by Ioan Grillo
Every day, Mexican soldiers buzz over the Triangle in helicopters searching for the light green of marijuana crops or the pink of opium. The troops find crops and burn them; they are such experts now, they can rip up and torch an acre of marijuana in less than an hour. Then mountain farmers sow more marijuana and poppy seeds and raise more green and pink blobs to be spotted from the sky. And the ritual starts again.
The crossroads where I gawk at opium is on the southwest corner of this Golden Triangle in the state of Sinaloa. There are gangsters all over these mountains, but most of the top dogs come from here. While Sicily is the home of the Italian mafia, Sinaloa is the cradle of Mexican drug gangs, the birthplace of the nation’s oldest and most powerful network of traffickers, known as the Sinaloa Cartel.
American agents only started using the name Sinaloa Cartel in indictments in the last couple of years. Before that they called it the Federation, and before that a host of other names such as the Guadalajara Cartel—named after Mexico’s second city, which Sinaloan crime bosses used as a base of operations. But all these names are just approximations to describe a quarrelsome empire of traffickers that spans out from Sinaloa across half the U.S. border. Some capos of this empire are linked by blood or marriage to the very first peasants who grew opium in the heights a century ago. It is an unbroken dynasty.
Like Sicily, Sinaloa has geographical traits that are condusive to organized crime. The state is a little smaller than West Virginia, but anyone who wants to disappear can move rapidly into the Sierra Madre and slip over peaks into Sonora, Chihuahua, or Durango. Beneath the highlands, Sinaloa boasts four hundred miles of Pacific coastline, where contraband has been smuggled in and out for centuries. Silver, muskets, opium, and pseudophedrine pills to make crystal meth have all been sneaked across its shores. Between the sea and the mountains, Sinaloa has fertile valleys that have spawned great plantations—particularly in tomatoes and onions—and earth teeming with gold, silver, and copper. This natural wealth fueled the growth of the state capital, Culiacán, a lively city built where the gushing Tamazula and Humaya rivers meet, and the buzzing port of Mazatlán.
Commercial hubs are crucial for organized crime, providing headquarters and businesses to launder money. Again, such merchant centers mark a similarity between Sinaloa and other criminal hot spots. Sicily developed a mafia that bridged an unruly countryside and the commercial hub of Palermo, a port linking North Africa and Europe. Medellín in Colombia was a buzzing market city surrounded by bandit hills when its infamous son Pablo Escobar rose to be the world’s number one cocaine trafficker. Criminal conspiracies do not spring up in certain regions by pure chance.
Sinaloa has a history of unruliness going back long before anyone talked about the Sinaloa Cartel. Pronounced see-nah-loh-ah, the name comes from the word for a local spiky plant in the language of the Cahita, one of six indigenous peoples that flourished in the region before the arrival of Europeans. Sinaloan tribes were mostly nomads who hunted and gathered for food, unlike the great empires of the Aztecs (Mexicas) and Mayas to the south. But their resistance to European invaders was more ferocious and effective than that of the vast Aztec legions, who fell before Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in 1521. When Spanish swashbucklers tried to extend their empire into the northwest, Sinaloan tribes thwarted them, aided by the hostile terrain. One of the tribes’ most noted triumphs was the murder of conquistador Pedro de Montoya in 1584 by Sinaloan indigenous Zuaques.3
Scarred Spaniards returned to Mexico City and wrote of ritual cannibalism among the ferocious Sinaloan tribes. Some historians dispute the claims as Spanish horror stories. But whether truth or myth, the idea has been taken on wholeheartedly by modern Sinaloans, who proudly boast that when the Spanish came, they were devoured. Whether they feasted on victims or not, indigenous resistance turned Sinaloa into a bloodstained frontier with only skeleton settlements by the end of the sixteenth century.
Jesuit missionaries found crucifixes were more effective than cannons at bringing tribesman into the Catholic empire. The conquest of Sinaloa was thus based more on faith than submission to the sword. The effect can be felt today, with Sierra Madre folk holding dear to their spiritual beliefs and folk saints. But the region continued to exist on the fringe of the law, serving as a hotbed for silver and gun contraband during the War of Independence from Spain from 1810 to 1821.
