by Ioan Grillo
Alma’s friend is a forty-year-old woman called Guadalupe. She lost her eldest son, Juan Carlos, who was gunned down by police. She clutches a huge photo of him, a handsome twenty-three-year-old staring upright at the camera. The police had gone after somebody else in the neighborhood, she said, and Juan Carlos was shot down in the cross fire. She sobs hard, uncontrollably, as she tells the story. She gave birth to him when she was just seventeen, carried him in her womb, changed his nappies, watched his first steps, took him to school … and then kissed his corpse.
Guadalupe carries a three-month-old baby with her. The infant sleeps as she sobs and tells her story, then wakes up for milk, then sleeps again. I ask his name. “Juan Carlos,” she says. It is the same name as that of her firstborn who was gunned down. This is a new son for the one that was lost. His mother has put hope in the fresh blood to grow up and make a better world than the one that killed his brother. We have to put our hope there too.
Books
The literature on Latin American trafficking is almost as jumbled as the drug trade itself. It includes breathtaking investigations, profound academic studies, accounts by American agents, scrawling by semiliterate gangsters and wonderful novels—which are often the safest way to tell the dark story. I have tried to read everything printed on Mexican gangsters, but it is hard to keep up with the flurry of books on El Narco that have come out of Mexico in recent years. One that stands out is El Cártel de Sinaloa by Diego Osorno, which among other things put the diaries of godfather Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo into our hands. The books of José Reveles, Julio Scherer, Ricardo Reveles, Javier Valdez, and Marcela Turati have also been crucial to build up the complicated big picture.
The older work of Jesús Blancornelas’s still shines, especially his landmark volume El Cártel: Los Arellano Félix, la mafia más poderosa en la historia de America Latina. Among Mexican academics, or narco-ologists, the undisputed champion remains Luis Astorga. I find his books El Siglo de las Drogas and Drogas Sin Fronteras especially useful. The wave of narco-fiction includes great novels by Élmer Mendoza and Alejandro Almazán, while the most famous is La Reina del Sur by Spaniard Arturo Pérez-Reverte.
Books in English on the Mexican drug trade have been more sporadic. Desperados by Elaine Shannon is a jewel for historic context, telling the tale of DEA agents in the 1980s, while Terrence Poppa’s Drug Lord offers a compelling account of traffickers themselves in the period. Charles Bowden has authored a series of influential books on the issue, and Down By The River gave me great context on the Salinas era. Among American academics, John Bailey and George Grayson are some of the most renowned Mexican-ologists. I also found anthropologist Howard Campbell’s Drug War Zone very useful for its interviews with traffickers on the U.S. side of the border. For Mexico in general, Distant Neighbors by Alan Riding holds up after three decades. Andres Oppenheimer’s Bordering on Chaos and Julia Preston and Samuel Dillion’s Opening Mexico also helped me piece together the turbulent transition to democracy in the 1990s.
I found many books on organized crime in other countries helpful in deciphering Mexico. McMafia by Misha Glenny offers great insight into the Russian mafia and how organized crime has mushroomed globally since the end of the Cold War. Roberto Saviano’s classic, Gomorrah, is useful in identifying criminal systems rather than just crime families. Confesiones de un paraco by José Gabriel Jaraba helped me understand the growth of Colombian paramilitaries and their parallels with Mexico. Cocaine by Dominic Streatfield gives a wonderfully written history of the drug itself. But one of the best crime journalists of all time writes on the New York mob. Nicolas Pileggi’s classics, Goodfellas (originally called Wiseguy) and Casino, show that books on organized crime can be rigid with the facts and still read like novels.
