by Ioan Grillo
On the afternoon of our visit, one such load conveniently arrives for us to photograph. A truck rolls up and young soldiers move with military orderliness to unload hundreds of brown packages into the warehouse. General Solórzano grabs one, reaches into his black vest for a box cutter, and carefully slices a triangle in the packaging to reveal white powder crammed into a brick shape. “Cocaina!” he says triumphantly. A lab technician quickly proves him right. The white-coated specialist conducts the test using a portable kit, which looks like a car toolbox. He selects a vial of pink solution, mixes it with a small sample of the captured blow, and it instantly turns blue—indicating a positive match.
General Solórzano, a foot lower than me but with shoulders twice as broad, turns round and stares me in the face. “Taste it,” he says, unsmiling. “Go on.” I look round at the other officers, agents, and technicians to see if he is joking. They all have sturdy straight faces. So I dab my little finger onto the cocaine brick and stick it into my mouth. Cocaine has an unforgettable bittersweet flavor, neither tasty nor disgusting, like a prescription medicine you cautiously swallow and are then relieved that it isn’t so bad. “You will feel that your tongue falls asleep,” General Solórzano says, a grin now spreading across his face. “This is pure, uncut cocaine.” My tongue certainly does feel numb. And I also feel a little giddy. But then again, maybe that is from walking in the hot sun. Or maybe it is from earlier in the day when we watched soldiers cut up a whole field of captured marijuana and set fire to it, sparking a golden green blaze that unleashed clouds of ganja smoke wafting off into the horizon in these arid, jaggy mountains.
I once interviewed the chief FBI officer of a major city on the U.S. side of the Mexican border. Before I turned up, he had taken the trouble to read some of my articles. Speaking with a thick New York twang, he told me he had spent fifteen years by the Rio Grande making cases against drug traffickers. He went on, “I enjoyed your stories. When I get new recruits, I tell them that is exactly the way not to look at the drug business.”
I betrayed a miffed look. What had I got wrong? I asked. He replied that it wasn’t that I had got anything wrong. It was that the points I focused on were not going to help make cases. In our journalistic vision of the Mexican drug trade, we see stories of colorful kingpins and shifting maps of cartel territory. But on the ground level, the drug trade doesn’t see that. It is about movement of narcotics, pure and simple. Drugs get produced, transported, sold, and snorted. Just follow those drugs and you make cases, he said. Forget about folk stories of kingpins and carefully drawn maps of cartel boundaries.
He made a good point. Stripped down its basics, El Narco—or Mexican drug trafficking—is just an industry. And like any industry, the mechanics of making and selling products are more fundamental than the companies and CEOs calling the shots. The evidence room in the army base in Culiacán is a fantastic display of this industry. It shows the colossal fruits of drug trafficking: tons of produce in hundreds of different packets and pans. Who knows how many different cartels or kingpins put money into these goods? And who cares? These mind-bending substances have passed through thousands of hands in fields, laboratories, on ships, airplanes, and in trucks. And they all end up together in one room, being shown off to journalists to demonstrate Mexico’s fight against trafficking, but having the reverse effect of illustrating how incredibly productive the country’s industry is.
Mexico’s drug industry never sleeps. Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, somewhere new plants grow, chemicals react, transporters carry loads, burros cross the border. And every day, somewhere in the United States, Americans buy drugs that passed through Mexico and inhale them into their lungs, snort them up their noses, or inject them into their veins. Kingpins rise and fall, teenagers experiment, and old addicts overdose, and all the time the drug machine keeps ticking on with the steady rhythm of the earth circling the sun.
We all know the Mexican drug trade is so productive that it is one of the country’s biggest industries. It rivals oil exports in helping stabilize the peso. It directly provides thousands of jobs, many in poor rural areas that most need them. Its profits spill over into a number of other sectors, particularly hotels, cattle ranches, racehorses, record labels, football teams, and movie companies.
