The Day Kamala Harris Took $10 Million From El Chapo

When she served as California’s attorney general, she acted with an iron fist to stop the Sinaloa Cartel from transporting cocaine in “ghost trucks.”

Drug enforcement agents in the United States have a name for a type of suspicious bus that crosses the border from Mexico. They call them “ghost buses” because they circulate with empty seats. The discovery of this drug trafficking mechanism and the iron fist with which the then California prosecutor, Kamala Harris, acted must have caused more than one shock to Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán.

That white, touristy, 44-seater vehicle met those characteristics: between January and May 2016, it made a trip without passengers every two weeks, from Baja California to California, always at dawn. That routine caught the attention of the Los Angeles Drug Enforcement Task Force, better known by the acronym LA IMPACT, and asked border authorities to alert them if he was seen on U.S. soil again.

Something was definitely not right. Suspicions were aroused on May 31, 2016, at 4 a.m., when they received the alert that, once again, the “ghost bus” was crossing the San Ysidro border from Tijuana without any passengers.

Immediately, the agents discreetly followed the truck to a mechanic’s shop labeled Jimenez Auto Electric in the South Los Angeles neighborhood of Wilmington. There, believing no one was watching, three men got out and began unloading packages wrapped in duct tape from a secret compartment. They were to be stopped and questioned, but they had a problem: the agents were not carrying an official permit to enter private property. Without a judge’s warrant, it would do no good.

As soon as dawn broke, the LA IMPACT team applied to the courts for an extraordinary search warrant. Every minute gave the suspects a chance to escape. After three hours of tense waiting, at 9 a.m., anti-narcotics agents finally got the green light to legally break into the 545 North Avalon Boulevard property. The metal packages turned out to be bricks of cocaine. In total, 83 kilos. The three traffickers claimed to be 50, 48 and 33 years old, Mexican and working for a Sinaloa Cartel cell that had made the state of California its distribution center.

That Tuesday night the California Attorney General’s Office bragged about the seizure in a press release. The headline celebrated the operation: the drugs were worth $10 million dollars. A major blow against Joaquín Guzmán Loera’s organization. The message was signed by the prosecutor, known for her strong hand and scandalous laugh. Future vice president and who is now about to get the Democratic presidential nomination to try to defeat Republican Donald Trump: Kamala Harris.

Kamala Harris, the iron prosecutor

Taking $10 million from the Sinaloa Cartel is no small feat, but doing it in May 2016 was even more momentous. El Chapo desperately needed resources to finance another escape from a Mexican prison or put together an expensive legal team to avoid extradition to the United States, as four months earlier, on January 8, he had been arrested for the last time, after 181 days on the run.

In those months, every peso earned by the cartel was destined to shield its founder. In both Mexico and the United States, anyone who interfered with the money ran the risk of being killed. Prosecutor Kamala Harris probably knew this and, even so, decided to snatch some 200 million pesos from the world’s most famous drug trafficker when he most needed funds to become a free man again.

“Transnational criminal organizations terrorize our communities, traffic large quantities of illegal drugs and weapons into our neighborhoods, and undermine public safety,” said then U.S. Attorney Kamala Harris with a triumphant pose. “And know that we will not allow it.”

It was not the first time that the African-American and Asian-American lawyer, then 52 years old, had reached into Chapo Guzman’s pocket: just nine months after being sworn in as California attorney general, on October 5, 2011, Kamala Harris had already proudly announced that she had taken $5 million from the Sinaloa Cartel with a raid in Long Beach. Those were the years when Guzman Loera needed big money to expand his criminal empire in Europe and Asia, obsessed with returning to the 701st spot on Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s millionaires.

That boldness became key in the transformation of Kamala Harris: daughter of a scientist of Indian nationality and an economics professor of Jamaican origin, who at 39 years of age ran for her first election in 2003 and won the post of district attorney in San Francisco, California, motivated by the story of a high school classmate whose justice failed her when she let her sexual abuser go free.

That campaign centered on a promise to be ruthless against criminals in the land of such notorious killers as Charles Manson, William Bonin, the Zodiac Killer and Richard Ramirez, aka “The Night Stalker”. She started in third place out of three candidates, but her brassy debating style led her to an unexpected triumph. It took her a year to perfect her style: proving her effectiveness by racking up convictions against criminals, especially drug dealers and non-violent felony defendants who, in exchange for reduced prison time, pleaded guilty and pledged to get jobs.

