To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War (5 page)

The 1914 Harrison Act required registration, taxation, and medical prescription for most drugs. The 1919 Volstead Act inaugurated the Prohibition Era that included alcohol and lasted until 1933. Harry Anslinger was the first ever U.S. “drug czar” and ran the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962. Anslinger pushed for and defended the criminalization of marijuana from 1937 on with disinformation, lies, and bullying. He accused medical researchers who published a report finding that marijuana use “does not lead to any physical, mental, or moral degeneration,” of being, “unsavory persons engaged in the illicit marijuana trade” (quoted in
The Pursuit of Oblivion
). Anslinger’s tenor coincided with perhaps the first instance of the Central Intelligence Agency knowingly funding and arming drug traffickers, in this case Corsican gangs, to attack trade unionists and communists organizing among dockworkers in Marseille.

In the 1950s and ’60s, millions of Americans experimented with drugs. Vibrant countercultures emerged within a broader movement of discarding the norms and mores of a rigid, racist, and oppressive society. Those of the dominant culture responded by further demonizing drug use, conflating all forms of protest against racism and the Vietnam War with criminality—drug use—and launched the so-called War on Drugs.

Two months after taking office, Richard Nixon set up the Special Presidential Task Force Relating to Narcotics, Marijuana and Dangerous Drugs. The task force, in a June 6, 1969, report, said that Mexicans were “responsible for the marijuana and drug abuse problem.” The task force recommended that Mexico “be forced into a program of defoliation of the marijuana plants.” How to force them? Kate Doyle of the National Security Archive, put it this way, “The weapon used to bludgeon Mexico into compliance would be a massive surprise attack on Mexico’s border by U.S. law-enforcement personnel, code named ‘Operation Intercept.’”

On September 21, 1969, Nixon launched Operation Intercept. The plan was simple; rigorously inspect every person, car, and plane arriving in the southern United States from Mexico. This virtually shut down the 1,969-mile border. Nixon did not inform Mexican President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz—who oversaw the army massacre of hundreds of students in Tlatelolco Plaza on October 2, 1968—of his plans. The unilateral decision incensed Mexican officials. The border traffic jams and the economic threat to Mexican exporters brought the Mexican government quickly to unequal and unfavorable negotiations. Mexico dispatched a delegation to Washington. and by October 10, the Díaz Ordaz administration had “convinced” the Nixon Administration to call off Operation Intercept, while the Nixon administration “convinced” their Mexican counterparts to join Operation Cooperation and through it the United States’ War on Drugs—a term Nixon used publicly for the first time on June 17, 1971.

Seven years after Operation Intercept, in September 1976, the Mexican government launched a military defoliation program called Operation Condor. Five thousand soldiers and 350 federal police, working together with thirty U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents stationed in Mexico and using forty airplanes—some from the United States—attacked and destroyed tens of thousands of acres of marijuana fields in Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Durango, and Guerrero.

At that time there were no known transnational drug cartels in Mexico. The relatively small marijuana growers and traffickers in Sinaloa, however, fled Operation Condor and relocated in cities across the country. Operation Condor burned marijuana fields, but it also prompted the geographical dispersion of marijuana growers and traffickers from the rugged, isolated mountains of Sinaloa to the cities of Guadalajara, Tijuana, and Ciudad Juárez. Also, as soon as the Operation Condor soldiers went away, people replanted the burned fields.

Before Operation Condor, Sinaloans grew marijuana in Sinaloa and smuggled it into the United States. After Operation Condor Sinaloans grew marijuana in Sinaloa, Sonora, Chihuahua, Guerrero, Michoacán, Jalisco, Durango, Zacatecas, and Baja California and smuggled it into the United States. Sinaloans controlled every major drug-trafficking organization that grew throughout the 1980s. Sinaloans would run the Guadalajara Cartel, the Tijuana Cartel, the Juárez Cartel, and, of course, the Sinaloa Cartel. The Gulf Cartel burst onto the scene in the early ’90s with the rise of Carlos Salinas and the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). La Familia Michoacana would declare its independence in 2006 and be all but dismantled by January 2011.