Image Section
God’s own medicine. Opium poppies in the Sierra Madre Occidental. (Fernando Brito)
Mixing up coca paste in a clandestine lab in Putumayo, Colombia. (Oliver Schmieg)
The finished product. A kilo brick of pure cocaine. The markings indicate which cartel it belongs to. (Oliver Schmieg)
Economy of scale. Soldiers tear up an industrial-size marijuana plantation in Sinaloa. (Fernando Brito)
Drug-ballad crooners Grupo Cartel pose outside the Humaya cemetery in Culiacán. The towering mausoleums are of deceased narcos. (Fernando Brito)
Holy Death. The faithful pray, dance, and smoke outside a shrine to the Santa Muerte in Tepito, Mexico City. (Keith Dannemiller)
Mexico’s Eliot Ness. President Felipe Calderón explains his drug-war strategy. (Keith Dannemiller)
A soldier at the scene of a cartel killing in Sinaloa. (Fernando Brito)
Assassin Gustavo inside a cartel safe house in Medellín, Colombia. (Oliver Schmieg)
One move and you’re dead. Colombian special forces bust a truckload of cocaine. (Oliver Schmieg)
Urban war. Soldiers run to a crime scene in Culiacán. (Fernando Brito)
A cartel murder victim in Sinaloa. (Fernando Brito)
Daily mourning. Family members lay to rest a murdered police officer in Sinaloa. (Fernando Brito)
Body messaging. A corpse decorated by gangsters in Sinaloa. (Fernando Brito)
Terror. A cartel victim dumped in a Sinaloan canal. (Fernando Brito)
Peace in the future? Schoolgirls in Culiacán march against violence. They carry photos of innocent victims. (Fernando Brito)
Notes
Chapter 1: Ghosts
1. Comparison of FBI homicide statistics with Mexico City’s PGJDF homicide statistics.
2. Report entitled Joint Operating Environment 2008 by the Virginia-based United States Joint Forces Command.
3. The phrase smoke and mirrors to describe the drug war was most famously used in the classic by Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (New York: Little, Brown, 1996).
4. Database released in December 2010 by Mexico’s Public Safety Department (Secretaria de Seguridad Publica) on deaths connected to organized crime.
5. Mexico’s 2010 census counted 112,332,757 residents.
6. Count of police deaths was first given by Public Safety Secretary Genaro García Luna on August 7, 2010, and updated in December 2010.
7. The International Monetary Fund in 2010 counted Mexico’s GDP at $1.004 trillion, the fourteenth-biggest economy in the world.
8. Forbes list of the world’s billionaires (2010).
Chapter 2: Poppies
1. The crossroads described is in the village of Santiago de los Cabelleros, municipality Badiraguato, Sinaloa.
2. The family home of Joaquin Guzmán is in the village of La Tuna, municipality Badiraguato, Sinaloa.
3. My Sinaloan history was helped by the work of Sergio Ortega, Breve Historia de Sinaloa (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1999).
4. The Treaty of Guadalupe was signed on February 2, 1848, in Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico. The new territory boundaries are described in Article 5, beginning, “The boundary line between the two Republics shall commence in the Gulf of Mexico, three leagues from land …”
5. The first detailed study on opium receptors was published in March 1973 by Candace Pert and Solomon H. Snyder.
6. David Stuart, Dangerous Garden: The Quest for Plants to Change Our Lives (London: Frances Lincoln Limited, 2004), 82.
7. Lo-shu Fu, A Documentary Chronicle of Sino-Western Relations (Tucson: Association for Asian Studies by the University of Arizona Press, 1966), 1:380.
8. The reference was in the government study Geografía y Estadistica de la Republica Mexicana, cited by Luis Astorga, El Siglo de Las Drogas: El narcotráfico, del Porfiriato al nuevo milenio (Mexico City: Plaza & Janés, 2005), 18.
9. The photograph described is of an opium den in Malinta Street, Manila, Philippines, and can be found in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs, LC-USZ62-103376.
10. Edward Marshall, “Uncle Sam Is the Worst Drug Fiend in the World,” New York Times, March
12, 1911.
11. Edward Huntington Williams, “Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ New Southern Menace,” New York Times, February 8, 1914.
12. Document was sent by F. E. Johnson, Agent in Charge, September 16, 1916, cited by Luis Astorga, Drogas sin Fronteras: Los Expedientes de una guerra permanente (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2003), 17.
13. Report filed by G. S. Quate, Deputy Collector of Department of Treasury, January 15, 1918, cited by Astorga, Drogas sin Fronteras, 20.
14. “Customs Agents in Gun Battle With Runners,” El Paso Times, June 16, 1924.
15. Manuel Lazcano, Vida en la Vida Sinalense, ed. Nery Cordova (Culiacán, Mexico: self-published, 1992), 38–39.
16. Ibid., 40.
17. “Todavia No Han Logrado Aprehender a ‘La Nacha,’” El Continental, August 22, 1933.
