Do the United States and Mexico Really Want the Drug War to Succeed? by Robert Joe Stout
Article
Prepared by: Mary H. Maguire, California State University, Sacramento Kim Schnurbush, California State University,Sacramento
Psychology of Drugs and Abuse
Do the United States and Mexico Really Want the Drug War to Succeed?
Robert Joe Stout
Learning Outcomes
After reading this article, you will be able to:
• Discuss the history of the narco-war on the Mexico–United States border.
• Discuss the contributing factors and barriers to ending the “war on drugs.”
• Discuss policy reforms that affect the current state of drug trafficking.
Until 1914 laudanum and morphine were legally sold and distributed in the United States, heroin was pre- scribed as a cough medicine, and coca and cocaine were mixed with wine and cola drinks. Although most of the opium came from the Orient, Chinese settlers on Mexico’s west coast, particularly in the state of Sinaloa, began cultivat- ing adormidera (opium gum) during the 1870s and gradually developed an export trade.
Even after the use of opium-based products was declared illegal in the United States the exportations from Sinaloa con- tinued; prosecution of offenders, if it happened at all, was benign. The adormidera crossed into the United States through places like Tijuana, a dusty little frontier town until the mid- twentieth century; San Luis Rio Colorado, across the border from Yuma, Arizona; Nogales, also on the Arizona border; and Ojinaga, across the Rio Grande River from Presidio in Texas’s isolated Big Bend country. Customs agents on both sides of the border, but particularly in Mexico, cooperated with the export- ers and the flow of drugs, though not large by 1960s or ’70s standards, went through virtually unimpeded.
The majority of those involved were locals who spent the cash they acquired in the areas in which they operated. They hired
local residents for construction, transportation, ranching, and other sidelines in which they invested their earnings. As far as most of their neighbors were concerned they were good citizens whose business was no better or worse from that of any other.
Prohibition changed this genial and basically cooperative landscape. Large amounts of liquor were harder to conceal than adormidera or marijuana, making it necessary for exporters to bribe—or form partnerships—with those in charge of customs. Politicians ranging from local councilmen to state governors became involved, forcing the local exporters either to join them or evade them as well as evade law enforcement.
The end of Prohibition wounded but did not slay the golden calf of liquor exportation. The politically connected entrepre- neurs that controlled the aduanas (customs inspection stations) also controlled prostitution and a percentage of drug exporta- tions. They financed the construction and operation of luxuri- ous night clubs, gourmet restaurants, and gambling activities that attracted large numbers of U.S. residents. Both politically affiliated and independent drug exporters invested in these enterprises as Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez, and other border cit- ies became brightly lit tourist meccas surrounded by desolate slums packed with new arrivals, deportees, addicts, beggars, and petty criminals.
By 1948 the volume of Sinaloa adormidera crossing the bor- der triggered harsh recriminations from representatives of the U.S. federal government. Mexico’s Attorney General responded with equally acerbic suggestions that officials north of the bor- der deal with those who were purchasing the drugs since the market attracting the exports was in the United States. Mexican federal and state law enforcement did arrest a few farmers and mulas (mules, i.e., those hired to transport contraband) but did not prosecute any leading political or business figures.
Despite cinema and television depictions of drug runners as gun-toting, Pancho Villa-like gangsters, the truth was that
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