Mexican Cartels and the American Dream
Why the Drug Trade is Going Nowhere, Even if Trump Invades Mexico
Right now the US-Mexican drug trade is bigger news than ever.
On day one of his presidency, Trump issued an executive order designating a range of as-yet unspecified Mexican drug cartels ‘as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists,’ and massed American troops on the southern border, seemingly true to his and other Republicans’ threats to wage ‘war’ on Mexico’s drug traffickers in run-up to the 2024 election.
All of this in response to an epidemic of opiate use – first centred on illegal heroin, then on legal drugs like OxyContin, and most recently on cheap and deadly fentanyl flowing across the border from Mexico – which has already killed a million Americans since the start of the new millennium to the extent that overdoses have overtaken road accidents as the most common cause of death in American men under the age of 50.
Meanwhile, Mexico continues to grapple with the violent consequences of its government’s own ‘war on drugs,’ which has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of its citizens since 2008 – most of them killed with American guns – and sparked vicious battles between cartels and induced violent social breakdown across the country.
The most recent front in the war is El Chapo Guzmán’s home state of Sinaloa, where fighting between rival factions of the cartel he once led – in the wake, by the way, of his cartel co-leader ‘El Mayo’ Zambada’s arrest in Texas in August, following what appears to have been his kidnap by El Chapo’s son Joaquín, El Mayo’s own godson – has killed more than a thousand people already.
Even if we turn off the news we can’t keep the drug trade off our screens, thanks to hit television series like Narcos: Mexico, now officially one of Netflix’s most popular shows ever.
These days, then, US-Mexican the drug trade seems to be synonymous with a particularly spectacular brand of violence and despair – corpses swinging from bridges, disappeared students and migrant massacres, tent cities of homeless drug addicts and the post-industrial rustbelt hopelessness that drives the MAGA narrative.
But the story of the Mexico-US drug trade is actually less a tale of cops and kingpins – of an endless conflict between ‘law’ on the one side and ‘disorder’ on the other – than it is a fable about the dangers of elite obsession with ‘development’ and ‘modernity’ and the unintended consequences of state policy on both sides of the border.
And unless today’s policy makers get their heads around this fact, the death toll in both the US and Mexico will continue to spiral.
I’ve been researching the history of Mexican drug production and trafficking for a decade now, since I finished my PhD and began working with Professors Benjamin T. Smith and Wil Pansters on a major AHRC-funded project based at the University of Warwick. A couple of months ago I finally saw a chunk of the research that I first started way back in 2016 published in the UK-based history journal Past & Present.
In that article I argue – pretty convincingly, I’d say, but then of course I’d say that! – that the emergence and growth of the US-Mexican drug trade was ultimately inseparable from state-sponsored processes of social, political and economic modernisation: a ‘dark side’ to the so-called Mexican Miracle that transformed that country’s economy between the 1940s and 1970s.
Based on research in archives across Mexico, data taken from regional newspapers and local historical chronicles, and insights gleaned from the literature on the regional dynamics of postrevolutionary state formation, the article uses thenorthern Mexican state of Durango – the lesser-known neighbour of the country’s brasher, archetypical narco-state, Sinaloa – as a case-study to show how rural drug production and trafficking were from their very beginnings tied up with global crises, government corruption, and the Mexican and US governments’ promotion of ‘modernity’ via infrastructural improvements and mass migration.
There, the violence of the Mexican Revolution (1910-20), combined with the economic shock of the Great Depression (1929), led to the closure of the gold, silver and lead mines that had once been the lifeblood of the economy. Many of Durango’s battled-scarred and poverty-stricken former miners adapted to the blows of national and global turbulence by turning to a profitable — and, since 1920, illegal — cash crop: opium poppy, the raw material for powerful drugs like morphine and heroin.
The increasing profits that opium production brought to Durango earned the state’s illicit poppy plantations and burgeoning heroin trafficking networks the protection of an expanding range of representatives of the postrevolutionary Mexican political system, as well as corrupt US customs officials and police officers. And the drug trade also fuelled further ‘licit’ economic development throughout both countries, making it part of the very foundation of Mexico and the US as we know them today.
