Women Drug Traffickers

by Elaine Carey

  103. J. Meza Terán, el jefe de los servicios confidentiales, to secretario de gobernación, July 19, 1929, vol. 14, box 17, Fondo Salubridad Pública, Sección Servicios Jurídicos, Archivo de Secretaría de Salud, Mexico City. Citizens’ complaints connected the Chee Kung tong to opium dens and gambling in Sinaloa, but Meza Terán disputed these allegations. C. F. Ramirez to Plutarco Calle, April 10, 1928, Dirección General de Gobierno, Estupefacientes Drogas, vol. 2, file 24, AGN.

  104. Ibid.

  105. Ties between the police and organized crime is not a new phenomenon.

  106. C. M. Goethe, “The Influx of Mexican Amerinds,” Eugenics: A Journal of Race Betterment 1, no. 3 (December 1928): 6–9.

  107. Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006).

  108. See, for example “Weeds That Cause Insanity,” Washington Post, June 15, 1914. Carlota (1840–1927) was the wife of Emperor Maximilian, who was executed by Mexican Republicans in 1867.

  109. “Plants Cause Madness,” Washington Post, May 9, 1913.

  110. “Kills Six in Hospital: Mexican, Crazed by Marihuana, Runs Amuck With Butcher Knife,” New York Times, February 21, 1925.

  111. “Mexican Family Go Insane,” New York Times, February 6, 1927.

  112. “Mexico to Join US in Fight on Drugs” and “Mexico Bans Marihana,” New York Times, December 29, 1925.

  113. William O. Walker III, ed., Drug Control Policy: Essays in Historical and Comparative Perspective (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1992), 16–18.

  114. Anslinger was not the only public official or criminologist to document reefer madness. See also Carleton Simon, Plants That Incite to Crime (New York: n.p., 1940).

  115. Harry J. Anslinger, “Marijuana: Assassin of Youth,” American Magazine 124, no. 1 (July 1937).

  CHAPTER TWO

  1. Marston, María Full of Grace.

  2. Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine; and Paul Gootenberg, “ ‘Blowback’ Cocaine Commodity Chains and Historical Origins of the Mexican Drug Crisis, 1910–2010,” World History Lecture, presented at St. John’s University, October 15, 2012.

  3. Images may be found in the Anslinger archive and in David Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). More recently, a photograph circulated on the Internet of an elderly Mexican woman arrested with kilos of narcotics strapped to her thighs. The woman, who was well beyond seventy years of age, was photographed in her underwear and bra alongside police officers. In this case, humiliation rather than sexual titillation was the prime objective.

  4. See Frances Heidensohn, Women in Control?: The Role of Women in Law Enforcement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Susan Ehrlich Martin and Nancy C. Jurik, Doing Justice, Doing Gender: Women in Legal and Criminal Justice Occupations (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2007); and Dorothy Moses Schulz, Breaking the Brass Ceiling: Women Police Chiefs and Their Paths to the Top (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004).

  5. In 1866, the U.S. Congress passed an act allowing women to be customs inspectors. Most of the first women in customs worked on the northern border between the United States and Canada in the Great Lakes region. Women also worked in customs in the western territories. The first female deputy collector on the U.S.-Mexico border was Mary C. Devine in Laredo, Texas. The first female customs guard at an international crossing was Daisy U. Holder in El Paso. U.S. Customs Today, at http://www.cbp.gov/cU.S.today/mar2000/womhist.htm, accessed December 12, 2009.

  6. Tammy Anderson, “Dimensions of Women’s Power in the Illicit Drug Economy,” Theoretical Criminology 9, no. 4 (November 2005): 371–400. A good contemporary analysis can be found in the chapter “Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms,” in Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Secret Side of Everything (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 114–52.

  7. Lisa Maher and Ric Curtis, “Women on the Edge of Crime: Crack Cocaine and the Changing Contexts of Street-Level Sex Work in New York City,” Crime, Law, and Social Change 18, no. 2 (1992): 221–58.

