by Ioan Grillo
In Mexican border cities, everybody knows someone who has got mixed up in the drug trade: a cousin, a brother, a classmate, a neighbor. Everybody has a story. A taxidriver picked up a man who showed him ten kilos of cocaine he had stuffed up his sweater; a social worker’s neighbor’s house was raided and had a million dollars in cash; a waitress’s brother and father are doing life sentences in American prisons for trafficking; a businessman’s cousin started running drugs and got dissolved in a bath full of acid.
Everybody also knows that drugs are a fast way to make cash. If you are in between jobs, struggling with house payments, or desperate to get a new car, vacancies as a burro—someone hired to take drugs over the border—are always open. Making a film about youth in Ciudad Juárez, I talked to teenagers and young men from the barrios who had taken up the offer. The cartel offered a flat rate: $1,000 to drive sixty pounds of marijuana into the United States; more to take heroin, cocaine, or meth. You could use your own car or they lent you a vehicle. It was about three hours’ work, then you got paid right away in cash—earning as much you would from a month sweating in a Juárez assembly plant. You could traffic once and never again. Or you could keep going back four, five times a week and start making some serious money.
Binationals or people with U.S. residency are particularly sought after. I interviewed a twenty-year-old living in El Paso who had made several shipments for the $1,000 fee, using the money to help his mom out and to buy studio equipment to record music. But then he got caught and sentenced to five years’ probation, in which he had to stay indoors at night, wear a security tag, and was banned from going into Mexico. I asked him what was he most upset about. Being stuck in boring El Paso and not being able to go to Juárez and see his friends, he replied.
Mexican smugglers’ endless ingenuity has made hours of entertaining reports for American television. A whole industry in Mexico builds so-called trap cars with secret compartments in tires, gas tanks, and under seats. Trucks are even specially made with sealed metal containers appearing like gas canisters that customs agents have to burn open with a blowtorch to look into. Ripping apart vehicles with fire is hard work in a place such as Laredo, where ten thousand trucks cross daily. And it is embarrassing for agents when they burn up a car with nothing in it.
Many traffickers avoid border posts altogether and walk right in over the desert. Gangs even manufacture their own hefty backpacks, designed to carry maximum loads of weed or cocaine. With hundreds of thousands of migrants walking over the border, it is easy for smugglers to slip in through the same routes—a point screamed out by America’s “militarize the border” lobby.
Others don’t go through or round the gates, but under. Mexican smugglers have built an extensive warren of tunnels that rivals that of the Gaza Strip. For Border Patrol agents, it is like playing Space Invaders—every time they fill one passage with concrete, another pops up. These are no mere rabbit holes. Cartels hire professional engineers, who build tunnels with wooden supports, concrete floors, electric lights, and even rail carts that carry dope. One passage that went into Otay Mesa, California, measured a colossal twenty-four hundred feet in length.3 Another went on five hundred feet to come up behind an innocent-looking fireplace in Tecate, Mexico.
Then there is the art of disguise. Imagine any way you can camouflage narcotics, and you find that it has been done in an even weirder way in real life. Smugglers have hidden cocaine under the chocolate layer of candy bars, in the center of watermelons, mixed cocaine into fabricated fiberglass dolls, and even made yayo into an imitation of the soccer World Cup trophy. One smuggler went even further and put heroin into two artificial slabs of flesh that were plastered onto the end of his butt cheeks. The heroin leaked into his blood, causing his death.
In a hotel room in Culiacán, a twenty-one-year-old woman called Guadalupe shows off a new method of hiding marijuana. She works for some Sinaloan gangsters who agreed she could talk to journalists and even be filmed with the drugs—apparently for no recompense. Perhaps they like showing off how clever they are. Obviously, they don’t fear they are giving away great secrets.
