This World s12e02 Episode Script
Secrets Of Mexico's Drug War
You don't send a swan down a sewer to catch a rat you send a bigger rat.
The US government spends billions of dollars fighting powerful Mexican drug cartels.
They have a heavy investment and they're willing to kill for it.
But the Americans stand accused of getting too close to some of the world's most notorious criminals.
They are making deals with them, they are in bed with the enemy.
The big question here is what does cocaine and heroin trafficking have to do with US national security? (WOMAN WAILS) As a brutal drug war raged in Mexico, American law enforcement helped arm the gangs.
We watched over 2,500 firearms go south to Mexico.
Another popular gun with the cartel buyers was the AK-47 pistol.
Could be handled very easily.
I saw them trying to hide it and trying to cover it up.
But with cocaine and heroin still flooding the streets, many are now questioning the true cost of America's war on drugs.
Their criminal policy has been a failure, from the US government's standpoint.
But how many millions of dollars of drugs, how many weapons, how many people will die before they say enough is enough? March 11th, 2015 For people fighting in the war on drugs, this is huge-- this is as big as it gets.
Chapo is Chicago's public enemy number one.
On the 22nd February 2014, Joaquin Guzman, the most wanted drugs trafficker in the world, was captured in Mexico.
major victory.
The arrest of a Mexican druglord whose reach was far and wide.
He was cruel, unforgiving in his Tonight, US law enforcement is hailing the arrest of the top drug dealer in the world, after hunting him for more than a decade.
Guzman, known as El Chapo-- Shorty-- was boss of Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel, and the highest ranking drug kingpin ever arrested.
You see his hands-on approach, his ability to control distribution, his ability to control transportation, his ability to collect illegal proceeds-- we've never seen anything like it.
With a personal fortune estimated at 1 billion dollars, Chapo was the first man to be on the FBI's Most Wanted list at the same time as Forbes Magazine World's Richest.
For America's Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA, Chapo's capture was a triumph.
When I was told it happened, it made my year.
I was a high school quarterback, a football quarterback in high school, and it was like I threw the winning touchdown and we won the state championship, when I heard he was hooked up.
But for some observers of international organised crime, something about Chapo's arrest didn't feel right.
The typical script was that the good guys are the law enforcement, trying to protect our kids from the bad guys, and that's the script.
It's like a spaghetti western, you know.
If you like spaghetti westerns, you'll buy that, but maybe this script we're being sold isn't really the one we should be paying attention to, that there's alternative ways of looking at this.
The capture was quite peaceful.
He was apparently in his room with another person, not the usual number of body guards that you would expect a criminal leader to have around him, no praetorian guard.
You cannot believe that one of the most important drug cartel leaders in Mexico was arrested like that.
No shots, for example.
He was sleeping in a house with just one bodyguard.
I mean, come on-- even when they go to lunch, they go with 20, 40 bodyguards, or when they go to the bathroom.
It's incredible.
It's just incredible.
So why would Chapo Guzman, a man with a vast private army under his command, fall meekly into the hands of the authorities? Is there another story behind his capture? Stretching 2,000 miles from Texas to California, the US-Mexican border is the world's greatest drug-smuggling frontier.
Mexico's border towns are at the centre of a trade worth billions of dollars a year.
But the cradle of Mexico's drug business lies further inland, in the western state of Sinaloa.
With its remote valleys and high sierra, Mexican bandits have grown and trafficked narcotics from here for decades.
It is the home of the world's most powerful organised crime group.
The Sinaloa Cartel is a very sophisticated enterprise, criminal enterprise, and is composed of a board, a board where Chapo Guzman was one of the members of the board.
They work through franchises, far beyond Mexico, with presence in 58 countries.
The Sinaloa Cartel's traditional business involved trafficking marijuana and cocaine.
But back in 2008, the focus shifted to another commodity-- heroin, produced in Mexico.
Chapo summoned his key lieutenants to a secret meeting in the mountains.
The guests included Pedro and Margarito Flores, Mexican-American twins from Chicago.
The cartels are there for the same reason many Fortune 500 companies are there.
It is a transportation mecca for them.
It really is a logistical home run in terms of a business, whether it's legit or not.
The Sinaloa heroin would be trafficked through Chicago.
The Flores twins operated out of a Mexican enclave called Little Village.
They distributed the product through a Chicago street gang with more than 5,000 members.
They also controlled networks in cities across the US capable of shifting up to two tonnes of drugs a month.
John de Leon and Gal Pissetsky are criminal defence lawyers.
We represent the guilty, the innocent and anybody in between.
Mobsters, anybody who's charged with a crime.
The rapid rise of the Flores twins was well known in the city.
It's no different than a young man who starts to work at a company and works his way up the ladder.
They were good at what they did, they made a lot of money for the bosses, so they got promotions, they got trusted more and more, with larger amounts.
But there was a hitch in the Sinaloa Cartel's heroin plan.
The DEA was seemingly one step ahead.
Somehow, they knew all about the meeting in the mountains and the Chicago heroin plan.
Someone had turned.
The Flores brothers-- people that brought into Chicago tonnes of cocaine, marijuana, heroin-- they turned into what we call snitches.
They're probably the biggest informers that the United States, especially here in Chicago, have ever produced.
You have to look at this way-- an old-time cop told me years ago, um you don't send a swan down a sewer to catch a rat you send a bigger rat.
If there's a truism in the drug war that I've discovered is the badder you are, the more valuable you are to the government as an informant, because you are further up the food chain and you have access to more information and you can help make cases against more people.
And that's precisely the position the Flores brothers found themselves in.
As two of America's biggest drug traffickers, the Flores twins could have expected to spend the rest of their lives in prison.
But that's not always the way the US justice system works.
What they say is, "You give us the information, you tell us what it is, and at the end we'll see, if you cooperated with us enough, if you gave us enough information, then we'll see if we're going to give you your deal.
" The twins provided information that helped convict around a dozen of their own associates and indict several more.
For them to put away-- which they have-- put away other individuals who've done much less than they have, for 10, 15 years, 20-year sentences, that's not justice.
That's not justice.
It's now thought that the Flores twins could be out of jail by the age of 40.
The Flores brothers were facilitating the movement of tonnes of cocaine and heroin into the US market and dealing directly with Chapo Guzman and the Sinaloa organisation.
They were at that level, and hence perfectly placed to betray them.
But despite the twins' information, Chapo Guzman and the leaders of the cartel remained free, seemingly untouchable.
And their heroin business boomed.
We're driving east on the Eisenhower Expressway.
It has the nickname of the Heroin Highway.
It's travelled oftentimes by people from the outlying areas, the suburbs, travelling into Chicago to purchase narcotics, primarily heroin.
This guy might be serving somebody up in front of us here.
Within blocks of this highway, you purchase about a tenth of a gram of heroin for 10, roughly.
Former Illinois State Police colonel Mark Piccoli has witnessed Mexican heroin flood into Chicago.
You see down the street up there-- it could be a drug transaction.
For a long time, heroin wasn't a problem, wasn't the problem that it is now in Chicago and the suburbs.
Three guys on the corner.
That guy up on the porch just hanging out too.
The scourge of cheap heroin has spread from Chicago's inner city to its middle-class suburbs.
Those looking to purchase drugs from the suburbs are back on the Eisenhower Expressway, back on their way to wherever they're from in minutes.
You want to look around at the scene and determine-- is it an overdose or not? Heroin has changed so much.
It's cheap, it's extremely strong and because it's strong, people don't have to inject it any longer.
People believe that because you're smoking it or because you're snorting it-- number one, you can't be addicted, and number two, you can't die of an overdose, because you're snorting it.
Both of those are wrong.
Last year, in the Chicago suburb of DuPage County, there were more deaths from heroin overdoses than homicides and traffic accidents combined.
We had one body every day coming in to our morgue of a drug overdose, and I and all of our staff here were just shocked.
We just were like, what was going on? Most of the dead are victims of the drugs supplied by the Sinaloa Cartel.
It has become a multinational corporation which by some estimates generates 100 million a month.
The huge quantities of illegal cash are usually shipped by lorry back to Mexico.
From there, the dirty money needs to be laundered before it can be put to use by the bosses.
The most incredible thing about the Sinaloa Cartel is that at the end, when the Sinaloa network launders the money, they seek, they look for, the rule of law, they try to protect their money into the most secured and legally protected markets in the world, the US and Europe.
Laundering the Sinaloa drug money proved astonishingly easy.
For several years, they simply deposited the cash in the bank, including the Mexico City branch of Britain's biggest bank, HSBC.
