Seduction of a Generation

A HOT DAY IN TIJUANA IS COOLING INTO A GOLDEN SUNSET. BUSINESSWOMAN Guadalupe Gonzalez is helping a customer select the perfect floral teacup from a china showroom that is a fantasia of fine figurines. Delicate swallowtail butterflies rest on china daisies. Mermaids hold out conch shells with tiny freshwater pearls. Porcelain brides and grooms painted in reassuring pastels gaze at each other with bland expressions of matrimonial joy.

The elegant breakables in the tall glass cases seem too fragile for the tale that Gonzalez is telling. It is the story of her daughter Angelica’s first marriage. And it was anything but bland.

Angelica Bustamante is the granddaughter of Alfonso Bustamante, Tijuana’s Rockefeller, the border pioneer who built the twin business towers that loom over this boomtown. Her path seemed preordained: an adolescence consumed with long days at the Tijuana Country Club, the possibility of college in San Diego, and marriage to another young scion of Tijuana’s ruling class.

Instead, when Angelica was 16, she tearfully revealed to her mother that she was pregnant. Her suitor was a rakish 19-year-old unknown with bedroom eyes and a crooked smile, a man known as “Kitty” to his friends. Like Angelica, Kitty partied with a popular crowd of teenagers who studied at the Instituto Mexico, one of Tijuana’s exclusive private schools. They were hastily married not long before the birth of their twins in 1988. And that was merely the first chapter in a life never imagined by Angelica’s parents.

In May 2001, Arturo “Kitty” Paez, 34, became the first accused lieutenant of the Tijuana drug cartel to be extradited to the United States for cocaine trafficking. U.S. prosecutors say he worked for the notorious Arellano Felix brothers: Benjamin, described by law enforcement authorities as the cartel’s chief executive, and Ramon, considered the “enforcer,” the man who planned the murders of the cartel’s enemies. Authorities on both sides of the border believe the organization was responsible for shipping billions of dollars of cocaine into the United States over the last decade. Benjamin Arellano Felix is currently housed in a high-security prison near Mexico City, awaiting trial on drug-trafficking charges. Ramon was shot to death by Mexican police in February.

Angelica wasn’t the only well-to-do Tijuanan to bring a reputed trafficker into the family. In 1986, Ruth Serrano Corona, the granddaughter of a top federal official in Tijuana, married Benjamin Arellano Felix. Ruth was with Benjamin in March when soldiers barged into their house in Puebla and took him away.

And consider the saga of Lina Literas, one of Angelica’s best friends, a beautiful young woman whose father’s chain of border import stores supplied much of the crystal that graces the tables of Tijuana’s elite. After a childhood of ballet lessons and society weddings, Lina married the baby-faced son of a courtly Tijuana colonel who had been a presidential guardsman. Emilio Valdez Mainero seemed an appropriately upper-tier husband, but he too allegedly found employment in the Arellano Felix organization, recruiting ‘young assassins who belong to Tijuana’s upper class’-some of them his childhood friends. Emilio ended up in a U.S prison, convicted of drug trafficking in 1998. Lina disappeared during the 2000 Thanksgiving weekend and turned up dead.

Gonzalez shakes her head. “So many kids from society got involved with them,” she sighs. “All the ladies my age, we all say that’s the worst cancer to ever hit Tijuana.” That cancer was the cartel.

By the time Ramon was killed in Mazatlan in February, at least 25 young Tijuanans from established families had been killed or jailed in a 15-year period, all because of their connection to the cartel. They were graduates of the finest private schools, at home on both sides of the border, the children of families that knew or were related to some of the most powerful people in Baja California.

Their fate poses an uncomfortable question for this cosmopolitan border city: How did a bunch of kids from Tijuana’s wealthiest neighborhoods get mixed up with some of the deadliest men in the hemisphere?

TIJUANA IS THE MEXICAN CITY OF REINVENTION. IN THE LAST 50 YEARS IT has been transformed from a dusty backwater of 65,000 to an electric border boomtown whose official population tops 1 million, though many believe it is twice that size. As in Los Angeles, the past is not taken quite so literally. Once people move to Tijuana, they are pretty much whoever they say they are.

