The Catholic Church in the face of the drug rifle

Part III

It was May 24, 1993. Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo had gone to the air terminal of Miguel Hidalgo International Airport, in Guadalajara, to pick up the then apostolic nuncio Geronimo Prigione.

But at 1540 hours everything went out of control: first a burst of gunfire was heard in the parking lot, and then seven bodies were detected fallen on the pavement. One of them was that of Cardinal Posadas Ocampo.

A quarter of a century, more than 200 testimonies and 100 volumes after an extensive judicial file, and there is still no person sentenced for the crime of Posadas. However, that incident marked a before and after in the world of drug trafficking in Mexico.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began to track a Mexican drug trafficker who would in the future become one of its priority targets: Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzman.

From that day on, the names of those who would be the great capos of the following decades, such as Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, who then was still fighting to promote the criminal world, and the brothers Ramón and Benjamín Arellano Félix, became known.

On May 29, when presenting its first findings of the crime, the Mexican Public Prosecutor's Office reported that a shooting had been unleashed in the airport parking lot between the Sinaloa Cartels and the Arellano Felix Cartels. The latter reportedly went to kill El Chapo, who was allegedly mistaken for the cardinal, who arrived in a white Grand Marquis car of the year, similar to the one that would allegedly take the capo to board a plane to Puerto Vallarta. The archbishop of Guadalajara had also died in a crossfire, according to the official version.

Guzmán Pérez Peláez, the person who knows the most about the subject in Mexico, assured that he always encountered not only inconsistencies in the research but also with obstacles even in accessing copies of the inquiry. The forensic report concluded that the prelate's car was shot 57 times, all against its crew members. The forensic physician Mario Rivas Souza, who analyzed the cardinal's body, said that he had been shot 14 “very directly”.

“Statements from people who were in front of the cardinal's car say that they heard as if they were closing a metal curtain, they were the gunshots, but they also say that when the shots stopped being heard someone said 'it was there, there are no witnesses, let's go, '” Guzmán Pérez Peláez commented.

Guzmán and others questioned whether the assassins confused the cardinal with “El Chapo”, who at that time was 39 years old and the prelate 67, Posadas Ocampo was a tall and burly man while the capo's height is 1.64.

Jesús Alberto Bayardo Robles “El Gory”, a man from the Arellano Felix who had been sent to the airport that day to buy tickets to Tijuana for his bosses, stated that in Mexico he was forced to sign a confession under pressure and that the real motive for the murder was linked to documents held by the cardinal, involving organized crime chiefs and senior officials.

Statements by people who were at the airport, to whom Guzmán Pérez had access as part of an inter-agency group that investigated the case, said that after having murdered Posadas, a man opened the trunk and stole documents, whose fate and contents are unknown until now.

After being arrested in Guatemala in June 1993 and his “escape” from the Puente Grande prison, Jalisco, in a laundry cart, Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera became one of the most persecuted men in the world. He spent 13 years at large until he was reapprehended on February 22, 2014 in a condominium in Mazatlán Sinaloa, by elements of the Mexican Navy, after evading them for several days by a system of tunnels.

He was immediately held in another maximum-security prison, that of the Altiplano, located in Almoloya, State of Mexico, where authorities say he was isolated and monitored day and night by security cameras. However, after being held in prison for more than a year, on Saturday, July 11, 2015, the drug trafficker escaped from prison through a tunnel one and a half kilometers long, from the bathroom of his cell, to a plot of land adjacent to the prison. The tunnel was illuminated and had some tracks on which he would have quickly escaped on a motorcycle driven by an assistant.

“El Chapo” was recaptured in the city of Los Mochis, Sinaloa, on January 8, 2016 and was quickly transferred to another prison in Ciudad Juarez, on the border with the United States, where he was extradited and sentenced to life imprisonment.

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