In 2012, HSBC was found guilty of failing to stop money being laundered between its Mexico and US offices, including at least 881 million dollars of cash deposits from the Sinaloa Cartel.
Banks are not subject to enough regulations.
The intervention is not enough to control the tsunami of dirty money coming into the legal market.
By 2013, Chicago's heroin epidemic was running out of control.
The public demanded action.
Chicago's Crime Commission responded by declaring the Sinaloa leader, Chapo Guzman, public enemy number one-- the first man to be given the title since Al Capone terrorised these same streets in the 1920s.
What Al Capone was to beer and whisky during prohibition, Guzman is to narcotics.
He's responsible for the death of over 10,000 people and he not only has killed many of those, he has brutally tortured them, mutilated them.
It's a caricature of organised crime, but to some degree, if you want to focus public attention, the public's attention on one problem, you always bring the face of one person, to make it equivalent to that problem, and that's the face of El Chapo Guzman.
But despite the heat, Chapo Guzman still seemed untouchable.
Just how the world's most wanted drug lord had remained at large for 13 years was a mystery.
Many thought the answer lay south of the border, in Mexico.
In 2006, the Mexican government declared war on the drug cartels, sending troops to the border to try and crush their power.
(WOMAN WAILS) (SHE CRIES OUT IN SPANISH) God, answer me! A violent drug war erupted.
Mass killings, torture, even beheadings brought terror to the streets as rival gangs fought for control of the lucrative smuggling routes into the US.
(SHE SHOUTS) The Sinaloa Cartel was coming into cities and border crossing areas where the drugs moved through that traditionally had been controlled by other players, and it wasn't done in a nice way-- it was a very bloody invasion.
As the Sinaloa Cartel's war of conquest dragged on, more than 100,000 Mexicans were killed in the space of five years.
It looked like the government had lost control of the country.
For the Mexican authorities, something had to be done.
One strategy that's been used before in history is "divide and conquer"-- you know, we will use one group to attack another group.
That saves our resources and accomplishes our ends, and at the end we'll wipe we'll clean up the final group.
The Sinaloa organisation was subject to a very, very small number of detentions.
On the one hand, it was the largest criminal organisation in Mexico.
On the other hand, if you look at the statistics, criminal statistics, they were not subject to the same number of detentions as any other organisation in Mexico.
So we started to become suspicious that they were benefitting from some kind of protection.
Many Mexicans came to believe that their government was favouring the Sinaloa Cartel.
A Sinaloa victory would mean an end to the carnage on the streets.
It's something the Mexican government has always denied.
If the Sinaloa Cartel seemed somehow untouchable in Mexico, what about America? Most of the guns used in Mexico's bloody drug war come from the US.
It's the job of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the ATF, to stop these weapons flowing south.
Our mission was to prevent illegal firearms trafficking, from Phoenix to Mexico, that was going in support of the violence being committed by the Mexican drug-trafficking organisations.
In 2009, Arizona ATF special agent John Dodson was assigned to a secret operation called Fast and Furious, targeting the Sinaloa Cartel.
I was very much enthusiastic about it.
It was the front lines of America.
Every one of those rifles that we could prevent from being trafficked is not going to be responsible for its percentage of the carnage that's occurring south of the border.
The plan seemed simple.
Working on tip-offs from local gun dealers, ATF agents would put suspicious buyers, so called straw purchasers, under surveillance.
They would then track the guns and break the gun-trafficking networks.
Mike Detty is a gun dealer from Tucson, Arizona.
He worked with the ATF on a similar operation, selling guns to buyers acting for the Sinaloa Cartel.
The part that I played, as a corrupt gun dealer, money was my main concern.
Money was all that mattered to me because I, as a gun dealer, I had to have a motivation to sell to these people and not worry about what the law is, and so forth.
It was just a role that I played and it seemed to be believable.
OK, so we're going hot now.
On a typical night, a buyer would arrive and usually he'd have a sack or a garbage bag that had a lot of cash in it.
I would have the living room arranged with stacks of guns, varieties of AK-47s, AR pistols-- all the guns that were popular to them and would have stacks, quantities, at least five of each different variety, for them to choose from.
Popular guns were AK-47s of all different varieties.
This one happens to be a Romanian-made semi-auto AK-47, chambered for the 7.
62 x 39 cartridge.
That was the number one seller for these individuals.
We also sold different varieties of AR 15s-- this one, basically, a semi-auto version of the American military model.
Another popular gun with the cartel buyers was the AK-47 pistol.
These are popular because they could easily be concealed under a coat.
They could handled very easily inside of a car, tight doorways and so forth with a 30-round mag or even a 75-round drum mag they could put a lot of lead down range quickly.
Within weeks, Operation Fast and Furious seemed to be paying dividends.
John Dodson and his team had identified a network that was buying hundreds of assault rifles for the cartel.
We got notified by one of the gun shop owners that one of the individuals that had been identified as the straw purchasers was in there about to make a purchase of 10 or 15 AK variants.
We watched the target as he comes out of the gun shop, trip after trip, loading 10 or 15 AK-47 rifles into his vehicle.
When he leaves the gun shop parking lot, we know that there's an arrest imminent.
We cannot allow him to leave with these firearms.
We know they are about to be trafficked, and they'll end up in the hands of in the most violent criminal organisation that this continent has ever seen or had to deal with.
It was time for the take down-- catching the buyers in the act and destroying the network.
When he leaves the gun shop parking lot, as we are following him we began to get ready to put on our tactical gear on.
We strap on our guns belts, our police insignia.
In our minds, an arrest is imminent, we cannot allow the suspect to go with these firearms.
We get to a location that's tactically sound to take him off and get on the radio and advise everyone that that's it, let's go, and we are told to stand down.
It came back over the radio, "Stand down.
We are not going to arrest, we are merely going to surveil.
" There's a brief pause initially when we hear it because we can't believe what's being told back to us over the radio.
It doesn't make any sense at all.
And then we have to fall back on, OK, there 's something we don't know, there is something we're not being told about this.
After that day, we both went back to the office and asked the case agent, "What are we missing? "Why are we allowing these guns to go? What are we not being told?" And we were told quite simply that we're not doing that, that they are under surveillance and we'll try to get a wire and that this is a big case.
A case that in their minds, could some how potentially topple the Sinaloa cartel and Chapo Guzman and it wasn't ours to understand.
If we didn't like it, it was their call.
Weeks and months passed with no arrests.
John Dodson complained repeatedly to his bosses as he watched more and more guns being smuggled into Mexico.
South of the border, the violence was increasing day by day.
I asked my boss, "Do you not see the correlation?" The more that our suspects buy, the more violence and carnage that's occurring south of the border.
And the only reason they're allowed to buy in the quantities they are is because we've facilitated it, and we've allowed them to move the firearms unimpeded into Mexico and into the hands of the drug cartels.
The guns weren't only killing gang members, thousands of innocent Mexicans were caught up in the slaughter.
The city of Ciudad Juarez was the main battle ground for the Sinaloa Cartel's war for control of the border.
Brisa Delgado is waiting for her husband Edwin to arrive back from his job across the El Paso border in Texas.
They were just 15 when their home town became the murder capital of the world.
In January 2010, Edwin and Brisa went to a birthday party on their street in the outskirts of the city.
At 11 o'clock, one of the kids who had left the party early saw a convoy of cars approaching.
The cars drew up in the street where the party was in full flow.
A group of heavily armed men now approached the house.
The gunmen opened fire on the helpless teenagers.
When the shooting stopped, 15 people, mostly teenage kids, lay dead or dying.
Alonzo Encino came running to look for his sons.
The gunmen had mistaken the partygoers for a rival gang.
(THEY SPEAK SPANISH) The families of the victims are now campaigning for justice.
They have obtained a government document that suggests at least three of the guns used in the attack were part of an American gun-tracking operation.
During the month the massacre took place, nearly 1,000 people were murdered in Mexico's drug war.
But the spiralling loss of life had no impact on the Fast And Furious operation.
Oh, he's got a whole bunch of cases that we're recording.
As this undercover footage shows, guns continued to flow to the Sinaloa Cartel.
The ATF watched without making a single arrest.
He is going back into the store.
He is out again carrying another, it appears to be five boxes, hard-case Pelican that would hold a pistol.
Trunk is closed, he is backing up now, looks like he's going southbound through the parking lot.
He's backing out southbound.
Over the 14 months that investigation was going on, we watched over 2,500 firearms go south to Mexico.
There were several times, whenever a high profile murder happened along the US-Mexico border, the case agent and supervisors, they got scared.
They got scared.
I heard them walk around and say, "I hope it's not one of our guns.
