by Elaine Carey
In this case, Stewart cast Salazar Viniegra as a pusher of marijuana among the upper echelons of the Mexican government. Like some other doctors, he had experimented on himself, which gave pause among the bureaucrats but had been a common practice among researchers. His role as an alleged distributor, compounded with the reaction of the Minister of Health, Dr. Almázan, who found humor in Salazar’s self-experiments, illustrated to serious men such as Stewart and Anslinger that the Mexican could not be trusted to respond to the growing drug problem in an efficient way. In turn, Salazar became a prime target.
Stewart and Creighton kept up a correspondence about Salazar’s ineptitude and perceived criminality. The embassy translated his articles and distributed them to experts, who disputed and faulted Salazar’s findings, particularly his article “The Myth of Marijuana” and his assessment of the Narcotics Farm in Lexington, Kentucky. In “The Myth of Marijuana,” Salazar considered the work of a number of his associates, including Dr. Almazán, Dr. Francisco Elizarrarás, Dr. Fernando Rosales, and Salazar’s student Jorge Segura Millán.117 This research built upon earlier studies of marijuana use among soldiers in the Mexican army conducted in the 1920s, and earlier studies of marijuana and its use by Mexican researchers. Although Salazar documented certain changes in human behavior, he discovered that marijuana-induced psychosis was simply the patient’s actual psychosis. Those patients who hallucinated during marijuana use already suffered from dementia or acute alcoholism.118 Marijuana did not cause hallucinations.
Segura Millán’s writing more directly targeted the U.S.-instigated hysteria of “reefer madness”:
Everybody knows about the very great propaganda started in the United States against marijuana, and that in this neighboring country the most absurd reports are spread, imputing to the plant suicides, acts of madness, terrible assassinations etc. It is enough for this purpose to read the article by H. J. Anslinger (Commissioner of Narcotics in the United States) in the periodical Excélsior of this capital city [Mexico City]. In the heaviest type there is published the news that six persons had been wounded by a marijuana addict, and later it is stated that it cannot be ascertained whether it is a marijuana addict or an alcoholic. . . . The soldier who assassinated three persons, according to our ascertainments, was not under the influence of marijuana intoxication when he carried out his criminal acts, but feeling himself caught in the traffic in drugs he tried to flee and killed those who came to capture him.119
The FBN forwarded Segura Millán’s dissertation to John Matchett, chief chemist of the FBN, to read and criticize. In both cases, the documents identified Segura with Salazar. Matchett argued that Segura had concluded that marijuana did not provoke hallucinations or aggression. Rather, it produced euphoria, introspection, and gaiety. In his analysis of Segura, Matchett wrote: “They also insist that use of marijuana has been shown to have a degenerative effect on mental capacity.”120 Matchett associated Segura’s work with that of Salazar, further adding to the condemnation of the latter.
Salazar paid a heavy price for his insolence toward Anslinger, whom he criticized for his loose use of science and lack of medical experience. In November 1939, Dr. Salazar wrote to Stuart Fuller of the Treasury Department requesting permission to continue his research at Harvard University and visit the narcotics sanitariums at Lexington and Forth Worth. In April 1940, Salazar wrote to Anslinger that he had never received a response from Fuller. In that letter, he disclosed that Anslinger may have been partially responsible:
I was inconvenienced by the fact that my government put into effect a new regulation concerning narcotics, about which we spoke in Geneva as you will remember, and that I proposed to study this question again in order to eliminate its disturbing results. Unfortunately, upon my return from Geneva I was forced to give up my position as chief of narcotics—as you know—in Mexico technical matters are tied up with politics—and for this reason I had no authority.121
The tension between Salazar and the FBN heightened in part due to Salazar’s public persona. His 1938 “Open Letter to Lola la Chata” and her protectors confirmed certain suspicions of the FBN and the U.S. State Department. Salazar’s medical and scientific training put him at odds with men such as Anslinger, who saw drugs as a criminal problem rather than a medical one. In turn, Salazar’s ability to sway career diplomats to his mode of thinking fell on deaf ears, leading to his marginalization in the global drug debates. The open letter looked to them like he was sympathetic to la Chata. He seemed to court her, when in fact he was attempting to disrupt her business by exposing her, her collaborators, and her protectors to a broad audience.
