Nick Reding (17 page)

Back in the 1980s, Guatemala was what was called a “trampoline” state. Planes coming from Colombia laden with cocaine would
stop there to refuel before “bouncing” to locations in Texas, Arizona, and California. In that way, Guatemala played the same
role the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and the Bahamas did with marine delivery of cocaine via the Caribbean. As soon as Operation
Snowcap limited the Cali and Medellín cartels’ two principal options for delivery into the United States, the Colombians approached
the Mexican organizations that controlled access to the twenty-five hundred miles of essentially unprotected U.S. border.
The Colombian cocaine and heroin empire, which had for years depended on cooperation with Guatemala and the Bahamas, was now
dependent on Mexico. According to Tony Loya, the ex-SAC who ran Operation Snowcap from Guatemala City, “What happened was
not the lesser of two evils; it was the greater. Our success with Medellín and Cali essentially set the Mexicans up in business,
at a time when they were already cash-rich thanks to the budding meth trade in Southern California.”

In essence, the Mexican organizations based along the border—in Tijuana, Juárez, Nogales, Nuevo Laredo, and Matamoros, each
of which would become the base of operations for the five DTOs—were able to heavily influence the price of cocaine by controlling
its entry into the United States. DEA’s success with Snowcap essentially awarded the Mexican organizations gate-keeping rights
in the most valuable narcotic market on earth, at the same time as those organizations were building a separate but related
business in the meth trade. What the Mexican organizations did subsequently, however, was far more significant. For the favor
of allowing the Colombians to ship their cocaine into the U.S. marketplace, the DTOs demanded payment not in cash, but in
product. For every kilo of cocaine the Mexicans let cross their border, they kept a kilo for themselves.

A senior American official assigned to the U.S. embassy in Mexico City who also worked on Operation Snowcap explained the
result this way: “By controlling the entry point for all of the cocaine into the U.S., the Mexicans controlled the price.
How else will Colombia get its product to its customers? It depends on the DTOs. By taking payment in cocaine and distributing
it themselves, the DTOs created fifty percent market share overnight. If you control the price, along with half the retail
and distribution, you basically own the business.”

The shift in power from the Colombian cartels to the Mexican traffickers had two major consequences. First, the DTOs grew
rich enough to buy larger amounts of precursors to make meth. Second, DEA was unable to adjust to the new paradigm. The Medellín
and Cali cartels had relied on Bahamians, Dominicans, and Americans to distribute and sell their cocaine. Those businesses
were, according to the embassy official in Mexico City, highly centralized. Their movements were predictable, and decisions
came from the top—most famously from Pablo Escobar. In contrast, the DTOs, said the official, are decentralized and protean.
They rely only on Mexican nationals to distribute and sell their products, making it harder for DEA to infiltrate the organizations.
Because individual distributors have more decision-making power, the movements of the organization as a whole are much less
predictable.

Seen in one respect, the DTOs are an expression of the immigrant labor force as it was successfully portrayed by defense lawyers
in the 2001 Tyson case—virtually invisible and nearly impossible to follow. Lori Arnold’s description of the reality of many
illegal immigrants at the Excel plant—using fake identification, moving from town to town and packing plant to packing plant—sounded
a lot like meth’s trajectory around the country as I tried to trace it back in 1999: there, but never quite visible.

According to a Pew Hispanic Center report in 2005, there are twelve million illegal immigrants in the United States. Eight
hundred and fifty thousand more arrive every year, the report found, along with the fact that 25 percent of all agricultural
jobs in the United States are done by illegal immigrants. The link between the agricultural business, meatpacking, and illegal
immigration would appear to be self-evident. As University of Missouri sociologist William Heffernan says, “Cracking down
on illegal immigration would cripple the [food production] system.” What also appears to be true is that the DTOs employ a
miniscule percentage of the illegal immigrants in this country. Ironically, that fractional number is harder still to police
within an ever-expanding multitude of people that is overwhelmingly law-abiding.

But there’s also a more subtle connection between meth, immigration, and the food industry. That relationship is driven by
the conceit that drugs, like viruses, attack weak hosts. Or, to put it another way, narcotics and poverty—along with the loss
of hope and place that Clay Hallberg has described—mutually reinforce one another.