18. Vargas Llosa said the oft-quoted phrase in 1990 during a debate with Mexican writer Octavio Paz organized by Vuelta magazine.
19. Journalist Alan Riding writes a chapter on this metaphor in his classic work Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans (New York: Knopf, 1985).
20. Lazcano, Vida, 207.
21. Ibid., 202.
22. The letter from Anslinger to journalist Howard Lewis is cited in Astorga, Drogas sin Fronteras, 138–39.
23. Lazcano, Vida, 207.
Chapter 3: Hippies
1. The marijuana smoking of Diego Rivera and other Mexican artists is described in the work of muralist David Alfaro Siquieros, Me llamaban el Cornelazo (Mexico City: Biografias Gandesa, 1977).
2. Details of the Coronado Company case can be found in the court document, The United States vs. Donald Eddie Moody, 778 F.2d 1380, September 4, 1985.
3. Elaine Shannon, Desperadoes: Latin Drug Lords, U.S. Lawmen and the War American Can’t Win (New York: Viking, 1988), 33.
4. Oval Office Tape, May 13, 1971, between 10:32 A.M. and 12:20 P.M.
5. G. Gordon Liddy, Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1980), 134.
6. Richard Nixon speech, September 18, 1972.
7. Richard Nixon, Executive Order 11727—Drug Law Enforcement, July 6, 1973.
8. One of the first comprehensive reports of the Sicilia Falcon case was in a German article, “Die gefährlichen Geschäfte des Alberto Sicilia,” Der Spiegel, May 9, 1977). The case is also elaborated in detail through the work of James Mills, Underground Empire (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1985).
9. The jailhouse book of Sicilia Falcon was entitled El Túnel de Lecumberri (Mexico City: Compañia General de Ediciones, circa 1977).
10. José Egozi is registered in Cuban Information Archives as a participant in the Bay of Pigs invasion. His code number was R-537. R-710.
11. Luis Astorga, El Siglo de las Drogas (Mexico City: Plaza & Janés, 2005), 115.
12. Shannon, Desperadoes, 63.
13. Fabio Castillo, Los Jinetes de la Cocaina (Bogotá: Editorial Documentos Periodisticos, 1987), 18–21.
14. CIA Declassified Docs, Mexico: Increases in Military Antinarcotics Units (declassified October 1997).
15. A vivid account of the plaza system in the 1970s is offered in Terrence Poppa, Drug Lord: The Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin (New York: Pharos Books, 1990).
Chapter 4: Cartels
1. The phrase banana republic was coined in the 1904 book Cabbages and Kings by American writer O. Henry.
2. The early cocaine trade is well documented by the utmost authority on the issue, Paul Gootenberg, in Andean Cocaine: The Making of a Global Drug (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
3. Interview of George Jung from prison with PBS Frontline (2000).
4. Pablo Escobar dressed up as Pancho Villa in an iconic photo, in which he wears a Mexican sombrero and ammunition belts. The photo is reprinted in James Mollison, The Memory of Pablo Escobar (New York: Chris Boot, 2009).
5. Documents from U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, U.S.A. vs. Matta Ballesteros, No. 91-50336.
6. Billy Corben, Cocaine Cowboys (Miami: Rakontur, 2006).
7. Michael Demarest, “Cocaine: Middle Class High,” Time, July 6, 1981.
8. Official homicide statistics from Miami-Dade Police Department.
9. Photos of Félix Gallardo were published by his son on the Web site www.miguelfelixgallardo.com until the site was supended.
10. The infamous marijuana farm was on the El Bufalo ranch, near Jiménez and Camargo, Chihuahua, raided in November 1984.
11. Documents from U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, U.S.A. vs. Matta Ballesteros, 91-50165 (argued and submitted January 4, 1993).
12. The prison diary was passed by Félix Gallardo to his son and published in Diego Osorno, El Cartel de Sinaloa (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2009), 207–57.
13. The seizure was in Yucca, Arizona, on November 27, 1984.
14. U.S.A. vs. Matta Ballesteros, No. 91-50336.
15. This incident is retold in Elaine Shannon, Desperadoes (New York: Viking, 1988), 213–14.
16. The Ronald Reagan speech was broadcast live on September 14, 1986.
17. The full version of the Dark Alliance series, along with dozens of files of audio and documentary evidence, has been rehosted on the Web site www.narconews.com/darkalliance/drugs/start.htm.