Figure 17. María Dolores Estévez Zuleta. Serie Mariguana, opio, y drogas, ca. 1935, 14834, Casasola, Mexico City, Fototeca Nacional del Instituto Nacional de Anthropología e Historia (INAH), Pachuca, Hidalgo.
Salazar’s attempt to engage Lola la Chata and her supporters in a dialogue demonstrates a greater knowledge about the power of the narcotics trade. He spoke to a world of power and alliances that few contemplated in the 1940s. Lola la Chata and women like her defied contemporary images of narcotraficantes, although the role of women in the trade continues to shock, surprise, and titillate.122 Like her mother before her, she, and many women of her background, knew how to buy, sell, and create a market whether for food, sex, or narcotics. Using those few spaces within the economy left open to them, women like la Chata resisted the limitations that had been constructed for them. Although a large cadre of men assisted la Chata in her narcotics empire, Salazar, Anslinger, and even President Ávila Camacho acknowledged that she was a boss, a godmother. Her physical presence, criminal mind, and ability to manipulate fascinated the narcotic warriors. She embodied a threat to Mexican and U.S. society, since she ruptured the expectations of what it meant to be a woman. She was not an addict but a shrewd businesswoman who recognized the demand for her product. More dangerous than an addict, her ability to bribe and manipulate the laws and those entrusted to enforce them showcased her danger. Significantly, other women joined la Chata, causing concern in the United States. A woman on the border operating out of Ciudad Juárez, Ignacia Jasso González, “La Nacha,” created a multigenerational transnational trafficking family that endured into the 1980s. La Chata died in 1959, and La Nacha in January of 1982. Both women, who had trafficked for years, represent Burroughs’s characterization of La Chata’s career that, “Selling is more of a habit than using.”123
CHAPTER FOUR
TRANSCENDING BORDERS
La Nacha and the “Notorious” Women of the North
THE 1940S WERE ALSO EVENTFUL FOR ANOTHER MEXICAN FEMALE criminal boss. Along the U.S.-Mexico border, another familial dynasty took form beginning in the 1920s. The matriarch, Ignacia Jasso la viuda de González, also known as Emma and la Nacha, entered the popular imagination like her more cosmopolitan counterpart, Lola la Chata in Mexico City. Jasso also found herself the target of transnational scrutiny that drew unwanted attention, particularly beginning in the early 1940s.
In 1942, narcotics trafficker Jasso made the critical error of stepping into a planned snare set up by U.S. narcotics officers in El Paso, touching off a four-year firestorm between the United States and Mexico over drug trafficking. Harry J. Anslinger, director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), demanded her extradition to stand trial in the United States for violation of the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. As he had done for Lola la Chata, President Ávila Camacho targeted Jasso with a presidential decree on April 27, 1945. The two cases differ, because la Nacha had been in prison since 1942 and a well-known border boss since 1930.
As a product of the border, Jasso understood the cultural constructs of both Mexico and the United States, and she also knew how contraband flowed between the two nations. Borderlanders like Jasso and her family demonstrated a sophisticated knowledge of market demand in the United States, but, more importantly, their location on the border enabled them to take advantage of the illicit as well as legal flows of people, prod
ucts, and information.1 With this knowledge, she adeptly manipulated the press, the public, and government officials. Her extradition case heightened tensions between the two countries at a time when opiate use had allegedly declined. Her stature as a transnational trafficker, like la Chata’s, rose as World War II cut trade from Asia and Europe. With wartime blockades and increased surveillance by warships and submarines patrolling the waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific, key transportation routes were disrupted. Significantly, European and Asian land routes for trafficking opium and opiate derivatives were also disrupted by the global conflict.
