八月末的一个午后，洛杉矶郊外的一家医院里，前选美小姐艾玛·克罗内尔（Emma Coronel）诞下了一对女继承人。这对双胞胎分别于凌晨三点五十和五十一分出生，她们将继承的财富，据《福布斯》估计约有十亿美元。女儿出生时，克罗内尔的丈夫并不在场，他是一名富有传奇色彩的巨富大亨，经历了农村贫穷的童年，刻苦努力创下了一份跨国事业。如果克罗内尔选择不填孩子出生证明上的“父亲”一栏，绝不是因为财产纠纷，而是她不敢填，因为她的丈夫——华金·古兹曼（Joaquín Guzmán）——是墨西哥锡那罗亚贩毒集团的大头目，财政部称他为世界头号毒枭。每年从墨西哥进口到美国的毒品中，古兹曼的组织占了大部分，在这个后本·拉登时代，他很可能就是头号通缉犯。但他的妻子却是一位身家清白的美国公民。所以当权政府也只能眼睁睁看着她抱着女儿，跨过国界，溜回去见丈夫。
又矮又壮的古兹曼现年55岁，绰号“矮子（El Chapo）”，但在缉毒刑警看来，他老奸巨猾得仿佛已经150岁了。在墨西哥，他是一个传奇人物，还是无数歌谣中的主人公，无论与敌或友相比，他都是最长寿的，还打破了毒品交易界一个不成文的定律：毒贩子吃香喝辣有风险，最后不是入狱便是进坟墓。在矮子这岁数，巴勃罗·埃斯科巴（Pablo Escobar）已经离开人世十年了。美国禁毒署(Drug Enforcement Administration)称，实际上，矮子现今交易的毒品数量超过了埃斯科巴的巅峰时期。某种程度上，他的成功很容易解释：就如希拉里·克林顿许多年前承认的那样，美国“对非法禁药的贪得无厌”促使了此类地下行业的发展。世界上最大的毒品供应国和毒品消费国是邻居，这并不是巧合。墨西哥前总统波菲里奥·迪亚斯(Porfirio Díaz)曾经感慨：“可怜的墨西哥，离上帝太远，离美国太近。”
锡那罗亚贩毒集团花约两千美元从哥伦比亚或者秘鲁的高地买下一千克可卡因，然后坐等它的价格随着一步步进入市场而逐步上升。在墨西哥，这样的一千克毒品可以卖到一万美元以上。一旦卖到美国，批发可售三万美元。把它拆成克来零售，同样的一千克就能卖到十万美元——比黄金还昂贵。而这只是可卡因的价格。墨西哥所有的贩毒集团中，锡那罗亚既具有产品多样性又能实现纵向一体化，除此之外，还生产出口大麻、海洛因和冰毒。
然而，我们很难精确地估算出矮子的毒品王国到底有多大。这种地下经济的数据从来都不准确：贩毒集团既不做年终财政报表，也没有审计师去检查他们的账目。相反的，我们只能从大致数据中推算出大概的情况，而这些数据大部分是政府机构提供的，出于官僚激励目的，他们的数据可能会夸大问题的严重性。
据司法部门统计，哥伦比亚和墨西哥的贩毒集团每年都会从美国毒品交易市场上搜刮180到390亿美元(光这数字就够让你目瞪口呆)。所以，本着对经验主义的保守态度，我们不能完全相信这个估算的数据。就算你采取最为保守的估算方法，锡那罗亚也是全球黑市上的巨大黑手。举个例子，据兰德公司对实际帐目的估算，墨西哥所有贩毒集团出口毒品到美国的年收入仅为66亿美元。尽管从大部分估算来看，锡那罗亚已经占有了至少百分之四十甚至百分之六十的市场份额，也就意味着矮子古兹曼的组织年收入将达到三十亿美元左右，能与Netflix和Facebook的年收入相媲美。
自2006年起，墨西哥的毒品战争已经导致了五万多人死亡。但在这场规模巨大的流血战争背后，掩盖的却是毒品行业的飞速发展。近期有一项对锡那罗亚贩毒集团的研究，研究的基础包括此集团多达几千页的毒品交易记录、对已定罪毒贩的采访以及对现任和前任墨西哥及美国官员的采访。该研究发现了一个全球性的经营体系（在十几个国家都有活跃的贩毒网），总的来说，十分巧妙，也十分庞大复杂。锡那罗亚不仅在经济危机中存活下来，近几年，它反而发展得更为繁荣。随着在最近几次大规模冲突中的压倒性胜利，它在国界线上控制的区域规模空前。
“矮子不管到哪里都爱谈论他的毒品生意，”几年前，有个矮子的心腹在法官面前这么描述他，他口中的矮子对微观管理有特别的癖好，是一个有冲劲甚至乎到了狂热地步的企业家。矮子在藏匿于偏远山岗之处时，四面一直被许多枪手包围，但他仍监管着一个极为精密复杂的物流网络。某种意义上来说，该物流网络与亚马逊或UPS（联合包裹速递服务公司）的网络一样复杂，仔细想想看，或许会有两倍那么复杂，因为毒贩们不仅要秘密地转移毒品和赃款，还要不断灵活机动反应以免被杀或被捕。联想到琴吉·罗杰斯跟着弗雷德·阿斯泰尔跳着完全相同的舞步，区别只是在于他们是穿着高跟鞋往后跳（毒贩们的贩毒活动和合法商品业务并行，就像罗杰斯和阿斯泰尔那相互契合的舞步一样，只不过舞步方向是向后的）， 墨西哥锡那罗亚贩毒集团因此就以合法商品业务为镜像进行他们的商品运输和贸易。从活跃时间、获益程度以及涉猎范围来看，该集团可能是有史以来最为成功的犯罪集团。
该贩毒集团名字的出处锡那罗亚州紧紧夹在西马德雷山脉和墨西哥西海岸之间，烈日炎炎且地处偏僻，锡那罗亚堪称墨西哥的西西里，都是暴力人群的发源地与避难所，也是很多墨西哥头号毒贩的祖上之地。矮子1957年出生于西马德雷山脚下一个叫做La Tuna的村庄。他的正式教育结束于三年级，据说他长大成人之后读和写都有困难，甚至一度靠别人代笔给他的情妇写信。人们对于矮子的早年生活所知甚少，从80年代开始，他就加入了前任警员人称教父（EI Padrino）的菲利克斯·加拉多的瓜达拉哈拉贩毒集团（Guadalajara cartel）。