Many people who come to this freewheeling experiment in urbanism shed the reserve and formality of central Mexico. Tijuana citizens have acquired a reputation for being extroverted, unpretentious and open-minded. A large middle class feeds a pulsing youth culture of crowded discos and hip rock bands.

Upper-class circles are as newly minted as the modern Tijuana Country Club, built in 1948 on the grounds of the old casino, a remnant of the time that the city was a Prohibition getaway for Hollywood movie stars. Families with such names as Bustamante, Fimbres and Anchondo coalesced into tight-knit circles that formed the core of Tijuana society.

But by the mid-1980s, even this reliable terrain began to shift. The devalued Mexican peso was relegating some upper class Tijuana families to the middle class. A new, cash-rich generation of drug traffickers was jostling for control of Tijuana; they took advantage of police and government corruption, and of the city’s strategic location at the doorstep of the world’s largest narcotics market. The Arellano Felix brothers did that and more-they exploited one of Tijuana’s treasures: its youth.

To Dario Garin, the president of the Tijuana Country Club, the Arellano Felixes’ allure boiled down to two simple things: Money. “And power,” Garin says with a wry, world-weary air. “They have lots of money. And they go around spreading it everywhere. “I believe it was the Arellanos’ strategy to infiltrate the young so they could establish themselves in society.”

THE ARELLANO FELIXES, A PROSPEROUS FAMILY OF SEVEN BROTHERS AND FOUR sisters, were from Sinaloa, the Pacific Coast birthplace of many Mexican drug traffickers. Mexican police say some of the brothers were the proteges of a well-connected relative, the Sinaloa drug kinpin Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, who was jailed in 1989 in connection with the murder of U.S. DEA agent Enrique Camarena.

At first, no one on either side of the border took much notice when some of the brothers drifted into Tijuana in the early 1980s. They seemed small-time. In 1980, Francisco Arellano Felix, owner of a Mazatlan disco, failed to appear in a San Diego court to answer charges of selling half a kilo of cocaine. Drug Enforcement Administration officials say Benjamin Arellano Felix first appeared on the radar for a petty 1982 drug arrest in Montebello; he was with his former wife and brother Eduardo. The brothers skipped bond and returned to Mexico. It was around that time that Benjamin began coming to church with one of the prettiest girls in town.

Father Gerardo Montano says he was first introduced to Benjamin by Ruth Serrano Corona, a striking blond in her early 20s who was very devout and very proper, when he was parish priest at San Francisco Javier church. He says her stepfather owned an elegant Tijuana restaurant and her grandfather had been head of immigration and a political party chief.

Like more than a few well-connected Tijuanans, Ruth was born in San Diego County. She had volunteered at the church since she was 16, reading Scripture at services and carrying the wine, chalice and water. Her new boyfriend was “a very polite young man, and very much in love with Ruth,” says Montano. Benjamin, the priest adds, said he was a contractor.

But Tijuana’s upstart investigative newsweekly, Zeta, identified Benjamin and Ramon Arellano in 1985 as the mysterious men behind a marijuana warehouse guarded by municipal police. And by the following year, Benjamin had enough notoriety in certain circles that he raised eyebrows when he and Ruth arrived at the “Miss Mexico” pageant in Tijuana and were shown to a VIP area usually reserved for business sponsors and their friends.

Ruth gave birth to their first child-also named Ruth-in San Diego a year later, and Montano baptized her. “I never saw anything strange about them in the religious meetings,” the priest says. “They wore gala attire. Benjamin was very well-mannered, very cultivated and gracious, always very gracious.”

If Father Montano was in denial, he wasn’t alone.

Benjamin opened a nice seafood restaurant in town. He would sit at nearby Sanborn’s cafe on Avenida Revolucion, poring over his ledger books, wearing a distinctive white linen suit and carrying an executive attache case. He offered businessmen generous credit to tide them through the tight economy. Perhaps they were grateful enough to ignore the fact that Benjamin had begun to move about with an armed security detail, rare for an ordinary entrepreneur.