It was thanks to World War Two that opium cultivation in Durango really began to take off in the 1940s.
The war cut off US drug dealers from their traditional suppliers in Europe and Asia, stimulating demand for Mexican-made heroin, and by 1944 the assistant US military attaché stationed there reported that Mexico had become ‘one of the largest producers of opium in the world… [a]lmost all’ of which was exported to the US. Growers in Durango, aided by the local authorities, were clearly doing their best to keep up with demand: in 1945, one peasant arrested while trying to find a buyer for half a kilo of opium confessed that, in his home village up in the mountains,
the whole world grows [poppies] and despite the existence of a Mayor and Authorities there, they trouble no-one nor enforce any prohibitions, so for him it seemed easy to grow them, especially given the bad [economic] situation in which the declarant found himself; he had harvested a little more than a kilo of opium gum, of which three quarters he sold to a short, fat man wearing a cowboy hat, whose name he did not know, who visited the declarant in order to buy [the opium] from him.
In response, US officials like Harry J. Anslinger promoted a ‘crusade’ against the drug trade on both sides of the border. Believing that ‘it is more effective to destroy the opium at its source in Mexico than to prevent effectively the entrance of the drug into the US,’ the government of the latter began to sponsor, co-organise and supervise the militarised eradication of poppy crops in Mexican states including Sinaloa, Chihuahua and Durango.
American boots were on the ground waging a ‘war’ on Mexican drug production nearly a decade before Donald J. Trump was born.
In 1944, one such joint US-Mexican expedition – involving Mexican soldiers and police officers but coordinated by a ‘special employee’ of the US Treasury Department’s drug control division, Salvador Peña, based at the US embassy in Mexico City – uncovered in northern Durango the largest opium plantation ever discovered in Mexico: the size of 325 football pitches, it would have yielded four and a half tonnes of opium per harvest – enough to produce 450 kilograms of pure heroin, worth more than 27 million US dollars on today’s market.
Given that the plantation’s irrigation system would have enabled two or even three such crops a year, it is likely that by 1944, tens of millions of dollars’ worth of opium was being produced in the Durango.
Little wonder, then, that the traffickers who controlled these fields had been able to construct their two-kilometre concrete aqueduct: a true feat of engineering in such a remote and mountainous region. In the self-consciously paternalist fashion common to so many Latin American traffickers, from Pablo Escobar and El Chapo, they had promised to hand the canal over to the local peasants once their five-year rents were up. In this sense a drug ring proved more effective in providing a peasant community with irrigation — one of the foundational elements of ‘modernised’ agriculture — than the postrevolutionary Mexican state itself.
The income from small-scale poppy cultivation also allowed peasants access to other fruits of modernity, including previously unaffordable consumer goods like ‘radios, arms, cars and even American tinned foods.’ Cattle ownership — a key marker of status in peasant society — also rose exponentially throughout northwestern Mexico in this period. Thus in the mountains of Durango, the drug trade offered marginalised rural populations a more promising route to ‘development’ than the apparently empty words of a distant state.
No wonder, then, that local political bosses, police chiefs and military commanders protected, taxed and even directly invested in Durango’s opium trade, sabotaging the campaigns being waged against it. In so doing, they avoided conflict with their constituents and took a healthy cut of their illicit profits for themselves; profits which also buoyed the local economy and eased its integration into the Mexican mainstream.
As WWII gave way to the Cold War, the Mexican drug trade was further stimulated by government policies that, sometimes with direct US financial assistance, promoted urbanisation, industrialisation, infrastructural expansion, population growth and transnational economic integration in order to counter the perceived threat of home-grown communist ‘subversion.’
Between 1950-1970, Mexico’s one-party state invested massively in public services and industrial and agricultural development, which doubled the size of the economy and transformed a predominantly rural society into a ‘modern,’ consumer-capitalist, majority-urban one.
This ‘Mexican Miracle’ also transformed the drug trade.
