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In the mid-1990s, Guatemalan businessman Otto Herrera finds himself in the middle of a cocaine gold rush and decides to cash in.
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NotíciasTranscrição
00:00O encontro de Pabllo Escobar, o colombian drug lord, terminou hoje.
00:12O cartel de Sinaloa, sob a liderança do Chapo Guzman,
00:19rose para se tornar o caralho, mais poderoso do mundo.
00:23Chapo era uma pessoa malha, e eu não usei-se a palavra ligeiramente.
00:27Estamos falando de milhares de bilhões de dólares.
00:29Estamos falando de violência que é pior que o Afganistan e o Iraque.
00:53A good 80% of the cocaine that finally gets here to the United States is probably going through Guatemala.
00:59Guatemala became a critical geographic and operational area in the global narco-trafficking industry.
01:12Otto Herrera was the player in Central America.
01:16He was the largest, wealthiest, most powerful Guatemalan trafficker.
01:20The Herrera organization moved in excess of 50 tons of cocaine into Central America on behalf of the Sinaloa cartel.
01:36I never envisioned how big this was going to get.
01:39The logistics, the loads, the storage, the whole entire Guatemalan operation was being run by me.
01:59My name is Otto Herrera.
02:03I was born in Guatemala.
02:06My name is Steven Fraga.
02:08I'm a special agent of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration.
02:14My father used to work for an American company down in Guatemala.
02:19So we had the chance to attend American school.
02:25I did my high school in United States in Riverside, California, after school.
02:32I had a couple of jobs here in United States and I worked construction.
02:38I did a lot of work for oil companies, building gas stations.
02:41When he was in California, he married an American woman.
02:47When he returned to Guatemala, he had a wife and a young family.
02:51So he was looking for work.
02:55I returned to Guatemala with my wife and my first daughter.
02:59And as I come back to my hometown, I meet with old friends.
03:05And I started a new business with them, a trucking company.
03:12I'm making a living, but it's not enough.
03:17We were aware that there was airplanes landing in the area from Colombia.
03:23And they were bringing cocaine into the area.
03:27The reason that we knew this is because a few months earlier, there was a plane crash close by.
03:36An airplane crashed with a full load of cocaine and cocaine was spread out all over the fields.
03:44Because of where Guatemala sits in Central America, it is an ideal location geographically as a landing point for cocaine
03:53shipments from Colombia that were transferred by plane.
03:59One of my friends, we always spoke about how well his brother was doing, you know, making real money.
04:09And how little did we see him work?
04:14We had a yard where we parked all our equipment.
04:17And I noticed that his brother had a box truck parked at the yard that hardly ever moved.
04:23So, I opened up the box truck.
04:27What I found was lights and generators and radio equipment to land airplanes during the night.
04:39So, we came up with an idea.
04:42We blocked the fuel line to the truck from the start.
04:47And sure enough, about two, three weeks later, I got the call from him and told me that he needed
04:53help because he wanted to move the truck.
04:56So, we told him that we wouldn't fix the truck unless he told us what he was doing.
05:00And, you know, he came clean.
05:11For me, at first, it was like the opportunity of making real money.
05:16I could assume that it was going to be risky, so it had to be good pay.
05:23Otto Herrera saw an opportunity and provided valuable assistance to that organization.
05:31I knew what I was getting into.
05:35I knew there was a big responsibility.
05:39There was the fear of failure more than anything else.
05:46Herrera maintained a couple of skill sets that were unique that could be used within the drug trafficking arena.
05:54I grew up in a banana plantation watching the crop dusters work every day.
06:01So, that was my dream, to become a crop duster.
06:05And that's why, you know, I took the lessons and I was never able to finish.
06:09But the knowledge is there, you know.
06:13You knew how to fly planes.
06:15Knew how to assess properties that could be utilized as airfields.
06:21I was very handy with GPSs and old navigation equipment.
06:25So, I was being sent out to get coordinates from the administrative fields and trying to help with the logistics
06:32of the jobs.
06:34I was just thinking about getting ahead, making money and trying to provide my family with a better life.