马丁内斯
几十年的时间里，墨西哥的走私犯将本地出产的大麻和海洛因出口到美国。但是由于哥伦比亚的可卡因风潮在80年代涌现，因此美国的执法部门开始加强在加勒比地区的巡逻，哥伦比亚毒贩们因而想要寻求另一条通向美国之路，他们在墨西哥如愿以偿。一开始，墨西哥的毒贩们都像独立的承包人，由哥伦比亚人给他们钱让他们帮着运毒。其中有一个25岁的矮胖子飞行员米格尔·安赫尔·马丁内斯（Miguel Angel Martínez）就是如此。1986年的时候，达拉哈拉贩毒集团派马丁内斯去哥伦比亚的巴兰基利亚（Barranquilla）港口，指望有人会派他飞去墨西哥，将毒品带过去。但是马丁内斯无法找到运毒的人，因此就苦哼哼地在哥伦比亚呆了数月，担心这一次与集团的大交易就这么黄了。终于他还是搭上了一架回墨西哥的商务机，不久以后，他就被当时的二当家矮子召见。“你在哥伦比亚表现地很好”，根据后来的证词，矮子是这么对他说的。看来他对马丁内斯等待任务的耐心印象深刻。
经过这次测试之后，马丁内斯开始为矮子工作，负责监管空中运输，直接与卡利和麦德林贩毒集团协商，并将他们的可卡因航线从南美引到墨西哥偏僻的跑道。马丁内斯知道美国探员在监听他的无线电通讯，因此他用口哨代替说话，因为飞行员都清楚，口哨就是扫清障碍可以起飞的信号。
随着加勒比路线的没落，哥伦比亚毒贩开始用可卡因而不是现金来与墨西哥走私贩交易。美洲的毒品供应链的源动力重新组合，该转变是最重要的因素，因为这一举动让墨西哥人从物流的中间人身份变成了自产自销的投资者。1986年的时候，马丁内斯还没法将快艇像低调的信使一样一声不响地停靠在巴兰基里亚。不到五年，他就有了百余次的飞行记录，为矮子来回运可卡因。“有时候我们一个晚上就可以搞定五架飞机，”他回忆道。“有时候是16架。”如今哥伦比亚毒贩毕恭毕敬地来找矮子，不是来雇他运毒，而是直接卖毒品给他。他们甚至愿意给马丁内斯25000美元的小费，只为了见矮子一面。
而年轻的飞行员也成为中流砥柱，履行着看门人的职责，他安排矮子的电话事宜并陪他去国外出差。在墨西哥有个嘲弄的说法，后来也变为昵称，矮胖的马丁内斯在集团里以“大胖子”（EI Gordo）的绰号闻名。他和矮子——胖子和矮子——是天生一对。“日本，香港，印度，整个欧洲，”马丁内斯在证词中回忆说。矮子有一队“利尔喷气”(Learjet)飞机，他们一起走遍了“整个世界”。他们也都会吸食可卡因，不过矮子最终戒掉了。几年以后，当一个律师问他是不是做过矮子的左右手时，马丁内斯回答说，他可能做过，但是古兹曼有五个左手和五个右手。“矮子查柏·古兹曼，他是一只章鱼，”他说。因为马丁内斯的努力，他每年都有一百万元的收入，一次付清：“每年的12月付款，都是现金，放在一个手提箱里。”马丁内斯儿子出生后，矮子还要求做他的教父。
1989年，教父El Padrino被墨西哥当局抓获，瓜达拉哈拉集团的剩余成员在阿卡普尔科集会，决定各个分支以后的走私路线。根据尤安·格里罗（Ioan Grillo）所著之书《毒枭（El Narco）》的描述，这次集会表面上是朋友聚会，实则在这场聚会中教父El Padrino组织的余党分别成为提华纳、华雷斯和锡那罗亚三大贩毒集团的主力军，这些曾经的同伴们转眼就要成为腥风血雨之地盘争夺战的竞争对手，直到今日。
"贩毒集团"压根儿就是个巨大的谎言，不管是墨西哥毒枭，还是哥伦比亚毒贩，都从未串通商定好固定的价格或是货源。“我倒希望他们是一个集团，”墨西哥驻华盛顿大使阿图罗•沙路汗（Arturo Sarukhán）说：“这样他们就不会引起暴力斗争了。”
毒品运输——道高一尺魔高一丈
最初矮子的组织只有一条走私线路，通过墨西哥西部进入亚利桑那州。但到1990年，该组织每月能走私3吨可卡因入境，再从那里运到洛杉矶。墨西哥锡那罗亚贩毒集团最出色的就是它的走私手段，在哥伦比亚供货商的协助下，贩毒分子先是利用小型私人飞机和商用航空行李将毒品带入墨西哥，最后发展到用自己的波音747，可运输多达13吨的可卡因。他们的运输工具有集装箱船、渔船、快艇、潜水艇——最初是半潜式设备，后来发展为全潜式潜水艇，在亚马逊的天然遮蔽下由专业人员所设计，然后在下游分散，最后在海岸线集合。这些船的花费可能高达百万美元，但是对走私分子来说，实在不是什么大数目。在一次海岸警卫队的拦截行动中，船上人员利用杠杆原理将水漫进船内好让毒品沉到水底，只留下船员在船上坐等。
虽然可卡因贸易投资巨大，但是贩毒集团有充足易得的资金收入：大麻。大麻烟常被称为墨西哥贩毒集团的“摇钱树”，因为它广泛生长于寒拉斯山脉，而且无需加工处理。但是与可卡因相比，大麻体型和气味都更大，难以掩藏。所以走私大麻入境时一定要远离官方入口。贩毒集团用沙袋在科罗拉多河上搭桥，然后装有大麻的越野车通过 帝国沙丘进入加利福尼亚。美国禁毒署的前任长官迈克尔·布莱恩给我讲了一个在亚利桑那州边境线上建筑高科技防护栏的故事，“建立防护栏之后几天就发现那些人采用了弹射器，把上百磅的大麻包弹到另一边去，”他停了一下，看着我重复道：“弹射器！我们用的是能买得到的最高级的防护栏，他们用2500年前的技术就轻松搞定了。”
