by Elaine Carey
Mexican government bureaus and social agencies, worried about increasing tensions with their northern neighbor, sought to recall workers, vagrants, and citizens in the United States and repatriate them to Mexico.107 Repatriation took place when the newly formed U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics began taking a greater interest in Mexico. The rhetoric of deviance increased because of economic competition, decline, and problems along the border that resonated within the social policies of the United States with regard to Mexico. As a supplier and transshipper of narcotics, Mexico informed U.S. government policy but also spawned tales of horror printed in the sensationalist press and escalated a narrative of deviance associated with Mexico and Mexicans in the popular imagination. The categories of deviance that had been embraced in North America to target Chinese shifted to other supposedly dangerous groups, due in part to successful immigration controls that stemmed the influx of Chinese workers.
Harry J. Anslinger became a primary vehicle for such propaganda. He elaborated images of foreignness to portray a country under attack by external forces. Anslinger dredged up twenty-year-old narratives of “reefer madness,” which he claimed was afflicting Mexico. Newspaper reports and medicinal studies of the early 1900s argued that “Mexican” marijuana was a cause of grave concern. Ridiculous claims ensued. Some journalists wrote that the Empress Carlota had succumbed to insanity because of her penchant for marijuana.108 Other reports argued that Belem Prison was full or marijuana addicts, that soldiers freely used the plant, and that miners who were intoxicated on it killed their American managers.109 All these tales added to increasing fears that Mexico was trying to push addictions on its northern neighbor.
Newspapers reported on “freak outbursts of madness” among Mexicans in both rural and urban areas.110 In another sensational case, a distraught mother fed her children marijuana, which caused the entire family to engage in outbursts of “crazed laughter” before they went insane.111 These reports came at the time that Mexico embarked on its first eradication of poppy and its first ban on marijuana cultivation.112 Regardless of such positive steps, Mexico and Mexicans became increasingly associated with drugs, smuggling, and madness.
One of Anslinger’s most poignant examples was that of Victor Licata, a Mexican American arrested for the murder of his entire family in Tampa, Florida.113 Licata allegedly murdered his family after he smoked marijuana.114 Documents released at the time suggested that Licata had a long history of mental illness prior to his 1933 arrest. Later he was admitted to the Florida State Hospital, where he murdered a fellow inmate and eventually killed himself in 1950. Licata’s Mexican background is also subject to debate, but his case served as ammunition to highlight the dangers of marijuana and foreigners. Despite the lack of clear evidence about Licata’s actual state of mind, not to mention his ethnicity, Anslinger made Licata’s case central to the reefer madness hysteria. The violence that came to be associated with marijuana smoking became part of a new narrative that blamed Mexicans for the distribution of drugs and vice. Anslinger, who was commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962, first associated Mexicans with drugs and violence in his speeches as early as 1933, and he sensationalized these claims in a published report in 1937, in which he wrote:
Figure 5. Public prosecutors posing with confiscated packages of marijuana. Serie Mariguana, opio, y drogas, ca. 1935, 142908, Casasola, Mexico City, Fototeca Nacional del Instituto Nacional de Anthropología e Historia (INAH), Pachuca, Hidalgo.
Marijuana was introduced into the United States from Mexico, and swept across America with incredible speed. It began with the whispering of vendors in the Southwest that marijuana would perform miracles for those who smoked it, giving them a feeling of physical strength and mental power, stimulation of the imagination, the ability to be “the life of the party.” The peddlers preached also of the weed’s capabilities as a “love potion.” Youth, always adventurous, began to look into these claims and found some of them true, not knowing that this was only half the story They were not told that addicts may often develop a delirious rage during which they are temporarily and violently insane; that this insanity may take the form of a desire for self-destruction or a persecution complex to be satisfied only by the commission of some heinous crime.115
Whether poppy or marijuana, Mexico became associated with the dangers, sexual allure, deviance, and political destruction that ensued from drugs, despite the low use of drugs among Mexicans—even as documented by American organizations like the Bureau of Social Hygiene. The United States, often working with Canadian officials, sought to influence internal Mexican affairs through a narrative of vice and deviance. This narrative, however, incorporated a xenophobia that flowed across borders and informed international as well as domestic policies. Just as the United States had little stake economically in China at that time, American officials saw an opportunity to gain influence by sponsoring the International Opium Conference in 1909. In 1911, the United States continued the initiative at the meeting in The Hague, where they were joined by other countries in favoring regulation.
