Hugo Fernandez

**Hugo Fernandez** (also known as "**El Lobo**", "**Zorro**" and "**Camionero Villanueva**") was a Solíno mafia boss and criminal.

This article might be a part of New and Improved Solís, but the author did not really specify.

## Brief summary

After a very modest start as a bodyguard and armed wing of the Villanueva clan, still small and irrelevant at the time, under his direction he expanded the interests of the clan to the sale of weapons and oil, making it one of the most influential companies in the island. After a phase of collaboration with the Mano Negra, which gave him almost *carte blanche* in the rich city, he came into conflict with Espinosa after selling a shipment of weapons to the Army of Chaos. His business became clandestine but continued prosperous until the discovery of the boss's lair, where he was killed in an attempted capture.

## Life

### Youth and first crimes

Hugo Fernandez was born in the village of La Thak on March 3, 1959. Son of the fisherman Thiago Fernandez and of the housewife Donna Chavez, he experienced firsthand the growing disparities that came with the expansion of the Solíno economy; the slums, instead of disappearing, were hidden and buried under a blanket of concrete and tropical plants. Around the age of 14, while he was starting to attend the technical institute in nearby Villanueva, he founded a small band of thugs, gathered from the slums of his town, which he began to manage with the shrewdness and mentality of a businessman; the precise and unscrupulous actions earned him the title of "Zorro", or fox. Under his leadership, the La Thak cartel became the supply center of soft and hard drugs for the criminals of Villanueva; the city, far from Espinoza control, was beginning to be a famous home of drugs and lust. The gang, initially called *Los hijos de la Thak* and then only *Los hijos*, began its ascent into the criminal network, until the now 18-year-old Fernandez was accepted into one of Villanueva's historic gangs, *Los Brutos.* His first major criminal operation was transporting 500kg of cocaine by sea to Puerto Diego; the first crime was the murder, committed in 1978 together with four other members of the gang, of the Quya mafioso John de Lèon, who had obstructed the plans of the clan.

After the leader of the Brutos, the Italian-Hispanic Mario Pèrez, was gunned down by killers from the Aguaclara clan, it was Fernandez who took care of the revenge; he cut deals with the El Abismo-Kullu clan, which transported goods along the Rio Wanay to Lake Hatun, and blew up the car of one of the Aguaclarino bosses, imposing the fictitious company Pescado Cargo as the main transporter of, in theory, of the fishes from Villanueva and La Thak, but in fact of smuggled goods.

### Fernandez's empire expands

Fernandez's criminal empire then expanded to employ a large part of the port of Watasumag; initially the two companies that had a monopoly on the port, Espetrol and Armadillo, opposed the presence of Pescado Cargo in the harbor. However, the management of the port was forcibly changed by the Black Hand and mafia affiliates in the Espinoza government ensured that the port was commanded by the Italian-Portuguese collaborator Tomàs Caruso, who gave several concessions for seats on the pier to Pescado. The result was a deep split with the economic section of the Black Hand; the department, which owned Espetrol and had deep ties to Armadillo for the supply of cargo vehicles, lobbied the justice ministry to open an investigation into Pescado's activities.

At about the same time, Villanueva was purged of competition. The only three gangs in the city, which in the meantime had grown economically and in height thanks to the "help" of the mafias, were now the *Brutos*, the *Bustillo* (main administrators of a prostitution racket) and the *Holguìn*, who owned most of the businesses of sea transport. The *Hoguìn* turned against the *Brutos* for a series of unpaid loans; the latter began a heavy war for the control of the port, which resulted in two bloody massacres. The *Brutos* attacked the offices of the boss Thiago Lucero, killing a large part of his entourage and destroying part of the trafficking documents; the next day the same boss, who was already planning to cease most of the activities and reduce himself to a subsidiary of the *Brutos*, was killed by the explosion of a bomb filled with iron shrapnel under the porch of his restaurant at the port. The remaining members of the *Hoguìn* were assimilated into the gang, starting to refer to the boss as *Lobo* or *El Lobo* to deride his unscrupulous violence; soon the term became a custom to speak of the maximum power of the town of gold and blood. The *Bustillo* instead decided to surrender spontaneously to the group, as long as they formed their subsidiary; Fernandez accepted, put their boss in charge of the management of the brothels and chose two new agents for traffic control on the port and at sea (thus also assimilating the Pescado in the former Conquistador clan) and one for quality control and transport on land. He first created the fictitious company Banda, under which a variant of a conveyor belt was marketed, and then used it to transport goods along the wide, modern roads of the island, an activity which he personally supervised and brought the newspapers and inhabitants. to trivially nickname him *El Camionero Villanueva*, the truck driver. In his long travels, he met and became friends with the boss of the Carvalho clan, Renato Escamilla, and made extensive deals to regulate drug trafficking in Aguaclara. His relationship with Escamilla was close, and they often avoided conflict.