在不同的情况下随机应变是走私分子最大的优点。最近几年锡那罗亚贩毒集团采取了更有效的入境手段——就在本地种植。几年前，一位徒步穿越北威斯康辛丛林的猎人发现了一座巨大的灌溉种植园，由十几个配有AK-47突击步枪的墨西哥农民看守。据美国缉毒署透露，这是锡那罗亚集团建立在美国国家森林公园的大麻种植园，供应芝加哥市场。
海洛因容易私运却不容易制造。法院公文中特别指出，矮子对自己组织的毒品制造技术相当自豪。他私自商议出货给美国，保证货品的质量，纯净度达94%。“海洛因的价值重量比确实比其他毒品要高，” 离职不久的墨西哥国家调查与安全中心（相当于美国的CIA）的阿雷翰多·霍伯说。
不过这个生意的未来很可能是冰毒。上个世纪九十年代，当美国冰毒市场爆炸的时候，新法令的制定让冰毒的大量制造在这个国家变得更加困难。锡那罗亚集团迅速抓住了这个机会，据《毒枭之王（Los Señores del Narco）》的作者安娜佩尔·赫尔南德斯（Anabel Hernández）说，是矮子的副手伊格纳西奥·科罗内尔（绰号“玉米片”）第一个嗅到了冰毒的巨大潜力。“玉米片就像乔布斯一样，赫尔南德斯说：“他能看到未来。”
这是一种相当有诱惑力的毒品，制造低廉且运输方便。锡那罗亚最开始制造冰毒的时候，向美国中西部的批发客户提供免费样品。“比如说客户订购了500磅大麻，里面就会有2kg的冰毒，”美国缉毒署芝加哥办公室的主任Jack Riley说：“冰毒是免费的，他们想要打开市场。”随着需求的增长，贩毒集团开始建立超级研究室，大量生产冰毒。从印度和中国来的集装箱船在太平洋港口拉萨罗卡德纳斯（Lázaro Cárdenas）和曼萨尼约（Manzanillo）卸下大量的生产原料——主要是麻黄素。为了了解大概的生产规模，我们可以看看近年查收到的生产原料的数量：2009年10月查收22顿，2010年五月查收88吨，2011年12月查收252吨。在墨西哥下令禁止进口麻黄素之后，贩毒集团又调整了生产配方，目光转向还未被禁止的相关原料，最近他们开始把生产外包给了危地马拉的新研究室。
矮子的杰作——地道
但就毒品交易逐步发展的情报技术中，矮子的最大贡献是其发明中的一项杰作－地道,这项发明在事后看起来十分合理并惊叹道这前无古人的发明。20世纪80年代后期，矮子聘请了一位建筑师设计了一条从墨西哥通往美国的地道。在位于墨西哥边境小镇阿瓜普瑞塔（Agua Prieta）的锡那罗亚集团的一名律师的家外有一个水龙头，看似普通实则是一个秘密机关，转动它就会激活一个液压系统，这个系统会打开一个隐藏在屋内台球桌下面的活板门。这条通道长度超过200英尺，布局在边境检查站的正下方，连着锡那罗亚集团位于亚利桑那州道格拉斯城的一处仓库。矮子称它很“酷”。
当新通道打通后，矮子吩咐马丁内斯通知哥伦比亚的毒枭。“让他们尽可能多的运送毒品，”他说。随着运输毒品数量的增多，锡那罗亚集团也因其惊人跨边境出货速度而声名鹊起。“当运输毒品的飞机还没有返回哥伦比亚前，毒品已经出现在洛杉矶的毒品市场上，”马丁内斯惊叹道。
地道最终还是被发现了，矮子再一次改变策略，这次是通过涉入辣椒贸易的业务。矮子在瓜达拉哈拉（Guadalajara）开设了一家罐头工厂，生产数千罐标着“辣椒教母”实则填装可卡因的罐头，这些罐头经真空密封后被运输到加州墨西哥人经营的杂货店。他用定制的冷冻箱式货车运送毒品，在车体上打了小洞同时装满鱼（工作在闷热不堪的检查站的官员一般不会扣留这样的车辆检查太长时间）。他用货运列车将毒品送出边境送到洛锡那罗亚集团位于杉矶和芝加哥的仓库，在铁路岔道处货车可以直接开到列车内部卸货。他也用联邦快递出货。
但那条地道仍然当之无愧地作为矮子的杰作，是他创造力的象征。20年来，各个毒品卡特尔仍在边境线下挖掘地道，自矮子的第一条地道始，这些年已经发现了过百条地道。这些地道经常通风并配有空调设备，一些甚至装上了近半英里长的电车线路，能够同时运输近吨的毒品。
组织结构
你也许会认为，想做毒品生意，不计后果是必要条件。但事实上，考虑到风险问题，高级毒贩们是更固定且时刻神经紧绷着的。“这些人的目的不是贩卖毒品，”去年退休的美国禁毒署前高级情报官员托尼•帕尔锡多（Tony Placido）告诉我，“而是赚到钱并保住自己的命去享用这些钱。”所以聪明的毒贩都会好好研究皮特•如特（Peter Reuter）和马克•克莱曼（Mark Kleiman）曾提到的一篇关于毒品交易的经典论文《边际监禁的危险》。2010年，矮子的老朋友伊斯梅尔•赞姆必达（Ismael (El Mayo) Zambada），锡那罗亚贩毒集团2号头目，授权墨西哥杂志普罗萨尔对其进行采访。现年60多岁的埃尔梅洛已经是一位祖父了，他从事毒品生意近50年并积聚了大量的财富。但钱财买不来心的安宁。“一想到可能被抓，我就感到十分恐惧”他承认：“我心中充满恐惧，时时刻刻。”
可卡因和海洛因在街头售卖的价格之所以远高于出厂收购价格的原因是：你不是为毒品付费，而是付给配送链上这些承担着风险将毒品送到你手上的毒贩的补偿费。走私者经常要就保险精算细节进行协商，确定一旦货物损失责任该由谁承担。众所周知，每次警方搜查后，被逮捕的毒贩都会要求当局出示一份收据，以便证明损失不是因为他们自己的疏忽（疏忽则意味着损失由他们承担）或他们监守自盗（监守自盗则可能要了他们的命）。一些哥伦比亚毒品贩卖集团已经为麻醉毒品上了保险，一旦货物丢失或被没收也好有个保障。
