Chapo, my breakfast companions said, was forged in the early years of the drug war. He was old-school. And for all his lunacy and willingness to do whatever it took to build his empire, he had been a kind of mitigating force — killing when he was betrayed, but staying away as much as possible from attacks against the government as long as the government allowed his business to operate. If he were allowed to get back to business, the breakfast bunch said, he’d take care of El Mencho — most likely in a spate of violence that, while painful, would be quietly treated by Mexican authorities as a necessary evil. And whichever cartel leaders remained standing would be much weakened.
“Mexico’s security apparatus is simply not ready to combat organized crime,” the intelligence official said.
Mexico: Making the Dogs Dance
Immediately afterward he quoted an old Spanish saying that sums up both his modus operandi and Mexico’s present humiliating condition. “Money makes the dog dance.”
“I put that escape at some fifty million dollars.” This highly professional estimate came from a man called Jhon [sic] Jairo Velásquez Vásquez, more commonly known as Popeye, Pablo Escobar’s closest bodyguard, contract killer, and go-between. Out of prison after twenty-two years behind bars, compulsively garrulous, a little tense, he discussed the case of Joaquín Guzmán with a reporter from Univision, the Spanish-language television network. “That’s a very delicate case,” he said. “In high security prisons you can’t make tunnels, because in the [control] room where they have the cameras they have sensors that detect immediately if there’s digging going on. That escape was about money…[involving] the prison guards and a lot of people outside.”
.. El Universal, a Mexico City newspaper, has estimated that 291 trips by a dump truck would have been required to remove the 2,040 cubic meters of dirt and rubble extracted in the construction process.
.. I give him eighteen months at large. Mr Chapo Guzmán must be feeling what I felt after we broke out of prison. Right now he’s feeling good, Pablo Escobar was feeling good, but [Guzmán] knows that…they’re going after his family, his wife. He’s going to have to break with all his old ties. He’s only going to be able to meet with his partners in the drug trade and with the people in charge of his military apparatus. It’s going to be hard to catch him [but] the Americans are going to put a 20 million dollar price on his head. Anyone with [that kind of price] on his head will fall.”
.. Café Tacvba has huge drawing power among youths from Mexico’s poorer neighborhoods, and it was these kids del Rey had in mind. “The message the escape will leave all those muchachitos who work with the drug trade,” he said, “or who are thinking of making a life in organized crime, and who already think that Chapo is more intelligent, more astute, more powerful, more moneyed, and also a lot more fun, is that he is! They’ll think Chapo Guzmán is proof that, just like in Star Wars, the dark side is more powerful. And this is a terrible thing.”
Smoking: Cheapest Treatment for Anxiety
“One of the reasons we have not yet banned nicotine outright in this country,” a brilliant social theorist declared several years ago, “is that it is the cheapest treatment for anxiety that we have, in the sense that majority of the people suffering from the mental issues that are somewhat soothed by nicotine will pay for the drug without any kind of government or employer subsidy, and if we actually got rid of cigarettes the true cost of treating everyone who doesn’t even know that they’re smoking to be less sad would maybe break the country.”
How the DEA Harasses Amtrak Passengers
The officer asked if I was Aaron Heuser, and then asked to see my ticket. He then told me that there were many red flags on my trip, mainly that I had a sleeper car, was traveling alone, and did not check my luggage.”
.. She told me that Amtrak is forced to give passenger info to Feds, that the DEA comes on every trip, usually arresting someone in the sleeping car or taking all their money. When I asked for her name in case I needed it later she refused and told me Amtrak would fire her.”
.. “After that he asked if he could bring a dog into my room to check out the bags, to which I again said ‘no,’” said Heuser, who hasn’t passed the bar but knows a little bit about Fourth Amendment law. “Finally he told me that he was going to bring a dog, walk it by my room, and that if alerted, my room would be searched. He told me that I could not argue this and that I was not allowed to be present for the search. His reasoning for violating my right to be present was that the dog might bite me.”