CRISTINA PALACIOS DE HODOYAN OPENS THE DOOR TO A FOYER FILLED WITH a large doll collection and other touches of the decorative juvenilia that adults somtimes use to reinforce a sense of innocence. She is the mother of Alfredo Hodoyan, 31, the childhood friend of Emilio who is accused of taking part, at the behest of the cartel, in the spectacular gangland slaying of Baja California’s federal police commander in September 1996. Cristina, 62, rolls her eyes dismissively at any suggestion that Alfredo was the killer, the “Wolf” described by prosecutors. Not Alfredo-tall, good-looking, bilingual, U.S.-born; a graduate of the prestigious St. Augustine Academy in San Diego.

She shakes her head. Alfredo was openhearted, generous- wasn’t he always issuing invitations to play basketball at the Hodoyans’ hoop? And Emilio-Did you know his father was the cousin of a Mexican president?-lived right around the corner.

So did skinny little Fabian Martinez, who was so shy that his father, a respected pediatrician, organized a baseball team so his son would have children to play with. It’s hard to believe Fabian grew into “the Shark,” alleged by Mexican police to have killed at least a dozen people on behalf of the cartel.

Authorities said terrible things about other neighborhood boys, too. Boys whose parents Cristina knows from school PTAs. Boys who played with Cristina’s sons at the Tijuana Country Club years ago. Those were simpler times.

They began to change around 1985, when Cristina picked up her daughter at a rock concert and was introduced to a flamboyant teenager with flashy gold chains on his wrists and a big gold medallion around his neck. He was Ramon Arellano Felix, the blue-jeaned kid brother of a big family new to Tijuana. “No one knew who they were,” Cristina says. But soon all the teenagers knew Benjamin’s kid brother, 12 years his junior. Ramon roared through the streets on a motorcycle, wearing splashy Versace shirts, black leather pants and an easy smile. Cristina’s older son, Agustin Hodoyan, would wave when Ramon drove by in a red sports car, rock-and-roll booming from his stereo. Once, Agustin served as a translator for Ramon and an attractive young American at a party given by Lina Literas’ boyfriend, Emilio. “How could you not know him?” Agustin asked after Alfredo’s arrest in 1996. “He was a party boy. Every Friday or Saturday night he would be at a party or a disco. He was fun.”

But “I never wanted to ask him for a favor,” Agustin said, “because nothing is free.” Not everybody had those reservations.

Ramon’s habit of treating everyone to champagne endeared him to the Instituto set. His manic charisma drew the admiration of kids such as Emilio Valdez Mainero, the kind of young men who are known in Mexico by a not entirely flattering term: “juniors.” Eventually Ramon’s friends would be tagged by the press as “narcojuniors.”

People whispered about what Ramon and his brothers did. But in those days, explains one self-described “narcojunior” who is now a protected witness, “the guys with the nicest cars and girls were the drug dealers. This is happening at an age where that stuff is very important to you.”

Judging from U.S. court files, Ramon’s Rat Pack also knew he was not the most predictable party guest.

According to those same documents, Emilio and Ramon were attending a birthday party at Tijuana’s Club Britania in late 1988 when an unwelcome guest arrived. The young man had just run off for three weeks with Ramon’s sister. Ramon walked out of the crowded party and shot and killed his sister’s boyfriend and two friends parked outside.

“If he got drunk or started using, you didn’t even want to be around him,” the protected witness says. But if being an enemy was dangerous, being a member of his entourage could be a rush. Kids admired his long hair, his rococo Chinese dragon bedside lamps, and the respect and fear he inspired.

“It’s unbelievable the power you feel,” the witness says. “You have no rules. You’re young. You have women all over the place. It’s like this big adult playground. It was a very unique time of my life.”