Figure 6. Victor Licata. H. J. Anslinger Papers, box 14, folder 5, image 228, Eberly Family Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
From 1900 to the 1930s, Mexico remained a country in struggle, first with the revolution and then in building a new nation. That difficult transition and the ensuing instability offered the United States an opportunity to create a narrative of Mexican culpability in the increasing use of marijuana and later heroin. The early international drug meetings set the stage for continued confrontations between the neighboring countries. Internally in Mexico, the transitory nature of the state led to attacks on foreigners, who served as scapegoats for drug trafficking and drug use—the same role that Mexico itself was saddled with in global meetings on narcotics. Mexican public welfare officials and politicians developed their own language of deviance; thus a shared narconarrative was generated, resulting in cross-border sting operations that predate the founding of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) and later the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). More importantly to this study, women would emerge as central antagonists in these cross-border collaborations and sting operations. These women could reside in the shadowy underworld as low-level players. Once they moved beyond that role, they drew attention, speculation, and transnational interest. Like men, women worked in all levels of the drug trade, whether selling from their homes or in the street or trafficking large quantities of drugs across international borders. More significantly, women of all backgrounds regardless of class, ethnicity, or national origin entered the trade. They, too, became involved in organized crime, since drug trafficking is an organized crime, and they, too, created transnational alliances.
CHAPTER TWO
MULES, SMUGGLERS, AND PEDDLERS
The Illicit Trade in Mexico, 1910s–1930s
IN 2004, THE ROLE OF WOMEN AS DRUG MULES ENTERED THE POPULAR imagination with the release of the film María Full of Grace, which depicts the life of a young Colombian woman who swallows sealed packets of cocaine and smuggles them into the United States.1 María Álvarez, played by Catalina Sandino Moreno, passes through the port of entry at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport, a present-day Ellis Island. In the film, María also works in one of Colombia’s other leading export industries, flower production. She resorts to muling after she loses her job and finds herself in a precarious economic situation. Young, unemployed, and pregnant, she enters the trade seeking to improve her life. Instead, she predictably encounters additional difficulties. She sees her friend die from poisoning when a cocaine-packed condom ruptures in her stomach while she’s in transit. After she arrives at JFK, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and customs agents interrogate her because she cannot pass through the X-ray machine due to her pregnancy. She then meets her contact, who detains her until she is able to expel the cocaine. Abandoned in Corona, Queens, with few friends and few economic prospects,
she eventually finds assistance within New York’s Colombian community.
María Full of Grace gained recognition because it placed women in a masculine world. María and her fellow mules are instrumental in the transnational flow of products, whether legal carnations or illegal cocaine. In 2004, when the film was released, she was not the stereotypical feminine image found in films about drugs. Women in this genre tended to play sultry sirens to drug lords, junkies, or whores in freak houses. The film portrays María’s physical and economic vulnerability and places her in a global context. As portrayed, the men aren’t necessarily to blame as much as the neoliberal economic structures that force far too many men and women into illicit trade. Rarely have women appeared as instrumental to the economics of the narcotics trade as the character María. Circumstances force a sympathetic protagonist into the shadowy world of drugs.
The contemporary image of María, sensational as it may be, positions women within the transitional drug trade, yet the film also dramatizes the internal drug industry in Colombia. Trafficking and peddling narcotics have long served as profit-making enterprises. Both men and women have sought opportunity in the field, but the role of the female mule was particularly troubling both for Colombia and for destination countries. Women demonstrated an agility to circumnavigate surveillance because officials did not expect women to engage in the trafficking of contraband at this level. Of course, smugglers recognized that women were less prone to searches, so they hired them to move drugs and other commodities. The activities of mules ranged from small-time border smuggling to transnational multimillion dollar trafficking businesses. Smuggled items included durable goods, arms, cattle, food commodities, clothing, and personal hygiene products as well as drugs and alcohol. Women sought profit in illicit products, using their bodies, fashion accessories, and luggage to conceal contraband. As burros or mules, they facilitated the transnational movement of goods, narcotics, and money, whether physically on their persons or on a larger scale as couriers of narcotics, commodities, or cash.
Female smugglers, local peddlers, and international drug mules were and remain important players in the international drug chain. While they may not appear as dangerous as male suppliers and drug lords, one must consider that their involvement in illegal flows has continually altered the policing of borders and flows of people and goods. This chapter opens with what may be described as a “glocal” approach in which women intersect with the transnational drug trade by creating and working in local markets as peddlers and mules.2 In the early twentieth century, women appeared as the victims of the international drug trade, pernicious doctors, and indifferent politicians. Yet, as policing agents discovered, women were also involved in selling and trafficking illegal commodities such as alcohol (during Prohibition) and drugs. Of course, these women did not identify with the modern-day mantra “think globally, act locally,” but their illicit work reflects their ties to global markets, whether for the purpose of expanding their own trading networks or profiting from the illicit flows. Their peddling, muling, and smuggling led to societal repercussions, because women as small-time smugglers and mules moved through cities, controlled spaces, and crossed borders. In turn, their involvement in contraband and vice created new professions for noncriminal women whether along the border, in communities, or in prisons.
