Between Partying And Women, This Is How The Beltrán Leyva Brothers’ Cartel Ended

The arrest of ‘La Barbie’ brought the Beltran Leyva Cartel to the brink of death. At least 48 fragmented armed branches have emerged from that old criminal group throughout Mexico.

Sitting in the VIP area of his own lap dance table, Édgar Valdéz Villarreal aka La Barbie holds a glass of whiskey while dancing to the rhythm of electronic music. At the back of the place he observes the nakedness of the dancers of the XXXóticas bar, his favorite business in all of Guerrero, with a distinguishable brown marble facade. There is no safer place in the world for the Beltran Leyva Cartel’s favorite triggerman in the port of Acapulco.

From the mayor to any traffic police officer, they knew that La Barbie was untouchable. And that his business, in the heart of the tourist city’s red light district, was as armored as he was. Perhaps because of the security he always flaunted, he used to boast that some “fucking northerners” wanted to kill him, taking advantage of his weakness for beautiful women. He told this to his subordinate El Mortal and other hitmen, according to what they declared in 2014, in the then Attorney General’s Office of the Republic, as stated in the extension of the file PGR/SEIDO/UEIDCS/476/2014 to which DOMINGA had access.

In 2008, according to official documents, La Barbie went with friends to the Baby’O nightclub, where two young women circumvented his security to sit next to him. Both accompanied him all night and asked him to continue the party at their house, but the veteran drug trafficker, known for his violence to expand his bosses’ criminal empire, identified an intonation he knows well from his old dealings with the Gulf Cartel: a Tamaulipas accent that sounded dangerous.

Suspicious, he searched their bags and found the reason for his suspicions: a handgun and a grenade that they would use to kill him alone. So he ordered them to be kidnapped, held for three days and then returned to Tamaulipas with the certainty that, if they failed in their mission, they would be killed by their own companions. And as he predicted, it happened.

El Mortal watched Edgar Valdez Villarreal, in front of the dance floor, rejoice remembering the end of those two women: they were shot as soon as they set foot in Matamoros. His only regret was that he did not spend the night with them. Had it not been for the grenade he would have gladly taken the risk, protected by his 9-millimeter Colt, as American as he was.

“Everyone knew that all the Beltran Leyvas were crazy about women,” the informant says. That’s why, he suggests, the cartel shattered like a broken heart.

The quintet of kingpins was about to rob the country

Like all the criminals who orbited around Joaquin El Chapo Guzman Loera in the 1990s, the Beltran Leyva brothers also dreamed of being eternal and leading drug trafficking in Mexico. They did not imagine that, like the rest of the cartels, the failed security strategies that followed the “war on drugs” would atomize them into dozens of armed arms with no order or place in the history books.

Brothers Arturo, Alfredo, Carlos and Hector – better known as El Barbas, El Mochomo, El Charly and El H, respectively – began their criminal careers at a very young age, in the 1970s, as drug transporters and later as bodyguards for Amado Carrillo Fuentes, El Señor de los Cielos (Lord of the Skies). His death in 1997 brought them closer to Chapo, an already famous drug trafficker with the potential to become the kingpin of kingpins; moreover, they shared a common cradle: they all grew up amidst the fields of cocaine and poppy in Badiraguato, Sinaloa.

The Beltran Leyvas were identified with the Guzman Loeras as ambitious, ruthless and in love. They saw women as instruments to force courtships that ended in weddings and, later, in business partnerships. Marriage was understood in both families as an inescapable condition for doing trustworthy, mafia-style business. So much so that the second Beltran Leyva, El Mochomo, married a niece of Chapo, and the two affectionately called each other “cousins” as they planned their business dealings.

By 2002, the Beltran Leyvas were on the verge of the power they had longed for: El Chapo, El Mayo Zambada, El Azul Esparragoza and the Carrillo Fuentes brothers from Juarez were about to form an unprecedented union of drug traffickers under the name of the Federation. And the four brothers were at the edge of that historic table in Mexican crime.

But that love was short-lived: in 2004, a double homicide against Chapo’s gunmen ordered by the Carrillo Fuentes brothers caused a rift between the Sinaloans and the Juarez brothers. Thus, a seat was left open and the Beltran Leyvas were quick to take it with an offer: to become the security faction of the Sinaloa Cartel, high-level bodyguards who would defend their relatives from harm.

