Against All Enemies

the boy’s face, but he never could.

He put his head down on his brother’s chest and began to cry. Neighbors found him there a few minutes later, and eventually his parents arrived. The wailing of his mother carried on throughout the night.

That was another lifetime, thought Rojas, running a finger along the burled-wood arm of his seat. The rags-to-riches story was a cliche, he’d been told, yet he defied anyone to classify his present life as a cliche. As much as he still loved and admired his brother, Rojas understood now that Esteban had made a grave and foolish mistake. Rojas had spent nearly half of his life searching for the boy who had killed Esteban, but no one had come forward to help.

“Well, Jorge, I can’t thank you enough for this. For all of this. I mean, I’ve never actually met the president of a country before.”

“I’ve met many of them,” Rojas said. “And you know what? They are just men. People will try to intimidate you, but no one is better than anyone else. Some have money and guns. That is the only difference.”

“Some have private jets, too,” Campbell added with a grin.

He nodded. “I like to travel.”

“I’m sure you’ve been asked this question before, but I’m always intrigued by people like you. What do you think contributed the most to your success? Was it discipline or just smarts? Luck? A little bit of everything? I mean, you’ve told me the story of the small town where you grew up. And now you’re literally one of the richest people on the planet. That article in Newsweek said your estimated worth is at least eight percent of Mexico’s gross domestic product. It’s just …staggering. Who would’ve thought this in college, right?”

“You’ve done pretty well, too. Don’t sell yourself short.”

He nodded. “But nothing like this. So, as I look around your beautiful jet, I ask you, how’d you get here?”

“Buying businesses, making wise investments …I don’t know, really. Friends helped the most.”

“Don’t be coy.”

“I’m serious. The friendships I’ve made are what’s become most important, and you’ll see that when we get to Colombia.”

Campbell considered that and finally nodded, and it seemed Rojas had successfully ducked the question. But then Campbell said, “Do you think it was school? Doing well in school?”

“Sure, that’s it. Friends and school.”

“But that doesn’t answer the real mystery.”

Rojas frowned. “Oh, what’s that?”

“How so many of your companies have been able to weather this economic downturn. If memory serves, not a single one of your companies has had to file for bankruptcy. Given this volatile market, that’s incredible.”

Rojas allowed himself a faint grin. “I have good people working for me and an army of lawyers to protect me and my investments.”

“The Subways you have in Mexico are making more money than those in the United States, yet the people in Mexico have less disposable income. How do you do it?”

He began laughing. “We sell a lot of sandwiches.” And then he cast his mind back to a board of directors meeting he’d had in the previous month, where his team had presented on the year’s earnings for the chain of car dealerships he owned with locations throughout all of Mexico. Many people were unaware that the country often had the largest car production and sales in the world. The numbers, however, had been disappointing, yet Rojas had been able to assure his people that dealer incentives would not only remain but increase tenfold.

“But how can they do that with this tremendous drop in sales?” asked his CEO. It was a fair question, and the dozen or so people seated at the long conference table focused their attention on Rojas, who stood at the head and said, “I’ve been in direct talks with the manufacturers, and I promise you that your incentives will increase.”

They shrugged in disbelief. But Rojas made it happen. And the calls and e-mails flooded in: “Thank you! Thank you!”

One manager even remarked that Senor Rojas “has a magical vault filled with magical money that saves lives and protects families and schools.”

The truth was, indeed, often said in jest, and the vault contained within the mansion at Cuernavaca just outside Mexico City was, in fact, piled from floor to ceiling with dollars and pesos. Walls and walls of cash. Millions and millions — money that would be deftly laundered through the networks and the shell companies and deposited in overseas accounts in addition to bolstering Rojas’s legitimate businesses, his dealerships and restaurants and cigarette manufacturers and telecom companies.

Because the one business that not only weathered rough economic times but even flourished was the drug trade. At times Rojas wished he could detach himself from the business that had helped build his empire. It had been a painstaking challenge to keep his identity and involvement in the cartel a secret. Neither his wife nor his son knew anything about the Juarez Cartel and how Rojas, then a senior in college, had become involved with the business.

Rojas had met a grad student named Enrique Juarez, who his colleagues and professors said was a genius in recombinant DNA gene technology and the insulin manufacturing process. Juarez wanted to establish a pharmaceutical company in Mexico to take advantage of the cheap labor. So impressed was Rojas by the business proposal that he invested a huge portion of his life savings (nearly $20,000) for a partnership in the company. GA Lab (Genetics Acuna) was established in Ciudad Acuna (population 209,000) along the banks of the Rio Grande, south of Del Rio, Texas. Juarez had explained the process of their operation: The first contract was to produce the A chain with twenty-one amino acids and the B chain containing thirty amino acids as the precursor to the synthesis of human insulin.

Once the A and B amino-acid chains were grown, GA would ship the material back to the United States, where it would be stitched into circular DNA strands called plasmids, using special enzymes to perform molecular surgery, the next step in the insulin manufacturing process.

The contracts came in. The business took off, and during the next five years both Rojas and Juarez drew six- figure salaries. Rojas clearly saw the advantage of owning a pharmaceutical company with a legitimate front, and he began to hire people behind Juarez’s back to produce black-market versions of drugs such as Dilaudid, Vicodin, Percocet, and Oxycontin, all of which produced more money than the insulin side of the business.

One Friday night, over a long dinner and even more heated debate, Juarez stared at Rojas through his thick glasses and said, “Jorge, I don’t like the direction you are taking our company. There’s too much at stake now. Too much to lose. I don’t care how much we make on the black-market drugs. If we get caught, we lose everything.”

“I know what you’re saying. That’s why I’m prepared to buy you out of the business. You can take the money and start up a new venture. I’ll make you a very generous offer. I don’t want to see you unhappy. We started this with some great ideas and a lot of praying. Let me free you up to do something else.”

“I created this business. It was my brainchild from the start. You know that. I’m not going to hand it over to you. We were partners, but you’ve never consulted me on any of this. You’ve gone behind my back. I can’t trust you anymore.”

Rojas stiffened. “You’d be nothing without my money.”

“I won’t sell you this business. I’m asking you to stop risking everything.”

“You need to accept my offer.”

“No, I don’t.” Juarez rose, wiped his mouth, and stormed away from the table.

The next morning he attempted to fire all of the scientists and lab personnel Rojas had hired.

Rojas told him to go away, take a week off, go skiing in Switzerland. He was not thinking clearly. Juarez finally resigned himself to the pressure and took the vacation. Unfortunately, while there he died in a terrible skiing “accident,” and had left all of his money and property to his elderly mother, who immediately struck a most agreeable deal with Rojas.

The Juarez Cartel had been unofficially named after the city where the operation did most of its business, but the striking irony was that the man responsible for its birth also bore the same name. Rojas had begun with a small pharmaceutical company, which he expanded into many more businesses, which in turn helped him to create companies that could help launder money while purchasing huge swaths of real estate that cut through some of the most populated cities in Mexico.