El Narco

by Ioan Grillo

  “The habit has this Nation in its grip to an astonishing extent. Our prisons and our hospitals are full of victims of it, it has robbed ten thousand business men of moral sense and made them beasts who prey upon their fellows, unidentified it has become one of the most fertile causes of unhappiness and sin in the United States …

  “The opium and morphine habits have become a National curse, and in some way they must certainly be checked, if we wish to maintain our high place among the nations of the world and any elevated standard of intelligence and morality among ourselves.”10

  There was indeed rising opium consumption in Wright’s day, with an estimated one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand American users. Such a number is significant, but at about 0.25 percent of the population pales in comparison with contemporary drug use. While some “dope fiends” puffed opium in dark dens, many got hooked from doctors’ prescriptions.

  Wright was also concerned about another drug gaining popularity in the early-twentieth century: cocaine. He collected police reports on African-American cocaine use and pushed the angle the white powder was whipping uppity blacks into a frenzy. The story played big in the press. Among numerous articles about cocaine-crazed Negroes, the most infamous was printed in the New York Times in 1914. The piece of inflammatory racism is regrettable, verging on self-parody to modern readers. Under the headline NEGRO COCAINE “FIENDS” NEW SOUTHERN MENACE (a certain eye-catcher with your Sunday coffee), the piece opens with a rant about cocaine-crazed blacks murdering whites. It then follows with a spectacular tale about a police chief in North Carolina facing a black on blow:

  “The Chief was informed that a hitherto inoffensive negro, with whom he was well acquainted, was ‘running amuck’ in a cocaine frenzy, had attempted to stab a storekeeper, and was at the moment engaged in ‘beating up’ various members of his own household …

  “Knowing that he must kill this man or be killed himself, the Chief drew his revolver, placed the muzzle over the negro’s heart, and fired—‘Intending to kill him right quick,’ as the officer tells it, but the shot did not even stagger the man …

  “He had only three cartridges remaining in his gun, and he might need these in a minute to stop the mob. So he saved his ammunition and ‘finished the man with his club.’”11

  A cocaine-crazed Negro turning into the Incredible Hulk! Chinamen using their foreign poison to seduce white women! It certainly rattled the white establishment. Wright finally got thirteen nations to sign an accord to rein in opiates and cocaine in 1914, and in December of that year the U.S. Congress passed the daddy of American drug laws: the Harrison Narcotics Act. It was not totally prohibitionist, aiming to control rather than wipe out drugs. A certain amount of legal opiates would be needed for medicine as they are today. But the Harrison Act did create an immediate black-market trade in opium and cocaine. El Narco was born.

  Back in Sinaloa, it didn’t take long to do the math. An unruly state, poppies in the mountains, and an illegal opium market 360 miles to the north. It was an easy equation: Sinaloan poppies could be turned into American dollars.

  Chinese immigrants and their descendants had the vision and connections to kick-start Mexico’s first drug trafficking. Over decades, they had grown into a community that spread from Sinaloa up to cities on Mexico’s northwest border. Most were bilingual in Spanish and Mandarin and had Mexican Christian names. The list of early arrested traffickers includes Patricio Hong, Felipe Wong, and and Luis Siam. The Chinese built a network that could harvest the poppies, turn them into gum, and sell the opium to Chinese dealers on the U.S. side. As the British had defied Chinese prohibition, so the Chinese would defy American law.

  The vast Mexican-U.S. border was ideal for trafficking—a problem that has confounded American authorities for the last century. It is one of the longest borders on the planet, stretching two thousand miles from the Pacific at San Diego to the Gulf of Mexico at Brownsville. The Mexican side has two major metropolises: Ciudad Juárez, smack in the middle of the line; and Tijuana (reportedly named after a madam of prostitutes named the Tía Juana). Many migrants in these cities are from the Sierra Madre states of Sinaloa and Durango, creating family links between the border and bandit mountains.

  The border also boasts a dozen medium-size Mexican towns, including Mexicali, Nogales, Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, and Matamoros. In between cities are vast stretches of wild land running through deserts and arid hills. Over the years, everything from ceremonial Aztec skulls to Browning machine guns to white tigers have been smuggled over the line in the sand. The first batches of opium slipped over the membrane like water through a sieve.