But as an industry we have little reliable data on it. Mostly we have estimates. Then we have more estimates based on estimates, x factors multiplied by y factors creating misty, doubtful numbers passed off as statistics. Both the media and officials help feed the misinformation machine. We all love to pack a story or press release with figures. Forbes magazine estimates that Chapo Guzmán is worth $1 billion—conveniently bang on the number with straight zeros. So what is their magic formula for that number? Pretty much, a wild guess. Back in the 1970s, DEA said that Mexicans temporarily controlled three quarters of the American heroin market after narcs hit the French Connection. A year later, it said that Colombian marijuana dealers controlled three quarters of the American weed market after they hit the Mexicans. What a statistical coincidence! Or is three quarters just a standard estimate that really means a whole lot of drugs?
However, the Mexican drug industry is so important that we have to try to come to terms with its scale. The most solid figures are from busts on the United States’ southern border. These are physical quantities of dope on the scales that can be compared year after year. And it is clearly being trafficked from Mexico to provide to American users.
The overall seizures confirm, just in case anyone doubted, that a shitload of narcotics are moving north. In 2009, customs agents tossed cars and walkers going through the official ports of entry to nab a total of 298.6 metric tons of marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and crystal meth. Meanwhile, border patrol agents who roam deserts and rivers seized a whopping 1,159 tons of marijuana, along with 10 tons of cocaine and 3 tons of heroin. These are enough drugs to get hundreds of millions of people wasted and would have been worth billions of dollars on street corners. But nobody can say how many tons of drugs they didn’t catch. That number, the most important one, becomes another unknown.
These border seizures have held up year after year. Back in 2006, customs nabbed 211 tons of drugs; in 2007, it to swung up to 262 tons; in 2008, it tilted back down to 242 tons; then in 2009, it shot up to 298 tons.1 Customs agents say the latest high may be the result of more agents, but they can’t be sure; it could mean smugglers are busier. What is clear is that President Felipe Calderón’s war on drugs and the thousands of shootings, busts, and massacres are not slowing the narcotics heading north.
On the border with Ciudad Juárez, drug seizures did fall as violence exploded—from 90 tons in 2007; to 75 tons in 2008; and 73 tons in 2009. But they were still higher than the 50 tons seized in 2006 when there was a fraction of the number of assassinations. Over on the San Diego–Tijuana crossings, seizures went up from 103 tons in 2007 to 108 tons in 2008, when fights between rival cartel factions left record piles of corpses.
This may seem all sound like masturbatory bean counting. It really isn’t. These cold figures have frightening human implications: Mexican drug cartels can still operate at full capacity while they fight bloody battles with each other and the government. In the drug business, it seems, a war economy functions perfectly well. Gangsters can go on having downtown shoot-outs with soldiers, leaving piles of severed heads, and still be trucking the same quantity of dope. That doesn’t bode well for peace.
The formula for Mexicans to make drug money is hard to beat.
Take cocaine. A Colombian peasant can sell a bundle of coca leaves from a two-acre field for about $80. After it goes through its first simple chemical process, known as a chagra, it can be sold as a kilo of coca paste in the Colombian highlands for about $800. This paste will then be put through a crystallizing laboratory to become a kilo brick of pure cocaine—like that General Solórzano showed me. According to the United Nations, such a brick in 2009 was worth $2,147 in Colombian ports, rocketing up to $34,700 by th
e time it got over the U.S. border, and $120,000 when it was sold on the New York streets.2 The traffic and distribution of the drug, the part run by Mexican gangsters, nets a 6,000 percent profit from the narco to the nose. If you calculate the cost all the way from the farm it is 150,000 percent. It is one of the most profitable businesses on the planet. Who else can offer that kind of return for your dollar?
Mexican cartels have emissaries in Colombia who place their cocaine orders. But Mexican gangs get Colombians to actually deliver the disco powder to them in Mexico or Central America, especially Panama and Honduras. The way the business has developed has made Mexicans traffickers the top dogs over the Colombian producers. DEA Andean Bureau chief Jay Bergman explained it to me using more great metaphors:
“Who really calls the shots in a global supply-and-demand economy? Is it Mexican cartels or Colombian cocaine suppliers? Is it the manufacturer or the distributor?
