Prohibition & War
A History of Mexican Drugs
To fully understand how the cartels gained all this power you have to look at how they started.
Very little information is truly known about where and when the Mexican drug trade started, but as America’s policies of prohibition and drug regulation grew so did the Mexican drug trade.
Drugs came to Mexico 150 years ago, before the American civil war. It all started with Chinese immigrants. They brought opium poppies with them and began growing them in the Sinaloa Mountains; a backwater secluded place very well suited to poppy farming. This region would later be referred to as the golden triangle.
—Opium poppies from east asia are at home in the Sinaloa Moutains.
The Golden Triangle
The Golden triangle is the principal drug growing region of Mexico. Here is where most of Mexico's marijuana and opium (which is used to make heroin) is produced.
The Triangle is a very secluded area, laying in the center of the Sinaloa mountains. These mountains offer a natural boundary allowing the cartels to operate here unopposed.
Opium and Prohibition
—Flowering Opium poppies.
The first piece of American prohibitionist legislation came in 1914 when The Harrison Narcotics tax act was passed into law. This was passed to control and regulate how and where cocaine and heroin were being used and sold.
The next piece of American drug legislation to affect Mexico was the Eighteenth amendment to the Constitution and the Volstead Act, or more famously known as Prohibition. Now the Mexican people started bootlegging their spirits into the United States. During the same time that Al Capone and Meyer Lanky were making their fortunes bootlegging in the north, Mexican bootleggers were importing booze into the south. By the time Prohibition was repealed, the Mexican bootleggers had learned that American Prohibition made Mexico money.
In 1929 the Partido Revolucionario Institucional or PRI took power in Mexico. The PRI is a political party in Mexico that would hold complete control of Mexico for the next 71 years. The PRI would run Mexico like medieval fiefdoms, and hold it all together with massive corruption and voter fraud. It is in this environment that the drug cartels were born.
Since the booze industry had become legal in the states, Mexican bootleggers needed a new product to sell in the United States. The Chinese opium market was still thriving, and still run by the Chinese immigrants. The result, like today, was blood. In the thirties Mexicans began driving the Chinese immigrants from their homes and opium plantations in the Sinaloa. Both racism and greed fueled these attacks. There are instances where the Chinese immigrants were boxed into train cars and shipped out of the Sinaloa. It wasn’t long after that the opium and heroin business was firmly in the hands of the Mexican people.
There is another plant that grows in the Sinaloa Mountains. It grows like a weed, but it has much more value than any other weed on the planet. In the 1960s the American counterculture exploded, and with it the American demand for marijuana. Mexico’s drug traffickers were more than happy to meet this demand. This started a huge boom in profits for the drug traffickers. During this time the traffickers were also introduced to the AK-47. The AK-47 is a Soviet made assault rifle that is cheap to produce and extremely lethal. Before this weapon was introduced, the cartels were mainly armed with old shotguns and pistols, the AK-47 is a whole other ballgame.
“The PRI is a political party in Mexico that would hold complete control of Mexico for the next 71 years. The PRI would run Mexico like medieval fiefdoms, and hold it all together with massive corruption and voter fraud. It is in this environment that the drug cartels were born.”
—Mexican soldiers in a cartel poppy field.
Since the booze industry had become legal in the states, Mexican bootleggers needed a new product to sell in the United States. The Chinese opium market was still thriving, and still run by the Chinese immigrants. The result, like today, was blood. In the thirties Mexicans began driving the Chinese immigrants from their homes and opium plantations in the Sinaloa. Both racism and greed fueled these attacks. There are instances where the Chinese immigrants were boxed into train cars and shipped out of the Sinaloa. It wasn’t long after that the opium and heroin business was firmly in the hands of the Mexican people.
There is another plant that grows in the Sinaloa Mountains. It grows like a weed, but it has much more value than any other weed on the planet. In the 1960s the American counterculture exploded, and with it the American demand for marijuana. Mexico’s drug traffickers were more than happy to meet this demand. This started a huge boom in profits for the drug traffickers. During this time the traffickers were also introduced to the AK-47. The AK-47 is a Soviet made assault rifle that is cheap to produce and extremely lethal. Before this weapon was introduced, the cartels were mainly armed with old shotguns and pistols, the AK-47 is a whole other ballgame.
Americas “War on Drugs”
In the early 70s the United States government decided to fight this growing drug trend. Thus started the United States war on drugs. In 1970 Richard Nixon signed into law the “Comprehensive Drug Abuse and control Act of 1970”. Sweeping changes came to how law enforcement handled drug offenses. This act created the Drug Enforcement Agency or DEA. The DEA’s sole purpose is to hunt down and arrest any one that has anything to do with the drug trade. This marked a huge increase in drug related arrests in the United States, both with traffickers and the users.
