by Elaine Carey
Although Nixon undertook Operation Intercept unilaterally, its poor results ended up forcing negotiations with Díaz Ordaz. Perhaps to make amends, Nixon extended greater military aid to Mexico in the form of helicopters. Moreover, this period marked a closer relationship between the two countries to battle antigovernment guerrilla groups that had emerged in Mexico during the 1960s. Like in many other Latin American countries, the United States feared the success of guerrillas, who drew inspiration from Cuban revolutionaries as well as Mexican figures.21
Operation Intercept did yield one significant outcome for the Mexican government. Whether marijuana or heroin, drugs threatened the security of the nation, and the war on drugs met the Cold War and contributed to Mexico’s dirty war. Americans who crossed the border to purchase marijuana found themselves subjected to greater harassment. Hippies, who came to Mexico not necessarily to traffic but to smoke some pot and enjoy the beaches, encountered harassment and at times arrests. Mexican young people, whether in the guerrilla movements or not, found themselves, like their American counterparts, associated with drugs and trafficking. The international aid, particularly aerial equipment for crop eradication and border surveillance, became instruments of repression that ended up targeting young people.
In March 1970, the attorney general for the United States, George Mitchell, and the attorney general for Mexico, Julio Sánchez Vargas, approved what became known as Operation Cooperation.22 Immediately following Mexican approval of this initiative, Mexican agents and agents of the BNDD worked jointly in numerous raids and arrests of prominent and not-so-prominent drug traffickers and dealers.23 In the 1960s, the FBN, followed by the BNDD, opened offices in Mexico City (1963), Guadalajara (1969), and Hermosillo (1971) to facilitate collaboration between Mexican and U.S. officials.24 Joint operations and arrests took place, and official agencies shared information. Internally, the BNDD reported its own apprehension about Mexico’s ability to work jointly with the United States in stemming the flow of heroin. BNDD officials believed that Mexican antinarcotics agents could not be trusted, as U.S. agents had believed for sixty years.
The 1970s ushered in a time of social turmoil in Mexico. The Cold War and national issues intersected with the evolving drug policies of the United States. In the wake of the 1968 Mexican student movements, some young Mexicans fled to the guerrilla movements or took up arms against the government. Moreover, Mexican society was entering a modern age that seemed to contradict the perception of control exhibited by the Mexican government in the summer of 1968. Increasingly discontent, young people who recognized that civil actions did not lead to democratic change sought more rapid transformation, sometimes through violence.
Genaro Vázquez Rojas was the leader of Comité Cívico Guerrerense (Civic Committee of the People of Guerrero), which opposed government corruption, poverty, and violence in the state of Guerrero.25 During the 1960s, Guerrero was a hotbed of activity, with Vázquez Rojas’s CCG and Lucio Cabañas’s Partido de los Pobres (Party of the Poor).26 Educators and students joined the rural struggle. Vázquez Rojas and Cabañas served as intellectual mentors to disenchanted youth around the country who were captivated by the struggle in the mountains of Guerrero.27
In the northern Mexican city of Monterrey, Ignacio Salas Obregón, a student at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, an elite private university, was an activist in the Professional Student Movement, a lay Catholic organization. He came into contact with communists while working with the urban poor. Salas Obregón would later lead a number of activists into armed struggle. In 1973, various guerrilla groups formed the Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre (Communist League of September 23, or LC-23), led by Salas Obregón.28 LC-23 took its name from the 1965 guerrilla assault on a military compound in Chihuahua led by Arturo Gamíz and medical doctor Pablo Gómez, similar to Fidel Castro’s attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba twelve years earlier. On September 23, 1965, the guerrillas issued a formal statement that directly challenged the corruption of the Chihuahua state government. The following day, a group led by Gamíz and Gómez assaulted the Madera military compound; both of these leaders as well as six soldiers died in the resulting battle.
