The Muelles warehouse attack occurred in 1986 when Tijuana plaza lieutenant Ramon Arellano Felix attacked a warehouse used by the Sinaloa plaza lieutenant Joaquin Guzman Loera to house a drug-smuggling tunnel which ran from Tijuana to San Ysidro, California. The attack resulted in the massacre of the Sinaloan workers and the collapse of the tunnel, sparking a war between Sinaloa and Tijuana.
Background[]
In 1986, due to a DEA crackdown on drug trafficking in Latin America in the aftermath of the kidnapping, torture, and murder of Kiki Camarena, the Guadalajara Cartel's plazas began to suffer from declining income. Before 1986, Guadalajara boss Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo's native Sinaloa plaza - headed by Hector Luis Palma Salazar, Manuel Salcido Uzeta, and Joaquin Guzman Loera - had been given the privilege of transporting Colombian cocaine through the Tijuana corridor and into the United States. This created friction with the Tijuana plaza, run by the brothers Benjamin and Ramon Arellano Felix, who were frequently mocked by the Sinaloans, and whose income was sharply declining due to increased drug seizures by the DEA. At Felix Gallardo's birthday party on 8 January 1986, Benjamin asked Felix Gallardo to levy a tax on the Sinaloan traffickers moving through Tijuana, as the Arellano Felix brothers demanded the stability that Felix Gallardo had promised them when they first joined his federation. Felix Gallardo initially refused, as he sought to collect on the debts owed to him by Cali Cartel representative Helmer Herrera. The Sinaloans later taunted the Tijuana plaza by sending them a truck with a pig (a reference to Salcido's nickname, "Cochiloco"), leading to Ramon being told by Benjamin to shoot the pig. The Sinaloan leaders later crashed Francisco Rafael Arellano Felix's prison homecoming party at the Roxanne nightclub in Tijuana and started a brawl, gravely injuring Ramon's eye. After this, Felix Gallardo decided to satiate the Tijuana plaza by levying a 10% tax on all Sinaloan drugs transported through their city.
The Leyenda team being briefed by Guillermo Calderoni
However, this new tax instead angered the Sinaloans, and the ambitious Guzman decided to go behind the dismissive Palma's back by purchasing two foreclosed properties on either side of the Mexico-United States border in Tijuana and San Ysidro. He then had a team of engineers dig a tunnel, which he nicknamed "Cocaine Alley", with the goal of bypassing the Tijuana plaza and smuggling drugs cross-border by himself. The corrupt Mexican Federal Police commander Guillermo Calderoni soon caught wind of the Sinaloans' 300-kilogram cocaine shipments, and he decided to help the DEA's "Operation Leyenda" task force bring down Guadalajara by cutting off their cocaine income. Agent Walt Breslin investigated the shipments and discovered the tunnel entrance at the Muelles warehouse, and Calderoni suggested that the best way to fight against Guadalajara would be to divide and conquer. With Breslin's reluctant permission, he leaked the tunnel's existence to the Arellano Felix crew, and Benjamin ordered Ramon to gather some men and destroy the tunnel.
Attack[]
The DEA team waited on the rooftop of a nearby building as they observed the arrival of a cement truck and several motorcycle-riding Tijuana gunmen at the Muelles warehouse. There, Ramon took the engineers' foreman hostage and forced him to recall the men in the tunnel, after which he ordered the cement truck to pour cement into the tunnel. Dismayed at the slow pouring, he decided to halt it and instead threw a grenade into the tunnel, causing it to gradually collapse. El Chapo and a handful of engineers succeeded in escaping to the San Ysidro exit, but the rest of them were buried by the debris. Ramon then proceeded to execute the captured engineers one-by-one, execution-style with his Micro-Uzi, punishing Sinaloa for its transgression. Breslin and his team could only watch Ramon's appalling cruelty before departing.