Private Networks

Private Network: Who Killed Manuel Buendía - A review and some thoughts on mullets, Mexican action flicks, journalism and mapping CIA training camps

If you are reading this you are probably already familiar with Netflix’s new documentary, Private Network. The film looks at the life and work of acclaimed Mexican journalist, Manuel Buendía. But it focuses in on his assassination on May 30 1984 and the who-done-it or perhaps more pertinently the why-done-it that followed his death. The title, Red Privada or Private Network refers to Buendía’s most famous column but also the gossipy infrapolitics of the ruling PRI.

First, a recommendation - watch this film. If you have a passing interest in the recent history of Mexico, the profession of journalism, or the messy denouement of the Cold War, it is both fascinating and alarming. The documentary makers have done an extraordinary job at tracking down Mexico’s most esteemed newspaper columnists, politicians, and lawyers to comment on and speculate about Buendía’s passing and the politics of the day.

These talking heads make riveting viewing. There is Miguel Aldana (head of Interpol) jovially explaining that we (the government) had power over the press through the paper monopoly, PIPSA. There is Sergio Aguayo (Colmex professor, expert on the Mexican secret services and son of a DFS agent) pondering how the historian (like the journalist) walks the line between empathy and distance. There is the jowly, gravel-voiced drug prosecutor Javier Coello Trejo cooly balancing a ciggie in hand while describing how he hugged the DFS head, José Manuel Zorilla, reached round his back and whipped out his pistol.

There is José Reveles - bald, hipster tash - claiming that the Ministry of the Interior under Manuel Bartlett made so much money from protecting the drug trade that it didn’t need an official budget. And there is the strangely magnetic Jorge Carrillo Olea (sub-secretary of the interior) - perched on a chair in the corridor of what looks like a lunatic asylum - who has made a career out of pretending that he had no idea that this protection racket was going on.

Then there is the footage. There are the jaw dropping moments from a French documentary on the Guerrero governor, Ruben Figueroa Figueroa. In them Figueroa runs official business from a swimming pool, dresses up in a comedy poncho with his name plastered on the front, boasts about the “pious women” that share his bed, and shows off that two mariachis singing songs in his honor follow him everywhere. It is a portrait of caudillo as madman, an indictment if needed of where PRI politics had taken the country by the late 1970s. (For the full documentary, including Figueroa’s Jimmy Saville-like ruminations over his mother see here). But there is more including clips of DFS agents performing rather quaint gymnastic routines and the media circuses surrounding the murder of Buendía and the arrest of José Antonio Zorrilla five years later.

The Revelations

Then there are the revelations. Two stand ou

t. The first concerns the spy/actor/motorcyclist, Juan Rafael Moro Ávila aka Juan Moro. Sporting the mullet and facial hair of down-at-heel porn star, Moro had an auspicious heritage; he was a grandson of President Manuel Avila Camacho.

Connections brought jobs and in 1984 Moro was part of a DFS motorcycle unit known as Las Abispas (the Wasps). The government created Las Abispas as a rapid response unit. But rather than fill it with trained agents, they instead opted for the rather cheaper alternative of recruiting a Mexico City motorcycle gang. Moro was their head.

He claims that on 30 May 1984 he received an order to go to the Mexico City street where Buendía was murdered. He arrived, but found nothing - just a corpse and a crowd of alarmed strangers. Soon afterwards Moro was sacked from the DFS and found a role as a jobbing actor. He specialized in playing “bad men and cops” in knock-off action flicks. In 1989 the Mexican authorities arrested him, claiming that he drove the motorcycle on which Buendía’s killer had ridden. He was sentenced to 25 years.

According to Moro, the accusations were a farce. The authorities tortured him and threatened his family. He took the rap to save them.

The interviews with Moro are breathtaking. He has an actor’s charisma, the language of a street tough, and the outrage of a man who did 25 years inside for a murder he didn’t commit. Flanked by a bunch of racing motorcycles, he openly discusses his job as a DFS agent, the play-by-play of his arrest and the ways the authorities managed to fit him up. Faced with the accusations of the state prosecutor he repeats “that’s bullshit, that’s bullshit”. He even claims that he heard - in prison - who killed Buendía. It was another professional hitman called Luis Sayas. Sayas was killed the day after Buendía’s killing in an Acapulco jewelry heist gone wrong.