Vázquez Rojas, Cabañas, and La Liga all became tied to the emerging drug trade in the 1970s, whether or not they had anything to do with drugs and trafficking. In 1970, Mexican police arrested American James Lee Daniels with $6,000 (2012: $35,500). He planned to buy marijuana from Manuel Priedo Llaguno of Huachinantla, Puebla. The police raided Priedo’s home and found 150 kilos of Acapulco Gold, a common strain of marijuana from Mexico known for its toffee scent. Along with the marijuana, the police also found propaganda from Vázquez Rojas and Cabañas.29 In 1971, Sabino Rodriguez Pérez was arrested with his friend Pascual Olais Alvarado in the port of Veracruz in an unrelated case. They had in their possession two thousand firearms, twenty-two thousand bullets, and twenty-five thousand pesos in cash. Despite the guns and ammunition, the police asserted that they were engaged in the sale of opium. Rodriguez’s house was searched, and the police found 150 kilos of Acapulco Gold and materials related to Vázquez Rojas and Cabañas.30 In the reports, Rodriguez and Olais had met with “an American” potential buyer.
In 1973, the Federal Security Directorate (DFS) also reported the arrest of Emilia “Mily” Peña Contreras. She had suitcases that contained forty kilograms of marijuana. The DFS documented that she carried literature from the Liga Comunista.31 Modeled on the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, the DFS formed in the 1940s to combat subversion by foreign and revolutionary groups; later it became the investigative arm of narcotics policing.32
By the early 1970s, LC-23 as well as other guerrilla groups were kidnapping and holding business leaders hostage for money to finance their activities.33 LC-23’s kidnapping and murder of Eugenio Garza Sada, a prominent Monterrey businessman, did little to enhance the Echeverría administration’s reputation among the business elites of northern Mexico.34 Under Echeverría, disappearances and state-sponsored torture became tools of repression, resulting in the murder of at least 275 people and perhaps as many as 1,500, including the intellectual architects of LC-23.35 The government considered youth suspect and dangerous, as it had in 1968. Like in the United States, some young men and women who were actively opposed to the Vietnam War also became associated with drugs and drug trafficking. The DFS’s role to protect the state from terrorism and subversion also extended to drugs. Like Raúl Camarago, the chief of the narcotics police in Mexico City who worked for the Lung Sung tong in the 1920s, DFS agents accidentally stumbled onto drug safe houses while in pursuit of antigovernment guerrillas; and, like Camarago’s targets, drug traffickers knew the economic weaknesses of many police officers and DFS agents. For some DFS members, the financial rewards that could be acquired through the drug trade were too significant to ignore.36 Over time, the DFS evolved into protectors for the drug traffickers, which contributed to the growth of narcotics organizations and their connections to people in power. From the few accessible documents, evidence suggests that some DFS agents planted drugs on terror suspects while others planted propaganda on drug peddlers and smugglers.
This subterfuge worked for corrupt DFS agents in two ways. By connecting drugs and guerrillas, they gained greater support from Washington. At the same time, as top policing agents they could control multiple situations and information regarding arrests and raids. Drug traffickers sought out corrupt but highly trained DFS agents, and the “war” became a lucrative arrangement for both the DFS and drug dealers while it targeted young people. Some of the young people arrested for possession or distribution did confess to being part of the guerrilla movements, but one document suggests that the DFS forced a confession from a young man who possessed marijuana but was also mentally ill.37 How many forced confessions did the DFS obtain from young men and women who simply passed a couple of joints or from young people who circulated propaganda and later found that their cars or backpacks also contained
marijuana or heroin? And how many of the images of young men and women standing beside confiscated marijuana and propaganda were staged by corrupt DFS agents? We may never know, but it is not entirely implausible to assume that such incidents occurred.