Her reputation won her re-election in 2007 and, because of her reputation as a “tough fighter”, she was praised in 2008 by journalist Kate Zernike, of The New York Times, who included her in a list of possible names to be the first president of the United States: “She Just Might Be President Someday”, was the title of the article.

A year later, Kamala Harris published her first book, Smart on Crime, in which she described herself as “tough on crime by being smart on crime”. That would be her letter of introduction and under that profile she competed and won in 2011 the position of attorney general of California, making history as the first woman in the post and, as soon as she started working, she unleashed a wave of investigations against cartels dedicated to drug trafficking and undocumented migrants. El Chapo and his allies unwittingly became her target.

Kamala Harris was barely a year into her new job when she made an appointment with Mexico’s attorney general at the time, Marisela Morales, with whom she signed a cooperation agreement to fight organized crime on both sides of the border. That deal dealt a blow to the Sinaloa Cartel in 2013: the prosecutor opened criminal files on Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada, Chapo’s compadre, and two of his sons, and that same year ordered the reopening of state investigations, which had begun in 1996 for cocaine trafficking.

She had the Sinaloa Cartel leader so well studied that she even wrote a report entitled Gangs Beyond Borders in which she gave Mexico recommendations on how to take him down once and for all, taking advantage of the fact that by 2014, the kingpin had already been arrested for the second time… although he would later escape again.

“Law enforcement in foreign countries has also made steady progress, as evidenced by the recent February 2014 arrest of Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán Loera, the reputed leader of Mexico’s notorious Sinaloa cartel. This report describes strategies that are working and sets out recommendations for combating transnational organized crime,” Kamala Harris wrote and signed in March of that year.

But giving suggestions was not enough for the prosecutor. And seven months after publishing her report, she hit back hard at the world’s most famous drug lord.

Operation Road Trip against “Chapo” Guzmán

Prosecutor Kamala Harris called the strategy Operation Road Trip. The name was inspired by the objectives of the anti-drug agents under her command: they had discovered a gang called Los Nitro in Southern California that was transporting several packages of methamphetamines from Mexico – purchased from the Sinaloa Cartel – by land to Contra Costa County in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In this county full of parks, rivers and long stretches, Los Nitro delivered the drugs to another cell that operated for El Chapo in the Californian state, Los Urtiz, who took methamphetamines north with other partners to cover the entire country. A complex criminal logistics that passed through the territory of the Democratic Party militant.

Kamala Harris enlisted the veteran LA IMPACT team and gradually followed up on the suspects until patience ran out on October 20, 2014, when she unleashed a storm of arrest warrants against the gang members. To avoid escapes, all the arrests were made simultaneously. One by one they fell during the operation.

The result was announced by an orated Harris at a press conference: 22 people had been arrested and 226 kilograms of methamphetamines were seized along with $700,000 in cash. The drugs alone had a street value of between $2 million and $3 million, the same amount Emma Coronel spent a year later, in 2015, on bribes to secure her husband El Chapo’s escape from the maximum security prison “El Altiplano” in the State of Mexico. But the surprises did not end there.

Without giving an exact date, Kamala Harris revealed that Operation Road Trip had already dealt secret blows to the cartel: 67 people had been arrested, 1.82 million dollars secured and dozens of kilos of methamphetamines seized. In total, just over $40 million dollars seized from Chapo Guzman’s organization. A historic result.

“We will do whatever it takes with our federal and local partners to dismantle these violent and insidious organizations,” boasted Kamala Harris, who has since emerged as a new star in U.S. politics.

That bludgeoning – added to that of the “ghost truck” the following year – served to consolidate her image as a strong hand and in 2017 she reached the Senate with the backing of President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden; who in 2019 invited her to be his running mate in his campaign to deny Trump a second consecutive term in office. A year later, the favorite daughter of Oakland, California, began working in the second most powerful political office next to the Oval Office.

Today she is close to making history again: becoming the first female president of the United States by beating, once again, Donald Trump. She will do so with the narrative that she is a veteran and tough prosecutor with experience in putting the most ruthless criminals in their place, taking advantage of the fact that the former Republican president has been found guilty of 34 criminal charges. And if anyone doubts his record, just ask Chapo Guzman.

Kamala Harris can boast that she once took $10 million from the world’s most powerful drug lord in a single day.

Source: Milenio