Marijuana arrests in the United States increased by 77 percent from 1948 to 1951. After Dr Harris Isbell, director of research at the Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, testified before Congress that marijuana was not addictive and did not lead to violence or sexual depravity, Anslinger changed course and lobbied that marijuana—even if not dangerous in and of itself—was a “gateway” to harder drugs like heroin and cocaine. The government agreed, passing the Boggs Act in 1952 that quadrupled mandatory sentencing for marijuana possession and sales, and increased them again with the Narcotics Control Act of 1956, also known as the Daniel Act.
Nixon's war on drugs
Public, medical and academic attitudes toward drugs, particularly marijuana, changed profoundly in the 1960s. In 1971, the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse drafted a report that indicated that the laws had not worked to decrease drug addiction or levels of use, and recommended the decriminalization of marijuana. President Richard Nixon refused even to read the report, however, naming drugs to be the nation's top enemy (even though the military was still involved in the southeast Asian conflict) declaring a “War on Drugs.”
His theory was that by using military and paramilitary forces to seal its borders, the U.S. could stem the flow of drugs into the country, reducing use. Billions of dollars and many lives were spent on this controversial policy. Of course, marijuana was just one of many illegal drugs—and one few considered addictive or dangerous any more—but it was included anyway.
In 1986, the RAND Corporation think tank put together a study that concluded that the concept and practice of interdiction did virtually nothing to stem the flow of drugs into the country. Another 1994 study by the same group indicated that the War on Drugs actually helped organized crime by pushing drug prices up.
Still, both the United States and Canada retained it as their policy against illegal drugs, but President Barack Obama decided to retire the phrase “War on Drugs” when he was elected in 2008.
Public attitudes toward marijuana have softened considerably over the years and the individual American states and Canadian provinces have enacted legislation or ruled judiciously to reflect this. In 2007, Ontario ruled that criminal prosecution for small amounts of marijuana was unconstitutional. Justice Norman Edmonson said that, “there is no offence known to law which the accused have committed,” meaning that while growing and selling marijuana in Canada is still illegal, purchasing it and possessing it is not. While that may sound like hypocrisy, the theory is that drug dealers are breaking the law, not drug users. After that landmark ruling came a flood of states and provinces changing their attitudes toward the drug. By 2011, although actual decriminalization for small amounts of marijuana for personal use was still rare, law enforcement in all of Canada and the more densely populated parts of the United States stopped charging people for possession of small amounts of marijuana.
As it has been since the Pancho Villa days, most of the marijuana in the United States and Canada comes from Mexico, with a significant amount also from farms on American soil cultivated by Mexican nationals. The DEA also claims that at least 90 percent of the cocaine entering the United States comes through Mexico and that Mexico is also the biggest exporter of methamphetamine.
The most obvious problem with the War on Drugs concept is the border between the United States and Mexico. It is almost 2,000 miles long and much of it passes through wilderness, mountains and desert, making it nearly impossible to defend. Damming and irrigation have reduced much of the Rio Grande to a trickle and, in spots, it is easily forded by foot. There are about 250 million border crossings annually and the U.S. Department of Immigration estimates about 5 million illegal entries into the United States from Mexico each year. There is even a professional class of border-crossing experts called coyotes or polleros (chicken farmers).
Illegal crossings are often dangerous. Migrants must face American Border Patrol and Immigration officers, who round up and return as many as they can, as well as dehydration and exposure to the elements. U.S. officials recovered the bodies of 417 illegal crossers in 2009. The Mexican government stopped publishing such figures after finding 499 dead would-be crossers on their side in 2000. In 2007, a purpose-built morgue in Tucson, Arizona had to add refrigerated trucks to handle the overflow of corpses.
But still they keep coming, in rising numbers. The primary reasons for this Mexican diaspora are economic. With wages for even the most menial jobs in the United States far higher than just about any job in Mexico, many younger workers in a wide array of occupations migrate north for work. Compounding this is the fact that many American businesses and individuals routinely hire undocumented workers to save on wages, benefits and paperwork. In fact, large swaths of the American and Canadian economies rely on undocumented workers.
