by Ioan Grillo
The idea that marijuana drove people to rape and murder was discredited by the 1960s. But Nixon did still believe that weed made people immoral, alleging it was driving youth astray and causing the countercultural revolution he found so abhorrent. His ideas were revealed most clearly in the White House tapes that were declassified in 2002. Drugs, he said, were part of a communist conspiracy to destroy the United States. As he said in one recording:
“You see, homosexuality, dope, immorality in general. These are the enemies of strong societies. That’s why the communists and the left-wingers are pushing the stuff. They’re trying to destroy us.”4
Nixon was also concerned about heroin, which he blamed for rising crime from Washington to Los Angeles. In his election campaign, he promised law and order. And when he took office in 1969, he wanted to take action that showed he was putting his money where his mouth was. His first sledgehammer move was to shut down the Mexican border.
Operation Intercept was born after Nixon’s officials went to Mexico City in June 1969 to persuade Mexico to spray poison on marijuana and opium crops. Mexican officials refused, citing how Agent Orange sprayings in Vietnam were causing frightening side effects. As G. Gordon Liddy described the visit in his memoir, “The Mexicans, using diplomatic language of course, told us to go piss up a rope. The Nixon administration didn’t believe in the United States taking crap from any foreign government. Its reply was Operation Intercept.”5
Under Operation Intercept, customs inspectors thoroughly searched—or in agent talk tossed—every vehicle and pedestrian trying to enter the United States along the entire southern border. In between posts, the U.S. army set up mobile radar units, while drug agents patrolled in rented planes. The operation wreaked havoc, backing queues of cars deep into Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez. Mexicans with green cards couldn’t get to their jobs; avocados rotted in gridlocked trucks; and Mexican expenditure plummeted in American cities. However, agents seized few actual drugs, with the smugglers waiting out the siege. After seventeen painful days and a barrage of complaints, Nixon called off the dogs. The United States and Mexico agreed they would work together in a new Operation Cooperation.
Historians are mixed on the merits and failures of Nixon’s aggressive experiment. On one side, it showed the United States could not afford the economic consequences of shutting down its southern border. Four decades later, with far greater trade between the two nations and the volatility of global markets, such a move is unthinkable. Customs agents have to contend with the reality that they can only search a fraction of cars and people coming from Mexico. However much they seize, a percentage of drugs will invariably slip through.
However, Nixon claimed it was a victory. He had shown his base that he meant business and strong-armed Mexico into fighting the drug trade. As part of Operation Cooperation, Mexico promised to crack down on drug crops, and American agents were allowed to work south of border. A new modus operandi was being developed for the drug war abroad—coercing countries to destroy narcotics at the source.
In 1971, Nixon extended the tactic to Turkey, where he pressured the government to clamp down on opium production under threat of cutting U.S. military and economic aid. He also worked with France to attack the so-called French connection of heroin labs. These actions had a serious impact on the Turkish product. But this was a blessing for Sinaloan producers, who expanded their own operations to fill the gap. Mexican mud and black tar were propelled from being a last resort for American junkies to a staple of their diet.
As he went into his 1972 election, Nixon focused on his fight against heroin as a cornerstone of his campaign. It was an easy target. Heroin was an evil, foreign enemy and it didn’t answer back. Plus it diverted attention from the lost, real war in Vietnam and let him claim that he was helping inner-city blacks as well as his white base. Nixon defined the war in absolute terms, predicting the adversary would be completely annihilated:
“Our goal is the unconditional surrender of the merchants of death who traffic in heroin. Our goal is the total banishment of drug abuse from the American life. Our children’s lives are what we are fighting for. Our children’s future is the reason we must succeed.”6
Nixon won the election with a stunning 60 percent of the vote. Of course, many other factors, such as a strong economy, helped his victory. But strategists the world over learned a valuable lesson: a drug war is good politics.
Nixon’s 1973 creation of the DEA left an even bigger legacy. He set up the agency through an executive order, with a mission to “establish a single unified command to combat an all-out global war on the drug menace.”7 Now you had an entire agency whose very reason to exist was the war on drugs. Once installed in Washington, the DEA would successfully lobby for greater and greater funds over the decades. At its outset, it had 1,470 special agents and an annual budget of less than $75 million. Today, it has 5,235 special agents, offices in sixty-three countries, and a whopping budget of more than $2.3 billion.