06:44I never envisioned how big this was going to get.
06:49I never did.
06:58The operation was centralized in Guatemala because of the geographical position.
07:06From that area, you can access the Mexican borders very quick.
07:23The shipments came into Guatemala and it was our responsibility to help these aircraft land.
07:35And after that, we needed to safeguard and store the cocaine till the Mexicans were ready to transport this cocaine
07:45into Mexico.
07:47To call them airstrips is an insult to airstrips.
07:50But these are basically small roads in the grass that they make where they have the small planes land with
07:55cocaine.
08:08The first representative of the Sinaloa cartel that Otto Herrera established a working relationship with was an individual known as
08:17Chewie.
08:21His true name was Jesus Soto.
08:26Chewie played a very important role in the Sinaloa cartel.
08:29He was pretty much in charge of Guatemala and the rest of countries in Central America.
08:36Everything I learned about trafficking, about drug trafficking, I learned from Chewie.
08:41The way to approach people, the way to negotiate deals.
08:47Most important was to learn what the people in Sinaloa liked.
08:51To be loyal to them and to work strictly for them.
09:08Myo Zambada, I was very close to Myo Zambada.
09:12I visited Myo several times.
09:14The first person that introduced me to Myo Zambada was Chewie.
09:21I did spend a lot of time with Chewie.
09:26I drove him around all over the country, scouting places, meeting people, and I got to know him quite well.
09:33Our relationship grew closer.
09:36At the same time, there was a lot of rumours being spread about Guatemalans I was working for in relation
09:44with shipments getting stalled.
09:48Portions of shipments and full shipments.
09:52This is a subject that me and Chewie used to talk about.
10:06I was instructed to take the shipments over to the border.
10:11The plan was for the shipments to disappear on the way to the Mexican border.
10:17I did fear for my life because I had a feeling that with that shipments, I was going to disappear
10:25too.
10:25They knew about my relationship with Chewie already.
10:28They knew I was very close to them.
10:30So I figured that if the load disappeared, I would disappear too.
10:37I got a hold of Chewie and told him what I was going to do.
10:42I switched the drugs to a different truck.
10:46And I took off.
10:48I took off without telling anybody.
10:59And I got to the rendezvous spot, okay, and turned in the merchandise.
11:12Chewie brought me in and told me,
11:14From here on, you will be my employee.
11:18You have nothing to do with them anymore.
11:20I knew that we're not going to be happy.
11:23The transition was kind of hard.
11:26And it was just a matter of laying low.
11:35As time went by, more responsibility was laid on me.
11:39And I became that link in between the Colombians and the Sinaloa cartel.
11:47Chewie, on behalf of the Sinaloa cartel,
11:50recognized Otto Herrera's discipline, communication, attention to detail, business sense,
11:58the fact that Otto Herrera was a person that did not desire attention.
12:04I kept a very low profile around my family.
12:07It was a secret to my wife what was going on.
12:12If you were going to work for me, you had to be straight.
12:19I didn't allow anybody to use drugs because I didn't use it.
12:25It's a different story with the Mexicans.
12:29I think it's part of their narco culture.
12:34Chewie always struggled with a drug addiction, a heavy drug addiction.
12:40And I tried to stay away from him when he was in his rampages
12:45because he was a totally different person.
12:49He got very violent.
12:53Chewie, at a social event in Mexico,
12:59he started drinking and he started doing drugs at the event.
13:03And first thing he did was go after a gun.
13:07And by mistake, he shot a family member.
13:18It's a tragedy.
13:19He never got over that.
13:33After a year or a little longer, after a year,
13:37he came to me and said,
13:39Otto, you can run this yourself.
13:44Herrera ultimately became his own drug trafficking organization within Guatemala.
13:50The Herrera organization moved in excess of 50 tons of cocaine
13:54into Central America on behalf of the Sinaloa cartel.
13:58I don't think Otto Herrera ever considered that he would be arrested.
14:15What we have here is a hyper-Aztec.
14:19This particular aircraft was used many, many, many times
14:24to smuggle drugs from Colombia into Central America.
