The Border

May 2014

Keller looks down at the photo of the skeleton.

Blades of grass poke up through the ribs; vines wrap around the leg bones as if trying to strap the body to the earth.

“Is it Barrera?” Keller asks.

Barrera’s been off the radar for a year and a half. Now these photos have just come in from the DEA Guatemala City field office. Guatemalan special forces found the bones in the Petén, in the rain forest about a kilometer from the village of Dos Erres, where Barrera was last seen.

Tom Blair, the head of DEA’s Intelligence Unit, lays down a different photo on Keller’s desk, this of the skeleton lying on a gurney. “The height matches.”

Barrera is short, Keller knows, a shade under five seven, but that could describe a lot of people, especially in the undernourished Mayan regions of Guatemala.

Blair spreads more photos on the desk—a close-up of the skull next to a facial shot of Adán Barrera. Keller recognizes the image: it was taken fifteen years ago, when Barrera was booked into the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego.

Keller put him there.

The face looks back at him.

Familiar, almost intimate.

“Orbitals match,” Blair is saying, “brain case measurements identical. We’d need dental and DNA analysis to be a hundred percent, but …”

We’ll have dental records and DNA samples from Barrera’s stay in the American prison system, Keller thinks. It would be highly doubtful that any useful DNA could be pulled from a skeleton that had been rotting in the rain forest for more than a year, but Keller can see in the photos that the jaw is still intact.

And he knows in his gut that the dental records are going to match.

“The way the back of the skull is blown out,” Blair says, “I’d say two shots to the face, close range, fired downward. Barrera was executed, by someone who wanted him to know it was coming. It would match the Dos Erres theory.”

The Dos Erres theory, a particular pet of the DEA’s Sinaloa Working Group, postulates that in October 2012, Adán Barrera and his partner and father-in-law, Ignacio Esparza, traveled with a large, armed entourage to Guatemala for a peace conference with their rivals, an especially vicious drug cartel known as the Zetas. There was a factual precedent for this—Barrera had sat down with the Zeta leadership at a similar conference back in 2006, divided Mexico into territories, and created a short-lived peace that fell apart into an even more violent and costly war. The theory continues that Barrera and the Zeta leader Heriberto Ochoa met in the remote village of Dos Erres in the Petén District of Guatemala and again carved up Mexico like a Thanksgiving turkey. At a party to celebrate the peace, the Zetas ambushed and slaughtered the Sinaloans.

Neither Barrera nor Esparza had been seen or heard from since the reputed meeting, nor had Ochoa or his right-hand man, Miguel Morales, also known as Forty. And there was intelligence to support the theory that a large gunfight occurred in Dos Erres—D-2, the military unit that controls Guatemalan intelligence, had gone in and found scores of corpses, some in the remnants of a large bonfire, which was consistent with the Zeta practice of burning bodies.

The Zetas, once the most feared cartel in Mexico, went into steep decline after the alleged Dos Erres conference, further suggesting that their leadership had been killed and that they had suffered mass casualties.

The Sinaloa cartel had not experienced a similar decline. To the contrary, it had become the undisputed power, by far the most dominant cartel, and had imposed a sort of peace on a Mexico that had seen a hundred thousand people killed in ten years of drug violence.

And Sinaloa was sending more drugs than ever into the United States, not only the marijuana, methamphetamine and cocaine that had made the cartel wealthy beyond measure, but also masses of heroin.

All of which argued against the Dos Erres theory and for the rival “empty coffin theory” that Barrera had, in fact, decimated the Zetas in Dos Erres, then staged his own death and was now running the cartel from a remote location.

Again, there was ample precedent—over the years several cartel bosses had faked their deaths to relieve relentless DEA pressure. Cartel soldiers had raided coroners’ offices and stolen the bodies of their bosses to prevent positive identification and to encourage rumors that their jefes were still on the right side of the grass.

Indeed, as Keller has often pointed out to his subordinates, none of the bodies of the leaders alleged to have been killed in Dos Erres have ever been found. And while it is widely accepted that Ochoa and Forty have gone to their reward, the fact that Sinaloa just keeps humming along like a machine lends credence to the empty coffin theory.

