Guillermo González Calderoni (1949-5 February 2003) was a Mexican judicial police commander who was nicknamed "the Eliot Ness of Mexico" due to his "big game hunter" reputation during Operation Condor. However, Calderoni - like most other Mexican policemen of his time - occasionally veered into corruption, working with the Guadalajara Cartel before supervising the captures of Rafael Caro Quintero in 1985 and Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo in 1989. He fled to the United States in 1993 after being fired from the police due to his past corruption, and, after years of whistleblowing against former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, he was murdered in McAllen, Texas in 2003.
Biography[]
Guillermo González Calderoni was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico in 1949 to a Mexican businessman and an Italian-American mother. He was fluent in Spanish, English, and French, and he enrolled as a federal officer during the early 1980s, being stationed along the American border and quickly rising to the rank of commander. He expressed contempt for Americans and the DEA and even smuggled cocaine into El Paso, Texas; he reasoned that the term for bribe was called a mordidita not only because policemen wanted to take a bite, but because everyone had to eat. In 1984, he was sent from Mexico City to hunt down Guadalajara Cartel lieutenant Rafael Caro Quintero following his kidnapping of Sara Cosio, and he ultimately won the trust of the Americans while acting against the cartel. However, he had to face corruption from his superiors, hampering his efforts to fight crime. Calderoni led the 1985 operation which captured Caro Quintero in Costa Rica two months after Kiki Camarena's murder, and he was later sent to arrest Guadalajara Cartel boss Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo. Miguel Angel forced Calderoni to release him lest he release tapes implicating Calderoni's DFS bosses in the murder of Camarena and thus place Calderoni's family at risk, and he was given $2 million and reluctantly came to work for Miguel Angel. The DEA initially shunned Calderoni for letting Miguel Angel escape, but he redeemed himself when he led the raid which killed Pablo Acosta Villarreal in 1987. On 8 April 1989, he finally succeeded in capturing Miguel Angel as the Guadalajara Cartel broke up, refusing a $5 million bribe. Despite this, DEA agent Walt Breslin refused to reconcile with Calderoni, and he was fired from the police in 1993 after his corruption became known. He fled to McAllen, Texas, where the United States refused to extradite him to Mexico. In 1996, he accused President Carlos Salinas de Gortari of being in business with drug traffickers, and, in 2000, he alleged that Salinas had ordered the murders of two rival political activists during his 1988 presidential campaign. On 5 February 2003, he was shot in his car as he left his attorney's office in McAllen, Texas, and he died at the hospital.