Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros, a Honduran drug kingpin who linked Colombian and Mexican cartels through a trafficking highway that fueled the 1980s cocaine boom, died on Thursday in Springfield, Mo. He was 80.
His daughter María Isabel Matta Vásquez confirmed the death, in a hospital. She said the Federal Bureau of Prisons did not specify a cause.
At his death, Mr. Matta Ballesteros had served more than 30 years of a life sentence for distributing cocaine in California and Arizona. He was granted compassionate release on medical grounds by a district court judge in May, but that decision was reversed by an appeals court in September, and he remained incarcerated.
During the early years of the cocaine trade that made Colombian production in Medellín and Mexican smuggling operations in Guadalajara notorious, Mr. Matta Ballesteros made a fortune as a power broker to top cartel leaders like Pablo Escobar, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo and Rafael Caro Quintero.
He did not share those men’s ripe-for-Hollywood infamy, but he rose from poverty to work with them at the uppermost echelons of the drug market, orchestrating deals that allowed more cocaine to be shipped into American cities with greater speed than ever before.
“I’m a good businessman,” he told a reporter in 1988. “I always know how to make money.”
Julie Bunck, a political scientist who wrote the book “Bribes, Bullets and Intimidation: Drug Trafficking and the Law in Central America” (2012) with her husband, Michael Fowler, said in an interview: “So many of these traffickers are thugs. Even somebody like Escobar wasn’t as intelligent and as creative and as intense as Matta.”
Mr. Matta Ballesteros held an unusual amount of power for someone from Central America, whose traffickers were generally not considered serious players because they did little more than move the product along for Colombian cartels. But his confidence, his position of middleman neutrality and his ties to the Honduran military, which ensured safe passage of the product, all made him a trusted partner of Colombian and Mexican kingpins alike.
“It’s not possible to talk about narcotrafficking in Honduras without starting with Ramón Matta Ballesteros,” the Honduran journalist Óscar Estrada wrote in “Tierra de Narcos,” his 2021 book about the country’s drug trade.
In the late 1970s and early ’80s, cocaine mostly flowed through the Caribbean to Miami. But as Drug Enforcement Administration officials got better at intercepting shipments in Florida, cartel leaders began to take big losses just as demand from affluent Americans was making cocaine a $15-billion-a-year business.
Mr. Matta Ballesteros, then a trafficker with a growing résumé in the Colombian and Mexican underworlds, smelled opportunity.
He had been a hit man for Medellín cartels, and he operated a laboratory that produced semi-refined coca paste. During stints in Mexico, he introduced his South American sources to Alberto Sicilia Falcón, the Cuban leader of the incipient Guadalajara cartel.
After Mr. Sicilia Falcón was arrested in 1975, Mr. Matta Ballesteros partnered with his successor, Mr. Félix Gallardo, and helped him become bigger and richer than his competitors. U.S. officials have estimated that Mr. Matta Ballesteros and Mr. Félix Gallardo at one point were making $5 million a week from their marijuana and cocaine enterprise.
Mr. Matta Ballesteros was arrested on a few occasions, including in the United States, but did not stay imprisoned long.
“He was just in the middle of everything that was big,” Ms. Bunck said in a joint interview with Mr. Fowler, who added, “That’s a very dicey situation to be in.”
The Medellín cartel was prone to bloody feuds — with Colombian government officials who sought justice, and with guerrilla groups attempting to use drug traffickers for their own ends. Mr. Félix Gallardo became one of Mexico’s most feared drug lords by killing a long list of enemies. Yet amid all the violence and internecine quarrels, Mr. Matta Ballesteros managed to operate largely without making enemies of his own.
He made himself valuable to cartels seeking ways to evade D.E.A. agents along their Caribbean smuggling routes. He pitched them on shipping the product to the United States through Central America and Mexico instead. Honduras would provide a safe transportation hub because its borders were controlled by a military that, by many accounts, was intimately involved in the drug trade.
Mr. Matta Ballesteros “was the one who was able to create what was then one of the most prolific bridges of cocaine through Central America,” Steven Dudley, a founder of the think tank and media organization InSight Crime, said in an interview.
The arrangement was highly effective. By the late 1980s, cocaine was being sold in dozens of American cities. U.S. federal agents seized more than 40,000 kilograms in 1989, up from fewer than 2,000 in 1985.
Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros was born Juan Ramón Mata del Pozo on Jan. 12, 1945, in a poor rural area near Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. Little is known about his family or his early life, but it is known that he was the second of four children and that his mother was named María Teresa Mata del Pozo and that she worked as a shopkeeper and died in 1980.
Some sources say he began his life of crime as a young homeless pickpocket. When he entered the drug trade, like other upstart smugglers in 1970s Honduras, he operated in the shadows. But then came the 1977 disappearance and killing of Mario Ferrari, the owner of a car dealership, and his wife.
Over a monthslong search for the couple, reporters uncovered Mr. Ferrari’s involvement in the drug trade and his collusion with military officials. No one was convicted of the crimes, but reporting suggested that Mr. Matta Ballesteros was Mr. Ferrari’s business partner and had conspired to kidnap, torture and murder the Ferraris after a dispute. The case brought to light the Honduran security apparatus’s apparent entanglement with the international drug trade.
In the 1980s, as President Ronald Reagan’s war against Communism took priority over the war on drugs, Mr. Matta Ballesteros found unexpected opportunity in flying stealth weapons to the contra rebels in Nicaragua, who were fighting the Sandinista government with help from the Americans. The C.I.A. paid his company nearly $186,000 for services in 1986.
By then, D.E.A. officials had spent years pursuing him as someone they considered among the world’s most influential cocaine traffickers.
In the end, Mr. Matta Ballesteros was not betrayed by the Mexican or Colombian cartels, but by the Honduran military that had long protected him. After a long negotiation, American officials persuaded the Hondurans to help capture him at his home in Tegucigalpa in 1988. He faced charges that originated from a 1981 raid on an apartment complex in California in which 114 pounds of cocaine and $1.9 million in cash were seized.
He and other members of the Guadalajara cartel were also wanted for the 1985 torture and murder of Enrique Camarena, a D.E.A. agent. Mr. Matta Ballesteros was convicted of kidnapping in that case in 1990, but the charges were dismissed in 2018.
In addition to his daughter María Isabel, Mr. Matta Ballesteros is survived by his wife, Nancy Marlene Vásquez Martínez; three siblings, Reinaldo Mata, José Nelson Ballesteros Mata and María Letícia Pavón Mata; three other children, María Teresa Matta Waldurraga, Claudia Patricia Matta Waldurraga and Juan Ramón Matta Waldurraga; and seven grandchildren. His three eldest children are from a previous relationship, with María Alcira, whom he did not marry.
As his health deteriorated in prison in recent years, his son Juan Ramón and his daughter María Isabel advocated for his release.
To some, Mr. Matta Ballesteros was a symbol of corruption, greed and bloodthirsty vengeance. But many Hondurans knew him as an owner of dairy and cattle farms who gave generously to his community.
“If you didn’t have money for medicine, you could go to his house and get it from him, or he would call the pharmacy,” a local resident told The New York Times in 1988.
When he was extradited from Honduras, hundreds of people, many of them students, protested the forced removal of a beloved local figure. They set fire to the American Embassy during demonstrations that left five people dead.
“Abduction,” Mr. Matta Ballesteros said to reporters as he was loaded into a car.
The post Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros, 80, Dies; Cartel Kingpin Fed Cocaine Boom appeared first on New York Times.
