In the beginning, on a brutal morning in June, when the South Texas heat congealed in the sky and baked the floodplains, there were only the stirrings of a city, an inkling of identity. Were they American or Mexican? Should they settle on this side or that? Did it matter which Laredo they lived in?
It was 1853, after America won the Mexican-American War. In the mid-1840s, James Polk had turned his political career around, and won the White House, when he perceived public sentiment in favor of bringing Texas into the Union. He continued the westward expansion—“manifest destiny”—by attacking Mexico, and winning California and New Mexico in 1847. Now, six years later, after Laredo residents had been given the choice to stay north of the Rio Grande, on what was now American territory, or move across the river to Mexico, a reporter for a new newspaper, the New York Times, came to Laredo and observed an American surgeon shoot two men in a bar.
The surgeon fled across the border, where his captors put him in leg irons and shipped him back across. In Laredo, he was placed on a box and hanged. The Times reporter saw cattle raids and military encampments, violence and rough commerce. What was the effect of this demoralized frontier life on character? he asked. “People grow used to it—reckless of life, ragged, and saucy. The attention is called to getting whereof to clothe and to eat. The practice of carrying weapons, imposed by a few upon all, makes them suspicious and hasty.”
Since the end of the Mexican-American War, both countries had been expanding their legions of customs inspectors and border patrols, which turned Laredo and Nuevo Laredo into corrupt tariff-collecting towns. The mouth of the Rio Grande—where the great river empties into the Gulf of Mexico, two hundred miles southeast of Laredo—was becoming one of the busiest ports in the world. But Laredo and Nuevo Laredo remained trading posts, which meant that every new regulation presented a new smuggling opportunity: coffee, sugar, bacon, and even cotton. When the Civil War began, European ships waited in the Gulf to exchange their cargo for the outgoing Confederate cotton that helped finance the war for the south. When Union warships attempted to blockade the cotton trade and cut off Confederate financing, cotton smugglers traveled through Laredo instead.
Smuggling went both ways. Mexico’s prohibition of tobacco, following its independence from Spain in 1821, translated into enormous premiums for American tobacco merchants. During the hostilities that followed the end of the Mexican-American War, Mexican authorities seized 565 bales from Samuel Belden, a New Orleans tobacconist. Belden petitioned U.S. president Millard Fillmore, demanding that Washington intervene on his behalf. Others filed similar grievances. Although better than what today’s Mexican drug lords could hope for when their dope is seized, Belden’s outcome was less than satisfactory. Decades later, in 1885, the U.S. government awarded Belden $128,000 on a $500,000 loss.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, as Laredo developed new industries—oil, ore, and onions—the industrial revolution turned the city into a place of some significance. Bridges connected the countries. Railroads brought immigrants. French and Lebanese merchants. Swiss saddle makers. Polish grocers. Czech tanners. Italian hoteliers. In 1880, Anheuser-Busch established one of its first distributorships in Laredo. But the city remained a trading post. War and policy would always be hatched elsewhere; Laredo was the border frontier’s petri dish of implication. No trade would affect the city as narcotics would.
IN THE 1870S AND 1880S, Civil War veterans hankered for the morphine they got on the battlefield, and doctors discovered cocaine’s value as an anesthetic. The pharmaceutical business, led by companies such as Parke-Davis, built consumer interest in dope and coke, and the drugs became health problems.
During the first decade of the twentieth century, states experimented with regulation while support grew for federal prohibition. In 1912, the United States and a dozen other nations, including Germany, France, Italy, China, Japan, Russia, Persia, and Siam, signed the International Opium Convention at The Hague. The first international drug treaty, the convention committed its participants to suppress opiates and rid society of “hop heads.” Two years later, the United States restricted access with the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act.
The first U.S. narcotics agents had low-paying, low-status jobs deep in the “miscellaneous division” of the Treasury Department, which was charged with other distinguished duties like ensuring the quality of margarine. When early Supreme Court decisions held that the Harrison Act prohibited doctors from prescribing even “maintenance doses” of opium or coke, narcotics agents arrested thousands of physicians and closed clinics—driving addicts to shady suppliers, and creating a lucrative black market.
