EPISODE TWO. The investigation leads to the depths…
By: Molly Molloy
Tags: Big Stories Matter, Crime, Mexico

Chapter Six

THE DIET OF A DON —

LOTS OF BEEF AND HOT PEPPERS

Jorge Godoy, the first eyewitness from the house where Camarena was murdered, sits in an anonymous office in an anonymous strip mall in Southern California. He leans over a computer and scans the blocks and byways of Guadalajara on Google Earth. Here, he points, and here and here and here, as he locates the many houses of Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, also called Don Neto, the man he served for about a year.

Godoy wears Dickies slacks, a blue shirt, glasses, and his fleshy face glows with excitement as he virtually prowls the streets where he was young and someone to be reckoned with.

He was in his mid-20s then, when the abduction, torture, and murder of the DEA agent upended his world. He is an encyclopedia of a subject seldom broached by agents or the press: the care and feeding of leaders in the drug industry. You must know the right brandy to pour, how to ease the tobacco out of a cigarette and replace it with cocaine paste (basuco). He sweats while describing the rigor required of a bodyguard who can never be off duty, the stamina needed to keep the ashtrays empty and the liquor and drugs circulating at fiestas that can last three or four days. And he has the intelligence to understand that while justice is merely a word, power is real.

Godoy’s future had looked quite different once. He went to Bell High School in Los Angeles. His mother had nursed Vietnam veterans in a hospital in Guadalajara. Jorge was determined to be a soldier. But after he graduated from high school, the U.S. Army rejected him because he was illegal. So, in 1979, he returned to Guadalajara. A friend there worked with the state attorney’s office and told Godoy he could get him on with the state police.

He looks up and says of that time, “I believed in doing justice. I had a noble heart. And I wanted to be a policeman.”

He was 17. He goes straight onto the force.

He is assigned to work with the federal police as they fly in helicopters searching for marijuana fields. They have maps with fields marked, and the maps have a simple purpose: “These ones we investigate, these we do not.” Those who pay have their crops protected, those who do not pay have their crops destroyed to satisfy the Americans.

There is a day when Godoy is a young cop and Rubén Zuno Arce, son of one of the city’s most prominent families, comes out of his fine house on Lope de Vega Street and discovers two federal policemen apparently on stakeout. He dispatches each cop with a bullet to the head. Zuno Arce has been known to DEA as a heroin trafficker since 1975. Zuno Arce’s father, former governor of the state of Jalisco, is recently dead, his body buried in a cemetery adjacent to the airport. Godoy learns that the body is being exhumed and will be reburied elsewhere; he knows Zuno will be there to observe the procedure. So Godoy and his partner drive to the airport to arrest the cop-killer. On the way, they get a call from dispatch: “Do not arrest Rubén Zuno Arce. If you do, we cannot protect you.” This is part of Godoy’s preparatory schooling before he becomes a bodyguard to Fonseca.

Later Godoy will see Zuno Arce at the parties and meetings of the drug capos. The Zuno family were founders of the University of Guadalajara, capital of the state of Jalisco. At one of the narco-fiestas, the current governor of Jalisco arrives in a dress and blond wig as a kind of wink at the proprieties of hanging out with international criminals. And virtually all of the capos have federal police credentials to ease their way through roadblocks.

The fundamentals of this system do not change. The drug world meshes with the government in a joint operation that shares money and power. The government hosts those traditional elites who have had their boot heels on the necks of the poor since long before the market for heroin, cocaine, and marijuana inflated the national economy in Mexico. The drug capos rise from the underclass, briefly flourish, then vanish into prisons or graves. The system, and the rich who thrive on the system, they endure for generations. This is the way it has always been, and for Jorge Godoy the police work and the assignment to Ernesto Fonseca’s bodyguard detail are his big chance to rise.

By 1983 he is introduced to Rafael Caro Quintero and to Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo at the Lebanese Club in Guadalajara. His corrupt commander explains, “These guys are going to be your bosses.” The group at the club includes officers from the Mexican Directorate of Federal Security (DFS), an investigative agency patterned on the FBI and trained by the CIA, and federal police. Antonio Gárate Bustamante, who later becomes an informant in the Camarena investigation, is there. During the meeting, a subordinate arrives and announces: “The mission is accomplished, we killed the guy.” Godoy will learn that fiestas do not interrupt the schedule of executions. Cigarettes are loaded up with basuco and money is handed around. He’s told to use a little coke in order to be sociable, but not too much.

Godoy enters a world without regular hours. He is to live with Fonseca and be on duty 24 hours day, seven days a week. If Fonseca got up in the middle of the night, so did Godoy.

“I would be there like a watchdog.”

The drug capos own several restaurants. After they arrive no one can enter or leave. To make up for the inconvenience, they pick up the tab for everyone. At the houses, women take care of the cooking. The bosses often have several women and each will have her own house, and a basuco-smoking priest takes care of the multiple marriages. Sometimes during the day, Fonseca would be in his room with a woman — “He looked like a Christmas tree with all his jewelry.”

The fiestas require lots of steaks. The leaders come from Sinaloa and they crave the diet of a vaquero: beef, hot peppers. And a lot of seafood, grilled or in soups. It is not a fancy diet — no matter how rich the capos get, they prefer corn tortillas to flour. They want their coffee dark and very strong.

It’s a humdrum life, the millions in drug profits sloshing around become just one more detail. There is a room where Fonseca stores ready cash and Godoy speculates that the rats chew through at least a million dollars a year that sink to the bottom of the pile. The parties roar in and consume three or four days. Godoy must attend to a room where guests can have all the drugs and liquor they desire. And women.