The role of women in political subversion was not as threatening as that of men to officials.38 The narconarratives that emerged in the United States during the 1960s and early 1970s again served the Mexican government as justification for the detention of certain people. The guerrilla uprisings, increasing demand for drugs in the United States, and lucrative drug flows contributed to strange collaborations. Guerrillas interested in overthrowing a corrupt government might have trafficked marijuana, and elite policing agents seeking to snuff out guerrillas wanted to profit from the drug trade. As in 1968, the government cast the young members of guerrilla organizations as drug addicts or drug traffickers. The government used images of young men with longish hair and counterculture-influenced clothing to establish connections between drugs and criminality.
Although women were rarely depicted as drug runners and marijuana traffickers, the government tied those who were to the guerrilla movements, building the model of the new Mexican trafficker on the legacy of women like Lola la Chata and la Nacha. This new female trafficker was not ideologically opposed to the government. More likely, she never considered the government as a hindrance or threat until it targeted her, her family, and her business. The woman trafficker of the 1970s still used familial networks, but she became far more mobile and used multiple means—whether cars, planes, or human mules—to move marijuana, heroin, and cocaine through international ports of entry.
ANOTHER PERFECT COUPLE
It was in Tijuana where Mexican and U.S. agents worked together to arrest Roberto Hernandez, his wife Helen, his brother Juan, and Mercedes Coleman, the owner of the home where the raid took place. The BNDD described the group as “the most sophisticated and efficient of all clandestine drug trafficking operations in U.S.-Mexican channels today.” The BNDD went on to argue that Hernandez supplied much of the illicit drug supply to the United States, smuggling over twenty kilograms of heroin per week through Tijuana to San Diego and beyond.39 The transnational cooperation and arrests made national news in the United States and Canada. Reports claimed that Roberto Hernandez resisted arrest and had to be dragged from the home.40 Other reports stated that the police found drugs, fifteen pounds of cocaine, grenade launchers, a bazooka, a machine gun silencer, and small arms.41 Newspapers also reported that the members of the Hernandez group had in their possession $25,000 cash (2012: $149,000) and thirty-one uncashed money orders from customers in the United States. Those arrested included two other women who served as couriers and six other men.
Because of their location in Tijuana, the Hernandez family acted in much the same fashion as their predecessors, Big Mike and Ismelda Galindo Barragán. Customers placed orders by telephone in coded messages and then paid via money order from the United States. In turn, the Hernandezes delivered to the other side of the border using female couriers. Because Operation Intercept had curtailed the flow of drugs through increased surveillance and other measures, the Hernandez network had grown more creative. As depicted in the 2000 Steven Soderbergh film Traffic, the Hernandezes used Mexican folk art to enclose the heroin for the purpose of transport across the border.
With the arrest of the Hernandez ring, the BNDD had a huge case, and the FBI identified Helen Hernandez specifically as a woman who had benefited from the narcotics trade.42 Because she was a partner in the illegal enterprise, the FBI recognized that whether her husband was in or out of jail, the smuggling and selling of heroin and marijuana would continue. Four years later, the Hernandez family provided the DEA, the successor to the BNDD, with another case. On Thursday, October 17, 1974, Mexican federal police and army units raided the La Mesa Penitentiary in Tijuana. The newly formed DEA participated in the case. Police officials and army soldiers searched the cells of Roberto, Helen, and Juan, who had served four years of their eleven-year sentences by that date.
