The Strange Disappearance of Protected Witnesses Who Knew Too Much About ‘El Chapo’

His name was Marcelo Peña García. But when he decided to become a cooperating witness for the Attorney General’s Office (PGR), he was assigned a code name: Julio. Under that pseudonym, he revealed the structure of the organization co-founded by Joaquín Guzmán Loera, El Chapo. His testimony ended up becoming the first major legal document against the Sinaloa Cartel.

How could he not know the organization, having been the official messenger, the link between the drug trafficker and his brother, Arturo Guzmán Loera, alias El Pollo, who was living outside of Sinaloa? That’s how he learned that in 1993 they built the first drug tunnel in history, designed by architect Mariano Villegas Zamora, on the border between Aguas Prietas, Sonora, and Douglas, Arizona.

After El Chapo Guzmán’s first capture, Julio would learn the most intimate details of the Sinaloa Cartel’s negotiations. And once El Pollo assumed leadership of the organization, he became his confidant and even brother-in-law.

During his first week in charge, he says, El Pollo would send seven tons of drugs to the United States, a delivery that El Chapo had left unfinished. As the months passed, Arturo Guzmán, just as cunning as his brother, would begin bringing cocaine from Colombia, which would arrive directly at the ports of Nayarit. The witness would also reveal the alleged relationship between drug trafficking and political power.

He confessed that Arturo himself sent him to the Puente Grande prison to deliver a message to his incarcerated brother. “[We’re] going to have a meeting with General Rebollo to start working with him on drug trafficking and give him one hundred million dollars.” Julio was referring to Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, then head of the National Institute for Combating Drugs.

According to the protected witness, this astronomical sum of money would be raised with the cooperation of many drug traffickers, including some of the cartel’s historical founders. Amado Carrillo Leyva, “The Lord of the Skies,” organized the meeting and asked each drug trafficker for $10 million. “From what I understand, the negotiation wasn’t finalized, but they did give him an advance of $10 million,” he would say.

There are two other protected witnesses who shook the cartel. José Javier Burgueño, a businessman from Culiacán, using the alias César, revealed how they operated in central and southern Mexico, and that the Beltrán Leyva brothers had allied themselves with Colombian partners. Another witness who would speak to the authorities was Jesús Castro Pantoja, a former soldier working for the cartel under the alias El Chabelo.

These are the details of the witness statements that built the mega-case against the Sinaloa Cartel in 2001, and which were again called upon by the Attorney General’s Office to prosecute another founding kingpin: Héctor “El Güero” Palma Salazar.

This is a collaboration between ARCHIVERO and DOMINGA, with statements from protected witnesses that reveal that in Mexico the official truth is always under construction.

The former soldier who was part of El Chapo’s security detail

ONE. His real name was Jesús Castro Pantoja, but in the criminal underworld he was known as El Chabelo. On November 2, 2001, he was arrested in the lobby of a Guadalajara hotel by agents of the Attorney General’s Office (PGR). He would provide a wealth of previously unpublished details, intimate information about the Guzmán Loera family.

Until 1991, he belonged to the armed forces with the rank of infantry second lieutenant; however, due to personal problems, he deserted and decided to go live with his mother’s family in the United States, where he began working in construction. But he grew tired of it: in early 1993, he decided to return to Mexico and, through a friend, met El Chapo Guzmán in Mexico City. A chance encounter.

Although it would actually be at a ranch known as La Ruana, in Nayarit, where he ran into him on the day of the town’s festivities and said: “What a surprise to see you!” Pantoja believes Guzmán liked him, as he immediately invited him to work with him. That year he started in security and, as a kind of initiation, was given a 9mm Pietro Beretta pistol to protect the boss.

One of the first scandals he witnessed was the attempted assassination of El Chapo Guzmán at the Guadalajara airport. On May 24, 1993, a group of Arellano Félix hitmen ambushed him in the airport parking lot with AK-47 rifles. However, the gunmen thought he was arriving in a white Grand Marquis. They were wrong. Cardinal Jesús Posadas Ocampo was riddled with bullets.

Pantoja says it all happened because the Arellano Félix cartel hired gang members from Barrio Logan in San Diego, who were heavily drugged. “[El Chapo] told me, ‘These idiots killed a priest, there’s going to be a global uproar.’”

On June 9, however, El Chapo was captured in the department of San Marcos, in Ciudad Tecún Umán, by members of the Guatemalan Treasury Guard. Hours later, the Guatemalan government expelled him and formally handed him over to Mexican authorities at the Talismán International Bridge over the Suchiate River, for transfer to the Attorney General’s Office (PGR). He was imprisoned at the Federal Social Rehabilitation Center No. 1 in Almoloya de Juárez.

Learjet to Jalisco Wedding Crashes

Chabelo escaped to the United States again. But he’d developed a taste for easy money, so in early 1994 he returned to Tepic, where he was advised to speak with Héctor “El Güero” Palma, who controlled the area. He introduced himself to the drug lord, saying he had previously been part of El Chapo Guzmán’s security detail. El Güero Palma accepted him, and he became part of his security detail. 

Then tragedy struck: on June 22, 1995, Palma and eleven others, including Pantoja, boarded a Learjet bound for a wedding in Jalisco. But the aircraft crashed. “I pulled El Güero Palma out to save him,” he would later say, providing further details to understand what happened that day.

“I was wounded in the back, head, and legs, and El Güero was just as badly injured, or worse.” They managed to contact some friends who took them to a hospital, while Palma was taken to an unknown location. A day later, he learned that his boss had been caught in a raid while receiving treatment at a house in Jalisco.

During that time, Pantoja went into hiding and received rehabilitation for his spine after the Learjet crash. He would later escape to the United States for the second time. But he returned in 2000 to marry a young woman named Verónica and then went to live in Guanajuato.