为了避免蒙受巨额损失，毒品卡特尔们更趋于尽可能地分散自己的风险。在将100公斤毒品运送出境之前，毒贩们会将其拆分成5车运输，每车20公斤。矮子和他的伙伴为了进一步降低自己暴露的风险，会相互合作，所以虽然20公斤较100公斤已经算少了，但就这20公斤还可能是矮子10公斤，梅洛•赞姆必达10公斤。锡那罗亚集团有时也被成为联盟，因为尽管使用相同的走私设备，但集团内的高层和他们的下属组织是半自主运作的。
锡那罗亚组织严密的结构似乎也是用来保护其领导层的。没有人知道到底有多少人为其工作，而据估计这个数字大的惊人。一本最近刚出版的有关“矮子”的书的作者马尔科姆.贝斯（Malcolm Beith）指出，无论什么时候，都有15万人在为这个大毒枭工作。研究过锡那罗亚集团的乔治城大学教授约翰.贝利（John Bailey）说，该团伙的实际雇员可能只有150人。将带薪员工和分包商区分开来可以解释这个巨大的差异。种植这块大陆上的毒品也许需要数以千计的劳工，但许多工作可以委托给独立承包商，墨西哥政治学家与安全顾问爱德华多.格雷罗（Eduardo Guerrero）将其描述为“在组织工作却不在组织内”。
即使那些直接为卡特尔工作的人也被严格限制在为其仔细划分的角色内。在最近的一次审判中，若泽.埃斯帕扎（José Esparza），该卡特尔的一个地区助理，供述了他在边境一带为锡那罗亚集团工作的经历。有一次，他与团伙的其它高层领导人一同参加库利亚坎城（Culiacán）外举行的一次会议，但却连矮子的影子都没见到。而讨论一结束，一名密使就起身离开，走到远处一辆被身着防弹衣手持机枪的人围着的悍马车旁，汇报会议进程。而矮子从不踏出车外半步。
毒贩们害怕的不光是联邦军队，还有其他的毒贩。黑道经济崇尚的是残忍的投机主义，这意味着大多数合作伙伴都是暂时的，而背叛更是家常便饭。几十年来，矮子一直和他的童年伙伴阿图罗.贝尔特兰.莱瓦（Arturo Beltrán Leyva）——他也是一名令人闻风丧胆的毒贩，经营着锡那罗亚旗下一家利润可观的子公司——进行着紧密合作。
但是在2008年，两人分道扬镳之后，就爆发了战争，莱瓦派出的刺客被指杀害了矮子的一个儿子。为了减少类似的冲突发生，锡那罗亚启用了一项现在已不常见的习俗：政治联姻。矮子的组织有时被归为血缘联盟，因为其骨干成员中有太多都是姻亲。艾玛.科罗内尔（Emma Coronel），矮子的双胞胎儿子的生母，是冰毒大佬那可.科罗内尔（Nacho Coronel）（2010年死于与墨西哥政府军的枪战）的侄女。一位美国驻墨西哥官员告诉我，所有这些内部联姻的作用都是“防止不信任的篱笆”。
考虑到跟他的妻子不好交代，因此跟别人比起来，你的姻亲欺骗或者谋杀你的可能性要小很多。这是一种犬儒主义的策略，不过想想矮子的一个竞争对手有“Mata Amigos——朋友杀手”的“美名”，看来这个策略也不总是那么管用。
毒品离不开贿赂
在毒品生意中，避免麻烦最可靠的方法是少量、随机的发放贿赂。毒品集团都不交法人税，但是像锡那罗亚这样庞大的组织向联邦、州、市政府这些权力机构定期进的贡甚至可以与墨西哥的高税率相媲美。几年前，美国禁毒署对其最顶级的50个探员和线人进行了一次内部调查，让他们列出操纵毒品生意最重要的因素，他们的回答是一边倒的：腐败。2010年的一次审判中，华雷斯（Juárez）的一名前警官，赫苏斯.费耶罗.门德斯（Jesús Fierro Méndez），承认其为锡那罗亚工作。律师问他，“毒品集团的工资单上有警察吗？”。
“上面的人都是警察”，门德斯回答道。
毒品集团贿赂市长，检察官和州长，州警察和联邦警察，陆军，海军和一大批国家的高级官员。在20世纪90年代一次因毒品交易而被捕后，矮子被判刑20年，并押送至哈利斯科州戒备森严的大桥监狱（Puente Grande）服刑，这是墨西哥对一个头号罪犯的回答。然而在其服刑的五年间，矮子享受着让电影《好家伙》的监狱看上去都相形见绌的特权。大多数的花销都记在他的账上，据说他在监狱里每顿饭都是从菜单上点菜，通过手机继续控制生意，并且有警卫定期开着监狱的卡车送来妓女供其享受。我曾经和一个在矮子入狱期间与其进行过一笔合资生意谈判的毒品生产商交谈过,据说最后矮子是藏在洗衣车中逃狱的。根据马丁内兹的供述，矮子付给他300多万美元以确保其逃脱成功。现在，矮子是一个自由人，大桥监狱的典狱长只是匆匆地签署了一份将其释放的监狱判决，而墨西哥人从此称大桥监狱——大门监狱。
这些年来，墨西哥政府对境内毒品贸易的容忍已经模糊了毒贩与政府之间的界限。 米格尔•安吉拉•马丁内斯（Miguel Angel Martínez）说，他为“矮子”工作期间，组织里的“每一个人”都有军人或者警察的身份证明。 有不少光天化日下的杀戮都是一些身着警察制服的人犯下的，事实上，我们并不是很清楚这些人究竟是毒贩假扮的假警察还是被毒贩收买的真警察。 每当政府完成一次大的逮捕行动后都会开新闻发布会，警察和军官在会上手持武器摆拍时脸上还戴着滑雪面罩，以此来掩盖其身份。 在这场毒品战争中那令人迷乱的符号学里,警察穿得像帮派份子，帮派份子穿得像警察。