  Washington called on Mexico to stop this traffic. But Mexico had more pressing concerns. After Porfirio Díaz had resisted democracy for thirty-five years, Mexicans finally rose up and overthrew him. But celebrations didn’t last long, with the country descending into a bloody civil war involving four major armies. Much of the Mexican Revolution fighting took place in the northwestern territories close to the Sierra Madre, with famous battles in Ciudad Juárez and Parral. Many Sinaloans fought, including Pancho Villa’s executioner, Rodolfo Fierro, who earned a reputation as one of the most sanguine murderers in the conflict. The immense violence claimed about a million casualties or 10 percent of the entire Mexican population, a legacy of blood loss that is still felt today in family and folk memory.

  While Mexicans worried about surviving, Americans worried about opium smugglers. The Harrison Act created the Narcotics Board to police the drug trade, but it had no budget for real investigations. However, agents in customs, consulates, and the Treasury put their heads together to build the first big American probe into Mexican traffickers. Details of this case were later dug up by Sinaloan academic Luis Astorga, who pored through dusty documents all over Washington. It showed the agents ran straight into a snake pit.

  The case was opened in September 1916 when a special agent in charge of customs at Los Angeles sent a report to Washington with dynamite implications.12 His informants, he wrote, had tracked a syndicate of Chinese Mexicans who were smuggling opium through Tijuana into California. In Los Angeles, the syndicate sold the opium to a Chinese man called Wang Si Fee, who also had connections in San Francisco. Working with the traffickers was a shadowy figure called David Goldbaum, whose nationality is unclear. Goldbaum attended a meeting with none other than the governor of Baja California (Tijuana’s state)—Colonel Esteban Cantú. After a heated negotiation, Goldbaum had agreed to pay Cantú $45,000 up front and $10,000 a month for immunity for the syndicate to traffic through northern Mexico.

  The report shows that even back then, agents used a tactic that would characterize America’s antidrug efforts for the next century: paid undercover informants. Furthermore, the amount of the bribe—$45,000 at the value of 1916 dollars—indicates that even in the earliest days decent profits were to be made in the junk trade. The report also mentions that a member of the crime syndicate was driving around in a Saxon Six, one of Detroit’s most expensive automobiles. But the agents were most concerned about the central revelation—Mexico’s politicians were in on the game.

  More evidence was added to the Governor Cantú file. A customs agent reported that Baja California police made opium busts, such as four hundred tins of gum seized in the port of Ensenada—but the same drugs later reappeared for sale. Treasury officials stated that Cantú sold opium to a distributor named J. Uon in Mexicali, south of Calexico. Uon then dealt the opium out of a shop called Casa Colorada, which doubled as a Chinese employment agency.13 A second Treasury report added that Cantú was himself a morphine addict. The governor had injected the opiate into his arms and legs so much they were black with bruises, the source said.

  Stacked files of damning testimonies were sent to Washington. Both customs and Treasury officials urged the State Department to investigate and take up the issue with Mexico. The agents thought they had a red-hot case. And then … nothing. There are no records that Washington ever pressed Mexico o
ver the issue, and Cantú served out his term untroubled. Maybe Cantú was on the side of the alliance that Washington approved of in the Mexican Revolution at that moment. Maybe the government was more concerned about war in Europe. Maybe officials just didn’t care to stop the supply of opiates, which were being handed out in bucketloads to troops on all sides in the bleeding trenches of France.

  Whatever the reasons, the Cantú case would set a precedent that American drug agents would be complaining about for the next century. Time after time, when agents built cases involving foreign political targets, the State Department would do nothing or even block their efforts. The drug war abroad and Washington’s foreign diplomacy were two different missions with two very different priorities.

  In the 1920s, the opium trade became an even lower priority when police focused on a new public devil: booze. As the “noble experiment” of alcohol prohibition gave birth to America’s most infamous mobster, Al Capone, it also financed up-and-coming hoodlums on the Rio Grande. Mexican border cities were already popular for their brothels and table-dance clubs. Now the lure of alcohol spawned cantinas serving whiskey and tequila to thirsty Americans. Entrepreneurial Mexicans also smuggled liquor to the huge network of speakeasies across the United States. Just as the Chicago bootleggers shot back at police who tried to seize their booty, so the border smugglers retaliated.

