The Drug War in Mexico

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0:00:08.0 Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts. I’m Trevor Burrus. Joining me today is Benjamin T. Smith, professor at the University of Warwick in England. His new book is The Dope, the Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade. Welcome to Free Thoughts, Professor Smith.

0:00:21.1 Benjamin T. Smith: Thank you very much Trevor.

0:00:23.1 Trevor Burrus: I’d like to start with the background of how you wrote this book because when you read it, you realize that you had to have spent some considerable amount of time in Mexico and talked to a lot of people on the ground, so to speak, and higher ups too, but also just on the ground to kinda tell this century long history of the Mexican drug trade.

0:00:44.7 Benjamin T. Smith: Well, it’s a good question, and I’m not sure that we spend enough time kinda thinking how to put together these kind of arguments, these kind of insights. So really, I’m a trained historian. So I spent a lot of my time doing this, I spent about a decade flitting from archive to archive. Some of them are have heavily organized, very well organized. You can find both classified and declassified documents in these archives. At the same time, I went to some pretty small archives out in the municipalities, in the townships of Mexico, but I also combine this with a fair amount of interviews that I did both in Mexico and also in the United States. And I think this is, perhaps where I’ve got a slightly different take. I didn’t simply interview Mexican traffickers, but also Mexican drug growers, but also people on the other side. So Policemen in Mexico, but also in the United States. So I was fortunate enough to get into, or to be introduced to kind of network of DEA or former DEA agents who provided a lot of information and even some of the sources which I used for the book. So I think it was this combination of fairly rigorous, academic, archival research, combined with a fair amount of journalistic-​style interviews.

0:02:01.6 Trevor Burrus: I have to ask it if at any point in some of these interviews, did you feel endangered at all?

0:02:08.9 Benjamin T. Smith: Well, I can tell you that the DEA agents are fairly hard [0:02:10.9] ____ the retired ones, so I certainly felt hung over. No, in all seriousness, there is obviously a great danger to people reporting on the drug war in Mexico. I think we’ve got… I think the numbers now stand at somewhere in the region of 150 journalists have been killed over the last 20 years. I think two things to bear in mind about this, none of these have been foreign journalists, all of them have been Mexican and the vast majority have not worked for national newspapers. They’ve worked for small, local newspapers, and they’re often killed, it would appear, not by drug traffickers, but as much by the authorities to hide corruption frankly. So I will say, however, there were a couple of occasions where I felt fairly nervous, on at least one occasion, I was mistaken for a, potentially some kind of security forces or DEA agent, which was fairly scary, but I have to say I’m not that willing to kind of go into details about that. But I think compared to the kind of everyday fear that journalists have in Mexico, I’ve come from a very privileged position, frankly, and I also could return to the UK, which so many of my contacts could not.

0:03:25.2 Trevor Burrus: So setting the stages as your book does around the turn of the century of 1900, so what does Mexico look like at that time for those who don’t understand the political situation, and what is the first type of drug trafficking that emerges in Mexico around that time?

0:03:42.4 Benjamin T. Smith: Right. So Mexico in 1900 is effectively a dictatorship run by a guy called Porfirio Díaz, who’s been in power since the kind of Civil War era, kind of 1876 is where he officially takes over and he runs Mexico until a revolution in 1910. Now, during this period, like a lot of Latin American countries, there’s a fair amount of discrimination against the indigenous groups of Mexico, people who speak indigenous languages, people who don’t necessarily speak Spanish. And one of the ways in which they discriminated against this group was to accuse them of not only smoking marijuana, but also by smoking marijuana becoming extremely violent. So it’s not dissimilar to the way that certain narcotics became attached to certain racial groups in the United States, just to the north, but certainly during the early 1900s, you get this connection between marijuana smoking, being indigenous, and being a violent criminal. And these three things get kind of packaged together, there’s very little of actual scientific research about what marijuana actually does at the time, and simply these assumptions get packaged together and end up putting, at that time, it has to be said, only hundreds in prison, this isn’t the kind of fully paid up war on drugs of the ’70s or ’80s. So it starts fairly small scale, people rarely get more than about six months in jail, but this is the kind of slow winding up of the drug war.

0:05:12.7 Trevor Burrus: And how’s that interacting with what’s going on, on the American side of the border in terms of marijuana?

0:05:19.2 Benjamin T. Smith: So in the early 1900s, 1910s, even the 1920s, America frankly does not have a market in marijuana. It’s a really, a really small scale one perhaps in New Orleans, perhaps growing by the 1920s in some jazz clubs in New York, but it’s incredibly limited, incredibly small scale. I think what’s fascinating is we assume that the Americans in the 1930s with the Marijuana Tax Act were reacting, A, to maybe growing marijuana use, and B, were inventing a fairly kind of racist discourse with persecuted Mexicans and Mexican Americans. There were two things here, A they were not responding to any real marijuana market, no one really was smoking weed, as I say, a few jazz trumpeters, a few people in some border cities, mostly have over the side in Mexico, because that was much more easy to buy it there. The second thing is, this was not an invention of the Americans. In actual fact what they did is they imported these basically anti-​indigenous ideas from Mexico and simply applied them to the United States. This was wholesale borrowing by the Americans. It was not even terribly original in their war on drugs, in this case. They are in many other bits of the war on drugs. But yes. No, so it was an import from kinda 1900s Mexican eugenesis dictatorship thoughts.