Inspired by their rival the Gulf Cartel, which had recruited elite deserting soldiers to form its armed guard – Los Zetas – the Beltran Leyvas gave meaning to their existence by creating their own troop: Los Negros, after the color of the U.S. S.W.A.T. team’s tactical uniforms. At the head of this mission they placed a bloodthirsty Texan who grew up in Tamaulipas and who, like them, liked excesses and women: Edgar Valdez Villareal, whose light eyes and pale skin made those who met him fall in love with him.

That quintet was ready to steal the country and make it their own.

The breakup with ‘Chapo’ Guzmán

At the beginning of 2007, at the start of the “war on drugs,” the Ministry of National Defense prepared a diagnosis of the Mexican cartels and their metastasis throughout the country. The result showed that, after the Sinaloa Cartel, the Beltran Leyva Cartel was the second in national presence: 16 states had some cell with the name of the four brothers or La Barbie, who killed and conquered land as if he was in a hurry to rise as young as possible.

In addition to its own letterhead, the cartel already had armed groups such as Los Panda, Los Coyote and Arturo’s Special Forces. If they continued like this, they would surpass the influence of Chapo Guzman and his associates in a few years. And that perception strained the alliance between the two sides. The split came after two irreconcilable conflicts: the dispute over the narcotics route from the Pacific to Chicago and Chapo’s betrayal of Alfredo Beltran Leyva El Mochomo, knowing how easily he let his guard down in front of a woman.

El Chapo waited for his “cousin” to throw a party to set him up. He knew that Alfredo would celebrate the eve of his anniversary with some woman who would exhaust him into a deep sleep. And so it happened: El Mochomo was so exhausted that he never heard how troops from the Ninth Military Zone surrounded his house in Culiacán, Sinaloa, at three in the morning and arrested him without having to fire a single shot.

On his 37th birthday, January 21, 2008, he was arrested in his underwear. His brothers accused that it was Joaquín Guzmán who gave his location to the federal government. And that was the beginning of the end for the powerful clan that cherished the dream of being the absolute bosses of organized crime in Mexico.

Arturo Beltrán Leyva’s pants were pulled down.

With El Mochomo arrested, the federal government dedicated the rest of the year to arresting Arturo, El Barbas, the first-born son of Carlos Beltran Araujo and Ramona Leyva Gamez. His reputation preceded him: he had an irresistible attraction for young women, especially actresses and models, according to data held by the National Investigation and Security Center (CISEN). His name, habits and vices were frequently heard among the show business community.

Journalist Anabel Hernandez assures that among his partners were host Galilea Montijo, actress Betty Monroe, singer Ninel Conde and others, who have denied such links. “We are talking about a man with a lot of fragilities. A man who with all his money and his virility had a lot of inferiority complexes and sexual vices,” wrote the author of the book Los Señores del Narco.

In December 2009, an affair ended his criminal career. On the 11th of that month she organized a huge party in a house in Tepoztlán, Morelos, where the musical group Los Cadetes de Linares arrived. In the middle of a private concert, an elite detachment of the Secretary of the Navy surrounded the house and attacked him. A few minutes difference allowed him to flee through a hidden exit.

However, in his flight he left behind information that would lead the Armed Forces to him, again, five days later: 24 sex workers who entertained the meeting gave the location of other houses in Morelos where they had already been taken. Thus, with the clues of these women hired by him, on December 16, El Barbas was surrounded, again, by the military. He tried to repel the aggression, but was surprised by 20 bullet wounds, leaving him lying in the hallway of an apartment in the Altitude residential complex in Cuernavaca.

A photograph went viral in those years: Arturo Beltrán Leyva’s corpse was covered with bloody bills that covered his chest and bare legs. Those who shot him down pulled down his pants, which some in the Armed Forces interpreted as a mockery for the way he began his hunt.

Two weeks after Arturo’s death, the third brother, El Charly, was arrested in a restaurant in Culiacán, Sinaloa. The fourth and youngest of the clan, Hector El H, managed with middling success to keep the family criminal empire going by creating alliances with the Zetas for four more years, but in 2014 he was arrested. While serving a sentence in the Altiplano maximum security prison, he suffered a heart attack at the age of 58.

It was 2018 and the entire Beltrán Leyva Cartel received its death certificate.

