The story
Founded by Juan Nepomuceno Guerra Cárdenas.1
Foundation: 1930s
The Gulf Cartel, a drug cartel based in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico, was founded in the 1930s by Juan Nepomuceno Guerra. Originally known as the Matamoros Cartel (Spanish: Cártel de Matamoros), the Gulf Cartel initially smuggled alcohol and other illegal goods into the U.S. Once the Prohibition era ended, the criminal group controlled gambling houses, prostitution rings, a car theft network, and other illegal smuggling. It grew significantly in the 1970s under the leadership of kingpin Juan García Ábrego.
García Ábrego era (1980s–1990s)
By the 1980s, García Ábrego began incorporating cocaine into the drug trafficking operations and started to have the upper hand on what was now considered the Gulf Cartel, the greatest criminal dynasty in the US-Mexico border. By negotiating with the Cali Cartel, García Ábrego was able to secure 50% of the shipment out of Colombia as payment for delivery, instead of the US$1,500 per kilogram they were previously receiving. This renegotiation, however, forced Garcia Ábrego to guarantee the product's arrival from Colombia to its destination. Instead, he created warehouses along the Mexican's northern border to preserve hundreds of tons of cocaine; this allowed him to create a new distribution network and increase his political influence. In addition to trafficking drugs, García Ábrego would ship cash to be laundered, in the millions. Around 1994, it was estimated that the Gulf Cartel handled as much as "one-third of all cocaine shipments" into the United States from the Cali Cartel suppliers. During the 1990s, the PGR (Procuraduría General de la República), the Mexican attorney general's office, estimated that the Gulf Cartel was "worth over US$10 billion."
Corruption in the United States
García Ábrego's ties extended beyond the Mexican government corruption and into the United States. With the arrest of one of García Ábrego's traffickers, Juan Antonio Ortiz, it became known the cartel would ship tons of cocaine in the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) buses between the years of 1986 to 1990. The buses made great transportation, as Antonio Ortiz noted since they were never stopped at the border.
It also became known that, in addition to the INS bus scam, García Ábrego had a "special deal" with members of the Texas National Guard who would truck tons of cocaine and marijuana from South Texas to Houston for the cartel.
Garcia Abrego's reach became known when a United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent named Claude de la O, in 1986, stated in testimony against García Ábrego that he received over US$100,000 in bribes and had leaked information that could have endangered an FBI informant as well as Mexican journalists. In 1989 Claude was removed from the case for unknown reasons, retiring a year later. García Ábrego bribed the agent in an attempt to gather more information on U.S. law enforcement operations.
Arrest of Ábrego
García Ábrego's business had grown to such length that the FBI placed him on the Top Ten Most Wanted in 1995. He was the first drug trafficker to be on that list. On 14 January 1996, García Ábrego was arrested outside a ranch in Monterrey, Nuevo León. He was quickly extradited to the United States where he stood trial eight months after his arrest. García Ábrego was convicted for 22 counts of money laundering, drug possession and drug trafficking. Jurors also ordered the seizure of $350 million of García Ábrego's assets — $75 million more than what was previously planned. Juan García Ábrego is currently serving 11 life terms in a maximum security prison in Colorado, United States. In 1996, it was disclosed that García Ábrego's organization paid millions of dollars in bribes to politicians and law enforcement officers for his protection. It was later proven after his arrest that the deputy attorney general in charge of Mexico's federal Judicial Police had accumulated more than US$9 million for protecting García Ábrego.
García Ábrego's arrest was even subject to allegations of corruption. It is believed the Mexican government knew all García Ábrego's whereabouts all along and had refused to arrest him due to information he possessed about the extent of corruption within the government. The arresting officer, a FJP commander, is believed to have received a bullet-proof Mercury Grand Marquis and US$500,000 from a rival cartel for enacting the arrest of García Ábrego.
Further theories put forward to allege the arrest of García Ábrego was to satisfy U.S. demands and meet certification, from the Department of Justice (DOJ), as a trade partner, the vote set to take place on 1 March. García Ábrego was apprehended on 14 January 1996, and Mexico shortly after received certification on 1 March.
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United States v. García Ábrego
Upon his capture outside Monterrey, Nuevo León, García Ábrego was flown to Mexico City where U.S. federal agent took him on a private plane to Houston, Texas. Wearing slacks and a striped shirt, García Ábrego was immediately extradited to the United States where he was interviewed by an FBI agent, and confessed to have "ordered people murdered and tortured", bribed top Mexican officials, and smuggled tons of narcotics into the United States. His prosecutors, however, tried García Ábrego as a U.S. citizen because he also had an American birth certificate, although Mexican authorities claimed the certificate was "fraudulent." He also had an official birth certificate that claimed García Ábrego was indeed born in Mexico. According to The Brownsville Herald, García Ábrego went into the courtroom grinning and talking animatedly with his lawyers who helped him translate his words from Spanish into the English language. Hours after the judge told García Ábrego that he was going to spend the rest of his life in prison, the death penalty was out of the question for the prosecutors.
According to the factual documents presented in court on 8 May 1998, the Matamoros-based criminal syndicate of the Gulf Cartel was responsible for trafficking tremendous amounts of narcotics into the United States from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, and García Ábrego was given eleven life sentences in prison. During the four-week trial, 84 witnesses, ranging from "law enforcement officers to convicted drug smugglers", confessed that García Ábrego smuggled loads of Colombian cocaine on planes and then stored them in several border cities along the Mexico–United States border before being smuggled to the Rio Grande Valley.