U.S. drug policy was rooted in morality and panic about public health. But Mexico’s antidrug law, adopted in 1916, grew partly from security concerns—or at least xenophobia. For decades, Chinese immigrants had been arriving in Mexico’s Pacific Coast cities. Some paid fifty dollars to be smuggled into California. Others remained in Mexico, and some headed into the interior, settling in Sinaloa and Sonora. There, in the Sierra Madre mountains, they found a climate to ply the trade they knew well from home: poppy cultivation.
Post-1916, the growers and traffickers of the opium that was in such demand in the States lacked a black-market regulator to supervise the illegal market for narcotics. Colonel Esteban Cantú filled that void. A cavalry officer who campaigned against the Yaqui Indians during the Mexican Revolution, Colonel Cantú took control of the Mexicali Valley. Part of the northern Baja Peninsula, Mexicali was a popular destination for American tourists. Cantú trained a private army of 1,800 men, and projected a sense of order to Americans who had reservations about their safety while visiting Mexicali’s red-light district.
Cantú’s primary revenue came from taxing vice—sex, drugs, and gaming. The Tecolote Gambling Hall paid him $15,000 a month. A syndicate of Chinese opium dealers paid $45,000 to get started, and another $10,000 a month. These “taxes,” Cantú argued, “moralized” vice by keeping the forbidden trades safe; financing public works and education; and liberating vice tourism from reliance on a corrupt and feckless central government in Mexico City.
A utilitarian outlaw, Colonel Cantú didn’t plunder or pillage; didn’t steal or menace. As Mexico’s first vice lord, he innovated a centuries-old role in Mexico.
PRIOR TO THE SPANISH CONQUEST of Mexico, in 1519, merchants paid “tribute” to the dominant warrior elites, such as the Olmecs, Toltecs, and Aztecs. The Aztecs, a wandering tribe that claimed to come from Aztlán, a mythical region in the northwest of Mexico, began as mercenary warriors for whichever tribe ruled the prosperous lake region around what is now Mexico City. Eventually, the Aztecs established their own city-state. Through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Aztec empire stretched across much of Mexico. Under Aztec rule, sophisticated cities hosted vibrant merchant economies. Governors regulated the trading markets, and adjudicated business disputes.
In 1519, when Hernán Cortés docked at Veracruz, in the Gulf of Mexico, the Spanish removed the Aztec warrior elites and leveled the empire. The natives who survived the Spanish conquest, and the disease that came with it, awoke to a new world. The encomienda system assigned zones of natives to serve individual Spanish colonists, “local nobles” known as encomenderos, who reported to the Spanish Crown.
Under Spanish rule, the natives upped their intake of pulque, a high-octane drink fermented from cactus. Imbibers blacked out, lost control, and became violent. Pulque, it was said, cast “the spell of Four Hundred Rabbits.” The Spanish Crown, worried that lazy natives produced only enough crops to pay the royal tribute, granted encomenderos the power of reparto de efectos: a monopoly to sell imported luxury items, such as horses and chocolate, to natives at inflated prices. The reparto de efectos coerced natives into accelerating production of valuable exports, such as wheat. In the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, the industrial potential of a zone was regulated by what became known as caciquismo, local-boss rule. A warlord with strongmen, the cacique morphed, during the nineteenth century, into a military man like Colonel Esteban Cantú.
As Cantú organized Mexicali into Mexico’s first zone of vice, the United States made serious changes to its trade policies—changes that would mold men with Cantú’s inclinations into very different criminals.
During the early twentieth century, trade protectionists and liberal-trade advocates in America debated between a closed economy and an open one. Ever since the Civil War, tariffs, the hallmark of a closed economy, provided half of U.S. government revenue. But in 1913, the “opens” won: Congress approved the Sixteenth Amendment, instituting a national income tax. This tax reversed the way America financed itself. By 1920, falling tariffs composed a mere 5 percent of national revenue, while income tax supplied more than half the country’s budget. This policy transformation prompted changes at the border.
