They started to streamline a model of money-laundering into the supposedly “legal” economy north and south of the border that would be perfected by Gallardo’s successors: Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, standing trial in New York this week, and Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada.īut in 1985, a calamity mutated the cartel, and the history of Mexican political conviviality with it. The system worked with the cartel, guaranteeing a modicum of calm if corrupted officialdom helped it keep the product flowing against challenges from rival, smaller syndicates. Gallardo laid the foundations for a system of corruption and conviviality with the Mexican state that would protect mutual interests on the principle of Pax Mafiosa (the Mafia’s Peace). He spoke their language and set up the Mexican dominance of the narcotraffic it still enjoys today. Gallardo understood the markets as well as any of his opposite numbers on Wall Street or Canary Wharf. They established cocaine routes from South America, through Mexico, to the USA and Europe that pertain today. Gallardo and his lieutenants modernised, commercialised and internationalised narcotraffic. By the mid-80s, the Guadalajara Cartel had become the biggest in the world. But when Avilés was killed in a shootout in 1978, it was time for his heir Félix Gallardo, with two lieutenants – Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo – to take over the operation. But with Sanchez’ protection, he soon gravitated towards the business traditional to the wild Sierra Madre Occidental.Īfter Operation Condor destroyed poppy production in Mexico, the stage was set for a narco from Sinaloa called Pedro Avilés to step into the vacuum and escalate existing marijuana smuggling routes into a full-scale cocaine-trafficking operation. Gallardo was born near the state capital of Sinaloa, Culiacán, where he joined the police and became a bodyguard for the governor, Leopoldo Sanchez. If Escobar was Copernicus, Félix Gallardo was the great entrepreneur, the empire-builder with foresight and an astutely perfect understanding of his market: the Henry Ford or Bill Gates of cocaine.įormer cartel boss Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo in1989 Photograph: AP Cocaine: the perfect commodity that knows no such thing as recession, which can sell reliably without quality control at a steady price. The mafia expert Roberto Saviano said Pablo Escobar was “the Copernicus” of narcotraffic because he was “ the first to understand that it’s not the world of cocaine that must orbit around the markets, but the markets that must rotate around cocaine”. It is near universally presumed to be a tribute portrait to Gallardo. There is a famous drug ballad (or narcocorrido) by the masters of the genre, Los Tigres Del Norte, called El Jefe de los Jefes – the boss of bosses. The latest season focuses on the founding father of Mexican narcotraffic: Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, AKA El Padrino, The Godfather – and that he certainly was. And, of course, the less well-known the original, the more space for the fictive version to fill. Its portrayals of the drug-trafficking barons who form the dramatis personae of Narcos in its Colombian seasons are now ingrained in the popular imagination. T here is a way in which Netflix writes history.
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