by Elaine Carey
Betrayed by men who worked for her or were in her pay, Jasso realized that her antagonism toward Bermúdez, her arrest, and her imprisonment in the local jail in 1942 could lead to her extradition to the United States or, after 1945, her removal to the Mexican penitentiary at Islas Marías. La Nacha remained in prison more than three years, but she was never far from the public eye. In 1944, the El Paso Herald-Post reported that the psychological pressure caused by the stress of her possible extradition to the United States or a sentence to Islas Marías had driven la Nacha to become a born-again Christian, who followed the evangelical minister Pablo I. Delgado and his twelve-year-old son, Beto, reportedly a biblical prodigy.48
Letters from Delgado’s followers and from Jasso’s family (including her husband’s mother and brother) pleaded for la Nacha to be permitted to attend his revivals. Although she had been permitted to attend family events such as funerals, prison authorities in Ciudad Juárez denied requests to attend the religious services. She then called upon her fellow prisoners to listen to the sermons of Delgado and his son in the prison yard. She stated, “I accepted Christ after I heard the Bible messages. I have also found, through reading the Scripture, a consolation and peace of mind hard to describe.”49 The newspaper published a photo of Jasso peering into the camera holding a Bible.
In spite of la Nacha’s alleged conversion and the prayers of her fellow inmates, Mexican president Manuel Ávila Camacho issued a presidential decree on April 27, 1945, that waived constitutional guarantees in cases of narcotics trafficking and permitted the immediate detention of peddlers and smugglers in the federal penitentiary at Islas Marías without first having to be tried in the Mexican courts.50 She, along with Lola la Chata and other traffickers, were to be sent to Islas Marías. She immediately petitioned for an amparo (a protection of an individual’s rights for due process) to be released or permitted to remain in Ciudad Juárez.51 Jasso may have succeeded in her pleas, because an attorney for the family claimed that she was never sent to Islas Marías.52 Evidence suggests that she was moved to Chihuahua City and later returned to the penitentiary in Ciudad Juárez without ever being sent to the island prison. In Chihuahua City and Ciudad Juárez, she received prominent visitors who were never inspected for contraband prior to entering or leaving the jail. As a result, she continued to sell marijuana and opiates in and outside the prison.53 Newspapers, however, reported that she was sent to Islas Marías in July 1945 and later gained her release in 1946 or 1947. The family, the evidence, and la Nacha herself disputed what the newspapers reported.54
Ultimately, Ávila Camacho and officials in Ciudad Juárez decided not to extradite her to the United States. The Mexican government denied the U.S. request in 1943, but Anslinger continued to press in the courts. In 1946, U.S. federal judge Charles Boynton dismissed the case on the recommendation of Holvey Williams, assistant U.S. district attorney, because of the Mexican government’s refusal to grant Jasso’s extradition on the grounds that insufficient evidence had been presented. She had never been arrested in the United States and had not committed a crime there before returning to Mexico. “We convicted two of La Nacha’s confederates on the evidence the Mexican Government says is insufficient,” Mr. Williams explained. “However, extradition has been refused.”55
Once released from prison, la Nacha continued to sell and distribute heroin, morphine, and marijuana, although some U.S. journalists reported that she returned to selling tortillas from a stall in Guadalajara.56 This story made good press for American Weekly but was more wishful thinking than reality. Of course, American journalists embraced the rhetoric of the state and demanded punishment as a successful deterrent to crime. In 1950, FBN officials documented Jasso as the likely narcotics source of a prominent California trafficker and dealer, an ex-prostitute from Ciudad Juárez who operated in the Los Angeles area.57
In 1951 the mayor of Ciudad Juárez, Pedro García, told P. A. Williams, an FBI agent, that la Nacha lived permanently in Guadalajara. When she visited her sons in Ciudad Juárez, she always carried an amparo prohibiting her arrest. Her children, Natividad, Manuel, Pabla, and Ignacia, continued to live in Ciudad Juárez. Like la Chata, la Nacha too had brought her children into the drug trade. They ensured that her business interests and access to the international port of entry in Ciudad Juárez continued whether she was physically present or not. Prison or “exile” did not undermine her smuggling, because her social networks ensured her economic survival. By the early 1950s, she could have very well been the supplier to her own children, who then supplied dealers in El Paso and beyond.
Figure 19. “Fall of the Opium Queen,” American Weekly. Courtesy of the Hearst Corporations.
BORDER MENACE
In the mid-1950s, la Nacha and her children reemerged in the United States as one of the primary sources of opiates in the Southwest.58 In 1955, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee created a subcommittee to undertake a study of drugs and the need to change the federal criminal code. Meetings were held in cities across the United States. During what have come to be known as the Price Daniel hearings in Texas in October 1955, the celebrated Chicano journalist Ruben Salazar gave testimony about a notorious border trafficker, la Nacha, thus reintroducing her to the U.S. Congress thirteen years after initial efforts to extradite her.59 Salazar painted the history of a prominent woman in the trade, but his work also provided insight into other women operating on or close to the U.S.-Mexico border in the 1950s. He also exposed ties between drug traffickers and people in power along the border and the conflicts that emerged between different political figures.
The hearings took place in New York, Pennsylvania, Texas, and California. Beginning a year after the end of the McCarthy hearings, the Price Daniel hearings were overshadowed by the effects of the Red Scare; the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was still operating. Anslinger routinely associated drug addiction, peddling, and trafficking with communism and behavior deemed un-American or threatening to American values.60 The purpose of the hearings was to establish the extent of drug use and drug trafficking in the United States, much of it associated with “Red China” and China’s attempts to poison Americans.61
Anslinger testified in March 1955 to the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on China and narcotics traffic. In these meetings, he continually alluded to attempts to undermine the United States through drugs and addiction.62 Anslinger’s testimony was a persistent narrative of vice that connected Asia, particularly China, with drugs, prostitution, and other depravities. However, local police forces in the United States did not blame a “yellow menace” as described by Anslinger. Rather, the Price Daniel hearings reflected vastly different approaches to the same problem.
The Price Daniel hearings held in September reflected disagreements between the medical community and policing agencies over what to do about drug addiction. The New York hearings served as a platform to discuss efforts in the struggle against drug addiction; those held outside Washington, D.C., and New York had a regional focus, with an emphasis on the growing drug problems in major U.S. cities and regions. In Chicago and Detroit, the hearings highlighted connections to Canada and the role of organized crime families in major American cities.
During the Texas and California hearings, Mexico was again emphasized as a dangerous site of drugs and drug trafficking. The Mexican government sent representatives to the hearings in California. From Texas, Daniel sent an invitation to Foreign Minister Óscar Rabasa and Attorney General Carlos Franco Sodi.63 Both declined but outlined their ongoing commitment to the battle against drug trafficking. In part, Rabasa and Franco Sodi’s reason for not attending the hearings came from the U.S. State Department, which advised them not to attend and expressed concern then and in later hearings in Los Angeles in 1959 that Rabasa might be used as a political scapegoat. Lower-level Mexican officials attended the hearings in southern California, and in 1959 Rabasa offered to meet in another state.64
A close reading of the Daniel Commission Report of 1
955 on illicit narcotics traffic challenges conclusions commonly drawn in the drug literature published from the 1970s to the 1990s. The literature situates Mexico as a minor player in the international narcotics trade. In part, this conclusion derived from a lack of appreciation for Mexico’s strategic geopolitical position. Instead, scholars studied the Asian and European drug trade because U.S. foreign policy, largely directed by Cold War concerns, focused on those areas of the world. Ever an astute bureaucrat, Anslinger framed his arguments and rhetoric with this in mind to ensure the continuation of his bureau. Throughout the numerous interviews and hearings, Mexico was cast as a major player in the heroin and morphine trade in the 1950s in the southwestern United States. The Texas and California hearings positioned Mexico not as an upstart in the heroin trade but rather as a site of marijuana and heroin supply for years past. This picture emerged in the testimony of Alvin Scharff, who had broken the Loeffelholz-Brandstatter case in the 1930s (chapter 2). By the 1950s, as the treasury agent in charge of Texas, Scharff dramatically depicted Mexico’s role, which, to those on the border, remained blatantly obvious.
Jasso came up in many of the hearings and interviews prior to Salazar’s testimony. In the days before his appearance, people spoke about “la Noche Queen” (the Night Queen) of Ciudad Juárez and speculated about her reach into Texas and the Southwest. Testimony in the hearings brought up the ties between Ciudad Juárez’s drug trade and El Paso’s army post, Fort Bliss. Daniel and the other members of the committee heard about soldiers going to Juárez’s shooting galleries (picaderos) and those in El Paso, many of which were supplied by Jasso, her son Natividad, and her adopted son Gilberto. Clearly, the hearings demonstrated that women such as Jasso posed a national security threat.
The most famous case involving drug use at Fort Bliss concerned twenty-two-year-old paratrooper Daniel Barrera, whose body was found in an El Paso arroyo apparently dead of a heroin overdose. On the evening of August 23, 1955, Barrera had gone to the home of Antonio Tavarez Rodriguez in El Paso, where he purchased and then injected heroin. In an interview, Tavarez claimed that Barrera was already drunk before he injected himself, and he immediately became ill and passed out. Tavarez and Barrera’s two female companions assumed that he was asleep. When they failed to wake him the next morning, Tavarez hired a cab to take Barrera to the arroyo on the other side of the border. There, he cut Barrera’s throat and arms to hide the track marks that indicated heroin use.65 The Juárez police later arrested Tavarez, the two women, and the two drivers who had disposed of the body.66 This case further contributed to a growing fear of drug pushers such as Tavarez, who may have been supplied by women such as Jasso and who in turn got American veterans and active-duty soldiers addicted to heroin.
The issue of soldiers using narcotics had been a concern of the FBN and other U.S. agencies since the Mexican Revolution, when U.S. soldiers sought companionship, alcohol, and drugs in the border cities (chapter 1). The arguments articulated during the efforts to extradite la Nacha kept her imprisoned during World War II to ensure that soldiers remained in good fighting shape. As noted with Lola la Chata, Anslinger continued to put pressure on Mexico regarding its role in drug trafficking, whether along the border or in Mexico’s capital city. Despite the focus on Mexico during World War II, with the war’s end and the low levels of addiction among returning veterans, Anslinger’s attention turned to organized crime and drugs as a communist plot. The attention paid to Mexico diminished in the post–World War II era only to resurface in the mid-1950s.
In 1955, journalists such as Ruben Salazar provided the most insight into Jasso, but they also reported extensively on the drug workings in Ciudad Juárez and along the U.S.-Mexico border. What is striking about Salazar’s testimony is that, despite having been a veteran himself, he had to establish his own as well as Barrera’s U.S. citizenship.67 While working with the El Paso Herald-Post, Salazar covered El Paso and Ciudad Juárez as a local.68 Born in Ciudad Juárez and a naturalized American citizen who attended Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso) on the GI bill, Salazar, like Jasso, knew both sides of the border. His work as a journalist and his observations of addiction in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez gave credence to his testimony. In his statement to the committee, he announced that he had told the mayor of Ciudad Juárez that he was scheduled to appear before them. In other words, Salazar had been honest with the politicians in his hometown about his testimony.69 Daniel asked how he had come to know la Nacha, and Salazar said that many people in the border region knew her, because she had been trafficking for at least twenty-three years; this information shocked Daniel, who immediately inquired about her operations.70
Salazar’s articles on Jasso had also drawn the Texas senator’s attention. Moreover, Salazar provided the committee with a number of eight-by-ten photographs of places where drugs were sold in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.71 Fifty-six other people testified including addicts, small-time traffickers and peddlers, narcotics agents, and customs agents as well as children of addicts.72 In his newspaper articles, Salazar noted la Nacha’s presence on the border. He wrote: “La Nacha is the dope queen of the border. She’s big stuff. But she will sell you one papel (paper) of heroin for five dollars just like any other pusher on a street corner.”73
In one instance, Salazar visited her with a junkie named Hypo.74 Salazar posed as a jornear, a heroin sniffer rather than a mainliner who injects. He described her as “fat, dark, cynical, and around 60.” Salazar noted that Jasso’s life in Ciudad Juárez was far more modest than that of Lola la Chata, who lived in much grander style. La Nacha lived in a barrio with unpaved roads—“a good house in a bad neighborhood.” Her house had all the modern conveniences despite its location on an unpaved street.75 According to Salazar, she lived quite differently from her client Hypo, who had sold all his furniture to pay for his ten-dollar-a-day addiction. Thus, he shared a filthy mattress on the floor with his wife and children.