Then he was contacted by Mauro Palomares Melchor, a former soldier who worked for El Chapo Guzmán. He summoned him to the Otomi Ceremonial Center in the State of Mexico, where he told him that the new boss needed a security team: it was Arturo Guzmán, alias El Pollo.

So, El Chapo had escaped from Puente Grande prison and was the most wanted man, along with his brother Arturo. El Pelón, one of the Guzmán cousins, secured safe houses where the two brothers moved at least once a month to avoid being tracked by the authorities. But something went wrong. El Pollo was arrested in Mexico City on September 6, 2001. According to Pantoja, that afternoon he left his hiding place to see a lawyer.

Two months later, Pantoja was captured. After his arrest, he was sent to the maximum-security prison of El Altiplano, better known as La Palma. And from that day on, he decided he wouldn’t spend his entire life in prison: he offered himself as a protected witness. He testified that El Chapo, since his escape, visited his wife, Griselda, twice a month. He also said that El Chapo had a girlfriend named Gladys, who also lived in Sinaloa, and that his wives had judicial police officers as bodyguards.

The Businessman Who Tracked Arturo Beltrán Leyva’s Movements

TWO. The Attorney General’s Office (PGR) renamed businessman José Javier Burgueño Urías as César. By 1996, he was a messenger for Sergio Fierro Chávez, Joaquín Guzmán’s pilot. According to his story, he started trafficking cocaine for “The Lord of the Skies” (Fierro Chávez) and, later, for Guzmán Loera. He had achieved remarkable feats in the criminal underworld, such as transporting up to 6,500 kilograms of cocaine in a single trip.

In his statements, he recounts that his boss, Fierro Chávez, had decided to go independent. The gossip reached the Puente Grande prison, and “El Chapo” Guzmán wasn’t happy about it. Therefore, to avoid a conflict, he sent José Javier to meet with Humberto Loya Castro, a lawyer who served as legal advisor and political liaison for the Sinaloa Cartel. And Loza, in turn, arranged a meeting with El Pollo one day in 1996 at a restaurant in Pabellón Polanco, Mexico City.

El Pollo told him he would speak with his brother. He received El Chapo’s blessing a few weeks later, but not before agreeing that 20% of the profits would go to the Sinaloa Cartel. It would be the drug trafficker Arturo Beltrán Leyva, then a lieutenant in the northwest of the country, who would be in charge of collecting Fierro’s earnings. And everyone was happy.

Once arrested by the PGR (Attorney General’s Office) and under protection, he revealed Beltrán Leyva’s tastes: he would lock himself in hotel rooms to buy $150,000 worth of jewelry; his trusted man was always Humberto Márquez García, the cartel’s debt collector; and they were the ones who murdered Raúl Ángel Ibarra Celis, a Sinaloa native, because he owed $7 million.

Burgueño said he ordered the murder in 1997 because he owed this million-dollar sum to one of his Colombian associates, José Vicente Castaño Gil, alias “El Profe,” founder of the now-defunct far-right armed group United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). He also recounted that Arturo Beltrán’s lieutenants carried credentials from the Ministry of the Interior, transporting cocaine by boat.

The messenger who became a member of the Guzmán Loera family

THREE. Marcelo Peña García, who would later become El Chapo Guzmán’s brother-in-law, rose from messenger to family member. Upon becoming a witness, he continued to reveal more intimate details. Regarding Arturo Guzmán, he said: “We sometimes talked about how difficult it was for him to run the organization and how the situation was very delicate because of the DEA and PGR’s search for his brother, El Chapo. El Pollo also told him that he was going to contact a DEA agent named Tito to negotiate his brother’s situation.”

These witnesses provided the first details of the Sinaloa Cartel’s relationship with the Colombians, with law enforcement authorities, and even with the DEA. Starting in 2001, when they became protected witnesses and some of their information was leaked, they disappeared without a trace.

However, on 15 June 2016, the demons were unleashed once again. The United States decided to release the notorious drug lord El Güero Palma. The drug lord had been extradited in 2007 and his statements had been kept under lock and key. It was through a cooperation agreement that he secured his release. However, the Mexican government detained him at the border and re-imprisoned him for his alleged responsibility in the murder of a deputy commander, Antonio Contreras, and his bodyguard, José Cruz Guerrero. He was also charged with organized crime.

In May 2021, various media outlets reported that a judge had acquitted Palma of this latter charge, citing the disappearance of two men: witnesses Julio and César. These men had collaborated in the 2001 mega-case and were needed by the prosecution to prove that El Güero Palma had been part of the criminal organization.

They were key informants: they revealed operations, routes, and pacts of the Sinaloa Cartel. This is the story of the disappearance of protected witnesses.

At the time, authorities stated they had ordered searches for Julio and César across all 32 of the agency’s administrative units, meaning throughout the entire country. They even contacted personnel at the United States embassy to try to track them down there.

In the written statement from Güero Palma, delivered through his lawyers, he says: “The protected witnesses or collaborators present contradictions, are incoherent, contradictory, implausible, unreasonable…”. He reveals that he lost contact with Julio in October 2003, and with César in December 2006. According to the Prosecutor’s Office, César requested the removal of the protection provided by the Federal Investigation Agency in 2003, as well as permission to leave the country.

In 2023, a court in Jalisco issued another formal prison sentence against drug trafficker Palma, this time for the aggravated murder of Juan Castillo Alonso, deputy director of Federal Prison No. 2. One of the protected witnesses from 2001 did reappear: Marcelo Peña García, El Chapo’s former brother-in-law. According to the media, Marcelo dared to say to Palma that day: “Have some guts!” He then backed 

Source: Milenio