Cocaine Nation

by Thomas Feiling

  Those most affected by violent crime are also those least likely to call the police. Where law enforcement is absent, it is in everyone’s interest to recognize and submit to somebody’s law as quickly as possible. This is why the dons have become the enforcers of order in the garrison communities. A garrison dweller whose daughter has been raped will get swifter justice by going to the area don than by going to the police. The dons’ order may lack due process and procedure, and can be frighteningly swift, but that doesn’t mean it is always unjust. Nor are criminal cultures always chaotic. Christopher ‘Dudus’ Coke, also known as ‘the President’, is the son of Lester ‘Jim Brown’ Coke, founder of the Shower Posse. ‘Dudus’ runs a highly organized criminal operation from Tivoli Gardens, a citadel that the Jamaican army and police tried and failed to take in 2001, in a stand-off that resulted in twenty-six deaths. Tivoli Gardens has an independent health care system and judiciary. Those hoping to tackle violent crime in Jamaica would do well to ask themselves why no politician has such tight control over his constituency, nor inspires the loyalty that ‘Dudus’ does. The dons may be ostracized by the mainstream, but the laws they break lost whatever respect people had for them when legal ways of earning a livelihood dried up, and politicians began colluding with criminals. In every poor country through which cocaine passes, corruption vies with violent crime for the top spot in the people’s list of complaints. In explaining the relationship between the two, I have strayed some way from the subject of cocaine, but only to shed light on how and why the supply of cocaine is so resistant to law enforcement.

  The national motto of Jamaica is ‘Out of Many, One People’. It was foisted on the island by the mixed-race elite in preparation for the departure of the British in 1962. In fact Jamaica is 85 per cent black, and, far from being ‘one people’, any visitor can see that there are still two Jamaicas on the island. Away from the ghettos, Jamaica remains a small-minded place. Bernard Headley, a professor of sociology at the University of the West Indies, has written that ‘our everyday crime concerns have more to do with monitoring the mango tree in the yard for barefaced thieves and remembering to take in clothes not quite dry off the clothes line. As long as the police keep violent crime in downtown Kingston, and prevent people from blocking Mountain View Road when we need to get to the airport in a hurry, crime is not for us a terribly big deal.’49 Elite Jamaicans still talk about lower-class violence, but acknowledge no responsibility for it, and come up with no solutions to it. The cocaine business has made Jamaicans more impatient for change than ever, and has divested many of them of whatever scruples they once had (much as it has its users). But it has changed none of the fundamentals: Jamaica has few resources, and receives less today for the few that it has. The country needs a renewed sense of purpose, and the commitment to realize it. If the politicians cannot muster either, those confined to the margins of Jamaican society will find both in crime.

  6

  The Mexican Supply Chain

  I live off three animals / that I love as I do my life / with them I make my money / and I don’t even buy them food / They are stupid animals / my parakeet [cocaine], my rooster [marijuana] and my goat [heroin].

  Los Tucanes de Tijuana, ‘Mis Tres Animales’1

  The most famous drug smuggler of all time must be Pablo Escobar, the founder of the Medellín cartel. But the cocaine-smuggling business has changed beyond recognition since Escobar’s day. ‘In the mid-1980s, Miami was the focal point for all the drugs coming in from Colombia,’ a former smuggler called Christian told me. ‘The Medellín cartel started the whole thing of flying it in on little Cessna planes, throwing it in the water, and picking it up in speedboats.’ Cocaine is still flown over the US-Mexico border in light aircraft. In one case, a road-building crew in Texas had to make a dash for cover when a quick-thinking smuggler decided to use their freshly laid tarmac as a landing strip. But once the Americans were able to monitor flights over the Caribbean Sea effectively, most traffickers stopped using light aircraft, and these days only a tenth of the cocaine entering the United States comes in by air.2 ‘When the US government started cracking down, we started using alternative routes, like Haiti,’ Christian told me. ‘The Cali cartel took it to the next level, made it more like a corporation, sending it in by the ton on boats. All the Colombian ships were being searched up and down in the port of Miami, so they’d ship it to another country and bring it in on a Panamanian ship or a Guatemalan ship. We were hiding the stuff in concrete statues, or dissolving two or three kilos in water, soaking it into businessmen’s suits, then drying them out and bringing it in that way. We were doing it the same way in plastic pipes.’