La Barbie”s fondness for lap dances

Despite the casualties, La Barbie ignored everyone’s advice, even that of his late mentor Arturo Beltran Leyva. Perhaps because he never led by example: at every opportunity, El Barbas would ask the Texan not to trust women, to control himself, that one day he was going to make a serious mistake that he wouldn’t be able to correct. But La Barbie not only set up his own XXXotic lap dance, but also invested in several others around Acapulco: El Foxys, El Maxim, El Platinum, which he used to meet women as well as to hide drugs or launder money, according to local journalists who have requested anonymity.

According to reporters from Acapulco, during his years of greatest impunity, he even became an investor in the mythical Quinta Rebeca, a former brothel that operated until 2013, which many reports said hid girls in its rooms and operated within the Marroquín neighborhood, where Felix Salgado Macedonio, now a senator re-elected by Morena, lives, accused of alleged ties to the Beltran Leyva clan.

La Barbie’s fondness for a lap dance -fostered by an old vice in Acapulco of tolerating sex tourism- infected his armed groups: in Quintana Roo, Los Pelones entered the human trafficking business; in Morelos, Los Güeros dedicated themselves to forced prostitution; in the Costa Grande, Guerrero, the epicenter of child pornography, La Gente del Mudo (The Mute Mob) developed.

All of these groups became splinter groups when Edgar Valdez Villarreal was arrested in August 2010. Three versions explain his arrest in Lerma, State of Mexico: that the federal government managed to capture him after months of investigative work that resulted in a surprise operation; that El H paid commanders close to the then Secretary of Public Security, Genaro Garcia Luna, to arrest him because he was creating his own criminal organization; or – the one told by journalists in Acapulco who saw him smiling on television – that it was all a set-up and that he turned himself in to become a protected witness after years of collaborating with the DEA as an informant.

This third version includes the possibility that Edgar Valdez Villarreal, at 37 years old, felt ready to stop running and finally enjoy his marriage to an almost unknown young woman named Priscila Montemayor, the woman for whom he would bury his criminal career and whose charms made the last Beltran Leyva boss succumb.

The End of the Beltran Leyva Cartel

The arrest — agreed or not — of La Barbie put the Beltran Leyva Cartel on the verge of death. And what pushed them to the precipice was that his father-in-law Carlos Montemayor, heir to the criminal structure and owner of a million-dollar transportation company that went back and forth from Mexico to the United States, was arrested in Santa Fe, Mexico City, in November 2010, and later extradited to the United States.

That arrest forever broke the cartel’s hegemony. Then, the north, center and south of the country changed forever, as the cells that previously answered to the Beltrán Leyva brothers or the Texan gunman La Barbie became their own bosses within their own little pockets of power. From these shattered cells emerged, for example, the Chapo Isidro mob, a criminal group that still operates in Sinaloa under the orders of Fausto Isidro Meza Flores, who leads at least three violent armed groups: La Oficina, Los Anti-Antrax and Los Mazatlecos, enemies to the death of Los Chapitos, as reported by Insight Crime.

Also from this wound were born the Guerreros Unidos, who are accused of involvement in the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa. Their enemies, Los Rojos, also have their roots in the Beltran tree.

The former allies of La Barbie created the fearsome Independent Cartel of Acapulco, which pulls the strings of the clandestine sex industry in the Guerrero port with eyes in every lap dance, brothel and hotel. And La Barredora, which has become the scourge of the businessmen who survive the extortions of the old and new Acapulco.

Los Tlacos, Los Ardillos, Los Granados, Los Rusos, Los Carrillo, Los Maldonado, La Bandera, Los Tequileros and other creatures that emerged from the breakup of the Beltrán Leyva in Guerrero were also born; in the State of Mexico they called themselves El Cártel de la Mano con Ojos and now sign as Nuevo Imperio; In Morelos, they baptized themselves Los Tlahuicas, Los Mayas, El Infierno, the Ghost Cartel or the Morelos Federation; in Mexico City they gave birth to the Tlahuac Cartel, which in 2007 provoked the first narco-blockade in the Mexican capital during an operation against its leader Felipe de Jesus Perez Luna, El Ojos.

A database compiled by MILENIO based on data from the Ministry of National Defense, the Colegio de México, the Universidad Iberoamericana and the law firm Lantia Intelligence shows that at least 48 armed groups have emerged from the old Beltrán Leyva Cartel. They are private armies run by a handful of local capos who owe their existence to the weakness of four brothers and their appetite for partying and women.

Source: Milenio