We know then, the who-done-it. The why-done-it is more complicated. Here is the second revelation. It is one that has already been covered in books like Jesús Esquivel’s La CIA, Camarena y Caro Quintero and the Bartleys’ Eclipse of the Assassins as well as the recent Amazon documentary, The Last Narc. It is - still - one that is deeply controversial. (At the end of 2020, one DEA agent started to sue the makers of the Last Narc for defamation).

According to this theory, at the time of Buendía’s death, the CIA had established two major operations in Mexico. (As Sergio Aguayo points out 1980s Mexico was the Cold War spy-capital, the Berlin of Latin American). The first was helping the Guadalajara cartel to run cocaine through Mexico to pay for Nicaraguan Contra weapons. The second was setting up training camps for the Contras in the state of Veracruz.

Buendía had stumbled on both operations through contacts in the Mexican government and the Veracruz journalism core. And, so the theory goes, he was threatening to reveal the whole corrupt mess. In desperation the government - in league with the CIA - intervened and had him murdered. Buendía’s killing was - in short - both a government cover-up and the first cartel murder As such, it was one which preempted the subsequent assassination of hundreds of journalists, and tens of thousands of citizens over the next forty years.

Both revelations are extraordinary. They point the finger and they accuse great swathes of the U.S. and Mexican governments of drug trafficking, murder, subterfuge and corruption. They are also - as the documentary suggests - the precursor to the charnel house of today.

The Limits of Private Networks

But slick and entertaining as the documentary is, it is also limited. Red Privada never really manages to escape from the insular private network of the educated, elegantly dressed Mexico City journalists and politicians that form its key sources. And by doing so, it fails to follow up three crucial aspects of the Buendía case. They concern, not coincidently, topics that the capital’s big columnists have never been comfortable exploring - their own links to the political elite, tacky Mexican popular culture, and most damningly, any place outside Mexico City.

Buendía and El Sol de México

The first concerns Buendía’s own personal trajectory. The film acknowledges that Buendía was not a born rebel, but rather one who emerged from inside the PRI’s governing apparatus. In the 1960s he directed the cloyingly pro-government La Prensa. And in early 1970s he even took a cushy job as an official public relations manager. In fact, he only started to critique the government after his return to journalism in the late 1970s. It is a journey, which is brilliantly laid out in this article by Vanessa Freije.

The documentary makers portray Buendía’s radicalization as a kind of Pauline revelation. Faced with PRI corruption Buendía is pushed into speaking out. But, there is another, rather more cynical, way to view Buendía’s transformation from voice of the government to one of its sternest critics.

Buendía returned to the world of journalism as a columnist for the national Sol chain. Up to 1976 the Soles had been the most conservative newspapers in Mexico, close to the Americans and the hard right of the PRI and wedded to an almost laughably paranoid version of anti-communism.

But in 1976 the Sol chain changed hands. It was bought up by a company called the Organización Editorial Mexicana (OEM). But many believed that the OEM was little more than a front for the Mexico president, Luis Echeverría. OEM’s two prominent board members were the furniture tycoon Mario Vázquez Raña and El Universal owner Francisco Ortiz Ealy. They were both close to Echeverria; Vázquez was even rumoured to be a distant relative. And the two men OEM chose to lead the chain were Echeverria’s closest collaborators, his press secretary Fausto Zapata and his minister of the interior Mario Moya Palencia. Even the US embassy concluded that OEM was probably a front for the president. (For an overview of the takeover see Chapter 6 of my book, The Mexican Press and Civil Society)

There is no doubt that Buendía knew the rather shadowy background to the newspaper when he joined in 1977. (Former Excélsior editor, Julio Scherer certainly did. He confessed to a US informant that the company had asked him to work for the Sol chain. “I would never do that. I would never work for those people. I’m not a prostitute”, he said.)

So the question emerges. To what extent was Buendía ploughing his own furrow, moving further to the left as the Mexican government became more and more tied to the U.S.’s anti-communist Central American initiatives? Or to what extent was he just a voice for Echeverría’s left-leaning Mexican nationalism? To what extent were his stories about Guadalajara’s right-wing death squads and the CIA’s Mexican operation fed to him by a branch of the PRI?

The Prosecutor of Iron

If this lacuna questions Buendía’s own motives and trajectory, the next two question the documentary’s theories about his death. The first is perhaps only a coincidence, all be it a very strange one. In 1989, Juan Moro, the former-DFS agent-turned-actor, released his last film. It was called El Fiscal de Hierro and was based on Mexican prosecutor Salvador del Toro’s murderous campaign against the Pruneda drug gang in Nuevo Laredo during the early 1970s. Though the Americans applauded the campaign, locals always whispered that Del Toro had worked in collusion with the future head of the Gulf Cartel, Juan García Abrego.