IT’S UNCLEAR WHETHER ANGELICA BUSTAMANTE AND LINA LITERAS KNEW exactly what they were getting into when they started going to the kind of parties where the bad-boy charms of Emilio Valdez Mainero and Kitty Paez were drawing sultry glances from teenage girls. Angelica belonged to a sheltered, well-chaperoned world of weddings and baptisms. But Kitty, with his jeans, T-shirts and irresistable grin, was considered the coolest guy in his Instituto clique. He had a nice car, his own place, money, and a lot more independence than his peers. Friends say that when he dropped by the Instituto one day to pick up some seniors, Angelica was thrilled to be noticed.

“He was cute, he was charming, he was very athletic, and he had all the girls crazy,” a former schoolmate of Angelica’s says. “Girls always want to be with the guy who has all the girls crazy.”

That did not qualify Paez as a suitable fiance for the daughter of the president of the Tijuana Convention and Visitors Bureau. Officially, Kitty owned a liquor store in Rosarito. But how had a penniless 19-year-old come up with the money for a liquor license? “Kitty Paez? I’d never heard of him,” Gonzalez says. “It would have been fine with me if they hadn’t gotten married at all. But it wouldn’t have mattered. She would have kept seeing him. When her father found out she was expecting twins, he said, ‘She’s getting married.’ ” Then-Tijuana Mayor Federico Valdes said he officiated at the wedding.

Lina was a far savvier player in the social scene. “Lina was gorgeous,” her brother Jaime says. “She has always had many admirers. She was the perfect girl.” Her mother tried to discourage her romance with the swaggering Emilio. But when Lina became pregnant, her family reluctantly consented to their marriage, a relative says. “She was very young. He was very handsome,” another mother says. Court documents say Ramon was named godfather of their son, Emilio Alfredo, in 1991, though relatives say he didn’t show up for the baptism. (“These people have last-minute commitments and problems,” one relative says. “They’re like doctors. Their beeper goes off and they have to go.”) An invitation that found its way into U.S. court files directed the juniors to a splashy post-baptism disco party hosted by Ramon and the baby’s other godfather, Kitty Paez. “Ramon became the godfather of a number of children in Tijuana,” Cristina de Hodoyan said in 1996. “Let’s face it, it was often for the money. He would pay for a big baptism party.”

The Arellano Felixes and their entourage became “the beautiful people, the 90210 of drug cartels,” says Gonzalo Curiel, the assistant U.S. attorney assigned to the case. “The Arellanos and the narcojuniors were celebrities.”

But the new godfathers and their friends presented a social quandary. Grandparents rolled their eyes when ostentatious gifts from the godfathers arrived at children’s birthday parties. The Arellano Felix brothers might be the life of the disco scene, but some established families did not care to be this intimately associated with them. “They would tolerate [Benjamin] at times, if it was a party at somebody’s ranch outside of the city. But mostly Benjamin would have his own parties, and the juniors would show up with their girlfriends,” the protected witness says.

WHATEVER RELATIONSHIP THE ARELLANO FELIXES HAD WITH TIJUANA SOCIety was irreparably damaged on May 24, 1993, when Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo, the archbishop of Guadalajara, was shot to death at the Guadalajara airport-a killing that shocked the deeply Catholic nation. Mexican authorities believed that gunmen led by Ramon Arellano Felix mistook the archbishop’s car for that of a rival druglord, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. The gothic twists and turns of this feud had already resulted in the deaths of six people at a Puerto Vallarta disco in 1992 (Ramon escaped through an air-conditioning duct in the bathroom) and prompted an Arellano Felix associate to have someone seduce and kill the estranged wife of a rival drug lord, push her children off a bridge and send her head to her husband, Mexican authorities said.

After the archbishop’s killing, Ramon and Benjamin were no longer enigmas but front-page headlines-Mexico’s most wanted fugitives. Father Montano says he was not the only one who was stunned to discover that the Arellanos were drug traffickers. “It was a surprise to a lot of people in Tijuana who had dealings with them without knowing what they did,” Montano says. Ruth went to work on her husband’s behalf. She called, Montano says, and begged the priest to deliver a letter to the pope explaining the Arellano Felixes’ “innocence.” “Father, I’m asking this of you because I trust you,” Ruth implored, and, according to the priest, “I didn’t even think about the fact that she was the wife of a fugitive.”