当把所有账目汇总，贿赂支出也许就是一个毒品卡特尔资产负债表上数额最大单一支出项。 2008年，墨西哥总统费利佩•卡尔德龙（Felipe Calderón）自己的缉毒总指挥诺•拉米雷斯（Noe Ramirez）就被控每月收受45万美元的贿赂。 据推测，持续向高层官员支付数额如此庞大的贿款，确保了他们的服从。一名腐败的警察费耶罗•门德斯（Fierro Méndez）在作证时说道，“你不得不雇佣高级指挥官，他们才有权向下级传达消息并命令其做任何事情。” 但是在重要的审判中，毒品集团很可能将指挥系统从上到下所有人都贿赂了个遍。 墨西哥公共安全部长赫纳罗•加西亚•卢纳（Genaro García Luna）在2010年的一次演讲中就曾推测，各个毒品集团每年仅是收买普通城市警察的花费加起来就超过了10亿美元。
必须贿赂的不只官员而已。 还有“猎鹰们”，这是一群被收买的市民，是毒贩们的望风者，他们只需要睁大眼睛，一旦发现边境检查加强，或者发现警察巡查，便打个电话通风报信，这样就可以收到100美元每月的报酬。 “事实上，在墨西哥的很多城市中，几乎每一名出租车司机都在他们的‘工资单’上，”原任职于美国禁毒署的迈克尔•布劳恩（Michael Braun）说， “他们的耳目无处不在。”
其中当然还有美国人。 众所周知，在美国边境，你只需要付几千美元给警卫就能驾着你的车顺利通过检查点。自2004年起的贪污调查中，累计有138件涉及美国海关和边境保护的起诉或者定罪的案件。 非常自相矛盾的是，对该状况所给出的一个解释是，国土安全局创立后边防军队的快速扩张。 看来，似乎在加快美墨边境部队扩张的时候，美国官员们已经开始从背景调查和筛选上捞油水了。在一些案例中，工作机会居然给了已确认为毒贩近亲的人。
有一件事是矮子一直都在做的，那就是创新。就连他在边境施行极端边缘政策之时，锡那罗亚依旧没有停下脚步，他们正在欧洲开拓新的市场，在那里一公斤可卡因可卖到3倍于美国市场的价格。其也在向澳大利亚发展业务，澳大利亚政府认为矮子现在是其国内的主要可卡因供应商。现在还有迹象表明锡那罗亚正在东南亚、中国和日本探索商机，这些都是矮子和马丁内斯年轻时走访过的地方。不过，矮子的巨大竞争优势仍然是在危机重重的美墨的边境。就算老大被杀或被捕，矮子同伙中的某人也很可能出来接过他的位子。而矮子建造的贩毒设施仍将继续发挥作用——运送毒品、攫取利润、用少得可怜的毒品供给边境另一端源源不断的需求——历史学家海科特•安吉拉•卡明（Héctor Aguilar Camín）曾称之为“北美人贪得无厌的鼻子”。
One afternoon last August, at a hospital on the outskirts of Los Angeles, a former beauty queen named Emma Coronel gave birth to a pair of heiresses. The twins, who were delivered at 3:50 and 3:51, respectively, stand to inherit some share of a fortune that Forbes estimates is worth a billion dollars. Coronel’s husband, who was not present for the birth, is a legendary tycoon who overcame a penurious rural childhood to establish a wildly successful multinational business. If Coronel elected to leave the entry for “Father” on the birth certificates blank, it was not because of any dispute over patrimony. More likely, she was just skittish about the fact that her husband, Joaquín Guzmán, is the C.E.O. of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, a man the Treasury Department recently described as the world’s most powerful drug trafficker. Guzmán’s organization is responsible for as much as half of the illegal narcotics imported into the United States from Mexico each year; he may well be the most-wanted criminal in this post-Bin Laden world. But his bride is a U.S. citizen with no charges against her. So authorities could only watch as she bundled up her daughters and slipped back across the border to introduce them to their dad.