By the mid 70’s the opium and marijuana growers in the Sinaloa Mountains had gone from impoverished backwater drug farmers into full-blown narocotraficantes, or drug traffickers. Violence began breaking out all over the Sinaloa region. This increased violence, coupled with the United States pressure on Mexico to crack down on these drug traffickers, led Mexico to launch Operation Condor.
Operation Condor was the single largest crack down on the drug trade by the government in its 71 years in power. It was the most successful round of anti drug raids in Mexico’s history. Mexican police raided the growers’ plantations in the Sinaloa Mountains, arresting anyone they suspected for drug trafficking. The DEA also supplied planes to the Mexican government to spray the crop opium with 2.4-D acid and parquat on marijuana. This operation did a number of things. First, it proved the Mexican government could be paid by the United States to go after drug growers. It crushed most of Mexican drug production in the Sinaloa, and it caused a scare in the United States. Paraquat is extremely toxic to humans, and if any one smoked the marijuana that had been sprayed with it, they would face a huge amount of heath problems. These three issues compounded to knock Mexico out of the drug business.
With Mexico down and out it wasn’t long before another country stepped up to take its place in the drug business. Colombia was more than qualified.
“With Mexico down and out it wasn’t long before another country stepped up to take its place in the drug business. Colombia was more than qualified.”
Because of the scare over the poisoned “Paraquat Pot” marijuana from Mexico and other contributing factors, cocaine now became the drug of fashion. Columbia was getting rich off of America’s addicts now. Cocaine was getting shipped in through Miami and would spread throughout the United States that way. With this huge amount of drug activity in Miami came the inevitable violence. The drug violence drew the attention of then president Ronald Reagan. He wanted to make an example of these drug cartels. In 1982 Reagan formed the south Florida task force to take down the cocaine barons of Miami. This task force brought in the FBI, Army and Navy to the drug war for the first time. By the end of the year the cocaine import business through Miami dried up. The Colombian Cartels had to rethink how they were going to get their product to the American market, and their solution was Mexico.
It was with this connection that we start to see the first Mexican cartel form. Up to this point the Mexican drug trade was a largely scattered mess of backwater hillbillies growing opium and pot and fighting over scraps. Now it was becoming more and more centralized around the flow of Colombian cocaine. By the mid 80s all of Mexico’s drug trade was under the control of one man, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo.
The Colombians started using Félix Gallardo and his cartel as couriers. The job was to transport cocaine from where the Colombian’s dropped it off in Mexico, over the border, to the Colombian distributors in the United States. They would pump cocaine through Mexico into the United States by the truckloads. This was spread out over a 2,000-mile border and was nearly impossible for the United States government to confront and stop. This made Félix Gallardo extremely wealthy and powerful and by the late 80s he thought he was invincible.
This feeling of invincibility was inevitably his downfall. In 1985 a DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena was operating in Guadalajara. Mexican cartel members kidnapped him. He was then beaten and tortured. After a month his captors murdered him. His body was dumped hundreds of miles from where he was abducted. This set the DEA and the rest of the United States law enforcement into high gear. High profile arrests were made. America kept pressuring Mexico and in 1989 Félix Gallardo was finally arrested while at a restaurant in Guadalajara. This seemed like a great victory for law enforcement. The godfather of all Mexican drug operations was behind bars, but with no leader. The Cartel faced infighting, power grabs, and chaos.
The structure of the cartel to this point was run much like the PRIs regime. It fed off institutional corruption. There was an understood hierarchy and everyone got paid. Now this hierarchy was in shambles.
Colombian drug routes
1970–1982
Colombian drug routes
1982–Present Day
New Cartels
“Encobijado”
A person found wrapped in blankets after being assassinated by drug traffickers or their associates.
“By The end of the 90s, all of the heads of these new cartels were ether arrested or dead, leaving yet again a vacuum of power that would be replaced by more infighting and murder.”
Throughout the 90s, the pieces of Félix Gallardo’s organization formed into different cartels. With no godfather, the bosses of the cartels began back stabbing each other and fighting for power. This time violence wasn’t just contained to the Sinaloa. All of Mexico was starting to see the true nature of the cartels.
Out of the pieces left of Félix Gallardo’s cartel came the Sinaloa Cartel, Tijuana Cartel, the Juáruz, Cartel and the Gulf Cartel. The violence between them was slowly ramping up.
In the 90s, the Tijuana Cartel became a pioneer in murder. They began using a new bloody tactic of intimidation called the encobijado. This was the act of dumping bodies in public places as a threat, and putting their murders on display for the whole city to fear. This was the start of the current tactics that are utilized by the Mexican drug war today.
By The end of the 90s, all of the heads of these new cartels were ether arrested or dead, leaving yet again a vacuum of power that would be replaced by more infighting and murder. This would pale in comparison to the coming shift in Mexican power.
