To Die in Mexico

by John Gibler

  The headlines assault. El Universal, July 25, 2010: “A Total of 70 Bodies Found in Narcograves in Nuevo León.” CNN México, June 11, 2010: “Armed Group Kills 19 Inmates at Rehabilitation Center in Chihuahua.” Milenio, May 1, 2010: “55 Thousand Pesos to Kill a Family.” Notimex, April, 9, 2010: “Two Bodies Found Hanging from a Bridge in Cuernavaca.” La Jornada, March 29, 2010: “10 Youths Between 13 and 19 Years Old Executed in Mountains of Durango.” New York Times, February 2, 2010: “Gunmen in Mexico Kill 15 in Attack on a Teenagers’ Party.” Associated Press, January 8, 2010: “Mexico Cartel Stitches Rival’s Face on Soccer Ball.”

  Of the 22,000 executions carried out between December 2006 and April 2010, the Mexican federal attorney general’s office (Procuraduría General de la República, or PGR) had investigated 1,200 cases. Meaning the Mexican government did not investigate 95 percent of the drug war murders. (By May 2011, the known death toll had reached over 38,000 people, and the dismal level of arrests and convictions stayed the same. Some 30,000 murders were not even under investigation, their perpetrators thus guaranteed impunity.) The Mexican national daily El Universal first reported this story on June 21, 2010, after the 22,000 number became part of the public record in the Mexican Senate. The story quotes Jorge Chabat, a well-known drug-trafficking analyst and professor at the nonprofit Center for Economic Research and Teaching in Mexico City. Chabat says, “The small number of serious homicide cases being investigated by the PGR is a reflection of the incapacity to investigate those crimes.” Incapacity? Ninety-five percent is too overwhelming a number to reflect incapacity. Ninety-five percent indicates an astonishing success rate, where the objective is not justice, but impunity.

  Federal police make scores of arrests across the country every day. Those arrests lead to a minuscule number of convictions. According to Mexican federal reports analyzed by the investigative newsmagazine ContraLínea, of the 121,199 people that soldiers and police had detained in three and a half years of Calderón’s war, prosecutors brought charges against only 1,306 for having links to one of the eight cartels presumed to operate in Mexico. Judges sentenced 735 to prison for organized crime. In 2009, federal police arrested, amidst great fanfare, eleven mayors and twenty-four other officials in Michoacán state for alleged links to drug traffickers. By late September 2010, prosecutors dropped the cases and judges ordered all but one set free for lack of evidence. The mayors and officials all belonged to the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and had been arrested six weeks before the midterm federal elections. In the drug war, detentions and arrests produce results on the television screen, not in the courtroom.

  And this is what they tell us: if you are found dead, shot through the face, wrapped in a soiled blanket, and left on some desolate roadside, then you are somehow to blame. You must have been into something bad to end up like that. Surely you were a drug dealer, a drug trafficker, or an official on the take. The very fact of your execution is the judgment against you, the determination of your guilt.

  Mexican political cartoonist Antonio Helguera published a drawing in La Jornada, in March 2010, that captures this official logic of death in Mexico’s and the United States’ drug war. The title of the cartoon is Morir en México, To Die in Mexico. Eight asymmetrically aligned gravestones fill the frame and read, clockwise from the left: “She must have been into something; It was a gang feud; They murdered amongst themselves; What was he doing at that hour?; It was a settling of accounts; She dressed provocatively; Who knows what he was getting into; She was a whore.”

  The official logic of death seeks to safeguard the legitimacy of the army and federal police, and through them Calderón and his enforcers, to cloak them in a layer of discursive Kevlar that deflects all scrutiny. In the drug war, the dead are guilty, ipso facto, of their own murder. And whosoever would seek to argue otherwise confronts the likelihood of looking, briefly, at an AK-47.

  But the drug war death squads make mistakes. And names wait with the dead.

  ONE SHOULD NOT FORGET that the United States invaded Mexico in 1846 and conquered half of its national territory. Mexicans do not forget this; many in the United States never learn it.

