by Elaine Carey
Although Anslinger and Salazar worried about la Chata’s deviations from the constraints of civilization, the American Beat writer William S. Burroughs found her a fascinating person and used her as a character in his writing, thus introducing one of Mexico’s most infamous drug traffickers to U.S. popular culture. Burroughs went to Mexico in 1949 to escape a narcotics charge in New Orleans. Accompanied by his wife and young son, Burroughs, like other contemporary urban explorers, sought cheap drugs and easy interracial sex.91 He found Mexico’s perceived acceptance of drug culture fascinating, although he—as well as other Beat writers—indeed misread its cultural meanings. While living in Mexico City, he became mesmerized by the infamous crime boss Lola la Chata.92 As a character, she appears in his novels and short stories, sometimes with the name of Lupe, Lupita, or Lola.93 Burroughs specialists have questioned whether he actually met her or not, but his fascination with her continued for years.94
Unlike Salazar and Anslinger, Burroughs relished La Chata’s deviations from constraint, and he found these departures a source of power that were uniquely tied to the body. In Cities of the Red Night, Burroughs described a meeting between his protagonist, Mr. Snide, and a version of Lola la Chata.95 As Snide arrived at a warehouse owned by la Chata and guarded by a “skull-face pistolero,” he entered a room richly decorated like a “Mexican country estate.” A feast had been prepared for the visitors: “platters of tamales and tacos, beans, rice, and guacamole, beers in tubs of ice, bottles of tequila, bowls of marijuana, and cigarette papers.” He pointed to the table with the syringes and “beverages” as well as the curtained booths for later encounters. Then his attention shifted to Lola. As Burroughs wrote:
Lola la Chata sits in a massive oak chair facing the door, three hundred pounds cut from the mountain rock of Mexico, her graciousness underlining her power. She extends a massive arm: “Ah Meester Snide . . . El Puerco Particular . . . the private pig,” she shakes with laughter. . . . And your handsome young assistants . . .” She shakes hands with Jim and Kiki, “You do well by yourself Meester Snide.”
“And you Lola . . . You are younger if anything. . . .”
She waves her hand to the table, “Please serve yourselves. . . .”96
Burroughs payed homage to his dealer by admiring her power contextualized by her body and physical presence. Basing his literary inventions on reality, Burroughs described her as gracious because of her immensity in presence and power. He elaborated upon her mountainous and massive figure and visibly displayed wealth. In the Beat subculture, he celebrated her deviance as corporal and sexual. To Burroughs, she embodied a natural essence of Mexican culture; he described her as an Aztec, an earth goddess who gave her special clients packets of heroin from between her massive breasts. Burroughs associated her breasts as a site that nurtured his addiction. She suckled her favorite clients to her, via a syringe, just as she did her “kittens.” Her femininity and nurturing of her addicts was an integral part of her peddling. Similar to Anslinger, Burroughs’s visions of her gender, but also her otherness, offered a potential site of weakness that led even junkies to consider the fragility of her power in the hopes of conquering her heroin franchise.
Salazar also recognized la Chata’s power and influence. Both he and Burroughs acknowledged that she knew the desires and needs of her clients. Like any good businesswoman, she provided a hook to expand her clientele—a day when all could be had for free, even for the police.97 In examining her business acumen, Salazar recognized her intelligence and her hard work in the same letter in which he discusses her physical appearance. He confessed:
This, I must tell you for your own satisfaction has not diminished my admiration for you. I consider you to be a perfect product of our time. For you, a drug addict is merely a good customer and nothing more. For me, he is an unhappy person dragged in the dust by civilization. As it is, you as a drug dealer have had better luck than those of us who are entrusted with incorporating the addicts [among] active, social, and living [people]. You have accomplished a marvel—and this is a real compliment to your talent and ability—of knowing how to maintain your position and gaining always goodwill of the whole police force. You are a dispenser of graft, a national emblem. No one ever resists your bribes which, according to what I am told are very grand indeed. One thing is surely clearer, you, old in the custom, know how the business can produce even if sometimes the demands are heavy and excessive, with a little more bicarbonate in the heroin and a little more pressure on the client, you are able to make ends meet.