To secure his own interests and the continuation of the activities of the Hijos de Puta, he lobbied for the legalization of prostitution in the Umiňa region; however, the previous disagreements with the Mano Negra led to the collapse of the idea. Fernandez carried out his revenge with unspeakable ferocity: he detonated a car bomb in Nueva Voz, killing the ministers of transport and the economy, ordered the governor of the region to be shot in the legs (an usual type of revenge for Italian mobsters) and raided the town hall, destroying the city archive of Villanueva. The escalation of violence received extensive press coverage; Oscar Espinoza, who succeeded his late father, was forced to act, but slowed down after the El Abismo insurrection developed into a huge movement that soon conquered the political prison of Casquillos Vacìos. At the same time, however, Fernandez took advantage of the crisis to expand again; assumed the fictitious identity of Moretti S.p.a. and ordered a shipment of obsolete weapons which he resold at lower prices to the newly formed Army of Chaos, while at the same time taking an import of weapons from the Black Hand and reselling them at a lower price than the competition, but still amply sufficient for the profit. Similar actions were rarely repeated, but trade with the Army remained standing and the fictitious Moretti was the main supplier of weapons to the rebels for much of the conflict.

Still, the war brought also pain. Fernandez mourned the death of his close friend, Escamilla, which had killed himself after much of his entourage and substances had gone destroyed in the battle for Quya; still, he immediately took his affairs in his hands.

With ample earnings supporting him, Fernandez expanded the drug business to include morphine and cocaine in his already extensive catalog; the elites of the government and of the cities began to supply from him, while the brothel business also grew, with the concession from the corrupt owner of the *Triunfo* Hotel to use the first and last floor of the structure as a pleasure house. As earnings grew, Fernandez started at least three recycling businesses: Pescado entered into partnership with Espetrol and invested large earnings in oil transportation, entrusted part of his capital to Swiss and Luxembourgeoise banks, and most of them were laundered in a casino. through rigged winnings, all with so much success in Solís' corrupt economy that no one was able to resist when he bought a large house in the very expensive Ensueňo. Although the earnings from the sale of arms were already high, the largest of the *Brutos* ' revenues came when they supplied explosives to the partisans Yago Jesùs and Javier Rubio-Jimenez for the murder of general Alonso Benitez, an operation for which they were paid with a mere 12,300 dollars. . The mafia took the risk thinking of getting more space for operations, but instead the Espinoza government attacked them with much more violence and the boss was forced to go underground. With the conquest of Prospero Astillero, the boss's activity intensified: several drug shipments were planned to Manquswasi, isolated since the conquest, and two fishing boats were sent to stipulate contracts for the reopening of the port of Quya. A severe blow was dealt to the empire with the siege of Aguaclara, which destroyed the warehouse arm of the group; when all Cresta fell and the capital was abruptly moved to Illapa, business also moved north, with Los Molinillos remaining the only mafia center in the south.