" But it was a death on the US side of the border that would finally blow open the whole operation.
I was a teenager raised along the Mexican border and grew up riding horses in rough country like this.
We could camp out under the stars.
One never really thought about danger from Mexico back then.
My, how times have changed.
Ron Colburn is the former deputy chief of the United States Border Patrol Agency.
Those who work this area, smuggle this area, tend to bring in the marijuana and the cocaine.
They have a heavy investment and they are willing to kill for it.
The Sinaloa Cartel treats these border-smuggling routes as its own turf.
It sends gangs, so-called rip crews, to prey on rivals' drug carriers.
This is it.
Just before Christmas 2010, a US border patrol unit came across a heavily armed Sinaloa rip crew.
This is basically where the rip crew was halted by the border patrol.
It was close to midnight, nearly December 15th, as the border patrol agents detected sounds coming from the canyon.
The point man who was on observation just on this hillside spoke out and said, "Five.
" Then he said, "Guns.
" Meaning they were in fact armed.
That's who they were looking for.
The border patrol agents challenged the men with the guns (HE SPEAKS SPANISH) Párense.
Patrulla fronteriza.
"Stop! Border patrol.
" And basically that is when all hell broke lose.
The rip crew shooting up the hill and the border control agents returning fire down the hill.
They secured the area and found Brian dying at the scene.
As the AK47 rounds began to hit near him.
he rolled for greater cover and that's when the one got him beneath his vest.
They body-carried him all the way up these canyons until they could find a spot flat enough for a medevac helicopter to pick him up.
By then he had no pulse.
NEWS: A US border patrol agent has been shot and killed this is near the Arizona/Mexico border One US officer dead.
His name was Brian Terry.
gun battle ensued and Officer Terry was shot and killed.
In December of 2010, I was getting ready for work and I heard on the news that a border patrol agent had been killed.
Another agent called me and told me that firearms at the scene of the border patrol agent's murder was traced right back to the Fast And Furious investigation.
They were guns we'd allowed to walk as part of that case.
It looked like the truth about Fast And Furious would finally break.
When I got to work and logged into my computer systems, I had been denied access to the Fast And Furious Case.
Instantly.
I had it the day before, but some time between when the border patrol agent was murdered and I got to the office that morning, I no longer had access.
The cover-up had begun.
The ATF was distancing the two investigations.
It was clear to me they did not want the Fast And Furious investigation to be linked to the border patrol agent's murder at all.
I saw them trying to hide it and trying to cover it up and that compelled me to act, to do something.
Cos that's not who we are.
That's not what we do, right? We're allowed to make mistakes, but we're not allowed to cover shit up.
Dodson decided to blow the whistle.
I tried every sanctioned avenue that I ever knew of, you know, to blow the whistle, throughout my chain of command, throughout my agency, through the Department of Justice, through the office of the Inspector General Finally, a committee of the US Congress launched an investigation.
They demanded the release of thousands of documents relating to Operation Fast And Furious.
Senior officials from the US Department of Justice were called to give evidence.
Thank you for inviting me to testify and I'd be pleased to answer your questions.
Sir if you're going to count pages like this as discovery, you should be ashamed of yourself.
The only thing that this says is, "Internal use only and not for dissemination outside the ATF.
" That's not discovery.
The pages go on like this for ever.
You've given us black paper instead of white paper, you might as well have given us a ream still in its original binder.
- I - Who authorised this programme that was so felony stupid that it got people killed? The Attorney General has said that he wants to get to the bottom of this For nearly a year, the Justice Department denied intentionally allowing guns to fall into the hands of the cartel.
Eventually, Washington officials blamed Fast And Furious on the ATF in Phoenix.
They said it was a serious but isolated mistake made by local law-enforcement officers.
They insisted that the operation was a well-intentioned plan to arrest senior cartel figures.
Tucson gun dealer Mike Detty had been involved in a similar operation just a few years earlier.
The thing that made me suspicious about this was that, after we'd have these conversations about what families the guns were going to and where in Mexico they were going and who the top lieutenants were and the ports of entry that they crossed over, we kept selling guns, and more guns and more guns to these same people, but no arrests were ever being made.
So was there more to these secret operations than a botched attempt to bring down the cartel? If our goal was to take down a cartel, to actually topple a cartel, let's take them at their word.
How do you do that? Well, you do that by climbing the ladder, all right? The next higher rung, the guys that were ordering the firearms and paying for them, literally placing the orders like a grocery list of what they want, turn out to be informants working on the payroll of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
INTERVIEWER: - The FBI? - The FBI.
We could never get any higher because the next rung of the ladder was already working for the FBI.
At the heart of the Sinaloa Cartel's operation to buy guns in Arizona were two men acting as informants for the US Government.
They had even been paid a quarter of a million dollars.
An unknown percentage of those weapons, potentially up to 250,000 worth, were purchased with taxpayer money.
You take the federal government out of this equation, it doesn't happen, none of it happens, there's no firearms trafficking ring, there's no money to purchase them with, there's no coercing the gun dealers to facilitate the transactions, there's no opening the flood gates to allow the trafficking to occur unabated, and there's no FBI informants either orchestrating everything or just moving the pieces as they're directed by their FBI handlers.
Five years after Fast And Furious, the streets of Ciudad Juarez are now relatively calm.
Helped by my more than 3,000 guns provided with the knowledge of the US authorities, the Sinaloa Cartel has won its war for control of the border.
Once the Sinaloa organisation took over the city, they placed their people, they controlled politicians, so there's no need to kill so many people as before, but the citizens are still subject to the most serious economic crimes-- extortion, kidnapping and fraud and other types of economic crimes.
That's what Sinaloa Cartel is all about.
The true extent of the US involvement with the Sinaloa Cartel's gun runners will probably never be known.
For the only time in his presidency, Barack Obama used his executive privilege to block the release of certain information linked to the Fast And Furious operation.
Many of the secrets of Mexico's drug war will always remain hidden.
But we now know that contacts between the Sinaloa Cartel and the US authorities stretch back a long way.
In 1998, Chapo Guzman was serving a prison sentence in a maximum-security jail in Mexico.
Chapo sent a messenger to the Embassy, into our office.
He wanted to discuss some things with us.
According to one DEA agent, who wished to remain anonymous, Chapo decided to make the Americans an offer.
It was three of us that went to see him.
He was wearing a prison khaki uniform.
And he was very polite, he was very very formal.
One of the first things he did was kind of incredible.
He dropped down on the ground, like he was going to do a push-up, and he looked underneath the door to see if anybody was standing there, outside, listening that he was talking to these people that he had summoned.
In 1998, the Sinaloa Cartel was engaged in a brutal turf war with the Arellano Felix family in the border town of Tijuana.
It went on for about 40 minutes or so, just talking bad about the Arellanos and that he knew where they were and that he could follow them and that he had people that would tell us where they were and and things like that, that he wanted to pass that information.
So we let him talk as much as he wanted to.
Guzman was offering to provide information to the DEA on a rival cartel.
But he wanted something in return.
I think, probably, Chapo was looking for some type of deal, that perhaps maybe the US Government was going to allow him if he gave us this information, to to perhaps, er, reduce his charges or things like that.
We would ask him questions simply like, "Well, how would this take place?" And he says, "Well, you know, if I find them, I'll let you know where they're at in the general area as best as I can possibly find them," things like that.
I think he trusted us.
I mean, simply the way that he talked to us.
He wanted to see us in the future.
We never went back, but, er, you know, he indicated, "Well, maybe next time I'll have some more information for you," that kind of thing.
In 2001, Chapo Guzman escaped from jail, allegedly hidden in a laundry basket.
In the years that followed, the power of the Sinaloa Cartel continued to grow at the expense of its rivals.
And in 2009, an arrest in Mexico City would lead to further astonishing allegations about relations between US law enforcement and the Sinaloa Cartel.
Vicente Zambada-- young, technologically driven, developing strategic and tactical alliances with other criminal organisations within Europe, Asia, South America.
He's a prince within the criminal organisation.
Vicente Zambada was the most senior cartel figure ever to be extradited to the US.
Mexican journalists looked forward to a sensational trial.
As you can imagine, it was a big case.
The son of one of the bosses of the Sinaloa Cartel, the most powerful crime organisation in Mexico.
When we saw how many lawyers were members of Vicente Zambada's defence, I was surprised.
Five?! And those are lawyers who charge a lot of money.
So it was obvious for me that el Cartel de Sinaloa was behind Vicente Zambada.
Because you are arrested and extradited to the US, the cartel basically forget about you.
You are gone.
