by Elaine Carey
Figure 18. La Nacha’s 1942 mug shot. RG59, box 6, General Records of Department of State, National Archive College Park, MD.
Bermúdez’s statements to the press may not have been completely accurate. On September 2, 1942, Ben Foster, U.S. attorney for the western district of El Paso, had formally requested Jasso’s extradition. On October 22, the U.S. embassy sent a formal request to Secretary Padilla to detain Jasso in preparation for extradition proceedings.21 In the documents, U.S. authorities described la Nacha as forty-eight years old, standing five feet five inches tall, weighing 170 pounds, and dressed poorly “when around home.” The document reflected that agents from the FBN and other agencies had regularly observed her and her activities at home. They also may have had informants who gave them information.22
The argument for the extradition of Jasso touched off a crisis in Mexico and contributed to heated exchanges between officials on both sides of the border, an example of the historical realities of U.S.-Mexico diplomacy regarding criminal behavior. On January 19, 1943, Anslinger wrote to Municipal President Bermúdez following a meeting about la Nacha:
We believe that the extradition of Ignacia Jasso González is of utmost importance in suppressing the illicit traffic in narcotics between Mexico and the United States. Mexico has now become the principal source of supply of opium and its derivatives throughout the United States. We find narcotic drugs of Mexican origin in New York, Washington, Chicago, and Detroit and in fact every large center of population. Those narcotics drugs are being distributed by organized gangs which we are sending to prison, but as long as Mexico remains the source of supply and the traffic is not suppressed there, the traffic will increase. Before the war, Japan was the source of these drugs and this traffic was part of the Imperial policy of Japan to poison and weaken our people for conquest. The people of Mexico were also being poisoned by these drugs. We presented sufficient evidence to substantiate our charges before the Opium Advisory Committee of the League of Nations. It is unfortunate that we must now place before the world public the fact that Mexico has now become the source of smuggled narcotics.23
To encourage Mexican officials to prevent their country from becoming a promoter of “human slavery” (drug addiction) and to force the extradition of Jasso González, Anslinger threatened that the United States would publicize Mexico as a chief source of narcotics at the League of Nations as well as in its own reports. This caused grave concern in Mexico and added further strains to relations with the United States, already tense because of Mexico’s recent nationalization of oil.24 In February 1943, the case of la Nacha came before the House of Representatives. On the tenth, John J. Cochran, representative from Missouri, recognized the work of Anslinger and his men. He insisted that Anslinger deserved “a medal of honor” for his work in attempting to rid the United States of drugs. Cochran identified Mexican poppy and opiates as the source of narcotics distributed by Dutch Schultz’s and Lucky Luciano’s gangs.25 Whether the “remnants” of Schultz and Luciano actually dealt in Mexican opiates remains subject to debate.
Cochran’s declaration, however, markedly highlights the escalation of moral panic that surrounded Mexican drug trafficking and its alleged ties to U.S. organized crime. Cochran read a statement about the case against la Nacha and called her the largest distributor of illicit drugs on the Mexican frontier.26 His claim thus positioned la Nacha as one of the earliest Mexican drug traffickers to gain public recognition in the United States. She had been called out on the floor of Congress and tied to organized crime in the United States.
In October 1942, Anslinger emphasized la Nacha’s and Mexico’s growing role in the narcotics trade to George S. Messersmith, U.S. ambassador to Mexico. Anslinger wrote: “This case is of unusual importance at this time because narcotic smuggling from Europe, the Near East, and the Far East has just ceased, and the traffic is switching to Mexico. We feel that potentially large traffic has been destroyed by the apprehension of this ring.”27 Anslinger’s letter implies that Mexico had evolved into a key site of production and that it was no longer simply a site of transshipment. La Nacha, like la Chata, had played an important role in that evolution.