Cocaine money built Miami in the 1970s, but by the early 1980s, the blood in the streets got to be too much—homicides in Miami went from 104 in 1976 to 621 in 1981—so the U.S. government decided to push the gunplay out. Enter Reagan and
his
War on Drugs. The Reagan administration shut off the direct trafficking routes from Colombia and the Caribbean into Florida with a massive deployment of federal agents. The drugs kept coming. No Miami nightclub went without blow. The Colombian cocaine smugglers looked to Mexico and its long and desolate border with the United States. Thanks to Operation Condor, the Mexican marijuana traffickers from Sinaloa had built networks along the length of the border for marijuana smuggling. The pot kept coming, more than ever, and now with cocaine from Colombia.

Reagan’s drug war consolidated the racist underpinnings of prohibition into a new racial caste system, as Michelle Alexander argues. It also expanded upon the U.S. hemispheric “security” policy—or counterinsurgency proxy wars—and its unsavory drug habit. It has been well documented in books like Alfred McCoy’s
The
Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
that the Central Intelligence Agency was involved in trafficking narcotics in Southeast Asia throughout the 1950s and ’60s and in Afghanistan and Central America in the 1970s and ’80s to fund anti-communist death squads. Throughout the 1980s the CIA also supported counterinsurgency wars in Nicaragua funded from cocaine smuggling. Robert Parry and Brian Barger were the first reporters to break the story for the Associated Press in 1985. Reagan administration officials launched a personal defamation campaign against both reporters and drove them out of the AP. From April 1986 to April 1989, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics and Terrorism held hearings and investigated the allegations of CIA involvement in supporting counterinsurgency forces in Nicaragua involved in cocaine trafficking to the United States.

The Subcommittee report, released on April 13, 1989, found, among other things, “involvement in narcotics trafficking by individuals associated with the Contra movement” and “payments to drug traffickers by the U.S. State Department of funds authorized by the Congress for humanitarian assistance to the Contras, in some cases after the traffickers had been indicted by federal law-enforcement agencies on drug charges, in others while traffickers were under active investigation by these same agencies.” The three main newspapers in the United States buried short articles in their back pages:
Washington Post
, page A20;
Los Angeles Times
, page A11;
New York Times
, page A8. Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive wrote in the
Columbia Journalism Review
that “the Kerry Committee report was relegated to oblivion; and opportunities were lost to pursue leads, address the obstruction from the CIA and the Justice Department that Senate investigators say they encountered, and both inform the public and lay the issue to rest.” Reagan administration officials mocked the Subcommittee chair, Senator John Kerry, and the media followed suit;
Newsweek
famously called Kerry a “randy conspiracy buff.”

In July 1995, after publishing an award-winning exposé of California’s drug asset forfeiture laws the year before called “The Forfeiture Racket,” investigative reporter Gary Webb, then at the
San
Jose Mercury News
, picked up a lead on the CIA, the Contras, and cocaine trafficking to Los Angeles and decided to follow the story. His articles reported that the CIA had supported known drug traffickers in Nicaragua, but for the first time it also traced the arrival of those drugs in the form of crack cocaine to African American neighborhoods in South Central Los Angeles. Webb published his series, “The Dark Alliance,” in mid-August 1996 and came face to face with the hired guns of silence. The same three newspapers that ignored the Kerry Committee Report in 1989 (
Washington
Post
,
Los Angeles Times
,
New York Times
) assigned teams of experienced investigative reporters and collectively published more than 30,000 words—
not
to follow the story that Gary Webb broke, but to break Gary Webb. One of the
Washington Post
reporters assigned to debunk “Dark Alliance” was Walter Pincus, who spied on youth groups for the CIA in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

Nick Schou, in his book
Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack-Cocaine
Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb
, describes how the
Washington Post
,
Los Angeles Times
, and
New York Times
hit pieces hooked onto contradictions in testimony by convicted drug felons cited in “Dark Alliance” to bludgeon the credibility of Webb and the
San Jose Mercury News
, pressuring the paper to retract the story and demote Webb; the editors sent him off to cover the daily beat in Cupertino. He resigned soon after. Discredited and unable to get a job at a newspaper, he worked for the California Senate, then briefly for the
Sacramento News and Review
before shooting himself in the head with a .38 on December 10, 2004.