Ramon met the priest at a busy Mexico City cafe in December 1993 and they drove to the papal nunciate for Ramon’s three-hour private audience with the nuncio. At midnight, Montano says, the nuncio went to speak with then-president Carlos Salinas: Ramon wanted to meet with him, too. That meeting was denied. The nuncio blessed Ramon, and they left. The priest says he repeated the rendezvous with Benjamin in January 1994. He never considered turning the brothers in “because this was a matter of conscience. My work as a priest is one thing, but to act as an authority is another.”

Officially, the Arellano Felixes were on the lam. Mexico City sent authorities to ransack the Hodoyans’ house, and houses belonging to Emilio, Kitty, Benjamin and Ramon were seized. Authorities managed to swoop in and arrest Francisco Arellano Felix in 1993 in Tijuana’s tony Chapultapec hills. In March 1994, Mexico City federal police flew into Tijuana again and handcuffed Javier Arellano Felix, a little brother with a campy nom de narco, “the Little Tiger.” Tijuana police were curiously unhelpful: Javier’s state police bodyguards opened fire and spirited Javier to freedom, leaving a federal police commander and four others dead.

Ramon and Benjamin retreated to gated beach houses south of Rosarito, according to the protected witness, where Ramon’s appetite for cocaine and his “huge steriod rages” made him increasingly unpredictable. One day the witness was surfing at an Arellano Felix beach house while Ramon relaxed in his bedroom. Looking up, “I see Ramon sitting there with a scope, like an M-16, pointing at us surfing,” the witness says. “Like he was going to scare us, or [was] joking around. I went ‘Hey what’s going on.’ He’s like, ‘I’m just sitting here.’ But I could see him with the tripod pointing with his scope. I thought [forget] that, and got off the beach. I knew about his rages.” By then, he says, “Ramon was just muscle. He was a killer idiot.”

By the time Ramon joined the list of FBI’s Most Wanted in 1997, Ruth was in San Diego, immersed in a life of intense suburban normalcy-except for the DEA crew trailing her family. Angelica moved to San Diego, too, but Kitty remained close to his family, and the couple vacationed together in Cancun with the families of other juniors and some Tijuana businessmen. Other wives, like Lina Literas, hunkered down and became one of the boys-but she was not crazy about Ramon. One night, Ramon invited Emilio out to romance some beautiful women, and Lina snapped: “Shut up Ramon.” “Emilio worried about it,” a relative says. “He said, ‘Don’t talk to Ramon that way.’ Because Ramon did not forgive.” Lina told her family: “I’m afraid of him. He’s really crazy.”

Ramon’s narcojuniors now had a much higher profile in Tijuana, and they were drawing scrutiny for a spate of gangland murders that would include eight senior prosecutors from Baja in a single year. A new federal police commander, Ernesto Ibarra Santes, put down his bags in Tijuana in August 1996 and promised a “revolution” against the Tijuana drug cartel. He named Emilio on national television. After 28 days on the job, Ibarra was shot to death Sept. 14, 1996, outside the Mexico City airport. Authorities rounded up two suspects Sept. 30 in a luxury apartment in San Diego’s picturesque Coronado Shores. They were Emilio Valdez Mainero and Alfredo Hodoyan.

After a long period of few consequences, the narcojuniors were about to discover that U.S. prosecutors couldn’t care less about their fathers, wives, friends or family connections. And the parents of these rebels without a cause found themselves the subject of unwelcome scrutiny.

“I am an honest, decent family woman who has spent my life completely dedicated to my husband and children. This has been a terrible blow,” said Amparo de Valdez, Emilio’s aging mother, who died last year.

“I know Alfredo is innocent,” Cristina Hodoyan said at the time. “These boys are from good families, known to all of Tijuana. Everyone who lives here has the money to give their children opportunities, cars, private schooling, clothes, an allowance. If Alfredo said, ‘Mama, I need a car,’ I got him a car. I still pay for his gas. If he is broke, I pay his credit card bill.

