Women Drug Traffickers

by Elaine Carey

  The recent terror unleashed by Calderón’s (2006–2012) war on drugs led to the death of more than sixty-five thousand people during his six-year term. This war shifted the focus away from the struggles of everyday people trying to go to school or work, simply living their lives, to a heroic masculine epic struggle that again marginalizes women and children. This struggle between men escalated the spectacle of violence, as in every narco-melodrama. As debates circulate in Mexico about what to do regarding the escalating violence, U.S. policing agencies encounter skeptical Latin American politicians who are becoming more vocal in their criticism of the demand for drugs in the United States, and the U.S. government’s ongoing militarized response. Recently, Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, questioned the access that the DEA and other U.S. agencies have had in Mexico. While U.S. agencies collaborated with the Calderón government, the victims of the melodrama struggle to flee from the violence, with asylum requests from Mexicans increasing to a staggering forty thousand a year. They flee to the very same country whose demand for cocaine, heroin, marijuana, methamphetamines, and pharmaceutical drugs contributes to the terror in their home cities and states.

  That demand and desire has triggered increased spending on diplomacy and enforcement, but as the recent HSBC case revealed, the revenue derived from drugs spreads from country to country and into the pockets not only of criminals but also of elite businessmen and women. As film director Felipe Aljure vividly acknowledged in his film El colombian dream, the money is far more intoxicating than the drugs.23 Whether narc or narco, mule or boss, politician or banker, there is no secret: the money is alluring. And, it knows no gender.

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  1. The Bushwacker is a rum and coffee drink. The owner of the patent was the source of a lawsuit. See Sandshaker Lounge and Package Store, LLC v. Quietwater Entertainment, Inc., U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, 92051664, October 25, 2012.

  2. Tamara Lush, “Cocaine, Sand, and a Bunch of Friends,” Tampa Bay Times, December 4, 2004; Associated Press, “Panhandle Lounge Owner Gets 2 Years in Drug Case,” Herald-Tribune (Sarasota), July 29, 2004; and “Sandshaker House Sells for $1,043,800,” Pensacola News Journal, June 22, 2005.

  INTRODUCTION

  1. “Por narco, capturan a la llamada Reina del Pacífico,” La Jornada, September 29, 2007; and Arturo Pérez-Reverte, La reina del sur (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2002). Pérez-Reverte’s book was also adapted into a miniseries of the same title; La reina del sur began airing in the fall of 2011.

  2. Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo and Juan José Quintero Payán, along with Ernesto Fonseca Carillo, worked closely with Colombian cocaine traffickers creating what became known as the Guadalajara cartel. In the 1990s, their organization split into two other organizations, one based in Tijuana led by the Arellano Félix family and the other in Sinaloa led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera.

  3. “Ejecutan a siete personas en Guerrero,” La Jornada, October 9, 2007. Pancho Villa launched his invasion of Columbus, New Mexico, from Palomas, also known as Puerto Palomas de Villa.

  4. For an interview with a female boss, see Howard Campbell, Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Juárez (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009).

  5. Following a practice from colonial times, narcos use their daughters to create alliances by marrying them into other drug families. For a brief discussion of this, see Elaine Carey and José Carlos Cisneros Guzmán, “The Daughters of La Nacha: Women, Drugs, and the Border,” NACLA Report on the Americas (May–June 2011): 23–24.

  6. Steven Soderbergh, Traffic, Bedford Falls Productions, 2000; Joshua Marston, María Full of Grace, HBO Films, 2004; Ted Demme, Blow, New Line Cinema, 2001; and Brian De Palma, Scarface, Universal Pictures, 1983.