Known as El Chapo for his short, stocky frame, Guzmán is 55, which in narco-years is about 150. He is a quasi-mythical figure in Mexico, the subject of countless ballads, who has outlived enemies and accomplices alike, defying the implicit bargain of a life in the drug trade: that careers are glittering but brief and always terminate in prison or the grave. When Pablo Escobar was Chapo’s age, he had been dead for more than a decade. In fact, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Chapo sells more drugs today than Escobar did at the height of his career. To some extent, this success is easily explained: as Hillary Clinton acknowledged several years ago, America’s “insatiable demand for illegal drugs” is what drives the clandestine industry. It’s no accident that the world’s biggest supplier of narcotics and the world’s biggest consumer of narcotics just happen to be neighbors. “Poor Mexico,” its former president Porfirio Díaz is said to have remarked. “So far from God and so close to the United States.”
The Sinaloa cartel can buy a kilo of cocaine in the highlands of Colombia or Peru for around $2,000, then watch it accrue value as it makes its way to market. In Mexico, that kilo fetches more than $10,000. Jump the border to the United States, and it could sell wholesale for $30,000. Break it down into grams to distribute retail, and that same kilo sells for upward of $100,000 — more than its weight in gold. And that’s just cocaine. Alone among the Mexican cartels, Sinaloa is both diversified and vertically integrated, producing and exporting marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine as well.
Estimating the precise scale of Chapo’s empire is tricky, however. Statistics on underground economies are inherently speculative: cartels don’t make annual disclosures, and no auditor examines their books. Instead, we’re left with back-of-the-envelope extrapolations based on conjectural data, much of it supplied by government agencies that may have bureaucratic incentives to overplay the problem.
So in a spirit of empircal humility, we shouldn’t accept as gospel the estimate, from the Justice Department, that Colombian and Mexican cartels reap $18 billion to $39 billion from drug sales in the United States each year. (That range alone should give you pause.) Still, even if you take the lowest available numbers, Sinaloa emerges as a titanic player in the global black market. In the sober reckoning of the RAND Corporation, for instance, the gross revenue that all Mexican cartels derive from exporting drugs to the United States amounts to only $6.6 billion. By most estimates, though, Sinaloa has achieved a market share of at least 40 percent and perhaps as much as 60 percent, which means that Chapo Guzmán’s organization would appear to enjoy annual revenues of some $3 billion — comparable in terms of earnings to Netflix or, for that matter, to Facebook.
The drug war in Mexico has claimed more than 50,000 lives since 2006. But what tends to get lost amid coverage of this epic bloodletting is just how effective the drug business has become. A close study of the Sinaloa cartel, based on thousands of pages of trial records and dozens of interviews with convicted drug traffickers and current and former officials in Mexico and the United States, reveals an operation that is global (it is active in more than a dozen countries) yet also very nimble and, above all, staggeringly complex. Sinaloa didn’t merely survive the recession — it has thrived in recent years. And after prevailing in some recent mass-casualty clashes, it now controls more territory along the border than ever.
“Chapo always talks about the drug business, wherever he is,” one erstwhile confidant told a jury several years ago, describing a driven, even obsessive entrepreneur with a proclivity for micromanagement. From the remote mountain redoubt where he is believed to be hiding, surrounded at all times by a battery of gunmen, Chapo oversees a logistical network that is as sophisticated, in some ways, as that of Amazon or U.P.S. — doubly sophisticated, when you think about it, because traffickers must move both their product and their profits in secret, and constantly maneuver to avoid death or arrest. As a mirror image of a legal commodities business, the Sinaloa cartel brings to mind that old line about Ginger Rogers doing all the same moves as Fred Astaire, only backward and in heels. In its longevity, profitability and scope, it might be the most successful criminal enterprise in history.
The state of Sinaloa, from which the cartel derives its name, lies wedged between the Sierra Madre Occidental and Mexico’s west coast. Sun-blasted and remote, Sinaloa is the Sicily of Mexico, both cradle and refuge of violent men, and the ancestral land of many of the country’s most notorious traffickers. Chapo was born in a village called La Tuna, in the foothills of the Sierra, in 1957. His formal education ended in third grade, and as an adult, he has reportedly struggled to read and write, prevailing upon a ghostwriter, at one point, to compose letters to his mistress. Little is known about Chapo’s early years, but by the 1980s, he joined the Guadalajara cartel, which was run by a former policeman known as El Padrino — the Godfather.