Consider what used to happen in Oelwein, Iowa, before the large-scale consolidation in the 1980s and ’90s of almost every
niche of the food-production chain. Corn farmers, such as James and Donna Lein, would have bought seed from the local seed
company. Once harvested, that corn would go to a grain elevator, also locally owned. It would be shipped to a small feedlot
in order to fatten cattle raised in Nebraska, Wyoming, Florida, or Arizona; or perhaps it would go to a dairy in northern
Missouri, a chicken farm in Indiana, or a pork outfit in Kansas. The variables were infinite, and the market was dynamic.
The barge, truck, or railroad car that carried the grain was likely independently owned, too, as would have been the pigs,
cows, and chickens it fed. At each stage, the price would have to be “discovered” as multiple potential customers vied to
handle the product, with competition keeping the price “true,” or fair, in the context of the marketplace.

Eventually, the Oelwein corn used to feed sows in Topeka might return to Oelwein in the form of hocks to be disassembled,
packaged, and shipped at the Iowa Ham plant by people like Roland Jarvis. From there, a whole new market, just as complex
and multifaceted, would take over in order to distribute the food and sell it at a retail level, perhaps at the grocery once
owned by the Leo family (which today is an IGA). James and Donna Lein would have been the essential building blocks in a vibrant
system in which the variables contributed at all stages to what’s called the “social capital” of rural communities. In circulatory
terms, there was blood flow even in the capillaries.

Beginning with the precedent set in 1987 with the IBP takeover of Hormel in Ottumwa—and the subsequent takeover of Iowa Ham
by Gillette—a few companies would come to control most of the U.S. food business. Today, according to sociologists like Heffernan,
the dynamism essential to the marketplace has been lost because there is no longer a multifaceted context. Price discovery
no longer happens; the value chain is controlled by a limited number of entities. Seed is not sold; it’s biogenetically engineered
by companies like Monsanto, which entered a joint venture with Cargill in 1998. Cargill—not the farmer—owns the corn that
is grown, too, because it’s more than likely that the farmer, who would once have chosen a buyer for his crop, has been contracted
to sell only to Cargill. In the Illinois and Ohio river valleys, Cargill owns 50 percent of the grain elevators and other
storage facilities. Along with Tyson, Swift and Co., and the National Beef Packing Company, Cargill owns 83.5 percent of the
beef packing industry. Cargill, Hormel, ConAgra, and Carolina Turkey own 51 percent of turkey production and packing. Cargill
is number one in flour milling; number two in ethanol production and in animal feed plants, producing nine million tons a
year; and number three in soybean crushing. If you are a corn farmer almost anywhere from Pennsylvania to Iowa, you are likely
to work for Cargill in at least one of several ways. Even in places like Fayette County, Iowa, where Cargill’s presence is
implicit rather than explicit, family farms must grow to an enormous size in order to compete. This squeezes out all but the
heartiest souls, like the Leins, who care enough about their way of life to essentially take a vow of poverty.

Douglas Constance characterizes the changes in rural America in terms of Karl Marx’s critique of the theory of political economy
posited by Adam Smith. With many buyers and many sellers, says Constance, there is perfect competition and no need for government
intervention. Smith’s “invisible hand of capitalism” works, in theory, to effect the highest amount of economic blood flow
at all levels. In reality, says Constance, Marx’s countertheory has unfortunately proved more insightful. Strapped with the
mandate to “grow or die,” businesses are encouraged to cannibalize competition until there are no longer many buyers and many
sellers, but rather, many buyers and an increasingly limited number of sellers. The flow of capital is dammed up. Once competition
has been annihilated, Constance says, the surviving companies, like Cargill, begin to effect political decisions through their
enormous lobbying capabilities. The government no longer governs unimpeded: it does so in tandem with the major companies,
just as Marx predicted. It was less than a century ago that Teddy Roosevelt made his reputation by “busting up the trusts”
that had become too powerful. Those “trusts,” not coincidentally, were in large part the industrial meat-packers of the early
twentieth century.