After banishing the Spanish Crown, Mexico suffered decades of civil strife and upheavals, allowing bandits to flourish in Sinaloa and elsewhere. One of the key issues Mexico has struggled with since independence is security. The inheritors of New Spain suddenly ruled a complicated country of competing fiefdoms and ethnic groups. The Spanish left the legacies of a corrupt bureaucracy, torturous police, and millions of dispossessed. The rulers needed a system to control this mess. But in the first decades of the nineteenth century, they were more concerned with who was top dog. Coup followed coup. Liberals battled with conservatives. Descendants of Spaniards clutched for power while indigenous tribes and bandits raided in frontier territories.
Internal disorder left Mexico weak against the ambitions of its powerful northern neighbor. Texan militias and then the full U.S. army defeated Mexican troops in two wars, and the United States strong-armed Mexico into selling the entire northern third of its territory. The possessions ceded in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe included huge chunks of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming, the whole of California, Nevada, and Utah, with political recognition of the loss of Texas.4 In total, the ceded territory measured more than nine hundred thousand square miles, laying the foundations for the USA to become a twentieth-century superpower. Sinaloa lay some 360 miles south of this new line in the sand.
The Mexican-American War remains a burning-hot bone of contention between the two nations. Mexico annually commemorates a squad of young cadets shot dead by American troops (los ninos héroes), and politicians routinely bark about the imperial monster to the north. Meanwhile, the vast wave of Mexican migration to the United States is referred to as la reconquista—the reconquest. Many Texans or Arizonans, on the other hand, are bitterly incensed at accusations they stole the mammoth chunk of turf. The few inhabitants of the acquired territories, they argue, were liberated by the green-capped soldiers (at whom Mexicans are said to have shouted “Green, go”—the origin of the word gringo).
A 2009 billboard ad by Swedish vodka brewer Absolut illustrated how these wounds are still sore. Behind the slogan IN AN ABSOLUT WORLD, the ad showed an imaginary map in which a giant Mexico stretches close to the Canadian border and dwarfs the United States. The ad helped sell liquor and got some chuckles in Mexico. But Americans were so angry they bombarded the vodka brewer with thousands of complaints until Absolut withdrew the ad and apologized for causing offense. These attitudes all have a profound effect on the Mexican Drug War—and the knee-deep role of the United States.
Following loss of territory and pride, Mexico plunged into more civil strife and disorder—until dictator Porfirio Díaz took its reins. A muleteer of Mixtec origins, Don Porfirio was a war hero against the Americans and the French, before ruling Mexico with a big stick from 1876 to 1911. His domination of power was not all about force. He found an effective formula to control the wild Mexican beast—a network of local chieftains, or caciques, who all got their piece of the pie. But if anyone dared to defy his rule, Don Porfirio would smash back with brutality. Up in the Sierra Madre, this meant rivers of blood. The Yaqui tribe refused to give up their ancestral lands to make way for sprawling plantations. Díaz unleashed manhunts, transporting prisoners in chains to tobacco plantations in Mexico’s swampy south. Most died from disease and inhumane conditions.
But amid heightened security, the dictator oversaw rapid industrialization and mass agriculture. In Sinaloa, Díaz’s rich friends developed profitable plantations, while American and British companies built railroads and dynamited mine shafts. Industrialization brought Sinaloa into the international grid, beckoning steamers from across
the globe. The plantations also swallowed the plots of small farmers, unleashing an army of landless peasants hungry for opportunity. The territory was ripe for trafficking. Now all Sinaloan bandits needed was a product. And in the reign of Don Porfirio, pretty pink opium poppies were first brought to the Sinaloan highlands.
A century after Porfirio, I stare at Matilde’s poppies, which grow between surreal-shaped cacti that sprout out of the ground like tentacles. Stepping closer, I feel the petals are as soft as velvet and release a sweet aroma like an English garden on a spring morning. Such a pretty plant, yet the source of so much pain. Covering the fury of the drug war—the thousands of killings, beheadings, piles of seized dollar bills, the foreign aid, changing maps of cartel territory, and streams of refugees—we lose sight of the root of this whole conflict. It all starts with a simple flower on a hill.
The opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, is a flower with particularly potent properties. It contains one of the oldest drugs known to man, a substance that has been called “magical” and “godly,” as well as “poisonous” and “evil.” The plant’s medicine is released when you scrape the buds with a knife, releasing a light brown mud. On the Sinaloan hills, they call it gum, and the people who scrape it are called gummers or, in Spanish, gomeros. Only a tiny amount of mud is released from each plant. Sinaloan gummers take a two-and-half-acre field with tens of thousands of poppies and harvest them to get just ten kilos of pure opium. I look at such a bag that has been seized by soldiers. The plant doesn’t look or smell pretty anymore—it is a sticky, dark mess, with a toxic stench.
When this mush is eaten or smoked, it unleashes its miraculous effect: pain abruptly disappears. The consumer may have a gaping hole in the side of his head, but suddenly all he can feel is numbness. The incredible speed with which it works has epic consequences. Opium is one of the most effective anesthetics known to man. It was even once sold in the United States under the label GOD’S OWN MEDICINE. But while curing agony, the mush also releases its infamous side effect: the consumer feels a sleepy euphoria.
I ask Matilde to describe the effect of these flowers. What is the magical property they have? What is it that makes them so valuable? She looks at me blankly for a moment, then answers in a slow, thoughtful tone.
“It is a medicine. And it cures pain. All pain. It cures the pain you have in your body and the pain in your heart. You feel like your body is mud. All mud. You feel like you could melt away and disappear. And it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. You are happy. But you are not laughing. This is a medicine, you understand?”
Such effects have inspired writers for three thousand years, from Homer to Edgar Allan Poe. They describe the opium buzz as feeling as if you were covered in cotton wool; being the happiest in your life; or feeling as if your head were a feather cushion that could burst open. Musicians croon about this blissful low in a hundred songs, looking for melancholy chords that conjure up glazed smiles in smoke-filled opium dens.
The scientific secrets of opium were uncovered by two physicists in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1973.5 When opium is eaten or smoked, the scientists found, it stimulates groups of molecules called receptors in the central nervous system—the brain and the spinal cord. The whole drug war mess starts with chemical reactions.
Opium has an especially potent effect when it hits the brain’s thalamus—an inch-long, ovoid mass that registers pain. To put it simply, when we have a toothache, messages rush to the thalamus and we feel discomfort. Opium’s ingredients bond with receptors in the thalamus and make the pain messages it is receiving slow down to a crawl. Our tooth may still have a cavernous hole, but we only feel a dull twinge rather than seething agony. This same chemical bonding makes people feel euphoria. Their brains are slowed down, but this makes them overcome with bliss, in turn making them feel creative, philosophical, romantic.
The other opiates, such as morphine, codeine, and the queen of them all, heroin, work the same way. In the Sinaloan mountains, gummers now turn almost all their opium into heroin, including Mexican mud, which is light brown in color, and black tar, which is … well, black and looks like tar.
The chemistry that creates such “godly” effects also leads to the dreaded downside: addiction. The brain sends its own natural opiate-type signals to slow down pain. When people blast themselves with opium or heroin too regularly, these natural mechanisms stop functioning. Without their fix, people feel the notorious “cold turkey” withdrawal effects, such as diarrhea, depression, and paranoia. As a heroin addict I knew back in Britain said, “Imagine the worst flu and multiply it by ten. Then, know you can make it go away with one more hit.”
Thousands of years before Sinaloan gummers made heroin, primitive humans had discovered opium’s power. Poppy-seed capsules show that hunter-gatherers in Europe scraped gum four millennia before the birth of Jesus Christ. Around 3,400 B.C. in southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), the world’s first farmers drew images of opium poppies on clay tablets under the name Hul Gil or the “joy plant.” Two millennia later, ancient Egyptians wrote about our poppy in the Ebers Papyrus, one of humanity’s oldest medical documents, as a remedy to prevent the excessive crying of children. As European civilization rose, opium was enjoyed from Constantinople to London. But the flower gained the most popularity in China, where poets deemed the mud “fit for Buddha,”6 and the nation’s army of opium smokers grew into the millions.
