Smuggler Nation (53 page)

The U.S. interdiction offensive in the 1980s disrupted not only the traditional routes for cocaine smuggling through the Caribbean and South Florida but also the favored method of such smuggling: light aircraft. Extending the U.S. radar net from the Southeast to the Southwest forced much of the trade out of the air. The United States had built what one senior customs official described as a “Maginot Line of radar” across the border that drastically curtailed air smuggling.
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Washington drug warriors boasted that the sharp drop in air smuggling demonstrated the effectiveness of interdiction. But the actual effect was to redirect rather than reduce the drug flow. With much of the traffic pushed out of the air, road transportation networks through Mexico to the U.S. market became a much more integral part of the cocaine trade. And the Mexican organizations that controlled smuggling along these routes were more than willing to sell their services—off-loading, storing, and smuggling—to Colombia’s cocaine exporters.

As Salinas assumed the Mexican presidency in December 1988, he faced the daunting twin tasks of coping with a more powerful and internationally connected Mexican drug-smuggling business (thanks largely to the “success” of U.S. interdiction in the Caribbean and south Florida) and dealing with rising U.S. political expectations that Mexico demonstrate much greater commitment to doing something about it. Salinas therefore launched an aggressive campaign to revitalize the Mexican antidrug program, declaring that drug trafficking was the number one security threat facing the nation. He reorganized and greatly expanded the country’s drug-control apparatus, which was particularly impressive given that it occurred during a time of deep cuts in overall government spending. The resources devoted to drug control by the Mexican attorney general’s office tripled from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. Drug control came to dominate the Mexican criminal justice system. Salinas also extended the antidrug role of the military, with about one-third of the military’s budget devoted to the effort by the end of the 1980s. Militarization fit well with the new emphasis on defining drugs as a national security threat.

As the Salinas government beefed up its efforts on the Mexican side of the border, U.S. drug-control strategists built up interdiction efforts
on their side. The enforcement-induced shift in drug smuggling from the Southeast to the Southwest provided the main rationale. As the Bush administration reported in 1991, “the success of interdiction in the southeastern United States and the Caribbean islands and Sea has caused drug smugglers to shift their focus towards Mexico as a primary transfer point into the United States.” As a result, “resources have been enhanced along the Southwest Border.” Concretely, that meant 175 new Customs Service inspectors, 200 more Border Patrol agents, twenty-three more canine drug-detection teams, and increased funds for “capital assets such as fencing, ground sensors, traffic checkpoints, aerostats, and other equipment to detect smugglers.”
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Between 1988 and 1993, Customs increased the number of southwest border inspectors by 41 percent and investigators by 21 percent. While Customs focused on the ports of entry, the Border Patrol was designated the lead law enforcement agency for drug interdiction between ports of entry. New fencing projects were initiated to deter drug-laden vehicles from entering the U.S. at unauthorized crossing points.

The border also became much more militarized. As part of the Pentagon’s expanded interdiction role, Joint Task Force Six was established, based at Fort Bliss, Texas. The task force involved units of some seventy infantrymen armed with M16 rifles; they were divided into camouflaged four-man teams to cover designated thirty-mile segments of the border. In fiscal year 1990, the task force conducted twenty operations in support of border drug interdiction. By fiscal year 1992 the number of missions had increased to 408.
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Teams of National Guardsmen were also drafted into counterdrug work, deployed to remote border posts to monitor smuggling in rural areas and to ports of entry for cargo inspection.

The impressive quantitative results of the drug enforcement offensive—more crops eradicated, more traffickers arrested, and more drugs seized—were officially touted as evidence of unprecedented U.S. and Mexican resolve and cooperation in fighting drugs. Mexico boasted that it was confiscating more drugs than any other country in the region—and indeed more drugs were seized during Salinas’s first year in office than in the previous six years combined.
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Year after year, the State Department offered glowing reviews of Mexico’s antidrug record. The antidrug performance touted by both U.S. and Mexican officials
helped preserve the upbeat mood in U.S.-Mexico relations on the eve of passing NAFTA.

At the same time as the Salinas government was renegotiating its economic partnership with Washington, Mexican smugglers were renegotiating the terms of their partnership with Colombia’s cocaine exporters. In the beginning of this business alliance, the Mexicans were simply paid in cash for moving Colombian cocaine across the southwestern border, $1,000–$2,000 for every kilogram. But as the relationship matured, and the Colombians faced growing law enforcement pressure at home and abroad, the leverage of the Mexican smugglers grew. As a result, they increasingly demanded payment in the form of product: 40 to 50 percent of every cocaine shipment, which in turn expanded their own distribution networks, especially in the western parts of the United States. This increased the Mexican share of cocaine profits five to ten times, dramatically changing the financial stakes of smuggling across the border.
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At the same time, Mexican drug traffickers diversified by taking over much of the U.S. market for methamphetamines—thanks in part to U.S. crackdowns on domestic producers. Just as had been the case with the U.S. offensive against Colombian traffickers, the offensive against domestic methamphetamine producers played right into the hands of Mexican smugglers.

Mexico’s growing stake in the drug trade produced more sophisticated and organized smuggling organizations along the border’s main transportation hubs, the most prominent of which were the Gulf, Tijuana, and Juarez drug-trafficking groups. Their meteoric rise would later prompt the head of the DEA to describe them as “the premier law enforcement threat facing the United States.”
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The Mexican government calculated that the gross revenue of Mexican drug-smuggling organizations reached $30 billion in 1994; U.S. officials estimated the profits at $10 billion, putting it ahead of Mexico’s leading legal export, oil.
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Such figures, of course, necessarily represented “guesstimates,” at best, but even the most conservative numbers indicated the drug trade had become a leading economic force in Mexico.