  7. See Susan Boyd, From Witches to Crack Moms: Women, Drug Law, and Policy (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2004). Boyd examines the shifts and distinctions of policies that focus on women in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States. In Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice (New York: Routledge, 2000), Nancy Campbell historicizes the shifts of policy on cultural meanings of drug use in the United States. Much has been written on mothers’ use of drugs from various disciplines. For a legal and policy perspective, see Laura Gómez, Misconceiving Mothers: Legislators, Prosecutors, and the Politics of Prenatal Drug Exposure (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1997), who studies drug policy in California from 1983 to 1996 as directed at crack mothers. Sheigla Murphy and Marsha Rosenbaum, Pregnant Women on Drugs: Combating Stereotypes and Stigma (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), provide a sociological study of mothers who use opiate and coca derivatives. Boyd’s earlier work, Mothers on Illegal Drugs: Transcending Myths (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), questions why the numbers of using mothers is so high in North America when compared to Europe, while analyzing the impact of antinarcotics legislation and maternal behavior in Canada. See also Mara L. Keire, “Dope Fiends and Degenerates: The Gendering of Addiction in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Social History 3 (1998): 809–22.

  8. For contemporary analysis of women and drug peddling, see Howard Campbell, Drug War Zone; Eloise Dunlap, Gabriele Stürzenhofecker, and Bruce D. Johnson, “The Elusive Romance of Motherhood: Drugs, Gender, and Reproduction in Inner-City Distressed Households,” Journal of Ethnicity and Substance Abuse 5, no. 3 (2006): 1–27; Barbara Denton, Dealing: Women in the Drug Economy (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2001); Eloise Dunlap and Bruce D. Johnson, “Family and Human Resources in the Development of a Female Crack Seller: Case Study of a Hidden Population,” Journal of Drug Issues 26, no. 1 (1996): 175–98; and Patricia Adler, Wheeling and Dealing: An Ethnography of an Upper-Level Drug Dealing and Smuggling Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

  9. See peripheral role in drug research, Valli Rajah, “Intimacy, Time, Scarcity: Drug Involved Women Account for Secretly Withholding Financial Capital in Violent Intimate Relations,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 39, no. 131 (2010): 131–58.

  10. “Smuggling of Dope Alarms,” Los Angeles Times, August 21, 1922. Mexicali-Calexico was second only to the ports in Los Angeles and San Francisco as a gateway for narcotics flowing into the United States.

  11. Kimberley L. Thachuk, “An Introduction to Transnational Threats,” in Transnational Threats: Smuggling and Trafficking in Arms, Drugs, and Human Life, ed. Kimberley L. Thachuk (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007), 3–20. These entrepreneurs should also include what Peter Andreas and Ethan Nadelmann call “transnational moral entrepreneurs,” who generally work to convince foreign elites to adopt the moral codes of one society as if they were universal truths. See Peter Andreas and Ethan Nadelmann, Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Michael Kenney, From Pablo to Osama: Trafficking and Terrorist Networks, Government Bureaucracies, and Competitive Adaptation (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2007).

  12. For a contemporary analysis of these trends, see Enrique Desmond Arias, Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro: Trafficking, Social Networks, and Public Security (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). One of Arias’s categories of analysis is that of informal networks with civic and political actors.

  13. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).

  14. Hermann Herlinghaus, Violence Without Guilt: Ethical Narratives from the Global South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 4. The theme of narconarratives was widely discussed at the conference Narco-Epics Unbound: New Narrative Territories, Affective Aesthetics, and Ethical Paradox, University of Pittsburgh, April 4–5, 2008.

  15. Paul Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

  16. Samuel Truett and Elliott Young, “Introduct
ion: Making Transnational History; Nations, Regions, and Borderlands,” in Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History, ed. Samuel Truett and Elliott Young (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 6–32; Roger Rouse, “Mexican Migration and the Social Spaces of Postmodernism,” in Between Two Worlds: Mexican Immigrants in the United States, ed. David Gutiérrez (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1996), 247–64 and Michiel Baud and Willem van Schendel, “Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands,” Journal of World History 8, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 211–42. For a contemporary study of the impact of drugs on borderlanders and on a particular border site, see Howard Campbell, Drug War Zone. Also see Elaine Carey and Andrae Marak, “Introduction,” Smugglers, Brothels, and Twine: Historical Perspectives on Contraband and Vice in North America’s Borderlands, ed. Elaine Carey and Andrae Marak (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011), 1–9.

