El Narco

by Ioan Grillo

  Manuel Lazcano—the student who had been in the race riots—remembers this attitude as he rose up in the PRI political machine in Sinaloa. He explains how he knew many of the people who took over the Chinese opium business.

  “Things started slowly. I like to think that people were not conscious of the harm that they were doing. At the beginning it was like something normal, a minor crime, tolerable, passable. Similar to going to Nogales and bringing back a case of cognac.”20

  Sinaloan opium output rose dramatically in the 1940s, Lazcano remembers. Like many others, he says the growth was due to a mystery customer who paid in dollars for vast loads of poppies. The generous client, he says, could have been Uncle Sam himself.

  The notion that the U.S. government systematically brought Sinaloan opium during the Second World War is the classic conspiracy theory in the early Mexican drug trade. In today’s Sinaloa, politicians, police, and drug traffickers all talk about such a deal as pure fact. The Mexican Defense Department also describes it in its official history of the drug trade printed on the wall at its Mexico City headquarters. However, U.S. officials vehemently denied the deal at the time.

  The conspiracy theory goes that the U.S. government needed opium to make morphine for its soldiers in the Second World War. The American army was certainly handing out bucketloads of morphine as its troops bled from Japanese and German shells. The traditional supply of opium poppies for this U.S. medicine was Turkey. However, the war cut off supply lines, with German U-boats roaming the Atlantic sinking merchant vessels. The U.S. government thus turned to the Sinaloan gummers and cut a deal with the Mexican government to let them grow their poppies.

  Lazcano remembers the ease with which friends shipped opium paste north in the period as indication that a deal was on.

  “I knew several people from the mountains. They were friends of mine that grew opium poppies and after harvesting them they would go to Nogales dressed as peasants with four or five balls in a suitcase or in a rucksack. The curious thing is that at the border they would go through customs without any problem, without any danger—in sight of customs guards. They handed in their goods where they had to hand them in and returned completely calmly; it was obvious that they let them go past.”21

  An American journalist visited Sinaloa in 1950 and found that sources in business and local government all confirmed the pact. He wrote an inquiry about it to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the agency created in 1930 to better coordinate American antidrug efforts. The FBN’s director for its first thirty-two years was Harry Anslinger, a hard-line drug warrior. Anslinger responded personally to inquiries about the pact, saying the theory is “utterly fantastic and goes beyond even the wildest imagination.”22 Mexico’s finest narco-ologists have also been unable to dig up any conclusive evidence that the deal ever took place, and some question whether Mexican authorities made it up to ease their own conscience.

  Whether Uncle Sam helped or not, the Sinaloan opium trade certainly bloomed. Sinaloans gained such a reputation for production of the mud that even their baseball team was known as the Gummers. In the 1950s, Lazcano went on government business to the same mountain municipality where I stare at the pretty poppies. Back then, there was no dirt road even as bad as the one I climbed up. He took a small plane. But in the highlands, Lazcano writes, he saw peasants with “radios, guns, cars and even gringo canned food”23 from the opium business.

  The descendants of cannibal tribes, bandits, and displaced peasants had found a crop that pulled them out of wretched poverty. The opium and heroin trade became ingrained in their culture, along with pickup trucks, folk saints, and later Kalashnikov rifles. El Narco had rooted itself in a community from where it could sprout like a hungry plant. It was into this environment, that Joaquin “Chapo” Guzmán and the “Beard” Beltrán Leyva were born in rough shacks in 1957 and 1961. As they grew up, a social phenomenon would explode onto the world that would transform their people’s drug trade from a niche business supporting a few hill folk to a multibillion-dollar global market—the social revolution of the sixties.

  CHAPTER 3

  Hippies

  You know, it’s a funny thing. Every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists.

  —PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON, MAY 26, 1971, WHITE HOUSE TAPES, RELEASED MARCH 2002

  The Summer of Love is said to have kicked off on June 1, 1967, when the Beatles released their landmark album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, with its iconic cover of the Liverpool lads in orange, blue, pink, and yellow suits. The album stayed at the top of the Billboard 200 for fifteen weeks straight, in part because American record buyers were so excited by its references to drugs. Looking back, the references were laughably tame. The nearest the album comes to even mentioning the name of a drug is in code in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (LSD for the few stragglers who were never told). Then the closing song says those oh-so-rebellious words “I’d love to turn you on,” which was enough to get it banned on the BBC on the grounds it could “encourage a permissive attitude toward drug-taking.” But drugs seemed so exciting that summer you only needed to hint at them and kids would come running. Suddenly, intoxicating herbs represented youth, revolution, and a brave new world. That same month, thousands puffed joints in front of TV cameras as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin played weird new blends of rock at the Monterey festival in California. The world was turning on its head.

  But not up in the Sierra Madre. In the summer of 1967, a teenager called Efrain Bautista was sleeping on the same dirt floor he had shared with eight brothers and sisters for all sixteen years of his life. In his village of mud and bamboo shacks, nobody had ever heard of Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles, LSD, Liverpool, or Monterey because nobody had a transistor radio or a record player, let alone a television set, and newspapers didn’t get that far into Mexico’s jagged highlands.

