The Improbable Friendship of the Lord of the Tunnels and the Lord of the Boats

The Colombian National Police launches a secret beauty contest. A group of agents searches from top to bottom of the corporation for the most attractive female police officer. None of the participants know that several men are rigorously examining their photos to find someone who meets the beauty standards associated with young, upper-class Colombian women: a tall figure, white skin, light eyes, exquisite features.

It is the search for the perfect lure to attract a drug trafficker who poses as a wealthy businessman and whose weakness is high-class women.

After weeks of searching, there is white smoke. A female officer in her twenties is chosen from among hundreds for an undercover job commissioned by the Criminal Investigation Department and Interpol: to pose as a socialite who has recently moved to the province of Manabí, in western Ecuador, and to frequent the places where a criminal who has been under the authorities’ radar for months hangs out.

Alicia –her real name is not revealed in police records– walks around with jewelry, designer clothes and a modern vehicle through the most chic places on the coast. She attracts attention wherever she goes: bars, restaurants and boutiques until her prey takes the bait at a gym. The two talk from time to time. Then, they become friends. At the same time, lovers. For months, they weave a love relationship that is put on hold when Alicia announces that she must return to Cali, Colombia, due to a family problem. Their relationship continues from a distance through phone calls until the false socialite begs her to spend Easter together.

The date of the love reunion is dated April 12, 2017 in Ipiales, Colombia, on the border with Ecuador. The lover leaves his area of ​​influence and runs into Alicia’s arms. According to the Colombian magazine Semana, he enters the country illegally in an armored truck. She, on the other hand, awaits him with a betrayal that will break his heart: a checkpoint by the Colombian National Police and an arrest warrant with his name, Edison Washington Prado Alava, alias El Gerald, friend and partner 4,190 kilometers away from Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán.

The story begins on the Malecón de Altata

Facing the Sea of ​​Cortez, my companion finishes a beer, taking long gulps with a thirst that only castaways have. Navolato and Culiacán burn at 38 degrees and the haze dries out your mouth so much that you can’t talk without moistening it. It’s the summer of 2023 and we’re resting on the Altata boardwalk after a day working on a documentary series with the help of local journalists who know much more about the Sinaloa Cartel than they publish.

If I had published this story immediately after our conversation, I would write his name. Back then, the state capital was not the morgue it is today, after Los Chapitos’ betrayal of Mayo Zambada. But these days, naming my source would be like putting a rope around his neck, so I will call this can-eater simply and with silent gratitude: Alejandro.

So Alejandro chases away the heat with determined drinks and a gaze lost in the horizon when he says the phrase that originates this text: “How many friends of the ‘old man’ have become rich with these waves?” And since he is a born narrator, I remain silent and let the sunset cover us with the story of a little-known friendship: that of El Chapo and Gerald, united by the waves that make cocaine surf around the world.

‘El Chapo’ meets the supplier who is worth an army

Let’s go to 2010. Fourth year of the “war against drugs.” Joaquín Guzmán is at the height of criminal power. His fortune is estimated at a conservative estimate of one billion dollars, which led Forbes magazine to place him 701st among the world’s wealthiest men a year earlier. In 2010, the same magazine placed him again, but in 60th place among the most powerful men in the world, below US President Barack Obama, but close to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and above journalist Julian Assange.

El Chapo appears as the CEO of cocaine on a global level. He has businesses in Australia, China, Malaysia, Turkey, Italy, Spain and, of course, South America. So from the top he watches the world to find those who work for him. One country in particular interests him: Colombia. Since the death of Pablo Escobar in 1993, there has been a vacuum that has caused deadly disputes between groups that covet the place left vacant by El Patrón del Mal.

El Chapo doesn’t care who wins the battle in Colombia; instead, he does care that the winner works for him. His most reliable suppliers, Los Rastrojos, are skilled, reliable and bring high-quality cocaine to Mexico, but their most important leaders are beginning to be arrested. It doesn’t seem like they will last long in the business, so the Mexican needs to find an organization to replace them in order to fulfill his plan to cover the world with white powder.

Looking for a criminal group to replace Los Rastrojos, El Chapo finds a man who is worth the same as an army: Edison Washington Prado Álava, an Ecuadorian boatman who works with the Colombian mafia and has a reputation for being a stoic sailor who knows how to weather the worst storms at sea and is capable of delivering the drug loads entrusted to him to their destination. He is the toughest sailor in the Pacific.