Mexico joins the cocaine trade
Anslinger may have been wrong about marijuana use being a gateway to harder drugs for users, but if he was talking about traffickers, he was right. Of course, the real money for traffickers isn't in marijuana, but in cocaine. Cocaine is derived from the coca leaf, which is native to the Andes Mountains of South America. Indigenous people in the area chewed the leaves as a stimulant and its use became widespread as the Incas—an indigenous empire not unlike that of the Aztecs—cultivated it as a trade crop. When the Spanish conquistadores arrived, they scoffed at coca, but soon came to embrace it, often smoking it with tobacco.
Pharmaceutical cocaine use became widespread as a stimulant and tonic. And, as many people are aware, the iconic American soft drink Coca-Cola actually contained cocaine from 1886 until 1903. Cocaine fell into disrepute for many of the same reasons marijuana did, but the tales of addiction and erratic behavior were far more grounded in fact. It was outlawed in the United States in 1914.
Demand for cocaine rose steadily and it has become the second-most-consumed illegal drug after marijuana for generations. For most of that time, the high price of cocaine meant it was used only by the relatively well off. But in 1984, police in Miami began intercepting a new form of cocaine. Called crack because of the sound it makes when it's cooking, this new type of cocaine offers the same high as traditional powdered cocaine, but at a tiny fraction of the price. For the first time in history, people could get a coke high for as little as $5 a pop.
Crack quickly spread to New York City and then Los Angeles, becoming immensely popular in a very short time. This demand—which still exists today, but generally in smaller cities and towns—fueled a tremendous increase in cocaine importation from South America and violent crime in North American cities, as gangs fought over territory that was suddenly incredibly profitable.
Coca is traditionally cultivated in a number of South American countries—Bolivia and Peru among others—but the biggest producer has traditionally been Colombia, which is also where virtually all cocaine was processed. The coke was then shipped from Colombia's north coast, primarily to Miami, from where it was distributed throughout North America.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and Coast Guard became adept, however, at intercepting the boats and aircraft the Colombian cartels sent across the Caribbean, and cocaine shipments to Florida were slowed considerably from the 1980s to the '90s. The Colombians were forced to look for another route. Because Mexicans had long been funneling marijuana to the United States overland though California, Arizona and Texas, it made sense to hire them to take cocaine along the same route.
At the time, the Colombian cartels—particularly the Cali, Medellin and Norte de Valle—were incredibly powerful within their own country. In an effort to bolster their power, the cartels strove to destabilize the government—which had been fighting a war against a number of rebel groups since the 1960s. They routinely killed or kidnapped police, prosecutors and judges in efforts to intimidate the state into leaving them to conduct their business without interference.
In the middle 1980s, the most visible of these cartels was the Medellin, led by the notorious Pablo
Escobar. He supported an opposition party, the Nuevo Liberalismo, and its leader, Senator Luis Carlos Galán. Escobar was hired as a deputy to Congressman Alberto Santofimio, but his notoriety forced Galán to dismiss him, and the Nuevo Liberalismo party later aligned with the War on Drugs.
Rebuffed, Escobar threw his weight behind the Movimiento 19 de Abril (19th of April Movement or M19), a guerrilla group supporting the ideals of Simón Bolívar, including national self-sufficiency, pan-Latin American unity and an end to government. With the gradual weakening and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, rebel groups everywhere lost their primary source of revenue and weapons, and the M19 saw the Medellin Cartel as a suitable financial backer. For their part, Escobar and his group won a great deal of public support and sowed unrest with the government by providing work, healthcare and school supplies for people who could not have otherwise afforded them.
The first Mexican drug lord
At the time that the Colombians turned to the overland route, there were no powerful cartels in Mexico, but there was a Godfather. Born in 1946 in the Pacific coast city of Culiacán, Sinaloa, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo sold chicken and sausages from his bicycle as a boy. After school, he became a Federale (officer of the Mexican national police) before being hired as a bodyguard for Sinaloa's PRI governor, Leopoldo Sanchez Celis, in the late 1960s despite carrying just 160 pounds on his six-foot-two frame.
