El Narco (6 page)

Racial tension exploded onto the streets. Among those who joined the lynch mob was a university student named Manuel Lazcano. Born in a Sinaloan ranch in 1912, Lazcano would go on to to become a prominent figure in law enforcement and politics, serving three terms as Sinaloa’s attorney general. He was later ashamed for taking part in racial attacks and claimed to be shocked by their cruelty. His memoirs are among the most open of any Mexican official’s and provide one of the best sources on the early Mexican drug trade. Shown in a photo as a sharp, handsome young man smoking a pipe, Lazcano describes how an anti-Chinese mob marched into the central plaza of Culiacán to recruit followers.

“There were 150 people, which was a lot for those days in Culiacán. The banners were pathetic: Chinese shown eating rats; Chinese with sores in their heads (they used to say that the Orientals had endless diseases, were dirty and ate reptiles). There was a shower of attacks and insults … The boys started to push, to demand that we got involved. I remember their voices: ‘Come on, Come on.’ And I went in: I became anti-Chinese. It is something that still makes me feel bad.”
¹⁵

Lazcano describes how the mob would scour the streets to hunt Chinese. Finding their victims, he writes, they would drag them to a clandestine jail in a shuttered-up house and keep them prisoner with their arms and legs bound. When they had enough captives, they would pack them into boxcars, put them on cargo trains, and ship them out of state. Sinaloans then took over the Chinese homes and property. The ethnic cleansing in Sinaloa came as the Nazi regime was persecuting Jews in Europe. Lazcano didn’t miss the comparison.

“We have seen films of the brutal repression that the Jews were subjected to and scenes of how they were transported like animals. Well, the same thing happened in Sinaloa but with the Chinese. Seeing the images in real life was overwhelming.”
¹⁶

Elsewhere, Mexican gangsters didn’t bother with boxcars; they simply shot dead Chinese rivals. In Ciudad Juárez, a gunman known as El Veracruz is reported to have rounded up and murdered eleven Chinese men working in the opium trade. His boss was allegedly a woman from Durango called Ignacia Jasso, or La Nacha. Mexicans began to dominate the drug trade from the opium-growing Sierra Madre to the bubbling border cities.

Described as a short, robust woman with a black ponytail, La Nacha became the first famous female mobster in Mexico. By all accounts, she was a talented businesswoman. La Nacha recognized the changing demands of the market and expanded production of heroin, reportedly having her own makeshift labs to process the Sierra Madre poppies. Rather than smuggling her drugs over the border, she sold the packets of heroin out of her home in the center of Juárez. Americans, including many GIs from the base at El Paso, would cross the river to buy their fixes. Other customers came from as far as Albuquerque, New Mexico, for her famous mud.

The market was small by today’s standards, and Mexican mud was considered inferior to the dominant Turkish heroin. But there was enough business to make La Nacha one of the wealthiest residents in Juárez. She sponsored an orphanage and a breakfast program for children, as well as having a flashy American car. She also had money to buy off police. As the local newspaper
El Continental
reported on the heroin queen on August 22, 1933:

“Ignacia Jasso, alias La Nacha, has still not been arrested by authorities for possession and sales of heroic drugs [heroin] which they say she has done for many years out of her own house in Degollado No. 218. We are informed that La Nacha travels tranquilly round the Juárez streets in her luxury car that she just bought. It seems she has some important influences and this is why she has not been captured.”
¹⁷

Again, as in the Cantu case, the first years of the drug trade bring up stories of corruption. But by the time of La Nacha, corruption was not by a renegade governor in the midst of civil war. The years of battle had finally subsided and an all-powerful party ruled Mexico.

The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, has been compared to the Soviet Communist Party for its grip on power, ruling Mexico almost as long the Bolsheviks ran Russia. It is also credited with giving Mexico the longest period of peace in its history and shielding it from the turbulent conflicts that wracked South America throughout the twentieth century.

