Original subtitles

NEWSREADER: The hunt for Pablo Escobar,

the Colombian drug lord, ended today.

PETER: The Sinaloa Cartel, under the leadership of El Chapo Guzman,

rose to become the wealthiest, most powerful cartel in the world.

BONNY: Chapo was an evil person, and I don't use that word lightly.

DEREK: We're talking multi billions of dollars.

We're talking about violence that's worse than Afghanistan and Iraq.

RUBEN: A good 80 percent of the cocaine that finally gets to the United States

is probably going through Guatemala.

PETER: Guatemala became a critical geographic

and operational area in the global narco trafficking industry.

PETER: Otto Herrera was the player in Central America.

He was the largest, wealthiest, most powerful Guatemalan trafficker.

STEVE: The Herrera organization moved in excess of 50 tons of cocaine

into Central America on behalf of the Sinaloa Cartel.

OTTO: I never envisioned how big this was going to get.

The logistics, the loads, the storage, the whole entire Guatemalan operation

was being run by me.

OTTO: My name is Otto Herrera. I was born in Guatemala.

STEVE: My name is Steven Fraga.

I'm a Special Agent of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration.

OTTO: My father used to work for an American company down in Guatemala so,

we had the chance to attend American school.

I did my high school in the United States, in Riverside, California.

After school I had, you know, a couple of jobs here in the United States

and I worked construction.

Did a lot of work for oil companies, building gas stations.

STEVE: When he was in California, he married an American woman.

When he returned to Guatemala, he had a wife and a young family,

so he was looking for work.

OTTO: I returned to Guatemala with my wife and my first daughter, and,

as I come back to my hometown, I meet with old friends,

and I started, I started a new business with them.

A trucking company.

I'm making a living, but it's not enough.

We were aware that there were airplanes landing in the area,

from Colombia and they were bringing cocaine into the area.

The reason that we knew this, because a few months earlier,

there was a plane crash close by.

An airplane crashed with a full load of cocaine

and cocaine was spread out all over the fields.

STEVE: Because of where Guatemala sits in Central America,

it is an ideal location geographically, as a landing point for cocaine shipments

from Colombia that were transferred by plane.

OTTO: One of my friends, we always, spoke about

how well his brother was doing, you know?

Making real money and how little did we see him work.

We had our yard where we parked all our equipment,

and I noticed that his brother had a box truck

parked at the yard that hardly ever moved.

So, I opened up the box truck.

What I found was lights and generators, and radio equipment

to land airplanes during the night.

So we came up with an idea.

We blocked the fuel line so the truck wouldn't start.

And sure enough, about two, three weeks later, I got the call from him and told me

that he needed help because he wanted to move the truck.

So we told him that we wouldn't fix the truck unless he told us

what he was doing and, you know, he came clean.

For me at first, it was like the opportunity of making real money.

I could assume that it was going to be risky, so it had to be good pay.

STEVE: Otto Herrera saw an opportunity and provided valuable assistance

to that organization.

OTTO: I knew what I was getting into.

I knew there was a big responsibility.

There was the fear of failure more than anything else.

STEVE: Herrera maintained a couple of skill sets that were unique

that could be used within the drug trafficking arena.

OTTO: I grew up in a banana plantation, watching the crop dusters work every day.

So that was my dream, to become a crop duster and that's why, you know,

I took the lessons and, I was never able to finish.

But the knowledge is there, you know.

STEVE: He knew how to fly planes, he knew how to assess properties

that could be utilized as airfields.

OTTO: I was very handy with GPSs and all the navigation equipment

so I was being sent out to get coordinates from these airfields

and trying to help with the logistics of the jobs.

I was just thinking about getting ahead, making money and trying to,

provide my family with a better life.

I never envisioned how big this was going to get.

I never did.

The operation was centralized in Guatemala because

of the geographical position.

From that area, you can access the Mexican borders very quick.

