Free Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers by Roberto Saviano Page B

drug trafficking linked to the CIA was very delicate, and it would be better not to discuss it. He sent a group of agents supposedly to protect the columnist and his family. Nonetheless, forty-one days later, Manuel Buendía was killed by members of the DFS. Just one hour after that, “Velasco”—Buendía’s main source for the CIA story—was also killed, in Veracruz. 9
    The DEA’s secret report notes that:
The DFS allegedly excluded the [PJF] from the investigation and removed all Buendía’s files concerning the information on CIA arms smuggling and the connection the CIA had to narcotic traffickers. Shortly thereafter Eden Pastor [ sic ], 10 aka Comandante Zero, another individual who had given Buendía information about CIA arms smuggling, allegedly suffered a CIA sponsored bomb attack while traveling in Costa Rica.
    Lawrence Harrison, or Torre Blanca, also told the Operation Leyenda investigators that a German identified as Gerhard Mertins—who lived in Mexico City from 1981 to 1985—had a company in Guadalajara called Merex: “I knew that Mertins had links with the CIA in relation to arms trafficking,” he told them. This was entirely verifiable, since Mertins was known to the DEA. A former member of the SS, after the Second World War he became the German Federal Republic’s biggest arms exporter.
    Buendía had published information about Mertins and the CIA in his column in Excélsior , after which the German is thought to have left Mexico. According to the DEA report, Mertins was working for a powerful Guadalajara family. Harrison told the investigators: “I have heard that the Leaño family controls large marijuana plantations in Jalisco, the same area of Mexico where Mertins used to sell large quantities of weaponry.”
    Apparently, some colleagues of Buendía’s obtained information to the effect that high-ranking PRI politicians were assisting the CIA with arms smuggling, and were also informed about the Agency’s links with drug lords. By 1990 it was common knowledge that several narcotic traffickers had financed the Contra,while poisoning US society with their wares—both activities with Washington’s approval.
    According to Torre Blanca, before Velasco, the reporter from Veracruz, was murdered, he had been working on a story about how the CIA, using the DFS as cover, was responsible for setting up and operating clandestine landing strips used for refueling the planes carrying arms to Honduras and Nicaragua. The pilots, said Harrison, then loaded up with cocaine in Barranquilla, Colombia and flew it to Miami. Mexico was again the refueling point. Thus the DEA report confirms that it was the CIA that really operated the drug smuggling and the secret landing strips that were used.
    Torre Blanca went on to talk about the bribes allegedly taken by Major General Vinicio Santoyo Feria, the then commander of the Fifth Military Region, and about Santoyo’s relations with the lawyer Everardo Rojas Contreras, who worked for Don Neto and Caro Quintero. The report affirms that for the last three years Rojas had been acting as General Santoyo’s assistant in the purchase and management of real estate, involving large sums whose provenance could not be explained. For example, Santoyo bought a ranch in Puerto Vallarta for $600,000. This sum, the report claims, was actually part of the money Santoyo received for “extorting” Félix Gallardo and Salcido El Cochiloco, when they were arrested in Guadalajara in November 1988 by troops under Santoyo’s orders.
    Harrison renewed contact with Félix Gallardo three years after Camarena’s murder: he visited him in 1988 in one of his Guadalajara residences. Despite the arrests of Don Neto and Caro Quintero, Félix Gallardo continued his narcotics operations in peace until April 8, 1989, when he was arrested by a corrupt ex-associate of his, the PGF chief Guillermo González Calderoni.
    In July 1990, extracts from the secret DEA report were published in the main US