Not in this case.
Despite facing spending the rest of his life in an American jail, Zambada appeared strangely unflustered.
Vicente he doesn't look worried.
He was always looking to the eyes of his lawyers, you know, like, "I am the boss.
" And I remember the face of one of the lawyers, looking always happy, like you saying, "Mm, I have a surprise for you, Mr.
Judge," something like that, it was very strange.
Zambada did indeed have a surprise for the court.
Vicente Zambada's lawyers went to the judge and told him, "Our client wants to get free.
" Why? Because it was a promise from the US Government.
Zambada claims that he has a cooperation agreement, essentially an immunity deal, with the US Government.
And that was like a jaw-dropper, it's like, "What?!" Zambada claimed that he had met DEA agents in a Mexico City hotel and struck a deal.
In return for information on rival cartels, he would get immunity from prosecution.
The government argued that was not true and there is no evidence of it and most people would think, "Yeah, this guy is desperate, he's facing some hard time and he is going to say anything he can to get off.
" But as the hearings continued, the government admitted that the meeting with Zambada had, in fact, taken place.
So, essentially, right there, that opened the door to the fact that it was not completely beyond the pale, that there was more going on than the government was willing to concede at that point.
And Zambada's claims went much further.
He alleged that, for more than ten years, there had been an agreement in place between the Sinaloa Cartel and the US authorities.
It was a pretty shocking story to hear.
A partner for Chapo Guzman comes into court and says that the government was allowing him to conduct his business and bring in drugs into the United States in exchange for cooperation against other cartels.
It It was very, very unsettling, it was very shocking and at first, when we heard about it, we didn't really know what to think.
Zambada claimed that there was a regular channel of communication between the cartel and the Americans.
The go-between was a Mexican attorney.
Humberto Loya Castro was a Mexican attorney, who was a confidant of the top leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel, Chapo Guzman among them.
He basically worked for the Sinaloa organisation.
A senior figure in the cartel, Castro's role, it was alleged, was to feed the DEA information about rival drug gangs.
Chapo Guzman and the Sinaloa leadership found Loya Castro a useful pawn for their purposes because what he's effectively doing is passing information to US law enforcement that was then being used against Chapo's rivals and making it easier for Chapo to, you know, grow his organisation and take over markets in Mexico.
I mean, it's a simple business calculation.
For the Americans, the information from Castro allowed the DEA to make high-profile drug busts.
For US law enforcement, they were making big cases and making big headlines in US papers.
And as complicated as the drug war is, most people don't know the difference between the Sinaloa organisation and the Juarez cartel and the Gulf cartel-- all they know is a big bad narco trafficker or a bunch of drugs got seized and and that looks good for US law enforcement.
It's, you know a bargain that works for everybody.
Sworn testimony from US government officials confirmed that agents had repeatedly met with Castro over a period of ten years.
But the DEA strongly denies that any deal with the Sinaloa cartel has ever existed.
(MAN KNOCKS) Clearly, we do not in any investigation play one cartel against the other.
That is just a fallacy, it's been, er printed time and time again and it's just not accurate at all.
To prove Zambada's claims, his lawyers demanded that the alleged go-between, Humberto Loya Castro, testify in court.
The lawyers of Vicente Zambada said, "We want the lawyer of Sinaloa Cartel, Loya Castro, to be witness in the trial.
" And I remember the face of the lawyers of the justice department, they said "Uh-oh.
" They didn't say, "Uh-oh", but you see their faces.
And the judge says, "Sounds fine, it's fair to me.
" I was doing this with my hands-- an informant here, telling everything, this is going to be fun! A lot of news.
At this point, the US justice department took a drastic step.
They blocked Castro giving evidence, on the grounds of national security.
When they said national security issue with Vicente Zambada, it was like, "This guy is not Osama bin Laden, come on-- why are you doing all of this stuff?" The big question here is what does cocaine and heroin trafficking have to do with US national security? And why is any effort to discover what the relationship is between this massive criminal organisation in Mexico and the US government, why is that cloaked or hidden by national security? It implies that, somehow, the US Government finds it in its national security to aid and abet criminal organisations.
We are talking about Sinaloa Cartel.
It's a real threat for the national security of the United States.
It's what this government said.
But at the end, you see, they are making deals with them, they are in bed with the enemy.
Vicente Zambada will now never go on trial.
He has become the latest kingpin to do a deal with the US authorities-- negotiating a reduced sentence in return for co-operation.
America's so-called war on drugs costs billions of dollars a year.
It's meant to protect US citizens from the dangers of illegal narcotics.
The authorities have always denied that they've favoured one cartel over the others as part of that war.
And in February 2014, the proof surely came when Chapo Guzman, leader of the Sinaloa cartel, so-called "Public Enemy Number One", was finally captured in a seaside town in Mexico.
I tell you what, it was a big triumph for law enforcement, I applaud the Mexican government, er for working with all the US agencies, including DEA, and doing the right thing.
And we got a bad guy in jail, so I think it's great.
I've heard the argument that Chapo Guzman was captured.
That means that obviously he wasn't being favoured, but it's not individuals being favoured.
At that particular moment in time, there was an interest convergence-- that would explain it-- between the Sinaloa organisation and the US government.
There's an old saying in Mexico-- when a cartel leader becomes so well known, like El Chapo Guzman, the saying goes, "It smells like a dead person.
" It means that usually, when you become a very well-known criminal, your days are counted.
El Chapo Guzman was captured when the Sinaloa organisation was willing for that capture to take place.
It was a managed capture.
It's likely we'll never know the full truth about the events surrounding Chapo's capture.
But more than a year on, Sinaloa cartel drugs are still flooding onto the streets of America.
There's big money to be made in the drug trade and as long as there's money to be made, these cartels and Guzmans and everybody else You know, Guzman gets arrested, it I don't think we saw much of a dent at all, much of a change.
If any, very little.
And I think it's just the nature of the business.
It's all about the dollars.
Everything that I analyse in this case tells me that the Sinaloa organisation is greater, stronger, more expanded than before.
So, so far, this case shows that the criminal policy has been a failure, from the US government's standpoint.
The war against an international drugs trade worth 300 billion a year appears to be increasingly unwinnable.
And even veterans of the war on drugs are beginning to question how it is being fought.
Ron Colburn is former deputy head of the US Border Force-- the front line in the battle against the traffickers.
There's a practice involved with investigative agencies commonly along borders.
It's the concept where an investigative agency allows an organised crime group to pass through loads-- the cocaine, the heroin, the marijuana, the weapons, the illicit gained cash, whatever it happens to be, walks, it gets away.
It does not get seized or stopped by that law enforcement agency while they build their case towards some day arresting the person.
But how many millions of dollars of drugs, how many weapons, how many people will die before they say "Enough is enough"? Many times, we've got to really weigh the options of what do we have to do, what are our legal bounds, safety involved, and we've got to make sure that we always keep our eye on the ball on safety and the public interest.
So it is a fine line we walk.
Gun dealer Mike Detty risked his life helping to trap cartel gun runners.
I thought I was being a good American by following my orders, like a good Marine, and I did exactly what they told me without question, thinking that I was doing my part to help take down a dangerous cartel.
But his efforts led to just a few low-level arrests.
The fear I have is, you know, I still live in the same home where I sold all those cartel members guns to.
The longest sentences any of them received was 36 months so they are all out of prison now and I have to think that maybe one out of 30 of those people would be interested in hurting me or killing me.
When the doorbell rings, my blood pressure goes up cos I just have no idea who's on the other side of the door and I have to think, you know is this the one thing I've been waiting for for the last five years? And I take all the precautions that I can.
I have a 12 gauge shotgun that's loaded with steel goose loads and would do a great job of shooting through my security screen if I need to.
If there is something that requires more ammunition, I have an AR15 with a combat optic on it, and 30 rounds.
I have learnt a hard lesson.
There is a big difference between helping your country and helping your government.
And to this day, I'd be happy to die if it was for a good cause for my country.
But I wouldn't cross the street for my government.
(APPLAUSE AND CHEERING) John Dodson still works for the ATF thanks to the laws that protect whistle-blowers.
But he feels he's been sidelined and that his career is over.
When I blew the whistle, I had been warned that this never works out well for the whistle-blower.
I used to love going to work every day.
Every single day, I loved going to work.
Now, I don't get to do that job any more and it's not the same.
You know, ultimately, it boils down to cops and robbers, good guys getting the bad guys and I thought we were the good guys.
I had to take a long, hard look at myself, you know, and my agency, who I worked for, and the things that we did.
Am I playing on the team that I thought I was playing on? Because everything looks different now.
