The Power Of The Dog (79 page)

The dope also goes by sea. It’s delivered from its landing in Mexico to towns on the Baja coast, where it’s vacuum-wrapped and then loaded into private and commercial fishing boats, which cruise up the coast to the waters off California and dump the dope into the water, where it floats until it’s picked up by speedboats or sometimes even scuba divers who take it to shore and drive it to the safe houses.

It also goes by foot. Lower-end smugglers simply stuff it into packs and send it on the backs of mujados or coyotes who make the run across the border in the hope of making a fortune—say $5,000—for delivering it to a pre-arranged point somewhere in the countryside east of San Diego. Some of this countryside is remote desert or high mountains, and it’s not unusual for the Border Patrol to find the corpse of a mujado who died from dehydration in the desert or exposure in the mountains because he wasn’t carrying the water or blankets that might have saved his life, but was humping a load of dope instead.

The dope goes north and the money comes south. And both legs of this round-trip are a lot easier because border security has been relaxed by NAFTA, which assures, among other things, a smooth flow of traffic between Mexico and the United States. And with it, a smooth flow of drug traffic.

And the traffic is more profitable than ever because Adán uses his new power to leverage a better deal with the Colombians, which is basically “We’ll buy your cocaine wholesale and do the retail ourselves, thank you.” No more $1,000-a-kilo delivery charge; we’re in business for ourselves.

The North American Free (Drug) Trade Agreement, Adán thinks.

God bless free trade.

Adán’s making the old Mexican Trampoline look like a little kid bouncing on his bed. Hey, why bounce when you can fly?

And Adán can fly.

He’s The Lord of the Skies.

Not that life has returned to the status quo ante bellum.

It hasn’t; ever the realist, Adán knows that nothing can be the same after the murder of Parada. Technically he’s still a wanted man: their new “friends” in Los Pinos have put a $5 million reward on the Barrera brothers, the American FBI has put them on the Most Wanted list, their photos hang on walls at border checkpoints and government offices.

It’s a sham, of course. All lip service to the Americans. Mexican law enforcement is no more trying to hunt down the Barreras than it’s trying to shut down the drug trade as a whole.

Still, the Barreras can’t rub it in their faces, can’t show them up. That’s the unspoken understanding. So the old days are over—no more parties at big restaurants, no more discos, racetracks, ringside seats at big boxing matches. The Barreras have to give the government plausible deniability, allow them to shrug their shoulders to the Americans and claim that they would gladly arrest the Barreras if only they knew where to find them.

So Adán doesn’t live in the big house in Colonia Hipódromo anymore, doesn’t go to his restaurants, doesn’t sit in a back booth doing the figures on his yellow manuscript pads. He doesn’t miss the house, he doesn’t miss the restaurants, but he does miss his daughter.

Lucía and Gloria are living back in America, in the quiet San Diego suburb of Bonita. Gloria goes to a local Catholic school, Lucía attends a new church. Once a week, a Barrera courier car meets her in a strip-mall parking lot and gives her a briefcase with $70,000 cash.

Once a month, Lucía brings Gloria down to Baja to see her father.

They meet at remote lodges in the country, or at a picnic spot by the side of the road near Tecate. Adán lives for these visits. Gloria is twelve now, and she’s starting to understand why her father can’t live with them, why he can’t cross the border into the United States. He tries to explain to her that he’s been falsely accused of many things, that the Americans take all the sins of the world and load them onto the backs of the Barreras.

But mostly they talk about more mundane things—how she’s doing in school, what music she likes to listen to, movies she’s seen, who her friends are and what they do together. She’s getting bigger, of course, but as she grows so does her deformity, and the progress of the disease tends to accelerate in adolescence. The growth on her neck pulls her already heavy head down and to the left and makes it increasingly difficult for her to speak properly. Some of the kids at school—it is a cliché, he thinks, that children are cruel—tease her, call her the Elephant Girl.

He knows it hurts her, but she appears to shrug it off.

“They’re idiots,” she tells him. “Don’t worry, I have my friends.”

But he does worry—frets about her health, chides himself that he can’t be with her more, agonizes about her long-term prognosis. He fights back tears when each visit comes to an end. As Gloria sits in the car, Adán argues with Lucía, trying to convince her to come back to Mexico, but she won’t consider it.

“I won’t live like a fugitive,” she tells him. Besides that, she says she’s afraid in Mexico, afraid of another war, afraid for herself and for her daughter.

These are reasons enough, but Adán knows the real reason—she has contempt for him now. She’s ashamed of him, of what he does for a living, of what he’s done for that living. She wants to keep it as far away from herself as possible, be a soccer mom, take care of their fragile daughter in the peace and tranquility of an American suburban life.

But she still takes the money, Adán thinks.

She never sends the courier car back.

He tries not to be bitter about it.

Nora helps.

“You have to understand how she feels,” Nora tells him. “She wants a normal life for her daughter. It’s tough on you, but you have to understand how she feels.”

It’s odd, Adán thinks, the mistress taking the side of the wife, but he respects her for it. She’s told him many times that if he can get his family back together, he should, and that she would fade into the background.

But Nora is the comfort of his life.