18. The Senate Committee Report on Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy is also known as the Kerry Report, as Senator John F. Kerry chaired the committee that prepared it.
19. CIA Report on Cocaine and the Contras, paragraph 35. The report was released in 1998, during the attempted impeachment of Bill Clinton, burying the news that some basic truths of Dark Alliance were conceded.
20. The violence was reported in detail in B. Esteruelas, “Cinco muertos en una manifestación frente a la embajada norteamericana en Honduras,” El Pais, February 23, 1988.
Chapter 5: Tycoons
1. All the ballad lyrics quoted throughout the book are my own translations. If I don’t do the poetry justice—sorry!
2. Jesús Blancornelas, “Death of a Journalist,” El Andar (Fall 1999).
3. Official figures from the Office of the United States Trade Representative.
4. Diego Osorno, El Cartel de Sinaloa (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2009), 184–85.
5. Jesús Blancornelas, El Cartel: Los Arellano Félix, la mafia mas poderosa en la historia de America Latina (Mexico City: Plaza & Janés, 2002), 46.
6. Ibid., 48.
7. Report entitled Amado Carrillo-Fuentes, from Operational Intelligence Unit of El Paso Intelligence Center, marked “DEA Sensitive.”
8. The hunt for Pablo Escobar is related in great detail in Mark Bowden, Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw (New York: Penguin, 2001).
9. The Swiss Police investigation was headed by Valentin Roschacher and the report compiled in 1998. It is detailed in Tim Golden, “Questions Arise About Swiss Report on Raúl Salinas’s Millions,” New York Times, October 12, 1998.
10. Tim Padgett and Elaine Shannon, “La Nueva Frontera: The Border Monsters,” Time, June 11, 2001.
11. Blancornelas, El Cartel, 237.
12. Ibid., 243–44.
13. Ibid., 284.
14. Jesús Blancornelas in interview with Guillermo López Portillo for Televisa in 2006.
Chapter 6: Democrats
1. Fox made the notorious comment at a news conference in Puerto Vallarta, May 13, 2005.
2. I counducted the interview with Vicente Fox in San Francisco del Rincón, November 25, 2010.
3. The quote was from ABC’s Nightline, July 3, 2000, transcribed from the original recording courtesy of ABC’s Mexico City bureau.
4. José Reveles, El Cartel Incómodo: El Fin de los Beltrán Leyva y la Hegemonía del Chapo Guzmán (Mexico City: Random House Mandadori, 2010), 57–71.
5. A series of love letters from Joaquin “Chapo Guzmán” were published to much fanfare in Julio Scherer Garcia, Maxima Seguridad: Almoloya y Puente Grande (Mexico City: Nuevo Siglo Aguilar, 2001), 21–28.
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p; 6. This anecdote is also discussed in Diego Osorno, El Cartel de Sinaloa (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2009), 193.
7. Many articles exploring links between the federal government and Sinaloa Cartel have been published in Mexico’s bestselling newsmagazine, Proceso, among other places.
8. Juan Nepomuceno, also known as the Padrino de Matamoros, was a huge figure for more than half a century. In old age, he gave an interview with Sam Dillon, “Matamoros Journal; Canaries Sing in Mexico, but Uncle Juan Will Not,” New York Times, February 9, 1996.
9. The quote is from the manual Handling Sources, of the U.S. army, which has been redistributed by School of Americas Watch NGO.
10. Details of these attacks are included in the Zapatista (EZLN) communiqué entitled Sobre el PFCRN, La Ofensiva Militar del Gobierno, los actos terroristas y el nombramiento de Cammacho (January 11, 1994).
11. The text of the conversation was released by an agent in the Agencia Federal de Investigación (AFI).
12. The DEA agent was Joe DuBois and FBI agent was Daniel Fuentes.
13. The meeting was first reported by Mexican journalist Alberto Najar, who obtained an intelligence document from the PGR. It was later supported by testimonies of protected witnesses handled by federal agents.
14. The described mass killing took place in Nuevo Laredo, October 8, 2004.
15. Sources have quoted different towns as the birthplace of Lazcano, but evidence points to Hidalgo towns near the state border with Veracruz, where he has sponsored at least two churches.