And I had to ask myself, you know are we the bad guys?
The US government spends billions of dollars fighting powerful Mexican drug cartels.
They have a heavy investment and they're willing to kill for it.
But the Americans stand accused of getting too close to some of the world's most notorious criminals.
They are making deals with them, they are in bed with the enemy.
The big question here is what does cocaine and heroin trafficking have to do with US national security? (WOMAN WAILS) As a brutal drug war raged in Mexico, American law enforcement helped arm the gangs.
We watched over 2,500 firearms go south to Mexico.
Another popular gun with the cartel buyers was the AK-47 pistol.
Could be handled very easily.
I saw them trying to hide it and trying to cover it up.
But with cocaine and heroin still flooding the streets, many are now questioning the true cost of America's war on drugs.
Their criminal policy has been a failure, from the US government's standpoint.
But how many millions of dollars of drugs, how many weapons, how many people will die before they say enough is enough? March 11th, 2015 For people fighting in the war on drugs, this is huge-- this is as big as it gets.
Chapo is Chicago's public enemy number one.
On the 22nd February 2014, Joaquin Guzman, the most wanted drugs trafficker in the world, was captured in Mexico.
major victory.
The arrest of a Mexican druglord whose reach was far and wide.
He was cruel, unforgiving in his Tonight, US law enforcement is hailing the arrest of the top drug dealer in the world, after hunting him for more than a decade.
Guzman, known as El Chapo-- Shorty-- was boss of Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel, and the highest ranking drug kingpin ever arrested.
You see his hands-on approach, his ability to control distribution, his ability to control transportation, his ability to collect illegal proceeds-- we've never seen anything like it.
With a personal fortune estimated at 1 billion dollars, Chapo was the first man to be on the FBI's Most Wanted list at the same time as Forbes Magazine World's Richest.
For America's Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA, Chapo's capture was a triumph.
When I was told it happened, it made my year.
I was a high school quarterback, a football quarterback in high school, and it was like I threw the winning touchdown and we won the state championship, when I heard he was hooked up.
But for some observers of international organised crime, something about Chapo's arrest didn't feel right.
The typical script was that the good guys are the law enforcement, trying to protect our kids from the bad guys, and that's the script.
It's like a spaghetti western, you know.
If you like spaghetti westerns, you'll buy that, but maybe this script we're being sold isn't really the one we should be paying attention to, that there's alternative ways of looking at this.
The capture was quite peaceful.
He was apparently in his room with another person, not the usual number of body guards that you would expect a criminal leader to have around him, no praetorian guard.
You cannot believe that one of the most important drug cartel leaders in Mexico was arrested like that.
No shots, for example.
He was sleeping in a house with just one bodyguard.
I mean, come on-- even when they go to lunch, they go with 20, 40 bodyguards, or when they go to the bathroom.
It's incredible.
It's just incredible.
So why would Chapo Guzman, a man with a vast private army under his command, fall meekly into the hands of the authorities? Is there another story behind his capture? Stretching 2,000 miles from Texas to California, the US-Mexican border is the world's greatest drug-smuggling frontier.
Mexico's border towns are at the centre of a trade worth billions of dollars a year.
But the cradle of Mexico's drug business lies further inland, in the western state of Sinaloa.
With its remote valleys and high sierra, Mexican bandits have grown and trafficked narcotics from here for decades.
It is the home of the world's most powerful organised crime group.
The Sinaloa Cartel is a very sophisticated enterprise, criminal enterprise, and is composed of a board, a board where Chapo Guzman was one of the members of the board.
They work through franchises, far beyond Mexico, with presence in 58 countries.
The Sinaloa Cartel's traditional business involved trafficking marijuana and cocaine.
But back in 2008, the focus shifted to another commodity-- heroin, produced in Mexico.
Chapo summoned his key lieutenants to a secret meeting in the mountains.
The guests included Pedro and Margarito Flores, Mexican-American twins from Chicago.
The cartels are there for the same reason many Fortune 500 companies are there.
It is a transportation mecca for them.
It really is a logistical home run in terms of a business, whether it's legit or not.
The Sinaloa heroin would be trafficked through Chicago.
The Flores twins operated out of a Mexican enclave called Little Village.
They distributed the product through a Chicago street gang with more than 5,000 members.
They also controlled networks in cities across the US capable of shifting up to two tonnes of drugs a month.
John de Leon and Gal Pissetsky are criminal defence lawyers.
We represent the guilty, the innocent and anybody in between.
Mobsters, anybody who's charged with a crime.
The rapid rise of the Flores twins was well known in the city.
It's no different than a young man who starts to work at a company and works his way up the ladder.
They were good at what they did, they made a lot of money for the bosses, so they got promotions, they got trusted more and more, with larger amounts.
But there was a hitch in the Sinaloa Cartel's heroin plan.
The DEA was seemingly one step ahead.
Somehow, they knew all about the meeting in the mountains and the Chicago heroin plan.
Someone had turned.
The Flores brothers-- people that brought into Chicago tonnes of cocaine, marijuana, heroin-- they turned into what we call snitches.
They're probably the biggest informers that the United States, especially here in Chicago, have ever produced.
You have to look at this way-- an old-time cop told me years ago, um you don't send a swan down a sewer to catch a rat you send a bigger rat.
If there's a truism in the drug war that I've discovered is the badder you are, the more valuable you are to the government as an informant, because you are further up the food chain and you have access to more information and you can help make cases against more people.
And that's precisely the position the Flores brothers found themselves in.
As two of America's biggest drug traffickers, the Flores twins could have expected to spend the rest of their lives in prison.
But that's not always the way the US justice system works.
What they say is, "You give us the information, you tell us what it is, and at the end we'll see, if you cooperated with us enough, if you gave us enough information, then we'll see if we're going to give you your deal.
" The twins provided information that helped convict around a dozen of their own associates and indict several more.
For them to put away-- which they have-- put away other individuals who've done much less than they have, for 10, 15 years, 20-year sentences, that's not justice.
That's not justice.
It's now thought that the Flores twins could be out of jail by the age of 40.
The Flores brothers were facilitating the movement of tonnes of cocaine and heroin into the US market and dealing directly with Chapo Guzman and the Sinaloa organisation.
They were at that level, and hence perfectly placed to betray them.
But despite the twins' information, Chapo Guzman and the leaders of the cartel remained free, seemingly untouchable.
And their heroin business boomed.
We're driving east on the Eisenhower Expressway.
It has the nickname of the Heroin Highway.
It's travelled oftentimes by people from the outlying areas, the suburbs, travelling into Chicago to purchase narcotics, primarily heroin.
This guy might be serving somebody up in front of us here.
Within blocks of this highway, you purchase about a tenth of a gram of heroin for 10, roughly.
Former Illinois State Police colonel Mark Piccoli has witnessed Mexican heroin flood into Chicago.
You see down the street up there-- it could be a drug transaction.
For a long time, heroin wasn't a problem, wasn't the problem that it is now in Chicago and the suburbs.
Three guys on the corner.
That guy up on the porch just hanging out too.
The scourge of cheap heroin has spread from Chicago's inner city to its middle-class suburbs.
Those looking to purchase drugs from the suburbs are back on the Eisenhower Expressway, back on their way to wherever they're from in minutes.
You want to look around at the scene and determine-- is it an overdose or not? Heroin has changed so much.
It's cheap, it's extremely strong and because it's strong, people don't have to inject it any longer.
People believe that because you're smoking it or because you're snorting it-- number one, you can't be addicted, and number two, you can't die of an overdose, because you're snorting it.
Both of those are wrong.
Last year, in the Chicago suburb of DuPage County, there were more deaths from heroin overdoses than homicides and traffic accidents combined.
We had one body every day coming in to our morgue of a drug overdose, and I and all of our staff here were just shocked.
We just were like, what was going on? Most of the dead are victims of the drugs supplied by the Sinaloa Cartel.
It has become a multinational corporation which by some estimates generates 100 million a month.
The huge quantities of illegal cash are usually shipped by lorry back to Mexico.
From there, the dirty money needs to be laundered before it can be put to use by the bosses.
The most incredible thing about the Sinaloa Cartel is that at the end, when the Sinaloa network launders the money, they seek, they look for, the rule of law, they try to protect their money into the most secured and legally protected markets in the world, the US and Europe.
Laundering the Sinaloa drug money proved astonishingly easy.
For several years, they simply deposited the cash in the bank, including the Mexico City branch of Britain's biggest bank, HSBC.
In 2012, HSBC was found guilty of failing to stop money being laundered between its Mexico and US offices, including at least 881 million dollars of cash deposits from the Sinaloa Cartel.
