistants? The drug war had its own covert netherworld. And as it continues to rumble on, men like Gárate still remain shrouded in mystery.