New roads built to promote capitalist development, integrate the Mexican and US economies, and allow for easier military movements as part of a new policy of ‘hemispheric defence’ against the Soviets, also helped to connect the poppy fields of Durango to the rest of northern Mexico and the US border. These roads also facilitated the departure of thousands of people from rural Durango to the US as part of the ‘Bracero’ temporary worker programme, which sought to resolve American labour shortages while also teaching Mexican workers new skills and techniques with which to ‘develop and modernize rural Mexico’ when they got home.
Plenty of these migrant workers never returned, however. Many Durango-born braceros (and eventually their families) instead ended up in Chicago, where they formed the core of a tight-knight community. By the mid-1960s, as heroin use increased exponentially in big cities across the US, a few members of this diaspora – in line, ironically, with the hopes of Mexican officials that immigration to the US would inspire ‘newfound skills, aspirations and behavioural traits’ amongst their countrymen – recognised the opportunity presented by increasing local demand for heroin, which they began to secure from contacts back in Durango for distribution in their new home city.
At the helm of this new transnational enterprise was a former traffic policeman named Jaime Herrera Nevárez, who would reign as the ‘Tsar of heroin in Mexico’ from the early 1970s until the late 1980s.
Herrera Nevárez apparently became involved in this trade at some point in the late 1950s or early 1960s, while working as a state police officer. He had grown up close to some of Durango’s main centres of opium production, and as a cop was stationed for several years on a new highway that connected Durango with the US border at Ciudad Juárez, where he would likely have had further contact with the drug trade via occasional run-ins with the heroin traffickers using this route. And given that his brother, Reyes, and other close family had settled in Chicago, he must also have been conscious of where much of this heroin eventually ended up, and of the increasing amounts of money to be made through its distribution.
By the late 1960s, Herrera Nevárez had combined the power and status that came with his position as a representative of the Mexican state, with his personal connections with three very different worlds — that of drug production in Durango’s mountains; the police forces that regulated regional trafficking; and the Mexican migrant communities of Chicago — to become a major heroin trafficker. By then, he had also risen to command of the Second Section of Durango’s Judicial Police, and, like many of Mexico’s other top narco-entrepreneurs, soon earned the badge of a Mexican secret servce agent, too, all of which provided him with further high-level political connections, protection, and the ability to selectively enforce anti-drug laws to his own advantage.
At the same time as it depended on constituent elements of Mexican modernity such as transnational highway networks, mass migration, political patronage and an increasingly well-organised (and deeply corrupt) law enforcement apparatus, the trafficking network Herrera Nevárez ran with his brothers and other relatives also remained deeply rooted in structures and practices long prevalent in the mountains of northern Durango.
The raw opium on which it ultimately depended was purchased from peasant growers by mule-riding travelling salesmen connected by blood, marriage or geography to the Herrera family, who left their produce for collection in designated spots in the mountains in what was effectively a more secretive version of traditional trade arrangements between highland peasants and lowland merchants.
The opium was then processed in secret Durango-based laboratories and hidden in cars and driven by drug mules up the Panamerican Highway to Chicago, a fifty-hour journey along a route by now familiar to two generations of local migrants.
This new trafficking route, which combined concrete and kinship ties, soon became known as the ‘Heroin Highway.’ It consolidated Durango’s importance as a Mexican drug-production centre, and transformed Chicago into the biggest heroin-trafficking hub on the continent.
All along the ‘heroin highway,’ Herrera operatives — including corrupt officials in both Mexico and the US — helped make sure the journey went smoothly. The Herreras also took advantage of US stereotypes to get their produce safely across the border. A DEA agent stationed at El Paso noted that Customs officers
‘stop the wrong people... It’s longhairs. It’s blacks. It’s Americans. But you sit at the border for a couple of hours and watch… [customs agents] wave through the clean-looking Mexican families in well-maintained cars with kids in the back seat. That’s your heroin coming through right under everyone’s nose.’
Ironically, US victories in the ongoing ‘war on drugs’ further boosted the Herreras’ trafficking operation. In 1972, US drugs agents finally managed to dismantle the ‘French Connection’ linking Turkish heroin producers to US dealers. But US demand for the drug was unchanged, so Mexican heroin simply replaced the old Turkish product and by 1975 supplied 90 percent of the US market.