OTTO: The shipments came into Guatemala, and it was our responsibility

to help these aircraft land.

And after that, we needed to safeguard and store the cocaine till the Mexicans

were ready to transport, this cocaine into Mexico.

RUBEN: To call them airstrips is an insult to airstrips,

but these are basically small roads in the grass that they make,

where they have the small planes land with cocaine.

STEVE: The first representative of the Sinaloa Cartel that Otto Herrera

established a working relationship with,

was an individual known as Chuy.

His true name was Jesus Soto.

OTTO: Chuy played a very important role in the Sinaloa Cartel.

He was pretty much in charge of Guatemala

and the rest of the countries in Central America.

Everything I learned about trafficking, about drug trafficking,

I learned from Chuy.

The way to approach people, the way to negotiate deals.

Most important was to learn what the people in Sinaloa liked.

To be loyal to them and to work strictly for them.

Mayo Zambada, I was very close to Mayo Zambada.

I visit Mayo several times.

The first person that introduced me to Mayo Zambada was Chuy.

I did spend a lot of time with Chuy.

I drove him around all over the country, scouting places,

meeting people and I got to know him quite well.

Our relationship grew closer.

At the same time, there was a lot of rumors being spread about Guatemalans

I was working for, in relation with shipments getting stolen.

Portions of shipments and full shipments.

This is a subject that me and Chuy used to talk about.

I was instructed to take the shipment over to the border.

The plan was for the shipment to disappear on the way to the Mexican border.

I did fear for my life, cause I had a feeling that, with that shipment,

I was gonna disappear too.

They knew about my relationship with Chuy already.

They knew I was very close to him.

So I figured that if the load disappeared, I would disappear too.

I got a hold of Chuy and told him what I was gonna do.

I switched the drugs to a different truck, and I took off.

I took off without telling anybody.

And I got to the rendezvous spot, okay, and turned in the merchandise.

OTTO: Chuy brought me in and told me, from here on, you will be my employee.

You have nothing to do with them anymore.

I knew they were not gonna be happy.

The transition was kinda hard and, it was just another matter of laying low.

As time went by, more responsibility was laid on me and I became that link

in between the Colombians and the Sinaloa Cartel.

STEVE: Chuy, on behalf of the Sinaloa Cartel, recognized Otto Herrera's discipline,

communication, attention to detail, business sense,

the fact that Otto Herrera was a person that did desire attention.

OTTO: I kept a very low profile around my family.

It was a secret to my wife, what was going on.

If you were going to work for me, you had to you had to be straight.

I didn't allow anybody to use drugs, because I didn't use.

It's a different story with the Mexicans.

I think It's part of their Narco culture.

Chuy always struggled with drug addiction, a heavy drug addiction.

And I tried to stay away from him when he was in his rampages,

because he was a totally different person.

He got very violent.

Chuy, at a social event in Mexico,

he started drinking and he started doing drugs at the event

and, first thing he did was go after a gun.

And by mistake he shot a family member.

It was a tragedy.

He never got over that.

I think his drug use increased after that.

And from there it was downhill.

After a year or a little longer after a year, he came to me and said, Otto,

you can run this yourself.

STEVE: Herrera ultimately became his own

drug trafficking organization within Guatemala.

The Herrera organization moved in excess of fifty tons of cocaine

into Central America on behalf of the Sinaloa Cartel.

I don't think Otto Herrera ever considered that he would be arrested.

OTTO: What we have here is a Piper Aztec.

This particular aircraft was used many, many, many times

to smuggle drugs from Colombia into Central America.

OTTO: In order to get this done with this aircraft,

you have to do a lot of a lot of custom work on it.

The main idea is to create enough space to put our load in it.

Anything from 700 to 900 kilos.

It's about 16 to 1800 pounds.

The wiring of these aircraft is very heavy, believe it or not.

So a lot of the wiring is stripped out.

