The murder of Shorty Lopez left the drug movement without a capo all along the Texas Big Bend. Raids by civil and military authorities from Chihuahua City, though not unusual even when someone had the plaza, became more frequent and indiscriminate. 
     The raids were the government's way of asserting authority in the isolated, nearly lawless border town following some sensational murder played up by the newspapers in the state capital, or following complaints by local authorities or citizens with influential connections that the local gangsters were really getting out of hand. People caught up in the sweeps were chained together around the neck and herded into the back of confiscated pickup trucks, then taken to jail in Chihuahua City or Ciudad Juarez. 
     With Shorty gone, those who would normally have been alerted directly from Chihuahua City about the coming of troops now somehow didn't get the message and wound up in chains in the back of pickup trucks. Pablo himself was picked up several times "for questioning," he later told friends. Once he spent several weeks in the medieval-looking penitentiary in the state capital. 
     After Shorty's death, the Ojinaga underworld expected some arrangement to be worked out quickly. Whenever they gathered at Pablo's downtown restaurant or at the stables where they kept their race horses, they all asked the same question: "Who is going to take over the plaza?" 
     They speculated that someone would send someone from another part of the country to take over, or the authorities involved in protection rackets in the federal police or the army would tap one of the Ojinaga traffickers for the job. And if someone did get the nod, the word would spread quickly and the other traffickers would make arrangements to come under the wing of the new padrino. 
     But six months went by and nothing of the sort had happened. 
     Like everyone else, Pablo Acosta knew how dangerous it was to operate without some sort of patronage. Get caught with dope and you could expect an excruciatingly painful interrogation and longer sentences than in the United States - unless, of course, you had enough cash on hand to extricate yourself. 
     But the market was literally knocking down the door. Small-time American buyers swarmed the riverside or prowled Ojinaga's rowdy zona trying to score contacts. Compared to the days of Shorty Lopez, however, not that much dope was moving. The people with drugs to sell were exercising caution. As the months dragged on, longtime wholesale buyers both in Texas and New Mexico and as far away as Alabama and California began to make "Hey-what's-going-on?" telephone calls to their Ojinaga connections. Important customers threatened to take their business elsewhere. 
     Like everyone else, Pablo moved just enough dope to pay his bills and to string his clients along. Like everyone else, he realized that someone was going to have to take over the plaza if business were to flourish once again. 
     In early 1978, some of the most important members of the Ojinaga drug world met at the stables to decide what to do. Pablo Acosta was there, as were two other up-and-coming traffickers, Victor Sierra and Rogelio Gonzalez. About a dozen other people involved to one degree or another in drug smuggling were also present. 
    Victor Sierra, the nephew of bar owners in the notorious zona, had worked as a runner for Manuel Carrasco and then worked with Shorty Lopez after Manuel disappeared. Like Pablo, Victor had become big enough to work deals independently - after paying a percentage to Shorty for protection. 
     Rogelio Gonzalez was a flying ace who piloted loads for anybody who needed his services and was willing to pay. 
     They chatted as they went about their chores - almost all of them had quarter horses that needed feeding and exercising every day. Someone started talking about several tons of marijuana that had just arrived in town from the interior, mota that was already stashed in caves or in underground storage tanks on ranches east of Ojinaga. The owners needed to start selling to pay off their suppliers, but they were afraid of the fickle Mexican law. 
     "Someone has to go and make arrangements with the authorities," one of the 
men said. 
     They had talked before of the need to send someone "down there" to talk to the federal comandante in Chihuahua City, the ornate state capital surrounded by pleasant mountains, prosperous cattle ranches, thriving Mennonite farms, and impoverished government ejidos. Ojinaga came under the jurisdiction of the same federal police comandante in the state capital who was in charge of the periodic raids. 
     Victor Sierra knew that Shorty had been making his monthly payments at the comandancia, the federal police headquarters in Chihuahua City. If they wanted to get some arrangements going for protection, that's where they needed to start. Victor volunteered Pablo to go. "You'd be a good one," he said and some of the others nodded in agreement. 
     Pablo could be boastful, liked being the center of attention, and aspired to be number one, but he was also a realist. An ex-con and now a DEA fugitive, he was certain the American police knew he was operating out of Ojinaga. Legally a citizen of the United States, he worried the DEA could try to pressure Mexico into extraditing him were he to acquire a high profile. 