“Why would they be mixed up in this?”

A few months after his son’s arrest in 1996, Alejandro Hodoyan pointed out that Alfredo wasn’t the only one in Tijuana rubbing shoulders with the Arellano Felixes.

“I think 90% of the kids who went to discos knew them by sight,” Alejandro said. “They saw them involved in an illicit business, yet roaming around free, getting all the French champagne and good-looking girls, and they said, ‘Hey, why can’t I be part of this elite?’ ”

“I knew [Alfredo] was with them,” Alejandro said. “He felt very brave strutting around with them. I don’t think he was involved in killing people,” he said. “But he probably would have been. You have to prove your loyalty. To do that, you have to kill someone.”

REPUTATIONS WEREN’T THE only things damaged.

Alfredo Hodoyan’s older brother, Alex, was invited to join the U.S. Witness Protection Program in exchange for his testimony against the cartel. His mother says a federal police commander pulled Alex out of her car in 1997 and the family hasn’t seen him since. U.S. officials say the cartel executed him. Alfredo was extradited from San Diego to Mexico in 1999 to face charges in the Ibarra murder and is awaiting a judgment in his case.

~ Emilio was convicted of orchestrating drug shipments from behind bars in San Diego in 1998. As his legal woes deepened, Emilio complained to a relative that his wife Lina was receiving “not a cent” from Ramon Arellano. “That worried Emilio a lot,” the relative says. “Emilio said, ‘If they’re not helping her, they must think I betrayed them.’ It made him think they viewed him as an enemy.”

Emilio got 30 years. But the chain of dark destinies did not end there. Lina had filed for divorce when she brought their children to visit Emilio at a California prison Nov. 20, 2000, her family says. Lina returned to Tijuana the next day and disappeared.

Her body turned up four days later with the corpse of her married boyfriend. Police told the family that he appeared to have been tortured in front of her. Emilio told her family “he won’t rest until he finds out what happened,” a relative says.

“She died with the person she loved, like a soap opera,” her brother Jaime says. “That gives us peace.

Lina’s father passed away four months later. Her mother is raising her three grandchildren.

The protected witness returned to the scene of an all-night drinking session and found two hungover gunmen playing soccer with a ball that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a third gunman’s head. Now he’s trying to sell his story to Hollywood.

Ruth Serrano Corona was with her husband Benjamin when Mexican soldiers burst into their bedroom in March. Benjamin’s personal assistant turned out to be Manuelito Martinez, Fabian’s brother. Fabian is presumed dead.

Kitty Paez was arrested by U.S. request in downtown Tijuana in 1997. He and Angelica had been divorced for a year, her family says. Her family says she has since remarried, but the San Diego Union-Tribune reported that she showed up with the children at Kitty’s sentencing hearing in January as he choked back tears and apologized to “society in general” for “everything I did.” His freewheeling life was reduced to clinical legal descriptions of meetings where Ramon plotted “violent acts” by narcojuniors. Kitty was sentenced to 30 years.

THERE ARE STILL SOCIETY KIDS WHO brag that they know two of the younger Arellanos, Eduardo and Javier, who, some DEA officials believe, are living under armed guard in Tijuana, trying to stave off competitors and paying $1 million a week to police.

“I don’t think they’ll fool them again,” Tijuana Country Club president Dario Garin said. “People have had the experience, and it was a very bitter one. It won’t be so easy now.”

But in March, another Tijuana “junior,” Walter Ruiz Fimbres, 21, turned up in Chicago newspapers, arrested in Deerfield, Ill., with a carload of marijuana, and was slapped with a $10-million bond.

And Tijuana discos are still prowled by charming strangers who seem far too eager to buy drinks for the whole table.

“History keeps repeating itself,” Jaime Literas says. “They keep meeting these people, in a party, at a disco, they buy bottles of champagne, and they become the new members of the narco-society. It’s the same now: You go to a party, you meet these guys and you don’t even know their names, just pseudonyms. They have new cars and they invite the girls to a disco and meet their cousins. Little by little, they get to know a lot of people.”