Authors: Ioan Grillo
From Central America, Mexican gangsters move cocaine on ships, submarines, or light aircraft. General Solórzano shows me the drug planes they have captured in Sinaloa. They are mostly single-engine Cessnas brought in the United States for about $50,000 a pop. The army now protects the seized aircraft because when they were in a police base, gangsters actually broke in and stole them back. In the last two years, soldiers have seized two hundred such planes. Driving around the airfield, the sheer size of the fleet makes a stunning sight. And these are only the ones they captured!
As drugs flow up into the United States, all kinds of people make money off them. People are subcontracted to ship, truck, warehouse, and finally smuggle the product over the border. To complicate this, drugs are often bought and sold many times on their journey. People actually handling these narcotics will often have no knowledge which so-called kingpin or cartel ever owned them, only knowing the direct contacts they are dealing with. Ask a New York cocaine dealer who smuggled his product into America. He would rarely have a clue.
All this helps explain why the Mexican drug trade is such a confusing web, which confounds both journalists and drug agents. Tracing exactly who touched a shipment on its entire journey is a hard task.
But this dynamic, moving industry has a solid center of gravity—turfs, or plazas. Drugs have to pass through a certain territory on the border to get into the United States, and whoever is running those plazas makes sure to tax everything that moves. The border plazas have thus become a choke point that is not seen in other drug-producing nations such as Colombia, Afghanistan, or Morocco. This is one of the key reasons why Mexican turf wars have become so bloody.
The vast profits attract all kinds to the Mexican drug trade: peasant farmers, slum teenagers, students, teachers, businessmen, idle rich kids, and countless others. It is often pointed out that in poor countries people turn to the drug trade in desperation. That is true. But plenty of middle-class or wealthy people also dabble. Growing up in the south of England, I knew dozens of people who moved and sold drugs, from private-school boys to kids from council estates (projects). The United States has never had a shortage of its own citizens willing to transport and sell drugs. The bottom line is that drugs are good money even to wealthy people, and plenty have no moral dilemmas about the business.
Iran Escandon is one of the thousands who have carried the white lady on her journey north. I find him in the municipal prison in Ciudad Juárez, playing keyboard in a jail-block church band. In my search to make sense of the Mexican drug trade, I have interviewed dozens of traffickers in cells, cantinas, and drug rehabs. But Iran stands out in my memory because he comes across as particularly innocent. That may sound like a funny word to use; he doesn’t deny that he trafficked
cocaina
. But he seems innocent in the sense of being harmless or naive. He was a never a gang member or drug user like so many smugglers; never a policeman or murderer like so many others. He was caught with forty kilos of cocaine when he was just eighteen years old. In a flash, his youth disappeared and he got a ten-year sentence. When I meet him, he has four years left to go.
He speaks in a voice so soft that I have to crane my head forward to hear him. A beige puffer jacket covers his skinny frame, which contrasts with that of other inmates who show off bulky, tattooed torsos, built by bench-pressing concrete blocks in the scorching sun. His eyes are wide-open and warm. He balances delicately on the end of a bunk bed in the cell he shares with six others, telling me his story.
“It was cars that brought me here. I just loved cars. I loved to fix them, build them. I loved to race them. Cars were my passion.”
Iran grew up in Cuauhtémoc, a city of a hundred thousand people set between cattle ranches and apple orchards, five hours south of Juárez. When he was seventeen, he dropped out of high school to work in a friend’s car body shop near the marketplace. For fourteen-hour days, he would strip down fuel tanks, beef up motors, spray-paint bonnets.
“We would take old bangers and soup them up to turn them into machines that could race like bullets. I quickly learned to work on anything—sports cars, pickup trucks, Jeeps.”
Happiness fills his eyes as he remembers good times past; times before he lived in a prison in the most murderous city on the planet; times that now seem an age away, like a distant memory, a dream he hopes one day to return to.