     And then, he really knew more about the American than the Mexican judicial system. But he knew that in Mexico things were inverted. The cops were poorly paid, expected to supplement their income by fair means or foul. Politics and government service had become roads to riches, terrific rackets if you were on the inside. That system could be bent to work to the advantage of a narcotics trafficker if he knew how to cultivate the right authorities and become a member of the club. Shorty Lopez had learned some of the tricks and had operated, however briefly, with impunity. Shorty had told his friend Pablo in general how things were arranged, but he had guarded the full extent of his contacts as jealously as Manuel Carrasco had and took most of his secrets to the grave. No, Pablo reasoned, it was better to operate under someone else's wing - at least 
for now. 
     Pablo was stooping over to give a bucket of oats to his a palomino. He looked around and said, "Nah, I got all kinds of heat right now." 
     The field of candidates was pretty slim. Some of the men at the informal gathering were Americans. Others were Mexicans too young, too old, too inexperienced, or too unreliable to be seriously considered. Other than Pablo, there were only two other serious possibilities: Victor Sierra and Rogelio Gonzalez. 
     Rogelio was a mystery to everyone. He had light skin and thin, fine features, in contrast to the swarthy, rough hewn men around him. He could easily pass for a Frenchman from Marseilles. Most Mexican smugglers who flew were self-taught bush pilots, but Rogelio Gonzalez had been a flight instructor and mechanic in Mexico City before flying for traffickers in Sinaloa.  He could land a Cessna 206 in a parking lot and then get it airborne again, or so it was said; he did make landings all the time at night on dirt runways with nothing but a signal fire at one end to guide him. At the same time, he was quiet, timid-seeming, even prudish.  The coarse talk about women that made up ninety percent of the talk among the dopers caused him to walk away in disgust.  "If you didn't know him well you'd think he was gay,"  one Ojinaga smuggler commented later. 
     Among his close associates it was known that Rogelio and his wife, a beautiful Indian from southern Mexico, once killed several soldiers in a shoot out in the state of Sinaloa - troops who had come to arrest him and take away his airplane even though he was "fixed" with the military commander. He and his Indian wife were on the run when they came to Ojinaga. Rogelio himself never liked to talk about the shooting. 
     Flying loads of dope was a way to make a living for Rogelio, and he made it clear he didn't aspire to do anything beyond that. "Give me a plane and I'll fly it. That's all I want to do," he said. 
     That left Victor Sierra. 
     Victor was in educationally a cut above the typical Ojinaga campesino smuggler. Originally from Ciudad Juarez, his mother had put him in a seminary after his father and an uncle were killed in an accident in Los Angeles. A pious woman who went to church every morning with her head covered with a black veil, she always knelt in a back pew, her head bowed in prayer. She did chores around the church, such as laundering and ironing the altar cloths for the priest. She prayed fervently that her son would not succumb to worldly temptations and would serve the will of God. As young men, some of Victor's paternal uncles had gone to Los Angeles and made money any way they could. When they were older and better off, they came to Ojinaga and bought some of the seedy adobe bars in the zona where some of the bawdiest, down-and-dirty strip shows in northern Mexico were put on. Victor's mother's prayers were as focused as a blowtorch, aimed at severing the bonds between Victor and his wayward uncles. 
     In the end the uncles won the battle for Victor's soul. He abandoned the cassock for a baggy pachuco outfit and a microphone and emceed midnight strip shows for his uncles. With the exception of the prudish Rogelio, everyone hung around the zona and everyone had heard Victor's verbal wizardry. He was indeed a good talker. 
     "Why don't you go, Victor?" Pablo suggested. 
     "How do I know about all this? I've never done it before." 
     "You know what's going on," Pablo said. "You hung around with Manuel Carrasco. You hung around with Shorty Lopez. You've seen how it works up and down the ladder." 
     Someone else went through Victor's curriculum vitae: the facts that he had crossed truckloads of marijuana over Big Bend range land for Shorty, that he knew the ranch gates and back roads to Marathon and other Texas towns. 
     All his assets were tallied up: He was a smooth talker; he wasn't on anybody's wanted list in Mexico or in the United States; he was young, but not too young; his vocabulary was polished when it needed to be; and he had never been in jail. 
     Pablo offered to back him with whatever money was necessary to make the plaza payments. "I'll contribute my part and a little bit more if I have to. I'm sure Rogelio here feels the same way." Pablo pointed around the stable to the various traffickers. Each nodded in agreement. But it took several more meetings before Victor agreed. 
     Only Rogelio raised any objections. He knew they were stymied without some sort of an arrangement with the authorities. But from his Sinaloa experience he also knew that shifting alliances and intrigue within the Mexican government, international political pressures, changes in federal and state administrations, and plain greed made protection costly and precarious. You had to pay everybody or nobody. 