  A report in the El Paso Times in 1924 describes how one gang of bootleggers got into a firefight with customs agents after they seized three sacks of tequila bottles and sixty-three gallons of whiskey. The drama focuses on the heroic acts of a customs agent identified only as Officer Threepersons, who takes on sixteen bootleggers single-handedly and shoots one of the Mexicans dead. Or so he says. The thrilling action at the border begins:

  “First indications of the battle were seen about midnight Saturday when Customs Officer Threepersons and Wadsworth ‘pitched their camp’ at the end of First Street to lie in wait for a cargo of liquor to be brought across the border.

  “Shortly after their arrival near a large tree close to the monument, Wadsworth left Threepersons to bring their automobile closer to the scene of operations. No sooner had Wadsworth left when 16 Mexicans appeared …

  “A man jumped in his path and pointed a pistol at him. Threepersons told the man to throw up his hands, but the man refused and fired his pistol point blank at the officer. Threepersons fired his 30-30 caliber rifle at the man, who dropped to the ground.

  “The gun battle lasted for over an hour and was heard in practically every part of the city.”14

  A gunfight lasting an hour in the center of town! A gang of sixteen armed men! The story sounds like many that fill border newspapers today. Except this battle was on the American side—in the center of El Paso. At that time though, with daily shoot-outs and massacres in Chicago, the El Paso skirmish was small potatoes, relegated to page ten of the local rag.

  As Prohibition ground to an end, Mexican bootleggers scrambled for a new product. They were quick to eye the handsome profits that Chinese made from their tins of opium and heroin. Bandits back in the Sinaloan highlands had also become jealous of the Asian gummers with their American cars and big homes. Mexicans wanted a piece of the pie. They soon realized they could take the whole lot.

  Mexican villains expropriated the Chinese opium business amid a wave of racial violence against Asians. (It is not only American racism that has shaped the drug trade.) Antagonism had grown against the Chinese for several decades, with Mexicans slandering the immigrants for being immoral and filthy—and looking enviously at their successful shops and restaurants. Racism reached fever pitch, spurred on by prominent politicians.

  Criminals also whipped up racism. In 1933, the American consul in Ensenada sent a report to Washington about the rising anti-Chinese tide. He cited an informant, a Mandarin-speaking American, saying that known villains were among the key anti-Chinese activists. Among them was a smuggler surnamed Segovia, who was moving round the states of Sonora, Sinaloa, and Baja California putting money into violent anti-Chinese groups. Segovia’s aim, the report said, was to take over Chinese opium-poppy production.

  Racial tension exploded onto the streets. Among those who joined the lynch mob was a university student named Manuel Lazcano. Born in a Sinaloan ranch in 1912, Lazcano would go on to to become a prominent figure in law enforcement and politics, serving three terms as Sinaloa’s attorney general. He was later ashamed for taking part in racial attacks and claimed to be shocked by their cruelty. His memoirs are among the most open of any Mexican official’s and provide one of the best sources on the early Mexican drug trade. Shown in a photo as a sharp, handsome young man smoking a pipe, Lazcano describes how an anti-Chinese mob marched into the central plaza of Culiacán to recruit followers.

  “There were 150 people, which was a lot for those days in Culiacán. The banners were pathetic: Chinese shown eating rats; Chinese with sores in their heads (they used to say that the Orientals had endless diseases, were dirty and ate reptiles). There was a shower of attacks and insults … The boys started to push, to demand that we got involved. I remember their voices: ‘Come on, Come on.’ And I went in: I became anti-Chinese. It is something that still makes me feel bad.”15

  Lazcano describes how the mob would scour the streets to hunt Chinese. Finding their victims, he writes, they would drag them to a clandestine jail in a shuttered-up house and keep them prisoner with their arms and legs bound. When they had enough captives, they would pack them into boxcars, put them on cargo trains, and ship them out of state. Sinaloans then took over the Chinese homes and property. The ethnic cleansing in Sinaloa came as the Nazi regime was persecuting Jews in Europe. Lazcano didn’t miss the comparison.

