Bribes, Bullets, and Intimidation. Julie Marie Bunck

to be the Southeast cell of the Juárez cartel. While Juárez long had a presence in Belize and the Yucatán, its activities here mushroomed in the late 1990s. This illustrates how broader developments within the drug trade often had critically important consequences for Central American bridge states. After the 1997 death of Juárez kingpin Amado Carrillo Fuentes, bloody struggles ensued within and among the principal cartels active in northern Mexico. Feeling intense pressure from the Arellano Félix brothers leading the Tijuana cartel, Vicente Carrillo, Amado’s brother, shifted many Juárez operations into the Yucatán.238

      Headquartered in Quintana Roo, the Southeast cell of the Juárez cartel was directed by José Albino Quintero Meraz (“Don Beto”) and former Mexican federal police officer Alcides Ramón Magana (“El Metro”). Before Magana’s 2001 arrest by the Mexican Army, this smuggling ring became one of Mexico’s most violent narcotics networks, dominating the Chetumal and Cancún drug trade. The U.S. government went so far as to direct its consul in Cancún to leave Mexico after his life was threatened.239 Indeed, by 2000 Cancún had become a regional drug center. Servicing the beach resorts out on the peninsula, the city had grown to 750,000 inhabitants, including surrounding slums, and the booming tourist industry provided exceptional opportunities both to launder money and to camouflage cocaine transshipment. The Southeast cell was deeply involved in both, and routes through neighboring Belize gained prominence.

      In early 1999 a Mexican federal police report declared that Chetumal traffickers were transporting cocaine for Colombians into northern Belize by air and sea. The narcotics were then being imported into Mexico, either via the Río Hondo or by shipment into nearby ports and oil refineries. The Mexican investigation also revealed that a pair of Belizean police officers in Corozal was assisting passage of the drugs. Most important, the network had support at the top echelons of Mexican politics. It had corrupted Mario Ernesto Villanueva Madrid, governor of Mexico’s Quintana Roo state from 1993 to 1999 and a member of the then nationally dominant Partido Revolucionario Institucional party.240

      Villanueva Madrid, who had extensive contacts in Panama linked to the Cali cartel, was on the payroll of the Southeast cell as well.241 His trusted subordinates had taken charge of importing and transporting drugs through Quintana Roo toward northern Mexico and the United States. Juárez traffickers had been provided with official credentials and with access to planes, hangars, and airstrips, as well as with heavy equipment to construct clandestine runways. In exchange, prosecutors later declared, Villanueva was receiving a per kilo kickback. In one incident a small plane carrying cocaine being transshipped from Barranquilla, Colombia, to the United States developed engine trouble. Traffickers reportedly capitalized on the governor’s influence and had the drugs off-loaded and moved up the coastal highway from Chetumal to Cancún. According to witnesses, state police and a judicial police chief accompanied the drug shipment as it traveled overland within Quintana Roo.

      This organization eventually succeeded in moving immense quantities of cocaine through Quintana Roo. Authorities came to believe that between 1994 and 2002 it exported hundreds of tons to the United States, and some of this cocaine was transshipped through Belize.242 In fact, a critical break in the U.S. federal case against the Southeast cell leaders came when U.S. government informants at a northern Belize airstrip loaded 550 kilos of cocaine onto an airplane owned by the Quintana Roo governor’s office to be flown into Mexico.