     "I know that someone has to go, but I don't like it. Once you start paying, they'll bleed you for the rest of your life and you can never get out of it," he said. 
     Not long after that meeting in the horse stables, Victor Sierra was in Chihuahua City looking up the federal police commander. 
     The way Victor told about his experience later to his Ojinaga friends, he was forced to cool his heels for several days before being allowed in to see the commander. Not that the comandante refused to see him; he was just never in. Victor sat around in a waiting area, suffering the suspicious stares of the tough-looking men walking in or out. After several days Victor was let in to the federal official's office, a small, unremarkable room except for the automatic machine guns stacked in a corner. The commander didn't get up. He just looked Victor up and down and motioned to a chair. 
     Before leaving Ojinaga, Victor had gone over and over again with Pablo and Rogelio and anyone else with an interest in his success what he should say.  They knew that the federal chief  had his informants and probably already had at least a general idea of who was doing what in Ojinaga.  So there wasn't any use hiding everything from him.  On the other hand, there was no use telling him everything, either.  "Just convince him that you know what's going on and you're willing to take over the plaza,"  Victor was told. 
     Victor chatted amiably, punctuating his sentences with Senor Comandante to show respect. He finally got around to the real purpose of his visit. "We can't move anything because nobody has the plaza in Ojinaga, Senor Comandante. I want your permission to work the plaza," he said. 
     "How do you know that I'm the person to come to for this sort of thing?" 
     "Well, like I told you. I worked for Manuel Carrasco for a number of years, I worked for Shorty Lopez.  I know what's going on." 
     The comandante kept pressing him about why he had come to the federal headquarters in Chihuahua City for his request. "How do you know to come to me?" 
     "I sometimes drove Manuel Carrasco here when he came to bring the plaza money." 
     They talked a while longer, then the police official stood up and walked to the door. He motioned for someone to come, and soon two of the goons Victor had seen walking in and out of the federal police headquarters appeared in the doorway. 
     The comandante pointed at Victor and said to the men: "Get him ready for me." 
     Victor soon wished he had stuck with the priesthood.  According to his account later to his friends, the agents led him from the commander's office to a back room. They strapped him onto a chair and threw a hood over his head. They started beating him. Between the punches came the questions. 
     "I was a runner for Carrasco.  I moved the loads.  What more can I tell you?" 
he pleaded. 
     The beating was all the more terrifying because he never knew when or where the next blow would fall. The beatings lasted on and off for three days. At night, they threw him into a smelly holding chamber with a bare concrete slab for a bed. 
     The torture was a variation of three effective techniques employed by many Mexican police interrogators. They rammed Victor's head into a bucket of water until he thought he was going to drown; they strapped him naked to a bench and jabbed his thighs and testicles with a cattle prod, sending jolts of electricity through him; and then came the punches, the incessant punches to the rib cage, the abdomen, the kidneys, the head. 
     During the severest of the torture the comandante was absent. He came in during the respites, taking the role of friend and protector rather than tormentor, asking questions in an almost tender tone. 
     Victor had gone to Chihuahua City to seek permission to work the plaza and instead had found the ultimate confessional. He told the federal policeman everything he wanted to know, about himself, about his entourage, their activities. 
     Then on the third day, a miracle. The comandante offered him the plaza.  Sure, Victor had talked, but he had put up resistance, and it took more than usual to break him down.  The comandante informed him he was satisfied that Victor had huevos, balls, and it was apparent from the interrogation that he had contacts and solid organization. 
     "You go ahead and work the Ojinaga area, but have ten thousand dollars right here on this desk every month.  And I want the first payment the day after tomorrow." 
     Bruised and shaking but relieved, Victor was back in Ojinaga the next day.  When he saw Pablo, he embraced him.  "Those people aren't human.  I thought they were going to kill me. But we got the plaza." 
     It took a while for Victor to get over the torture. He was a healthy thirty-year-old with lots of girlfriends. He tried not to complain about the lingering pain from the electric shocks. But he did confide to close friends, in a voice strained with fear, that he thought he had been permanently damaged: for the next six months, he just couldn't get it up. 
     With the plaza arrangement in place, Victor Sierra slept soundly at night, free from worries about being arrested. But the arrangement had its down side. Just as Rogelio had predicted in the meeting at the stables, the comandante soon got greedier and put pressure on Victor for more money. The comandante began showing up at Victor's house, leaving two men outside in a car while he walked in without knocking. "Muchachos!" he would shout as he walked in. "Everything going all right?" 