Despite being in jail, the Hernandez ring had operated without disruption. The raids of their cells yielded $30,000 (2012: $140,000) in cash and over $41,000 (2012: $469,000) in jewelry. Coded messages were also found.43 The DEA and Mexican authorities described the messages as documenting a multinational ring with connections to France, the United States, Mexico, and Canada. They argued that there were “strong indications” that the Hernandezes had replaced the French Connection for the purpose of smuggling heroin to the United States and Canada via Europe. Moreover, certain journalists alluded to the Hernandez connection to the U.S.-based prison gang known as the Mexican Mafia.44 The tie to the Mexican Mafia came at a time when that organization was gaining greater recognition as an influential prison gang.45
The Hernandez case confirmed Mexico’s ongoing role in illicit flows of drugs into the United States and the ability of Mexican organized crime to create transnational alliances with criminal entities in the United States. The DEA’s hopes, however, seem almost naïvely unrealistic in retrospect. By removing the Hernandez prison control, the DEA argued that the French Connection would finally be snuffed out, as would the Mexican flow of drugs. Plus, Mexican and U.S. authorities had dealt a heavy blow to the Mexican Mafia. Both of these claims as presented to the press in 1974 were simply another fictitious narconarrative of vice; they did not address the reality of an ever-responsive and changing business model of drug trafficking, an approach that would require policing strategies to finally focus on the ever-present demand side of trafficking.
The DEA and the U.S. Justice Department, however, did provide evidence to the Mexican authorities that resulted in the successful prosecution of Helen and Roberto. According to Glen E. Pommerening, the acting assistant attorney general in the Justice Department, Mexican authorities requested that the United States initiate extradition hearings because that would allow them to prosecute the couple for drug trafficking and not simply localized prison peddling.46
The Hernandez ring operated as an extensive family enterprise in which all three partners seemed to have equal power within the organization. With their proximity to one of the most important ports of entry, Roberto, Helen, and Juan mimicked their Tijuana predecessors, the Barragáns, and other borderlanders such as la Nacha. In fact, they were almost identical to the Barragáns. All the border organizations conformed to the prototype of Mexican organized crime as defined by Article 2 of the Ley Federal contra la Delincuencia Organizada:
When three or more persons agree to organize themselves or to be organized to carry out, in an ongoing or repeated way, actions which themselves or related to others, have as a goal or result, to commit [certain specified] crimes, they will be prosecuted for that very fact, as members of organized crime.47
The Hernandez organization shared certain characteristics with other Mexican traffickers. The family served as the nucleus of an organized crime entity. As with Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, family and blood relatives made up the organization. The fact that women in Mexico operated as jefes and capos from the 1930s to the 1970s offers a striking difference from popular perceptions of Italian organized crime families. In all Mexican cases, women played key leadership roles. They held equal positions of power—at times greater than that of their male partners—and they acculturated their children and other family members into the business. Helen Hernandez, like Lola la Chata and la Nacha, was one of the madrinas of the 1970s. By the mid-1970s, she had the company of other women who also ranked as bosses or capos, contributing to what the FBI described as the lack of “antiwoman” bias in the Latin American drug trade.
THE LATIN AMERICAN TRIANGLE
With the onset of a multifront drug war led by the Nixon administration in the early 1970s, the transnational routes used by traffickers evolved into more sophisticated operations that connected the Americas to European and Asian networks. In that decade, cocaine reemerged as a recreational drug of choice, leading to greater soph
istication of its transnational flows and networks. During the 1970s and 1980s, women proved to be innovators in the global heroin and cocaine trade. Along with Helen Hernandez, two women served as early test cases for the newly formed DEA. Yolanda Sarmiento and Griselda Blanco dominated the South America–New York City drug connection in the early 1970s. Although drug use became more common in the United States overall, distributors preferred to work in major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Chicago.48 These cities served as hubs for distribution to the suburbs and other cities.
Rhyn C. Tryal, head of the DEA office in Buenos Aires, described Sarmiento as “one of the sharpest dealers” anywhere. A Chilean by birth, Sarmiento moved to Argentina when she was twenty-two years old.49 By the 1970s, she owned a fashionable wig and hat shop close to the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires. Beyond her vending of fashionable hats, she worked with Corsican drug traffickers who operated out of Argentina. From their base in Marseille, Corsicans first started trafficking heroin in the post–World War II economy.50 From Marseille, they developed distribution networks that reached to Montreal and New York, and the resulting “French Connection” established itself in the popular imagination with the novel and film of the same name.51