His family were caring but humble, his father a hardworking laborer and man of God, a convert to evangelical Protestant Christianity, which is spreading fast across Mexico. Like his father, Iran says he believes in a personal relationship with Jesus. He also believes in working hard and trying to make something of himself. That was what street races were about for him. On Saturday nights, Iran and his friends would take cars they had customized in their workshop and burn them up against machines from other crews. In Mexico, these illegal street contests are known as
arrancones.
When I mention
The Fast and the Furious
, Iran laughs.
“They were nothing like the races you see in the movies. There were no gangs with suitcases of money and Uzis. We were just a bunch of friends who loved car racing. We built up machines using anything we could find. It was a way to be creative, to be resourceful. And we could beat these teams with much more money than us. It was a great feeling.”
One afternoon as Iran had his head in more filthy motors, a client turned up for some repairs on his vehicle. He was a well-dressed middle-aged man from Guadalajara who talked politely. When his car had been fixed, he offered the young guys some work—to drive a car upstate in exchange for ten thousand pesos, or about $900. The tires would be stuffed with pure Colombian cocaine.
“We thought, ‘Wow. Ten thousand pesos just to drive a car upstate. Just think what kind of machine we can build with ten thousand pesos, and how we can win races with that.’ It didn’t even seem like we were doing something bad. We were just delivery boys.”
After the first job, Iran and his friends celebrated like crazy. Then a week later, the man appeared again and asked for a second delivery. A few days later, a Sinaloan associate turned up with another package. Soon, they were moving several packages a week north. They had so much work, they started subcontracting other kids to drive packages. They were carrying up to 120 kilos of cocaine a shot in exchange for fifty thousand pesos or about $4,500. The money seemed like a small fortune to seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. But it was a tiny fraction of what the white powder would fetch in American nightclubs.
“In a few months we went from being broke to having more cash than we could spend. As well as building great cars for the races, I would help my family out. I also changed my own car every month—I had an Escort, then a Jetta, then a Mustang. And as we had money, loads of girls were suddenly interested in us. I started living with my girlfriend. It all happened so fast.”
The glory days were short-lived. Just after Escandon turned eighteen, he took on his most ambitious job yet: carrying forty kilos from Cuauhtémoc over the border and all the way to Colorado for a princely sum of $15,000. As he drove into Ciudad Juárez, soldiers stopped his car for a check. He took a deep breath while they felt under the hood and into the tires. Then they found the cargo.
“It was a nightmare moment. They pulled out the cocaine and my heart stopped. It had all been like a game, like a fantasy. In six months we went from nothing to riches. And then it was all over.”
The smuggling organization never contacted Iran again or reprimanded him about losing the drugs. Maybe he was set up, he sighs, so that another, bigger load would get through, a classic technique of traffickers. While his crew moved drugs north, other teams they didn’t know were certainly transporting cocaine on the same route for the same gangsters.
Juárez prison was terrifying and brutal for a skinny eighteen-year-old. In this ambience, he threw himself deeply into the evangelicalism of his father. He couldn’t work on cars behind bars, so he put all his energy into learning to play the keyboard in the church band.
“I lost my family. I lost many things. I had to adapt to a hard and violent place. I had to grow up here and become a man. I can’t look back and regret anymore. My years have gone. I have to look forward now. When I get out, I want to study music. I want to make music my life. At least I am still alive.”
In Mexican border cities, everybody knows someone who has got mixed up in the drug trade: a cousin, a brother, a classmate, a neighbor. Everybody has a story. A taxidriver picked up a man who showed him ten kilos of cocaine he had stuffed up his sweater; a social worker’s neighbor’s house was raided and had a million dollars in cash; a waitress’s brother and father are doing life sentences in American prisons for trafficking; a businessman’s cousin started running drugs and got dissolved in a bath full of acid.
Everybody also knows that drugs are a fast way to make cash. If you are in between jobs, struggling with house payments, or desperate to get a new car, vacancies as a burro—someone hired to take drugs over the border—are always open. Making a film about youth in Ciudad Juárez, I talked to teenagers and young men from the barrios who had taken up the offer. The cartel offered a flat rate: $1,000 to drive sixty pounds of marijuana into the United States; more to take heroin, cocaine, or meth. You could use your own car or they lent you a vehicle. It was about three hours’ work, then you got paid right away in cash—earning as much you would from a month sweating in a Juárez assembly plant. You could traffic once and never again. Or you could keep going back four, five times a week and start making some serious money.