The transponder is used when the plane has an accident, so It's stripped out of it too.

One of the most important things that came out was the radio system,

which is very heavy.

Most of the seats go, all the upholstery goes.

This seat right here was always removed,

and it was replaced with an extra fuel container.

So as you remove equipment, that makes the aircraft lighter

which increases the payload on it.

When the custom work was done, that would put it up to, you know,

close to 6 million dollar loads when it was at full capacity.

STEVE: It's an incredible amount of money.

At the same time, there's a very, very significant cost

to manage these transportation infrastructures.

For instance, a single‐engine aircraft may be upwards of one or two million dollars.

It includes the payment to pilots to fly the airplanes,

people who load the aircraft with the cocaine.

The air traffic controllers, police or military in corrupt countries

to allow aircraft to safely exit countries.

There's a very, very significant amount

of money that's paid into the operation.

OTTO: The Mayan Landing System, It's just a nickname we gave to a procedure that,

we came up with to operate during the night,

and basically, do manually what an instrument landing system does.

The idea was to minimize the risk of losing a load, so,

night operation was very important.

You know, we came up with a system that would help the pilots find the airfields

very easy, and land very easy.

We would take an aircraft and we would fly the last part of the route,

and we would record every single part of the route.

We would take elevation, speed coordinate.

We would trace the final approach.

We would give them all the information of the speed they needed to take,

and this facilitated the landing during the night.

The main idea is to fly into international waters as quick as possible,

and the route takes you through the Caribbean

and into the Caribbean shores of Guatemala.

The main idea is for the receiving end to have a clandestine airfield,

the closest to the ocean as possible.

STEVE: The flights would enter Central America during the hours of darkness,

early morning, one, two, three o'clock in the morning.

OTTO: As they do their final approach, everything is done in the dark.

Last two or three minutes of the final approach are the most crucial.

That's when they'll ask to have the lights on the airfield turned on.

They'll be turned on, and as they land, as soon as they touch ground,

those lights are out.

OTTO: Yeah, very dangerous stuff.

These operations are not for, for normal pilots.

It's a special breed of pilot that can do this type of operations.

We had casualties.

Sometimes, you know, at the beginning when we first started,

the planes were overloaded.

We did not know enough to know that the plane could not take the weight.

Sometimes the runway was too short, or you simply just had a pilot that didn't have

the experience and, malfunctions in the engines, especially on piston engines,

it was very common, that an engine would fail.

And once one of these engines failed and you have that type of load on it,

It's very hard for a flight, you know, to continue.

I did lose a friend.

Ah, the person just misread his instruments

and crashed against a mountain coming out of Colombia.

You can't do nothing about it but wait for the authorities

to come and rescue whoever is alive and, you know,

recover the load and that's how you find out, through the news.

STEVE: It was common within these organizations

to use planes for one‐time occurrences.

They would use bulldozers to dig massive holes.

The planes would be buried at landing strip sites,

and simply turned inti aircraft graveyards.

OTTO: We were running an air operation and a fast boat operation at the same time.

We had two fronts going full bore.

There was airplanes landing in my area every other day.

I would say in a good month, you can say, anything from 8 to 10,000 kilos.

At that time, the price of one kilo in Guatemala was $6,000.

So if you do the math, that is quite a bit of money.

So Chuy told me how he feels that I can run the whole entire Guatemalan operation.

There's going to be a difference.

You can have a percentage on every load that comes.

I will not pay you a salary like I've been paying.

From here on, you know, 10 percent of everything, every load we get into, you know,

into Guatemala and that you handle is gonna be yours.

STEVE: It's typical in the drug trafficking trade for people to be paid in cocaine.

OTTO: If I have a shipment coming in from Colombia with a thousand kilos,

that means that a hundred kilos are mine.

And that I can do with that, you know, whatever I want.

I think at the time I still believed that, I'd done things the right way and I was,

invisible, that nobody knew about me.