0:06:48.5 Trevor Burrus: But there’s an interesting interaction with the Mexican Civil War too, and the kind of social spread of marijuana in Mexico. Including things like term roaches, like the term roach or cockroach and the song La Cucaracha, which you mentioned in the book. It kind of has this interesting cultural impact around the time, there’s always these legends that Pancho Villa’s troops could march so long, because they smoked so much marijuana. So culturally, it kinda takes a foothold in Mexico, it seems around that time.

0:07:20.3 Benjamin T. Smith: It does, although I think that foothold can be overexaggerated. There is no doubt that during the Mexican Revolution, which goes really from kind of 1910 to 1920, although it then kind of continues in fits and starts throughout the 1920s, there were several conflicts in different regions of the country. So effectively, marijuana becomes campfire solace for the amount of soldiers under arms. So yes, quite a lot of soldiers use marijuana, both to pass the time of day. It’s cheaper than booze, it’s easier to get hold of than booze. And at the same time, it does have some kinda palliative effects, particularly if you’re dealing with kind of chronic injuries.

0:08:00.3 Benjamin T. Smith: So as a result, it does get picked up by soldiers. It also kind of gains, I suppose, a kind of cultural status. And the kind of weed addled kind of stoner who tells truth to power becomes basically part of Mexican popular culture, particularly in what we would call kinda musical hall theater of the time. So I think in the ’20s and ’30s, you can see the first kinda stoner comedies. And they’re not done by Cheech & Chong, and they’re not Pineapple Express, they’re being done in musical theater outside Mexico City by former soldiers to crowds of former soldiers who find this kinda thing amusing. So yes, it does gain a certain foothold among soldiers, among certain bohemians, but this is not general practice. In actual fact in most of Mexico, it is still broadly despised and looked down upon as a drug of the lower classes.

0:08:57.7 Trevor Burrus: So when does opium get involved in the mix here?

0:09:01.1 Benjamin T. Smith: Right, so opium… Mexico has no market in opium. No one takes opium, it’s far to expensive frankly. Even during the revolution where a lot of people get the kind of injuries where some kind of opiates would be very helpful, they don’t use opiates. That’s extremely rare, it’s far too overpriced. Most of them would use marijuana or booze if they’re gonna lop off a leg frankly. So most of them, as I said, go through enormous pain during this. So opium is effectively… There is an American, however, market for opium. Now, how big that is, there is an enormous amount of discussion about this. Some people talk about 2% to 4% of the US population at the end of the 19th century. I think that’s massively over-​exaggerated, it’s much nearer less than 1%, but still a fair market for opium.

0:09:46.2 Benjamin T. Smith: Now, the vast majority of that is coming either from Asia or from Europe, where it’s produced into morphine in factories. But starting in 1914 when America puts through the Harrison Act, which effectively prohibits the selling of opiates or morphine or even heroin, which is a form of opium, then some of those opiates start to come through Mexico, but Mexico at the time is not growing it. Nowadays, Mexico grows the vast majority of opium, which is made into heroin, which is killing American addicts. But in 1914, it wasn’t. All it was was a trans-​shipment point. It would bring… It would basically… People would smuggle morphine and heroin into the Caribbean port or the Atlantic port of Veracruz, it would go up north by train, and it would come out in Ciudad Juárez, over the border from El Paso and then really only served kinda Southern United States at the time, although quite a lot of soldiers who were on the US-​Mexican border. So the market in hard drugs or the smuggling of hard drugs is just beginning in the 1910s.

0:10:58.4 Trevor Burrus: And that’s the interesting part of… That’s the part of the story which I think could be said to be the overall theme of your book, is the interaction between different government officials and the drug trade. It’s kind of the overarching story, but this seems about that time that opium becomes popular or is becoming more popular. Americans are cut off from… Because of the Harrison Narcotics Act, and by 1924, heroin is completely prohibited here. So what starts to happen, just to… You could choose one of your stories, like Esteban Cantu or something. What starts to happen with these officials and how the drug trade kind of intermixes with the government?

0:11:37.2 Benjamin T. Smith: Yeah, certainly. So effectively, there are… Mexico at the time, just after the Revolution or during the Revolution, has these fairly autonomous governors who have a fair amount of independence in the way that they do policy. Yes, they are meant to follow federal laws, but they’re given an enormous amount of leeway to do so. And many of them are seriously underfunded, right? They’re effectively unable to tax vast swathes of their states, but they do see a big source of revenue in the vice centers of the border. Now, here you can tax lots of things that were in a bit of a tax gray area. So booze, smuggled booze to the United States, prostitution and sex work, gambling, but also narcotics. Now, officially narcotics are prohibited in both the United States and Mexico. But what happens is many governors start, in effect, taxing it.