For decades, Mexican smugglers had exported homegrown marijuana and heroin to the United States. But as the Colombian cocaine boom gathered momentum in the 1980s and U.S. law enforcement began patrolling the Caribbean, the Colombians went in search of an alternate route to the United States and discovered one in Mexico. Initially, Mexican traffickers, like a pudgy 25-year-old airplane pilot named Miguel Angel Martínez, acted as independent contractors who were paid a fee by the Colombians to move their cargo. In 1986, the Guadalajara cartel dispatched Martínez to the Colombian port of Barranquilla, in the hope that someone might commission him to fly drugs up to Mexico. But Martínez couldn’t find any takers and ended up languishing in Colombia for months, worrying that he had blown his big opportunity with the cartel. Eventually, he caught a commercial flight back to Mexico, and shortly thereafter, he was summoned to a meeting with Chapo, who was by then an underboss in the cartel. “You were very well behaved in Colombia,” Chapo told him, according to subsequent testimony. He seemed impressed by Martínez’s patience in waiting for an assignment.
Having passed this test, Martínez started working for Chapo as a kind of air traffic controller, negotiating directly with the Cali and Medellín cartels, then guiding their cocaine flights from South America to secret runways in barren stretches of Mexico. Martínez knew U.S. agents were monitoring his radio communications, so rather than say a word, he would whistle — a signal to the pilots that they were cleared for takeoff.
With the decline of the Caribbean route, the Colombians started paying Mexican smugglers not in cash but in cocaine. More than any other factor, it was this transition that realigned the power dynamics along the narcotics supply chain in the Americas, because it allowed the Mexicans to stop serving as logistical middlemen and invest in their own drugs instead. In 1986, Martínez couldn’t land a gig as a lowly courier in Barranquilla. Not five years later, he was marshaling hundreds of flights laden with cocaine for Chapo. “Sometimes we would get five planes a night,” he remembered. “Sometimes 16.” Now it was the Colombians who went hat in hand to Chapo, looking not to hire him to move their product but to sell it to him outright. They would tip Martínez $25,000 just to get an audience with the man.
The young pilot became a gatekeeper to the ascendant kingpin, fielding his phone calls and accompanying him on foreign trips. There’s a vaudevillian goofiness to nicknames in Mexico, and the stout Martínez was known in the cartel as El Gordo. He and Chapo — Fatty and Shorty — made quite a pair. “Japan, Hong Kong, India, all of Europe,” Martínez recalled in testimony. Chapo owned a fleet of Learjets, and together, they saw “the whole world.” They both used cocaine as well, a habit that Chapo would eventually give up. When a lawyer inquired, years later, whether he had been Chapo’s right-hand man, Martínez replied that he might have been, but that Guzmán had five left hands and five right hands. “He’s an octopus, Chapo Guzmán,” he said. For his efforts, Martínez was paid a million dollars a year, in a single annual installment: “In cash, in a suitcase, each December.” When Martínez’s son was born, Chapo asked to serve as godfather.
In 1989, Chapo’s mentor, El Padrino, was captured by Mexican authorities, and the remaining members of the Guadalajara cartel assembled in Acapulco to determine which smuggling route each capo would inherit. According to Ioan Grillo’s book, “El Narco,” the meeting was ostensibly a gathering of friends. But the shards of El Padrino’s organization would become the basis for the Tijuana, Juárez and Sinaloa cartels, and these onetime colleagues would soon become antagonists in a cycle of bloody turf wars that continues to this day.
“Drug cartel,” it turns out, is a whopper of a misnomer; neither the Mexicans nor the Colombians ever colluded to fix prices or supply. “I wish they were cartels,” Arturo Sarukhán, Mexico’s ambassador in Washington, told me. “If they were, they wouldn’t be fighting and driving up the violence.”
At first, Chapo’s organization controlled a single smuggling route, through western Mexico into Arizona. But by 1990, it was moving three tons of cocaine each month over the border, and from there, to Los Angeles. The Sinaloa has always distinguished itself by the eclectic means it uses to transport drugs. Working with Colombian suppliers, cartel operatives moved cocaine into Mexico in small private aircraft and in baggage smuggled on commercial flights and eventually on their own 747s, which they could load with as much as 13 tons of cocaine. They used container ships and fishing vessels and go-fast boats and submarines — crude semi-submersibles at first, then fully submersible subs, conceived by engineers and constructed under the canopy of the Amazon, then floated downriver in pieces and assembled at the coastline. These vessels can cost more than a million dollars, but to the smugglers, they are effectively disposable. In the event of an interception by the Coast Guard, someone onboard pulls a lever that floods the interior so that the evidence sinks; only the crew is left bobbing in the water, waiting to be picked up by the authorities.
Moving cocaine is a capital-intensive business, but the cartel subsidizes these investments with a ready source of easy income: marijuana. Cannabis is often described as the “cash crop” of Mexican cartels because it grows abundantly in the Sierras and requires no processing. But it’s bulkier than cocaine, and smellier, which makes it difficult to conceal. So marijuana tends to cross the border far from official ports of entry. The cartel makes sandbag bridges to ford the Colorado River and sends buggies loaded with weed bouncing over the Imperial Sand Dunes into California. Michael Braun, the former chief of operations for the D.E.A., told me a story about the construction of a high-tech fence along a stretch of border in Arizona. “They erect this fence,” he said, “only to go out there a few days later and discover that these guys have a catapult, and they’re flinging hundred-pound bales of marijuana over to the other side.” He paused and looked at me for a second. “A catapult,” he repeated. “We’ve got the best fence money can buy, and they counter us with a 2,500-year-old technology.”
