“Tales of Drug Lord 'La Barbie' Ripe with Speculation” |
| Tales of Drug Lord 'La Barbie' Ripe with Speculation Posted: 01 Sep 2010 10:59 PM PDT Borderland folk songs immortalize him as smart, ruthless, powerful and rich. From the Rio Grande to Mexico's Valley of the Beheaded, there is no shortage of stories about "La Barbie," the top-level drug trafficker born in Laredo and arrested Monday in Mexico. Was Edgar Valdez Villarreal really a star high school football player or just an average guy whose coach nicknamed him La Barbie for his light eyes and fair-haired complexion that set him apart in the Texas border town? And how did an American who got his start selling dime bags of marijuana have the connections to go on to lead a team of assassins, let alone climb to the summit of Mexico's criminal underworld? "There is a lot of speculation as to what relationships he had and what relationships led up to where he is now," said Laredo police spokesman Jose Baeza. "He was able to do enough to gain the trust. There is something to be said, that he is an American-born person who reached that rank." 'High-impact blow' Valdez, 37, is nearly a celebrity of sorts in parts of Laredo as well as Mexico. People tell stories about running into him in a bar. Or dating his sister. But Tuesday, the Texan turned Mexican mobster was paraded before the cameras in Mexico City sporting no less than a green Ralph Lauren Big Pony polo shirt and a slight grin on a slightly bearded face. Government spokesmen said 1,200 officers took part in the culminating moments of a yearlong effort to capture Valdez. The arrest dealt "a high-impact blow to organized crime," said Alejandro Poire, a spokesman for President Felipe Calderon's national security team. Poire said Valdez had ties to gangs operating in the United States and Central and South America. Among his drug gangster rivals, he was widely despised, known for viciously ordering the decapitation of his enemies. Messages to him have been carved into bodies and painted on sheets and hung near the mutilated corpses of his soldiers. "You'll have to find another lover. I've killed this one for you," read a placard for Valdez that was recently left with three men hanging from a bridge. War with Gulf Cartel Ramon Eduardo Pequeno, a commissioner with Mexico's federal police, offered a resume of Valdez's criminal life. He says Valdez was first arrested on marijuana charges in Missouri nearly 20 years ago. While he was briefly in custody in Mexico City years later, he met Arturo Beltran Leyva, who became his narco godfather. Valdez was later tasked with going to war with the Gulf Cartel along the border in Nuevo Laredo for control of lucrative smuggling routes into Texas. He led a team known as The Blacks, a squad that enforced the orders of cartel boss Beltran. The fighting tore apart the very region where Valdez grew up, and the city of Nuevo Laredo has yet to recover. He later became the chief of security for Beltran, and was among the inner circle in 2007 during a peace meeting of the leadership of each of Mexico's major cartels, according to Pequeno. The world apparently began to come apart for Valdez last December when Beltran was killed in a gunbattle with the Mexican military. Valdez ended up not only fighting Beltran's surviving brother, but also Mexican federal agents as well as his long-time crime rivals. After Beltran was killed by the Mexican military, his pants were pulled down and his corpse covered with money and jewelry before it was photographed in images given to news media. Valdez's Houston lawyer, Kent Schaffer, said his client has plenty of enemies in Mexico. "I think he'd be much safer in an American facility," Schaffer said. Trial venue unclear Michele Leonhart, acting head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, applauded Valdez's capture. "Thanks to the diligence and continued partnership of our courageous counterparts in the Mexican government, the arrest . . . shows that any violent drug cartel leader is within reach of the law," she said. Valdez showed no signs of ill treatment and had the chance to answer reporters' questions, but mutely declined to do so, according to video posted on the Web by the Mexican government. He is in a maximum-security prison and it remains to be seen whether he'll be tried in Mexico for charges there or be shipped to the United States to face trial. Schaffer said he was told the U.S. ambassador to Mexico requested that Valdez be returned to the U.S., but officials would not confirm that. "What will happen, I have no clue," Schaffer said. "It sort of makes sense to have the Americans deal with the case." Valdez faces an array of charges in the United States, and was most recently indicted in Atlanta, where he is accused of smuggling thousands of pounds of cocaine into this country as well as moving millions of dollars in proceeds back into Mexico. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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