  It would also be hard to have a summer of love because the folk in his part of the mountains were locked into a number of deadly feuds. His own extended family was at war with another clan because of some half-forgotten dispute his uncle had got into over a girl. His uncle had ended up killing a rival suitor, and the aggrieved clan had taken revenge by murdering another of Efrain’s uncles as well as his cousin. Both clans sat tensely waiting for more bloodshed. These feuds had habits of annihilating whole generations of certain families.

  But despite that Efrain and his village were a world apart from American hippies waving their long hair to Ravi Shankar, they became intrinsically connected by a light-green plant with sticky buds and an unforgettable bittersweet smell. As American lust for marijuana shot through the roof, the psychedelic herb roared through the Mexican countryside. Seasoned drug growers in Sinaloa couldn’t begin to meet the demand, so farmers started raising it in neighboring Durango, then over in Jalisco, then in the southern–Sierra Madre states of Oaxaca and Guerrero, where Efrain lived. Efrain and his family went through a sudden conversion from being small farmers to producers on the bottom rung of the drug chain.

  The meteoric rise of American drug taking in the 1960s and 1970s had dramatic impacts on a number of countries beyond Mexico, including Colombia, Morocco, Turkey, and Afghanistan. Within a decade, recreational drugs went from being a niche vice to a global commodity. In Mexico, the surge in demand transformed drug producers from a few Sinaloan peasants to a national industry in a dozen states. The government had to a respond to a much more widespread flouting of the law. But the industry began to pull in billions of dollars and politicians wanted to be in on the game. The raise in stakes led to Mexico’s first kingpins and unleashed the first significant wave of drug-related bloodshed. El Narco went through a sudden and astounding adolescence.

  Efrain’s family became aware of the marijuana boom searing through the Mexican mountains when a cousin began growing it in a nearby village. Efrain’s
father and grandfather had always known about cannabis, with the enticing star-shaped leaves cropping up sporadically all over the Sierra Madre. Unlike opium poppies, which were imported in the late-nineteenth century, marijuana had been used in Mexico since at least the days of Spanish rule, with some people arguing that Aztecs consumed the psychedelic weed. During the bloody campaigns of the Mexican Revolution, marijuana helped many soldiers forget their sorrows in clouds of smoke. Ganja also inspired the most famous verse of the folk song “La Cucaracha,” with the memorable lyrics “The cockroach, the cockroach, now he can’t walk. Because he doesn’t have, because he lacks, marijuana to smoke.” In peacetime, cannabis was popular in Mexican prisons while enjoyed by cultural icons such as muralist Diego Rivera.1

  When Efrain’s father saw his cousin making good profits from marijuana, he asked him about growing weed himself. His cousin happily gave him seeds and introduced him to his buyer. Efrain explains the decision to step into the drug business:

  “My father had four fields so we were a well-off family by the standards of those mountains. We had some cows and grew corn and limes and some other crops. But it was still hard to get enough money to feed everyone. We were nine brothers and sisters, and my dad also looked after the children of his brother, who had been killed in a feud. My dad was lazy, but clever. He would look for ways to make money that took less effort and brought in better rewards. So we tried marijuana.”

  Efrain smiles as he remembers his youth while we eat chili-laced eggs in a Mexico City diner. He has lived in the capital for decades now but still carries the mountain way: coarse but open and frank. He has weather-beaten skin with light eyes that he attributes to some French descendants way back over the centuries. But despite some European ancestry, he is proud of being a son of Guerrero—a state whose very name means “warrior” and has the reputation as one of the most violent regions of Mexico.

  “First we grew marijuana in just half a field where we had been raising corn. Marijuana is an easy plant to grow—our mountains are perfect for it. We just left it out in the sun and the rain, and the earth did the work. In a few months, we had big plants shooting up. They were about one and half meters tall. My brothers and I harvested it, using our machetes. It was an easy plant to cut up. We filled a couple of sacks full of it. It smelled like crazy, so I guess it was good stuff. We took it down to the town to sell.”

  The nearest market town was Teloloapan, a mountain enclave of stone streets famous for its dishes of mole (chocolate and chili) and festivals where locals dress up in devil masks. Efrain and his father found his cousin’s buyer, and he gave them a thousand pesos for the sacks stuffed with some twenty-five kilos of green. That was only worth about $5 per kilo and was a fraction of the price it would fetch on the quads of Berkeley. But to Efrain and his family, it seemed as if they had struck gold.

  “It was the best crop we had sold, much better money than we got for corn or limes or anything. We had some great feasts with meat and all got new clothes and shoes. So we started growing marijuana in two of our fields, and then we sold harvests of marijuana every few months with up to a hundred kilos each. We were still not rich. But we didn’t go hungry like before.”

  After Efrain and his family had been raising marijuana for two years, soldiers came through his mountain to destroy crops. Fortunately, their buyer warned about the troop maneuvers a week in advance—showing the organization moving the weed had some useful connections. As Efrain remembers:

  “We cut up all the marijuana in a hurry. Some of it was ready, so we could hide it in sacks up in the mountains. Other crops were only half-grown and we had to throw them away. The soldiers came through our village but they didn’t even check our fields. Then my dad was annoyed that we had wasted so much marijuana.