Banks are not subject to enough regulations.
The intervention is not enough to control the tsunami of dirty money coming into the legal market.
By 2013, Chicago's heroin epidemic was running out of control.
The public demanded action.
Chicago's Crime Commission responded by declaring the Sinaloa leader, Chapo Guzman, public enemy number one-- the first man to be given the title since Al Capone terrorised these same streets in the 1920s.
What Al Capone was to beer and whisky during prohibition, Guzman is to narcotics.
He's responsible for the death of over 10,000 people and he not only has killed many of those, he has brutally tortured them, mutilated them.
It's a caricature of organised crime, but to some degree, if you want to focus public attention, the public's attention on one problem, you always bring the face of one person, to make it equivalent to that problem, and that's the face of El Chapo Guzman.
But despite the heat, Chapo Guzman still seemed untouchable.
Just how the world's most wanted drug lord had remained at large for 13 years was a mystery.
Many thought the answer lay south of the border, in Mexico.
In 2006, the Mexican government declared war on the drug cartels, sending troops to the border to try and crush their power.
(WOMAN WAILS) (SHE CRIES OUT IN SPANISH) God, answer me! A violent drug war erupted.
Mass killings, torture, even beheadings brought terror to the streets as rival gangs fought for control of the lucrative smuggling routes into the US.
(SHE SHOUTS) The Sinaloa Cartel was coming into cities and border crossing areas where the drugs moved through that traditionally had been controlled by other players, and it wasn't done in a nice way-- it was a very bloody invasion.
As the Sinaloa Cartel's war of conquest dragged on, more than 100,000 Mexicans were killed in the space of five years.
It looked like the government had lost control of the country.
For the Mexican authorities, something had to be done.
One strategy that's been used before in history is "divide and conquer"-- you know, we will use one group to attack another group.
That saves our resources and accomplishes our ends, and at the end we'll wipe we'll clean up the final group.
The Sinaloa organisation was subject to a very, very small number of detentions.
On the one hand, it was the largest criminal organisation in Mexico.
On the other hand, if you look at the statistics, criminal statistics, they were not subject to the same number of detentions as any other organisation in Mexico.
So we started to become suspicious that they were benefitting from some kind of protection.
Many Mexicans came to believe that their government was favouring the Sinaloa Cartel.
A Sinaloa victory would mean an end to the carnage on the streets.
It's something the Mexican government has always denied.
If the Sinaloa Cartel seemed somehow untouchable in Mexico, what about America? Most of the guns used in Mexico's bloody drug war come from the US.
It's the job of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the ATF, to stop these weapons flowing south.
Our mission was to prevent illegal firearms trafficking, from Phoenix to Mexico, that was going in support of the violence being committed by the Mexican drug-trafficking organisations.
In 2009, Arizona ATF special agent John Dodson was assigned to a secret operation called Fast and Furious, targeting the Sinaloa Cartel.
I was very much enthusiastic about it.
It was the front lines of America.
Every one of those rifles that we could prevent from being trafficked is not going to be responsible for its percentage of the carnage that's occurring south of the border.
The plan seemed simple.
Working on tip-offs from local gun dealers, ATF agents would put suspicious buyers, so called straw purchasers, under surveillance.
They would then track the guns and break the gun-trafficking networks.
Mike Detty is a gun dealer from Tucson, Arizona.
He worked with the ATF on a similar operation, selling guns to buyers acting for the Sinaloa Cartel.
The part that I played, as a corrupt gun dealer, money was my main concern.
Money was all that mattered to me because I, as a gun dealer, I had to have a motivation to sell to these people and not worry about what the law is, and so forth.
It was just a role that I played and it seemed to be believable.
OK, so we're going hot now.
On a typical night, a buyer would arrive and usually he'd have a sack or a garbage bag that had a lot of cash in it.
I would have the living room arranged with stacks of guns, varieties of AK-47s, AR pistols-- all the guns that were popular to them and would have stacks, quantities, at least five of each different variety, for them to choose from.
Popular guns were AK-47s of all different varieties.
This one happens to be a Romanian-made semi-auto AK-47, chambered for the 7.
62 x 39 cartridge.
That was the number one seller for these individuals.
We also sold different varieties of AR 15s-- this one, basically, a semi-auto version of the American military model.
Another popular gun with the cartel buyers was the AK-47 pistol.
These are popular because they could easily be concealed under a coat.
They could handled very easily inside of a car, tight doorways and so forth with a 30-round mag or even a 75-round drum mag they could put a lot of lead down range quickly.
Within weeks, Operation Fast and Furious seemed to be paying dividends.
John Dodson and his team had identified a network that was buying hundreds of assault rifles for the cartel.
We got notified by one of the gun shop owners that one of the individuals that had been identified as the straw purchasers was in there about to make a purchase of 10 or 15 AK variants.
We watched the target as he comes out of the gun shop, trip after trip, loading 10 or 15 AK-47 rifles into his vehicle.
When he leaves the gun shop parking lot, we know that there's an arrest imminent.
We cannot allow him to leave with these firearms.
We know they are about to be trafficked, and they'll end up in the hands of in the most violent criminal organisation that this continent has ever seen or had to deal with.
It was time for the take down-- catching the buyers in the act and destroying the network.
When he leaves the gun shop parking lot, as we are following him we began to get ready to put on our tactical gear on.
We strap on our guns belts, our police insignia.
In our minds, an arrest is imminent, we cannot allow the suspect to go with these firearms.
We get to a location that's tactically sound to take him off and get on the radio and advise everyone that that's it, let's go, and we are told to stand down.
It came back over the radio, "Stand down.
We are not going to arrest, we are merely going to surveil.
" There's a brief pause initially when we hear it because we can't believe what's being told back to us over the radio.
It doesn't make any sense at all.
And then we have to fall back on, OK, there 's something we don't know, there is something we're not being told about this.
After that day, we both went back to the office and asked the case agent, "What are we missing? "Why are we allowing these guns to go? What are we not being told?" And we were told quite simply that we're not doing that, that they are under surveillance and we'll try to get a wire and that this is a big case.
A case that in their minds, could some how potentially topple the Sinaloa cartel and Chapo Guzman and it wasn't ours to understand.
If we didn't like it, it was their call.
Weeks and months passed with no arrests.
John Dodson complained repeatedly to his bosses as he watched more and more guns being smuggled into Mexico.
South of the border, the violence was increasing day by day.
I asked my boss, "Do you not see the correlation?" The more that our suspects buy, the more violence and carnage that's occurring south of the border.
And the only reason they're allowed to buy in the quantities they are is because we've facilitated it, and we've allowed them to move the firearms unimpeded into Mexico and into the hands of the drug cartels.
The guns weren't only killing gang members, thousands of innocent Mexicans were caught up in the slaughter.
The city of Ciudad Juarez was the main battle ground for the Sinaloa Cartel's war for control of the border.
Brisa Delgado is waiting for her husband Edwin to arrive back from his job across the El Paso border in Texas.
They were just 15 when their home town became the murder capital of the world.
In January 2010, Edwin and Brisa went to a birthday party on their street in the outskirts of the city.
At 11 o'clock, one of the kids who had left the party early saw a convoy of cars approaching.
The cars drew up in the street where the party was in full flow.
A group of heavily armed men now approached the house.
The gunmen opened fire on the helpless teenagers.
When the shooting stopped, 15 people, mostly teenage kids, lay dead or dying.
Alonzo Encino came running to look for his sons.
The gunmen had mistaken the partygoers for a rival gang.
(THEY SPEAK SPANISH) The families of the victims are now campaigning for justice.
They have obtained a government document that suggests at least three of the guns used in the attack were part of an American gun-tracking operation.
During the month the massacre took place, nearly 1,000 people were murdered in Mexico's drug war.
But the spiralling loss of life had no impact on the Fast And Furious operation.
Oh, he's got a whole bunch of cases that we're recording.
As this undercover footage shows, guns continued to flow to the Sinaloa Cartel.
The ATF watched without making a single arrest.
He is going back into the store.
He is out again carrying another, it appears to be five boxes, hard-case Pelican that would hold a pistol.
Trunk is closed, he is backing up now, looks like he's going southbound through the parking lot.
He's backing out southbound.
Over the 14 months that investigation was going on, we watched over 2,500 firearms go south to Mexico.
There were several times, whenever a high profile murder happened along the US-Mexico border, the case agent and supervisors, they got scared.
They got scared.
I heard them walk around and say, "I hope it's not one of our guns.
" But it was a death on the US side of the border that would finally blow open the whole operation.