But the absence of any appearances by Barrera over the past year and a half indicates otherwise. While he always tended to be reclusive, Barrera usually would have shown up with his young wife, Eva, for holiday celebrations in his hometown of La Tuna, Sinaloa, or for New Year’s Eve at a resort town like Puerto Vallarta or Mazatlán. No such sightings have been reported. Furthermore, digital surveillance has revealed no emails, tweets, or other social media messages; phone monitoring has revealed no telephonic communications.

Barrera has numerous estancias in Sinaloa and Durango in addition to houses in Los Mochis, along the coast. The DEA knows about these residences and there are doubtless others. But satellite photos of these locations have shown a decided lessening of traffic in and out. Ordinarily, when Barrera was moving from one location to another, there would be an increase in traffic of bodyguards and support personnel, a spike in internet and cell-phone communications as his people arranged logistics, and a heavier communications footprint among state and local police on the Sinaloa cartel payroll.

The absence of any of this would tend to support the Dos Erres theory, that Barrera is dead.

But the question—if Barrera isn’t running the cartel, who is?—has yet to be answered, and the Mexican rumor mill is full to capacity with Barrera sightings in Sinaloa, Durango, Guatemala, Barcelona, even in San Diego where his wife (or widow?) and two small sons live. “Barrera” has even sent texts and Twitter messages that have fueled a cult of “Adán vive” disciples, who leave hand-painted signs along roadsides to that effect.

Members of Barrera’s immediate family—especially his sister, Elena—have gone to some lengths to not confirm his death, and any ambiguity surrounding his status gives the cartel time to try to arrange an orderly succession.

The Dos Erres theory believers aver that the cartel has a vested interest in keeping Barrera “alive” and is putting out these messages as disinformation—a living Barrera is to be feared, and that fear helps keep potential enemies from challenging Sinaloa. Some of the theory’s strongest adherents even posit that the Mexican government itself, desperate to maintain stability, is behind the Adán Vive movement.

The confirmation of Barrera’s death, if that’s what this is, Keller thinks, is going to send shock waves across the narco world.

“Who has custody of the body?” Keller asks.

“D-2,” Blair says.

“So Sinaloa already knows.” The cartel has deep sources in all levels of the Guatemalan government. And the CIA already knows, too, Keller thinks. D-2 has been penetrated by everybody. “Who else in DEA knows about this?”

“Just the Guat City RAC, you, and me,” Blair says. “I thought you’d want to keep this tight.”

Blair is smart and loyal enough to make sure that Keller got this news first and as exclusively as possible. Art Keller is a good man to have as a boss and a dangerous man to have as an enemy.

Everyone in DEA knows about the vendetta between Keller and Adán Barrera, which goes all the way back to the 1980s, when Barrera participated in the torture-murder of Keller’s partner, Ernie Hidalgo.

And everyone knows that Keller was sent down to Mexico to recapture Barrera, but ended up taking down the Zetas instead.

Maybe literally.

The watercooler talk—more like whispers—speaks of the ruins of a wrecked Black Hawk helicopter in the village of Dos Erres, where the battle between the Zetas and Barrera’s Sinaloans allegedly took place. Sure, the Guatemalan army has American helicopters—so does the Sinaloa cartel for that matter—but the talk continues about a secret mission of American spec-op mercenaries who went in and took out the Zeta leadership, bin Laden style. And if you believe those rumors—dismissed as laughable grassy knoll fantasies by the DEA brass—you might also believe that on that mission was one Art Keller.

And now Keller, who took down both Adán Barrera and the Zetas, is the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency, the most powerful “drug warrior” in the world, commanding an agency with over 10,000 employees, 5,000 special agents, and 800 intelligence analysts.

“Keep it tight for now,” Keller says.

He knows that Blair hears the dog whistle—that what Keller really means is that he wants to keep this away from Denton Howard, the assistant administrator of the DEA, a political appointee who would like nothing more than to flay Keller alive and display the pelt on his office wall.