However, the Mano Negra was not unaware of the activities of the clan; a *Brutos* car was in fact stopped and hijacked by the army, with all its members being murdered shortly after, and several other exponents were arrested, which led to an attack on a nearby military checkpoint; at the same time, ANDEPS (Agencia Nacional de Policìa de Seguridad) opened an investigation against the mafia, which was first slowed down by the advance of the front and the evacuation of the headquarters in Vista Futura and subsequently accelerated enormously by the confession of two repentants. Meanwhile Fernandez had evacuated Villanueva, becoming a fugitive and destroying much of his business; he kept active in his native land only the prostitution ring at the Triunfo hotel, now an hospital, protected from corruption, while most of the drug trafficking moved to the desert and towards the elite. In view of decreasing earnings, Fernandez sold his villa.

### The end

On March 4, 2019, the day after the birthday, two intelligence battalions of the Mano Negra conducted a thorough search in the houses of Ensueňo and La Cuenca; the next day again in Punto Norte, Grillos and Solitaria, followed by the explosion of a car bomb on the railway at Cerros Empolvados. Fernandez's attempt to divert the investigation to the south failed completely; the Mano Negra carefully monitored the increase in "donations" to the Ensueňo church and the purchase of the parking lot in front of it, which now imposed a toll, drawing them as an indication that the boss was active in the area. At the same time, it seemed that he was a recluse in the house; there were few passers-by seen that seemed to coincide with his identikit, and all different, sighted even simultaneously in various areas of the city.

However, based on the photos and confessions provided by a repentant, he was recognized as a man spotted repeatedly in the green area of the city and in the vicinity of the church; in addition, a face compatible with identikits was recognized at least twice in a man walking near the former villa of Fernandez. For several days, various different cars began to slow down in front of the villa until one of its inhabitants was recognized as the boss's wife. The next day, April 1, even before the car passed and the Fernandezes could be alarmed, 15 men broke into the house. The boss opposed the capture, opening fire with an automatic pistol at the agents; he managed to reach the garden, but not the shotgun kept in a cupboard. He then attempted to assault the soldiers, who had come from the right flank, only to be shot in the back from a second team as he was trying to jump in the lake.

The clan archives were first seized and then analyzed in depth, which revealed only marginal activities and revealed that donations to the church were a means of laundering money after Fernandez had become co-owner with the corrupt ecclesiastical caste; the house was not returned to its owner, the assistant of the boss Johnny Tajazor, but seized and then abandoned after the fall of the Espinosa government.

## Private life

The boss married Marita Fonseca in a religious ceremony in La Thak, on June 16, 1980; she had two sons, Mario and Leòn, of whom only Mario followed his father's career. In fact, Leon decided to break away from the criminal life, enrolling in the institute and getting help from the Army, with whom he then tried to collaborate. Mario tried in vain to maintain his father's inheritance and empire, which however disintegrated almost immediately and split into a host of small clans. The *Brutos* disintegrated with the death of Mario, assassinated by a rival clan.

## Controversies

From the beginning, the Black Hand was accused of greatly underestimating the danger of the mafia in Solís. Growing up in the years of the economic collapse that characterized Leon Espinosa's government, the mafia was deeply rooted in the island and therefore difficult to deal with; however, many have assumed that in reality Oscar Espinosa's government was instead marked by a passive collaboration with the criminal group. Although the government was then forced to intervene, it is obvious that no one did anything when the *Brutos* eliminated the enemy clans.

The same was said of the Army of Chaos; not only did they actively collaborate with the mafia, supplying it with money while buying weapons from them until they began their production, but often allowed it to maintain its business both in remote regions such as the El Abismo-Kullu cartel and in larger, more important ones, such as the unloading center at the port of Watasumag or Quya, the main trading center.

In addition, it is mainly an accusation launched by the Espinosa government to be considered: that is, that most of the rebels were mafia themselves, deeply involved in the trafficking and use of the drugs sold, dependent on the mafia in all aspects. It is undeniable that the help of the clan was more than fundamental to keep the rebellion going, just as the presence of affiliates in the Army's network should not be underestimated; however, we are a far cry from the army of mad, drugged-up gangsters that Espinosa had tried to slander. In fact, there is no evidence that the rebels' plans included the legalization of various drugs or prostitution, as also supposed by the government; indeed, a prohibitionist movement was very strong in the most extreme fringes, which saw their enemy as a dissolute army.