immediately landed a stunning blow with the arrest of Angel Felix Gallardo—Mexico’s very own “Godfather,”—along with his palace guard of some 80 state and local cops. But this impressive strike turned out to be the high point of the Salinas drug war and from here it was all down hill. And though there were plenty of warning signs—like the runway shootout at Veracruz where the army and the police faced off over a planeload of cocaine—the extent of the decay was largely hidden from view.^[4]

Then at a quarter to four on the afternoon of May 24, 1993, Juan Cardinal Posadas Ocampo, Archbishop of Guadalajara, arrived at Hidalgo International Airport to meet the Papal Nuncio. It was an auspicious moment. The Mexican government and the Vatican had been on the outs for most of this century but President Salinas was determined to normalize relations, and the arrival of the Pope’s personal ambassador would be the capstone of this effort.^[5]  As the Archbishop’s driver wheeled into the parking lot across from the terminal, a young man yanked open the door and blasted His Eminence with fourteen slugs, killing him instantly.  Half-a-dozen other gunmen sprayed the scene, killing the driver and five bystanders, including an old woman and her nephew and a startled businessman with a cell phone in his hand.^[6]

The hit men stuffed their weapons into carry-on bags and ran to the terminal flashing police badges, where they boarded Aeromexico flight 110 for Tijuana—which was supposed to have left twenty minutes earlier but was held at the gate for these very important passengers—and during the two-hour flight from Guadalajara to Tijuana, nobody bothered to call ahead with the information that the killers were on board.^[7]  There was, however, a contingent of Federal Judicial Police waiting in Tijuana, but they were there simply to escort the assassins to the U.S. border, where they vanished into the night.^[8]

Like a manhole cover blowing off a sewer, this event got everybody’s attention. Even in Sicily, you can’t murder a prince of the church without rattling the foundation, and the resulting