The chief whisperer of all things Keller—Keller has a questionable past, Keller has divided loyalties, a Mexican mother and a Mexican wife (did you know that his first name isn’t actually Arthur, it’s Arturo?), Keller is a cowboy, a loose cannon, he has blood on his hands, there are rumors that he was even there in Dos Erres—Howard is a cancer, going around the Intelligence Unit to work his own sources, cultivating personal diplomatic relationships in Mexico, Central America, Colombia, Europe, Asia, working the Hill, cuddling up to the media.

Keller can’t keep this news from him, but even a couple of hours’ head start will help. For one thing, the Mexican government has to hear this from me, Keller thinks, not from Howard, or worse, from Howard’s buddies at Fox News.

“Send the dental records to D-2,” Keller says. “They get our full cooperation.”

We’re talking hours, not days, Keller thinks, before this gets out there. Some responsible person in D-2 sent this to us, but someone else has doubtless put in a call to Sinaloa, and someone else will look to cash in with the media.

Because Adán Barrera has become in death what he never was in life.

A rock star.

It started, in of all places, with an article in Rolling Stone.

An investigative journalist named Clay Bowen started to chase down the rumors of a gun battle in Guatemala between the Zetas and the Sinaloa cartel and soon tripped over the fact that Adán Barrera had, in the snappy hip language of the story, “gone 414.” The journalistic Stanley went in search of his narco Livingstone and came up with nothing.

So that became his story.

Adán Barrera was the phantom, the will-o’-the-wisp, the mysterious, invisible power behind the world’s largest drug-trafficking organization, an elusive genius that law enforcement could neither catch nor even find. The story went back to Barrera’s “daring escape” from a Mexican prison in 2004 (“Daring,” my aching ass, Keller thought when he read the story—the man bought his way out of the prison and left from the roof in a helicopter), and now Barrera had made the “ultimate escape” by staging his own death.

In the absence of an interview with his subject, Bowen apparently talked to associates and family members (“anonymous sources say … unidentified people close to Barrera state that …”) who painted a flattering picture of Barrera—he gives money to churches and schools; he builds clinics and playgrounds; he’s good to his mother and his kids.

He brought peace to Mexico.

(This last quote made Keller laugh out loud. It was Barrera who started the war that killed a hundred thousand people, and he “brought peace” by winning it?)

Adán Barrera, drug trafficker and mass murderer, became a combination of Houdini, Zorro, Amelia Earhart, and Mahatma Gandhi. A misunderstood child of rural poverty who rose from his humble beginnings to wealth and power by selling a product that, after all, people wanted anyway, and who is now a benefactor, a philanthropist harassed and hunted by two governments that he brilliantly eludes and outwits.

The rest of the media took it up during a slow news cycle, and stories about Barrera’s disappearance ran on CNN, Fox, all the networks. He became a social media darling, with thousands playing a game of “Where’s Waldo?” on the internet, breathlessly speculating on the great man’s whereabouts. (Keller’s absolute favorite story was that Barrera had turned down an offer from Dancing with the Stars, or alternatively, was hiding out as the star of an NBC sitcom.) The furor faded, of course, as all these things do, save for a few die-hard bloggers and the DEA and the Mexican SEIDO, for whom the issue of Barrera’s existence or lack thereof wasn’t a game but deadly serious business.

And now, Keller thinks, it will start again.

The coffin is filled.

Now it’s the throne that’s empty.

We’re in a double bind, Keller thinks. The Sinaloa cartel is the key driver behind the heroin traffic. If we help take the cartel down, we destroy the Pax Sinaloa. If we lay off the cartel, we accept the continuation of the heroin crisis here.

The Sinaloa cartel has its agenda and we have ours, and Barrera’s “death” could create an irreconcilable conflict between promoting stability in Mexico and stopping the heroin epidemic in the United States.

The first requires the preservation of the Sinaloa cartel, the second requires its destruction.

The State Department and CIA will at least passively collude in Mexico’s partnership with the cartel, while the Justice Department and DEA are determined to shut down the cartel’s heroin operations.

There are other factions. The AG wants drug policy reforms, and so does the White House drug czar, but while the attorney general is going to leave soon anyway, the White House is more cautious. The president has all the courage and freedom of a lame duck, but doesn’t want to hand the conservatives any ammunition to fire at his potential successor who has to run in 2016.

