special agents, 227 domestic field offices, foreign offices in 62 countries, and a budget of roughly $2.5 billion.
Despite his humiliation of Mexico, Nixon was not without his supporters there, most particularly President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964–1970), who was very much on Nixon’s cultural wavelength. Personally revulsed by marijuana-smoking Mexican students, he proclaimed the universities to be “full of garbage and filth!” But like Nixon, Díaz Ordaz had deeper worries, rooted not only in personal rigidity but in perceived challenges to PRI power. Many of the rising generation saw the one-party state as repressive, its socialist rhetoric masking an actually existing authoritarianism. Like Nixon, his partner in paranoia, Díaz Ordaz equated political dissent with communist conspiracy, and he lit into those urging democratic reform—writers, journalists, editors, disaffected workers, and particularly students.
In 1966, Díaz Ordaz sent paratroopers to occupy universities where students had mounted demonstrations. In 1968, incensed by insubordinate street protests that threatened to blacken Mexico’s image on the world stage just weeks before the country was to host the Summer Olympics, he dispatched armored trucks to disperse the thousands camped in the Zócalo, generating images that evoked those of Prague youth confronting Soviet tanks. Next, Díaz Ordaz orchestrated a massacre of students who were demonstrating in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, a neighborhood in Mexico City, unleashing the army, police, and paramilitary gunmen who fired rifles, bazookas, and machine guns into the crowd from all sides. Two thousand were rounded up, stripped, and beaten; some of them were disappeared; estimates of the dead (indeterminate as bodies were trucked away and burned) ran as high as three hundred. The massacre sparked national and international outrage.
The 1970 shooting of Kent State students protesting Nixon’s escalation of the Vietnam War into Cambodia was a pale echo of the Tlatelolco slaughter (in Ohio four were killed, nine wounded), though it did provoke a nationwide strike by over four million students. Similarly the emergence of the Weather Underground, and their bombing campaign in the early 1970s, was a shadow of the turn to armed resistance in Mexico by urban guerilla groups opposed to what they considered a brutal and unresponsive regime. What had no northern counterpart was the emergence of rural rebellions, feeding on a growing crisis in the agricultural sector.
In the mountains of Guerrero, Lucio Cabañas, a Ayotzinapa-trained teacher-turned-revolutionary, forged a small force dubbed the Party of the Poor that engaged in kidnappings and bank robberies to fuel an armed rebellion. By 1971, the new president Luis Echeverría (1970–1976) had dispatched twelve thousand troops to the region. Though he developed closer ties with socialist governments in Chile and Cuba and offered refuge to victims of the infamous Operación Cóndor, Echeverría remained adamantly opposed to allowing guerrilla groups to develop within Mexico, and he dispatched DFS agents to infiltrate various leftist organizations. In 1974, after Cabañas kidnapped a multimillionaire PRI senator and candidate for governor, the president upped the military presence to twenty-four thousand. The army carried out sweeping roundups, interrogations under torture, and disappearances. In the municipality of Atoyac de Álvarez alone, the military disappeared some four hundred people. Cabanas was killed that year in a shootout with soldiers.
Echeverría’s relationship with the U.S. had not been particularly warm, and he had been reluctant to expand the ongoing Operation Cooperation (CANADOR, in Mexico) inherited from his predecessor. But in September 1976, just as Echeverría was passing the presidential torch to his chosen successor, José López Portillo (1976–1982), his government did so. The turnabout was due partly to the insistence of the United States; partly to concern at the surging size of the drug industry (which then covered some six hundred thousand square kilometers, and included roughly thirty thousand opium plots, some of them exceeding forty acres); and partly out of alarm at the rising levels of trafficker-related violence. In Culiacán, gun battles on downtown streets had become daily fare, and Sinaloan papers were packed with complaints about the rising narco threat. The PRI was also dismayed by agrarian unrest—widespread land seizures and armed defiance of authority by desperate campesinos, hard-pressed by a deepening agricultural crisis. The two problems were in fact conjoined, as tens of thousands of these farmers had entered the drug economy and were prepared to defend their new economic lifeline at gunpoint.
The state decided on a full-scale ground assault, and green-lighted the up-till-then rejected U.S. urging of an aerial spraying campaign, as well as authorizing U.S. reconnaissance flyovers of the target area. The new López Portillo government’s stated aim was “the total elimination of opium poppy cultivation and maximum cooperation with the United States and other countries in the endeavor.” The Mexican attorney general predicted the end of drug trafficking in six months. Left unannounced was the determination to crack down on rural insurgents under cover of the anti-drug campaign. The program was soon renamed Operation Condor, the nom de guerre of the U.S.-supported campaign of political repression and assassination implemented after 1975 by right-wing dictatorships in South America against guerillas, dissidents, students, social activists, unions, and academics—a decade long “Dirty War” in which tens of thousands were killed or disappeared. This aspect of the Mexican operation was the purview of José Hernández Toledo, who had commanded military operations at the Tlatelolco massacre.
In early 1977, ten thousand soldiers stormed the Golden Triangle sierra of Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua. Marauding through villages, they kicked down doors, dragging hundreds of young men away, some to be beaten and tortured (via electric shock, burns, and chili-laced water shot up noses), hundreds never to be seen again. Army units also ransacked houses, raped women, and confiscated belongings, which intensified the armed resistance. From the air, U.S.-supplied aircraft began spraying drug crops—using 2,4-D acid on opium and the toxic herbicide paraquat on marijuana. Tens of thousands of plots and fields would eventually be destroyed, hundreds of kilograms of drugs seized.
The DEA and the now Jimmy Carter White House (1977–1980) sang the praises of Mexico’s “model program,” and indeed Condor had severely restricted the amount of drugs crossing the United States border. By 1979, the amount of heroin entering the U.S. had been almost halved—an ambiguous victory, as suppliers responded to scarcity by jacking up prices (a milligram’s street value rose from $1.26 in 1976 to $2.25 in 1979), which in turn hiked crime rates as junkies sought to feed their more expensive habit.8
The unanticipated consequences ran deeper still. When Operation Condor smashed into Sinaloa, the top narco bosses—who had been left suspiciously untouched—simply relocated.9 They moved their operations down from the mountains to Mexico’s second-largest city, Guadalajara, in the state of Jalisco. There they bought splendid villas and continued their business on an even bigger scale. Condor inadvertently centralized the trade by winnowing out the small fry and strengthening those with the resources to buy protection from the police, the military, the DFS, and PRI politicians.
Perhaps the primary outcome of the latest Great Campaign was to solidify the “plaza system” that had been rudimentarily set in place during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Operation Condor had reminded the gangsters who was boss, and when the program slackened off in the late 1970s, and drug commerce attained its former levels, it was handled in a more orderly fashion. Government agencies (particularly the DFS, whose writ was suppression of the trade) established unofficially sanctioned trafficking corridors at strategic transit points through which drugs had to pass on their way to the United States. The plazas were not controlled by the criminals; they were, instead, checkpoints at which the traffickers were greeted by the federal police or the military, there to collect bribes, or to bust (and occasionally kill) anyone who was not paying up. This also allowed them to rack up drug seizures, and thus demonstrate they were ardently fighting the war on drugs. De facto state regulation kept the narcos under control, damping down their violence, while handsomely profiting the regulators.
In their protected terrains, drug entrepreneurs grew more ambitious. Some began organizing bigger than ever payloads. Instead of buying marijuana from small family farms, they built and maintained enormous plantations of their own. One of the boldest innovators was Rafael Caro Quintero, a trafficker from Badiraguato, in the heart of Sinaloan drug country. Born in 1952, Caro Quintero had