Caimanes: El Cerebro

Santa Blanca build narco submarines in these swamps where Bolivians fish and hunt caimans.

• OperatioN: Smuggling
• Chief: El Cerebro
• Ecosystem: Swamps

This province is a big swamp, a prolongation of the Pantanal Swamp in Brazil and one of the two spillways of the Amazonian forest. Each year a big flooding covers these territories, except a few hills. The Rio Habana drains the Caimanes swamp and pours into a large river that opens itself in the south Atlantic.

The population is very small. The only possible activities in the swamp are fishing and caiman hunting. The province has 3 villages that share these activities: Puerto Chico, Frontera, and Ingani.

This forgotten place was part of Santa Blanca’s initial plan. Once produced, the cocaine must leave Bolivia and head toward consumption countries, without attracting attention. One of the safest smuggling vectors used by cartels is pocket submarines made out of glass fiber. They are almost undetectable and can transport several tons of cocaine in one trip.

Nidia Flores handed the mission of organizing the submarine trips of cocaine produced in Bolivia over to El Cerebro. But Bolivia does not have access to the sea. El Cerebro recruited former Russian engineers, experts in the construction of nuclear submarines. Bolivia has very large rivers that pour into larger rivers, which in turn pour into the Ocean. Given all the appropriate information about the watercourse to take, they defined a submarine plan able to navigate the rivers and end up in the Atlantic Ocean.

The last step of the plan was building a naval construction site Band-Aid where submarines were built. Every two weeks a submarine leaves Caimanes.

The naval construction site is well guarded, Bolivians learned to avoid this part of the swamp. Some of them whisper about gigantic caimans that swim between these waters.

Patricio Mendez, aka El Cerebro (the brain)

BORN: 08/08/1993 in Mexicali Mexico

CARTEL POSITION: Submarine Engineer

El Cerebro creates new technologies to get information and to move merchandise under the radar.

He is from a poor family in Mexico. He was the fifth child and while considered eccentric, he was clearly gifted from an early age. He would have been bullied and beaten in grade school if it were not for his older brother, a tough gang member who protected him. After his brother became a member of the Santa Blanca cartel, he introduced El Cerebro to Nidia Flores. The cartel paid for his education and he became the first in his family to attend college, at the Universidad Autonoma de Informatica, followed by graduate school in America at the California Institute of Technology. After he graduated with honors in 2014, Nidia put him to work.