In Mexico, Bermúdez immediately forwarded Anslinger’s translated letter to President Ávila Camacho, arguing that Mexico had inherited the “sad role” of France and Japan as the world’s major drug exporter. He asked what they should do in regard to the extradition request, since the Jasso case could have negative ramifications on Mexico’s global standing.28 In turn, Mexican officials began to investigate how to proceed with the extradition request. The war had severed the opiate lines from Asian and Europe. Mexican drug traffickers had discovered a market advantage that created problems for their government.
The pressure that Anslinger placed on Mexico initially appeared to work in the favor of the FBN.29 The U.S. embassy in Mexico City reported that the minister of foreign relations, Ezequiel Padilla, was cooperating with U.S. ambassador Messersmith, who had forged a close working relationship with Padilla during World War II. In his correspondence with Padilla, Messersmith echoed the words of Anslinger and argued that the prosecution of Jasso would destroy a significant narcotic smuggling ring that endangered not only the United States but also Mexico. To further persuade Mexico, the United States offered to extradite Americans charged with crimes in Mexico, specifically check fraud.
Notwithstanding the verbal support that Padilla and his legal advisers offered, the Americans expressed concern that Jasso would bribe Mexican authorities. Officials in the FBI, the FBN, and the State Department also noted that corruption existed among the police force along the border.
The officials of the Health Department of the Mexican government have been co-operating with the officials of the United States Treasury Department in Mexico City . . . in an effort to stamp out the international dope traffic. However, one obstacle to this program is the fact that local officials in the border states and even the municipal police sometimes “have a hand” in the growing of poppies. It has been rumored in several distinct pieces of correspondence that it might be difficult to keep Ignacia Jasso Gonzalez in jail because of the influence of local politicians, and even that the adverse decision of the trial judge in the initial extradition proceedings was strongly influenced by this factor.30
Before long, the Mexican national press knew about the proceedings and a campaign opposing the extradition of la Nacha began.
As with the case of la Chata, people in Ciudad Juárez wrote directly to the president. La Nacha had other contacts beyond her drug selling through her small businesses and farming. Her extensive family ties, business relations, and government patronage added to her popularity in the city. That popularity, whether real or contrived, could be found in the support letters. A letter from fellow farmers of Ciudad Juárez asked President Ávila Camacho to cancel the pending extradition order. The farmers recognized that la Nacha’s husband, Pablo González, indeed sold and trafficked drugs, but they argued that since his death in 1928 or 1929, Jasso had lived an “absolutely moral” life and supported her children by growing cotton and selling clothes. Her defenders insisted that as a Mexican national, she must not be extradited to the United States on manufactured charges by her enemies in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso.31 Jasso, they argued, traveled throughout Mexico only to buy clothes that she then sold in Ciudad Juárez, not to distribute drugs or engage in trafficking. The growers asserted that the case not only harmed her and her clothing and farming businesses, but also hurt her “modest but numerous family,” the majority of whom were minors.32
Just as citizens wrote letters to complain about foreigners who undermined the revolution, the health of the nation, and the general good, some of Jasso’s fellow Ciudad Juárez residents forwarded this letter to the president, positioning Jasso as an upstanding woman who was being attacked by the United States in its relentless antinarcotics crusade.33 Letters such as these represented the power that citizens felt they could legitimately muster to sway the
national government as well as to highlight their own nationalism and belief in the revolution. These exchanges exhibited a continuous dialogue between the masses and the powerful over their respective interpretations and elaborations of the concepts of citizen and state in the postrevolutionary period. The farmers co-opted a language of exceptionalism that became an essential component of Mexican identity. This documentary evidence also suggests contradictory readings of la Nacha on the part of ordinary Mexicans and the American authorities. While the United States presented Jasso as a menace, Mexican citizens interpreted her as a hard-working businesswoman who performed good works for the poor in various pueblos in Chihuahua. She emerged as a true product of the border and of Ciudad Juárez.