  The United States later invaded the port of Veracruz in 1914 during the Mexican Revolution to aid Venustiano Carranza in his war against Pancho Villa’s Northern Division and Emiliano Zapata’s Liberation Army of the South. U.S. intervention in Mexico is simultaneously a grounded historical fear-and-loathing in the population; a rhetorical device employed by all sectors of the political class to rally nationalist sentiment; and a brutish daily fact of Mexican life. The North American Free Trade Agreement and the drug war are examples of the latter.

  The blood and chaos that accompany drug trafficking from Mexico into the United States are inextricably related to the simultaneous demand within the U.S. population for the classic illegal products one can use to get high or seek oblivion, and the insistence of U.S. politicians on an ideological commitment to prohibition that seeks to veil prohibition’s use for social control.

  Social control? Might that be exaggerating, or conspiracy theorizing? Civil rights advocate and litigator Michelle Alexander recently published a study of the drug war’s impact on people of color, particularly African Americans, called The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. She argues that slavery evolved through Reconstruction into a caste system based on racial discrimination that in turn evolved during the era of the Civil Rights Movement and beyond into the drug war politics of mass incarceration of people of color. “We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it,” Alexander writes. Felony convictions, she reminds us, open the door for all manner of legal discrimination: denial of the right to vote, serve on a jury, or access public education benefits; subjection to employment and housing discrimination. “Quite belatedly,” Alexander writes, “I came to see that mass incarceration in the United States had, in fact, emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-designed system of racialized social control that functions in a manner similar to Jim Crow.” That emergence came through the drug war.

  President Ronald Reagan declared his War on Drugs in February 1982, a time when drug use in the United States was in decline, prisons seemed to be on their way out, Miami was awash in cocaine money and blood, and Central America was in the throes of left-wing revolutions. The drug war would radically alter all of that. Between 1980 and 2005, the number of people in U.S. prisons and jails on drug charges increased by 1,100 percent. By 2010 there were 2 million people in prisons and jails across the country. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration of any nation in the world. In 2009, Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project wrote, “The number of people incarcerated for a drug offense is now greater than the number incarcerated for all [other]offenses in 1980.” And how is this a racialized form of social control? Again, according to the Sentencing Project, African Americans alone make up 14 percent of regular drug users and 56 percent of persons in state prison for drug offenses; African Americans serve almost as much time in federal prison for drug offenses (58.7 months) as whites do for violent offenses (61.7 months). More African Americans are behind bars now than were enslaved in 1850. In addition to racial profiling on the street, for twenty years possession of five grams of crack carried a mandatory five-year prison sentence; there was a 100:1 crack-to-powder-cocaine sentencing disparity, meaning that it took possession of 100 grams of white powder cocaine to require the same mandatory minimum sentence as possession of one gram of crack. (This law was revised on August 3, 2010, to require possession of 28 grams of crack to trigger the mandatory five-year sentence.)

  The use of prohibition for racialized social control is the genesis of the modern drug-prohibition era. The first drug-prohibition law ever passed was an 1875 city ordinance in San Francisco banning opium, and with it, criminalizing working-class Chinese immigrants and attacking their local economy. The law came after more than two decades of discriminatory laws passe
d in California against Chinese workers, and six years before the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The drug war has its deepest roots in racism.

  In 1900, people in the United States could purchase opium, morphine, heroin, marijuana, and cocaine over the counter at drugstores or direct from producers through mail-order catalogues. Within twenty years that would change. Even though upper-class whites consumed opiates, cocaine, and marijuana, the prohibitionist fervor linked each drug with working-class people of color: opiates with Chinese, cocaine with African Americans, and marijuana with Mexicans. Historian Richard Davenport-Hines writes in The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics, “The fantasy of cocainised blacks from plantations and construction sites going on sexual rampages among white women soon raised a racist panic. A writer in the Medical Record, for example, warned that ‘hitherto inoffensive, law-abiding negroes’ were transformed by cocaine into a ‘constant menace’ whose ‘sexual desires are increased and perverted.’”

  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 D
epartment 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.