Binationals or people with U.S. residency are particularly sought after. I interviewed a twenty-year-old living in El Paso who had made several shipments for the $1,000 fee, using the money to help his mom out and to buy studio equipment to record music. But then he got caught and sentenced to five years’ probation, in which he had to stay indoors at night, wear a security tag, and was banned from going into Mexico. I asked him what was he most upset about. Being stuck in boring El Paso and not being able to go to Juárez and see his friends, he replied.
Mexican smugglers’ endless ingenuity has made hours of entertaining reports for American television. A whole industry in Mexico builds so-called trap cars with secret compartments in tires, gas tanks, and under seats. Trucks are even specially made with sealed metal containers appearing like gas canisters that customs agents have to burn open with a blowtorch to look into. Ripping apart vehicles with fire is hard work in a place such as Laredo, where ten thousand trucks cross daily. And it is embarrassing for agents when they burn up a car with nothing in it.
Many traffickers avoid border posts altogether and walk right in over the desert. Gangs even manufacture their own hefty backpacks, designed to carry maximum loads of weed or cocaine. With hundreds of thousands of migrants walking over the border, it is easy for smugglers to slip in through the same routes—a point screamed out by America’s “militarize the border” lobby.
Others don’t go through or round the gates, but under. Mexican smugglers have built an extensive warren of tunnels that rivals that of the Gaza Strip. For Border Patrol agents, it is like playing
Space Invaders
—every time they fill one passage with concrete, another pops up. These are no mere rabbit holes. Cartels hire professional engineers, who build tunnels with wooden supports, concrete floors, electric lights, and even rail carts that carry dope. One passage that went into Otay Mesa, California, measured a colossal twenty-four hundred feet in length.
3
Another went on five hundred feet to come up behind an innocent-looking fireplace in Tecate, Mexico.
Then there is the art of disguise. Imagine any way you can camouflage narcotics, and you find that it has been done in an even weirder way in real life. Smugglers have hidden cocaine under the chocolate layer of candy bars, in the center of watermelons, mixed cocaine into fabricated fiberglass dolls, and even made yayo into an imitation of the soccer World Cup trophy. One smuggler went even further and put heroin into two artificial slabs of flesh that were plastered onto the end of his butt cheeks. The heroin leaked into his blood, causing his death.
In a hotel room in Culiacán, a twenty-one-year-old woman called Guadalupe shows off a new method of hiding marijuana. She works for some Sinaloan gangsters who agreed she could talk to journalists and even be filmed with the drugs—apparently for no recompense. Perhaps they like showing off how clever they are. Obviously, they don’t fear they are giving away great secrets.
Guadalupe takes a green candle in a glass bottle and meticulously hollows out the wax, using a metal teaspoon. On her right side is big pile of green bud on a newspaper, which she sorts through and stuffs into transparent doggie bags. She then takes a roll of Fuji camera film, tears out the plastic filmstrip, and wraps it around one of the bags of ganja. She stuffs this bundle inside the candle and puts the wax back on top. Boom; there stands a regular-looking candle with drugs hidden inside. It was all done with the swiftness of a celebrity chef running through a recipe.
“This is a new technique. It is one of the most effective ones. The smell of the candle is very strong and police don’t want to spend time digging away at the wax. It was created by a group of people whose only work is to think about new ways to transport merchandise.”
I have heard about such figures before. They are referred to as
cerebros
or “brains”—people dedicated to dreaming up new ways for gangsters to smuggle their dope. In the corporate world, they would be like the masterminds who sit around drinking lattes and think up a genius way to package toothpaste or a catchy slogan for the Big Mac.
Guadalupe goes on, “When I first delivered this stuff, I got scared. But I learned to control the fear, so I don’t betray myself and get caught. If I had been caught, then I wouldn’t be here.”