PRI founding father General Plutarco Elias Calles created the party in 1929 after serving a term as president. He aimed to create peace and order by uniting all core sectors of society—trade unions, peasants, businessmen, and the military—all singing the same song and waving the same flag. Influenced by totalitarian Soviet communists and Italian fascists, Calles traveled to Europe to scrutinize politics. Curiously, he ended up spending more time looking at the British Labour Party and German Social Democrats. In any case, the PRI was a truly Mexican organization, even taking the green, white, and red of the Mexican flag as its colors. It aimed to embody the nation.

Some American journalists call the PRI a leftist party. They are way off the mark. While the PRI would produce some leftist presidents, such as Lázaro Cárdenas, it would also throw up some raving capitalists such as Carlos Salinas. Essentially the party was not about ideology but about power. Much of its system of control was taken straight from the playbook of Don Porfirio Díaz. It went back to a network of
caciques
or chiefs, who kept order in their turfs. In this patchwork of little kingdoms, thousands of police forces were created. However, a key difference with the Díaz regime was that the PRI would change its president every six years. Rule was by an institution instead of one strongman. The genius of this setup led to Nobel Prize–winning writer Mario Vargas Llosa calling it the “perfect dictatorship.”
¹⁸

The PRI system relied on corruption to keep ticking over smoothly. Businessmen could pay off small-town
caciques
, who could pay off governors, who could pay off the president. Money rose up like gas and power flowed down like water. Everybody was happy and stayed in line because everybody got paid. Historians have noted this paradox in Mexican politics—corruption was not a rot but rather the oil and glue of the machine.
¹⁹
In this system, heroin money was just one more kickback flowing up. The drug market was a fraction of the size of today, and officials didn’t see it as a huge deal. It was a misdemeanor—the way many people today view pirated music.

Manuel Lazcano—the student who had been in the race riots—remembers this attitude as he rose up in the PRI political machine in Sinaloa. He explains how he knew many of the people who took over the Chinese opium business.

“Things started slowly. I like to think that people were not conscious of the harm that they were doing. At the beginning it was like something normal, a minor crime, tolerable, passable. Similar to going to Nogales and bringing back a case of cognac.”
²⁰

Sinaloan opium output rose dramatically in the 1940s, Lazcano remembers. Like many others, he says the growth was due to a mystery customer who paid in dollars for vast loads of poppies. The generous client, he says, could have been Uncle Sam himself.

The notion that the U.S. government systematically brought Sinaloan opium during the Second World War is the classic conspiracy theory in the early Mexican drug trade. In today’s Sinaloa, politicians, police, and drug traffickers all talk about such a deal as pure fact. The Mexican Defense Department also describes it in its official history of the drug trade printed on the wall at its Mexico City headquarters. However, U.S. officials vehemently denied the deal at the time.

The conspiracy theory goes that the U.S. government needed opium to make morphine for its soldiers in the Second World War. The American army was certainly handing out bucketloads of morphine as its troops bled from Japanese and German shells. The traditional supply of opium poppies for this U.S. medicine was Turkey. However, the war cut off supply lines, with German U-boats roaming the Atlantic sinking merchant vessels. The U.S. government thus turned to the Sinaloan gummers and cut a deal with the Mexican government to let them grow their poppies.

Lazcano remembers the ease with which friends shipped opium paste north in the period as indication that a deal was on.

“I knew several people from the mountains. They were friends of mine that grew opium poppies and after harvesting them they would go to Nogales dressed as peasants with four or five balls in a suitcase or in a rucksack. The curious thing is that at the border they would go through customs without any problem, without any danger—in sight of customs guards. They handed in their goods where they had to hand them in and returned completely calmly; it was obvious that they let them go past.”
²¹

An American journalist visited Sinaloa in 1950 and found that sources in business and local government all confirmed the pact. He wrote an inquiry about it to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the agency created in 1930 to better coordinate American antidrug efforts. The FBN’s director for its first thirty-two years was Harry Anslinger, a hard-line drug warrior. Anslinger responded personally to inquiries about the pact, saying the theory is “utterly fantastic and goes beyond even the wildest imagination.”
²²
Mexico’s finest narco-ologists have also been unable to dig up any conclusive evidence that the deal ever took place, and some question whether Mexican authorities made it up to ease their own conscience.

