In the months of closure of the pandemic at the beginning of last year, while many were learning to make bread at home, a journalist from Sinaloa spent his nights calling a private jail in North Carolina looking there for a Mexican citizen.
“What is the difference between a transporter and a drug trafficker?”, The journalist, Meño Larios, asked Fernando Blengio Cesaña, a man imprisoned 10 years ago in the United States for conspiring to traffic cocaine and falsify the drug. registration of an aircraft.
"The drug trafficker buys and let's say he speculates with the product, sells it, distributes it," he replied.
"And the carrier only charges, precisely, the transport of the substance from one point to another."
More information
The mystery of narcoflights
For Blengio, an upper-class pilot who studied aviation in California and worked 30 years for the great drug lords — from Amado Carrillo, known as
El Señor de los Cielos
, to the feared Joaquín
El Chapo
Guzmán — it was unfair to be called a narco, although he moved tons of cocaine from Colombia to the United States for them. "The carrier is not normally an active member of the cartels, or the underworld," he tells Larios by phone. "He is a businessman or, as in my case, an aviation professional." Blengio is a man found guilty by the American justice that does not feel any guilt. He does not feel it because, he says, “he did not put the drug in the noses of the gringos. If anything, he would put it closer to their homes ”.
Mexican actor Joaquín Cosío, during the recording of 'Transportista' Courtesy
The story of this aviator has always remained marginal in the history of the war on drugs, but now it is the center of a new podcast directed by Larios and entitled
Transportista
.
It is an 8 episode podcast that premieres this week and will be distributed by the
iHeartRadio
platform
in the next two months, one per week.
It is directed by Larios and produced by documentary filmmaker Diego Enrique Osorno, the latter director of the film and journalism platform called
Detective
.
"
Transportista
is a door to the hidden stories about the world of drug trafficking and political power," promises Larios in the first episode. "His adventures portray three decades of complicity between drug traffickers and authorities in Mexico, the United States, Colombia, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic."
Larios tells El PAÍS that contact with Blengio started at the end of 2019, but intensified in the first months of the pandemic, when the two were confined in jail or at home. "I noticed him with great anxiety to tell his story, and tell the process of his trial in the United States, which was plagued with irregularities," says Larios. The journalist crossed Blengio's information with court documents and reconstructed 30 years of experience as a pilot and other years as a prisoner. "I hope this podcast is an opportunity to learn about the hidden world of aviation, but also about how politicians sometimes relate to drug traffickers," says the journalist.
Blengio was captured in 2011 in the Dominican Republic after dominating the clandestine routes of the continent, and immediately deported to the United States where he was wanted as a star witness in several trials.
Although he did not directly make the agreements with politicians during those years, he was clear that his work would not have been possible without them.
For example, the aviator tells Larios that in 2000, the first year in which former President Vicente Fox governed, he received a call from his bosses in which he was told "there is a green light from the federal government."
Green light, he understood, meant that they could move across the country without being chased by the feds.
Total institutional freedom.
The recording team during one of the work sessions Courtesy
"They are organized crime, they are the institutions, they are the real organized crime," says the carrier on the podcast. Questioned by the DEA and the FBI, Blengio's full story was first learned in classified form by United States prosecutors and judges.
Transportista
has a 'twin' podcast, in English, which starts precisely with that legal mess, narrated and investigated by the North American journalist John Gibler, who resides in Mexico and has been covering the war against drug trafficking for 10 years (Gibler joined the project for
Detective
request
). When Blengio was arrested and deported to the United States in 2011, he believed that for cooperating with the DEA they would give him between three and five years in prison. In his first months he had already given information to prosecutors against Vicentillo Zambada, a former leader of the Sinaloa cartel. But Blengio has been in jail for more than 10 years, with at least three more to go. Something went wrong with their plans. And that's what the podcast is trying to reveal, episode by episode.
"The first thing that impressed me [about Blengio] was his amazing memory, he is like an encyclopedia of the history of drug trafficking, not only in Mexico, but worldwide," journalist Gerardo Reyes, director of the investigation unit, told Gibler. of Univisión, and who interviewed Blengio several times. “He remembers the names of all the cartel chiefs, and their lieutenants, since the seventies. He remembers the dates of his adventures, the planes he handled, and even the names of the Colombian drug traffickers. But he also remembers the names of the politicians, lawyers, artists, or sports stars who were involved with the cartels. "
Blengio stopped answering calls in August 2020. Journalist Meño Larios suspects that he was transferred to another prison, without a telephone and incommunicado again.
On the nights that they managed to speak, Blengio did so using a clandestine telephone, risking going to the dungeon if the guards discovered him.
Now, to understand a little of 30 years of narco flights and 10 years in the North American judicial system, there are only 18 episodes of Larios and Gibler left to take off.
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