In addition, it was brought up that García Ábrego had previously been arrested in Brownsville, Texas for six-year-old auto theft charges, but was released later with no charges whatsoever. Two men from the Rio Grande Valley were charged before the drug lord's arrest for laundering more than $30 million for García Ábrego. He was also held responsible in 1984 for the massacre of 6 people in La Clínica Raya, a hospital where rival drug members were being treated, and was also blamed for the massacre of the Cereso prison in 1991, where 18 prisoners were slain—both in Matamoros, Tamaulipas.
After García-Ábrego era
Following Ábrego's 1996 arrest by Mexican authorities and subsequent deportation to the United States, a power vacuum was left and several top members fought for leadership.
Humberto García Ábrego, brother of Juan García Ábrego, tried to take the lead of the Gulf Cartel, but ultimately failed. He did not have the leadership skills nor the support of the Colombian drug provisioners. In addition, he was under observation and was widely known, since his surname meant more of the same. He was replaced by Óscar Malherbe de León and Raúl Valladares del Ángel, until their arrest a short time later, causing several cartel lieutenants to fight for the leadership. Malherbe tried to bribe officials $2 million for his release, but was denied.
Hugo Baldomero Medina Garza, known as El Señor Padrino de los Tráilers (the lord of the Trailers), is considered one of the most important members in the rearticulation of the Gulf Cartel. He was one of the top officials of the cartel for more than 40 years, trafficking about 20 tons of cocaine to the United States each month. In November 2000, he was captured in Tampico, Tamaulipas and imprisoned in La Palma. After Medina Garza's arrest, his cousin Adalberto Garza Dragustinovis was investigated for allegedly forming part of the Gulf Cartel and for money laundering. The next in line was Sergio Gómez alias El Checo, however, he was assassinated in April 1996 in Valle Hermoso, Tamaulipas. After this, Osiel Cárdenas Guillén took control of the cartel in July 1999 after assassinating Salvador Gómez Herrera alias El Chava, co-leader of the Gulf Cartel and close friend of his, earning him the name Mata Amigos (Friend Killer).
Osiel Cárdenas Guillén's era
As confrontations with rival groups heated up, Osiel Cárdenas Guillén sought and recruited over 30 deserters of the Mexican Army's elite Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFE) to form part of the cartel's armed wing. Los Zetas, as they are known, served as the hired private mercenary army of the Gulf Cartel. Nevertheless, after the arrest and extradition of Cárdenas, internal struggles led to a rupture between the Gulf and the Zetas.
Los Zetas
In 1997 the Gulf Cartel began to recruit military personnel whom Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, an Army General of that time, had assigned as representatives from the PGR offices in certain states across Mexico. After his imprisonment a short time later, Jorge Madrazo Cuéllar created the National Public Security System (SNSP), to fight the drug cartels along the U.S.–Mexico border. After Osiel Cárdenas Guillén took full control of the Gulf Cartel in 1999, he found himself in a no-holds-barred fight to keep his notorious organization and leadership untouched, and sought out members of the Mexican Army Special Forces to become the military armed wing of the Gulf Cartel. His goal was to protect himself from rival drug cartels and from the Mexican military, to perform vital functions as the leader of the most powerful drug cartel in Mexico. Among his first contacts was Arturo Guzmán Decena, an Army lieutenant whom Cárdenas reportedly asked to look for the "best men possible." Consequently, Guzmán Decenas deserted from the Armed Forces and brought more than 30 army deserters to form part of Cárdenas' new criminal paramilitary wing. They were enticed with salaries much higher than those of the Mexican Army. Among the original defectors were Jaime González Durán, Jesús Enrique Rejón Aguilar, and Heriberto Lazcano, who would later become the supreme leader of the independent cartel of Los Zetas. The creation of Los Zetas brought a new era of drug trafficking in Mexico, and little did Cárdenas know that he was creating the most violent drug cartel in the country. Between 2001 and 2008, the organization of the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas was collectively known as La Compañía (The Company).
One of the first missions of Los Zetas was to eradicate Los Chachos, a group of drug traffickers under the orders of the Milenio Cartel, who disputed the drug corridors of Tamaulipas with the Gulf Cartel in 2003. This gang was controlled by Dionisio Román García Sánchez, alias El Chacho, who had decided to betray the Gulf Cartel and switch his alliance with the Tijuana Cartel; he was eventually killed by Los Zetas. Once Cárdenas consolidated his position and supremacy, he expanded the responsibilities of Los Zetas, and as years passed, they became much more important for the Gulf Cartel. They began to organize kidnappings; impose taxes, collect debts, and operate protection rackets; control the extortion business; securing cocaine supply and trafficking routes known as plazas (zones) and executing foes, often with grotesque savagery. In response to the rising power of the Gulf Cartel, the rival Sinaloa Cartel established a heavily armed, well trained enforcer group known as Los Negros. The group was similar to Los Zetas, but with less complexity and success. There is a circle of experts who believe that the start of the Mexican drug war did not begin in 2006 (when Felipe Calderón sent troops to Michoacán to stop the increasing violence), but in 2004 in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, when the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas fought off the Sinaloa Cartel and Los Negros.
In 2002, there were three main divisions of the Cartel, all ruled over by Cárdenas and led by Jorge Eduardo "El Coss" Costilla Sanchez, Antonio "Tony Tormenta" Cárdenas Guillen, and Heriberto "El Lazca" Lazcano Lazcano.
Upon the arrest of the Gulf Cartel boss Cárdenas in 2003 and his extradition in 2007, the panorama for Los Zetas changed—they started to become synonymous with the Gulf Cartel, and their influences grew within the organization. Los Zetas began to grow independently from the Gulf Cartel, and eventually a rupture occurred between them in early 2010.
From Wikipedia’s article on Gulf Cartel, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4