14:37In order to get this done with this aircraft,
14:40you have to do a lot of custom work on it.
14:45The main idea is to create enough space to put our load in it.
14:50Anything from 700 to 900 kilos.
14:53It's about 16 to 1,800 pounds.
14:57The wiring of this aircraft is very heavy, believe it or not.
15:01So a lot of the wiring is stripped out.
15:05The transponder is used when the plane has an accident.
15:08So it's stripped out of it, too.
15:10One of the most important things that came out was the radio system,
15:13which is very heavy.
15:15Most of the seats go, all the upholstery goes.
15:19This seat right here was always removed,
15:22and it was replaced with an extra fuel container.
15:26So as you remove equipment, that makes the aircraft lighter,
15:32which increases the payload on it.
15:35When the custom work was done, that would put it up to, you know,
15:39close to $6 million loads when it was a full capacity.
16:10It's an incredible amount of money.
16:11to allow aircraft to safely exit countries.
16:15There's a very, very significant amount of money that's paid into the operation.
16:29The mild landing system is just a nickname that we gave to a procedure that we came up with
16:37to operate during the night and basically do manually what an instrument landing system does.
16:44The idea was to minimize the risk of losing a load.
16:50So night operation was very important.
16:54You know, we came up with a system that would help the pilots find the airfields very easy and land
17:01very easy.
17:05We would take an aircraft and we would fly the last part of the route and we would record every
17:14single part of the route.
17:16We would take elevations, speed, coordinate.
17:18We would trace the final approach.
17:21We would give them all the information of the speed they needed to take.
17:25And this facilitated the landing during the night.
17:36The main idea is to fly into the international waters as quick as possible.
17:42And the route takes you through the Caribbean and into the Caribbean shores of Guatemala.
17:49The main idea is for the receiving end to have a clandestine airfield the closest to the ocean as possible.
17:58The flights would enter Central America during the hours of darkness, early morning, 1, 2, 3 o'clock in the
18:06morning.
18:08As they do their final approach, everything is done in the dark.
18:13The last two or three minutes of the final approach are the most crucial.
18:18That's when they'll ask to have the lights on the airfield turned on.
18:22They'll be turned on.
18:23And as they land, as soon as they touch ground, those lights are out.
18:30Dangerous stuff, isn't it?
18:31Yeah, very dangerous stuff.
18:38These operations are not for normal pilots.
18:43It's a special breed of pilot that can do these type of operations.
18:52We had casualties.
18:56Sometimes, you know, at the beginning when we first started, the planes were overloaded.
19:01We did not know enough, you know, to know that the plane could not take the weight.
19:07Sometimes, the runway was too short, or you simply just had a pilot that didn't have the experience and malfunctions
19:14in the engine,
19:15especially on piston engines, it was very common that an engine would fail.
19:20And once one of these engines failed and you have that type of load on it, it's very hard for
19:26a flight, you know, to continue.
19:30I did lose a friend, the person just misread his instruments and crashed against a mountain coming out of Colombia.
19:43You can't do nothing about it, but wait for, you know, the authorities to come and rescue whoever is alive
19:51and, you know, recover the load.
19:52And that's how you find out, through the news.
20:08It was common within these organizations to use planes for one-time occurrences.
20:15They would use bulldozers to dig massive holes.
20:18The planes would be buried at landing strip sites and simply turned into aircraft graveyards.
20:36We were running an air operation and a fast boat operation at the same time.
20:40We had two fronts going full board.
20:42There was airplanes landing in my area every other day.
20:48I would say in a good month, you could say anything from eight to 10,000 kilos.
20:58At that time, the price of one kilo in Guatemala was $6,000.
21:03So if you do the math, that is quite a bit of money.
21:17So, Chewy told me how it feels that I can run the whole entire Guatemala operation.
21:23There's going to be a difference.
21:25You're going to have a percentage on every load that comes.
21:40It's typical in the drug trafficking trade for people to be paid in cocaine.
21:49If I have a shipment coming in from Colombia with 1,000 kilos, that means that 100 kilos are mine.
21:57And that I can do with that, you know, whatever I want.