     Victor and several of his men lived in a large brick house with a water bed in each of the four bedrooms, a stereo and color television in the living room, and a well-stocked kitchen and bar. The house was an oasis in an unremarkable dirt-street neighborhood near the dirt runway of the municipal airfield. 
     Pablo avoided Victor's house any time the comandante was in town, and with good reason. The police official had a habit of commandeering anything that wasn't nailed down. On one occasion he strode into Victor's living room and saw a six-hundred-dollar semiautomatic pistol with pearl handles lying on an end table. He let out an earsplitting A-i-e-e-e!" and picked it up. "Un regalito?" he beamed, showing his "little gift" around the room as if he had just unwrapped a Christmas present. "What a little darling!" He stuffed it into his waistband and then looked around for something else to take. 
     His attitude had changed remarkably from that of grim inquisitor during those first days in Chihuahua City. Now he was Victor's compadre, a bosom buddy plopping down on the sofa and asking for a drink. He would send one of Victor's people to fetch his own men from outside. These agents, sometimes the very ones who had participated in Victor's torture, would make themselves comfortable on one of the sofas and ask for drinks too.  And food.  And women from the zona, the best-looking ones. And not tonight, but right now! Victor had to send someone to fetch the girls, and the agents sat around drinking his booze before stumbling to the back bedrooms. 
     One day the comandante showed up at the house with some bad news. 
     "It's going to cost you more to work," he announced after falling back into Victor's sofa. "Ten thousand was okay for starters, but I'm getting a lot of pressure from higher up. A lot of heat's coming down. They're putting higher fees for me to let you people work. I need twenty-five thousand from now on." 
     The comandante's informants in town told him how much Victor and his people were moving. Victor argued, but it didn't matter. What the comandante wanted, the comandante got. After all, he had the federal police and the office of the attorney general behind him; and, if necessary, the army. Victor ended up paying thirty-five thousand dollars a month, he confided to one of his associates. 
     At every hike in the plaza fee, Victor passed the word on to Pablo, to Rogelio, and to everyone else paying him in much the same language the comandante used. It was tough, but the raids by the soldiers had virtually come to a halt. 
     Victor controlled the Ojinaga plaza until December 18, 1980, the day he and one of his chief lieutenants were arrested by DEA agents at the airport in Albuquerque on their way to Las Vegas to oversee a thousand-pound shipment of marijuana that was to arrive the following day by van.  Victor rarely traveled in the United States, as a precaution.  But this time he wanted to supervise the operation himself because it was the first time he was distributing that far west, and he wanted to make sure that nothing went wrong. In addition, he had always had an itch to see how the famed sin city of the desert measured up to his uncles' zona de tolerancia in Ojinaga. 
     It was a trip that Victor quickly regretted. He and an Albuquerque buyer were getting ready to board an airplane for Las Vegas when federal agents tapped them on the shoulder and told them they were under arrest for drug trafficking, airplane theft, and other charges. The feds had in hand arrest warrants based on a secret nineteen-count federal indictment against Sierra and several other men. A federal grand jury in Albuquerque had secretly indicted them six months earlier. Victor didn't have an inkling of the indictment until he turned around at the airport gate and saw federal badges sticking in his face. 
     Victor was tried in Albuquerque and sentenced to eight years in the federal pen. 
     During the two and a half years he was in charge, Victor's control of the Ojinaga plaza was relatively benign - a reflection of his own character and the fact that business was booming. There was a share for everyone, so why fight? Enforcement was discreet and usually consisted of throwing someone who hadn't paid his debts in the canal with his hands tied behind his back and then fishing him out just before his lungs filled completely. One way or another, people who didn't pay their bills were made to cough up. 
     Ordinary citizens knew drugs were moving through their town, but it was a quiet, low-key activity and people went about their day-to-day lives without giving much thought to the narcotics activity. Many people didn't even bother to lock their doors at night; nor did mothers and fathers worry when their teen-age children went out at night to cruise up and down Trasvina y Retes, the main boulevard. The underworld did its thing, the people did theirs. Outside the Ojinaga mafia, few people had even heard of Pablo Acosta. Or if they did know his name, he was that guy with the little restaurant uptown that served delicious cabrito and whose wife ran the clothing boutique on Trasvina y Retes with all those beautiful imported dresses in the store window. 
     Ojinaga was about to change. 
 
 
 Write to the Author at publisher@druglord.com