The Chinese finally saw the sour side to their favored flower by the end of the eighteenth century, with rising complaints of addiction. In 1810, the Qing Dynasty issued a decree banning the mud and putting sellers to death. “Opium is a poison, undermining our good customs and morality,” screamed the first act of narcotics prohibition in the modern world.7
The ban created the first drug smugglers—in the form of polite, pipe-smoking gentlemen of the British Empire. Seeing a golden opportunity, British merchants in the East India Company smuggled thousands of tons of opium from India into the land of the dragon. When Qing soldiers stormed British ships, Queen Victoria’s galleons showered the Chinese coast with cannon. If the East India Company was the first drug cartel, then the Royal Navy was the first band of violent cartel enforcers. After the two Opium Wars, the company won the right to traffic in 1860. The Chinese kept smoking and took the poppy with them in their diaspora round the planet.
Coolie laborers traveled on steamships to Sinaloa from the 1860s to toil on railroads and sweat in mine shafts. As was their custom, Chinese immigrants brought opium poppies, gum, and seeds on their long journey over the Pacific. The arid Sierra Madre provided an ideal climate for the Asian poppies to flourish. In 1886, the opium poppy was first noted as growing in Sinaloan flora by a Mexican government study. The flower had taken root.8
Sinaloan newspapers soon remarked on opium dens springing up in Culiacán and Mazatlán. Known as fumaderos, the haunts were described as dingy rooms above city-center shops where only Asians went. There are no known photos of these venues, but they were likely similar to an opium den documented in a classic journalistic photo from Chinatown Manila of the same period. In the black-and-white shot, Chinese men lie on mattresses and slump against the wall, their mouths on pipes up to two feet long. Their faces show blissful glazes, enjoying the magic euphoria of the brown mud.9 Similar scenes of opium dens were documented in California and New York, where Chinese and curious Americans burned away their sorrows.
But then the U.S. government raised its hand and took an action with profound consequences: it outlawed the Herb of Joy. The story of El Narco is also the story of American drug policy.
Growing up with drug prohibition, it is easy to think of it as an age-old ban, such as the outlawing of robbery or murder. It seems almost like a law of nature: the earth circles the sun; gravity pulls objects down; and narcotics are illegal—facts of life, pure and simple. But scholars have shown that prohibition is a late-blooming policy that has always been tainted by discord, disagreement, and disinformation.
The basic challen
ge of drug policy is tough: the majority favor certain recreational drugs, such as alcohol, which causes death and addiction. Doctors and soldiers need other narcotics, such as opiates. Meanwhile, people from poor and broken communities are hammered by addiction to any mind-bending substances they can get their hands on.
But debate over drug laws has been clouded by emotive, unscientific forces, including racism. Weird myths become accepted truths. In the early days, American newspapers claimed that the Chinese used opium to systematically rape white women and that cocaine gave Southern Negroes superhuman strength. More recently, we have heard about generations of deranged subhumans called crack babies, or that LSD makes people think they can fly.
Amid fears of moral collapse, doctors and scientists are drowned out. Shouting at the forefront is one of the great crusaders of modern times: the drug warrior. Politicians soon realized the drug issue was a useful platform, in which they fight an evil, alien force that can’t answer back. They look both tough and moral and win support from that crucial group, the concerned middle class.
The father of American drug warriors is Hamilton Wright, appointed U.S. opium commissioner in 1908. An Ohio native, Wright was influenced by puritanical beliefs and sharp political ambition. He made his job a personal crusade to protect good Americans against a foreign menace and was the first person to envision the United States as leader in a global campaign to stop drug use. To later drug warriors, this made him a visionary; critics see him as starting policy on the wrong foot. Wright rang the alarm bells of an epidemic in a 1911 New York Times interview, under the headline UNCLE SAM IS THE WORST DRUG FIEND IN THE WORLD. As he told the Times:
