by Elaine Carey
Ignacia Jasso was not the first Mexican citizen whom the U.S. government attempted to extradite for a crime committed in the United States. Her case provides some insight into Mexican revolutionary rhetoric and the country’s relations with the United States. With the consolidation of the state during the 1930s, the government sought to develop Mexico’s economy after years of revolution and displacement. Illegal contraband on the U.S.-Mexico border became a growing concern for Mexican customs officials and police. It undermined attempts to develop legal industries and fill state coffers. Mexican officials’ concerns thus focused on goods coming from the United States into Mexico that might compete with the country’s own emerging industries. The border was where the laws of the two countries clashed.
These collisions of illegal and legal industries along the border led to constant renegotiations of power, law, and culture. Jasso truly represents the culture of el ambiente fronterizo of the twentieth century. With her husband, she recognized the potential of their proximity to America’s market for drugs. After her husband’s death, she expanded her business beyond the immediate border region. With World War II, the transnational flows of heroin and opium from Asia and Europe were severed, and that gave la Nacha an economic advantage that she had never enjoyed before. Demand remained constant while supply declined. La Nacha, like many other borderlanders, took advantage of economic disparities and other forms of marginalities created along the border by using the region as a site for transnational entrepreneurial activity. In turn, Harry Anslinger, George Messersmith, Ezequiel Padilla, Antonio Bermúdez, and others demanded that she, like the border as a symbolic and rhetorical device, be restrained, controlled, and enclosed. She became a site, like the border, to reinforce the “need” for strengthening policies, laws, and relations, like the physical border with its fences, customs workers, policing agencies, and laws that reinforce such disparities across the region.103
Jasso’s analysis of the market, her multiple holdings, and her involvement in all aspects of the trade from growing and processing to distribution and even street selling ensured that her presence became an ongoing problem for the Mexican government. La Nacha was perceived as an insidious threat because of her physical location on the border and her acute knowledge of transnational flows, border inspections, customs, and policing. Like la Chata, she diversified her drug business from small-time peddling, to acquiring her own labs and chemists, to supplying places as distant as New York and Detroit. Her success suggests the inability of either Mexico or the United States to control migratory flows, whether of people, ideas, or narcotics. La Nacha, like countless other people along the border, must be located in some place between the United States and Mexico, legal and illegal, and masculine and feminine.
Despite her imprisonments, threats from male dealers and suppliers, the attempt at extradition by the United States, the revealing information aired at the Daniel Commission, and the constant chatter about her role as a supplier, Jasso sold and distributed heroin and marijuana from the late 1920s until her death in the 1980s. The Daniel hearings and other reports demonstrate that other women, too, developed multifaceted businesses to sell drugs and distribute in Mexican cities and across the border. Whether they were small-time peddlers or transnational traffickers, these women combined legitimate and illicit businesses and formed informal and formal networks for their own preservation and expansion. In the 1970s, women developed the drug business further. As cocaine displaced heroin, the U.S.-Mexico border played a smaller role in international drug smuggling for a few years, only to return as a central site for transshipment. Women on both sides of the border and in much of South America continued to play greater roles in the drug trade, from mule to boss. However, women like Jasso and la Chata pioneered women’s status as drug lords and rivaled their competitors in longevity. There have been few since who survived in the trade as long as they did, but beginning in the 1970s women, like men, made more money in a far shorter period of time. The profits, heightened competition, and violence of that era forever changed the drug trade.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE WOMEN WHO MADE IT SNOW
Cold, Dirty Drug Wars, 1970s
BY THE 1970S, LA NACHA AND WOMEN LIKE HER WERE VIEWED WITH nostalgia by some narcotics agents, who longed for the “good old days” when traffickers were known entities who stayed along the border. With the Vietnam War, student protests, and the “summer of love” came social discontent and an ever-increasing demand for illicit drugs. The U.S. government responded to the generational shifts and conflicts within the narcotics business with an approach that emphasized policing, even if that hampered its own efforts to control demand for narcotics.
Just as in the early 1910s, the United States waged a drug war directed at multiple enemies. The late 1960s and 1970s marked a pivotal shift in policy with a new war on drugs that led to greater professionalization of enforcement on both sides of the border and throughout the hemisphere.1 With increased professionalization and the formation of new agencies to fight the drug trade, the United States again embarked on a campaign to control supplies from Asia, Europe, and the Americas while diplomats advocated systematic changes in global policing.2 With a greater focus on a global struggle to stem the flow of narcotics, the United States and Mexico engaged in certain collaborations—although fraught with mistrust—to combat drug trafficking. Those collaborations ignored the changing dynamics of consumer demand for cocaine.
Richard Nixon’s 1968 election to the U.S. presidency and his pledge to combat drug trafficking triggered significant changes escalating the fifty-year drug war. The relationship between the United States and Mexico grew troubled due to Nixon’s focus on narcotics and its official targeting of sources of supply. In spite of this, authoritarian Latin American governments appeased the Nixon administration’s demand for cooperation. Mexico’s geographical proximity to the United States and its historical role as a supplier ensured that it remained a target of suspicion, but Mexican presidents, as well as other Latin American governments, were able to use the drug war and the Cold War to obtain certain financial and military support, a common issue that continues in some guise to the present day.
Despite the escalation of the war on drugs, demand for narcotics and drugs continued to grow in the United States. Urbanites rediscovered cocaine in the 1970s and used it as a “safe” party drug.3 Traffickers responded to the increased market demand, and to growing diplomatic and policing efforts to stem the flow, with ever more creativity and ingenuity.4 Their attempts to find new routes and methods to transport drugs ensured continued profits. That escalating profitability contributed to increased competition, which in turn ensured that traffickers used more violence in the 1970s and 1980s than in the near past. Increased demand and its corresponding profits ensured that all sides, whether drug suppliers, distributors, and traffickers or local, state, and federal policing agents, further professionalized their narcotics operations, resulting in complex organizations and operations with overlapping alliances that spread across continents. Increased policing led to an increase in profits because production costs remained more or less the same, but transportation and distribution costs escalated.
Beginning in the 1960s, the counterculture’s growing acceptance of drugs challenged society’s traditional taboos. Federal, state, and local governments sought to stem the flows of drugs by creating task forces, running advertisements targeting adolescents, and galvanizing parent and civic organizations in order to stop drug use. In the United States, many kids who came of age in the 1970s remember the “after-school specials” that addressed, and solved within sixty minutes, drug problems that had spread from the cities into the suburbs. As national campaigns from after-school specials to “Just Say No,” featuring first lady Nancy Reagan during the Reagan administration, sought to expose the dangers of drugs, U.S. officials again cast weary glances south and deemed Mexico, and much of Latin America, as prime culprits in the spread of the popularity of marijuana and her
oin among Americans.
Heroin and marijuana, and later cocaine, moved across borders to major U.S. cities in growing volume. From the cities, drugs then flowed to suburbs and small-town America. President Nixon created the Drug Enforcement Administration in 1973 after his overwhelming reelection the year before. With the formation of the DEA, the United States forged cooperation agreements with Mexico, France, and Turkey. Moreover, the U.S.-Mexico border remained a central site of concern. Formalization of the drug war led to the 1974 establishment of the El Paso Intelligence Center staffed by DEA, Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), and Justice Department representatives who coordinated the gathering of intelligence on the southern border with Mexico.
Figure 21. “No Antiwoman Job Bias in the Narcotics Trade.” New York Times.
In the 1970s, the DEA, FBI, and Justice Department decried the marijuana and heroin that arrived across land ports from Mexico and cocaine from the Andean highlands that was flown to rural areas in the United States or passed through U.S. ports only to be moved to major American and Canadian cities. Chileans and Argentines played key roles in the flows of heroin from Asia through Europe to the United States—commonly referred to as the French Connection.5 Other countries such as Brazil, Panama, and some Caribbean islands became sites of transshipment and money laundering.6 Although the trade had changed, women remained an integral part of it. As in the 1930s, women showcased an ability to create cross-ethnic alliances for profit, and in the 1970s geopolitical and economic forces ensured that alliances between different groups would emerge.
In 1975, the DEA proclaimed the slogan “No Antiwoman Job Bias in the Narcotics Trade,” in response to key arrests of women from Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela who were involved in transnational narcotics trafficking to the United States.7 The titillating and sensationalist headline purported that something new had “transpired,” as if it were only then that women appeared as central characters in the drug trade. The DEA’s embrace of feminist rhetoric served as an ironic twist to the emergence of new players in drug trafficking and to ever-escalating profits with the reintroduction of cocaine.
Yet the 1970s drug war recycled familiar political, social, cultural, and historical themes. A collective historical amnesia ensured that policy makers made the same demands that they had beginning in the 1910s, although the 1970s drug trade dramatized one profound difference: heightened competition for the lucrative U.S. market triggered greater violence by drug organizations in order to maintain supply routes. Although women historically avoided violence in the drug trade, the 1970s marked a clear escalation of feminine uses of violence as a tool. At times, the use of violence was a demonstration of power that women could brandish against male competitors. At other times, they used it to defend their male partners.
MARIJUANA, HEROIN, AND THE COLD WAR
The U.S. government and state and local officials described the flow of marijuana and heroin from Mexico to the United States during the Price Daniel hearings and follow-up hearings in the 1950s and 1960s. The Mexican government, first under Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964–1970) and then under Luis Echeverría (1970–1976), paid greater attention to the flow of narcotics internally and externally because of U.S. demand. In 1968, the Nixon administration launched an offensive on drug use in the United States. This multifront “war” proposed to stop the flows from the French Connection, the Golden Triangle region in Southeast Asia, and Mexico.8 The French Connection involved the flow of heroin from the Middle East and Turkey to France and then on to the United States, particularly New York. New initiatives and agencies formed to confront the perceived growing drug problem in the United States. This included the formation of the DEA and the Special Presidential Task Force Relating to Narcotics, Marijuana, and Dangerous Drugs.
On September 16, 1968, prior to his election, Nixon pledged to the American people that he would “move against the source of drugs” and “accelerate the development of tools and weapons to detect narcotics in transit.”9 Arguing that “mind-changing” drugs were essentially a problem of youth, the report of the Task Force Relating to Narcotics, Marijuana, and Dangerous Drugs focused on the flow from Mexico as a problem of supply rather than demand. Although the growing demand for drugs crossed classes and ethnicities, the task force downplayed such aspects of the overall problem and instead clamed that the U.S.-Mexico border needed greater control to keep drugs from entering America.
The task force proposed a number of changes to border crossing procedures. For example, it sought to encourage Americans to walk across the border rather than drive their cars. Border control and customs officials viewed motor vehicles as key transporters of contraband (chapter 2).10 Hence, those citizens who crossed in cars attracted more intense scrutiny than those who crossed on foot. Those on foot would be observed for any unusual behavior or appearances; surveillance of pedestrians is easier to achieve than surveillance of travelers sitting in or driving a car. The task force also suggested that border cities be declared off limits to military personnel. This suggestion echoed similar recommendations of the Price Daniel Commission in the 1950s as well as earlier discussions going back to the Mexican Revolution. Suggestions for infrastructural changes at the border, such as fences and easements, were far easier to implement.