Another of Sanchez Celis' bodyguards was Pedro Avilés Pérez. He is considered by many to be the first true Mexican drug lord, after taking over his old family business which had begun with smuggling alcohol (and some marijuana) into the U.S. during prohibition. He became Félix Gallardo's mentor. Not only did Avilés Pérez control much of the flow of marijuana and heroin into the United States well into the 1970s, he brought innovations to the business like using airplanes to carry drugs and widespread bribery of officials. Félix Gallardo's primary responsibility under Avilés Pérez was to bribe and/or intimidate police and other government officials.
When Avilés Pérez was killed in a shootout with Federales in 1978, Félix Gallardo assumed the reins of his organization and soon controlled virtually all drug trade to the United States through the border city and popular tourist destination Tijuana. He earned the nickname “El Patrino” (the Godfather).
Félix Gallardo had been known by the DEA for years, but they didn't have any idea of the extent of his operations and how much protection he was afforded by the PRI government until 1984. They sent an undercover agent—Enrique Camarena, a former U.S. Marine, police officer and firefighter—to infiltrate the organization. He was quickly very successful, befriending Félix Gallardo and sending information back to the United States. Camarena's nickname was Kike, a diminutive of Enrique pronounced KEE-kay, but he is often referred to as “Kiki” in mainstream media, although that's a feminine version of the same name.
What he reported allowed the DEA to convince the Mexican army to launch an operation against Rancho Búfalo, a 2,500-acre marijuana farm with more than 3,000 employees and annual production of $8 billion. With 450 men supported by helicopter gunships, the farm was taken down and the product destroyed.
Félix Gallardo sent word that finding the rat was of utmost importance and Camarena was kidnapped along with his pilot, Alfredo Zavala Avelar, in early February 1985. Their tortured, decomposed bodies were found a month later in the southern state of Michoacán.
The DEA began an investigation and the identity of the kidnappers surprised them. “We determined that the individuals who took Camarena off the street were law enforcement personnel,” said then-DEA administrator Jack Lawn. “That was particularly galling to me and to law enforcement agents throughout the nation, because when you send an agent overseas, he has an in-house support mechanism, and that is a fellow law enforcement officer. When the system becomes so corrupt that the law enforcement community in the host country upon which you depend is part of the problem, then nothing is safe.”
Shortly afterwards, the Federales informed the DEA that they had five Jalisco state police officers in custody. Under interrogation, they implicated themselves in the kidnapping, giving written statements about their involvement. One of the suspects mysteriously died during interrogation. The Federales arrested 11 more men based on the information from the Jalisco cops, and issued warrants for two of Félix Gallardo's lieutenants, Rafael Caro Quintero, who was already wanted by the DEA for a money-laundering scheme in San Diego, and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo. Caro Quintero (who many believed paid the Federales to kill Avilés Pérez, facilitating Félix Gallardo's rise to power) was discovered by DEA agents in Costa Rica and extradited to Mexico. Under interrogation, Caro Quintero cracked, admitting to his part in the kidnapping, but said he was unaware of who killed the men and that he was shocked and dismayed to learn that they had been tortured.
Fonseca Carrillo and his right-hand man Samuel Ramirez Razo surrendered after the Mexican army surrounded Fonseca Carillo's villa in Puerto Vallarta. They both admitted their roles in Camarena's kidnapping, but denied involvement with Zavala Avelar's abduction—which they had already established had happened a few hours after Camarena's—or either death.
After a lengthy investigation, the DEA and FBI located the house in Guadalajara in which the men had been tortured and determined that the Mexican government possessed audio tapes of their interrogation. The Mexicans reluctantly turned over the tapes and the Americans arrested and extradited Caro Quintera's bodyguard Javier Vásquez Velasco, who participated in Camarena's kidnapping and later killed two American tourists believing them to be DEA agents, along with Humberto Álvarez Machaín, a doctor they alleged kept Camarena alive so that his torture would be prolonged.