In the film Moro plays a gunman who is ordered to take out a local journalist. (The film plays with time and one suspects the story is based on the 1986 gunning down of two Nuevo Laredo El Popular journalists). So Moro arrives at a TV station armed to the teeth and guns down dozens of technicians, presenters and the journalist that he was ordered to kill.

Moro was arrested for the Buendía murder on 21 June 1989. The film was released just two weeks later.

A coincidence, perhaps? A sick joke? Or a deliberate ploy? Did the Mexican prosecutors choose Moro as their fall guy because they knew they could bolster his confession with film footage of him gunning down a studio full of journalists? Did they even secure him this role in the film before they made the accusations?

Paranoid? Maybe. But the PRI was not averse to these kind of elaborate, media-savvy set ups. In fact, as I recount in Chapter 2 of my book, The Mexican Press and Civil Society, they had been doing them for decades.

The CIA Training Camps

The third - and no doubt most important - hole in the story however concerns the alleged CIA training camps in Veracruz. According to the documentary, Buendía learned of these camps through a Veracruz journalist. The documentary then gets the name of the journalist wrong and leaves the accusation hanging. Instead it rushes to wrap up the accusations. Buendía was killed because he threatened to reveal these camps.

It is exactly the same accusation that Jesús Esquivel, and the DEA agent, Hector Berrellez, made in 2013 in relation to the murder of Kiki Camarena. Camarena - so the story goes - was also killed because he found out about these camps.

The camps, in short, form the direct motive for two of Mexico’s most high-profile political killings.

Yet no-one has made any attempt to go to Veracruz, ask around, gather even the most paltry evidence and try to pinpoint their location. They remain opaque and thinly drawn. They are simply portrayed and dismissed - in both Esquivel’s book and the documentary - as the “CIA’s Veracruz training camps.”

That is until now. In my new book, The Dope, I attempted to track down these camps. The results were contradictory and frankly underwhelming. If we are pinning the Buendía and the Camarena killings on the cover up of CIA training camps, we at least need some vague inkling as to where they were.

According to interviews with DEA informants (collected together in Rene Verdugo’s sadly extinct online archive), the CIA training camps could have been in two locations.

The first is one of the the ranches of the hitman-turned-heroin dealer, Arturo Izquierdo Ebrard. We know that Izquierdo had at least two ranches in the state. The first was called Camino Real and lay to the north of the state on the road from Cardel to Nautla. It was large, open and public; it even had a massive statue of a prize bull outside. It was - in short - a strange choice for a secret CIA camp.

The other, however, was more promising. According to José González, the biographer of Arturo’s brother-in-law, Arturo “El Negro” Durazo, there was also a ranch so high up in the Veracruz mountains to the west of Nautla that it could only be reached by air. This was the ranch where Arturo flew cocaine in, and where he hid El Negro after he fled the capital in late 1982.

The second possible location was further south, around the relatively remote jungle municipality of Hidalgotitlán. Again, there were coincidences. As one of the key DEA witnesses (a shadowy, possible CIA agent called Lawrence Harrison) pointed out, marijuana smugglers led by a local cacique called Abelardo Sánchez Alcaraz had massacred 21 federal judicial police agents in the fields around the town in November 1985. Was it not rather more likely that this was the work of the members of the CIA training camp?

Though both these places were possible, following another lead suggests a third location for the camps. In the documentary, as well as in the DEA reports, witnesses regularly misname Buendía’s Veracruz journalist contact as Velasco or Vazquez. This was not his name. In fact, he was Javier Juárez Vazquez. Juárez was the editor of a Coatzacoalcos newspaper called Primera Plana.

Juárez was killed the morning after Buendía, allegedly by gunmen working for the famed local strongman, Toribio Gargallo aka El Toro. In a none too subtle hint, his lips were sown together with wire.

If Juárez was Buendía’s principal source then, where did he think the camps were? Not even in Veracruz. In his last article for Primera Plana he claimed that they were in the foothills of the Sierra Negra in the neighboring state of Puebla.

Overall all then Red Privada is certainly worth a watch. It is a fascinating portrayal of PRI political culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But as a conclusive investigative work, which lays out the evidence for CIA drug running and training camps, there are still a lot of vital pieces missing.