I was a teenager raised along the Mexican border and grew up riding horses in rough country like this.
We could camp out under the stars.
One never really thought about danger from Mexico back then.
My, how times have changed.
Ron Colburn is the former deputy chief of the United States Border Patrol Agency.
Those who work this area, smuggle this area, tend to bring in the marijuana and the cocaine.
They have a heavy investment and they are willing to kill for it.
The Sinaloa Cartel treats these border-smuggling routes as its own turf.
It sends gangs, so-called rip crews, to prey on rivals' drug carriers.
This is it.
Just before Christmas 2010, a US border patrol unit came across a heavily armed Sinaloa rip crew.
This is basically where the rip crew was halted by the border patrol.
It was close to midnight, nearly December 15th, as the border patrol agents detected sounds coming from the canyon.
The point man who was on observation just on this hillside spoke out and said, "Five.
" Then he said, "Guns.
" Meaning they were in fact armed.
That's who they were looking for.
The border patrol agents challenged the men with the guns (HE SPEAKS SPANISH) Párense.
Patrulla fronteriza.
"Stop! Border patrol.
" And basically that is when all hell broke lose.
The rip crew shooting up the hill and the border control agents returning fire down the hill.
They secured the area and found Brian dying at the scene.
As the AK47 rounds began to hit near him.
he rolled for greater cover and that's when the one got him beneath his vest.
They body-carried him all the way up these canyons until they could find a spot flat enough for a medevac helicopter to pick him up.
By then he had no pulse.
NEWS: A US border patrol agent has been shot and killed this is near the Arizona/Mexico border One US officer dead.
His name was Brian Terry.
gun battle ensued and Officer Terry was shot and killed.
In December of 2010, I was getting ready for work and I heard on the news that a border patrol agent had been killed.
Another agent called me and told me that firearms at the scene of the border patrol agent's murder was traced right back to the Fast And Furious investigation.
They were guns we'd allowed to walk as part of that case.
It looked like the truth about Fast And Furious would finally break.
When I got to work and logged into my computer systems, I had been denied access to the Fast And Furious Case.
Instantly.
I had it the day before, but some time between when the border patrol agent was murdered and I got to the office that morning, I no longer had access.
The cover-up had begun.
The ATF was distancing the two investigations.
It was clear to me they did not want the Fast And Furious investigation to be linked to the border patrol agent's murder at all.
I saw them trying to hide it and trying to cover it up and that compelled me to act, to do something.
Cos that's not who we are.
That's not what we do, right? We're allowed to make mistakes, but we're not allowed to cover shit up.
Dodson decided to blow the whistle.
I tried every sanctioned avenue that I ever knew of, you know, to blow the whistle, throughout my chain of command, throughout my agency, through the Department of Justice, through the office of the Inspector General Finally, a committee of the US Congress launched an investigation.
They demanded the release of thousands of documents relating to Operation Fast And Furious.
Senior officials from the US Department of Justice were called to give evidence.
Thank you for inviting me to testify and I'd be pleased to answer your questions.
Sir if you're going to count pages like this as discovery, you should be ashamed of yourself.
The only thing that this says is, "Internal use only and not for dissemination outside the ATF.
" That's not discovery.
The pages go on like this for ever.
You've given us black paper instead of white paper, you might as well have given us a ream still in its original binder.
- I - Who authorised this programme that was so felony stupid that it got people killed? The Attorney General has said that he wants to get to the bottom of this For nearly a year, the Justice Department denied intentionally allowing guns to fall into the hands of the cartel.
Eventually, Washington officials blamed Fast And Furious on the ATF in Phoenix.
They said it was a serious but isolated mistake made by local law-enforcement officers.
They insisted that the operation was a well-intentioned plan to arrest senior cartel figures.
Tucson gun dealer Mike Detty had been involved in a similar operation just a few years earlier.
The thing that made me suspicious about this was that, after we'd have these conversations about what families the guns were going to and where in Mexico they were going and who the top lieutenants were and the ports of entry that they crossed over, we kept selling guns, and more guns and more guns to these same people, but no arrests were ever being made.
So was there more to these secret operations than a botched attempt to bring down the cartel? If our goal was to take down a cartel, to actually topple a cartel, let's take them at their word.
How do you do that? Well, you do that by climbing the ladder, all right? The next higher rung, the guys that were ordering the firearms and paying for them, literally placing the orders like a grocery list of what they want, turn out to be informants working on the payroll of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
INTERVIEWER: - The FBI? - The FBI.
We could never get any higher because the next rung of the ladder was already working for the FBI.
At the heart of the Sinaloa Cartel's operation to buy guns in Arizona were two men acting as informants for the US Government.
They had even been paid a quarter of a million dollars.
An unknown percentage of those weapons, potentially up to 250,000 worth, were purchased with taxpayer money.
You take the federal government out of this equation, it doesn't happen, none of it happens, there's no firearms trafficking ring, there's no money to purchase them with, there's no coercing the gun dealers to facilitate the transactions, there's no opening the flood gates to allow the trafficking to occur unabated, and there's no FBI informants either orchestrating everything or just moving the pieces as they're directed by their FBI handlers.
Five years after Fast And Furious, the streets of Ciudad Juarez are now relatively calm.
Helped by my more than 3,000 guns provided with the knowledge of the US authorities, the Sinaloa Cartel has won its war for control of the border.
Once the Sinaloa organisation took over the city, they placed their people, they controlled politicians, so there's no need to kill so many people as before, but the citizens are still subject to the most serious economic crimes-- extortion, kidnapping and fraud and other types of economic crimes.
That's what Sinaloa Cartel is all about.
The true extent of the US involvement with the Sinaloa Cartel's gun runners will probably never be known.
For the only time in his presidency, Barack Obama used his executive privilege to block the release of certain information linked to the Fast And Furious operation.
Many of the secrets of Mexico's drug war will always remain hidden.
But we now know that contacts between the Sinaloa Cartel and the US authorities stretch back a long way.
In 1998, Chapo Guzman was serving a prison sentence in a maximum-security jail in Mexico.
Chapo sent a messenger to the Embassy, into our office.
He wanted to discuss some things with us.
According to one DEA agent, who wished to remain anonymous, Chapo decided to make the Americans an offer.
It was three of us that went to see him.
He was wearing a prison khaki uniform.
And he was very polite, he was very very formal.
One of the first things he did was kind of incredible.
He dropped down on the ground, like he was going to do a push-up, and he looked underneath the door to see if anybody was standing there, outside, listening that he was talking to these people that he had summoned.
In 1998, the Sinaloa Cartel was engaged in a brutal turf war with the Arellano Felix family in the border town of Tijuana.
It went on for about 40 minutes or so, just talking bad about the Arellanos and that he knew where they were and that he could follow them and that he had people that would tell us where they were and and things like that, that he wanted to pass that information.
So we let him talk as much as he wanted to.
Guzman was offering to provide information to the DEA on a rival cartel.
But he wanted something in return.
I think, probably, Chapo was looking for some type of deal, that perhaps maybe the US Government was going to allow him if he gave us this information, to to perhaps, er, reduce his charges or things like that.
We would ask him questions simply like, "Well, how would this take place?" And he says, "Well, you know, if I find them, I'll let you know where they're at in the general area as best as I can possibly find them," things like that.
I think he trusted us.
I mean, simply the way that he talked to us.
He wanted to see us in the future.
We never went back, but, er, you know, he indicated, "Well, maybe next time I'll have some more information for you," that kind of thing.
In 2001, Chapo Guzman escaped from jail, allegedly hidden in a laundry basket.
In the years that followed, the power of the Sinaloa Cartel continued to grow at the expense of its rivals.
And in 2009, an arrest in Mexico City would lead to further astonishing allegations about relations between US law enforcement and the Sinaloa Cartel.
Vicente Zambada-- young, technologically driven, developing strategic and tactical alliances with other criminal organisations within Europe, Asia, South America.
He's a prince within the criminal organisation.
Vicente Zambada was the most senior cartel figure ever to be extradited to the US.
Mexican journalists looked forward to a sensational trial.
As you can imagine, it was a big case.
The son of one of the bosses of the Sinaloa Cartel, the most powerful crime organisation in Mexico.
When we saw how many lawyers were members of Vicente Zambada's defence, I was surprised.
Five?! And those are lawyers who charge a lot of money.
So it was obvious for me that el Cartel de Sinaloa was behind Vicente Zambada.
Because you are arrested and extradited to the US, the cartel basically forget about you.
You are gone.
Not in this case.
Despite facing spending the rest of his life in an American jail, Zambada appeared strangely unflustered.