  “At first we didn’t even know where all our marijuana was going. All we knew is that we could go down to the town and sell it. But after we had been doing it for a while, we learned that it was going to El Norte [the United States]. Around the same time, some people from our mountains started heading up to El Norte to look for work. But I didn’t want to go there. I loved the mountains too much.”

  Efrain and his family just called their product marijuana or by the Mexican slang mota. But in the United States, it was almost certainly sold by the attractive brand name Acapulco Gold. Teloloapan is in the same Guerrero state as Acapulco, where Elvis Presley and Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller were sipping margaritas out of coconut shells in the 1960s. Over the years, tons of marijuana passed from the southern Sierra Madre into the beach resort, from where it could be shipped north on fishing boats. Years later, I would go to a federal police office in Acapulco to find a gold-chain-wearing officer sitting casually in front of a huge stack of three hundred kilos of seized Acapulco Gold pressed into compact bricks. The marijuana unleashed an odor so overpowering that it could be smelled right through the police station door. Up close, I could see it had a distinct brown-green color that is the source of its gold name.

  Back in the 1960s, Acapulco Gold was a sought-after marijuana for American smokers, considered better quality than the weed growing in California or Texas. In any case, the U.S. marijuana market exploded so fast, dealers imported grass from wherever they could get it. By all accounts, Americans created the demand themselves and took to Mexico to supply it. Stoners rolled over the border to Tijuana in droves, buying ganja from anywhere they could. One group of students and their teacher from Coronado High School, San Diego, began sneaking marijuana into the United States off the Tijuana beach on surfboards. The so-called Coronado Company later graduated to yachts, before federal agents busted them.2 Along the border in Texas, buyers would go down to the Rio Grande and wait for Mexicans to toss bags of marijuana over the river. Others would head down to seedy bars in El Paso or Laredo looking for any suspicious-looking Mexican who might be selling.

  Marijuana on the border sold for about $60 per kilo compared to some $300 per kilo in East Coast universities. Some American entrepreneurs went deep into Mexico to get the product even cheaper. Among them was George Jung—a Boston stoner who began flying ganja across the country. Boston George later graduated to cocaine, had the hit movie Blow made about him, and has grown into a trafficker superstar with his own Web site, fan club, and T-shirt collection (Smuggler Wear).

  A hippie with long blond hair, a big nose, and a thick Boston accent, George describes his exploits in numerous videos and memoirs written in his cell of La Tuna prison in Anthony, Texas, while serving a fifteen-year sentence. When he first looked for marijuana in Mexico, he says, he was inspired by the movie Night of the Iguana to go to the Pacific resort of Puerto Vallarta. Speaking only pidgin Spanish, he wandered round for two weeks before he scored. Soon he was making $100,000 a month, flying up ganja in light aircraft. Boston George bought from middlemen, who picked up the grass from thousands of peasant farmers like Efrain. These middlemen, he says, had connections with the Mexican military.

  George eventually got arrested with a trunk full of marijuana at the Playboy Club in Chicago. Luckily (or unluckily) he shared a prison cell with Colombian Carlos Lehder, who introduced him to the Medellín Cartel and set him up to make millions in cocaine.

  Shutting down George’s Mexico operation had little effect on marijuana flowing north. The market just kept growing until, by 1978, a White House survey found that 37.8 percent of high school seniors admitted to having smoked weed. During the same period, use of heroin and later cocaine also shot up. Drug warriors jumped on this as evidence that ganja leads people down a slippery slope to darker vices. Maybe they’re right. Or perhaps the bigger shifts in core social and economic factors triggered supply and demand in all three mind-bending substances.

  Whatever the reasons, the period saw a radical change in America’s drugs-taking habits. In 1966, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics said the most profitable drug in the United States was heroin and estimated its black market moved $600 million a year.3 By 1980, reports said the American drug mar
ket was worth over $100 billion a year. This was a truly seismic shift that reshaped America from its universities to its inner cities; and Mexico from its mountains to its government palaces.

  During America’s drug-taking explosion, the president with the biggest impact on narcotics policy was unquestionably Richard Nixon. The feisty Californian declared the War on Drugs; browbeat foreign governments on drug production; and created the Drug Enforcement Administration. His thunderous actions defined American policy for the next forty years—and had a colossal impact on Mexico. However, as Nixon was so discredited by Watergate, later drug warriors prefer to downplay his titanic contributions. Meanwhile, drug-policy critics concede that while Nixon was confrontational, he gave more funding to rehab programs than some of his liberal successors.

  Born in 1913, Nixon came to manhood during the antimarijuana drive of FBN director Harry Anslinger, who alleged that smoking weed caused repugnant, immoral behavior and drove people to kill. Such ideas are depicted in the classic 1936 exploitation film Reefer Madness (aka Tell Your Children), made at the height of Anslinger’s fervent campaign. The movie follows a group of clean-living high school students who are lured by a drug pusher to smoke marijuana and go on to rape, murder, and descend into insanity. It has some fantastic moments, such as when a suited student puffs on a reefer and unleashes an evil Hollywood cackle.