In the optimistic early days, DEA agents thought they could really achieve Nixon’s goal of the “total banishment” of drug traffickers. The mistake before, agents argued, was that they had gone after nickel-and-dime street busts. But the new outfit could go after the big conspiracies—and bring down the devil. Agents quickly opened such a case in Mexico. They stumbled into one of the most bizarre probes in DEA history—a case with the complexity of a John Le Carré spy novel and cast of characters including Cuban guerrillas, a lover of the Mexican president, and the Cosa Nostra.
The probe opened when San Diego DEA worked up through seizures to find who was moving major loads of drugs through Tijuana into California.8 Using paid informants, they got to a palatial Tijuana residence known as the Roundhouse. Spying on the mansion, they saw well-tailored guests in expensive sports cars and an endless stream of call girls—and call boys. The wealth and extravagance suggested this was no simple street-level operation. Trailing the Roundhouse owner, they found he wasn’t even Mexican but was a Cuban American named Alberto Sicilia Falcon.
A photo shows the young Falcon with slick black hair and film-star looks. He had been born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1944 and fled to Miami with his family following the 1959 revolution of Fidel Castro. After a stint in the U.S. army, an arrest for sodomy, and a brief marriage and divorce, he was last seen in San Diego in 1968. Now just turning thirty years old, he had cropped up at the head of a Mexican trafficking organization. How on earth had he managed it?
DEA agents busted traffickers working for Falcon and, in agency speak, flipped them—or turned them into protected witnesses to rat out their boss. Based on their evidence, they said Falcon was buying heroin and marijuana by order from the producers in the Sinaloan mountains and flying it in light aircraft to the Tijuana area. He then moved it over the border with an army of so-called burros or donkeys—narco talk for paid smugglers—to a house in the luxury Coronado Cays neighborhood of San Diego. He was also pioneering the traffic of cocaine from South America. In total his operation was pulling in $3.6 million a week, the DEA estimated, making it the biggest trafficking organization they had ever seen out of Mexico.
DEA took their evidence to the Mexican federal police, who appeared surprisingly happy to get on the case. In July 1975, Falcon was busted in a Mexico City mansion. That was when things got really weird.
Police searched Falcon’s house and found Cuban, American, and Mexican passports and Swiss bankbooks showing accounts of $260 million. It emerged the flamboyant bisexual moved in Mexican high society, hobnobbing with celebrities and politicians. He was particularly close to a glamorous film star named Irma Serrano, nicknamed the Tigress, known as the lover of a former Mexican president. But that was only the beginning. After Mexican police battered him and shoved electric shocks through his body, Falcon said he was an operative for the CIA, using his drug money to supply guns to rebels in Central America. Such a tale could be dismissed as the rantings of a villain under torture. However, he later repeated the claims in a j
ailhouse book that offers some substantiation.9
Falcon wrote he had been trained by the CIA at Fort Jackson, Florida, as a potential anti-Castro recruit. Furthermore, a man arrested with him was a fellow Cuban called José Egozi Bejar, who was in the 1961 Bay of Pigs attempt to topple Castro.10 American officials also confirmed that Falcon indeed had his hand in weapons smuggling. ATF agents alleged an arms dealer in Brownsville, Texas, sold the Sicilia organization millions of rounds of ammunition.
Mexican police uncovered another curious connection. Fingerprints in a house that Sicilia visited matched those of Chicago mobster Sam Giancana. However, Giancana was shot dead thirteen days before Falcon’s arrest. Later, declassified documents confirm that Giancana had himself worked with the CIA in a plot to assassinate Castro. A picture was being painted of Falcon living in a surreal twilight zone of mafias, politicians, and guerrillas.
The story took a last strange twist when Falcon and Egozi escaped from Mexican prison together through a tunnel complete with an electric light in 1976. They were nabbed three days later after Mexican police received an anonymous tip from the U.S. embassy. Falcon was convicted of racketeering, drug trafficking, arms trafficking, and fraud and rotted in a Mexican jail. The alleged CIA links were never followed up, and many grueling questions remain unanswered.