Guadalupe takes a green candle in a glass bottle and meticulously hollows out the wax, using a metal teaspoon. On her right side is big pile of green bud on a newspaper, which she sorts through and stuffs into transparent doggie bags. She then takes a roll of Fuji camera film, tears out the plastic filmstrip, and wraps it around one of the bags of ganja. She stuffs this bundle inside the candle and puts the wax back on top. Boom; there stands a regular-looking candle with drugs hidden inside. It was all done with the swiftness of a celebrity chef running through a recipe.
“This is a new technique. It is one of the most effective ones. The smell of the candle is very strong and police don’t want to spend time digging away at the wax. It was created by a group of people whose only work is to think about new ways to transport merchandise.”
I have heard about such figures before. They are referred to as cerebros or “brains”—people dedicated to dreaming up new ways for gangsters to smuggle their dope. In the corporate world, they would be like the masterminds who sit around drinking lattes and think up a genius way to package toothpaste or a catchy slogan for the Big Mac.
Guadalupe goes on, “When I first delivered this stuff, I got scared. But I learned to control the fear, so I don’t betray myself and get caught. If I had been caught, then I wouldn’t be here.”
Guadalupe has a silky voice and glowing black hair. Many Sinaloan women dress ostentatiously in tight dresses and high heels and cover themselves in gold chains and jewels. But Guadalupe has modest clothes: simple black jeans and a red shirt with white circles on it. She says it is best to dress down to avoid attention. A high school friend first introduced her to the drug trade when she was seventeen.
“I told him I had certain economic problems. He said he was involved in all this, and he invited me to meet other friends of his and showed me that you can make good money fast. At first, I thought it was just men working in this business, but you see more and more women. This is probably because of the difficult economic situation in this country.”
Pretty, young women have particular uses for the mafia. They are good at networking and setting up contacts, Guadalupe says, and experts in spying. As well as taking drugs down to a Sinaloan port, Guadalupe has been sent on many missions to collect information—about rivals, police, politicians, or anything the cartel wants to find out about. She was even once sent for a short stint to Russia to see how criminals there worked and assess if it was possible to do business with them.
“I went to observe all their mafia system—how the business moves there. We had contact with certain Russian gangsters. I observed to see if we could make a connection between them and the people here, to see if we could move drugs over there. But it was impossible. They have their own ways and their projects are very organized. We couldn’t unite forces.”
On another occasion back in Mexico, Guadalupe was ordered to seduce and sleep with a man, so as to spy on him and probe him for info.
“It was like an obligation. It is like a commitment you have to fulfill to be inside. This was the worst thing I have done in this business, for me personally; seducing someone just to get information.”
Americans spend more on illegal drugs than the people of any other nation on the planet. That isn’t surprising. They also spend more on Wrangler Jeeps, Big Macs, and Xboxes. But while Mexico can’t cash in on American Xbox sales, the wretched gift of the drug trade goes straight over the Rio Grande.
The best indicator on American drug use is an annual survey by the Department of Health and Human Services, a cabinet-level agency.4 Investigators knock on doors and ask people if they have smoked any crack recently or ever puffed on a reefer. After traipsing from Alaska to Brownsville over the whole year, they finish with answers from 67,500 respondents over the age of twelve. There is an obvious flaw in the method. You can’t be sure that people are telling the truth; or whe
ther the houseful of depraved junkies told the surveyors to get lost while Jehovah’s Witnesses next door happily told all. But at least you can hope any margin of error is similar year on year.
According to this survey, overall American drug use was steady throughout the 2000s, in the period that the Mexican Drug War broke out and escalated. However, between 2008 and 2009, the number of people who said they had recently used drugs rose from 8 percent to 8.7 percent. In total, according to the survey, an estimated 21.8 million Americans were on some mind-bending substance in 2009. It seems unlikely that the bloodbath in Mexico is suppressing supply if more Americans are getting wasted.