  8. Dunlap and Johnson, “Family and Human Resources.”

  9. See for example the television series Breaking Bad, Sony Pictures Television, 2008–2013.

  10. Soderbergh, Traffic.

  11. Howard Campbell, “Female Drug Smugglers on the U.S.-Mexico Border: Gender, Crime, and Empowerment,” Anthropological Quarterly 81, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 235.

  12. Howard Campbell, Drug War Zone, 60–75.

  13. Tracy Wilkinson, “Mexico Under Siege: Women Play a Bigger Role in Mexico’s Drug War,” Los Angeles Times, November 10, 2009.

  14. Studies that do exist include Barbara Denton and Pat O’Malley, “Gender, Trust, and Business: Women Drug Dealers in the Illicit Economy,” British Journal of Criminology 39, no. 4 (1999): 513–60; James Inciardi, Anne Pottieger, and Charles Faupel, “Black Women, Heroin and Crime: Empirical Notes,” Journal of Drug Issues 12 (1982): 241–50; James Inciardi, Dorothy Lockwood, and Anne Pottieger, Women and Crack-Cocaine (New York: Macmillan, 1993); and Maher and Curtis, “Women on the Edge of Crime.”

  15. Courtwright, Dark Paradise, 2–4, 142. For a detailed history of the Harrison Act, see Musto, The American Disease, 54–68. For a policy history of cocaine, see Spillane, Cocaine. For a global approach, see Paul Gootenberg, ed., Cocaine: Global Histories (New York: Routledge, 1999); and Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine. For a policy history of marijuana, see Rudolph Joseph Gerber, Legalizing Marijuana: Drug Policy Reform and Prohibition Politics (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004). For studies on drug control in the Americas, see William Walker, Drug Control in the Americas; and William O. Walker III, ed., Drugs in the Western Hemisphere: An Odyssey of Cultures in Conflict (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1996).

  16. Webb et al. v. United States, 239 U.S. 96 (1919); United States v. Doremus, 249 U.S. 86 (1919); and Jin Fuey Moy v. United States, 254 U.S. 189 (1920). All three cases dealt with medical doctors who, while they maintained records as required by the Harrison Act, wrote prescriptions for opiates to known users in violation of the Harrison Act.

  17. Stephen R. Kandall, Substance and Shadow: Women and Addiction in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Caroline Jean Acker, “Portrait of an Addicted Family: Dynamics of Opiate Addiction in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Altering American Consciousness: The History of Alcohol and Drug Use in the United States, 1800–2000, ed. Sarah W. Tracy and Caroline Jean Acker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 165–81. For historical studies of addiction, see Abraham Myerson, The Nervous Housewife (1920; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1972); and Sara Graham-Mulhall, Opium: The Demon Flower (New York: H. Vinal, 1926). Graham-Mulhall served as New York City’s first deputy state narcotic control commissioner.

  18. See Edmond Congar Brown, attorney, to Franklin D. Roosevelt, February 22, 1913, and Charles B. Towns to Franklin D. Roosevelt, March 31, 1913, New York State Senator, box 8, FDR Library.

  19. For personal letters regarding the use of heroin to treat asthma and other respiratory problems, see Franklin D. Roosevelt, New York State Senator, box 8, FDR Library.

  20. George Pettey, “The Heroin Habit: Another Curse,” Alabama Medical Journal 15 (1903): 174–80.

  21. See Courtwright, Dark Paradise, 85–109; and Lawrence Kolb, Drug Addiction: A Medical Problem (Springfield, IL: Charles Thomas, 1962).

  22. Historical studies about the U.S.-Mexico border inform current perceptions of it as a place of danger, violence, and vice since the time of the revolution. For diverse approaches, see Ana María Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico’s Northern Frontier (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995); David E. Lorey, The U.S.-Mexican Border in the Twentieth Century: A History of Economic and Social Transformation (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999); Robin E. Robinson, “Vice and Tourism on the U.S.-Mexican Bo
rder: A Comparison of Three Communities in the Era of U.S. Prohibition” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2002); and Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).

  23. W. D. Hornsday, “Bootleggers on the Border,” Los Angeles Times, August 6, 1916.

  24. Dean F. Markham, executive director of the President’s Advisory Committee on Narcotics and Drug Abuse, 963, James Roosevelt Papers, Legislation Subject File, 1963, box 483, FDR Library.