0:12:34.9 Benjamin T. Smith: Now, over the years, undoubtedly many of these governors, many of these local officials have sequestered away large chunks of drug money and built vast ostentatious mansions and house… Bought flats in New York and sent their kids to posh private schools in Switzerland. I have absolutely no doubt that went on. But I think what I found most fascinating is certainly for the first 50 years or so, a lot of governors and a lot of local mayors were using at least some of this money to build up the state. So they were putting money quite, quite obviously, and you can see the kinda money trail into schools, into roads, into policing, into security, into making sure that people could walk the streets at night and could go from city to city without being robbed by bandits. So there was a…

0:13:27.2 Benjamin T. Smith: Drug money was being used in Mexico basically to build up the post-​revolutionary state, and I think this is a real surprise to me. So Cantu really, Esteban Cantu, was a revolutionary Governor of Baja California, which is where Tijuana is, and he really starts this process, but this is continued down to the kind of 40s and 50s in the place that they grow the opium. So in Sinaloa, which becomes the kind of, I suppose, the base for most of the opium growing in Mexico at the time, lots of the governors are effectively taxing these opium growers and some of the people who process it into heroin. What’s fascinating is you can see that the money goes to the local cops, but they don’t just put the money into a new car or a second house for their lover, they put the money, they give the money directly to the tax collector who puts the money into the state treasury. So some of this money is actually being used and is being distributed throughout society, which is kind of why it takes hold.

0:14:29.8 Trevor Burrus: When does the production function come in? It was interesting to me that I’ve written about the Chinese aspect of the American, of course, both just the general racism and all the Chinese Immigration stuff, but also their connection to the opium use in, especially the West Coast. I did not know there was that many Chinese in Mexico who were part of this too.

0:14:51.2 Benjamin T. Smith: Yeah. It’s not dissimilar to what is going on in America, but on a slightly smaller scale. So I think it gets up to about 30,000 Chinese immigrants who work predominantly like in the United States on building railways, but then some of them settle. Some of them go back to the US, but a lot of them do stay and kind of work either on small-​scale agriculture or basically buy up small shops, and some of them, particularly recent immigrants, are users of smoking opium, and they are really, I believe, the first people to actually start to try and grow opium which as I say has no real market in Mexico, except this very, very small Chinese population.

0:15:37.6 Benjamin T. Smith: So they start growing these opium poppies partly for their own population, which is concentrated in north west of Mexico, so not just based on the border of with California, particularly in a place called Mexicali, which is the capital of Baja, California, right next to Tijuana, and they start producing pretty poor quality smoking opium for these local Chinese groups. They do try to flog it over the border to the Chinese in America, but frankly, it’s such poor quality that they don’t really manage to sell much, and in actual fact, the San Francisco Chinese population or the Los Angeles Chinese population is much keener on importing the stuff from the far east, and they don’t really, frankly, they look down on the standard of Mexican smoking opium so it doesn’t… But if they do bring the tech to allow Mexico to start growing opium poppies on Mexican soil. So that is a real change and that happens kind of late 20s, early 30s.

0:16:38.0 Trevor Burrus: This all seems interesting it’s like, it all seems fairly organized and not terribly violent up to maybe this point in the story, you have some figures who factor in, but it’s much more of a, as you said, you have maybe pretty stand-​up people like Cantu using drug money to make his city better. But then, at some point violence comes into play. And what is the main, what is the main source of the violence? Aside from just violent murders, but what is the conflict that’s happening that’s causing sort of violence to start growing around the 30s, late 20s and the 30s.

0:17:13.9 Benjamin T. Smith: Right? So I think it’s a really important point to kind of stress is that initially there is not an enormous amount of violence associated with the trade. This is partly due to the scale of the trade. But more importantly, it’s because the vast majority of people who grow the stuff, or buy the staff, or transport the stuff, are related. They’re mostly kind of small familial networks and groups, or they come from the same village, and they are related by god parentage, by marriage, or by blood. So there’s very, very little kind of conflict between them. At the same time, where there is violence is effectively when certain local governments want to take over the protection of the drug trade. So I said in the past that certain local governments, like this guy Cantu, were very happy to tax the drug trade. When a new governor came along, what he would do was he would take out Cantu’s traffickers, possibly by arresting them, possibly by murdering them, and then he would put his own in place who were sufficiently loyal that they would pay him a percentage of their profits. So, the very, very few outbursts of violence in the 20s, 30s, 40s are entirely connected with the State control of the drug trade. They’re not beefs over people stealing drugs. They’re entirely to do with who controls the tax revenue effectively from the drug trade.

0:18:39.0 Trevor Burrus: During the depression, things got pretty dry it seems like in the story, which is part of the changing of the market, but was this because of just the lack of work and just the general depression conditions? Or do people… People started taking fewer drugs?

0:18:54.9 Benjamin T. Smith: Yeah, pretty much. I mean, I think this is something that I try to do in the book is basically make the, I mean, there are kind of exciting and interesting characters, and cross-​dressing drug traffickers, and female drug traffickers, that live for 50 years still trafficking drugs into Ciudad Juárez. But also, one of the major characters in the book, I think is the American drug market. And just like the American drug pockets, its an enormous role during the Counterculture, it also, when the American drug market goes dry, and it really does in the 1930s, really noticeably so, particularly I think in the south west. Basically Mexico doesn’t bother to produce any drugs. And it doesn’t produce really any narcotics to speak of between about 1930 and 1938, when suddenly America was cut off from its Chinese and European sources of opiates and suddenly Mexico realized here is a market. So you can really see that it’s the American demand that repeatedly kind of shapes what’s going on in Mexico. And you can’t see it any more clearly than the 1930s. No American demand, right? No Mexican drug trade.