“El Chapo is told that he has to meet this person. They nickname him El Gerald. And, pardon my French, but they say it like this: ‘he has balls the size of the world’. Then the ‘old man’ is interested and they talk on the phone. From the first call, they say, they became partners and friends. I think El Chapo saw something in him that reminded him of himself. The humble origins, the ambition or the fucking sadism,” says Alejandro and downs another beer.

‘El Gerald’ sets up a gas station façade on the seafront

Joaquín Guzmán’s birth certificate indicates that he was born in 1957 in Badiraguato, Sinaloa. 

Twenty-four years later, Edison Washington was born in Manabí, Ecuador, in 1981. They are separated by almost a quarter of a century, but something unites them: their native poverty.

The Mexican grows up poor in the mountains, while the Ecuadorian does so in the tropics. The first is a commoner from the land; the second grows up with nothing in the middle of the water. Both yearn for the wealth that their entire lineage lacked. If El Chapo begins his criminal career as a skilled car thief who later learns to traffic drugs, Edison will do so by stealing fishing boats until he is 19, when in 2000 he discovers that more money can be made moving loads of cocaine from one port to another.

“The old man is drawn to the story of that young boatman who had a reputation for being able to navigate the most difficult waves in the world. You know, everyone exaggerates their fame and Gerald’s is that he could complete any trip, even in a small boat shaken by a hurricane,” Alejandro tells me.

By 2004 Gerald is already a local legend. The Rastrojos look for him when they want to make a suicidal trip through wild waves and no one else dares. And he, as if nothing happened, moves drugs for them from Tumaco and Nariño, two large ports in Colombia, to Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala and Mexico. The risk pays him about five thousand dollars per trip.

“El Chapo was the same in his beginnings. All wild, he took the routes that no one else wanted because they were impossible. He went to the United States, Guatemala, Bolivia, Colombia, in planes that looked like they would fall down when they were old. Each one from his own level, they admired each other for being crazy. They became friends,” says my friend.

Another personality trait they share: El Gerald is brutally ambitious. With each trip he learns the business: where the crops are, who the connections are, when more product is needed, how negotiations are done. He is a sponge that absorbs knowledge waiting for the moment to take advantage of it. And that happens in 2010 when his bosses are arrested and he becomes a free agent.

From the first phone call with El Chapo, El Gerald offers him a long-studied plan: with the money he has saved, and thanks to contacts he has made with silver and lead, he will set up gas stations in the sea to serve as a front for the boats with drugs. These are floating facilities that serve as fuel for boats, but which he also loads with cocaine. Because they are located offshore, out of sight of the authorities, his drug business can span the continent from one end to the other. If a trip is particularly complicated, he will personally make it to ensure that the business doesn’t have delays.

El Chapo approves the strategy. Alejandro says, perhaps relaxed by the golden sunset that surrounds us, that he can almost imagine the Sinaloa boss smiling on the other end of the phone with a mocking grin because, finally, he has found someone who is as crazy about money and power as he is.

Each of his mansions, ‘El Gerald’ equips them with safes

Gerald sets up a dozen gasoline pumps on the high seas and buys everything from fishing boats to speedboats to simulate a booming fishing business. Each boat is loaded with between 800 and 1,000 kilos of drugs that go from South America to North America. On average, he dispatches between 10 and 15 boats each week. Most of them are shipped from Colombian waters.

He not only becomes the boss of tough sailors whom he teaches how to survive the storms, but he also trains a group of hitmen who eliminate anyone who might copy his strategy and who wants to rob him of El Chapo’s friendship.

From anonymity, he controls the entire drug chain: production, logistics, routes, marketing and collection. It becomes as wide and deep as the sea.

“The drug trafficking business was fragmented and each stage (cultivation, processing and distribution) had its own boss and organization. Without bosses, the Ecuadorian Gerald did something that no Colombian drug trafficker had done since the mid-nineties: he kept everything,” reads a profile published in Semana, which Alejandro will show me, evidence that his story is true.

In a few years, the boatman became a millionaire. According to estimates by the Criminal Investigation Department and Interpol, he amassed between 200 and 300 million dollars. And he bought houses all over Ecuador for his family under the guise of a prosperous businessman who moves around in armored caravans. He fitted out each of his mansions as safes to hide his fortune in secret compartments that soon become insufficient.