Improvisation is a trafficker’s greatest asset, and in recent years, Sinaloa has devised an even more efficient solution to the perennial challenge of getting marijuana across the border. Grow it here. Several years ago, a hunter was trekking through the remote North Woods of Wisconsin when he stumbled upon a vast irrigated grow site, tended by a dozen Mexican farmers armed with AK-47’s. According to the D.E.A., it was a Sinaloa pot farm, established on U.S. National Forest land to supply the market in Chicago.
Heroin is easier to smuggle but difficult to produce, and as detailed in court documents, Chapo is particularly proud of his organization’s work with the drug. He personally negotiates shipments to the United States and stands by its quality, which is normally 94 percent pure. “The value-to-weight ratio of heroin is better than any other drug,” says Alejandro Hope, who until recently was a senior officer at Cisen, Mexico’s equivalent to the C.I.A.
But the future of the business may be methamphetamine. During the 1990s, when the market for meth exploded in the United States, new regulations made it more difficult to manufacture large quantities of the drug in this country. This presented an opportunity that the Sinaloa quickly exploited. According to Anabel Hernández, author of “Los Señores del Narco,” a book about the cartel, it was one of Chapo’s deputies, a trafficker named Ignacio (Nacho) Coronel, who first spotted the massive potential of methamphetamine. “Nacho was like Steve Jobs,” Hernández told me. “He saw the future.”
Here was a drug that was ragingly addictive and could be produced cheaply and smuggled with relative ease. When they first started manufacturing meth, the Sinaloa would provide free samples to their existing wholesale clients in the Midwest. “They’d send five hundred pounds of marijuana, and secreted in that would be two kilos of meth,” Jack Riley, the D.E.A.’s special agent in charge of the Chicago office, told me. “They’d give it away for free. They wanted the market.” As demand grew, the cartel constructed superlabs, capable of churning out industrial volumes of meth. Container ships from India and China unloaded precursor chemicals — largely ephedrine — in the Pacific ports Lázaro Cárdenas and Manzanillo. To grasp the scale of production, consider the volume of some recent precursor seizures at these ports: 22 tons in October 2009; 88 tons in May 2010; 252 tons last December. When Mexico banned the importation of ephedrine, the cartel adapted, tweaking its recipe to use unregulated precursors. Recently they have started outsourcing production to new labs in Guatemala.
But Chapo’s greatest contribution to the evolving tradecraft of drug trafficking was one of those innovations that seem so logical in hindsight it’s a wonder nobody thought of it before: a tunnel. In the late 1980s, Chapo hired an architect to design an underground passageway from Mexico to the United States. What appeared to be a water faucet outside the home of a cartel attorney in the border town of Agua Prieta was in fact a secret lever that, when twisted, activated a hydraulic system that opened a hidden trapdoor underneath a pool table inside the house. The passage ran more than 200 feet, directly beneath the fortifications along the border, and emerged inside a warehouse the cartel owned in Douglas, Ariz. Chapo pronounced it “cool.”
When this new route was complete, Chapo instructed Martínez to call the Colombians. “Tell them to send all the drugs they can,” he said. As the deliveries multiplied, Sinaloa acquired a reputation for the miraculous speed with which it could push inventory across the border. “Before the planes were arriving back in Colombia on the return, the cocaine was already in Los Angeles,” Martínez marveled.
Eventually the tunnel was discovered, so Chapo shifted tactics once again, this time by going into the chili-pepper business. He opened a cannery in Guadalajara and began producing thousands of cans stamped “Comadre Jalapeños,” stuffing them with cocaine, then vacuum-sealing them and shipping them to Mexican-owned grocery stores in California. He sent drugs in the refrigeration units of tractor-trailers, in custom-made cavities in the bodies of cars and in truckloads of fish (which inspectors at a sweltering checkpoint might not want to detain for long). He sent drugs across the border on freight trains, to cartel warehouses in Los Angeles and Chicago, where rail spurs let the cars roll directly inside to unload. He sent drugs via FedEx.
But that tunnel into Douglas remains Chapo’s masterpiece, an emblem of his creative ingenuity. Twenty years on, the cartels are still burrowing under the border — more than a hundred tunnels have been discovered in the years since Chapo’s first. They are often ventilated and air-conditioned, and some feature trolley lines stretching up to a half-mile to accommodate the tonnage in transit.
You might suppose that a certain recklessness would be a prerequisite for anyone contemplating a career in the drug trade. But in reality, blue-chip traffickers tend to fixate, with neurotic intensity, on the concept of risk. “The goal of these folks is not to sell drugs,” Tony Placido, who was the top intelligence official at the D.E.A. until he retired last year, told me. “It’s to earn a spendable profit and live to enjoy it.” So the smart narcos are preoccupied with what Peter Reuter and Mark Kleiman once referred to, in a classic essay on the drug business, as “the marginal imprisonment risk.” In 2010, Chapo’s old friend Ismael (El Mayo) Zambada, the No. 2 man in the Sinaloa cartel, granted an interview to the Mexican magazine Proceso. Now in his 60s and a grandfather, El Mayo has been in the drug business for nearly half a century and has amassed a fortune. But you can’t buy peace of mind. “I’m terrified they’ll incarcerate me,” he acknowledged. “I’m full of fear. Always.”
There’s a reason coke and heroin cost so much more on the street than at the farm gate: you’re not paying for the drugs; you’re compensating everyone along the distribution chain for the risks they assumed in getting them to you. Smugglers often negotiate, in actuarial detail, about who will be held liable in the event of lost inventory. After a bust, arrested traffickers have been known to demand a receipt from authorities, so that they can prove the loss was not because of their own negligence (which would mean they might have to pay for it) or their own thievery (which would mean they might have to die). Some Colombian cartels have actually offered insurance policies on narcotics, as a safeguard against loss or seizure.