  By 2004, 90 per cent of the US’s cocaine wasn’t even coming through the Caribbean. It was coming through Mexico.3 The movement of cocaine through Mexico has been the source of some of the biggest fortunes yet accumulated in the history of cocaine smuggling, and the cause of bitter fighting between the country’s rival trafficking cartels. Now the Mexican army is waging a war on those cartels that overshadows even the bloody cocaine wars that gripped Colombia in the 1980s. Over 2,400 Mexicans were killed in drug-related violence in 2007. By December 2008, a further 5,600 people had been killed and the death toll looks set to go still higher in 2009.4

  Luis Rodriguez, the former gang member I had met in Los Angeles, told me how Mexico had become so important to the traffickers. ‘The DEA made big efforts to destroy the trade routes through Florida, and the Colombians started to think, “Well, let’s go through Mexico.” At first, the Colombians didn’t want to go through Mexico, because it had some of the oldest smuggling organizations on the continent, and they’d have to pay all these old drug lords who had been there for a long time. Back then, they had mainly been growing marijuana, but I used to go to Mexico to pick up heroin too. In the ’90s, there was collaboration between the Mexican cartels and the Colombian cartels, and the business became very lucrative and very violent.’

  There are several ways of getting cocaine from Colombia to the border between Mexico and the United States. A third of America’s cocaine comes overland from Central America. A quarter comes directly from Colombia’s Pacific coast ports like Tumaco and Buenaventura to Mexico’s Pacific ports before it is smuggled north to the border. Another quarter leaves Colombia’s Caribbean ports like Turbo, Santa Marta and Cartagena, hugging the coastline of Nicaragua and Honduras, before reaching ports on the Gulf of Mexico.5 The scale of the shipments is staggering. In 2000, Colombian police seized a 100-foot submarine from a warehouse near Bogotá. Had it ever set to sea, it would have been capable of carrying 10-ton loads of cocaine, with a retail value of $500 million per load. In October 2007, Mexican police intercepted 11 tons of cocaine in the port of Tampico. The following month, they seized a ship carrying 23 tons of the drug in the Pacific port of Manzanillo.6 Had it been sold in grams in the United States, the shipment would have been worth well over $1 billion.

  The United States border with Mexico runs from San Ysidro, California, to Brownsville, Texas, a distance of almost 2,000 miles. At the side of the main road leading into the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo from the south stand two giant concrete skeletons wrapped in cloaks, with sickles in their hands. Behind them are several simple chapels, filled with candles, beer cans, packets of cigarettes, and other offerings to La Santa Muerte (Holy Death), the cult of Mexico’s criminals and smugglers. Nuevo Laredo is the Mexican half of the Texan city of Laredo. Six thousand trucks cross the border at Laredo every day, making the city the single busiest crossing point for trade between the two countries. Once over the border, the trucks follow highway 1-35 up to Dallas, and from there fan out across the United States. They carry 40 per cent of Mexico’s exports, worth almost a billion dollars a day.

  The gargantuan volume of legal commerce also makes Laredo the single most important point of entry for illegal drugs into the United States. Americans consume roughly 290 metric tons of cocaine a year. Imported in bulk, this load could be carried across
the US-Mexican border in just thirteen trucks. Instead, it seeps in in thousands of ingenious disguises: dissolved in polystyrene and turned into pet bedding, sewn into children’s nappies, or smuggled inside pineapples. Very often such complicated chicanery isn’t even necessary: most of America’s cocaine crosses the border hidden in private vehicles.