He is living his golden dream: in a short time it seems that he has equaled the wealth of his Mexican friend, who from Sinaloa congratulates him on his growth.

But if the stories of ambitious drug traffickers have taught us anything, it is that it only takes one stumble to fall into the deepest of pits. And the fall of Gerald, the drug tycoon, begins with the collection of what for him would be a few coins from his treasure.

‘El Gerald’ appears on the map of the Ecuadorian police

Between 2014 and 2016, El Chapo experienced turbulent times. He began his stage as the lord and master of drugs, then he was arrested in Mazatlán, then he escaped from a maximum security prison, he returned to trafficking at large and, finally, he was captured again for the last time after being caught making calls with his platonic love, the actress Kate del Castillo.

While this storm was raging in Mexico, El Gerald was calmly rocking in the waters of drug trafficking. It seemed like it was his turn to stand on top of the world and look down to find new partners.

Until he discovered, at some point in 2016, that someone had broken into a secret vault in one of his houses in Manabí and stolen a wad of cash from him. His anger led him to accuse a bricklayer who had worked in several security installations at his houses and he ordered his hitmen to kill him. The eight gunmen, to make sure they get their act together, go overboard with violence: they kill the builder and also his three-year-old son.

The murder of the child shakes Ecuadorian society. The authorities are forced to act to lessen the high profile indignation. And the arrest of a hitman involved in the crime leads them to El Gerald, who had managed, until then, to go unnoticed among the most wanted criminals in the region.

When investigating further about this supposed businessman, the authorities realize that they are facing a drug titan: with the help of the DEA, they estimate that this thirty-something has sent at least 250 tons of cocaine to Mexico and the United States from the sea of ​​Colombia. In comparison, El Chapo was accused of 150 tons. Another nickname emerges: Gerald is now the Ecuadorian Pablo Escobar.

The United States demands his capture. The government of President Juan Manuel Santos gets to work. There is only one problem: Gerald doesn’t leave Ecuador because he has bought officials there who provide him protection and because his country doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States.

​The Colombian National Police must come up with a plan to get the drug trafficker to leave his country voluntarily. Then, someone has a great idea: that a beautiful policewoman disguised as a civilian makes him fall in love with her and organizes a date in Ipiales. The plan seems impossible to execute. Until it works.

This is how the criminal career of the ‘Lord of the Boats’ ended

2017 becomes a fateful year for the two friends. El Chapo is extradited to the United States and four months later El Gerald is arrested on his way to a vacation with his girlfriend with a badge and a gun. A year later, in 2018, he follows in the footsteps of the Sinaloan and is also extradited to the United States. Each chooses his own path. The Mexican clings in New York to the story that he is a poor farmer who has never trafficked an ounce of drugs and the Ecuadorian gives in in Florida and agrees to plead guilty to cooperate with the DEA and get a reduction in his sentence.

“Your Honor, I would like you to know that life has not given me any opportunity. My father abandoned me when I was five years old. I was born in a poor land without the opportunity to work. At nine years old I worked on the street to help my mother support my siblings. She was a housewife and with the little she earned it was not enough to support my siblings, who were younger than me.

“I would like you to know, Your Honor, that many people suffer abuse, injuries and mistreatment on those streets. I would have liked to be like everyone else and have a childhood, but I couldn’t. My life was a matter of survival, and that’s how I entered the world of drug trafficking, out of necessity,” El Gerald admits in one of his hearings before Judge Cecilia Altonaga.

His strategy is working: although he becomes the Ecuadorian with the most severe sentence for drug trafficking in the United States, he manages to get his sentence to just 19 years and seven months. El Chapo, on the other hand, will receive a life sentence.

“What a thing, huh? The two friends ended up in prison in the United States. Right now, they’re both in a cell,” says Alejandro and makes a clicking sound with his mouth.

Night falls on the Altata Malecón. It’s time to go back to the hotel. Retracing the path to Culiacán, I think about that improbable friendship between The Lord of the Tunnels and The Lord of the Boats. Two different beginnings, a common end.

The story of two men who settled in the Olympus of drugs and who fell almost at the same time, seduced by the most earthly matter: money and love.

Source: Milenio