So what can the bizarre case of Alberto Sicilia Falcon tell us about the development of the Mexican drug trade? Who really was this mysterious character—a mastermind or just a fall guy? Conspiracy theorists claim it shows the drug trade was secretly controlled by American spooks—a recurring theme through the growth of El Narco. However, this lacks any concrete evidence. Even if the CIA had once funded Falcon and Egozi to fight Castro, that does not mean they were still operatives by the 1970s.
It is interesting though that the first major kingpin to be arrested in Mexico was a foreigner, whether he worked with spooks or not. Both Cuban and American gangsters had long experience in organized crime and knowledge of cross-border networks and money laundering needed for the expansive drug trade of the 1970s. If they had links to intelligence services at some point, all the better. The mountain bandits of Sinaloa were only beginning to understand the billion-dollar industry. Foreigners taught them how to make it work. Mexican newspapers depicted Falcon as an evil, alien crime boss who was sexually degenerate. But they also noted his immense fortune, a fact not lost on the Mexican public.
In Sinaloa, the influx of American dollars had transformed gummers into a richer and noisier clan. Since the 1950s, successful opium growers had moved down from the mountains to the outskirts of Culiacán. By the 1970s, they had created an entire neighborhood called Tierra Blanca, building ostentatious homes with brand-new pickup trucks on unpaved roads. The Sinaloa press began to increasingly call them narcotraficantes or narcos for short, as opposed to just gummers. The change in language implies a shift in status from mere poppy growers to international smugglers. Old Culiacán families looked with disdain at the uncouth narcos with their gold chains, mountain accents, and sandals. But they also eyed their stacks of dollar bills with interest.
The streets of Tierra Blanca echoed with the sound of gunfire as the sombrero-clad hillbillies blasted at each other, often in broad daylight. Throughout 1975, Sinaloan newspapers were packed with quotes from local politicians complaining about the rising narco threat, saying shoot-outs had become daily affairs and gangsters were driving in cars with no plates and blacked-out windows. SINALOA UNDER THE POWER OF THE CRIMINAL MAFIA rattled one headline.11 Officials were also concerned about reports of drug growers in the mountains “bearing enough firepower for a small revolution.” Pressure mounted on Mexico’s federal government.
The hammer finally came down in 1976, when Mexico launched its Operation Condor. Ten thousand soldiers stormed the Golden Triangle, new, hard-nosed police commanders arrived in Culiacán, and planes sprayed drug crops. The government’s stated aim was to completely annihilate the narcos.
Operation Condor was the biggest government offensive against El Narco in the entire seventy-one history of the PRI. By all accounts it genuinely hit traffickers hard. DEA supplied planes for the crop spraying—they used 2.4-D acid on opium and the toxic herbicide paraquat on marijuana, and DEA agents were allowed verification flights to check the damage. One of these agents, Jerry Kelley, described missions over Sinaloa to Time correspondent Elaine Shannon:
“We flew every inch of the country and we knew what they were doing and what was there. It didn’t matter who was corrupt. There was no way they could hide what was going on.”12
This was the first American-backed spraying operation in the war on drugs and pioneered a tactic that would be replicated across the world, from Colombia to Afghanistan. History has now shown that spraying by itself cannot destroy a drug industry. But some Mexican traffickers apparently made a fatal mistake—they harvested poisoned marijuana and sent it to El Norte. Lab tests by the U.S. government found Mexican ganja with signs of paraquat. Who knows how much venomous weed was ever on the market. But mere talk of it was enough to rattle U.S. lawmakers, who were concerned their children at college could be shoving toxic salt into their system. The Health Department issued a public warning to marijuana smokers about poisonous weed, advising that it could cause irreversible lung damage.