0:20:03.2 Trevor Burrus: I’m glad that you spend a lot of time on one of my personal favorite people in this sort of in the harm reduction history as someone named Leopoldo Salazar Viniegra. So, who is he? And Viniegra and why is he so… He’s a character, to say the least. But a little bit ahead of his time.

0:20:21.4 Benjamin T. Smith: Yeah, he is. I mean, he’s a really fascinating character. He’s a doctor by training and he was trained in France comes back to Mexico, in the kind of early years of the revolution. Now, during the early years of the revolution, and in fact, there’s very little revolutionary or even terribly progressive thinking about drugs, the standard answer is, if you’re rich, bribe the judge, if you’re poor, we’ll jam you in jail. Not terribly progressive and a lot of the medical thinking also of it was basically borrowing off Baudelaire’s poetry on being on harsh to kind of make kind of grand medical pronouncements on how dangerous marijuana is. So Salazar Viniegra comes along, and he starts working in basically the Mexico City’s major lunatic asylum, which is also where they stick some of the drug addicts and he starts doing some really serious medical research and really quantitative and qualitative studies of both morphine addicts, heroin addicts and also marijuana addicts. And he comes to the conclusion that in the case of marijuana, basically, it does very little, it has very, very little psychoactive effects. And in actual fact, what is causing people to behave strangely or badly on marijuana is the fact that the press and the doctors say, if you smoke marijuana, you’re gonna behave really badly.

0:21:49.3 Benjamin T. Smith: So it’s really the power of suggestion that was making people behave badly. Now, he tries to sell this to the Mexicans. And I think what is interesting is, we might assume the Mexicans would lap this up, but in actual fact, so ingrained is the fear of marijuana by the ’30s, that they completely rejected. So his plan for legalizing marijuana or at least decriminalizing marijuana fails, but his second plan is even more radical. Now his second plan, is that, okay, he admits that morphine and heroin and opiates are dangerous. But his idea is that all that making them illegal does is giving money to the drug traffickers. So the best thing a state could do is effectively sell opiates, morphine and heroin, at very, very low prices to addicts, because all this would do is undercut the drug traffickers. So he puts in place this plan to basically open state morphine clinics that are selling narcotics to addicts, incredibly low prices. And in the four months, they’re allowed to stay open. They basically put all the drug traffickers and drug dealers in Mexico City, completely out of business in actual fact, these people are forced to basically give away their narcotics to keep any customer. So it’s a remarkable success. But one sadly, that is extremely short lived, which I imagine is where your second question might…

0:23:14.0 Trevor Burrus: Oh, yes. There’s a confrontation at the UN. Yes, This is a story that I had I only heard intimated about Harry Anslinger and what he did, but you got into that even more so, yeah, there’s a confrontation that results from this.

0:23:27.0 Benjamin T. Smith: Yeah, certainly. So Harry Anslinger at the time is the basically the Hoover of narcotics. He runs the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. And he’s trying to kind of push for this federal bureau, which frankly, has had nothing to do during the 1930s. There’s so little narcotic addiction, even in the United States. So he’s trying to make himself relevant. So he starts to say, this is gonna be a crisis… This is gonna create a crisis on our border. Sound kind of familiar? This is gonna flood America with evil narcotics, they’re all gonna be flogging it to our addicts or go down to Mexico. And he puts this forward at the League of Nations at the kind of proto UN. But the Mexicans still don’t back down. So what he effectively does is he realizes most of the morphine that Mexico is giving away at the state run clinics is actually coming through the United States. Now, in a rather strange position, he is allowed to effectively cut off Mexico from this supply of morphine, which he does. He says, “If you’re gonna give market price to addicts, we’re not gonna give you the morphine.” So he effectively does this and the Mexicans have to back down and they do fairly sharpish, so…

0:24:42.3 Trevor Burrus: He’s not even just cutting it off from the dispensing…

0:24:45.4 Benjamin T. Smith: No, no, I mean…

0:24:46.3 Trevor Burrus: Compulsive users, but even pain patients.

0:24:48.6 Benjamin T. Smith: Yeah. I mean, I have to say, there aren’t enormous quantity of pain patients who were taking the opiates this time, but yes, they also can’t get hold of morphine. So you get these incredibly desperate doctors who were dealing with people dying in extreme pain, but just cannot get hold of the stuff.

0:25:03.2 Trevor Burrus: It’s torturing essentially, Mexicans or some of them. I mean, addicts being deprived too, is a problem, too. And Harry Anslinger comes back again as just a foreign policy force after the war too, because he’s still trying to export America’s… It’s amazing how much foreign policy power he had.

0:25:21.4 Benjamin T. Smith: Yes, certainly. I mean, he was extremely smart at making the Federal Bureau of Narcotics look relevant even when it wasn’t. So in 1940, it simply wasn’t relevant when the Mexicans were decriminalizing opiates. The Second World War was happening, that was much more important. In algebra his only real relevance as far as I can make out, was making sure that United States had enough morphine for the troops. So we’re gonna go and go and fight in the Europe or in Asia.