  17. Itty Abraham and Willem van Schendel, “Introduction: The Making of Illicitness,” in Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization, ed. Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 4–25; and David Kyle and Christina A. Siracusa, “Seeing the State Like a Migrant: Why So Many Non-criminals Break Immigration Laws,” in Van Schendel and Abraham, eds., Illicit Flows and Criminal Things, 153–76.

  18. Gretchen Kristine Pierce, “Sobering the Revolution: Mexico’s Anti-alcohol Campaigns and the Process of State-Building, 1910–1940” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2011).

  19. Luis Astorga, Drogas sin fronteras: los expedientes de una guerra permanente (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2003); Luis Astorga, El siglo de las drogas: el narcotráfico, del Porfiriato al nuevo milenio (Mexico City: Plaza y Janés, 2005); Nancy Campbell, Using Women; Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine; Joseph Spillane, Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884–1920 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); and William O. Walker III, Drug Control in the Americas (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989).

  20. Rosemary Hennessy, “Open Secrets: The Affective Cultures of Organizing on Mexico’s Northern Border,” Feminist Theory 10, no. 3 (December 2009): 310–22.

  21. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

  22. Nancy Campbell, Using Women, 71.

  23. Denton, Dealing.

  24. Women in both Mexico and the United States made up the greater percentage of addicts, their addictions inadvertently induced by physicians or through medical treatments.

  25. Bingham Dai’s study of addiction in 1935 demonstrated that 15 percent of the women addicts whom he studied were traffickers. See Bingham Dai’s Opium Addiction in Chicago (1937; repr. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1970). For a definition of organized crime and how it intersects with economic structures, see Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, trans. A. M. Henderson and T. Parsons, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947).

  26. Joan W. Scott, “Unanswered Questions,” American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (December 2008): 1422–29.

  27. Isaac Campos, Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Carlos Aguirre and Robert Buffington, eds., Reconstructing Criminality in Latin America (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2001); Pablo Piccato, City of Suspects: Crime in Mexico City, 1900–1931 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Robert M. Buffington, Criminal and Citizen in Modern Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); Lyman Johnson, ed., The Problem of Order in Changing Societies: Essays on Crime and Policing in Argentina and Uruguay, 1750–1919 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990); and Paul Vanderwood, Disorder and Progress: Bandits, Police, and Mexican Development (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981).

  28. Nancy Leys Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Katherine Elaine Bliss, Compromised Positions: Prostitution, Public Health, and Gender Politics in Revolutionary Mexico City (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2001).

  29. “Mexico to Join U.S. in Fight on Drugs,” New York Times, May 10, 1925. Calles remained the de facto leader of the country until 1935.

  30. Carolyn Nordstrom, Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), xix.

  31. Anne Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011). Hyde documents the role of women in diverse economic activities.

  32. See Stephanie Mitchell and Patience A. Schell, The Women’s Revolution in Mexico, 1910–1953 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930–1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997).

  33. Michael Taussig, Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

  34. Theodore Levitt, “The Globalization of Markets,” Harvard Business Review, May–June 1983. Levitt popularized the use of the term. See Rawi Abelal and Richard S. Tedlow, “Theodore Levitt’s ‘The Globalization of Markets’: An Evaluation After Two Decades,” Harvard Business School Working Paper no. 03–0802, at http://papers.ssrn.com/s013/papers.cfm?abstract_id=383242, accessed April 8, 2011.

  35. This is still the case. The Arellano Félix cartel was a family business operated by seven brothers and four sisters. See Public Broadcasting Service, “The Family Connection,” Frontline, Drug Wars, October 9–10, 2000, at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/business/afo/afosummary.htm, accessed April 8, 2011.

