The 'One Thousand and One Nights', Amado Carrillo Fuentes' house in Hermosillo.
Amado Carrillo Fuentes was such a ostentatious man that when anti-narcotics agents from the Mexican Attorney General's Office seized, in 1993, an ostentatious Arab palace in the city of Hermosillo, few inhabitants of the Sonoran capital doubted that it was their property.
The former leader of the Juarez cartel never occupied the mansion that was left half built in the capital of the northwestern border of Mexico.
The palace was seized a few months after construction began, and Carrillo Fuentes passed away under confusing circumstances during surgery four years later.
The property, since abandoned, remained intact as a symbol of the drug trafficking heritage in the city: an ostentatious 2,500 square meter skeleton where people devastated by poverty or drugs were looking for a roof, and an unmissable location for the photo of the curious both of the architecture and the trace of drug trafficking.
That until this week, when the walls began to be demolished to put the property up for sale.
The property nicknamed by the residents of the Pitic neighborhood as 'the house of the Kisses', due to the resemblance of the Hershey's brand chocolates with the domes of Islamic architecture, was sold in recent weeks, after almost 30 years of neglect .
The Hermosillo City Council confirmed that the property, also called 'the house of a thousand and one nights' in reference to the founding book of Arabic literature, already has an owner who processed the permits to demolish the mansion and divide the land for its possible sale.
“They are looking for their Aladdin”, the local newspaper
El Imparcial
titled with irony
when after the seizure in 1993 no one claimed ownership.
The cover photo highlights the five traditional domes of Islamic architecture of the great white elephant that stands in a colony of low houses to the west of the capital of Sonora.
However, six months after the seizure, a man named Juan Jorge Mexía Monge - allegedly the name of Carrillo Fuentes - filed an injunction against the seizure, which resulted in a few months of police protection until its final abandonment in 1994. No one returned to claim ownership.
Since then, the residents of Pitic have been fighting against the huge terrain taken over by vandalism and illegal occupation.
According to local media, the real estate agency InBest Bienes Raíces published an advertisement in which it was selling the property on five different lots.
The ad briefly lived on their website before being taken off the hook.
A representative of the real estate company denied to this newspaper that they were in charge of the sale of the property and assured that the ad was published "by mistake of an agent who is no longer linked to the company."
So far, the name of the new owner or the plans he has for the property have not been revealed, although the City Council affirms that there are no permits to erect another building on the land.
Carrillo Fuentes - known as 'The Lord of the Skies' for the fleet of 30 planes with which he articulated a drug trafficking network supplied by Pablo Escobar's Medellín cartel - died during a surgical intervention on July 3, 1997, after be admitted to a hospital in Mexico City with the name of Antonio Flores Montes.
By then, the Juarez Cartel was generating up to $ 300 million a week thanks to drug trafficking, according to the United States Anti-Narcotics Agency (DEA, for its acronym in English).
A few months before his surgery, Carrillo had lost his main operator, General José de Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, the general in charge of the fight against drug trafficking in Mexico who was working under the DEA protection before his death came to light. collusion with the narco.
Weakened and wanted by several countries - led by the United States - Carrillo Fuentes sought to change his appearance with a series of cosmetic surgeries to plan an escape.
The lord of heaven passed away on the operating table.
Speculation about his death - reinforced by the subsequent murder of the doctors who intervened him - have raised suspicions about a possible homicide that has not yet been clarified.
After his death, Carrillo Fuentes left 28 children of various mothers, a cartel that ceased to be the most powerful in Mexico after a bloody struggle for power, and the palace that became a symbol of the city of Hermosillo.