La Chata and la Nacha flourished by stepping into the vacuum created by the war. Organized crime figures in the United States sought alternative sources of narcotics. Mexico was a known supplier, although its heroin was considered lower grade than that from Europe and Asia. After her extradition case, Jasso remained in the public eye for the next thirty years as a primary source of heroin, morphine, and marijuana for the U.S. market. After her release from prison in the 1940s, she maintained a lower profile but reemerged in the 1950s as a threat because of her continued dealing and trafficking along the border.
Jasso remains a pivotal figure in U.S.-Mexican narcotics relations because of her reemergence in contemporary drug literature and the centrality of the border region in the current war on drugs.2 A product of a city known for its zone of tolerance of legalized gambling and prostitution, she operated out of Ciudad Juárez supplying morphine and heroin to border residents and Americans who traveled there. Eventually, her reach extended as far as Seattle, Detroit, and New York City.3 Until her death in the early 1980s, la Nacha peddled and trafficked heroin, marijuana, and morphine. She persisted in this dangerous trade for over fifty years, surpassing many of her male peers in longevity.
Jasso and other women of the border involved in drugs remained a focus of the FBN, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), and politicians. Today, they are drawing greater scrutiny from border scholars and other specialists.4 Like Lola la Chata and the Texas-based Beland family, Jasso demonstrated the importance of family in building her drug empire, but her location on the border made her appear all the more threatening to the United States and to Mexico’s relations with the north. Jasso’s lifetime of activities coincides with and exemplifies the shifting attitudes toward and interpretations of the border and its centrality in the wars on drugs. Her life intersects with and informs the evolution of government policy with respect to the policing of narcotics that took place from the 1930s to the 1970s.5 Despite her longevity, her establishment of a multigenerational dynasty, and her physical location, she was rarely mentioned by name in the historiography on drug trafficking until recently even though the FBN, the FBI, the local police in Ciudad Juárez, journalists, the successive governors of Chihuahua and mayors of Ciudad Juárez, and members of the U.S. Congress saw her as a central threat beginning in the 1930s. More recently, scholars of drug trafficking have rediscovered Jasso, and her dynasty has been reconceptualized as an important nexus between old forms of drug trafficking and the new forms that have triggered such violence in the twenty-first century.6
THE EXTRADITION OF LA NACHA
Jasso’s 1942 arrest was triggered by two events. In April 1942, the FBN, U.S. Customs, and Mexican authorities set up a sting operation to arrest la Nacha. She had emerged in the early 1930s as a known drug trafficker, and Ciudad Juárez was seen as a city where many were involved in the drug trade. She, her family, and her peers had entered the popular imagination. These “meros gallos” lived lives of luxury with “magnificent houses, cars, and clothes,” often with the support of the local police and politicians.7 Since the 1930s, Jasso’s resources had given her these advantages, as demonstrated by her ability to buy her way out of prison.
In the summer of 1942, police in El Paso detained two of Jasso’s agents, Teodoro García and Guadalupe Guzmán, in front of the El Paso Laundry shortly after they had crossed the Santa Fe Bridge from Ciudad Juárez. They had planned to deliver nineteen cans of opium (valued at $150 a can; 2012: $2,128 a can) to a buyer who was actually an undercover agent. In interrogations, Jasso’s men admitted that the cans belonged to her.
Two “ace” U.S. narcotics agents, H. B. Westover and W. H. Crook, posed as dealers who sold to Oklahoma Indians. They went to Ciudad Juárez to buy large quantities of opium and morphine after Westover initially arranged a meeting with la Nacha. At first, she insisted that they purchase 450 cans of smoking opium and a kilo of gummed opium.8 Like any good dealer, Westover asked for a sample of her stuff. An assistant and her cleaning lady brought him a fruit jar full of smoking opium and a can of opium.9 La Nacha told Westover and Crook that she had a chemist who could extract morphine, but he was a five-hour drive from Ciudad Juárez. Westover told la Nacha that he wanted to think it over, but that he would soon contact her.