The ability to influence the governmental decision-making process is something the U.S. food and pharmaceutical industries
share with the five Mexican DTOs. The two catchphrases repeated by John McCain and Barack Obama in the lead-up to the 2008
presidential election were “earmarks” and “pork barrel spending.” Both expressions are, like the “trusts” of Roosevelt’s time,
meant to imply the depth and unhealthiness of the relationship between the federal government and major corporations, be they
in the food, the oil, or the defense industry.

One former DEA official who spent eight years in Mexico told me that the DTOs—because of their wealth, their propensity for
violence, and the sheer numbers of people they employ both directly and indirectly—have potentially more lobbying power than
any legal business in that nation. Fortunately, the comparison between the traffickers’ and the food industry’s ability to
sway government ends with the ungovernable violence that accompanies attempts by Mexico City to curtail the drug trade. Unfortunately,
the same American immigration policy that provides a low-wage workforce ideal for the food industry is what keeps the DTOs
in business. That’s to say that the DTOs do not directly influence the U.S. government. There is no earmarking for the Arellano
Felix Organization (AFO) or the Gulf Cartel. But by directly influencing the Mexican government, the AFO and the Gulf Cartel,
along with the other three DTOs, do in fact play a role in U.S. politics, for the interests of the DTOs are aligned with those
of the likes of Cargill and ADM. So, too, are the interests of the DTOs served by unrestricted free trade, which has been
a common priority of both governments at least since NAFTA. A key component of George W. Bush’s first victory, in 2000, was
his appeal to Mexican Americans, which he engineered in part by appearing with then-president Vicente Fox of Mexico to appeal
for a more open border. In the five trafficking capitals, from Tijuana to Matamoros, there must have been dancing in the streets.

By 2006, it was clear that the Combat Meth Act would require two things in order for it to work. First, the Mexican government
would have to stand up to the DTOs by making it more difficult for them to import bulk pseudoephedrine. Second, the U.S. government
would have to stand up to Big Ag and Big Pharma by forcing the former to curtail its employment of illegals and the latter
to make cold medicine from something other than pseudoephedrine.

What’s interesting is that the man who stood at the nexus of the immigration debate raging throughout the U.S. government
in 2005 and 2006 is the very congressman who all but single-handedly pushed the Combat Meth Act through: Representative Mark
Souder, Republican of Indiana. At the same time Souder was working on the meth legislation, he was an outspoken proponent
of President Bush’s plan to solve the “border issue” by heavily reinvesting in technological strategies like eye scans and
drone planes. In Souder’s politics, it’s possible to see almost all of the ironies and complexities of the meth epidemic in
stark relief.

Back in October 2005, I went to visit Representative Souder in Washington, D.C. Souder’s district, which includes Fort Wayne,
in northeastern Indiana, is home to several poultry plants run by Tyson. The area is much like that around Ottumwa and Oelwein:
overwhelmingly agricultural, with one dominant type of employment and many smaller places that have been struggling economically
since the mid-1980s. The Third District is also, as Souder put it, “defined by its meth problem.”

At the time, a year before the passage of the Combat Meth Act, Souder was the chairman of the Congressional Subcommittee on
Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources as well as a member of the Homeland Security Committee. As such, he had
three principal obsessions: meth, immigration, and terrorism. The immigration debate had reached a boiling point within the
Republican Party, even as President Bush was putting together a policy that would be put forth in his January 2006 State of
the Union address. Bush would recommend the use of technology and National Guard troops—along with fence construction—to secure
the largely uninhabited and invisible “line” between Mexico and the United States. Souder, like many representatives of both
parties, insisted the president was right: technology would stop illegals from entering the country.

Souder took for granted American’s dependence on immigrant labor—that is, the idea that large companies must be able to pay
as little as possible in order to remain relevant in a global economy. Souder also worried deeply about immigration as a contentious
divide that threatened to tear the Republican Party in half. That day in his office, Souder described the party’s growing
schism this way: some Republicans saw immigrants as a necessary evil, and others were on what Souder called the “We Don’t
Want Them Here” side. The former camp included businesses like the meatpacking plants. On the other side, said Souder, were
the people who think the illegal Mexicans and other immigrants take jobs from Americans. “Not necessarily racist,” said Souder,
“but they don’t want them around.”