0:25:53.1 Benjamin T. Smith: That wasn’t a bad job, right? Maybe you should have stuck to that. But you’re right in the post war period, when America is effectively trying to flex his muscles in the Cold War Anslinger again, realize he’s going to be sidelined. People are not concerned about drugs. They’re concerned about the threat of international Communism. So what he effectively does is try to push the Federal Bureau of Narcotics into relevance yet again, and yet again, his test case is Mexico.

0:26:20.2 Trevor Burrus: And that’s right around that time, around 1950 is when, as it is still today, the Golden Triangle emerges as a production part, correct?

0:26:30.3 Benjamin T. Smith: Yes, certainly. So I mean, to be to be fair to Anslinger, during the late 1940s, Mexico has upped its production in opium poppies. And it’s growing its own opium poppies, and it’s processing the stuff into heroin and morphine. And it’s during this period, that Anslinger, again, forces Mexico basically, through public humiliation, ritual humiliation at the League of nations, and in the international press, to put in place extremely harsh drug laws, actually harsher drug laws than the United States, which really surprised me. I mean, it was only a few years later, the Boggs Act came in. And that was harsh than the Mexican laws, but before that, Mex got the harshest laws in the Americas. And at the same time, he also initiated something which is going to be expanded hugely in the next few decades, which is militarized Counter Narcotics campaigns, which effectively means sending soldiers into the opium fields and getting them to either pull up or burn down the opium poppies. So he really kind of initializes that campaign.

0:27:37.6 Trevor Burrus: Is it safe to say that the sort of emergence of the golden triangles Sinaloa, Misha Lacan around there is that kind of this beginning of the modern Cartel system that we’re seeing today, or at least the sort of seeds of it, in terms of how much we get the production, the corruption of officials and violence continues to go up in this era too, we’re talking about they say, like, 1950 to 1970, establishing these families. Establishing these groups, some of which we’re still with today.

0:28:05.7 Benjamin T. Smith: Yes, certainly. So I think one thing that shocked me was reading a document, I think it was written in about 1941. And it was from a concerned local official, who said, everyone’s growing opium around here, and he gave a list of everyone growing opium, and it was exactly the same names that you see, peppering DEA reports over the last 20 years. It’s the Beltrans, it’s the Leyvas, it’s the Quinteros, it’s the Fonsecas. So it’s this same kind of families that were still involved they’re now three, four, five generations through doing this. So this is certainly when drug trafficking comes to that area during the 1940s. And really, again, it’s American demand that does it because America during the 40s, during the Second World War is cut off from its supplies of opium and Mexico’s is kind of the emergency opium producer and steps into this breach. And yes, it does create these families, which do have historical links to the drug trade. I will say however, again, during the 1940s, and even during 1950s, this is fairly, fairly Pacific. Again, these groups are mostly linked by family, there’s certainly no cartel, they’re not trying to control price in any way. They’re not terribly organized. And most of them are just very small familial networks linked by blood and marriage.

0:29:25.5 Trevor Burrus: So what do you think is the biggest factor that goes into increasing violence? I mean, there’s bunches of guns and things like this. But sometimes, as you said, these fairly Pacific relatively stable organizations can ramp up and then heads can be rolling to the streets. Is it connected to American demand for drugs? Is it connected to enforcement? Whenever they crack down? Does it get worse? I mean, maybe all of the above?

0:29:51.4 Benjamin T. Smith: Yeah, I mean, I think I mean, if we’re going to be talking and I don’t know, if you want to be talking about today, ’cause that is a really complex set of factors.

0:29:58.6 Trevor Burrus: We’ll get there. Yeah, we’ll definitely get there.

0:30:00.6 Benjamin T. Smith: But it really, violence really ramps up really noticeably in the 1970s. And I think two things are happening. One, yes, you’re absolutely right demand, American demand is going through the roof, which basically, it’s like an oil boom in Mexico, I had no idea quite how extensive marijuana and opium poppy growing was in the 1970s. So during the 1970s, America has not only addicted returning Vietnam vets, it also has kind of hippies going dark and taking heroin. And Mexico is producing 95% of US heroin at the time, and US has about 650,000 heroin addicts. So this is a fair amount plus it’s producing about 90% of all the weed in America and 40% of American high schoolers are smoking weed relatively regularly, right? So there’s a vast market of drugs so this spreads, so it’s not just the Golden Triangle a couple of a hand, frankly, a dozen villages in northwestern Mexico.

0:30:57.7 Benjamin T. Smith: Now it’s hundreds, maybe even thousands of villages throughout Mexico. So that’s absolutely a change. But the second big change and something that I think I and many others massively underestimated was quite how violent the Counter Narcotics policies of that era were. These did not simply involved a couple of buying busts, putting people in jail for two to three years, maybe breaking down a few networks. This involved murder, involved torture, really, really brutal forms of torture to try and find out who you’re working through who your supply was, who the other people in your network were. Now, I think this is right at the crux of why there is so much violence because frankly, if you are a trafficker, you’ll pretty much do anything to avoid being caught by the police, even shooting the police or shooting other traffickers that you suspect might be informing on you. So this breaks down those networks of blood and cooperation and marriage that have marked the drug trafficking networks for the last 50 years.