In addition to your business ability, you have a very acute sense of psychology, you know the “when” the “how” and the “how much” of the bribe to be given; you know how to tell if the person involved has his teeth sharpened or not.98
Salazar had an ironic admiration for la Chata’s ability to glean the needs of her clients as well as her skill in protecting herself; she indeed embodied the entrepreneurial peddler who had matured in the highly competitive and politicized informal economy.99 She created a plague of addicts, however, whom Salazar struggled to help against insurmountable odds. Like many prostitutes and street vendors, this uneducated mestiza from an impoverished family had few options in life.100 For many women in her circumstances, their futures were limited to becoming street vendors, waitresses, maids, nannies, prostitutes, or traffickers. Having few opportunities available to her, she overcame traditional constraints on her gender and developed criminal skills that evolved into a public threat because of her success and her ability to bribe.101 That leap drew the attention of international crime fighters.
On the surface, narcotics abuse is a solitary and private activity, in contrast to the public nature of drinking, which initially takes place in the cantina, bar, or pub (but which may too become a solitary endeavor).102 Thus, opium and its derivatives appealed to women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It was a private vice that could be indulged in far from the public eye. Moreover, if a doctor provided a user with a prescription for some contrived ailment, the vice could easily be explained away. In Mexico, habitués—elite female opium addicts—were represented as beautiful women, lounging on satin pillows with willowy smoke framing their perfectly made-up faces. Their addiction remained feminine, and a well-kept family secret. Their threat was private; they neglected their feminine duties of child rearing, sexually satisfying their husbands, preparing food, and maintaining their homes. Their beauty may have remained intact, but their addictions disrupted their families. Families easily concealed, explained away, or dismissed these disturbances. As long as a woman’s addiction never graduated to illicit or public sexual encounters, her secret remained safe.
Lowly and poor borrachas, on the other hand, were public nuisances. Artists, writers, and social workers documented their public shame.103 Borrachas transgressed acceptable gender boundaries to drink in masculine spaces—bars, cantinas, or streets. Like the borracha, la Chata differed from the addict because she resituated the private location of women’s lives and traditional work into the public realm.
Opium addiction as a feminized and private pastime tied to race and gender evolved into a public act when drugs were peddled and trafficked. The marketing and selling of these items represented a common and acceptable historical act on the part of women, except in cases where women became wealthy and powerful from those acts. La Chata used feminine skills as a basis upon which to build a powerful enterprise. Her legal food vending corresponded to a private skill common to all women, on the scale of home production. Once women marketed their wares more broadly, however, that became a public act that potentially led to danger. In-home food production or the street vending of food products denoted the systematic survival of people on the brink in a culture of poverty.104 Drug peddling, however, permitted certain people, like la Chata, to break away from that poverty by moving into the public realm. The illegality of heroin, and to a lesser degree marijuana, required that these products be more discreetly marketed and used than alc
ohol. Peddlers subtly created secret networks of distribution for these items. Even the ability to bribe the police became a form of manipulation that was common to women and, as Salazar suggested, la Chata had honed it to a fine art.
The private and informal selling of narcotics developed naturally from Mexican women’s traditional work in street vending, prostitution, and other lowly occupations.105 Lower-class people, particularly poor mestizas like la Chata, struggled against nearly insurmountable odds to break out of the culture of poverty. The legal system, the Department of Health, and the police sought to keep women like la Chata restrained and marginalized. Sexism and racism further ensured that she would not rise above her given lot. Even if she had been able to obtain an education, institutionalized sexism limited job opportunities for women. Instead, she advanced economically through illegal means, which made her a target of the state. The state, elites, and policing agents created the obstacles that she surmounted. La Chata realized how fragile those restraints were. She recognized that the police, judges, and politicians—those responsible for maintaining order and control—were just as easily bought as the junkie in need of a fix.