22:07I think at the time, I still believed that I had done things the right way and I was invisible,
22:15that nobody knew about me.
22:44I think I was not being careful enough.
22:46I was taking more precautions.
22:50I knew that the responsibility lay on me, so I had to take better care of myself.
22:56From there on, I really screened every single person that I had contacted, and that was my safety mechanism.
23:17As the shipments escalate, the cash flow gets bigger.
23:22I had a safe house in Guatemala in Zone 14.
23:26A house that was used to store money.
23:29In a given time, we had 30, 40 million dollars, you know, stored in that house.
23:35A lot of the money was not ours.
23:37It belonged to different people and different organizations.
23:41In early 2003, there was a location identified in Guatemala City that was being used by Otto Herrera and his
23:49organization to store money.
23:53Somehow, they found the house.
23:56They raided the house and they confiscated a little bit over 14 million dollars.
24:04That's what they claimed that was confiscated.
24:13At that moment, it was an eye-opener.
24:17A lot of things hit me.
24:20After the money was confiscated in Guatemala, you know, all chances of being invisible, you know, were gone.
24:44Right after that seizure, agents in Guatemala paid a visit to Otto Herrera's wife and made it very clear to
24:52her that he should make contact with the Drug Enforcement Administration, with the DEA.
24:58The DEA agents approached my wife and told them that they had a lot of interest on me.
25:08You know, your husband is involved in drug trafficking, this is what he's doing.
25:12If he doesn't talk to us, you know, he was going to run into problems.
25:16At this moment, we just want to talk to him and see, you know, how we can help.
25:49I think that was, it was an eye-opener for her.
25:51He didn't want to have anything to do with me at that point.
25:57I know I had attracted attention to myself.
26:01So for me, it was to, the best thing to do was to go into hiding, lay low and try
26:08to not being involved in it as directly as I was being involved.
26:16Once a traffic has been identified, his or her shelf life, in full operational mode, it's got shorter and shorter
26:25and shorter.
26:33Late 2006, I have a visit from another Sinaloa cartel member and he tells me a story.
26:42They found Chewie in his car.
26:49Chewie got killed.
26:51He gets killed in Culiacan, Sinaloa.
26:57I think he had to do with his craziness.
27:00I think he had to do with all his drinking.
27:02I think that he disrespected a lot of people while he was that way.
27:07He was drunk and stuff and, and I got a feeling that they just, it was decided to just, you
27:13know, get rid of him.
27:28He gets adopted by the Sinaloa cartel and he's detailed to Columbia.
27:36He was detailed to work with an individual named Pacho Cifuentes.
27:42Pacho Cifuentes is the person that is in charge of shipping all this cocaine to the Mexicans, shipments that have
27:49been delayed.
27:50So I get instructed to go to Columbia to find a way to continue to do business with Pacho in
27:59a way that he can be a little bit more diligent.
28:04Francisco Cifuentes Villa, better known as Pacho Cifuentes, was a pilot for Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel.
28:13After Pablo Escobar's death, he goes into business for himself and he sets up an extremely prolific and lucrative route
28:22via Central America, particularly Guatemala.
28:26We met for a couple of days and it started a new era of business with him.
28:34Pacho Cifuentes was another person that recognized the skill sets of Otto Herrera in a sense that it made the
28:42organization from the South America side more efficient.
28:49We shared an office together. This huge complex in the middle of Medellin and everybody knew that if you wanted
28:58to broker a load out of Columbia, that's the place to go.
29:02Pacho was very good at what he did. At that time, I think there was not a better person to
29:08ship drugs out of Columbia.
29:09Pacho had a network of pilots, traffic controllers, authorities that gave him a very, very high percentage of positive loads,
29:22you know, of success.
29:26Pacho was a very easygoing person, hardly ever raised his voice. And I still believe that he was kind of
29:35naive.
29:37He really thought that he was untouchable. He really thought that nobody was going to harm him.
29:46He drove around on his own everywhere. Pacho didn't have a bodyguard. Pacho didn't drive in a bulletproof car.
29:53So I think he just miscalculated things.
30:01Pacho Cifuentes is assassinated.