0:32:07.2 Benjamin T. Smith: So all those as I said, the kind of Pacific drug trade of the last 50 years completely disappears and everyone turns on one another because they’re so petrified of being caught by the cops. Now that is both the Mexican cops who are horrendously brutal as a group of the policy of who DCL feathered out who are particularly unpleasant, but also they are back to the hilt by members of the DEA. And the DEA is meant strictly post-​73 to report on any… If It ever sees torture if it suspects torture, and I believe there were only three complaints throughout the 1970s, and none of those were ever acted upon.

0:32:49.6 Trevor Burrus: As this happens, the profits go up, the enforcement goes up, the corruption also seems to go up in the sense of up the scale of the Mexican government, because as you said, you had mayors, municipalities with Cantu, and then I think it was the Loisa came in and tried to make that into a province-​based corruption racket, but it seems like the next step, as long as you keep fighting this crazy drug war, is you’re gonna get to the presidency, or at least to the federal level at some point. So at different times the Mexican presidency itself becomes corrupted by this…

0:33:20.5 Benjamin T. Smith: Yeah, I think during the… I don’t think necessarily the presidency does itself, it has Mexican presidents, have other ways of making money that they don’t necessarily have to indulge in something so politically risky, but I think that it is very clear, that federal cops, Secret Service and the Army get involved in attempting to extract money from protecting the drug trade. And I think what’s kind of interesting is during this period, they’re kind of fighting between each other for who controls the trade, which actually does cause also quite a lot of the bloodshed, so occasionally newspapers let it… Let it out. Normally, newspapers keep pretty shtoomp because they wanna keep their lives, but occasionally they let it out. The federal police have a gun battle in 1978 on the streets of Nuevo Laredo not with other traffickers, but with the secret service because they both wanna control the drug trade, so you’re absolutely right, it does move corruption, really changes a level, so these federal… So not state, not local, these federal police forces and secret service agencies are effectively now trying to take over the protection of the trade. Now I think, however, and this is something I’ve been thinking a lot about in a way that they’re kind of doing the same job as the local…

0:34:41.6 Benjamin T. Smith: As the local Mayors and the local governors, now, the local mayors and the local governors, 50 years ago, they wanted to build schools and build roads, well, the secret services in the 1970s wanted to kill commies, but again, rather like the local mayors, they didn’t have the money to do it. So what do they do? They’ve basically took money from drugs and they bought their own guns, they bought their uniforms, they bought their helicopters, and if you were a fairly good hitman for the cartels, they’d bring you on board and they give you a job and a badge, so in actual fact, again, it’s fairly unpalatable to say, but this is kind of Mexican state building, it’s a very cheap way to build up your armed, forces you don’t have to go and tax all the normal people, non-​drug traffickers, you can just tax drug traffickers.

0:35:31.2 Trevor Burrus: There’s a challenge, the very concept of what a state is and which one is being the state, and there’s different times. Especially I think in Michoacan, the governments essentially lose control of entire regions, it is pretty much the cartels that do the basics, even the basics of government.

0:35:48.4 Benjamin T. Smith: It’s exactly what’s happening now in swathes of Mexico, is that… Where does the State lie, is it in the federal national… Is it in the National Guard? Is it in the local villages which are tooling up in order to fight against the cartel, is it in some of the cartels which claim to stand for certain political programs, is it with the political parties which are allied to the cartels, where does that state lie? I think that’s a very good question, and one that the drug trade has cast into really kind of bare relief.

0:36:26.0 Trevor Burrus: So you talked about Nuevo Laredo and Ciudad Juárez so why… Americans, especially about 10 years ago, we can get this to the modern era, we started hearing 15 years ago about Ciudad Juárez especially just the level of violence got astounding. Why those cities, first of all?

0:36:43.2 Benjamin T. Smith: So effectively both cities it starts in Nuevo Laredo in about 2004, I think this is when we first heard about it, I remember living in Mexico at the time and attempting to get up to, I think up to UT Austin and being unable to travel through Nuevo Laredo because, I was just told don’t go there. It’s pitch battles in the street, it’s far too dangerous to take a bus there. And I had taken a bus I think in 2003. So right it starts in Laredo it goes then moves onto Ciudad Juárez by about 2008-2009. So these are effectively… These two cities are where the vast majority of drugs go through by the 2000s. So effectively this is where NAFTA has opened up the transport routes between Mexico and the United States, so if you wanna traffic weed or Coke, which at that point… Or meth, which is the kind of three big drugs at that point, heroine is yet to take off again. Then you go through Nuevo Laredo or Ciudad Juárez and Nuevo Laredo until I went now I thought it was a kind of a massive Ciudad Juárez Tijuana city.

