MEXICAN'S VIOLENT DEATH EXPOSES DOUBLE LIFE (2024)

Orozco's bloody end shocked his many friends and admirers in this little farm town. They were even more shocked when authorities announced that the wealthy rancher and frequent host of the local political establishment was not named Orozco, but Manuel Salcido Uzueta. Called "El Cochiloco" -- "The Mad Pig" -- Salcido, 44, was one of Mexico's most ruthless and long-sought drug trafficking barons and the last of a generation of murderous capos who ran the trade through the 1980s.

His outwardly untroubled life here over the last six years as a respected cattle and horse breeder -- when senior law enforcement officials say he was probably involved at the highest levels of drug smuggling -- has provided a vivid illustration of the difficulties Mexico faces in trying to reduce its role as the main way station for cocaine moving from Colombia to the United States.

President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, in the assessment of U.S. and Mexican officials, has made the drug war a high priority in his three-year-old administration, closing a period when U.S. agents complained that their Mexican counterparts were not cooperating fully in anti-drug efforts. But in provincial towns like this where change comes slowly, El Cochiloco could still move about, counting on complicity, incompetence or lack of interest from local police and politicians.

There was nothing inconspicuous about El Cochiloco's lifestyle in Coquimatlan, a peaceful town just under the Nahual and Mina mountains six miles southwest of Colima, capital of the state of the same name. His 1,000-acre main ranch, Jayamita, which he bought in 1985, was among the region's lushest, replete with purebred Arabian horses, fragrant lemon groves and registered bulls that he lent out for rodeos.

Mayor German Espinosa Villalobos, who struck up a close friendship with the man he knew as "El Indio" Orozco soon after coming to office in January 1989, was a frequent guest at barbecues beside the elegantly landscaped artificial lake at one corner of the ranch. As he and his guests feasted and made conversation, they could admire peaco*cks strutting about on carefully tended lawns on the lake's artificial islets. Pet monkeys chattered in their cage. A pair of llamas and a half-dozen deer wandered about, so tame that children could pet them.

"He seemed like an extraordinary person, a very nice person," Espinosa recalled. "He was very nice with everybody, very respectful, and I offered him my friendship."

Espinosa was not alone. Elias Zamora Verduzco,the former governor of Colima, also showed up at the ranch for lunch on a number of occasions. Isabel Martinez, who runs Los Portales restaurant in the state capital, recalled the time she prepared a special lobster meal for "Don Pedro" Orozco, Zamora and several other local officials invited to the ranch for what she called a "confidential" afternoon.

According to local judicial officials, journalists and Martinez, the guest list at one time or another over the last few years also included the state police chief, Jose Luis Barragan -- recently replaced -- mayors of other nearby towns, lawmakers and local executives of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. In return, El Cochiloco was invited to various official functions, including Zamora's annual report to the state in the governor's palace and Espinosa's Sept. 15 independence day reception at City Hall.

Alejandro Maldonado Loyo, the federal attorney general's Colima delegate, said all those he has interrogated about their dealings with El Cochiloco say they had no idea their host was anything more than a wealthy, gregarious rancher. Zamora, whose term ended Nov. 1, told reporters he does not "repent" for his friendship with the drug smuggler because in Colima nothing was known about that side of his life.

Espinosa said El Cochiloco's friendship also was beneficial to Coquimatlan. The rancher bought uniforms for the village volleyball league, helped finance celebrations for the local school's graduating class and lent heavy equipment to pave a two-mile stretch of the road linking Coquimatlan to the next village. It was at the inauguration of that road that El Cochiloco first met the governor, Espinosa recalled.

There was, however, one strange thing about the man known as Don Pedro, recalled Espinosa and other townsfolk: He paid for everything in cash. Martinez, whose husband, Marcelino, rented "Orozco" a section of land adjoining his own farm, said the rancher paid all 250 million pesos for the five-year lease at once -- in cash. Similarly, he turned over stacks of peso notes to settle his bills for the catering Martinez did for the barbecues.

"And when he came from Guadalajara, he never came empty-handed," she recalled. "He came with toys for my children, he came with gifts for me."

El Cochiloco spent at least several days a week at the ranch, arriving unarmed and without escorts in a pickup truck or one of the four-wheel-drive vans favored by Mexico's powerful. His route took him by the attorney general's office in Colima several times a week.

Although El Cochiloco let it be known that he had a construction business and some automobile dealerships in Guadalajara, about 90 minutes' drive north, many people in Coquimatlan and Colima wondered why he showed up suddenly at the ranch, where his money came from and why he always paid his bills out of a briefcase stuffed with peso notes.

Inevitably, some began to whisper about drug trafficking. But no one in authority made a move.

"All Colima wondered whether he was a narco," said Hector Sanchez de la Madrid, general director of the newspaper Diario de Colima. "It's rare that someone of 45 or 50 would show up with so much money and begin doing good deeds. How could the federal attorney general's office not know who he was?"

Frederico Ponce Rojas, Mexico's assistant attorney general in charge of investigations, said in an interview in Mexico City that most of the charges against El Cochiloco dated from the 1970s and were rendered moot by statutes of limitations. Although indicted in Mexico and the United States for various crimes, the notorious drug smuggler also had his criminal record lifted from police files in his home state of Sinaloa after escaping from prison there in 1976, Ponce Rojas added, and there was only one photograph of him available.

Partly for that reason, the attorney general's office by which El Cochiloco drove on the way to his ranch every week had tacked up wanted posters for Illich Ramirez-Sanchez, the long-disappeared international terrorist known as "Carlos," for Frank Terpil, the renegade CIA agent believed murdered by Syrian security a decade ago in Beirut -- but not for Manuel Salcido Uzueta.

Despite his discretion outside Coquimatlan, Mexican law enforcement authorities said El Cochiloco was believed involved with the drug smuggling network of Felix Gallardo until the end. Gallardo, another of the legendary Mexican drug lords of the 1980s, was arrested under Salinas's crackdown but reportedly stays in telephone contact with his lieutenants from his jail cell.

Two ships confiscated recently in the Colima port of Manzanillo -- one with three metric tons of cocaine, the other with 3.5 metric tons of cocaine and five of marijuana -- were probably destined for El Cochiloco's gang, according to Ponce Rojas. Although the identity of his assassins remains unknown, El Cochiloco may have been killed in a struggle over these new operations in the Colima region.