The survey does, however, estimate that use of the most profitable drug, cocaine, has gone down: from 2.4 million American snorters in 2006 to 1.6 million in 2009. This has led some observers to argue that this shrinking market is one of the key causes of Mexico’s butchery. Under pressure from decreased profits, the argument goes, the gangs have turned up the murders. The argument deals with a lot of unknown factors, but maybe this hypothesis is correct. If it is, it is a tough equation for Mexico to deal with: when drug profits swing up, gangsters get more powerful; when they swing down, they get more violent. It is the devil’s logic.
We then have to guess what all this American drug taking is actually worth in cash. The most publicized estimates are in reports commissioned by the drug czar’s office. When you first consider the challenges to experts compiling these studies, you wonder how on earth they can do it. So many factors are unknown: the amount of drug use varies enormously (you have cases such as Bill Clinton, who had one puff and didn’t inhale, and then former New York Giants star Lawrence Taylor, who said he blew $1.4 million on blow in a year); and prices vary from city to city and even deal to deal. But the surveys, entitled “What America’s Users Spend on Illegal Drugs,” make some valiant efforts toward a plausible set of estimates.
The reports are packed with tables full of all kinds of riveting facts about drug use. We learn that in 1988, marijuana smokers puffed an average of 16.9 joints per month, the joints weighing an average of 0.0134 ounces; while in 2000 they smoked 18.7 reefers, which weighed on average 0.0136 ounces. Wow, that is exact stuff! The analysts also try to calculate their way round the fact that junkies and crackheads are famous for being lying, self-deceiving nut jobs. As the report says:
“Because drug users frequently deny their drug use, we need means to inflate self-reports to account for underreporting. This required an estimate of the probability that a chronic user would tell the truth when asked about his drug use. To develop that estimate we selected everyone in New York City who tested positive for cocaine, and we calculated the proportion that admitted to some illegal drug use during thirty days before being arrested … Truthful reporting rates differed from year-to-year and from site-to-site but generally, about 65 percent of cocaine users were considered truthful. Call this the provisional rate of truthfulness.”
Or call it statistical sorcery. No mathematical equation can really compensate for the erratic behavior of drug addicts. But then these are only estimates.
The surveys have data on the drug market from 1988, when they estimate it was worth a whopping $154.3 billion, to 2000, when they calculate it was worth $63.7 billion. This steady decline is not only purported to reflect lowering American drug use in this period but also the undeniable fact that cocaine and heroin got much cheaper on American streets; in 2000, it cost less than half the price to shoot a bag of heroin into your arm than it would have in 1988.5
In the 2000s, the guesstimates have been incorporated into the United Nations drug report, which estimates that the American drug market has been fairly stable at about $60 billion. Analysts put this number through more statistical grinders to estimate that about half of the total, or $30 billion, goes to Mexican gangsters. Again, it is not an exact science. But everybody does agree that Mexican cartels are fighting for a prize with at least ten zeroes on the end.
So where does 30 billion in dirty drug dollars disappear?
Bankers believe it certainly helped keep the peso afloat during the world economic crisis from 2008 to 2009. It rivals Mexico’s other big sources of foreign currency: in 2009, oil exports were worth $36.1 billion;6 remittances sent home from Mexican migrants were $21.1 billion;7 and foreign tourism brought in $11.3 billion. Drug money would be number two on this list.
But one shouldn’t get carried away with its influence. Mexico is no Bangladesh. It has eleven billionaires, several world-class companies, and a total economy worth about $1 trillion. If the $30 billion figure is true, then drug trafficking accounts for some 3 percent of the gross domestic product.
The money does, however, constitute a much bigger percentage in certain communities and social groups. In the westside slums of Ciudad Juárez or the highlands of Sinaloa, the drug-trafficking mafia is likely the biggest employer. By falling most heavily in poor sectors, $30 billion has a particularly potent effect.
Thirty billion dollars also has the power to thoroughly corrupt Mexico’s institutions. Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna said in one speech that cartels could spend about $1.2 billion a year to triple the salaries of the nation’s entire municipal police forces.8 That is a true mathematical possibility. But it is also another X factor. No one can really say how many officers are on the cartel payroll, or whether the cop stopping you for speeding moonlights for the mafia or just takes bribes from motorists.