  The shift to overland smuggling through Mexico is hugely problematic for the authorities trying to intercept cocaine shipments bound for the United States. Smugglers need to be able to lose themselves and their precious cargoes in a crowd, and the isthmus of Central America allows them to do just that. One of the reasons for the huge profitability of smuggling through Mexico is that the chances of being intercepted are so slim. The Colombian cartels had originally brought their Mexican counterparts onboard as transporters and smugglers, but the smuggling routes running north through Central America to the border with the United States proved so profitable that Mexican trafficking groups were able to charge the Colombians 50 per cent of the value of a shipment for running a consignment through their country. This was quite a rise from the 20 per cent that the Colombian cartels were accustomed to paying Dominican and Puerto Rican smugglers when the bulk of the trade moved through the Caribbean. But the new arrangement suited the Colombians, as many of them were facing extradition to the United States to stand trial for importing cocaine, and were happy to delegate the riskiest part of their operations to Mexican organizations.

  The Mexican groups used their newfound leverage to build distribution networks of their own in the United States, relegating their Colombian suppliers to the role of wholesalers. They branched out from cities like Chicago and Detroit into the suburbs and the small towns beyond. In their wake, street gangs like the Gangster Disciples, the Vice Lords and the Latin Kings have formed new chapters in cities like Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit. Luis Rodriguez gave me an example. ‘There’s a family called the Herreras. They were from Mexico but they ended up in Chicago. When the Mexican cartels started controlling the business, the Herreras brought in a lot of drugs for the Chicago gangs, both Afro-American and Latino. In Los Angeles, the Mexican Mafia started making connections with the Mexican cartels, and brought in a lot of drugs from Mexico, which gave them more street credibility. Then all the gangs became drug-dealing organizations. Now the Guatemalan, Honduran and Salvadorean gangs are trying to get into taking cocaine through Mexico and into the United States.’ As a result of this westwards shift from the Caribbean to Mexico, even the cocaine users of Miami, where nearly all of the cocaine for the American market used to come ashore, are now supplied from Mexico.

  The weakness of the economy is a big driver of the cocaine business in Mexico, as it is in the United States and Jamaica. The devaluation of the peso after the financial crash of 1994, and the introduction of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) the same year, forced thousands of Mexican farmers to sell up. Farming families have been pulled in opposite directions. Sons have crossed the border with the United States illegally to work as gardeners, kitchen porters and fruit pickers in California and other southern states. Daughters are often to be found working hundreds of miles away, in one of the thousands of maquiladoras, the assembly plants that sprang up along the border after 1994 to produce goods for the US market.

  The invasion and occupation of Iraq might have dominated newspaper headlines in the United States for the past five years, but domestic politics in 2007 were notable for rising hostility towards Mexican immigrants. There have been calls for a 2,000-mile-long wall to be built along the border to keep them out. Groups of vigilante Minutemen patrol the border on the look-out for illegal migrants. In border cities such as El Paso-Ciudad Juárez, as much as 15 per cent of the population is living in the United States illegally, and many of them have suffered at the hands of officers from the US border patrol.7 Many border town residents would doubtless argue that whatever their political differences, the economies of states north and south of the border are interdependent. For the businessmen of the United States to demand cheap labour, only for its politicians to score points by penalizing those who supply it, is senseless.

  This is the backdrop to the rise of cocaine smuggling in Mexico, and explains why, despite the united front presented by the US and Mexican governments, in private, many Mexicans are reluctant to follow the United States’ line on the war on drugs. Their scepticism finds expression in the narcocorridos, which offer a version of events at odds with the grandstanding of authorities on both sides of the border. The corrido is a genre of polka that became popular in Mexico over a hundred years ago. To the sound of the tuba and the accordion, the corridor singer would relate his stories of village feuds, the lives of the migrant labourers who worked the fields of California and the women they left behind when they headed north. After the Dry Law made alcohol illegal in the United States in 1919, corridos prohibidos (forbidden ballads) were written about the tequila smugglers and their outfoxing of US border patrol officers. One is the ‘Corrido de los Bootleggers’, written in 1935, which includes the verse: ‘The crop has given us nothing / There’s nothing else to say / Now the best harvest / is the one the barrels give us.’ Another includes the lines: ‘Here in San Antonio / and its surroundings / they never catch the bootleggers / only those who work for them.’8