And one of those conservatives is your own deputy, Keller thinks, who would like to see you and the reforms swept out in ’16 and preferably before. The Republicans already have the House and Senate, if they win the White House the new occupant will put in a new AG who will take us back to the heights—or depths, if you will—of the war on drugs, and one of the first people he’ll fire is you.

So the clock is ticking.

It’s your job, Keller thinks, to stop the flow of heroin into this country. The Sinaloa cartel—Adán’s legacy, the edifice he constructed, that you helped him construct—is slaughtering thousands of people and it has to die.

Check that—it won’t just die.

You have to kill it.

When Blair leaves, Keller starts working the phones.

First he puts in a call to Orduña.

“They found the body,” Keller says, without introduction.

“Where?”

“Where do you think?” Keller says. “I’m about to call SEIDO but I wanted you to know first.”

Because Orduña is clean—absolutely squeaky clean, taking neither money nor shit from anyone. His marines—with Keller’s help and intelligence from the US—had devastated the Zetas, and now Orduña is ready to take down the rest, including Sinaloa.

A silence, then Orduña says, “So champagne is in order.”

Next, Keller phones SEIDO, the Mexican version of a combined FBI and DEA, and speaks to the attorney general. It’s a delicate call because the Mexican AG would be offended that the Guatemalans contacted DEA before they contacted him. The relationship has always been fragile, all the more so because of Howard’s incessant meddling, but mostly because SEIDO has been, at various times, in Sinaloa’s pocket.

“I wanted to give you a heads-up right away,” Keller says. “We’re going to put out a press release, but we can hold it until you put out yours.”

“I appreciate that.”

The next call Keller makes is to his own attorney general.

“We want to get a statement out,” the AG says.

“We do,” Keller says, “but let’s hold it until Mexico can get it out first.”

“Why is that?”

“To let them save face,” Keller says. “It looks bad for them if they got the news from us.”

“They did get the news from us.”

“We have to work with them,” Keller says. “And it’s always good to have a marker. Hell, it’s not like we captured the guy—he got killed by other narcos.”

“Is that what happened?”

“Sure looks like it.” He spends five more minutes persuading the AG to hold the announcement and then calls a contact at CNN. “You didn’t get this from me, but Mexico is about to announce that Adán Barrera’s body has been found in Guatemala.”

“Jesus, can we run with that?”

“That’s your call,” Keller says. “I’m just telling you what’s about to happen. It will confirm the story that Barrera was killed after a peace meeting with the Zetas.”

“Then who’s been running the cartel?”

“Hell if I know.”

“Come on, Art.”

“Do you want to get out ahead of Fox,” Keller asks, “or do you want to stay on the phone asking me questions I can’t answer?”

Turns out it’s the former.

Martin’s Tavern has been in business since they repealed Prohibition in 1933 and has been a haven for Democratic pols ever since. Keller steps inside next to the booth where legend says that John Kennedy proposed to Jackie.

Camelot, Keller thinks.

Another myth, but one that he had profoundly believed in as a kid. He believed in JFK and Bobby, Martin Luther King Jr., Jesus and God. The first four having been assassinated, that leaves God, but not the one who’d inhabited Keller’s childhood in the place of his absent father, not the omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent deity who ruled with stern but fair justice.

That God died in Mexico.

Like a lot of gods, Keller thinks as the stale warmth of the cozy tavern hits him. Mexico is a country where the temples of the new gods are built on the gravesites of the old.

He climbs the narrow wooden stairs to the upstairs room where Sam Rayburn used to hold court, and Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson twisted arms to get their bills passed.

O’Brien sits alone in a booth. His full face is ruddy, his thick hair snow white, as befits a man in his seventies. His thick hand is wrapped around a squat glass. Another glass sits on the table.

O’Brien is a Republican. He just likes Martin’s.

“I ordered for you,” he says as Keller sits down.

“Thanks,” Keller says. “It is Barrera’s body. They just confirmed it.”

“What did you tell the attorney general?” O’Brien asks.

“What we know,” Keller says. “That our intelligence about a battle between the Zetas and Sinaloa turned out to be accurate, and that Barrera was apparently killed in the gunfight.”