  “We have seen films of the brutal repression that the Jews were subjected to and scenes of how they were transported like animals. Well, the same thing happened in Sinaloa but with the Chinese. Seeing the images in real life was overwhelming.”16

  Elsewhere, Mexican gangsters didn’t bother with boxcars; they simply shot dead Chinese rivals. In Ciudad Juárez, a gunman known as El Veracruz is reported to have rounded up and murdered eleven Chinese men working in the opium trade. His boss was allegedly a woman from Durango called Ignacia Jasso, or La Nacha. Mexicans began to dominate the drug trade from the opium-growing Sierra Madre to the bubbling border cities.

  Described as a short, robust woman with a black ponytail, La Nacha became the first famous female mobster in Mexico. By all accounts, she was a talented businesswoman. La Nacha recognized the changing demands of the market and expanded production of heroin, reportedly having her own makeshift labs to process the Sierra Madre poppies. Rather than smuggling her drugs over the border, she sold the packets of heroin out of her home in the center of Juárez. Americans, including many GIs from the base at El Paso, would cross the river to buy their fixes. Other customers came from as far as Albuquerque, New Mexico, for her famous mud.

  The market was small by today’s standards, and Mexican mud was considered inferior to the dominant Turkish heroin. But there was enough business to make La Nacha one of the wealthiest residents in Juárez. She sponsored an orphanage and a breakfast program for children, as well as having a flashy American car. She also had money to buy off police. As the local newspaper El Continental reported on the heroin queen on August 22, 1933:

  “Ignacia Jasso, alias La Nacha, has still not been arrested by authorities for possession and sales of heroic drugs [heroin] which they say she has done for many years out of her own house in Degollado No. 218. We are informed that La Nacha travels tranquilly round the Juárez streets in her luxury car that she just bought. It seems she has some important influences and this is why she has not been captured.”17

  Again, as in the Cantu case, the first years of the drug trade bring up stories of corruption. But by the time of La Nacha, corruption was not by a renegade governor in the midst of civil war. The years of battle had finally subsided and an all-powerful party ruled Mexico.


  The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, has been compared to the Soviet Communist Party for its grip on power, ruling Mexico almost as long the Bolsheviks ran Russia. It is also credited with giving Mexico the longest period of peace in its history and shielding it from the turbulent conflicts that wracked South America throughout the twentieth century.

  PRI founding father General Plutarco Elias Calles created the party in 1929 after serving a term as president. He aimed to create peace and order by uniting all core sectors of society—trade unions, peasants, businessmen, and the military—all singing the same song and waving the same flag. Influenced by totalitarian Soviet communists and Italian fascists, Calles traveled to Europe to scrutinize politics. Curiously, he ended up spending more time looking at the British Labour Party and German Social Democrats. In any case, the PRI was a truly Mexican organization, even taking the green, white, and red of the Mexican flag as its colors. It aimed to embody the nation.

  Some American journalists call the PRI a leftist party. They are way off the mark. While the PRI would produce some leftist presidents, such as Lázaro Cárdenas, it would also throw up some raving capitalists such as Carlos Salinas. Essentially the party was not about ideology but about power. Much of its system of control was taken straight from the playbook of Don Porfirio Díaz. It went back to a network of caciques or chiefs, who kept order in their turfs. In this patchwork of little kingdoms, thousands of police forces were created. However, a key difference with the Díaz regime was that the PRI would change its president every six years. Rule was by an institution instead of one strongman. The genius of this setup led to Nobel Prize–winning writer Mario Vargas Llosa calling it the “perfect dictatorship.”18

  The PRI system relied on corruption to keep ticking over smoothly. Businessmen could pay off small-town caciques, who could pay off governors, who could pay off the president. Money rose up like gas and power flowed down like water. Everybody was happy and stayed in line because everybody got paid. Historians have noted this paradox in Mexican politics—corruption was not a rot but rather the oil and glue of the machine.19 In this system, heroin money was just one more kickback flowing up. The drug market was a fraction of the size of today, and officials didn’t see it as a huge deal. It was a misdemeanor—the way many people today view pirated music.