“In a legitimate economic model, is it Colgate or Walmart that calls the shots? It is actually Walmart who says, ‘This is what we want to pay for it, this is a unit price, this is when we want it delivered, and this is how it’s going to be,’ and Colgate’s position is, ‘As long as we are making a profit, as long as we are not losing money, we are willing to work on those terms. And the more you can move my product, the bigger discount we will give you, and you get to really call the shots. Tell us where you want it, tell us how you want it, put it on the shelves where you want it, just get it sold.’ … That is the evolved cocaine market we are dealing with.”
From Central America, Mexican gangsters move cocaine on ships, submarines, or light aircraft. General Solórzano shows me the drug planes they have captured in Sinaloa. They are mostly single-engine Cessnas brought in the United States for about $50,000 a pop. The army now protects the seized aircraft because when they were in a police base, gangsters actually broke in and stole them back. In the last two years, soldiers have seized two hundred such planes. Driving around the airfield, the sheer size of the fleet makes a stunning sight. And these are only the ones they captured!
As drugs flow up into the United States, all kinds of people make money off them. People are subcontracted to ship, truck, warehouse, and finally smuggle the product over the border. To complicate this, drugs are often bought and sold many times on their journey. People actually handling these narcotics will often have no knowledge which so-called kingpin or cartel ever owned them, only knowing the direct contacts they are dealing with. Ask a New York cocaine dealer who smuggled his product into America. He would rarely have a clue.
All this helps explain why the Mexican drug trade is such a confusing web, which confounds both journalists and drug agents. Tracing exactly who touched a shipment on its entire journey is a hard task.
But this dynamic, moving industry has a solid center of gravity—turfs, or plazas. Drugs have to pass through a certain territory on the border to get into the United States, and whoever is running those plazas makes sure to tax everything that moves. The border plazas have thus become a choke point that is not seen in other drug-producing nations such as Colombia, Afghanistan, or Morocco. This is one of the key reasons why Mexican turf wars have become so bloody.
The vast profits attract all kinds to the Mexican drug trade: peasant farmers, slum teenagers, students, teachers, businessmen, idle rich kids, and countless others. It is often pointed out that in poor countries people turn to the drug trade in desperation. That is true. But plenty of middle-class or wealthy people also dabble. Growing up in the south of England, I knew dozens of people who moved and sold drugs, from private-school boys to kids from council estates (projects). The United States has never had a shortage of its own citizens willing to transport and sell drugs. The bottom line is that drugs are good money even to wealthy people, and plenty have no moral dilemmas about the business.
Iran Escandon is one of the thousands who have carried the white lady on her journey north. I find him in the municipal prison in Ciudad Juárez, playing keyboard in a jail-block church band. In my search to make sense of the Mexican drug trade, I have interviewed dozens of traffickers in cells, cantinas, and drug rehabs. But Iran stands out in my memory because he comes across as particularly innocent. That may sound like a funny word to use; he doesn’t deny that he trafficked cocaina. But he seems innocent in the sense of being harmless or naive. He was a never a gang member or drug user like so many smugglers; never a policeman or murderer like so many others. He was caught with forty kilos of cocaine when he was just eighteen years old. In a flash, his youth disappeared and he got a ten-year sentence. When I meet him, he has four years left to go.
He speaks in a voice so soft that I have to crane my head forward to hear him. A beige puffer jacket covers his skinny frame, which contrasts with that of other inmates who show off bulky, tattooed torsos, built by bench-pressing concrete blocks in the scorching sun. His eyes are wide-open and warm. He balances delicately on the end of a bunk bed in the cell he shares with six others, telling me his story.
“It was cars that brought me here. I just loved cars. I loved to fix them, build them. I loved to race them. Cars were my passion.”