On the enforcement side, this change in economic policy meant that the U.S. Customs Service acted less like a department of economic security, collecting tariffs, and more like a security force with a mandate to stop smuggling. Between 1925 and 1930, Customs personnel grew by a multiple of six. On the criminal side, smuggling shifted from evading tariffs to evading prohibition. Increased enforcement pushed up prices for prohibited goods. Mexican border towns expanded to facilitate illegal trade. In 1930, Congress created the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, or FBN, as an agency of the Department of the Treasury. The FBN fought opium and heroin, and successfully pushed for cannabis criminalization with the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. By then Colonel Cantú had retired to California. The golden era of vice traffic was just beginning.
WHEN AMERICAN PROHIBITION PUSHED ALCOHOL underground, a youngster from the Gulf Coast began smuggling whiskey and sotol (cactus moonshine) up to Texas. In the 1940s, Juan Nepomuceno Guerra graduated to gambling, prostitution, and opium. World War II renewed the U.S. demand for morphine. Nepomuceno Guerra joined a coterie of contrabandistas such as the heroin king, Jaime Herrera Nevarez; Pedro Avilés Pérez, one of the first Mexican smugglers to expand into cocaine; and Domingo Aranda, who moved mule trains of tires, sugar, coffee, and anything else rationed in America during the war years.
Heroin still surpassed cocaine in demand. In New York and Chicago, the Jewish-Italian outlaw crew of Lucky Luciano, Bugsy Siegel, Frank Costello, and Meyer Lansky sent Siegel’s girlfriend, Virginia Hill, to Mexico. She cozied up to officials, bought a nightclub in Nuevo Laredo, and shipped heroin north. In 1948, the FBN declared Mexico the source of half the illicit drugs in America. Nepomuceno Guerra organized a network of smugglers that would become known as the Gulf Cartel.
During the 1950s and ’60s, narcotics traffickers slid into an alliance with Mexico’s one-party government, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional—the Institutional Revolutionary Party—known as the PRI, or “Pree.” At that time, the United States had little to say about drugs and corruption in Mexico. It was the Kennedy era, the height of the Cold War. Cuba, Russia, Vietnam. Similar to post-9/11 America, national security got all the attention. The CIA station in Mexico City—a hub of Soviet espionage, and a base for Cuban agents—was the CIA’s most important base in Latin America. Mexico’s federal secret police, Dirección Federal de Seguridad, the Directorate of Federal Security, was a criminal incubator that organized protection for traffickers on a national scale. But the DFS also shared intelligence with the FBI and the CIA. Ignoring corruption and trafficking was a condition for this assistance.
It was only after President Kennedy announced the Alliance for Progress, a multibillion-dollar aid program intended to strengthen ties with Latin America and fight leftist groups, that the Mexican government invited the FBN to open offices in Mexico. It was a token gesture, however. Mexico’s attorney general said: no “buy cases” allowed; no FBN agents testifying in Mexican courts; and traffickers could only be arrested prior to delivering the drugs—a rule that nullified drug interdiction.
Here was a lesson that would play out several times over the next fifty years. Was it realistic to expect a dictatorship to repay a little financial largesse from abroad by suppressing the only source of income for millions of peasants? It was not. U.S. aid, or investment, or whatever it would be called, instead bought only the appearance of cooperation, temporarily, until Mexico’s one-party government returned to regulating its drug industry in the safest way possible: selling smuggling routes to traffickers in return for bribes. And still, the Americans set up law enforcement offices in Mexico with the stated intent of attacking supply, while largely ignoring the demand at home.
In 1969, Richard Nixon picked up the antidrug ball and played with it. His Project Intercept inspected more vehicles at the border, slowing commerce. The idea was to prod Mexican businessmen interested in normal commercial relations between the countries to pressure the Mexican government to get serious about drug prohibition. But the program carried an unacceptably high price. Screwing up the economy to catch a few more drug loads: Was Nixon crazy?