Vicente he doesn't look worried.
He was always looking to the eyes of his lawyers, you know, like, "I am the boss.
" And I remember the face of one of the lawyers, looking always happy, like you saying, "Mm, I have a surprise for you, Mr.
Judge," something like that, it was very strange.
Zambada did indeed have a surprise for the court.
Vicente Zambada's lawyers went to the judge and told him, "Our client wants to get free.
" Why? Because it was a promise from the US Government.
Zambada claims that he has a cooperation agreement, essentially an immunity deal, with the US Government.
And that was like a jaw-dropper, it's like, "What?!" Zambada claimed that he had met DEA agents in a Mexico City hotel and struck a deal.
In return for information on rival cartels, he would get immunity from prosecution.
The government argued that was not true and there is no evidence of it and most people would think, "Yeah, this guy is desperate, he's facing some hard time and he is going to say anything he can to get off.
" But as the hearings continued, the government admitted that the meeting with Zambada had, in fact, taken place.
So, essentially, right there, that opened the door to the fact that it was not completely beyond the pale, that there was more going on than the government was willing to concede at that point.
And Zambada's claims went much further.
He alleged that, for more than ten years, there had been an agreement in place between the Sinaloa Cartel and the US authorities.
It was a pretty shocking story to hear.
A partner for Chapo Guzman comes into court and says that the government was allowing him to conduct his business and bring in drugs into the United States in exchange for cooperation against other cartels.
It It was very, very unsettling, it was very shocking and at first, when we heard about it, we didn't really know what to think.
Zambada claimed that there was a regular channel of communication between the cartel and the Americans.
The go-between was a Mexican attorney.
Humberto Loya Castro was a Mexican attorney, who was a confidant of the top leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel, Chapo Guzman among them.
He basically worked for the Sinaloa organisation.
A senior figure in the cartel, Castro's role, it was alleged, was to feed the DEA information about rival drug gangs.
Chapo Guzman and the Sinaloa leadership found Loya Castro a useful pawn for their purposes because what he's effectively doing is passing information to US law enforcement that was then being used against Chapo's rivals and making it easier for Chapo to, you know, grow his organisation and take over markets in Mexico.
I mean, it's a simple business calculation.
For the Americans, the information from Castro allowed the DEA to make high-profile drug busts.
For US law enforcement, they were making big cases and making big headlines in US papers.
And as complicated as the drug war is, most people don't know the difference between the Sinaloa organisation and the Juarez cartel and the Gulf cartel-- all they know is a big bad narco trafficker or a bunch of drugs got seized and and that looks good for US law enforcement.
It's, you know a bargain that works for everybody.
Sworn testimony from US government officials confirmed that agents had repeatedly met with Castro over a period of ten years.
But the DEA strongly denies that any deal with the Sinaloa cartel has ever existed.
(MAN KNOCKS) Clearly, we do not in any investigation play one cartel against the other.
That is just a fallacy, it's been, er printed time and time again and it's just not accurate at all.
To prove Zambada's claims, his lawyers demanded that the alleged go-between, Humberto Loya Castro, testify in court.
The lawyers of Vicente Zambada said, "We want the lawyer of Sinaloa Cartel, Loya Castro, to be witness in the trial.
" And I remember the face of the lawyers of the justice department, they said "Uh-oh.
" They didn't say, "Uh-oh", but you see their faces.
And the judge says, "Sounds fine, it's fair to me.
" I was doing this with my hands-- an informant here, telling everything, this is going to be fun! A lot of news.
At this point, the US justice department took a drastic step.
They blocked Castro giving evidence, on the grounds of national security.
When they said national security issue with Vicente Zambada, it was like, "This guy is not Osama bin Laden, come on-- why are you doing all of this stuff?" The big question here is what does cocaine and heroin trafficking have to do with US national security? And why is any effort to discover what the relationship is between this massive criminal organisation in Mexico and the US government, why is that cloaked or hidden by national security? It implies that, somehow, the US Government finds it in its national security to aid and abet criminal organisations.
We are talking about Sinaloa Cartel.
It's a real threat for the national security of the United States.
It's what this government said.
But at the end, you see, they are making deals with them, they are in bed with the enemy.
Vicente Zambada will now never go on trial.
He has become the latest kingpin to do a deal with the US authorities-- negotiating a reduced sentence in return for co-operation.
America's so-called war on drugs costs billions of dollars a year.
It's meant to protect US citizens from the dangers of illegal narcotics.
The authorities have always denied that they've favoured one cartel over the others as part of that war.
And in February 2014, the proof surely came when Chapo Guzman, leader of the Sinaloa cartel, so-called "Public Enemy Number One", was finally captured in a seaside town in Mexico.
I tell you what, it was a big triumph for law enforcement, I applaud the Mexican government, er for working with all the US agencies, including DEA, and doing the right thing.
And we got a bad guy in jail, so I think it's great.
I've heard the argument that Chapo Guzman was captured.
That means that obviously he wasn't being favoured, but it's not individuals being favoured.
At that particular moment in time, there was an interest convergence-- that would explain it-- between the Sinaloa organisation and the US government.
There's an old saying in Mexico-- when a cartel leader becomes so well known, like El Chapo Guzman, the saying goes, "It smells like a dead person.
" It means that usually, when you become a very well-known criminal, your days are counted.
El Chapo Guzman was captured when the Sinaloa organisation was willing for that capture to take place.
It was a managed capture.
It's likely we'll never know the full truth about the events surrounding Chapo's capture.
But more than a year on, Sinaloa cartel drugs are still flooding onto the streets of America.
There's big money to be made in the drug trade and as long as there's money to be made, these cartels and Guzmans and everybody else You know, Guzman gets arrested, it I don't think we saw much of a dent at all, much of a change.
If any, very little.
And I think it's just the nature of the business.
It's all about the dollars.
Everything that I analyse in this case tells me that the Sinaloa organisation is greater, stronger, more expanded than before.
So, so far, this case shows that the criminal policy has been a failure, from the US government's standpoint.
The war against an international drugs trade worth 300 billion a year appears to be increasingly unwinnable.
And even veterans of the war on drugs are beginning to question how it is being fought.
Ron Colburn is former deputy head of the US Border Force-- the front line in the battle against the traffickers.
There's a practice involved with investigative agencies commonly along borders.
It's the concept where an investigative agency allows an organised crime group to pass through loads-- the cocaine, the heroin, the marijuana, the weapons, the illicit gained cash, whatever it happens to be, walks, it gets away.
It does not get seized or stopped by that law enforcement agency while they build their case towards some day arresting the person.
But how many millions of dollars of drugs, how many weapons, how many people will die before they say "Enough is enough"? Many times, we've got to really weigh the options of what do we have to do, what are our legal bounds, safety involved, and we've got to make sure that we always keep our eye on the ball on safety and the public interest.
So it is a fine line we walk.
Gun dealer Mike Detty risked his life helping to trap cartel gun runners.
I thought I was being a good American by following my orders, like a good Marine, and I did exactly what they told me without question, thinking that I was doing my part to help take down a dangerous cartel.
But his efforts led to just a few low-level arrests.
The fear I have is, you know, I still live in the same home where I sold all those cartel members guns to.
The longest sentences any of them received was 36 months so they are all out of prison now and I have to think that maybe one out of 30 of those people would be interested in hurting me or killing me.
When the doorbell rings, my blood pressure goes up cos I just have no idea who's on the other side of the door and I have to think, you know is this the one thing I've been waiting for for the last five years? And I take all the precautions that I can.
I have a 12 gauge shotgun that's loaded with steel goose loads and would do a great job of shooting through my security screen if I need to.
If there is something that requires more ammunition, I have an AR15 with a combat optic on it, and 30 rounds.
I have learnt a hard lesson.
There is a big difference between helping your country and helping your government.
And to this day, I'd be happy to die if it was for a good cause for my country.
But I wouldn't cross the street for my government.
(APPLAUSE AND CHEERING) John Dodson still works for the ATF thanks to the laws that protect whistle-blowers.
But he feels he's been sidelined and that his career is over.
When I blew the whistle, I had been warned that this never works out well for the whistle-blower.
I used to love going to work every day.
Every single day, I loved going to work.
Now, I don't get to do that job any more and it's not the same.
You know, ultimately, it boils down to cops and robbers, good guys getting the bad guys and I thought we were the good guys.
I had to take a long, hard look at myself, you know, and my agency, who I worked for, and the things that we did.
Am I playing on the team that I thought I was playing on? Because everything looks different now.
And I had to ask myself, you know are we the bad guys?