In her own neighborhood, known as a place of thieves where anything could be purchased, addiction, prostitution, and crime reinforced one another. Like prostitutes around the world, Mexican prostitutes used mind-altering substances that enabled them to perform their jobs.106 As with food items that are sold to local community members, la Chata found a local market for heroin and marijuana in and around La Merced; local customers are a basic element of a successful business. As Burroughs wrote about his folk hero, la Chata sold “heroin to pimps and thieves and whores.”107
Her ability to build and maintain a local market for her drugs created a domestic front for Salazar in his battle against narcotics peddling and smuggling, but it also created a place to study those problems associated with addiction. As la Chata and other prominent peddlers rose to the fore, Salazar’s attempt to paint Mexico’s drug problems as affecting only a minor portion of the population who were fully susceptible to treatment was undermined. At the League of Nations’ Advisory Committee on Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs, Salazar stated: “In Mexico, the problem of drug addiction is of minor importance. It only exists in the capital and in the port cities, and a few larger cities.”108 When la Chata was based in Mexico City, Salazar’s “Open Letter,” published in 1938, demonstrated that her threat was more insidious than he had presented at international meetings. At the 1939 League of Nations meeting, Salazar discussed his research on the treatment of addicts in and out of prison with a morphine step-down program, seemingly ignoring Anslinger’s view of addiction as an international criminal problem. This notion of “treatment” infuriated Anslinger, who grew annoyed with Salazar’s presentation of Mexico’s drug problem as localized in a few areas of the country and not a systematic menacing threat, as perceived by U.S. officials.
Salazar’s attempts to combat narcotics revealed a growing recognition of the impact of technology and gender in the trade. Although la Chata used traditional women’s networks and vending practices to build her empire, her location in La Merced, her fast-food lunch stand, and her feminine skills became central to Salazar’s criticism of her. Like Burroughs, he suspected that her gender would eventually contribute to her competitive weakness. He saw her as evolving into a small-time peddler who would be outmuscled by others in the business. Times were changing, and Salazar’s 1938 “Open Letter” seeks to ridicule women like la Chata as slipping into history. He noted that her deputies, many of them men, would continue in her name, but he also noted that the trade was modernizing. He stated:
You are in spite of your popularity a factor of little importance in the vast network of drug dealing; your stay in the Penitentiary would only greatly increase the traffic therein, without really affecting the traffic outside as you would leave your deputies and temporary substitutes in charge. Moreover and above all, there are your colleagues who, while they do not sell quick lunches, have airplanes at their disposal and descend from the clouds with their infamous cargo.109
Among la Chata’s top deputies were her husband, Jaramillo, and her rumored lover and accomplice, Enrique Escudero Romano. Her relationships with men ensured that her business moved beyond the borders of La Merced. Jaramillo, a well-known trafficker in his own right, maintained contacts and laboratories in the provinces, as did Escudero.110 Men offered her protection, since they had a vested interest in her survival and continuation. She was not their dupe. Instead, she constructed and developed a criminal enterprise that served men. That did not mean that there were not other men who hoped to wrestle her market away from her. Like in any business, she faced stiff competition. Her lovers and police agents protected her—many of whom Salazar was well aware of—but she was also victimized by those who worked for her or alongside her.
In 1938, Captain Luis Huesca de la Fuente, chief of the narcotics squad in Mexico City, arrested la Chata and confiscated 250 packets of cocaine that she had on her person.111 After her arrest, Huesca substituted the cocaine with bicarbonate of soda and sold the cocaine, consequently leading to an investigation of him.112 He, too, had his price and demonstrated that law enforcement often competed in the drug trade.
Beginning in 1937, the Mexican newspaper La Prensa began a series of reports on the heroin trade in Mexico City. Journalists alleged that the Federal Judicial Police and bureaucrats from the attorney general’s office were known to traffic heroin within the Federal District.113 Captain Huesca de la Fuente emerged as one of the primary traffickers in heroin. As scholar Ricardo Pérez Montfort noted, to cover his own association with drug trafficking, Huesca de la Fuente implicated Salazar and the Department of Health in the drug trade at the beginning of 1938.