From Salazar’s articles, readers learned that Jasso’s daughters and sons worked with her. Her sons Gilberto and Natividad owned public baths but also controlled shooting galleries on both sides of the border.76 Her daughters, Ignacia and Pabla, also helped her in the trade. What is distinctive about Jasso is that, despite her success and extensive reach, she also sold papelitos from her home like any other small-scale pusher. She worked as a supplier and distributor but also as a peddler. Perhaps her protection in Ciudad Juárez gave her a sense of comfort, and she did not feel the need to create distance between herself and the sale of the product, as other traffickers did. Instead, she earned a steady cash flow by selling directly from her house in the Bellavista barrio on Violeta Street. Salazar pointed out that her house was close to the official border crossing.
La Nacha’s life and career remained an essential topic of the Daniel hearings in Texas because she not only peddled but also supplied key dealers throughout the state. Salazar verified that la Nacha had long been active and that U.S. agencies had previously attempted to control her drug dealing. He originally heard about her because he “got to know some heroin addicts . . . who talked about La Nacha to me. I had heard La Nacha was not selling any more because during World War II, the Mexican government sent her to a penal colony because the United States pressured them to take her out of the border because we feared she would sell narcotics to our soldiers.”77
He described how easy it was to purchase heroin from Jasso, and how she enjoyed some sort of legal protection. He was referring to the amparo that she obtained from the courts at various times. During Salazar’s testimony, Daniel revealed surprise and shock that she enjoyed such protections.
Mr. Salazar: I understand she had gotten an embargo which is an injunction. This I cannot prove but I understand at one time she could buy protection from Federal judges.
Senator Daniel: Now, you mean by injunction that she has had injunctions issued, restraining officers from arresting her?
Mr. Salazar: That is right.
&nb
sp; Senator Daniel: Is it common knowledge around there in Juárez that has been the situation in the past?
Mr. Salazar: Yes it is.
Senator Daniel: She has had court orders enjoining officers from arresting her?
Mr. Salazar: That is what I understand. I have never seen them, sir. It is common knowledge.
Senator Daniel: Have you talked to the district attorney across the border of Juárez?
Mr. Salazar: Right, sir. He says he has been district attorney a year and a half. She has not had an amparo during that time.78
After this exchange, Salazar told the commission that Humberto Poncinon Solaranzo, the district attorney in Ciudad Juárez, had told him to tell the commission that Mexican president Adolfo Ruiz Cortines had established his own commission to investigate the drug trade in that city. Agents from Mexico City had been sent to Ciudad Juárez to assist the police there in the investigation of narcotics. Senator Daniel expressed his appreciation that the Mexican federal government planned to investigate the narcotic problem in Ciudad Juárez, but he noted that the hearings had caused problems with the Mexican government because some officials denied that la Nacha sold drugs, at the same time that the Mexican federal government was sending federal agents to investigate the border region. This apparent inconsistency drew considerable attention from diverse sectors in the United States and fueled the perception that Mexico was too lax on drug peddlers and traffickers, a theme that had echoed since the early 1900s.79 Salazar used a map to show the committee the location and numbers of shooting galleries and dope pads in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, and he provided names of known sellers in the region.