Yet the PRI was not quite the monolith it claimed to be; the pyramid of power was not perfect. If their command of the country’s center was all but total, their grip on the periphery, while potent, was more compromised. Many of the circumferential governors were, as they had been under Porfirio Díaz, powerful local caciques (chiefs) who were allowed great leeway in ruling their fiefdoms, so long as they obeyed PRI dictates and channeled votes and resources up the chain of command. Many were former generals who had in effect been bought off by being dispatched to the provinces, allowing party politicians to steadily shrink the power of the officer class at the center, furthering demilitarization.
One of the perquisites of local power was the freedom, subject to presidential will, to engage in profit-making ventures, notably illicit ones. Drug trafficking was one such business that could be permitted to powerful members of the “Revolutionary family,” and this opportunity was most thoroughly seized upon in the northern states nearest the U.S. frontier. Cultivation and commerce of narcotics thus became incorporated into the political system—despite official strictures against it. More precisely, because of those strictures: criminalization gave politicians the upper hand and opened up profitable opportunities. Local police and military authorities could exact tribute from traffickers in exchange for guaranteeing no interference from police or military forces. At the same time they regulated the business by forestalling would-be competitors from entering the trade—thus keeping a lid on intramural violence—while also banning operators from themselves engaging in political activities.
Colonel Esteban Cantú, arguably the first major Mexican racketeer, had been sent to the border town of Mexicali in 1911, at the outset of the Revolution, to protect the northern region of Baja California from possible U.S. incursions. In 1914 he declared himself governor and proceeded to preside over a vice economy (prostitution, gambling) aimed at tourists. He also allowed opium dealers to sell their goods to the United States. Cantú lasted until 1920—partly because of Mexicali’s geographical isolation and the center’s preoccupation with revolutionary upheaval—when General Abelardo L. Rodríguez was dispatched to reaffirm federal authority. According to Paul Kenny, et al., Rodríguez more or less picked up where Cantú had left off. By 1930, after a ten-year reign in Baja California harvesting profits by providing parched Prohibition-era Norteños with drink and drugs, he had become a millionaire.
In the 1920s, alcohol smuggling proved an even bigger bonanza than drug dealing. Mexico did not impose a national counterpart to U.S. Prohibition, and such state laws as existed were completely ignored in the rush to profit from northern puritanism. Distilleries and breweries that were criminalized in the U.S. flocked south and reopened all along the border. Saloons shuttered on one side of the frontier stepped across the line and did a roaring business. When U.S. alcohol manufacturers and retailers were required to ship their remaining supply out of the country, Kentucky distilleries alone dispatched thirty-nine million gallons of whiskey south by rail, principally to Ciudad Juárez, from where they were promptly smuggled back north. Mexican capitalists, too, seized the moment and began constructing breweries along the border to quench the insatiable U.S. thirst. Much of the liquid contraband was conveyed in automobiles modified to carry one hundred gallons of booze in side-panel or under-the-rear-seat tanks. (Customs officials would rock suspicious cars and listen for the slosh.) Other smugglers ferried their cargoes across the river, with bribed Mexican authorities providing armed cover against U.S. Border Patrol agents on the farther shore, at times leading to international gunplay.
The glory days ended abruptly with the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, but what the U.S.A. took away by wiping out liquor super-profits, it gave back by criminalizing marijuana. The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 imposed punitively high taxes on the cash crop, driving it from the free market to the black market and increasing both its scarcity and profitability. Some of the decision to belatedly add cannabis to the list of previously banned psychoactive commodities could be put down to efforts at bureaucratic and personal self-preservation by Harry Anslinger, Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). Seeking to stave off plans to fold the agency into a larger body (and fire Anslinger), the FBN chief gathered up news stories about marijuana’s ability to drive men to violence and madness, and deployed them as evidence that it was an extremely dangerous drug, requiring oversight by an independent federal authority.3 His criminalization campaign was also backed by southwestern states which, in the prosperous twenties, had welcomed Mexican agricultural laborers and mine workers, but in the depressed thirties, embarked on a massive forced and illegal deportation, as described by Balderrama and Rodríguez. Estimates of those driven back across the border range from several hundred thousand to as many as a million, many of them U.S. citizens. Among the justifications for the expulsion was the Mexicans’ use of the “killer weed.” Lawmakers again declared a drug guilty by association with a “dangerous” population—adding marijuana/Mexican to cocaine/black and opium/Chinese.4
Anslinger had succeeded in creating a major new market demand for a product that easily could be cultivated in Mexico. But Anslinger’s impact south of the Río Bravo was far greater: he proceeded to intervene directly and heavy-handedly in Mexican affairs, contributing mightily to a fateful turn of events.
In 1937, drug policy and its enforcement in Mexico was still, as since Carranza’s day, in the hands of the public health department—Cárdenas having refused to shift it to the attorney general’s purview—and the health authorities now headed off in a direction diametrically opposite to that of Anslinger. Dr. Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra, head of the Federal Narcotics Service (part of the health department), was a physician highly regarded for his years of work in Mexico City’s Hospital for Drug Addicts, and his extensive research into the effects of drugs. In October 1938 he published a paper entitled “The Myth of Marijuana.” He argued that it was a relatively innocuous substance; that it did not (contrary to popular and scientific belief) induce psychosis or provoke violent, criminal behavior; and that Mexico should repeal its prohibition. Instead, the state should establish a government-regulated monopoly on drug distribution, cutting out the criminals by authorizing official dispensaries (or state-licensed physicians) to give addicts maintenance doses at cost. He also called for a public health campaign to educate people about truly dangerous drugs (notably alcohol), and for an expansion of the drug-treatment system. He openly criticized U.S. anti-drug policy as inappropriately punitive and inherently unworkable: “It is impossible to break up the traffic in drugs,” he declared, “because of the corruption of the police and special agents and because of the wealth and political influence of some of the traffickers.” Public health authorities backed his proposal, and the first clinics were opened.
Anslinger hit the roof and struck back fast, imposing (as his office was empowered to do) an embargo on the export of all medicinal drugs to Mexico.5 He also launched a campaign to discredit Salazar Viniegra, saying his plan was “fantastic” and “amoral,” and insisting that drug addiction was not an illness to be treated but an “evil” that “should be rooted out and destroyed.” Given inherited anti-marijuana attitudes prevalent in elite Mexican circles, Anslinger’s assault gained traction, especially after he wheeled in the U.S. State Department to apply additional pressure. In short order the clinics and the legalization regime were snuffed out.
Anslinger also contained a brush fire closer to home. In 1938, soon after marijuana was proscribed, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who had been a vigorous opponent of Prohibition, commissioned a study of the drug by the prestigious New York Academy of Medicine. After extensive study, its very distinguished Marihuana Committee concluded (as had Salazar Viniegra) that the drug was not connected to crime, violence, or sexual predation. Nor was there any evidence (pace Anslinger) that it was being peddled to schoolchildren. Nor was it addictive; indeed they thought it might prove useful in withdrawing from other truly harmful addictions. Completed by 1941, the report was published in 1944. La Guardia might have used its findings to call for reconsidering the 1937 law, but the wartime mayor had far more pressing issues to deal with, and did not follow up. Anslinger was left in possession of the federal field.6
3