A couple of weeks later, Westover and Crook returned to Ciudad Juárez to visit la Nacha. She told them that she had a group of smugglers who trafficked her opium into the United States, and that she had customers as far away as New York and San Francisco.10 Her assertion may have been true. In 1947, the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs reported:
The Mexican government in its intensified drive to stop the traffic ordered an aerial survey to be made in the spring of 1947 of the poppy cultivation which although prohibited by Mexican law, was increasing year after year. Some 4,500 fields were observed and of them, 200 destroyed. Between twenty and thirty clandestine landing strips for aeroplanes had been constructed in Mexico to handle the illicit transportation of narcotics from Mexico to the U.S. The traffic now appeared to be organized by underworld groups in the U.S. They have representatives in Mexico engaged in promoting the cultivation of opium poppy, purchasing the crop and arranging its transformation into more valuable and less bulky derivatives. It was estimated that at least one half of the raw opium [was] produced in Mexico and processed into morphine and heroin most of which found its way into the United States. . . . The so-called “brown” heroin found in Canada originated in Mexico. It was found in various parts of the country in adulterated form. The traffic in this drug was directed by a syndicate with headquarters in Toronto.11
Jasso agreed to sell Westover a can of opium so that he could gauge how quickly she could deliver it to a location in El Paso. Like many dealers located on the border, she guaranteed delivery to the U.S. side. Once delivered, Westover planned to have his own chemists test it.12 Crook went back to El Paso to await delivery, confident that la Nacha would indeed deliver. She did.13
Once the opium was tested, the agents told la Nacha that they could only obtain a small amount of morphine from the opium, but that they remained interested in doing business with her. Over time, they worked to gain her trust. Once she trusted them, she introduced them to her operation. She took them to visit poppy fields in the state of Jalisco and to one of her morphine labs in Guadalajara, where the agents observed chemists working with a ten-pound batch of crude opium. The agents met two of her lieutenants, “the Chemist,” Luis Manuel Vázquez, and “the Lawyer,” Alberto Torres Ibarra, who quietly offered to sell directly to the agents and cut la Nacha out of the deal.14 The four men thus worked out a separate transaction. Vázquez and Torres traveled to San Antonio with fifty-five ounces of morphine hidden in a secret compartment in the gas tank of their car, and they were arrested. They pled guilty in court, and both were sentenced to five years in prison.
Despite the arrests of Vázquez and Torres, la Nacha remained free, but she was now suspicious of cross-border contacts seeking supplies of narcotics. Along with the arrests in the United States, the Ciudad Juárez police also detained many of her runners, yielding seizures of 125 ounces of smoking opium and 78 ounces of morphine.15 These events led to the search of her café on the morning of November 4, 1942. She was found in the company of two addicts, Mariano Morales (“el chamaco”) and Regina Guzmán (“la picuchi”), both of whom she had allegedly injected. A toxicology
report showed that Morales and Guzmán were indeed addicted to morphine and heroin, but la Nacha’s blood showed no evidence of opiates. The ten-month attempt to arrest her ended with la Nacha in the custody of the Ciudad Juárez police.16
Recognizing that she had been the subject of a transnational sting, la Nacha told the Juárez chief of police, Teodoro Pérez Rivas: “I have been in tighter spots before, why shouldn’t I be able to get out of this one.”17 In previous arrests, she had merely paid a fine, and probably a couple of bribes. This arrest, however, was a bit more complicated because the United States demanded her extradition.
La Nacha’s arrest made national news on both sides of the border. Two days after her arrest, El Continental Span reported that the United States wanted to extradite Jasso de González.18 In Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, rumors persisted that U.S. narcotics and customs agents had orchestrated the raid of her house and her subsequent arrest. Due to these rumors, the municipal president, Antonio J. Bermúdez, issued a public statement in the newspaper El Mexicano repudiating such claims. He argued that la Nacha had been arrested by Pérez Rivas because her activities violated Mexican laws, not those of the United States. He further argued that extradition was not a matter decided by the municipal government but by federal authorities.19 Despite his claims, on November 9, 1942, the U.S. State Department presented the secretary of foreign relations, Ezequiel Padilla, with a request for her extradition for violation of the 1914 Harrison Act.20