The DEA came away from the Camarena investigations with a new understanding of how corrupt the Mexican officials were. “The Mexican government knew what happened, and it became more clear to us that the government of Mexico indeed was covering up the assassination, the killing of Kike Camarena,” said Lawn. “When we [asked them about finding the body], they said, ‘Well, we have Mexican officers killed all the time. You may never get the body back.’ So then, we began to get information. We found a body here, we found a body there, we found another body here. They were finding bodies left and right—none of which were the right bodies. And they said, ‘We know that Camarena is at this particular site.’ But [it] was not at the site. ‘And we found him, he was found by a Mexican peasant in a gully.’ The body had not been eaten by insects. We knew it [had been] buried. We were able to have the FBI laboratory tell us about soil samples, where the body had been buried. There was no cooperation. We then asked for the clothing that Kike had on. That was all destroyed. The destruction of evidence was everywhere.”
Gallardo establishes the cartels
Because of the massive loss of product and manpower after the Rancho Búfalo raid, Félix Gallardo turned to other sources of revenue. He made friends with Honduran cocaine trafficker Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros, who had been instrumental in helping his business partner, General Policarpo Paz García, seize control of the country and name himself president in what has since been called the 1978 Cocaine Coup and which supported the anti-Sandanista government Contras in Nicaragua. Matta Ballesteros then introduced Félix Gallardo to Escobar.
Soon, Félix Gallardo was using the effective infrastructure he had put together to move marijuana and heroin into the United States to traffic huge quantities of cocaine. This presented a number of problems for the DEA. The agency's efforts were still aimed primarily at the Colombians and their traditional trafficking routes headed toward Miami over the Caribbean. Overland border crossings are much harder to intercept and control. With 250 million legal border crossings a year (not to mention the illegal ones), determining which vehicle or pedestrian is carrying drugs poses a massive challenge. Making things worse was the fact that relatively tiny amounts of cocaine could be smuggled over the border profitably, while to get the same revenue that a far larger, more conspicuous
amount of marijuana would be required.
At first, Félix Gallardo was paid in cash, with literally planeloads of currency landing in Mexico. But as the partnership progressed, he began to demand payment in product. The Colombian cartels—weakened by arrests, including many extraditions to the United States, and infighting—had little choice but to comply, as the DEA's more sophisticated technology and tactics made the Caribbean route increasingly dangerous. This new arrangement allowed Félix Gallardo to become a cocaine baron in his own right, with up to 50 percent of the entire product moving through his channels—instead of being a mere organizer of drug mules, he was a true drug lord like the Colombians.
Aware that he was in the DEA's crosshairs, Félix Gallardo took measures to reduce his profile. In 1987, he moved his family to back Culiacán and set up a summit meeting with all of the area gang leaders who worked for his organization in Guadalajara. This led to the DEA calling his group the Guadalajara Cartel. He told them that he was dividing his territory among them and that, although he was no longer taking an active role in the daily workings of the business, he was still the boss and that they would have to pay him tribute.
He gave his oldest and most lucrative territory, the Tijuana route, to his nephews, the Arellano Félix brothers as the Tijuana Cartel. The second-best route, which links Juárez to El Paso, went to Amado Carrillo Fuentes (who had a fleet of twenty-seven Boeing 727 jetliners ferrying drugs into Mexico and cash out) and his family as the Juárez Cartel. The Sonora crossing south of Arizona was granted to Miguel Caro Quintero, Rafael Caro Quintero's younger brother, as the Sonora cartel. Juan García Ábrego was given control of the Matamoros crossing to Brownsville and Laredo, Texas, as the Gulf Cartel. The final area, between Tijuana and Sonora was given to Joaquín “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzmán Loera and Ismael Zambada García as the Sinaloa Cartel because that's where they were based. This is sometimes also referred to as the Pacific Cartel. To maintain control, Félix Gallardo kept the management of relations with the top men in Colombia to himself, naming Héctor “El Güero” (the Blond) Palma Salazar as his second-in-command and the nominal head of the Guadalajara Cartel, an umbrella group that oversaw the rest.
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