To expand the discussion from the glocal to the global drug trade, the most famous transnational mule of the 1930s, Maria Wendt, exemplifies the role of mules as essential to an international trafficking organization; her case allows for a glimpse of a highly sophisticated global trafficking organization that defies many contemporary stereotypes. The case exhibits early transnational cooperation between policing agencies on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Although Wendt portrayed herself as a mule, she had a tremendous impact on popular culture in the 1930s and 1940s, and her case informed policy in both Mexico and the United States. Fifty-six years before María Full of Grace, Wendt became the first transnational mule whose story was told in celluloid.
ILLICIT FRONTIERS
The historical role of women as mules feeds the contemporary imagination through sensational photos of detained women with kilos of uncut heroin and cocaine taped to their thighs.3 From the early 1900s, the detained mule emerged in popular culture as a victim, penitent, or deviant. During Prohibition and in its wake, as female mules grew more and more prominent in illicit trade, the U.S. and Mexican governments made adjustments to border strategies and public health policy to address the troubling criminology of women. Customs and other agencies on both sides of the border began hiring women as agents and inspectors to better cope with the new trend in an ironic twist of traditional views of gender in law enforcement.4
The reality of the mule serves as a vehicle to understanding shifts in policy on both sides of the border. The mule as a primary although subservient agent remains a conscribed, passive role that has been viewed as suitable exclusively for women. Smuggler and mule have distinct meanings. One moves goods for her own enrichment or benefit, while the other is merely a vessel for transportation controlled by others. The latter is exploited by the former. It is the role of women as mules and, to a lesser degree, as smugglers that has compelled governments to hire women in customs and policing agencies.5
Scholars such as Tammy Anderson, Eloise Dunlap, Bruce Johnson, and Ric Curtis recognize that women play key roles in the drug trade. They provide housing and sustenance to male peddlers and traffickers, and they subsidize those who are at the low end of the trade.6 They also engage in selling and buying. Frequently, women addicts exchange sex for drugs, and prostitutes use drugs to perform their work.7 In other contemporary examples, women use their drug vending to maintain aspects of a middle-class life such as a decent apartment and tuition for their children’s private schools.8 Additionally, women (and children) can provide an excellent cover for men in their family to engage in the drug trade, furnishing legitimacy in the form of a genuine family life. By having a family, the male drug dealer can be a doting father who is active in his community.9 The 2000 film Traffic demonstrates this in the character Helena Ayala, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones.10 In Ayala’s case, she took up trafficking to maintain her lifestyle after the arrest of her husband.
Anthropologist Howard Campbell interviewed women on the U.S.-Mexico border over a period of several years. His research expands the roles of women in the drug trade beyond those of addict and enabler to male drug peddlers. He found that women entered the drug trade for a host of personal, social, and economic reasons.11 Campbell argues that some woman are victimized by the trade. Some resort to working as mules to pay off the debts of their lovers, husbands, fathers, or sons. Others, however, find empowerment in the drug trade. By running drugs, women such as Cristal, whom Campbell interviewed, found a socioeconomic ladder to climb in an industry that is far more lucrative than traditional jobs available to them.12
Contrary to popular culture, for most of the twentieth century women served as the drug couriers of choice because they drew less attention from the authorities than their male counterparts.13 In the contemporary period, women are important economic actors in the trade as mules, but they have received scant attention.14 Although considered minor players, mules make up the majority of transnational actors in drug trafficking. Bosses, whether of small-time gangs or international cartels, rarely risk their own safety, security, and profit to go through international ports of entry with a stash hidden in a false compartment in a gas tank or stuffed in a bra, girdle, or panties. Even fewer bosses are willing to ingest condoms stuffed with coke or heroin. In reconstructing the history of mules and couriers, written evidence is slight because most of the mules were successful, avoiding detection and detention, and they do not appear in the official documents. For the most part, they remain nameless to history.
For transnational mules and drug smugglers to emerge, a market had to exist that demanded the products they carried. Scholars of narcotics have argued that the 1914 Harrison Ac
t marked the beginning of increased demand in the United States. With greater controls placed on pharmacists and medical doctors, demand shifted from legal outlets to illegal, thus altering the landscape in urban America, all along the U.S.-Mexico border, and in port cities throughout the North American continent. The act required physicians and pharmacists to register with the Treasury Department, maintain records of the narcotics they prescribed or dispensed, and pay taxes on sales they made.15
Historians and medical scholars argue that the Harrison Act, followed by the Supreme Court’s 1919 antimaintenance interpretation of the law, contributed directly to the increase in illicit trade and an explosion of addiction, since it essentially cut off supplies to iatrogenic addicts. The Supreme Court ratified the Harrison Act in a case brought before it regarding a Memphis-based physician who provided a morphine maintenance program to longtime patients.16 Prior to the passage of the Harrison Act, most opiate addicts were women because doctors prescribed it to treat a host of “feminine illnesses.”17 Doctors have historically treated men and women with various complaints, whether cough, dysentery, asthma, neuralgia, or neurasthenia, with opiates and their derivatives, thus creating a class of addicts. Some doctors treated female members of their own families with opiates, known of course for their calming effect.