  25. For a historiographical study of the family, see Ann S. Blum, “Bring It Back Home: Perspectives on Gender and Family History in Modern Mexico,” History Compass 4, no. 5 (2006): 906–26.

  26. Initial works of scholarship to contemplate gendered constructs and differences in Latin America include Ann Pescatello, Female and Male in Latin America: Essays (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973); and Asunción Lavrin, Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978). More contemporary literature reveals how women become public figures and how they interact with the state or other institutions. For the colonial period, scholars have examined constructs of honor and how men and women conform to or rebel against those constructs. See Ann Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera and Lyman L. Johnson, eds., The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998). For the modern period, scholars have examined how women of diverse classes engage in public life. See Thomas M. Klubock, Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904–1948 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Karin A. Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920–1950 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Heidi Tinsman, Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950–1973 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); and Elaine Carey, Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005).

  27. Mary Murphy, “Bootlegging Mothers and Drinking Daughters: Gender and Prohibition in Butte, Montana,” American Quarterly 46 (June 1994): 174–94.

  28. Tanya Marie Sanchez, “The Feminine Side of Bootlegging,” Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 41, no. 4 (2000): 403–33. For Russian women bootleggers, see Patricia Herlihy, The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 90–111.

  29. José M. Alamillo, Making Lemonade out of Lemons: Mexican American Labor and Leisure in a California Town, 1880–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 57–78; Julia Kirk Blackwelder, Women of the Depression: Caste and Culture in San Antonio, 1929–1939 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1984), 166–67; and Diane C. Vecchio, Merchants, Midwives, and Laboring Women: Italian Migrants in Urban America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 71.

  30. Giovanni Ferrucci, Bootlegger (New York: Independent Publishing Company, 1932), iv.

  31. See Alamillo, Making Lemonade out of Lemons, 72; and George Díaz, “Twilight of the Tequileros: Prohibition-Era Smuggling in the South Texas Borderlands, 1919–1933,” in Smugglers, Brothels, and Twine, ed. Carey and Marak, 59–79. For a novelistic account of bootlegging and socioeconomic advancement along the border and in California, see Victor Villaseñor, Rain of Gold (Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press, 1991).

  32. Much has been written about the business of organized crime. For example, see Tom Behan, The Camorra: Political Criminality in Italy (New York: Routledge, 1996); Anton Blok, The Mafia of a Sicilian Village, 1860–1960: A Study of Violent Peasant Entrepreneurs (New York: Harper and Row, 1974); Rich Cohen, Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998); Steven Erie, Rainbow’s End: Irish-Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840–1985 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

  33. Díaz, “Twilight of the Tequileros.”

  34. “A Informe sobre cajas de alcohol,” Archivo Histórico “Genero Estrada” 627, exp. 22, AHSRE, 523.16/41. The Mexican embassy was one of many foreign missions in the United States that held that Prohibition did not apply to their buildings and property on U.S. soil.

  35. “Capital Jury Indicts ‘Man in the Green Hat,’ ” New York Times, December 18, 1929; “ ‘Dry’ Agents Search for Congress Liquor as Alleged Capitol Bootlegger is Arraigned,” New York Times, March 26, 1926; “Sleuth Was Sent to Catch Senate Bootlegger; Curtis ‘Approved’ Watch on Office Building,” New York Times, November 1, 1930.

  36. Even today, street vending yields greater profits than working, for example, in a factory job. See John C. Cross, Informal Politics: Street Vendors and the State in Mexico City (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). Cross argues that a street vendor in the late 1990s could earn over $2,000 dollars a month in the informal market. Many professionals in Mexico City in the 1990s earned far less than that.

  37. John J. Rumbarger, Profits, Power, and Prohibition: Alcohol Reform and the Industrializing of America, 1800–1930 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989).

  38. The Blaine Act passed on February 17, 1933, ending Prohibition in the United States.

  39. “Traffic of Opium and Other Noxious Drugs,” résumé for the Mexican delegation at the League of Nations, by Dr. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, 1938. Salazar wrote: “In respect to the traffic in opium, it can be briefly said that in our country it has two aspects: Those who promote and encourage the use of drugs by our inhabitants, and that which is destined for the United States coming through our country merely in transit.”

