Amado Carrillo Fuentes

• 1. Lord of the Skies

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  Amado Carrillo Fuentes was a Mexican drug lord who became known as El Señor de Los Cielos, which means The Lord of the Skies. The nickname came from the large fleet of jets he used to move drugs. He ran the Juárez Cartel, and in his final days Mexican and U.S. authorities were closing in on him. How did a man from Sinaloa come to command such a fleet? Where did the money come from, and where did it go? And what happened to the people closest to him once he was gone?

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• 2. Family Roots

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  Guamuchilito, in the municipality of Navolato in Sinaloa, is where Amado Carrillo Fuentes was born on the 17th of December 1954. His parents were Walter Vicente Carrillo Vega and Aurora Fuentes. He had eleven siblings.

  Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, known as Don Neto, was Amado's uncle and the leader of the Guadalajara Cartel. Amado got his start in the drug business under his uncle's guidance. Later he brought in his own brothers, and eventually his son, Vicente José Carrillo Leyva.

  Loss touched the family along the way. His father died in April 1986. His brother Cipriano Carrillo Fuentes died in 1989 under mysterious circumstances. Before any of that, his uncle had given him a first assignment in Ojinaga, in the state of Chihuahua.

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• 3. Border Apprenticeship

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  Ojinaga, Chihuahua, was where Carrillo worked as part of the Guadalajara Cartel. Don Neto sent him there to oversee the uncle's cocaine shipments. Carrillo also had to learn how operations along the border worked. His teachers were Pablo Acosta Villarreal, called El Zorro de Ojinaga, or The Ojinaga Fox, and Rafael Aguilar Guajardo.

  Aguilar Guajardo was also the man Carrillo later killed. By assassinating his boss, Carrillo seized control of the Juárez Cartel.

  Colombia supplied the other half of the business. Carrillo worked with Pablo Escobar and the Cali Cartel to smuggle drugs from Colombia into Mexico and the United States.

  Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, was among his other associates. So were the Arellano Félix family and the Beltrán Leyva organization. Colombia mattered to Carrillo for one more reason, because it was also where he sent his money.

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• 4. The Fortune

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  Colombia was the route Carrillo used to launder his money. The proceeds financed his fleet of aircraft.

  The scale of his wealth is hard to picture. During his tenure he reportedly built a multibillion-dollar drug empire. One estimate holds that he may have earned more than $25 billion in revenue across his career.

  At the time of his death, he was assessed to be worth around $25 billion. Those figures are estimates, not audited accounts. The place where his luck began to turn was the state of Morelos.

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• 5. Pressure From Morelos

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  Silent marches in Morelos state were aimed at Governor Jorge Carrillo Olea. Marchers believed he was complacent about drug-related violence. The marches intensified the pressure on U.S. and Mexican authorities to capture Carrillo Fuentes.

  Carrillo Fuentes owned a house three blocks from the governor's official residence. He regularly held narco-fiestas in the municipality of Tetecala. Governor Carrillo Olea was forced to resign and was arrested.

  Pressure of this kind may have convinced Carrillo Fuentes to change his appearance. He chose facial plastic surgery and abdominal liposuction. The decision to move forward with the operation came on the 4th of July 1997.

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• 6. Surgery and Death

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  Santa Mónica Hospital in Mexico City was where Carrillo went ahead with the operation. Complications arose during the procedure. They were either caused by a certain medication or by a malfunctioning respirator. Carrillo died in the early hours of the 5th of July 1997.

  His family told reporters a different story. They said he had suffered a heart attack while under anesthesia.

  Two of his bodyguards were in the operating room during the procedure. On the 7th of November 1997, the two surgeons who operated on him were found dead. Their bodies were encased in concrete inside steel drums and showed signs of torture.

  A third body lay in a matching barrel, just as mangled. It is presumed to be a third doctor who assisted, but it is unidentifiable and unconfirmed.

  On the 8th of November, Carrillo's corpse was displayed for a wake at the Federal Judicial Police's morgue in Mexico City. Within a month of his death, gunfire in a Ciudad Juárez restaurant had already shown how unsettled the border had become.

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• 7. Gunfire in Ciudad Juárez

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  On the night of the 3rd of August 1997, at around 9:30 p.m., four drug traffickers walked into a restaurant in Ciudad Juárez. They pulled out their guns and opened fire on five diners, killing them instantly. Police found more than 100 bullet casings at the scene. The Los Angeles Times reported that the men carried at least two AK-47 automatic rifles while others stood at the doorstep.

  Armando Olague became another victim outside the restaurant. He was a prison official and an off-duty law enforcement officer. Reportedly he had come from a nearby bar with a gun in his hand to see what the commotion was. It was later determined that Olague was also a known lieutenant of the Juárez Cartel.

  Mexican authorities declined to comment on the motives. They stated that the shootout was not linked to Carrillo's death. It was later stated that the gunmen belonged to the Tijuana Cartel.

  Confrontations between drug traffickers were common in Ciudad Juárez, but they rarely occurred in public places. The restaurant attack threatened to usher in a new era of border crime in the city. Authorities, for their part, were turning to the assets Carrillo had left behind.

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• 8. Legacy and Screen

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  Warehouses in Ciudad Juárez were among the first targets of the Office of the Mexican Attorney-General, known as the PGR. Investigators believed the cartel used them to store weapons and cocaine. The PGR also seized over 60 properties across Mexico belonging to Carrillo. It began an investigation into his dealings with police and government officials. Officials froze bank accounts amounting to $10 billion.

  Guamuchilito, in Sinaloa, hosted a large, lavish and expensive funeral for Carrillo. In 2006, Governor Eduardo Bours asked the federal government to tear down Carrillo's mansion in Hermosillo, Sonora. In April 2009, Mexican authorities arrested Carrillo's son, Vicente Carrillo Leyva.

  Television has returned to him often. Telemundo's El Señor de los Cielos began airing in 2013. Rafael Amaya stars as Aurelio Casillas, a fictionalized version of Carrillo. In the second season of El cartel, Esteban Franco plays a character called Juan B. Guillén, known as El Piloto.

  Rodrigo Abed plays him in El Chapo, the 2017 series about Joaquín Guzmán. In Surviving Escobar, he is fictionalized as Señor de los Aires and played by Mauro Mauad, who also played him in El General Naranjo in 2019. America's War on Drugs, a 2017 History Channel mini-series, casts Tatsu Carvalho. Marco Gomez plays him in the 2018 series Reyes Del Crimen.

  José María Yazpik portrays him in Narcos in 2017, and in Narcos: Mexico from 2018 to 2021. That series implies Carrillo faked his death to survive the drug business and avoid imprisonment.

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