I think I was not being careful enough.

You know, after a while you do this so often that for you it becomes just, you know,

another day at the office, and you start doing things a little bit more careless.

As the operation grew, I started taking, more precautions.

I knew that, the responsibility lay on me,

so I'll take better care of myself.

From there on, I really screened every single person that I had contact with,

and that was my safety mechanism.

OTTO: As the shipments escalate, the cash flow gets bigger.

I had a safehouse in Guatemala, in Zone 14.

A house that was used to store money.

In a given time, we had 30, 40 million dollars, you know, stored in that house.

A lot of the money was not ours.

It belonged to different people and different organizations.

STEVE: In early 2003, there was a location identified in Guatemala City that was being

used by Otto Herrera and his organization to store money.

OTTO: Somehow, they found the house.

They raided the house and they confiscated, a little bit over 14 million dollars.

That's what they claimed that was confiscated.

At that moment, it was an eye opener.

A lot of things hit me.

After the money was confiscated in Guatemala,

you know all chances of being invisible, you know, were gone.

STEVE: Right after that seizure agents in Guatemala,

paid a visit to Otto Herreras wife, and made it very clear to her,

that he should make contact with the Drug Enforcement

Administration, with the DEA.

OTTO: DEA agents approached my wife, and told her that,

they had a lot of interest on me.

You know, your husband is involved in drug trafficking.

This is what he's doing.

If he doesn't talk to us, you know, he was going to run into problems.

At this moment, we just want to talk to him and see, you know, how we could help.

I think that was an eye opener for her.

It was the first time that it was confirmed to her that I was doing, something illegal.

This is when we first started parting out, you know.

She really felt that I was not being honest, I think.

She could feel that I would continue to do what I was doing.

And she didn't want to have anything to do with me at that point.

I know I had attracted attention to myself so for me it was to,

the best thing to do was to go into hiding, lay low,

and try to, not be involved in it as directly as I was being involved.

JEREMY: Once a trafficker's been identified,

his or her shelf life, in full operational mode got shorter and shorter and shorter.

OTTO: Late 2006, I have a visit from another Sinaloa Cartel member,

and he tells me this story.

They found Chuy in his car.

Chuy got killed.

He gets killed in Culiacan, Sinaloa.

I think it had to do with his craziness, I think it had to do with all his drinking.

I think that he disrespected a lot of people while he was that way,

while he was drunk and stuff and I got a feeling that they just,

it was decided to just, you know, get rid of him.

STEVE: He gets adopted by the Sinaloa Cartel, and he's detailed to Colombia.

He was detailed to work an individual named Pacho Cifuentes.

OTTO: Pacho Cifuentes is the person that is in charge of shipping all this,

cocaine to the Mexicans.

Shipments that have been delayed.

So I get instructed to go to Colombia, to find a way,

to continue to do business with Pacho,

in a way that he can be a little bit more diligent.

JEREMY: Francisco Cifuentes Villa, better known as Pacho Cifuentes,

was a pilot for Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel.

After Pablo Escobar's death he goes into business for himself,

and he sets up an extremely prolific and lucrative route,

via Central America, particularly Guatemala.

OTTO: We met for a couple of days and it started a new era of business with him.

STEVE: Pacho Cifuentes was another person that recognized

the skill sets of Otto Herrera, in the sense that it made the organization

from the South America side more efficient.

OTTO: We shared an office together.

This huge complex, in the middle of Medellin,

and everybody knew that if you wanted to broker a load out of Colombia,

that's the place to go.

Pacho was very good at what he did.

At that time, I think there was not a better person to ship drugs out of Colombia.

Pacho had a network of pilots, traffic controllers, authorities,

that gave him a very, very high percentage, of positive loads.

You know, of success.

Pacho was a very easy going person.

Hardly ever raised his voice.

And I still believe that he was kind of naïve.

He really thought that he was untouchable.

He really thought that nobody was going to harm him.