In 1998, only days after the
San Jose Mercury News
announced Webb’s resignation, the CIA published a statement vindicating the agency of collaboration with drug dealers. A month later the CIA released the first volume of a report supporting that claim. A few months later the CIA released the second volume of the report, contradicting what agents had previously said and written, and admitting that between 1982 and 1995 its agents worked with known drug traffickers supporting the Contras and had maintained an agreement with the Justice Department to not report drug dealing by its “assets.” There was no scandal, there was no outcry. The major papers did not assign teams of investigative reporters to probe further into the prior twelve years of CIA lies and complicity in drug trafficking. Silence.

One does not need to talk of conspiracy theories or even conspiracies; the acknowledged facts are poignant enough. One does not need to ponder the possible plans or intentions of Ronald Reagan and his administration officials with the 1982 declaration of war. Thirty years later mass incarceration through drug laws has become the new Jim Crow caste system of racial discrimination in the United States, and the murder and chaos that always accompany illegal drug trafficking have been pushed over the border into Mexico.

If there were really a war on drugs, the drugs would be winning: the 2009 U.S. National Survey on Drug Use and Health estimated that 21.8 million people aged twelve or older had consumed an illicit drug within the past month. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime ventured a guess in its 2009
World Drug Report
that between 170 million and 250 million people use illicit drugs worldwide. The United States is the world’s largest consumer of every drug on the market. In 2009, more people in the United States got blasted than any year prior, while 2009 was also the bloodiest year then on record in Mexico’s drug war. The direct correlation between U.S. recreational drug use, prohibition, and the murder and terror unleashed throughout Mexico cannot be avoided. Some drugs may cause harm, but prohibition kills.

With full support from the U.S. Congress, successive presidential administrations have used drug war programs such as extradition and the annual certification reviews that threaten loss of foreign aid and sanctions for decertified countries as tools to bend less powerful nations into compliance with prohibition and U.S. intervention. As Richard Davenport-Hines writes in
The Pursuit of Oblivion
, “Prohibition policies have turned licit, if dangerous, medicines into the world’s most lucrative and tightly organized black market. Essentially prohibition has been a technique of informal American cultural colonisation.”

DEATH IS ESSENTIAL IN MEXICO
.
Troubled, fractured, beleaguered, and contested, like the nation itself, representations of death are an inextricable feature of Mexican daily life, popular culture, and national identity.

Take Day of the Dead, November 2, when the souls of the dead visit and family and friends honor them with their favorite foods and candlelit altars. In some regions, like communities in parts of Oaxaca, Day of the Dead is the most important spiritual day of the year. The celebrations are national events that draw the participation of millions. The rituals have also become prime attractions for international tourists as a singularly Mexican experience. Mexicans and Chicanos in the United States hold Day of the Dead ceremonies as acts of affirmation of Mexican national pride and cultural identity. The dominant image in Day of the Dead sculptures, offerings, and art is the skull, especially the edible sugar skulls elaborately decorated in the brightest hues.

Then there is
la nota roja
, the crime beat or blood news, an entire newspaper industry built on publishing daily, gruesome front-page photographs of the newly dead: car accidents, stabbings, beatings, and recently, with great frequency, executions. In Mexico City and other cities, newsstand sellers string these papers up at intersections where pedestrians gather and gawk throughout the day. In some small towns, distribution amounts to someone driving through city streets in a Volkswagen Beetle with megaphones mounted on the roof, blaring enticements with a vendor’s rehearsed excitement, shouting calls like this one I once heard in Tlapa, Guerrero, “
¡Mira la sangriente muerte que tuvo!
” (“See how bloody her death was!”)