In the 1970s, the second wave of Mexico’s narco-bosses began to take over. On the eastern side of Mexico, Juan Nepomuceno Guerra continued to expand his dominion over the Gulf Coast and the Texas border crossings, in partnership with his nephew, Juan García Ábrego. On the western Pacific side, in the states surrounding the Sierra Madre Occidental, the domain belonged to several traffickers of the Guadalajara Cartel—men such as Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo and Rafael Caro Quintero. Chief among the Guadalajara crew was the godfather of Mexican traffickers, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo. Born in 1946, Félix Gallardo—known as El Padrino, the Godfather—had been a cop and a governor’s bodyguard in the state of Sinaloa. El Padrino’s close working relationship with authorities made it seem as if he was the government, as if the drug trade, like oil and other industries of that era, was nationalized.
Mexico’s authoritarian PRI was created in the 1920s, in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. For all its other faults, the PRI was well equipped to manage a country with a large criminal element. All government positions relied on PRI patronage. Within law enforcement, careers were assigned through party connections. Politicians or cops who did business with a criminal that lacked the PRI’s blessing would be told to stop; if they persisted, they were killed. The PRI’s system of regulating the narcotics industry assured traffickers that a few large bribes protected their business at all levels, from Mexico City up to the border. Men such as El Padrino and Nepomuceno Guerra paid the Directorate of Federal Security, the Federal Judicial Police, the attorney general, and the local police commander.
As part of the deal, known as the Pax Mafiosa, the PRI required that criminals adhere to certain principles. Since violence negatively affected the PRI’s popularity with the electorate, with gringo tourists, and with Washington, traffickers had to operate more or less peacefully. This arrangement meant no dead people left in the streets; no media scandals; periodic imprisonment of low-level traffickers; and investment of drug revenue into poor communities.
By managing the black market, the PRI minimized violence, but this relative peace would be short-lived.
IN 1973, NIXON CONSOLIDATED SEVERAL drug-control agencies into one superagency, the Drug Enforcement Administration. At the same time he prevailed on Turkey, then the world’s premier opium producer, to prohibit that drug, which in turn inflated the value of Mexican opium. In 1977, when Mexico saw that there might be money and political benefits in the antidrug agenda, they agreed to let the Americans spray crops. Operation Condor appeared to be a success: In addition to putting 39 helicopters, 22 airplanes, and one executive jet in the coffers of Mexico’s attorney general, the crop eradication seemed to work. Strong herbicides like paraquat, which kills green plant matter on contact, reduced Mexico’s share of the U.S. marijuana market from 75 percent down to 4 percent, and its share of the U.S. heroin market from 67 percent to 25 percent. To Americans, Mexican drug growers being marched off their land made powerful media images. By pasting “dark, gun-toting foreigner” on the face of what had hitherto been an unclear enemy, those images began to cement the terms of the war.
Mexico also got nice publicity for its cooperation, but it reduced the American presence after Operation Condor was over, and said that DEA pilots would no longer be able to fly unescorted through Mexican airspace. The Directorate of Federal Security—which the Americans still relied on for intelligence—coalesced, once again, around El Padrino’s centralized control of the drug industry.
In Washington, the drug war remained a mostly secondary interest. Jimmy Carter, never a fan of prohibition, was concerned with reducing U.S. dependence on Middle East oil and striking a deal for Mexican oil. But Washington’s priorities always shifted back to drugs whenever national security was implicated. In the early 1980s, the overseas smuggling route for cocaine, from Central America to Florida, turned Miami into a war zone. In 1982, Vice President George H. W. Bush announced the South Florida Task Force, a multiagency effort that emphasized interdiction and prosecution of smugglers. American politicians from the East and Southwest complained that the task force wasn’t solving the problem but displacing it: Drug traffic now moved through California, Arizona, and Texas. So the task force concept expanded to five other regional centers: Los Angeles, El Paso, New Orleans, Chicago, and New York.
