Days after Mexican police sparked an international incident by crossing the Guatemalan border during a shootout with suspected criminals, federal prosecutors in San Diego unsealed an indictment revealing one of four people killed in the controversial gun battle was an alleged cartel boss and the lead defendant in a cocaine-trafficking prosecution in San Diego.
Guatemalan national Baldemar “Don Valde” Calderon-Carrillo, 67, was indicted by a federal grand jury in San Diego in 2019 along with 12 other Guatemalan defendants, including at least two of his sons, on charges of operating a criminal conspiracy to traffic cocaine from Guatemala into Mexico and the United States.
San Diego-based federal prosecutors revealed Friday in a motion to unseal the indictment that Calderon-Carrillo, who they allege was a founding leader of the Chiapas-Guatemala cartel, was killed in the controversial firefight that erupted June 8 along the Mexico-Guatemala border.
During that incident, police officers from the Mexican state of Chiapas drove armored vehicles into Guatemala and engaged in a shootout near a busy border crossing, apparently without permission from Guatemalan authorities. The Guatemalan government condemned the incident, parts of which were captured on video and circulated on social media. Mexico’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued its neighbor a formal apology. Guatemala’s president has since announced that his government is working with the Mexican government to address the situation.
The Chiapas-Guatemala cartel that was allegedly involved in the confrontation is reportedly aligned with Mexico’s ultra-violent Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación, or CJNG. Prosecutors said the indictment of Calderon-Carrillo and his co-defendants was based on a “long-term wiretap investigation” of the Chiapas-Guatemala cartel.
Federal prosecutors had partially unsealed that indictment in March 2024 when one of Calderon-Carrillo’s sons, 45-year-old Edgar “Panon” Yovani Calderon-Calderon, was extradited to the U.S. from France. Prosecutors said he had been arrested on a warrant in the San Diego case in January 2023 in Paris.
Calderon-Calderon pleaded guilty earlier this year to a conspiracy charge involving cocaine distribution. In his plea agreement, he admitted that between at least 2017 and 2019, he worked with co-conspirators “to distribute large quantities of cocaine in Guatemala on behalf of a drug trafficking organization based in La Mesilla, Huehuetenango, Guatemala.”
From the border state of Huehuetenango, “the cocaine was transported to co-conspirators operating near the Guatemala-Mexico border, into Mexico, and ultimately smuggled into the United States,” according to the plea agreement.
Calderon-Calderon admitted in his plea that the conspiracy involved at least 550 kilograms — more than 1,200 pounds — of cocaine. On May 30, U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw sentenced him to seven years and three months in federal prison.
A little more than a week later, Calderon-Calderon’s father was killed in the cross-border shootout in La Mesilla, prompting prosecutors to unseal the case “given the public nature of these events,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin Mokhtari wrote in a court filing.
Among the remaining defendants is 43-year-old Walfre “El Teniente Jr” Donaldo Calderon-Calderon, who prosecutors identified as another of Calderon-Carrillo’s sons. Four other defendants also share at least one last name of Calderon, though prosecutors did not describe their exact familial relationships to the reputed cartel boss killed last week.
Few other details of the indictment have been revealed publicly, though a related case offers a glimpse at one aspect of the Chiapas-Guatemala cartel’s alleged drug-trafficking operations.
In April 2018, a U.S. Coast Guard vessel and a Royal Canadian Navy ship patrolling international waters intercepted a go-fast smuggling boat about 430 nautical miles south of the Mexico-Guatemala border, according to a criminal complaint. On board the small vessel were two Colombian men, an Ecuadorian man and a Guatemalan man, plus more than 1,000 pounds of cocaine.
The Coast Guard seized the drugs and detained the men, who were then charged in San Diego federal court, where they eventually pleaded guilty to cocaine trafficking charges. Sabraw sentenced each of the four to prison terms ranging up to nine years.
Prosecutors filed a notice in the Chiapas-Guatemala cartel case that the two prosecutions were “part of the same alleged criminal event or transaction; that is, the cases involved substantially the same facts and the same questions of law.”
Aside from the defendant who was killed and his son who was sentenced last month, the other defendants named in the cartel indictment remain fugitives, prosecutors said.