When he’s being honest with himself, he has to acknowledge that the bright side to his estrangement with his wife is that it’s left him free to be with Nora.

No, The Lord of the Skies is flying high.

Until—

The supply of cocaine starts to dry up.

It doesn’t happen suddenly. It’s gradual, like a slow drought.

It’s the fucking American DEA.

First they busted up the Medellín cartel (Fidel “Rambo” Cardona turned on his old friend Pablo Escobar and helped the Americans track him down and kill him), then they went after Cali. They picked off the Orejuela brothers as they were returning from a meeting in Cancún with Adán. Both the Medellín and Cali cartels fractured into small pieces—the “Baby Bells,” Adán dubbed them.

It only makes sense, Adán thinks—a natural evolution in the face of ceaseless American pressure. Those who survive will be those who can stay small and low. Fly, as it were, under the American radar. It makes sense, but it also makes Adán’s business more complicated and difficult—instead of dealing with one or two large entities, he now has to juggle dozens if not scores of small cells, and even individual entrepreneurs. And, with the demise of the vertically integrated cartels, Adán can no longer rely on the smooth and timely delivery of quality product. Say what you will about a monopoly, Adán thinks, it’s efficient. It can deliver what it promises where and when it says it will, unlike the Baby Bells, with whom the prompt delivery of a quality product has become the exception rather than the rule.

So the production end of Adán’s cocaine business is getting shaky, and this vibrates all the way down the line, from the wholesalers to whom the Barreras provided transportation and protection, to the new retail markets in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York that Adán took over after the Orejuelas’ arrest. Increasingly, he has empty Boeing 727s—expensive to buy, maintain and staff—sitting on airstrips in Colombia, waiting for cocaine that’s too often late or doesn’t show up at all or, when it does get there, isn’t of the promised quality and potency. So the customers on the street complain to the retailers, who complain to the wholesalers, who (politely) complain to the Barreras.

Then the flow of cocaine all but stops.

The flood becomes a stream, then a trickle, then a drip.

Then Adán finds out why:

Las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia.

Aka FARC.

The oldest and largest surviving Marxist insurgency movement in Latin America.

FARC controls the remote southwestern area of Colombia, along the critical borders with the cocaine-producing countries of Peru and Ecuador. From its stronghold there in the northwestern reaches of the Amazon jungle, FARC has waged a thirty-year-long guerrilla war against the Colombian government, the nation’s wealthy landowners and the oil interests that operate from the petroleum-rich coastal districts.

And FARC’s power is growing. Just last month, its guerrillas launched a daring attack on an army outpost in the town of Las Delicias. Using mortars and high-explosive charges, it took the fort, killed sixty soldiers and captured the rest. FARC cut off the critical highway connecting the southwestern districts to the rest of the country.

And not only does FARC control the cocaine-smuggling routes from Peru and Ecuador, it also has within its territory the Putumayo district, thick jungle and Amazonian rain forest and now also an important area for growing the coca plant. A domestic supply of coca was long a dream of the giant cartels, and they put millions of dollars of capital into coca plantations in the area. But just as their labors were coming to fruition, as it were, the cartels went out of business, leaving behind the chaotic Baby Bells and some 300,000 hectares under cultivation, and more being planted every day.

What Sinaloa was to the poppy, Putumayo is to the coca leaf—the source, the wellspring, the headwaters from which the drug traffic flows.

FARC cut it off, then reached out to him to offer to negotiate.

And I will have to do just that, Adán thinks now as he looks at Nora lying beside him.

She wakes up to see Adán looking at her.

Nora smiles, kisses him softly and says, “I’d like to go for a walk.”

“I’ll come with you.”

They put on robes and step outside.

Manuel is there.

Manuel is always there, she thinks.

Adán has had a house built for him on the grounds. It’s a small, simple house built in the Sinaloan campesino fashion. Except that Adán had the builder put it up in slightly outsized dimensions to allow for Manuel’s stiff, dragging leg. Had special furniture built to make it easier for him to get up and down, and a little Jacuzzi put in the back to ease the aches in his leg, which get worse with age. Manuel doesn’t like to use it, because he thinks it costs too much money to heat it, so Adán has a servant go over every night and turn it on.

Manuel gets up from a bench and follows them, his right leg dragging. At a discreet distance, he follows, with his distinctive limp. To Nora he is almost a caricature: an AK slung over his shoulder, a double loop of bandoliers over his shoulders like an old-time bandito, a pistol holstered at each hip, a huge knife tucked into his belt.

All he’s missing, she thinks, are the big sombrero and the drooping mustache.

A maid comes scurrying out with a tray.

Two coffees: white and sweet for him; black, no sugar, for her.

Adán thanks the maid and she hurries back into the kitchen. She doesn’t look at Nora, afraid that the gringa’s eyes will bewitch hers the way they did the patrón’s. It is the talk of the kitchen—look into the eyes of this bruja and you will come under her spell.

It was difficult at first, the staff’s passive hostility and Raúl’s active disapproval. Adán’s brother thought it was fine to have mistresses but not to bring them into the family home. She heard the brothers quarrel about it and offered to leave, but Adán wouldn’t hear of it. Now they’ve settled into a quiet domestic routine, which includes this morning walk.