Whether Uncle Sam helped or not, the Sinaloan opium trade certainly bloomed. Sinaloans gained such a reputation for production of the mud that even their baseball team was known as the Gummers. In the 1950s, Lazcano went on government business to the same mountain municipality where I stare at the pretty poppies. Back then, there was no dirt road even as bad as the one I climbed up. He took a small plane. But in the highlands, Lazcano writes, he saw peasants with “radios, guns, cars and even gringo canned food”
²³
from the opium business.

The descendants of cannibal tribes, bandits, and displaced peasants had found a crop that pulled them out of wretched poverty. The opium and heroin trade became ingrained in their culture, along with pickup trucks, folk saints, and later Kalashnikov rifles. El Narco had rooted itself in a community from where it could sprout like a hungry plant. It was into this environment, that Joaquin “Chapo” Guzmán and the “Beard” Beltrán Leyva were born in rough shacks in 1957 and 1961. As they grew up, a social phenomenon would explode onto the world that would transform their people’s drug trade from a niche business supporting a few hill folk to a multibillion-dollar global market—the social revolution of the sixties.

CHAPTER
3

Hippies

You know, it’s a funny thing. Every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists.

—
PRESIDENT
RICHARD
NIXON
,
MAY
26, 1971,
WHITE
HOUSE
TAPES
,
RELEASED
MARCH
2002

The Summer of Love is said to have kicked off on June 1, 1967, when the Beatles released their landmark album
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
, with its iconic cover of the Liverpool lads in orange, blue, pink, and yellow suits. The album stayed at the top of the Billboard 200 for fifteen weeks straight, in part because American record buyers were so excited by its references to drugs. Looking back, the references were laughably tame. The nearest the album comes to even mentioning the name of a drug is in code in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (LSD for the few stragglers who were never told). Then the closing song says those oh-so-rebellious words “I’d love to turn you on,” which was enough to get it banned on the BBC on the grounds it could “encourage a permissive attitude toward drug-taking.” But drugs seemed so exciting that summer you only needed to hint at them and kids would come running. Suddenly, intoxicating herbs represented youth, revolution, and a brave new world. That same month, thousands puffed joints in front of TV cameras as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin played weird new blends of rock at the Monterey festival in California. The world was turning on its head.

But not up in the Sierra Madre. In the summer of 1967, a teenager called Efrain Bautista was sleeping on the same dirt floor he had shared with eight brothers and sisters for all sixteen years of his life. In his village of mud and bamboo shacks, nobody had ever heard of
Sgt. Pepper
, the Beatles, LSD, Liverpool, or Monterey because nobody had a transistor radio or a record player, let alone a television set, and newspapers didn’t get that far into Mexico’s jagged highlands.

It would also be hard to have a summer of love because the folk in his part of the mountains were locked into a number of deadly feuds. His own extended family was at war with another clan because of some half-forgotten dispute his uncle had got into over a girl. His uncle had ended up killing a rival suitor, and the aggrieved clan had taken revenge by murdering another of Efrain’s uncles as well as his cousin. Both clans sat tensely waiting for more bloodshed. These feuds had habits of annihilating whole generations of certain families.

But despite that Efrain and his village were a world apart from American hippies waving their long hair to Ravi Shankar, they became intrinsically connected by a light-green plant with sticky buds and an unforgettable bittersweet smell. As American lust for marijuana shot through the roof, the psychedelic herb roared through the Mexican countryside. Seasoned drug growers in Sinaloa couldn’t begin to meet the demand, so farmers started raising it in neighboring Durango, then over in Jalisco, then in the southern–Sierra Madre states of Oaxaca and Guerrero, where Efrain lived. Efrain and his family went through a sudden conversion from being small farmers to producers on the bottom rung of the drug chain.