The “heroin triangle” between Salazar, Huesca de la Fuente, and known heroin dealers such as la Chata that was exposed in the Mexican press drew the attention of U.S. officials, who grew more and more concerned with Mexico’s drug problem. The arrest of Huesca de la Fuente and Salazar’s “Open Letter” to la Chata attracted wide interest in the United States. This led to increased surveillance of Salazar and the Mexican police. James B. Stewart, U.S. consul general in Mexico, reported to the secretary of state his discussions with H. S. Creighton, supervising customs agent, revealing that Salazar had little interest in acting as a policeman. Stewart reported: “The arrest of the chief of the narcotic squad does not necessarily mean that there is to be inaugurated a campaign against those engaged in drug trafficking.”114 To the U.S. authorities, Mexican officials appeared corrupt or inept, as in this portrayal of Salazar. However, no interpretation of the facts could adequately reflect the complexities of the situation.
While men provided la Chata with protection and their alliances became her alliances, Salazar’s “Open Letter” focused on la Chata, not her deputies, as the source of a contagion that demanded to be controlled. While she could be victimized, as when she was arrested by Huesca de la Fuente, Salazar did not see her as a victim. In the documents, her male associates were not the basis of her power but her underlings. If and when she went to jail, Salazar knew that her business would continue. Instead, Salazar sought points of weakness based on her gender and on rapidly modernizing technology. While he congratulated her on the feminine angle of her business expertise, he also expressed that her time was coming to an end. Playing on the age-old theme of the middle-aged woman who gazes in the mirror and fears the loss of her beauty and sexual viability, Salazar noted that traffickers now employed more sophisticated technologies. How could an illiterate mestiza compete? In other words, he used his views of her class and her inability to access new forms of technology to mock her as a has-been whose time was coming to an end.
In 1938, Salazar’s gendered assumptions about la Chata’s marginality were more wishful thinking than reality. La Chata had developed from local peddler to international trafficker during a time when traffickers were becoming increasingl
y sophisticated in their use of technology and networks.115 Moreover, she continued to sell heroin, morphine, and marijuana, whether in or out of prison, for almost another twenty years. This led to a growing crisis between the Mexican and U.S. officials who had repeatedly attempted to arrest and imprison her. Even after Ávila Camacho’s presidential decree in 1945, she successfully fought a long-term prison sentence and continued to traffic and peddle for another twelve years—a testament to her ability to maintain networks of powerful friends.
Salazar was not as lucky as la Chata. His public disagreements with Anslinger over marijuana, poppy and marijuana eradication, and the enforcement of more stringent narcotics laws caused great consternation between the United States and Mexico. From the time of Huesca de la Fuente’s arrest, Salazar found himself on the front lines of a transnational struggle that ultimately undermined his career. From late 1938 to 1940, the FBN waged a campaign against Salazar to have him removed. Salazar’s research on marijuana drew greater and greater criticism and ridicule from the United States but also from within Mexico. James B. Stewart reported on experiments that Mexican doctors conducted to ascertain the links between marijuana and insanity. In his letter, he argued that Dr. Fernando Rosales, a peer of Salazar, also disputed the ties of marijuana to violence and insanity. In both cases, the researchers, examining patients at the Federal Hospital for Drug Addicts in Mexico, reached similar conclusions, that using marijuana combined with alcohol (now a legal commodity in the United States) contributed to increased violence. Stewart went on to write:
There is no doubt that Dr. Salazar Viniegra has been passing around marijuana cigarettes for some time to persons whom he believes to be interested in the subject of marijuana. In fact on September 6, 1938 when I visited Dr. Almazán, Minister of Public Health, with Mr. A. F. Scharff, U.S. Customs Agent, San Antonio, Texas, Dr. Almázan jokingly remarked that when he called on Dr. Viniegra he would properly offer us marijuana cigarettes. In passing out these cigarettes Dr. Salazar Viniegra in his capacity as Chief of the Narcotics Section at the Department of Public Health takes the position that he is doing so for experimental purposes and in interest of science.116