30:05This killing creates serious shockwaves in the Medellin underworld.
30:22Pacho was a good friend.
30:26I did really feel unprotected because I could move around as freely as he could because of his shape.
30:39So what's going to happen to me now?
30:43There was a certain fear.
30:52At any given time in the drug trafficking industry, there are invisibles that are out there.
30:59The question becomes, how long do they stay invisible?
31:07I was assigned in 2005 to a unit of the Drug Enforcement Administration called the Bilateral Investigations Unit.
31:14When I arrived to that unit, Otto Barrera was one of the case file titles.
31:20He was a very wanted subject by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. government.
31:26We were not positive of what his whereabouts were.
31:29There was rumor that he was in Mexico.
31:34My sense at that time that he was in hiding somewhere in remote locations in Guatemala.
31:41We just weren't positive actually where he was.
31:58I received a phone call from some of the DEA agents in Miami where they told me that during the
32:07course of their operation,
32:09they had identified someone in Bogota that was using the name Antonio.
32:16But all indications was that this individual was actually Otto Herrera.
32:23It was actually quite a surprise to us. We had no idea that he was there.
32:27We couldn't quite figure out why he thought it would be safe to effectively hide out in Colombia,
32:33given the large number of Colombian and U.S. resources dedicated towards combating narco trafficking.
32:42You know, the Pacho event had just happened.
32:45And I'm trying to lay low.
32:47I did try to keep myself invisible for a while.
32:51And I was very low-key. I've never been flashy type.
32:56I always lived a humble life.
33:01I think that, that kept me invisible for a while.
33:21Out of nowhere, you know, this, I could only see three officers, a lady and two guys.
33:29They put me not in a police car, just in a normal car.
33:34And they start driving through Bogota.
33:42I truly thought that I was going to get killed.
33:52And Otto Herrera was arrested in Colombia.
33:55The DEA Miami Field Division took the lead with working with the Colombian police
33:59in confirming that this individual named Tonio was, in fact, Otto Herrera.
34:05And it ultimately resulted in him being arrested on the street in a vehicle car stop in Colombia.
34:12I knew that I had been, you know, laundering money.
34:16I knew I would be, I've been trafficking drugs.
34:18I knew that this was going to catch up with me sooner or later.
34:21And basically that's what happened.
34:32My name is Bill Clay, C-L-A-Y.
34:35I'm a criminal defense lawyer.
34:37My caseload tends to be complex federal criminal cases involving drug trafficking,
34:44drug transportation, money laundering.
34:46So when I saw Otto got arrested, I told my receptionist,
34:50be on the lookout for a mystery call, I call it,
34:53because sometimes people call me, they don't identify who they are.
34:56So sure enough, within two hours, he called me and he says,
35:01hey, do you know who this is?
35:03I said, you're Otto.
35:04So when he said, when can you come down?
35:07I said, I'll get on a plane tomorrow.
35:13For me, Comita was an eye-opener.
35:19High security at Comita.
35:22And when I got in there, Otto got brought out to an area which is not an interview room, no
35:29privacy.
35:30Then something very interesting happened.
35:33A young prison guard, maybe looked like an 18-year-old kid to me,
35:38comes up, he leans in, and he says, he's on the wrong side.
35:45The guard literally turned white as a sheet, and he said, he's not safe,
35:50it's not safe for me to say anything anymore.
35:55They had put a price on my head.
36:03I guess it was people that had a lot of fear that I come to the States and tell the
36:14story.
36:16So they wanted to make sure that didn't happen.
36:22You can be killed in any place, in any prison, probably anywhere in the world.
36:28But you're a higher risk in Colombia than you would be in a U.S. prison.
36:33And at that point in time, I think the risk was very high for Otto.
36:41Bill approached the right people so I could be in a safer area in the prison.
36:48DEA had auto-transferred with the other extraditables.
36:52And then they instituted security procedures to safeguard him,
36:56that they would wake him up every two hours to see if he had been poisoned.
37:18Really, the only way that you can effectively lower your criminal liability, your sentence,
37:26under the federal system is to cooperate.