The bad publicity pushed dealers to look for a new source of weed for millions of hungry hippies. It didn’t take long to find a country with the land, laborers, and lawlessness to fill the gap—Colombia. Farmers had been growing weed in Colombia’s Sierra Nevada since the early 1970s. As Mexico cracked down, the Colombians stepped up, creating a boom in their own marijuana industry known by local historians as the Bonanza Marimbera.13 Soon DEA agents were uncovering Santa Marta Gold everywhere from Midwest rock festivals to Ivy League universities. This geographical movement of drugs production has become known as the balloon effect. In this analogy, when you grab one corner of the narco balloon, the air just rushes to bulge out the other side.
Back in Sinaloa, troops hammered narcos on the ground as well as from the air. Residents across the Sierra Madre still have painful memories of soldiers marauding through their villages, kicking down doors, and dragging hundreds of young men away. Reports came back of such ugly treatment of suspects that the Culiacán lawyers’ association sent a team to investigate. They interviewed 457 prisoners locked up on drug charges and found that every single one complained of being beaten and tortured. The abuses against them included electric shocks, burns, and chili-laced water shot up the nasal passages. Other prisoners said they were raped by police. No officers were reprimanded.
The tactics may have been rough, but they were effective in slamming the narcos. The onslaught of soldiers in the mountains pushed many growers and other peasant farmers to flee their villages for city slums. Federal police also shot dead several key suspects including kingpin Pedro Avilés in 1978. Avilés’s lieutenants ran from the heat in Sinaloa to reestablish themselves in Guadalajara. The poison of El Narco had spread. Now the Sinaloan narco tribe stretched from the mountains to Mexico’s second-largest city.
So why did Mexico’s government unleash Operation Condor? Had politicians suddenly seen the light that the drug trade was evil and dangerous?
One clear incentive was the American carrot. DEA bosses and the Jimmy Carter White House sang praises of Mexico’s antidrug efforts calling it a “model program.” More substantially, Mexico got to keep the hardware America supplied for the spraying. Within two years, Mexico had acquired thirty-nine Bell helicopters, twenty-two small aircraft, and one executive jet, giving it the largest police fleet in Latin America. Drug work became a new way for governments to gain aid and airpower from the United States.
The Mexican government also used Operation Condor to crack down on small bands of leftist insurgents. Students and disaffected workers had risen up in the 1960s to protest totalitarian rule. The PRI reacted in a calm and receiving way: in 1968, it ordered snipers to surround a demonstration and
fire on the crowd from all sides. Drawings of the corpses can still be seen today in the somber Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City. Unable to challenge the system through protests, leftists formed guerrilla groups that carried out sporadic kidnappings and attacks on government installations. They were becoming quite a bother by the mid-1970s—just as Operation Condor kicked off.
Soldiers on drug operations rounded up suspected guerrillas, who happened to have a substantial presence in the Sierra Madre states of Sinaloa and Chihuahua, where Condor was concentrated. Often leftists would be arrested under the pretense of drug charges. Hundreds of activists were never seen again. Mexicans use the words the disappeared to refer to these lost souls. As antidrug operations spread to other states, so did the dirty war on leftists. Yet another modus operandi was established in the war on drugs—it could provide effective cover for anti-insurgency ops.
Coincidentally, the CIA had also code-named its own regional operation against communists in the 1970s Operation Condor. Observing Mexico’s eradication campaign, the agency was sharply aware the Mexican government was using antidrug equipment for political work. As it said in a declassified memo to the White House:
“The army will also take advantage of the eradication campaign to uncover any arms trafficking and guerrilla activities … Army eradication forces may devote as much effort to internal security as eradication. They do not however have their own airlift support capabilities and they may seek helicopters and other equipment from the Attorney General’s limited eradication sources.”14
The rest of the memo is blacked out with a felt pen. We can presume that has the really juicy parts. But don’t worry. It is for our safety that we can’t see it.
After two years of Operation Condor, it seems that the Mexican government had enough of battering the hell out of the narcos. In March 1978, Mexican officials informed DEA agents they would be making no more verification flights. The eradication campaign would officially continue—and still be praised by the White House—but without a bird’s-eye view. President Carter raised no fuss, in line with his less confrontational attitude to drugs. But agents in the field moaned to their bosses there was a cover-up. DEA agents on the U.S. side also noticed that Mexican marijuana was flooding back in, the scare over venomous weed forgotten.