  40. William O. Walker III, “Control Across the Border: The United States, Mexico, and Narcotics Policy, 1936–1940,” Pacific Historical Review 47, no. 1 (February 1978): 93.

  41. Ethan Nadelmann, Cops Across Borders: The Internationalization of U.S. Criminal Law Enforcement (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1993), 105. For a discussion of the contemporary exchange of information as well as DEA activities in Mexico, see María Celia Toro, “The Internationalization of Police: The DEA in Mexico,” Journal of American History 86, no. 2 (September 1999): 623–40. For a discussion of Mexican and U.S. enforcement in the 1920s and 1930s, see William Walker, “Control Across the Border.”

  42. For an international focus on policing, see Andreas and Nadelmann, Policing the Globe.

  43. Much of the recent literature on drug trafficking focuses on security issues; see Tony Payan, The Three U.S.-Mexico Border Wars: Drugs, Immigration, and Homeland Security (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2006); and Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). Journalists have continued to question the U.S. war on drugs. See Elaine Shannon, Desperados: Latin Drug Lords, U.S. Lawmen, and the War America Can’t Win (New York: Viking Press, 1988); Sebastian Rotella, Twilight on the Line: Underworlds and Politics at the U.S.-Mexico Border (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988); and Charles Bowden, Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder, and Family (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002). Mexican journalistic approaches include María Idalia Gómez and Darío Fritz, Con la muerte en el bolsillo: seis desaforadas historias del narcotráfico en México (Mexico City: Planeta, 2005), which documents the different cartels and individuals operating in Mexico; and Jesús Blancornelas, El Cártel (Mexico City: Random House, 2002), which focuses on the rise of the Arellano Félix family as it emerged as one of the most powerful organized crime families in the country. Ricardo Ravelo has written a number of books on those involved in drug trafficking in Mexico: Los capos: las narco-rutas de México (Mexico City: Plaza y Janés, 2005); Los narcoabogados (Mexico
City: Grijalbo 2007); and, in light of the escalated drug war, Herencia maldita: el reto de Calderón y el nuevo mapa de narcotráfico (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2007).

  44. As noted in chapter 1, Harry J. Anslinger directed the Federal Bureau of Narcotics for thirty-two years. The FBN became the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in 1968 under the U.S. Justice Department. In 1973, the BNDD was reorganized into the Drug Enforcement Administration.

  45. “Luisa Primero Mendoza,” file 1244, Dirección General de Servicios Coordinados de Prevención and Readaptación Social, AGN.

  46. Class distinctions over perceptions of crime have been well documented; see Piccato, City of Suspects, 132–37. Much of the crime involves banditry; see Vanderwood, Disorder and Progress.

  47. “Anastasia Serna Mendoza la viuda de Mendoza,” vol. 361, exp. 498, folio 11, Dirección General de Servicios Coordinados de Prevención y Readaptación Social, AGN.

  48. “Eloisa Cárdenas Benavides de Guerra,” vol. 354, exp. 128, Dirección General de Servicios Coordinados de Prevención y Readaptación Social, AGN.

  49. “Natalía Ortíz Ramos la viuda de Cerda,” vol. 361, exp. 507, Dirección General de Servicios Coordinados de Prevención y Readaptación Social, AGN.

  50. “Manuela Ortíz Rodríguez de Caballeros,” vol. 354, exp. 903, Dirección General de Servicios Coordinados de Prevención y Readaptación Social, AGN.

  51. “Carmen Cantú de Garza,” vol. 354, exp. 235, Dirección General de Servicios Coordinados de Prevención y Readaptación Social, AGN.

  52. “Raquel Katz de Frenkel,” vol. 359, exp. 376, Dirección General de Servicios Coordinados de Prevención y Readaptación Social, AGN.

  53. “Emilia Fabris Guica,” vol. 357, exp. 228, Dirección General de Servicios Coordinados de Prevención y Readaptación Social, AGN.

  54. “Soledad González Sandoval,” vol. 359, exp. 383, Dirección General de Servicios Coordinados de Prevención y Readaptación Social, AGN.