He drove around on his own, everywhere.

Pacho didn't have a bodyguard.

Pacho didn't drive in a bulletproof car so,

I think he just ah, miscalculated things.

JEREMY: Pacho Cifuentes is assassinated.

This killing creates serious shockwaves,

in the Medellin underworld.

OTTO: Ah. Pacho was a good friend. I did, really feel unprotected,

because I could move around as freely as he could, because of his shade.

So what's going to happen to me now?

There was a certain fear.

STEVE: At any given time in the drug trafficking industry,

there are invisibles that are out there.

The question becomes how long do they stay invisible?

I was assigned in 2005 to a unit of the Drug Enforcement Administration

called the Bilateral Investigations Unit.

When I arrived to that unit, Otto Herrera was one of the case file titles.

A very wanted subject by the Drug Enforcement Administration

and the US Government.

We were not positive of what his whereabouts were.

There was rumor that he was in Mexico.

My sense at that time that he was in hiding somewhere in remote locations in Guatemala.

We just weren't positive actually where he was.

I received a phone call from some of the DEA agents in Miami,

where they told me that during the course of their operation,

they had identified someone in Bogota that was using the name Toño.

But all indications was that this individual was actually Otto Herrera.

It was actually quite a surprise to us.

We had no idea that he was there.

PETER: We couldn't quite figure out why he thought it would be safe,

to effectively hide out in Colombia, given the large number of Colombian

and US resources dedicated towards, combating Narco trafficking.

OTTO: You know the Pacho event had just happened, and I'm trying to lay low.

I did try to keep myself invisible for a while, and I was very low key.

I've never been a flashy type. I always lived a, a humble life.

I think that kept me invisible for a while.

OTTO: Out of nowhere, you know these, I could only see three officers,

a lady and two guys.

They put me not in a police car, just in a normal car.

And they start driving through Bogota.

I truly thought that I was going to get killed.

STEVE: Otto Herrera was arrested in Colombia.

The DEA Miami Field Division took the lead with working with the Colombian police,

in confirming that this individual named Toño was in fact Otto Herrera.

STEVE: And it ultimately resulted in him being arrested on the street

in a vehicle car stop in Colombia.

OTTO: I knew that I had been, you know, laundering money.

I knew I'd been trafficking drugs.

I knew that this was going to catch up with me sooner or later.

And basically, that's what happened.

BILL: My name is Bill Clay. C‐l‐a‐y.

I'm a criminal defense lawyer.

My caseload tends to be, complex Federal criminal cases involving

drug trafficking, drug transportation, money laundering.

So when I saw Otto got arrested, told my receptionist,

be on the lookout for a mystery call,

I call it, cause sometimes people call me, they don't identify who they are.

So sure enough, within two hours he called me and says, hey, do you know who this is?

And I said, you're Otto. So when he said, when can you come down?

I said, I'll get on a plane tomorrow.

OTTO: For me, Cómbita was an eye opener.

BILL: High security at Cómbita. And when I got in there,

Otto got brought out to an area which is, not an interview room.

No privacy. Then something very interesting happened.

A young prison guard, maybe looked like 18‐year‐old kid to me, comes up,

he leans in and he says, he's on the wrong side.

The guard literally turned white as a sheet, and he said, he's not safe.

It's not safe for me to say anything anymore.

OTTO: Ah. They had put a price on my head.

I guess it was people that, had a lot of fear that I'd gone to the States,

and tell the story.

So they wanted to make sure that didn't happen.

BILL: You can be killed in any place in any prison,

probably anywhere in the world,

but you're a higher risk in Colombia than you would be in a US prison.

And at that point in time, I think the risk was very high for Otto.

OTTO: Bill approached the right people so

I could be in a safer area in the prison.

BILL: DEA had Otto transferred with the other extraditables.

And then they instituted security procedures to safeguard him,

that they would wake him up every two hours to see if he had been poisoned.