0:37:49.0 Benjamin T. Smith: It’s a city of 300000 people, not much bigger than the kind of boring provincial city I live in The United kingdom it’s pretty small, but it has a third of all the container traffic going between Mexico and the United States, goes through nuevo Laredo, now what happens up to the 2000s or maybe the late 1990s, the federal cops had protected the drug trade right, they had said, you go through this area, you traffic through this area during the 1990s, however, two things happen one the federal authorities lose power, Mexico democratizes for 70 years, Mexico has had one political party in power, something called the PRI… Now, this starts to lose elections, which means it loses power over sways, particularly of Northern Mexico, so that’s really key, okay so it no longer has the power to enforce its agreement on the drug traffickers. The second thing that happens is the drug traffickers get way, way richer, and this has to do with the Coke and Coke is again, like…

0:38:52.7 Benjamin T. Smith: I don’t know, a second oil boom or something like that. This is effectively America by the 90s, is taking 70% of the world’s Coke and Mexico is transporting about 95% of that. Mexicans also have distribution networks by the 1990s in US cities, so they are not just making a couple of grand on transporting Columbian Coke over the border. They can make $250,000 from selling that Coke on the US Street. So this is a game changer in terms of the finances of the Mexican cartels. So by the early 2000s, it’s not the government that wants to control who goes where, who traffics where, it’s the cartels. And they start to compete for geographical areas of trafficking. So previously, it had been the federal police who were doing this, who were controlling this. Now it’s the cartels and the cartels couldn’t be controlled disease as the federal police.

0:39:52.9 Trevor Burrus: And then we get the broadening of the cartel. ‘Cause at different times of the book, you kind of even resisted the easy label of cartel. Which sometimes this is a DEA propaganda to put some sort of a coherent organization to some of these groups. Which are actually much more organic and less organized than they think.

0:40:10.9 Benjamin T. Smith: I think this is… I don’t wanna go too far down the kind of intellectual root here, but there are effectively two ways to see what a cartel is. The first is the DEA way. The DEA way it’s introduced in the 1980s, and it describes what was going on in Colombia and in Mexico in the DEA’s mind. So they tried to sell to the US public with these vast organizations, rather like the OPEC oil cartel, bad capitalists who were so powerful, they were controlling the market in drugs. Now, frankly, this was… And I apologize for the language, bullshit. Effectively, these were networks. They were very similar to what… They were just sort of the extended version of what were going on in the 60s and 70s. They were large family networks that linked up occasionally to traffic drugs, and occasion they would link up with other families and traffic drugs. There was no competition between them. There was no attempt to control prices. The only control really was the federal government, which was telling them, “You give us money if you’re trafficking through with this area.”

0:41:12.5 Benjamin T. Smith: There is a second version of a cartel, which is basically what organized crime groups started to call themselves in the 2000s. You get the Gulf Cartel, the Tijuana Cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel. What do they mean by it? Again, they don’t really mean price controlling groups. They mean, we control this territory. That’s why they’re named after towns, the Tijuana Cartel is not some kind of vast Mexico-​wide thing. You pay them if you go through Tijuana. The Juarez Cartel, you pay them if you go through to Juarez. The Gulf Cartel, you pay them if you get anywhere near the Gulf. So effectively, there were these two versions of cartel but it’s kind of got mixed up in people’s minds think. And I think the DEA is very happy for them to get mixed up. But effectively one is a territory controlling organized crime group. And I think the other thing to really stress about that is these organized crime groups, most of them, by the late 90s drugs is just part of the portfolio. And now the Coke is a very, very important part of that portfolio. But by the early 2000s, it’s kidnapping, it’s oil theft, it’s extortion, it’s livestock theft, it’s basically any form of crime if you can charge it, for it, do it.

0:42:39.1 Trevor Burrus: And the Zetas, you say are the ones who are kind of just terrifying in their own way, because it’s Mexican Special Forces, Ex Mexican Special Forces member, or at least a good amount of them. And then they just decide to get into, as you said, anything you can charge for, correct?

0:42:54.4 Benjamin T. Smith: Yeah, pretty much, they are the ones that expand this. It’s kind of been going on at the border a little bit in Tijuana, in Juarez, and a little bit in Nuevo Laredo in the early to late 90s, early 2000s. So for example, in Juarez, I think in the late 90s they start to find a bunch of car thieves. The just started to appear dead all over Ciudad Juarez. ‘Cause basically they weren’t paying the Juarez Cartel the right protection money. So yes, undoubtedly there are signs of this happening. But it’s the Zetas who expand this, not outside the border cities into basically rural areas of Mexico that you cannot see this coming. There’s this terrifying recent book by a guy called Sergio Aguirre who’s a brilliant researcher in Mexico. And he did this excellent book on what happened in Torreon. Now Torreon is a… Doubt you’ve heard of it… It’s a pretty boring provincial city. It is basically a kind of agricultural market town, has a few factories, but the Zetas just arrived there in 2009, and they do two things. One, they kidnap the head of the police and they take a video of him being brutally tortured. And they ask him, “Give us a list of all the criminals in Torreon.” So he gives them a list, then they approach those criminals and they say, “Right, you’re working for us now. Half your profits go to us.”

0:44:07.8 Benjamin T. Smith: The second thing they do is they send a letter, which I do publish in my book, they send a letter to a couple of lawyers who work on behalf of the big merchants, factory owners, the kind of elites of Torreon. These aren’t big time players. These aren’t Mexico City billionaires. No, they’re rich, but they aint that rich. And they basically brought this letter to the lawyer going, “Right, you get all the people you work for and they’re gonna start paying us a tax. They can pay the government tax, we don’t really care about that. But they’re gonna pay us a certain percentage of their profits.” So yeah, the Zetas bring this kind of protection racket, Sicilian mafia mentality to the rest of Mexico. And it’s kind of what Mexico is still living with today, ’cause everyone starts to copy of them. It creates this kind of race to the bottom where every other cartel kind of has to get involved involved in this, or the Zetas are gonna out gun you and out money you.