Democracy and War
The PRI had been the ruling party since 1929 in Mexico. There were 71 years of the same power structure, the same channels of corruption, for the cartels to feed off. In 2000 Vincente Fox became the first democratically elected president of Mexico. With him in charge the entire political nature of Mexico was changed. With this change all the channels of bribes that the PRI had in place were gone. Cartels used to paying off the higher ups now had to resort to a more base form of influence to continue their operations. This influence, of course, was violence.
—Vincente Fox pictured, first democratically elected president of mexico in 71 years.
Another unintended consequence of Mexican democracy is the founding of “Los Zetas”. Los Zetas was an elite forces unit in the Mexican army. In 1999, 31 members deserted the Mexican army for the riches that the Gulf Cartel offered them. It is thought that the waning power of the PRI and the change in the Mexican military influenced this decision. The army was being picked apart by the new order of Mexico. Generals were being sent to jail for taking bribes and others were being court marshaled for human rights abuse.
—Police stand next to the body of a dead colleague in Ixtapaluca, on the outskirts of Mexico City.
“Cartels used to paying off the higher ups now had to resort to a more base form of influence to continue their operations.”
The 31 founding members of Los Zetas were completely different from the narco thugs that had been fighting over the last decade. These were men trained in counter insurgency tactics and urban warfare. They didn’t fight like thugs. They were soldiers. This was little understood by their enemies until war broke out.
Sinaloa/Gulf War of 2006
In 2002 the head of the Gulf Cartel was in jail, and the leader of Los Zetas was shot dead by Mexican police. The Sinaloa Cartel thought this was a sign for them to move into Gulf Cartel territory and take over. In 2004 they tried just that.
One of the biggest differences between Los Zetas and the rest of the cartels is they have a solid power structure. When the boss is gone, five men don’t fight for the throne; the second in command takes over. Therefore when the Sinaloa started moving into Gulf territory, they found Los Zetas more than ready.
The turf war that ensued was monumental in comparison to what was seen before. Mass executions became the norm. The terror tactics of the Tijununa Cartel were adapted and expanded upon. In 2005 the organized crime murder rate hit an all time high of one thousand five hundred. In 2006 two thousand people were murdered. In 2006 the cartels also started to decapitate their victims just to prove a point. Another seismic change happened in 2006. Felipe Caldrón was elected president.
Escalation
Felipe Caldrón’s presidency can be summed up in one word. War. Ten days into his term he declared war on the cartels and rallied the troops to his cause through 2007. It seemed that the Mexican army was making good headway. The Sinaloa Cartel and the Gulf had come to a cease-fire. The number of drug related deaths were at 2,500, but it seemed the government was gaining the upper hand. Then it all went to hell.
The murder rate increased from over 200 deaths per month in 2007 to 500 deaths per month in 2008. The year saw an extraordinary rise in attacks on police and officials. There were prolonged firefights in residential areas with civilians caught in the middle. Massacres of fifteen or more people at a time became common. This part of the war had to do solely with the Sinaloa Cartel Empire. There were three main fronts to this battle. The leader of the Sinaloa, Joaquin “Chapo" Guzmán, was backing fights in Juárez, Tijuana, and in the Sinaloa. They fought a civil war with a long time ally Beltrán Leyva. These wars raged on into 2009 until federal troops cornered Beltrán Leyva. They shot him and all his bodyguards dead.
Sinaloa Cartel 2008 Attacks
—Felipe Caldrón and his generals address the troops.
This was toted as great victory for the Mexican army and for Felipe Caldrón. This, like the time before it, left a power vacuum and left all of Beltrán Leyva treaty up for grabs. Violence spilled southwards towards the capitol. These gangs backstabbed and warred with each other. In 2010 Los Zetas split from the Gulf Cartel and took with it most of its territory. Thus started the third stage of the Mexican drug war. There were a dozen warlords fighting each other in a dozen states all across Mexico.
This war continued through 2011 and 2012 with every major drug bust and action by the Mexican government seeming to spawn more and more violence.
The answer to this problem doesn’t appear to lie with force. There are some shifts towards the goal of decreasing violence. Mexico's new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, was inaugurated in December 2012. Upon taking office, he offered a strategy shift away from his predecessor's policy. He pledged to "focus more on reducing violence and less on catching cartel leaders and blocking drugs from reaching the United States." This could mean a reduction in the violence associated with "power vacuums" left by killed or captured kingpins. Though cartels will still fight each other and the government, just with less chaos involved.
Today it seems the Sinaloa Cartel and Los Zetas are heading into all out war. The Gulf Cartel is on its last legs, the Jurez Cartel is being beaten back by the Sinaloa, and the Sinaloa seems to be integrating the remains of La Famillina and the Beltrán Leyva Cartels.
Approximate Cartel Territories 2013
With these two Cartels consolidating power is seems that Mexico may be at the end of yet another all out war between the two most powerful cartels in the nation.