Scorched Earth

5

"You misunderstand..."

The words summarized the history of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency alliance with the Mexican federal authorities in the war against heroin. From the first years, when the DEA established and guided the war, the North Americans ignored the beliefs and traditions of Mexico.

Mexicans believed only the lowest, most vile subclass of criminals dealt in drugs. Therefore Mexican investigators and prosecutors did not believe North Americans with their wealth and opportunities would waste their lives in the drug subculture. They considered the heroin trade and American addicts beneath their concern.

Nationalism also played a part. When the DEA traced heroin seized in the tenements of Los Angeles and Detroit and San Antonio to the western states of Mexico, the drug-enforcement officers expected the same cooperation they demanded and received from state officials in the United States. The officers reasoned that heroin represented a threat to both the U.S. and Mexico.

The demands of the DEA officers offended the national pride of the Mexicans. The Americans did not speak Spanish. The Americans presented documents in English and expected immediate comprehension. When Mexican prosecutors and field agents with no experience whatsoever with drug syndicates required detailed briefings, in Spanish, to understand the complex networks of heroin transport and distribution operating in the United States, the DEA presented only cursory and incomplete overviews.

Finally, Mexico had a fundamentally different justice system. In the United States, courts presume innocence until the proof of guilt. In Mexico the police prove guilt to a prosecutor who then orders the arrest. To win release, the Mexican suspect must then prove innocence. DEA officers went to Mexican prosecutors with stacks of files on suspects who had fled to Mexico. When the Mexican prosecutors expressed disbelief at the American system of justice that arrested criminals, released them, allowed the criminals to flee the country, then expected other countries to arrest them, the Americans called the Mexicans corrupt, in the pay of the gangs.

In most cases the accusations proved to be untrue. But the charges and countercharges disrupted the cooperation between the two governments. The atmosphere of distrust and misunderstanding provided camouflage for the truly corrupt. Those public officials and police on the secret payrolls of the syndicates explained the failed investigations and continuing drug trade on the "gringos brutos."

Despite continuing problems between the DEA and the federal officials of Mexico, the Mexicans continued the program. Mexico needed the foreign aid. The United States sent millions of dollars south in equipment and cash. American dollars bought aircraft for the Mexican army. Mexican antigang agents trained in the FBI academy. Mexican police chemists received specialized instruction in the laboratories of the DEA. As many as fifty DEA field agents operated in liaison with Mexican law enforcement.

But in the first five years of the antidrug campaign, the production of Mexican heroin and its transport to the cities of the United States multiplied by a factor of ten. Narcotic agents in the United States succeeded in capturing hundreds of couriers and middle-level gang captains, but the arrests did not break the syndicates. The Mexican federalesreported the imprisonment of thousands of farmers and couriers and gangsters, but the syndicates remained intact and operating.

Then a series of crimes alarmed then-President Escheverria. At the time when he initiated the most progressive land-reform program in the history of the Republic, Mexican officers found Colt M-16 assault rifles, stolen from Army installations in the United States, in warehouses around Mexico City, only miles from the National Palace. Elsewhere in Mexico, gang leaders broke out of police cordons using LAW rockets and Uzi submachine guns. The hired gunmen of landowners executed campesinos with silenced MAC-10 special-purpose machine pistols.

Federaleslearned from DEA informants that the drug syndicates wanted military weapons in payment for heroin. When the minister of the interior reported this detail to President Escheverria, the president sensed a link between the weapons and the increasing opposition he faced to his land reforms from the wealthy elite of the nation. He could not prove an association between the right-wing opposition denouncing him as a Communist and the drug syndicates importing thousands of military weapons. He ordered a secret investigation but did not wait for the findings.

President Escheverria ordered the Mexican army to break the drug trade.

Operation Condor assaulted the heroin empire of the syndicates. Two thousand elite soldiers entered the vast wilderness of the Sierra Madre Occidentals. They patrolled on foot, they launched airborne assaults against gang strongholds, they employed short-takeoff-and-landing planes in their effort to seize the hidden airstrips of smugglers. The DEA provided vehicles, communications and a hundred field agents. With the aid of American satellites, Mexican planes sprayed poppy fields with defoliant.

Before the end of President Escheverria's term of office, Mexico forced the syndicates into retreat. Mexican heroin disappeared from the United States. No more military weapons came south to threaten the Mexican democracy.

Then President Lopez Portillo took office. Lopez Portillo governed a Mexico exuberant with the flush of sudden wealth.

Mexico had oil.

The federal government of Mexico no longer needed foreign aid. The administration of President Lopez Portillo had no time for cooperating with the North Americans.

President Lopez Portillo initiated the most ambitious program of economic development in the history of Mexico. He financed multibillion-dollar industrial— and agricultural-development programs with the petro dollars flooding the Mexican treasury.

Americans played no part in these programs. However, the DEA reasoned that the rural programs, as the developments reduced rural unemployment and poverty, would undercut the heroin subclass. Fanners with irrigation systems and fertilizers would not need the illicit money earned by the red poppies. Teenagers with good jobs would no longer risk their freedom to earn a few hundred dollars carrying kilograms of heroin north.

But the next six years became a period of corruption and theft unparalleled in the history of crime. Dollars and gold surged into foreign bank accounts at the rate of millions of dollars a day as the leaders and upper-class elite of Mexico looted their nation of petroleum wealth.

The construction of mansions became a major new industry. The elite competed with one another in extravagance. The suddenly wealthy joined in the displays.

The chief of police of Mexico City, appointed to his post by his friend Lopez Portillo, built mansions in Mexico, the United States and Canada. His official salary of sixty dollars a week also bought race horses, discotheques and Cadillacs.

The government salary paid to President Lopez

Portillo reportedly paid for a mansion of thirty-two hundred square meters, containing theaters and libraries and swimming pools, valued at fifty million U.S. dollars.

In the last year of the Lopez Portillo administration, Mexico collapsed under the burden of international debts. Inflation robbed the Mexican people of their savings. Millions of unemployed and underemployed Mexicans fell into desperate poverty. Hunger and malnutrition became common.

As President Lopez Portillo left office, he stated, "I have nothing to be ashamed of."

Starving poor seized towns. Wage earners, working double shifts for pesos that could not buy food for their families, organized strikes, seizing factories and closing down the cities. The destitute farmers, the workers, the hungry middle classes threatened class warfare. The wealthy fled to their estates in Spain.

The new president of Mexico, Harvard trained and receptive to the guidance of economic advisors — Mexican and American — saved Mexico from chaos. He asked the people of his nation for patience and courage. The forces calling out for revolution granted the new president time to purge the criminals and renegotiate the foreign loans.

But poverty and hunger remained.

Soon Mexican heroin returned to the United States.