RUBEN: Really the only way that you can effectively lower

your criminal liability, your sentence,

under the Federal system is to cooperate.

It is the pretty much the only way.

I mean, you can argue that you're old, that you're sick, you're tired,

you've got a disease, whatever it is, you know,

your Mommy beat you up when you were a kid,

that's not really gonna work, especially not at that level.

BILL: My goal is to mitigate or reduce the sentence he's going to get.

So I'm looking at all the possibilities.

I go right to work.

My mind just focusses on, what can we do to maximize benefits for Otto?

STEVE: I received a phone call from Bill Clay, and he said,

what is it that needs to be done?

BILL: As Colombians would say, what kind of positivos

can we produce for the United States government.

STEVE: And I told Bill, I said, there's no question

that Otto needs to get on board or cooperate with us.

OTTO: It was totally against what I believed.

RUBEN: Okay, look, lets think about this for a second.

Since we were kids, in school, nobody wanted to snitch, right?

Snitches get stitches.

What makes you think that a grown man is any different?

OTTO: It's everything, everything that I was against.

You know, to sit in a room, to tell stories about what I did,

when I know that I'm not supposed to be doing that.

When I know that my loved ones are being in danger, by everything that I'm,

that I'm narrating.

RUBEN: You are giving up a lot of your former friends, cohorts,

who know where your family lives.

Know where you live and can really exact retribution.

STEVE: I thought, you know, how the hell are we gonna get,

like, across to this guy? How am I gonna get this point across?

I've found over the years that I've been doing this job,

the greatest success that you have is to treat people like people.

OTTO: I could tell he was a man of his word, lets put it that way.

STEVE: In his mind, his job was done when the bales of cocaine arrived in Guatemala,

and they were turned over to the Mexicans.

And that was the end of what the Herrera organization had to do.

Were two guys that are almost the same age.

We both have families, there's parents, there's kids,

so I went in the office and I said,

print me out like 12 pictures of the end result of crack use.

BILL: Steve, just to kind of make the point,

he reached into his briefcase and he presented some photographs.

STEVE: So, I took the pictures and I slid them across the table

as like I was dealing a deck of cards.

BILL: Addicts, who were in decrepit condition.

Said, this lady, she's 29.

She looks like she's 65 or older.

Look at her. Look at this person. Lets get serious here.

STEVE: I said, we can either continue the way that were continuing,

or we can consider going to a trial.

But in the United States, this is what they see as an end game.

This is what they see on their streets.

BILL: And, whoa.

And that did the trick.

OTTO: Yeah, it was a big impact for me to see those pictures.

To have somebody look at me, in the eye, and tell me, you did that.

And it was the first time that it really hit me hard.

So it was, I think, a turning point.

BILL: I mean, it was a humbling moment.

A brilliant moment.

STEVE: In the cocaine trafficking industry, it is powered by greed,

and It's powered by ego.

People think that they are untouchable or in some cases, invisible,

until they get caught.

OTTO: My process is not over yet.

As part of my sentence, I have supervised release.

I'm fifty percent done with it.

It's something that reminds me every day that, I have to walk a straight line.

BILL: Well let me just say, I've seen them all,

all of the types of drug traffickers.

I've seen the soulless ones, which may be kind of presumptuous

to say someone's soulless, but by the way they act, they sure look soulless.

They sure look like they have no remorse.

Otto has remorse.

STEVE: I've been involved in this case for 14 years.

I know the agents that were involved in this case before.

We have never been able to substantiate any act of violence

that's attributed to Otto Herrera.

OTTO: I think because of the way that I carried myself,

ahh, that kept me most of the time away from all those events.

I would never recommend anyone to follow up on my footsteps.

It's just not gonna bring them any good.

The pressure and all the stress, everything, the responsibility takes over you,

and the fact that you know you're doing something illegal.

So you change as a person,

and you forget what's important in life.