  Mexico has been producing and smuggling drugs into the United States since the late nineteenth century. Today the trade is bigger than ever. A large part of the heroin distributed in the United States is made in Mexico. Shutting down amphetamine laboratories in the United States has only displaced them south of the border, where they are even harder to locate, so Mexico also produces most of the methamphetamine consumed north of the border. In 2005, Mexico produced more than 10,000 tons of cannabis, making it the world’s second largest marijuana producer.9 Incredibly, around 30 per cent of Mexico’s farmland is believed to be sown with either marijuana or opium poppies.10

  Alcohol and marijuana are widely consumed in Mexico, but until recently, most Mexicans regarded the drug that smugglers like to call ‘cola without the cola’ with great suspicion. Cocaine smugglers met with the disapproval of the corrido singers, many of whose songs warned of the consequences of dabbling in what was regarded as a strictly gringo vice. The narcocorridos are a graphic illustration of how Mexican attitudes to cocaine have changed over the past fifteen years. Walk into any of the many record shops in downtown Los Angeles that cater to Mexican-Americans, and you can see how the corridos prohibidos have been revived and radicalized by large-scale cross-border cocaine smuggling.

  The most famous singer of narcocorridos is Rosalino ‘Chalino’ Sanchez. In the early 1990s, Chalino migrated from a hill village in the northern state of Sinaloa, where the Mexican drug-smuggling tradition is strongest, to Los Angeles (where the American drug-taking tradition is strongest). Until Chalino came along, Mexicans born in California had usually taken their cultural cues from the native urban culture, listening to West Coast hip-hop and dressing like their black neighbours. Chalino was a reserved, stubborn man with a reedy voice, but his celebration of the exploits of a new generation of drug smugglers struck a chord with West Coast Latinos. They found Chalino’s stories of how a cocaine trafficker evaded detection, made a fortune, and went back to his village to build himself a house with a pool cheering. If the trafficker then paid for a school to be built, he got added kudos for doing what the Mexican government had all too often failed to do.

  Thanks to Chalino, Los Angelinos started to dress like Sinaloan drug traffickers. Out went the hip-hop gear, in came wide belts with engraved plate-metal buckles, lizard-skin boots and frilled jackets. This is not to say that drug smuggling became cool. To understand the narcocorridos, or the American offshoot of hip-hop known as ‘crack music’, as celebrations of criminality misses the point. Most of the young Mexican-Americans in the audience at a Chalino gig knew next to nothing about smuggling, but they responded to his narcocorridos because he didn’t apologize for being a village-born Mexi
can. What Chalino celebrated was not the drugs trade, but the power the drugs trade has given to the powerless. For Mexicans who have had little choice but to leave their own country to work as second-class citizens in the United States, cocaine is the hero of the piece. It has given Mexicans something that Americans are happy to pay good money for, something that miraculously gains rather than loses value when it crosses the border.

  In 1992, Chalino Sanchez was shot and killed after a gig in Culiacán, the state capital of Sinaloa. Following his death, the narcocorrido genre that he had pioneered went stellar. It remains big business to this day and narcocorrido singers have gone on to appropriate elements from gangsta rap, posing with bazookas and AK-47s on the covers of albums that sport titles like Mi Oficio es Matar (Killing is My Business). As the cartels have become more powerful and their violence more extravagant, the distinction between commentator and apologist has gradually been lost, with lethal consequences for the singers of narcocorridos. Valentin Elizalde’s A Mis Enemigos (To My Enemies) became the signature tune of Sinaloa’s drug-smuggling cartel, a tribute that rebounded in 2006, when gunmen from the rival Gulf cartel shot and killed Elizalde. In many cities of the United States, the authorities have asked radio stations not to play narcocorridos. The DEA has reportedly trailed the composers of the songs, as they have the composers of crack music. In some cases they have even taken singer-songwriters to court, charging them with complicity in the drug-smuggling offences they describe in their corridos.