0:45:04.1 Trevor Burrus: That’s the dispiriting conclusion of someone who’s fought against the drug war for quite a while. You would wanna say, “Well, if America just legalized.” Let’s say we just went all out, let’s say you could buy heroin over the counter. Well, that would completely deflate our legalization of marijuana, I’m from Colorado, that has already deflated some part of that trade, so let’s just take away all their power because on one level our prohibition, our extreme demand for drugs, we are the biggest drug taking country on the planet by far, has destabilized Mexico for centuries, as we’ve talked about, that is the proximate factor. So if we just stopped, would we make a dent now in these organizations that have gone so much further into the criminal sphere?

0:45:53.8 Benjamin T. Smith: I think the vast majority of the violence and sadly, sadly the current president has effectively stopped certain of the more damaging policies of the war on drugs. So for example, he’s basically pushed to one side the kingpin strategy. No longer are there people put on the front page of newspapers saying, “We’ve caught the head of the Gulf cartel, it’s all over, everything’s fine guys.” None of that, but the violence has just increased and the murders are still increasing, so I think frankly a alot of the murders that go on Mexico have very little to do with drugs. The people who are really involved in making billions from the drug trade, they’re not really bothering to murder people, so people like El Mayo, who’s the guy who’s basically taken over from El Chapo, doesn’t need to murder people. Sinaloa is a relatively… Or it was, it was until very recently, a relatively safe State, it’s not competed over by any drug cartel. The vast majority of these murders are originating not from the international trafficking of drugs, but from the extension of the protection rackets over all sorts of different forms of crime.

0:47:00.5 Benjamin T. Smith: So I deal a lot with refugees escaping from various forms of violence in Mexico and what surprised me is how few of them are actually escaping anything to do with narcotics, the vast majority are escaping because they own a taco stand that’s being shaken down by some group that’s connected to the Caballeros Templarios or something like that. These are small-​scale groups who are effectively operating as almost parallel States in bits of the country, I should say not all of the country, but in eastern bits of the country.

0:47:33.6 Trevor Burrus: So is there anything we can do? I mean Mexico it’s a… I know Italy has talked different times the mafia has been so prevalent in Italy that it created problems for governing structures in different parts of Italy. I’m not sure it ever got to the level of Mexico today. It’s a pretty difficult problem when you think about it, unless you bring in bigger guns to outgun the already heavily armed cartels who almost have the army of a State.

0:48:01.6 Benjamin T. Smith: It’s something the current president has really struggled with. I think there has been an attempt to overhaul the judicial system, that’s been an enormous problem, so Mexico runs at still about 99% impunity rate for violent crimes. That cannot go on, so they have been certain judicial changes, they’ve worked in certain States, like Chihuahua has brought down its impunity rate from 99% down to about 60%, that’s quite an impressive kind of shift. So that’s worked. The current president has really stressed offering social and economic opportunities to basically men between 16 and 24, who are the vast majority who are killed and the vast majority of the killers. Now that has been massively hamstrung by the fact the Mexican economy was not doing very well before COVID and is doing even worse after and during COVID. So that’s been highly problematic. I do think by removing the kingpin strategy, what we don’t have are the big set piece battles between small groups, basically people at the top end of the cartels for who controls those cartels. I think that has stopped and that is a good thing, but what we do have is just, as I say, “Endless churns of violence and destabilization, particularly in certain rural areas of Mexico.”

0:49:24.4 Benjamin T. Smith: The final thing I should say, and I’m sorry for going on about this question, but it’s one that I always come back to is Mexico now has a drug market. It never had a drug market before. One thing that the federal government were very, very good at doing, and I think this… It’s something you get hints at talking to police officers. It’s something you get hints at talking to DEA officials, but I think it’s fairly understood that Mexican federal authorities not only took money from the drug cartels, they were very sure those drug cartels didn’t sell in Mexico. Since the 2000s, those agreements have basically disappeared. We still don’t have a really clear pattern over how many drug addicts Mexico has, but certainly big border cities like Tijuana and Juarez have vast addict populations. So a lot of the blood shed that’s happening in Tijuana and Juarez, and I think Tijuana now is the most dangerous city in Earth, in terms of homicides. That’s fighting over corners, that’s Baltimore circa 1990. This is about… Because if trafficking drugs is relatively pacific, dealing and selling drugs now that’s violence, right?

0:50:34.2 Benjamin T. Smith: Because you’ve got a very… You’ve basically got a small group of, small limited group of addicts, and you wanna dominate that particular market, whether it’s on this block or this block or this block, so people are… People when they are selling drugs, they do fight for territory a lot and very violently, so it’s 18-​year-​old kids gunning down other 18-​year-​old kids over selling Meth.

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0:51:11.5 S?: Thanks for listening. If you enjoy Free Thoughts, make sure to rate and review us in Apple podcasts or in your favorite podcast app. Free Thoughts is produced by Landry Ayres. If you’d like to learn more about libertarianism, visit us on the web at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.