In Chicago and in Durango, the drug trade boomed as never before. US law enforcement agencies estimated that the Herrera organization made around $21,000 USD profit per kilo of heroin, and that their total annual turnover ‘would place the Herrera group about 116th in the Fortune magazine listing of America’s most profitable corporations, and ninth, just behind Safeway Stores, in profit earned by U.S. retailers.’
Even treating these figures with a healthy scepticism, it is clear the Herreras — who became one of Durango’s most important families — earned tens of millions of dollars a year from the heroin trade. More than seventy-five percent of this money was sent back to Durango via neighbourhood money exchanges and reinvested locally in cattle ranches and discos, drainage and construction companies, and even an airline.
The cash that trafficking organisations like the Herrera-Nevarez clan earned wholesaling heroin in the US therefore continued to drive the development of Durango’s mountain regions, where remote former mining towns were home to shops stocking ‘a wide assortment of US and Mexican products’ to sell to local peasants flush with drug money. There, even a small (quarter hectare) field of poppies could, by the late 1970s, produce opium worth $3000 USD every year, ‘about five times the average annual wage. The DEA claimed that such profits directly supported some 7,460 farm labourers in Durango in this period, providing a ‘tremendous, if illicit, boon to the Mexican economy.’
By the late 1970s, the effects of crisis, corruption and the quest to bring ‘modernity’ to rural Mexico had made opium production and heroin trafficking among the biggest businesses in Durango, and ones so deeply intertwined with the licit regional economy and political system that they remained largely invulnerable to both US and Mexican government attack, no matter how many ‘kingpins’ were eventually caught or footsoldiers killed.
In August 1987, for example, Jaime Herrera Nevárez was arrested in Durango and extradited to the US, where he received a life sentence. But his downfall had little effect on Durango’s drug trade.
Nor has the active and continued involvement of US officials in anti-drugs crackdowns in the state — from the eradication expeditions of the 1940s to the heavily militarised ‘Operation Cóndor’ in the 1970s — done much to curb opium production and heroin trafficking there, or anywhere else in Mexico for that matter.
Instead, the insatiable appetites of US citizens, the increasing integration of global markets, and the resilience of corruption, caciquismo and rural poverty in Mexico despite its social, economic and political modernisation, continue to drive a booming drug trade in Durango: a trade that depends on family-based enterprises that concurrently span regional and national borders, working together to return profits that would make a megacorporation proud, on the back of an ‘artisanal’ product created by a few thousand hardscrabble peasants and rural merchants in a peripheral corner of a poor Mexican state.
In this sense, then, the birth, expansion, and consolidation of drug production and trafficking in Durango was not due to the ‘failure’ of state-led development. Instead, these were completely intertwined with the economic growth, infrastructural development and mass migration that characterised the ‘Mexican Miracle.’ The story of the modern US-Mexican drug trade is therefore not just about brutal violence and lives cut tragically short; it is also about transnational capitalist victories, built on the sweat and toil of the kinds of people US and Mexican policymakers want us all to be: from the peasants in the mountains of Durango chasing the ‘Mexican miracle,’ to the illicit entrepreneurs in Chicago trying to live the American dream.
And unless both the US and also the Mexican governments get their heads around this fact, the trade between the two countries in highly profitable illicit commodities like heroin and, more recently, fentanyl – which is much easier to produce and to smuggle and is there also much, much more profitable for Mexican suppliers and US dealers than heroin ever was – will continue to go from strength to strength, no matter how much money, firepower or even American ‘boots on the ground’ are levelled against it.
My father-in-law grew up in one of those distant mining towns of Durango, reachable only by plane. Were he alive today, I would have loved to talk to him about this fascinating article which delves into the back story of the Durango drug trade that led to the era of Chapo Guzman. There is now a super highway that connects the high-altitude city of Durango with the Pacific resort city of Mazatlan passing over the Espinazo del Diablo (the Devil's Backbone) section of the Sierra Madre. Nathaniel's article reveals how this poor, remote, and seldom-policed region birthed the Mexican drug trade.