Iran grew up in Cuauhtémoc, a city of a hundred thousand people set between cattle ranches and apple orchards, five hours south of Juárez. When he was seventeen, he dropped out of high school to work in a friend’s car body shop near the marketplace. For fourteen-hour days, he would strip down fuel tanks, beef up motors, spray-paint bonnets.
“We would take old bangers and soup them up to turn them into machines that could race like bullets. I quickly learned to work on anything—sports cars, pickup trucks, Jeeps.”
Happiness fills his eyes as he remembers good times past; times before he lived in a prison in the most murderous city on the planet; times that now seem an age away, like a distant memory, a dream he hopes one day to return to.
His family were caring but humble, his father a hardworking laborer and man of God, a convert to evangelical Protestant Christianity, which is spreading fast across Mexico. Like his father, Iran says he believes in a personal relationship with Jesus. He also believes in working hard and trying to make something of himself. That was what street races were about for him. On Saturday nights, Iran and his friends would take cars they had customized in their workshop and burn them up against machines from other crews. In Mexico, these illegal street contests are known as arrancones. When I mention The Fast and the Furious, Iran laughs.
“They were nothing like the races you see in the movies. There were no gangs with suitcases of money and Uzis. We were just a bunch of friends who loved car racing. We built up machines using anything we could find. It was a way to be creative, to be resourceful. And we could beat these teams with much more money than us. It was a great feeling.”
One afternoon as Iran had his head in more filthy motors, a client turned up for some repairs on his vehicle. He was a well-dressed middle-aged man from Guadalajara who talked politely. When his car had been fixed, he offered the young guys some work—to drive a car upstate in exchange for ten thousand pesos, or about $900. The tires would be stuffed with pure Colombian cocaine.
“We thought, ‘Wow. Ten thousand pesos just to drive a car upstate. Just think what kind of machine we can build with ten thousand pesos, and how we can win races with that.’ It didn’t even seem like we were doing something bad. We were just delivery boys.”
After the first job, Iran and his friends celebrated like crazy. Then a week later, the man appeared again and asked for a second delivery. A few days later, a Sinaloan associate turned up with another package. Soon, they were moving several packages a week north. They had so much work, they started subcontracting other kids to drive packages. They were carrying up to 120 kilos of cocaine a shot in exchange for fifty thousand pesos or about $4,500. The money seemed like a small fortune to seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. But it was a tiny fraction of what the white powder would fetch in American nightclubs.
“In a few months
we went from being broke to having more cash than we could spend. As well as building great cars for the races, I would help my family out. I also changed my own car every month—I had an Escort, then a Jetta, then a Mustang. And as we had money, loads of girls were suddenly interested in us. I started living with my girlfriend. It all happened so fast.”
The glory days were short-lived. Just after Escandon turned eighteen, he took on his most ambitious job yet: carrying forty kilos from Cuauhtémoc over the border and all the way to Colorado for a princely sum of $15,000. As he drove into Ciudad Juárez, soldiers stopped his car for a check. He took a deep breath while they felt under the hood and into the tires. Then they found the cargo.
“It was a nightmare moment. They pulled out the cocaine and my heart stopped. It had all been like a game, like a fantasy. In six months we went from nothing to riches. And then it was all over.”
The smuggling organization never contacted Iran again or reprimanded him about losing the drugs. Maybe he was set up, he sighs, so that another, bigger load would get through, a classic technique of traffickers. While his crew moved drugs north, other teams they didn’t know were certainly transporting cocaine on the same route for the same gangsters.
Juárez prison was terrifying and brutal for a skinny eighteen-year-old. In this ambience, he threw himself deeply into the evangelicalism of his father. He couldn’t work on cars behind bars, so he put all his energy into learning to play the keyboard in the church band.
“I lost my family. I lost many things. I had to adapt to a hard and violent place. I had to grow up here and become a man. I can’t look back and regret anymore. My years have gone. I have to look forward now. When I get out, I want to study music. I want to make music my life. At least I am still alive.”