A Narco History. Carmen Boullosa

U.S. police surveillance messages; and handed out DFS badges with abandon. (DEA agents could not help but notice that every time they arrested a high-level trafficker he was carrying DFS credentials.) Nazar Haro did yeoman’s service for the Guadalajarans until he was tripped up by his own greed. In 1981 the FBI arrested him in San Diego, having caught him smuggling autos into the U.S., a collateral business his drug profits rendered unnecessary. True, the CIA got him sprung—insisting he was an “essential, repeat, essential contact for the CIA station in Mexico City”—but Nazar Haro was now blatantly tarnished goods and axed accordingly. His replacement proved a more than adequate successor, though Zorrilla Pérez would later prove an embarrassment and be sentenced to the slammer for thirty-five years, having been found guilty of ordering the murder of a prominent journalist.

      As it turns out, the Guadalajarans received further crucial support from yet another state—the government of Ronald Reagan—this time not inadvertently (as with the unanticipated consequence of shutting down the Miami corridor) but done on deadly purpose.

      From 1982 on, CIA and White House apparatchiks (like Oliver North and Elliott Abrams) were looking for ways to circumvent a U.S. Congressional ban on further assistance to the Contras, the U.S.-supported paramilitary movement seeking to topple Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. One idea they hit upon was to covertly ferry arms to the Contras via Mexican drug dealers. Félix Gallardo, at that point running four tons of cocaine into the United States every month, provided “humanitarian aid” to the Contras in the form of high-powered weaponry, hard cash, planes, and pilots. Indeed a Caro Quintero ranch became a training facility, run by the DFS—the CIA’s faithful Mexican affiliate. In return, Washington looked the other way as enormous amounts of Mexican-processed crack cocaine flooded the streets of U.S. cities, the super-addictive, mass-marketed drug wreaking havoc in poor communities, and triggering an Uzi-driven competition for market share that sent crime rates spiking..

      The DEA was becoming increasingly frustrated by DFS and CIA closeness to the drug cartel, which was growing daily in strength and power. DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, who had been working out of Guadalajara since 1980, had been barraging Washington with complaints about the gangsters’ protective cocoon. In November 1984 he was able to prevail upon a DFS rival, the Federal Judicial Police (PJF), to raid Rancho Búfalo. When 450 men backed by helicopters destroyed the fields and burned ten thousand tons of marijuana, the cartel leaders—enraged—kidnapped, tortured, and killed Camarena. His body was eventually found in a shallow grave on a Michoacán pig farm.

      The DEA went ballistic. First they tracked the killers. Caro Quintero had escaped arrest at the Guadalajara airport by waving his DFS badge—Zorrilla Pérez was cashiered for giving it to him—but was eventually captured in Costa Rica, tried, sentenced, and jailed. So was Fonseca Carrillo, but for the moment Félix Gallardo remained in hiding. Then the DEA went to the media with the truth about the DFS and its symbiotic relation with the crooks it was supposed to be suppressing. The American agency had known this all along, of course, but had sat on the story because, in Reagan’s administration, the CIA’s anti-communist card trumped the DEA’s anti-drug hand. More, they made public the corrupt involvement of senior PRI politicians, a blow to the party’s image and credibility. In response the Miguel de la Madrid government (1982–1988) dissolved the entire DFS. Some agents and police commanders were sent to jail, but many simply changed uniforms and joined other federal agencies, either the old established PJF or the new CIA clone, CISEN (Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional or Center for Research and National Security).

      The scandal of Camarena’s murder boosted the DEA’s political clout in the States. Not only did it win an expansion of the agency’s bureaucratic empire, it propelled passage of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which required the executive branch to annually certify that any country receiving U.S. assistance was cooperating fully with U.S. anti-narcotics efforts, or taking steps deemed sufficient on its own. (Thus did the U.S., the world’s largest consumer of illegal drugs, set itself up as judge of other countries’ progress on solving a problem the U.S. could not.) If the country in question failed to measure up—and Mexico was an obvious target—it would be struck off from all foreign aid programs. Worse (particularly for Mexico), the U.S. would oppose any loan requests that country might make to multilateral development banks (like the International Monetary Fund [IMF]), such opposition of course being a guaranteed kiss of death.

      Also in 1986, with the crack epidemic at full throttle, with the Iran-Contra scandal about to splash into public view, and with the midterm elections approaching, Reagan turned up the volume of his drug war rhetoric. “My generation will remember how Americans swung into action when we were attacked in World War II,” he cried. “Now we’re in another war for our freedom.” He signed a National Security Decision Directive declaring drug trafficking a threat to national security. This permitted the U.S. Department of Defense to get involved in a wide variety of anti-drug activities, especially on the Mexico-U.S.A. border.