As cocaine traffic shifted to Mexico, El Padrino’s control of the Mexican drug market began to fall part. In 1985, El Padrino was blamed for the torture and murder of DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, whose face appeared on the cover of Time. Operation Leyenda, a huge DEA investigation, sought to bring everyone responsible for Camarena’s death to justice. Several capos, including Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo and Rafael Caro Quintero—El Padrino’s associates in the Guadalajara Cartel—were arrested. The DFS was disbanded, leaving Mexican traffickers to fend for themselves, and set up new protection arrangements with whomever had the power to make such deals.
To Americans, the Camarena tragedy seemed, ironically, like progress. But the dramatic overreaction to Camarena’s murder set another drug war pattern: Like a cartel boss’s capture, or his subsequent escape from prison, the murder of a single DEA agent was the kind of micro-event that would blur America’s ability to see what was happening in Mexico.
The same year of Camarena’s death, a major earthquake in Mexico City sent the value of the peso plummeting, and left Mexican cops, among others, desperate for dollars. In the past, when a dollar bought twenty-four pesos, corrupt police didn’t do much dirty work for the drug traffickers who paid them bribes. But as the value of the peso fell, senior police officials started providing substantive labor to traffickers, such as security and smuggling.
In 1987, El Padrino—sensing the breakdown of Mexico’s system-wide impunity for traffickers—convened the nation’s top traffickers in Acapulco and divided the trade routes among them.
The Tijuana route went to the Arellano brothers.
Juárez went to Amado Carrillo Fuentes, known as Lord of the Skies for his innovations in aerial smuggling.
The Pacific Coast went to one of El Padrino’s protégés, Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán. Chapo grew up in the Sierra Madre mountains during the 1960s. As a boy, he sat at his mother’s table and drew stacks of fifty-peso bills on rectangles of coloring paper. “Keep them safe for me,” he told her when he ran outside to play in the hills. It was there, among cannabis and opium ranchers, that Chapo—Shorty—left school in the third grade to work.
The Gulf territory, along with northeast Mexico, remained with the Gulf Cartel and Juan García Ábrego.
El Padrino’s “privatization” of the drug industry created a new landscape of independent, competitive subsidiaries. Without a central authority to reinforce the benefits of compromise, the men who ran these regions gradually traded dispute resolution at the talking table for a more aggressive style. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, territorial skirmishes broke out between Chapo Guzmán and the Arellano brothers of Tijuana. There were kidnappings and car bombings. In 1993, Arellano assassins converged on the airport in Guadalajara to assassinate Chapo as he was catching a flight. Chapo escaped when the hit men gunned down a Roman Catholic cardinal instead, creating the sort of catastrophic publicity that the PRI deplored.
But the PRI was on its way out.
Opposition parties were winning state elections in Mexico. Each year, beginning in 1989 and accelerating through the 1990s, more and more power dispersed among local politicians such as state governors, who could now form new patronage networks with traffickers. For a while, the PRI managed to retain some control over the drug industry by micromanaging corruption agreements. Raul Salinas—the brother of PRI then-president Carlos Salinas—personally conducted auctions to sell off protection areas during the early 1990s, essentially subcontracting out to local officials the right to extort traffickers. But the PRI would gradually lose its monopoly on the authority to anoint traffickers and guarantee protection.
Traffickers, meanwhile, no longer knew whom to pay. Did bribing one law enforcement group guarantee cooperation from another? In this new environment, many traffickers preferred to hire private armies rather than outsource ineffective protection to the state. What state? By 1995, current and former law enforcement members would comprise half of Mexico’s nine hundred armed criminal bands.
From warrior elites to caciques to Esteban Cantú and the contemporary capo—the narco-state, when it arrived, was five centuries in the making. Poverty and wealth, supply and demand, national security, free trade, and the exigent morality of world power—whatever war came would be as irreconcilable as the agendas that defined it, and restraint would not be a tenet of the new cartel ethos.
Many would link the modern-day Mexican Drug War to 2006, when a new president launched his assault against the cartels. Some would say it started here, a decade earlier, when the decentralization of Mexico’s political system set in motion the most violent criminal organization in modern history.
Others would say it began with dinner.