Despite the claims of La Nacha and her supporters, Mexican government documents revealed that Jasso’s business had been tied to drug trafficking since the 1920s. Ciudad Juárez had a long history of gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging.34 The first Juárez drug lords, many of them Chinese, emerged in the 1910s, but by the mid-1920s Jasso and her husband had displaced many of the Chinese and aligned themselves with different organized crime entities. Urban myths circulated that la Nacha and Pablo González (“El Pablote”) ordered the executions of eleven prominent Chinese distributors and traffickers in the 1920s.35 Whether the sensational aspects of such stories were true, it appears that the González family succeeded in removing their competition. They created what some have described as the first Mexican drug cartel to emerge on the border, and perhaps the first cartel in the hemisphere. La Nacha and her husband’s reputation as drug traffickers was well known on both sides of the border. The Spanish-language newspaper in San Antonio, La Prensa, identified her as a drug queen as early as 1930.36
Despite these undocumented assertions about the use of violence to wrest control of the Juárez dope trade, it is well documented that by the late 1920s González and Jasso began to move heroin, morphine, and marijuana into the United States. At times, she worked with other traffickers, but later she became independent and was increasingly seen as the one responsible for turning parts of El Paso into a tecato (old-time junkie) town whose back alleys were lined with shooting galleries.37 From El Paso, Jasso and her family branched out into New Mexico and other areas of the United States.
The dynamics between Jasso and González have been duplicated in other drug trafficking families. Their family members, both immediate and extended, played key roles in narcotics distribution. Unlike Lola la Chata, who entered the drug economy working with her mother, and Lucy Beland, who started selling to support her children’s addiction, it was la Nacha’s marriage that facilitated her rise. While Pablote has been described as loud, boisterous, alcoholic, and lavish with money, la Nacha remained more discreet and respectable.38
Jasso’s supporters contended that Pablote had forced his wife into the trade. However, evidence suggests that even prior to his death she already controlled the finances of their emerging enterprise, although her home, surroundings, and lifestyle reflected a modest businesswoman and farmer rather than a transnational trafficker. La Nacha may have seen drug smuggling as the best means by which she could maintain her family, and her husband’s trade became her own after his death. When male drug traffickers were imprisoned or died, it often happened that their wives sought to maintain their families through the same illicit business. La Nacha also recognized that concealing her real business venture ensured its continuation. Hence, her supporters’ letter in 1943 emphasized the points of her life that she wished to be known, although the supporters had come to a vastly different conclusion about la Nacha than that drawn by men such as Bermúdez and Anslinger.
Scholars of women and narcotics suggest that the most successful female drug peddlers exhibit more discretion in their trade than men commonly do, as is represented in popular culture.39 Women are more likely to maintain a middle-class lifestyle and avoid ostentatious expenditures that would draw unneeded attention to their business and their family.40 This, in part, may be due to the fact that women rarely appear to grow their businesses to the size of those of most prominent male dealers. Women also avoid drawing attention to their business for fear of the authorities and their competitors.
Some drug peddlers interviewed by U.S. and Australian scholars have described women as less trustworthy in the trade, but that may be because male dealers want to ensure that women remain marginal to the trade. La Nacha, like la Chata, proves that in Mexico, the discreetness of women may have contributed to their ability to remain in the trade for much longer periods than their peers in other parts of the world as well as their male colleagues in Mexico.
The fact that la Nacha and la Chata prospered in illicit trade to such a degree that their names became associated with transnational drug trafficking long before the men of the modern-day cartels offers a possible reading of class and gender relations among the working class as first suggested by anthropologist Oscar Lewis.41 Scholarly assertions implied that at times, women of working and rancho classes have taken the reins of power from men. La Nacha’s marriage to Pablote may have given her an entry into the business, and he may have trained her. However, another scenario may have existed. She may have been as adept as he in acquiring, processing, and moving product. Since she maintained a connection to her home state of Durango and a connection with Jalisco, she may have provided her husband with a direct supply line from the poppy fields.