Ironically, the most visible operational achievements of the U.S. and Mexican antidrug campaigns were actually aided by an expanding drug trade: well-publicized increases in seizures and arrests on both sides
of the border were partly made possible by the fact that there were more drugs to seize and smugglers to arrest. Similarly, record eradication levels were facilitated by bumper crops of marijuana and opium poppy. Impressive drug-enforcement statistics masked the fact that the Mexican crackdown was selective: old-guard smugglers were targeted, while the business of other smugglers expanded. Record arrest and seizure statistics did not lead to less smuggling but simply created openings for more aggressive smugglers on the rise.

As more government resources were devoted to drug control, smugglers also devoted more resources to paying off those doing the controlling. Law enforcement had to be bribed because it could not be entirely bypassed or bullied. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that rather than reforming the criminal justice system, Salinas had simply expanded the size of an already corruption-plagued policing apparatus. The perverse result was to boost opportunities for collecting bribes. The financial rewards of drug enforcement created enormous competition within law enforcement agencies for assignment to key posts along the smuggling corridors. Eduardo Valle, who left the Mexican attorney general’s office toward the end of the Salinas administration, claimed that while he was in office the top Mexican drug-enforcement posts were auctioned off to the highest bidder. The price of a particular law enforcement position, he said, depended on changes in drug-smuggling routes along the border: “In Coahuila, for example, there are four or five entrances to the United States. If one crossing point is closed, the price of a federal police chief’s position in that area goes down because the post is irrelevant, but the price of the police chief positions in other places goes up. This is openly discussed inside the federal police.”
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The higher the law enforcement position, the higher the payoff. For example, a notebook recovered from the smuggling organization run by Juan Garcia Abrego of the Gulf trafficking organization included a list of payoffs: $1 million to the national commander of Mexico’s Federal Judicial Police, $500,000 to the force’s operations chief, and $100,000 to the federal police commanders in the city of Matamoros.
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Mexico’s response to the growing corruption problem within the police was to turn even more to the military for help. The antidrug role of the Mexican military, though enhanced during the Salinas years, expanded much further under President Ernesto Zedillo. By early 1998,
military personnel occupied top law enforcement posts in two-thirds of Mexico’s states.
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For example, more than one hundred military personnel were brought into the Federal Attorney General’s Office in the border state of Chihuahua. In some states, such as Nuevo Leon, the Federal Judicial Police forces were entirely replaced by soldiers.
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By the end of the decade, the Mexican secretaries of defense and navy acknowledged that drug control had become the primary mission of their services.
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Yet sending in the military in response to corruption within the police also brought with it greater risk of corruption within the military. Indeed, in early 1997 the head of the federal antidrug agency, General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was arrested on charges of working for the Juarez trafficking organization. The agency, which had been patterned after the DEA when it first opened in 1993, was quickly dismantled. Just a few weeks before the scandal, the White House drug policy director, Barry McCaffrey, had described the general as “an honest man who is a no-nonsense field commander of the Mexican army who’s now been sent to bring to the police force the same kind of aggressiveness and reputation he had in uniform.”
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No other army commander had displayed more antidrug initiative. The problem was its selective focus, largely leaving the Juarez traffickers untouched while targeting other trafficking groups. This scandal, although an unusually high-profile one, was not an isolated incident. The next month, General Alfredo Navarro Lara was arrested for offering $1 million a month to the top federal justice official in Baja California on behalf of the Tijuana drug-trafficking organization.
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A White House report indicated that thirty-four senior Mexican military officers had been targeted for disciplinary action as a result of drug-related corruption.
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Meanwhile, smugglers were increasingly hiding their drug shipments within the rising tide of commercial trucks, railcars, and passenger vehicles crossing the border. The NAFTA-encouraged boom in cross-border traffic had the side effect of creating a much more challenging job for those border agents charged with the task of weeding out the illegitimate flows from the legitimate ones—a challenge that in turn provided the rationale for a further infusion of law enforcement resources at the official ports of entry. As the 1999
National Drug Control Strategy Report
explained, “Rapidly growing commerce between the United States and
Mexico will complicate our efforts to keep drugs out of cross-border traffic. Since the southwest border is presently the most porous of the nation’s borders, it is there that we must mount a determined coordinated effort to stop the flow of drugs.”
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Concern that drug smugglers might benefit from NAFTA was deliberately not discussed during the negotiations over the free-trade accord. “This was in the ‘too hot to handle’ category,” noted Gary Hufbauer of the Institute for International Economics, but “it’s a painfully obvious problem.”
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An internal report written by an intelligence officer at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City claimed that cocaine traffickers were establishing factories, warehouses, and trucking companies in anticipation of the expected boom in cross-border commerce. Some traffickers reportedly even hired trade consultants to determine what products move most swiftly through border inspection under NAFTA guidelines.
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NAFTA, it turned out, was good for both licit and illicit commerce, though this was conveniently glossed over by NAFTA boosters eager not to let the drug issue derail the trade agreement.

The sheer volume of border crossings fostered an ideal environment for drug smuggling. By 1997, more than two hundred thousand vehicles were coming into the United States from Mexico every day. That year, U.S. border officials searched more than a million commercial trucks and railway cars crossing from Mexico, and found cocaine in only six.
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The enforcement challenge, in other words, was the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack—except the haystack kept getting bigger and the needle was actively trying to avoid detection. Trade between the United States and Mexico tripled between 1993 and 2000, most of which was transported via commercial cargo conveyances across the border. Such conveyances, of course, could carry illegal goods as easily as legal goods. One truck that was stopped near San Diego was smuggling eight tons of cocaine stuffed into cans of jalapño peppers. U.S. officials believed that the shipment belonged to the owner of one of Mexico’s largest shipping companies.
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