Along with the infrastructure changes, which altered the movement of traffic for easier inspection, the task force wanted more detection capabilities along the border, using dogs and sensors. Much of the border control that is evident today came about through these recommendations. The report also recommended substantial budget increases for customs, border patrol, and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) to hire more personnel and to purchase more equipment such as airplanes for aerial surveillance.11
Following the report, White House adviser John Ehrlichman encouraged Nixon to force Mexico to defoliate marijuana and poppy fields and implement stricter enforcement on the Mexican side of the border.12 Again, these demands echoed the same requests American presidents had made to Mexican presidents beginning with Plutarco Calles in the 1920s. Defoliation programs had been requested and complied with by every Mexican president. With Ehrlichman’s encouragement, Nixon embraced a language of warfare to take “immediate steps calculated to make a frontal attack on the narcotic, marihuana [sic] and dangerous drug traffic across the Mexican border.”13 With a stalemate in the war in Vietnam, perhaps Nixon believed that a war on drugs in Mexico offered a more likely achievement in the first few short months of his presidency.
Nixon and Ehrlichman’s plans to engage in a “frontal attack” met with reservations within the State Department. The U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Robert McBride, warned President Díaz Ordaz about Nixon’s growing concern about the flow of drugs from Mexico. Before Nixon’s meeting with Díaz Ordaz to inaugurate the Friendship Dam on the Rio Grande River that took place in September 1969, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger briefed the U.S. president to ensure that the United States would not initiate any new protocol without first informing the Mexican side. Ambassador McBride again attempted to convey the seriousness of the issue and strongly encouraged the Díaz Ordaz administration to enact some changes. Despite the State Department’s and other agencies’ hesitancy to implement a unilateral action, Operation Intercept began on September 21.14
Two thousand customs agents working around the clock stopped cars and pedestrians for inspection at thirty-one border crossings. Motorists, pedestrians, business owners, and even customs agents vented their frustrations as businesses lost money and people waited six to eight hours to cross. G. Gordon Liddy described it as follows:
Operation Intercept has been called a failure—only by those who never knew its objective. It was actually a great success. For diplomatic reasons the true purpose of the exercise was never revealed. Operation Intercept, with its massive economic and social disruption could be sustained far longer by the United States than by Mexico. It was an exercise in international extortion, pure, simple and effe
ctive, designed to bend Mexico to our will. We figured Mexico could hold out for a month; in fact they caved in after two weeks and we got what we wanted. Operation Intercept gave way to Operation Cooperation.15
Liddy’s revisionist reading of the event did match many opinions expressed across the United States and in Mexico at the time. The New York Times reported that it had resulted in “a minor haul of marijuana,” while business leaders on both sides of the border complained.16 The Mexican newspaper Excélsior argued that Operation Intercept “can only be new grounds for the mistrust over the position that the United States will take on improving commercial and financial conditions for Latin American development.17 President Díaz Ordaz echoed this, stating that it had created a “wall of suspicion” in U.S.-Mexican relations.18 Díaz Ordaz’s criticism mirrored those denunciations leveled at the United States when the George W. Bush administration insisted that other nations adopt similar policing protocols and strategies during his war on terror.
The drug war met the Cold War in 1969, but in this case, Nixon and Kissinger may have miscalculated. Díaz Ordaz, a rather conservative Mexican politician, may have been more receptive to some sort of cross-border initiative with regard to drugs had he been directly consulted. He, like Nixon, was no fan of the emerging youth culture, and during his presidency he consistently, and at times violently, stood his ground against hippies, striking medical students, and student protesters.19 He sought to create a fiscally responsible and modern Mexico, which should have endeared him to Republican leaders in the United States.
Operation Intercept as a show of strength ensured criticism not only from Mexicans but also from Americans. The border searches caused havoc and generated myriad complaints from businesspeople on both sides of the border, who loudly protested to local politicians and to their national representatives. Then, as now, Mexicans and Americans crossed the border to visit family members, shop, work, and go to school. Journalist Ruben Salazar, who testified about the border drug trade in the Price Daniel hearings, reported about the disruptions that Operation Intercept caused for many border residents. In his articles, he argued that Operation Intercept “hurt the pride of southwest Mexican-Americans who feel the United States is trying to blame Mexicans for a problem which is to a large extent uniquely ‘Anglo.’ ”20 The operation turned up very little dope but stirred up resentment among borderlanders, Mexican Americans, commuters, and customs and government officials.