Physically, much of the cash moves back and forth over the border stuffed in suitcases or in the same secret compartments used to carry drugs. Mexican police and soldiers are often kicking down doors to find millions of dollar bills decorating lounges and kitchens. Overall, Calderón’s troops nabbed over $400 million in the first four years of his offensive. That considerable chunk of cheese quickly made the Mexican government millions in interest. But it is only a tiny fraction of the estimated $120 billion in total that the cartels are estimated to have moved in the period. North of the river, in the same period, American police took another $80 million linked to Mexican cartels, an even smaller piss in the ocean.
Once in Mexico, billions are believed to go straight into bank vaults. Professor Guillermo Ibarra of the Autonomous University of Sinaloa crunched numbers on the money generated by the state’s formal economy compared to what was in its banks. He found more than $680 million in bank deposits unaccounted for. And Sinaloa is a financial backwater compared to the economic whales of Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey.9
Gangsters’ ostentatious tastes also spill much of the money over to local entrepreneurs. Culiacán boasts some of the highest sales of bulky SUVs and Jeeps in the hemisphere, helping keep up brands such as Hummer. Meanwhile, the garish mansions that line its hills employ any architects and builders who can keep up with capos’ eccentric tastes and don’t mind working for high-pressure clients.
But the real money sets up entire front companies. The U.S. Treasury has blacklisted more than two hundred Mexican firms it alleges launder drug money. They include everything from a prominent dairy in Sinaloa to car washes, flower shops, and clothing lines.10
I visited several businesses on this Treasury blacklist in Mexico City. My first stop was a spa and clinic in the upscale Lomas neighborhood. Walking through the door, I was greeted by friendly young women dressed in loose white uniforms, while middle-aged ladies sat in the waiting room reading glossy magazines. The manager said they knew nothing about drug cartels or U.S. Treasury blacklists but plenty about breast implants and liposuction. She asked me if I was after a weight-reducing massage, signaling that I was looking a bit portly myself. To add to this flab, I went to a second listed business, a gourmet taqueria in between the offices of some major Mexican and American corporations. The eatery specialized in food with the habanero chili pepper, the spiciest of all chiles. After gorging on three tacos, I felt the chili’s burn—but learned little about mafia bosses.
The Treasury blacklist bans Americans from doing busi
ness with these places (I’m not American, so I didn’t commit a crime). But it would be up to the Mexican government to shut them down. They evidently hadn’t. And the alleged Laundromats kept on enlarging breasts and serving superspicy snacks.
This leads to a common reprimand of Calderón’s mighty war. He may have smacked gangsters with a large hammer. But he hasn’t followed the money. As long as cash keeps flowing, critics howl, bad guys will keep jumping to it.
Calderón has tried to remedy this, decreeing new measures to clamp down on dollar cash deposits and filing a major reform bill on money laundering in 2010. The bill would keep tight regulations on banks, investments, and funds; in short doing everything American critics call for. One can hope that if the law is approved, it will limit Mexico’s gangster economy in the future.
However, on a globalized planet, Mexico is still limited in its scope to stop drug barons from moving cash. Even if it is pushed out of their banks, the money can easily flow elsewhere, such as the United States or offshore tax havens or China. A lot of it is in these places already. Reforms to make it easier to zap capital around the planet have made it harder to police that money. In 1979, some seventy-five banks were in offshore tax havens; today there are more than three thousand. Every day, seventy thousand international money transfers move a trillion dollars. The executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, wrote:
“Money laundering is rampant and practically unopposed … At a time of major bank failures, if money doesn’t smell, bankers seem to believe. Honest citizens, struggling in a time of economic hardship, wonder why the proceeds of crime—turned into ostentatious real estate, cars, boats and planes—are not seized.”11