  36. Nordstrom, Global Outlaws.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1. Letter to J. de D. Bojórquez, April 1935, n.d., Dirección General de Gobierno: Estupefacientes Drogas, vol. 2, file 3, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (hereafter AGN).

  2. Leopoldo Alvarado to Secretario de Gobernación, June 21, 1935, Dirección General de Gobierno: Estupefacientes Drogas, vol. 2, file 3, AGN.

  3. The Porfiriato is a term used to describe Mexico from 1876 to 1910, when José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz held power either by direct rule or by indirect rule through a puppet president. During this time, Mexico modernized with electric lights, rail lines, new ports, and modern cities with boulevards and department stores modeled on those in Paris.

  4. For an excellent history of the Cristero rebellion and its impact on the modern state, see Jean Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion: The Mexican People Between Church and State, 1926–1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  5. Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics; Bliss, Compromised Positions.

  6. Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine, 7. For concepts of disease in Latin America, see Diego Armus, ed., Disease in the History of Modern Latin America: From Malaria to AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

  7. Andreas and Nadelmann, Policing the Globe.

  8. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Pantheon Books, 1978).

  9. See Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, A History of Ancient Mexico, 1547–1577: Anthropological, Mythological and Social (New York: Blaine Ethridge, 1931).

  10. Early work such as Francisco Guerra, The Pre-Columbian Mind: A Study into the Aberrant Nature of Sexual Drives, Drugs Affecting Behaviour and the Attitude Towards Life and Death, with a Survey of Psychotherapy in Pre-Columbian America (New York: Seminar Press, 1971) examines the attempts of Spanish laws to control the use of psychotropic drugs.

  11. See Richard Evans Schultes, “Teonanacatl: The Narcotic Mushroom of the Aztecs,” American Anthropologist 42, no. 3 (July–September 1940): 429–33; and Gastón Guzmán, “Hallucinogenic Mushrooms in Mexico: An Overview,” Special Mushroom Issue, Economic Botany 62, no. 3 (2008): 404–12.
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  12. Isaac Peter Campos-Costero, “Marijuana, Madness, and Modernity in Global Mexico, 1545–1920” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2006). Also see Campos, Home Grown.

  13. David F. Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

  14. Peter H. Reuter and David Ronfeldt, “Quest for Integrity: The Mexican-U.S. Drug Issue in the 1980s,” Special Issue: Drug Trafficking Research Update, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 34, no. 3 (Autumn 1992): 93.

  15. Ibid. Beginning in the 1940s, as Mexico’s war on drugs escalated, officials became concerned about trafficking across the southern border. See letter to Manuel Nájera Días, Viceconsul of Mexico in Guatemala, from Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Archivo Histórico “Genero Estrada,” Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (hereafter AHSRE), III-1650–52. Mexican customs officials patrolled the southern border for opium from Guatemala. Poppy was also grown in the southern United States.

  16. Campos-Costero, “Marijuana, Madness, and Modernity,” 105–7. Also see Reverend William Bingley, Travels in North America (London: Harvey and Darton, 1821); and Mathieu de Fossey, Viaje a Méjico (Mexico City: Imprenta de Ignacio Cumplido, 1844). During the colonial era, Spaniards argued that the poor climate of the Americas produced laziness. Criollos also employed similar rhetoric to criticize mestizos’ and indigenous peoples’ lack of productivity and their backwardness.

  17. Federal Narcotic Control Board. Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs with Respect to the Philippine Islands. Report by the Government of the United States, 1927/1928/1929 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1929).

  18. James Thayer Addison, The Episcopal Church in the United States, 1789–1931 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951); and James Thayer Addison, Memorial Sermons Commemorative of Charles Henry Brent (Buffalo: Diocese of Western New York, 1929).