37:28It is pretty much the only way.
37:30I mean, you can argue that you're old, that you're sick, you're tired,
37:34you've got a disease, whatever it is.
37:36Your mommy beat you up when you were a kid.
37:39That's not really going to work, especially not at that level.
37:43My goal is to mitigate or reduce the sentence he's going to get.
37:47So I'm looking at all the possibilities.
37:50I go right to work, my mind just focuses on what can we do to maximize benefits
37:57for Otto.
38:00So I received a phone call from Bill Clay.
38:03And he said, what is it that needs to be done?
38:06As Colombians would say, what kind of positivos can we produce for the United States government?
38:13But I told Bill, I said, there's no question that Otto needs to get on board or cooperate with us.
38:24It was totally against what I believed.
38:29Okay, look, let's think about this for a second.
38:32Since we were kids in school, nobody wanted to snitch, right?
38:38Snitches get stitches.
38:40What makes you think that a grown man is any different?
38:44It's everything, everything that I was against.
38:49You know, to sit in a room, to tell stories about what I did.
38:55When I know that I'm not supposed to be doing that.
38:58When I know that I'm, my, my loved ones are being in danger.
39:02by everything that I'm, that I'm narrating.
39:09You are giving up a lot of your former friends, cohorts, who know where your family lives,
39:16know where you live, and, and can really exact retribution.
39:25I thought, you know, how the hell am I going to get, like, across to this guy?
39:29Am I going to get this, this point across?
39:34I've found over the years that I've been doing this job,
39:38the greatest success that you have is to treat people like people.
39:43I could tell he was a, a man of his work.
39:45Let's put it that way.
39:47In his mind, his job was done when the bales of cocaine arrived in Guatemala,
39:52and they were turned over to the Mexicans.
39:54And that was the end of what the Herrera organization had to do.
39:58We're two guys that are almost the same age.
40:01We both have families, there's parents, there's kids.
40:04So, I went in the office and I said, print me out, like, 12 pictures
40:08of the end result of crack use.
40:13Steve, just to kind of make the point, he reached into his briefcase,
40:19and he presented some photographs.
40:23So, I took the pictures, and I slid them across the table,
40:27like I was dealing a deck of cards.
40:31Addicts, who were in decrepit condition, said, this lady, she's 29, she looks like she's 65 or older.
40:40Look at her. Look at this person. Let's get serious here.
40:46I said, we can either continue the way that we're continuing, or we can consider going to a trial.
40:52But, in the United States, this is what they see as an endgame.
40:56This is what they see on their streets.
40:59And, whoop. And that did the trick.
41:05Yeah, it was a big impact for me to see those pictures.
41:10To have somebody look at me in the eye and tell me, you did that.
41:16And, uh, it was the first time that, uh, it really hit me hard.
41:23So, it was, I think, a turning point.
41:26I mean, it was a humbling moment.
41:29A brilliant moment.
41:46In that cocaine trafficking industry, it is powered by, by greed.
41:52And it's powered by, by ego.
41:56People think that they are intouchable, or in some cases invisible, until they get caught.
42:04My, my process is not over yet.
42:07As part of my sentence, I have supervised release.
42:11I'm 50% done with it.
42:14It's something that reminds me every day that I have to walk a straight line.
42:25Well, let me just say, I've seen them all.
42:28You know, all the types of drug traffickers.
42:30I've seen the soulless ones, which may be kind of presumptuous to say someone's soulless.
42:35But, by the way they act, they sure look soulless.
42:39They sure look like they have no remorse.
42:41Otto has remorse.
42:45I've been involved in this case for 14 years.
42:49I know the agents that were involved in this case before.
42:52We have never been able to substantiate any act of violence that's attributed to Otto Herrera.
42:59I think because of the way that I carried myself, that kept me most of the time away from all
43:07those events.
43:10I would never recommend anybody to follow up on my footsteps.
43:15It's just not going to bring them any good.
43:19The pressure and all the stress and everything, the responsibility takes over you.
43:24And the fact that you know that you're doing something illegal.
43:27So you change as a person.
43:29And you forget what's important in life.
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