May 2014
Keller looks down at the photo of the skeleton.
Blades of grass poke up through the ribs; vines wrap around the leg bones as if trying to strap the body to the earth.
“Is it Barrera?” Keller asks.
Barrera’s been off the radar for a year and a half. Now these photos have just come in from the DEA Guatemala City field office. Guatemalan special forces found the bones in the Petén, in the rain forest about a kilometer from the village of Dos Erres, where Barrera was last seen.
Tom Blair, the head of DEA’s Intelligence Unit, lays down a different photo on Keller’s desk, this of the skeleton lying on a gurney. “The height matches.”
Barrera is short, Keller knows, a shade under five seven, but that could describe a lot of people, especially in the undernourished Mayan regions of Guatemala.
Blair spreads more photos on the desk—a close-up of the skull next to a facial shot of Adán Barrera. Keller recognizes the image: it was taken fifteen years ago, when Barrera was booked into the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego.
Keller put him there.
The face looks back at him.
Familiar, almost intimate.
“Orbitals match,” Blair is saying, “brain case measurements identical. We’d need dental and DNA analysis to be a hundred percent, but …”
We’ll have dental records and DNA samples from Barrera’s stay in the American prison system, Keller thinks. It would be highly doubtful that any useful DNA could be pulled from a skeleton that had been rotting in the rain forest for more than a year, but Keller can see in the photos that the jaw is still intact.
And he knows in his gut that the dental records are going to match.
“The way the back of the skull is blown out,” Blair says, “I’d say two shots to the face, close range, fired downward. Barrera was executed, by someone who wanted him to know it was coming. It would match the Dos Erres theory.”
The Dos Erres theory, a particular pet of the DEA’s Sinaloa Working Group, postulates that in October 2012, Adán Barrera and his partner and father-in-law, Ignacio Esparza, traveled with a large, armed entourage to Guatemala for a peace conference with their rivals, an especially vicious drug cartel known as the Zetas. There was a factual precedent for this—Barrera had sat down with the Zeta leadership at a similar conference back in 2006, divided Mexico into territories, and created a short-lived peace that fell apart into an even more violent and costly war. The theory continues that Barrera and the Zeta leader Heriberto Ochoa met in the remote village of Dos Erres in the Petén District of Guatemala and again carved up Mexico like a Thanksgiving turkey. At a party to celebrate the peace, the Zetas ambushed and slaughtered the Sinaloans.
Neither Barrera nor Esparza had been seen or heard from since the reputed meeting, nor had Ochoa or his right-hand man, Miguel Morales, also known as Forty. And there was intelligence to support the theory that a large gunfight occurred in Dos Erres—D-2, the military unit that controls Guatemalan intelligence, had gone in and found scores of corpses, some in the remnants of a large bonfire, which was consistent with the Zeta practice of burning bodies.
The Zetas, once the most feared cartel in Mexico, went into steep decline after the alleged Dos Erres conference, further suggesting that their leadership had been killed and that they had suffered mass casualties.
The Sinaloa cartel had not experienced a similar decline. To the contrary, it had become the undisputed power, by far the most dominant cartel, and had imposed a sort of peace on a Mexico that had seen a hundred thousand people killed in ten years of drug violence.
And Sinaloa was sending more drugs than ever into the United States, not only the marijuana, methamphetamine and cocaine that had made the cartel wealthy beyond measure, but also masses of heroin.
All of which argued against the Dos Erres theory and for the rival “empty coffin theory” that Barrera had, in fact, decimated the Zetas in Dos Erres, then staged his own death and was now running the cartel from a remote location.
Again, there was ample precedent—over the years several cartel bosses had faked their deaths to relieve relentless DEA pressure. Cartel soldiers had raided coroners’ offices and stolen the bodies of their bosses to prevent positive identification and to encourage rumors that their jefes were still on the right side of the grass.
Indeed, as Keller has often pointed out to his subordinates, none of the bodies of the leaders alleged to have been killed in Dos Erres have ever been found. And while it is widely accepted that Ochoa and Forty have gone to their reward, the fact that Sinaloa just keeps humming along like a machine lends credence to the empty coffin theory.
But the absence of any appearances by Barrera over the past year and a half indicates otherwise. While he always tended to be reclusive, Barrera usually would have shown up with his young wife, Eva, for holiday celebrations in his hometown of La Tuna, Sinaloa, or for New Year’s Eve at a resort town like Puerto Vallarta or Mazatlán. No such sightings have been reported. Furthermore, digital surveillance has revealed no emails, tweets, or other social media messages; phone monitoring has revealed no telephonic communications.
Barrera has numerous estancias in Sinaloa and Durango in addition to houses in Los Mochis, along the coast. The DEA knows about these residences and there are doubtless others. But satellite photos of these locations have shown a decided lessening of traffic in and out. Ordinarily, when Barrera was moving from one location to another, there would be an increase in traffic of bodyguards and support personnel, a spike in internet and cell-phone communications as his people arranged logistics, and a heavier communications footprint among state and local police on the Sinaloa cartel payroll.
The absence of any of this would tend to support the Dos Erres theory, that Barrera is dead.
But the question—if Barrera isn’t running the cartel, who is?—has yet to be answered, and the Mexican rumor mill is full to capacity with Barrera sightings in Sinaloa, Durango, Guatemala, Barcelona, even in San Diego where his wife (or widow?) and two small sons live. “Barrera” has even sent texts and Twitter messages that have fueled a cult of “Adán vive” disciples, who leave hand-painted signs along roadsides to that effect.
Members of Barrera’s immediate family—especially his sister, Elena—have gone to some lengths to not confirm his death, and any ambiguity surrounding his status gives the cartel time to try to arrange an orderly succession.
The Dos Erres theory believers aver that the cartel has a vested interest in keeping Barrera “alive” and is putting out these messages as disinformation—a living Barrera is to be feared, and that fear helps keep potential enemies from challenging Sinaloa. Some of the theory’s strongest adherents even posit that the Mexican government itself, desperate to maintain stability, is behind the Adán Vive movement.
The confirmation of Barrera’s death, if that’s what this is, Keller thinks, is going to send shock waves across the narco world.
“Who has custody of the body?” Keller asks.
“D-2,” Blair says.
“So Sinaloa already knows.” The cartel has deep sources in all
