By Olivier Acuña

MEXICO CITY (Mexico Tribune).- The secret meeting called by Rafael Caro Quintero to celebrate his freedom was attended by Mexico’s most powerful drug lords and in that meeting he reportedly told his colleagues hi was still in business.

Apparently not everybody was happy to hear it, although they knew this was true so in the end no one was surprised. When Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman was arrested February 22, he allegedly told federal officials that the meeting had in fact taken place somewhere in the mountains of Sinaloa, but he assured that Caro Quintero said he was no longer going to be involved in drug trafficking.

The fact is that he never quit doing business, not even during the 28 years he spent behind bars in a jail where he took possession of an enormous space –originally made to house 250 cellmates –and modified it to be his luxurious palace away from home.

Some say he made more money during those 28 years and did more business from inside the jail than he did on the outside and it could be true if you consider he was arrested in Costa Rica in 1985, when he was only 32 years old.

Miguelon is a photographer in Culiacan and he worked for Caro Quintero at the famous El Buffalo ranch in Chihuahua, just south of the border with Texas.

“When I was at the ranch working for Caro Quintero hundreds of soldiers raided the place and they sent all of us back home. I remember one train was not enough to transport us all. Days later, in Culiacan we are paid by Caro Quintero´s people for all the work we had done,” Miguelon said.

Official federal reports say 10,000 people were working at the ranch farming and packaging marijuana. There was over 10,000 tons of high quality marijuana all ready for export.

If that shipment would have made it to the United States it would have netted over $8 billion.

“Caro Quintero had the buyers for that weed and it wouldn’t have been the first time a shipment that size would have made it across the border. He sold that much marijuana many times over,” said Miguelon. “Believe me when I tell you he had the best marijuana growers working there. He had the best equipment and he had production lines of thousands of people cleaning the weed from leaves and seeds and very carefully packaging it for export.”

It is not difficult to believe that through El Buffalo, Caro Quintero made a multibillion dollar fortune.

“And that is the only business he had. He also had growers in Sinaloa and he was also trafficking cocaine, heroin and opium, although he had a lot of faith in the fine marijuana he was producing at El Buffalo. This stuff was worth well over 800 dollars a pound in the United Stes,” said Miguelon.

So why not quit the business at 61 or 62 years of age? Hell, why doesn’t Carlos Slim retire now that he is the second richest man in the world? Dumb question; the bigger the business the greater the responsibility and the bigger you want it to grow I suppose.

It is simply not that easy to walk away from something so great, so Caro Quintero told Chapo Guzman, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and Juan Jose “El Azul” Esparragoza that he would continue working and things would be different with him out of jail. This had to be said face to face after some many years in jail and the party was also in order.

In July of last year, journalist Dolia Estevez published an article in Forbes saying that a former DEA agent confirmed that it was a fact that Caro Quintero had been able hide two bank accounts from the United States, one in Luxembourg and another in Switzerland with over $8 billion.

“I saw the bank statements with my own eyes. The one from Luxembourg had over $4 billion and the one from Switzerland had much more than that,” said former DEA agent Hector Bellerez to Ms Estevez.

Bellerez told the journalist that those accounts had never been able to be frozen by the United States and assured that the money is still Caro Quintero’s.

Recently, officials from the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) reported they detected that Caro Quintero owned at least 28 major profit making companies that generated high income while he was in jail.

It is a fact that prisoners in many jails have great privileges and including many are armed with even Ak-47s and grenades. They possess cell phones, computers and other communication equipment. They deal drugs in and outside the prison walls. They conduct business inside and out.

But, back to the release of Caro Quintero “many feel it was an agreement with the government and that it included millions of dollars and the arrest of ‘el Chapo’”.

News reports and even authorities hinted that when Caro Quintero was detained he inherited the Guadalajara Cartel to Chapo Guzman, but many other don’t believe this. The Caro Quintero family is big and they all had a piece of the pie. They all hustled to help the ring leader to keep customers happy.

“This business is all about customers. It is not about how much marijuana you have or how much cocaine you can bring from Colombia or how much methamphetamine you can produce. Hell no, it is about how much you can sell. That is what separates the drug dealer or wannabes from the drug lords,” said Juan Torres to this Mexico Tribune journalist long time ago.

Torres was a small time operator. He was trafficking half a ton of weed a month to the United States and he was making at least $300,000 a trip.

The fact today is that there is no clear explanation why Caro Quintero was freed so inadvertently considering that the United States wanted him in extradition. The reality is that as soon as he walked out of prison he vanished into thin air and there are no new efforts today to bring him back to justice.

But in light of the infamous reputation of Mexican government officials and politicians, Mexican public opinion is inclined to believe that Caro Quintero bribed some important people and that only time will reveal what is really going on. It’s not good, that’s for sure.

MexTrib/oab