Both Pablote and Jasso were transplants to Ciudad Juárez, and perhaps they entered the trade as equals. In a 1930 article published by La Prensa, their names are listed as equals among border traffickers.42 Like la Chata’s relationship with Jaramillo, Jasso’s relationship with Pablote may have enhanced her own abilities rather than simply relegating her to be his accomplice or apprentice. For both women and their respective partners, their personal and sexual relationships may have added to their businesses and their longevity. Could they both have attained perfect business partnerships that endured beyond their emotional relationships? For la Nacha, her elevation to boss of her organization may have been preordained following her husband’s early death. Later, her sons, nephews, and grandsons played key roles as partners and mules.
After Pablote’s death, la Nacha consolidated and then ran the criminal enterprise until the 1980s. Very early, her reputation as a highly connected boss spread. In 1933, Daniel Minjares Párea and Daniel Rodríguez, leaders of the Confederation of Parents and Teachers in Ciudad Juárez, complained about her to the governor of Chihuahua, Rodrigo Quevedo. They wrote:
The sale of narcotics is being done shamelessly and with impunity in the house of a woman dubbed La Nacha with the knowledge of the Police chief, a man called Moriel, and the protection of the Municipal President who has exploited this business, not only in that [la Nacha’s] house, but in several places where armed men who flaunt their impunity engage in the sale who are nonetheless the employees of the current administration.43
The confederation outlined a host of threats to the health of the nation: the showing of banned films, illegal licensing of businesses, prostitution, extortion from tourists, and government corruption. In turn, they demanded that a commission form to study and remedy the numerous problems in the city. Citizens of Ciudad Juárez routinely engaged in dialogues with government officials regarding graft, corruption, and vice.44 In this petition, la Nacha was identified as a threat but also as a highly connected drug dealer in the city. The petition indicates that by 1933 she had the protection of the police and the local government. Governor Quevedo had also been linked to the drug trade, and he and la Nacha had some sort of working relationship. Quevedo and his brothers actively engaged in the vice trade, whether drugs or gambling. In the 1930s, they battled with a competitor and ally of la Nacha, Enrique Fernández. By 1936, the Quevedos had killed Fernández and merged the two gangs, and la Nacha became part of the Quevedos’ organization.45
In the 1930s, la Nacha served as a supplier to city employees who sold drugs to tourists. These city
employees, like other peddlers in Ciudad Juárez, sold for a commission or as part of a franchise rather than as independent vendors. As discussed in chapter 1, the multifaceted means of peddling created a system of networks and connections rather than small, independent, and self-contained groups of peddlers. In other words, those who worked on commission or were part of a franchise had less invested in the business but could access the profits more easily, although arrest was always a danger.
Despite la Nacha’s fierce reputation, men tried to outmuscle her in the trade, particularly when her children were young, which may account for her alliances with rival gangs. In 1939, American vice consul T. L. Lilliestrom wrote to the secretary of state about la Nacha and her ties to powerful men. He pointed out that she had long been the head of a prominent narcotics ring that operated in El Paso–Ciudad Juárez. In October 1939, she fled from Ciudad Juárez due to an impending arrest by Mexican authorities. In Torreón, Coahuila, two plainclothes police officers beat her and told her that she had to pay twenty thousand pesos or General Alatorre, the commander of the garrison at Ciudad Juárez, would use the evidence against her to send her to Islas Marías. A relative of la Nacha approached Alatorre. Lilliestrom wrote: “The General made it clear to this individual that he had no part in the matter, but that to the contrary he deplored the underhanded treatment she had received. He further stated that the only action he could condone would be legal punishment which might be meted out to her as a result of regular judicial procedure.”46
Lilliestrom further explained that Alatorre deplored the behavior of his men, but he also recognized that la Nacha had a protector, namely the sub-chief of police. This communication further indicates that the police had a dual relationship with traffickers and peddlers, as seen in other cases described in earlier chapters. In this case, la Nacha went to jail, in 1939. In 1940, however, Terry Talent, a customs agent, informed Anslinger that la Nacha was out of jail, lived close to Ciudad Juárez, and operated as “the source of supply for small peddlers.”47 In Talent’s report, she was the only confirmed female drug dealer in Ciudad Juárez, but there were five other women who were under suspicion.