O’Brien says, “If Dos Erres becomes a real story, we can be connected to Tidewater.”

“We can,” Keller says. “But there’s nothing to connect Tidewater to the raid.”

The company had dissolved and then re-formed in Arizona under a different flag. Twenty people went on the Guatemala mission. One KIA. His body was extracted, the family informed that he was killed in a training accident, and they agreed to an out-of-court settlement. Four wounded, also successfully extracted and treated at a facility in Costa Rica, the medical records destroyed and the men compensated according to the contractual terms. Of the remaining fifteen, one has been killed in a car accident, a second while under contract to another vendor. The other thirteen have no intention of breaching the confidentiality clauses in their contracts.

The Black Hawk that went down had no markings, and the guys blew it up before they exfilled. D-2 came in the next day and laundered the scene.

“I’m more worried about the White House getting nervous,” Keller says.

“I’ll keep them steady,” O’Brien says. “We got guns to each other’s heads, what we used to call ‘mutually assured destruction.’ And shit, when you think about it, if the public found out that POTUS went cowboy and whacked three of the world’s biggest drug dealers? In the current environment—the heroin epidemic—his approval rating would go through the roof.”

“Your Republican colleagues would try to impeach,” Keller says. “And you’d vote with them.”

There’s been talk of O’Brien running for president in 2016, most of it started by the senator himself.

O’Brien laughs. “In terms of sheer treachery, backstabbing and cutthroat, hand-to-hand combat—in terms of pure lethal killing power—the Mexican cartels have nothing on this town. Try to remember that.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“So you’re satisfied this won’t come back on us.”

“I am.”

O’Brien raises his glass. “Then here’s to the recently discovered dead.”

Keller finishes his drink.

Two hours later Keller looks at the image of Iván Esparza on the big screen of the briefing room. Esparza wears a striped norteño shirt, jeans, and shades, and stands in front of a private jet.

“Iván Archivaldo Esparza,” Blair says. “Age thirty. Born in Culiacán, Sinaloa. Eldest son of the late Ignacio ‘Nacho’ Esparza, one of the three principal partners in the Sinaloa cartel. Iván has two younger brothers, Oviedo and Alfredo, in order of seniority, all in the family business.”

The picture changes to a bare-chested Iván standing on a boat with other motor yachts in the background.

“Iván is a classic example of the group that has come to be known as Los Hijos,” Blair says. “‘The Sons.’ Replete with norteño-cowboy wardrobe, oversize jewelry, gold chains, backward baseball caps, exotic boots and multiple cars—Maseratis, Ferraris, Lamborghinis. He even has the diamond-encrusted handguns. And he posts photos of all this on social media.”

Blair shows some images from Iván’s blog:

A gold-plated AK-47 on the console of a Maserati convertible.

Stacks of twenty-dollar bills.

Iván posing with two bikini-clad young women.

Another chica sitting in the front seat of a car with the name Esparza tattooed on her long left leg.

Sports cars, boats, jet skis, more guns.

Keller’s favorite photos are of Iván in a hooded jacket bending over a fully grown lion stretched out in front of a Ferrari, and then one with two lion cubs in the front seat. The scar on Iván’s face is barely visible, but the cheekbone is still a little flattened.

“Now that Barrera is confirmed dead,” Blair says, “Iván is next in line to take over. Not only is he Nacho’s son, he’s Adán’s brother-in-law. The Esparza wing of the cartel has billions of dollars, hundreds of soldiers and heavy political influence. But there are other candidates.”

A picture of an elegant woman comes on the screen.

“Elena Sánchez Barrera,” Blair says, “Adán’s sister, once ran his Baja plaza but retired years ago, yielding the territory to Iván. She has two sons: Rudolfo, who did time here in the US for cocaine trafficking, and Luis. Elena is reputed to be out of the drug business now, as are her two sons. Most of the family money is now invested in legitimate businesses, but both Rudolfo and Luis occasionally run with Los Hijos, and as Adán’s blood nephews, they have to be considered potential heirs to the throne.”

A photo of Ricardo Núñez comes up.