In the same year, 1947, and largely at the instigation of U.S. authorities, the Miguel Alemán government created the DFS (Dirección Federal de Seguridad or National Security Directorate) which was part political police, part national security agency. Something of a cross between the FBI and the then newly minted CIA, it would work particularly closely with the latter, a token of Mexico’s alignment with the U.S. in the emerging Cold War. The CIA would come to count on DFS spies to provide it with information on the doings of Soviet, Eastern Bloc, and, later, Cuban officials in Mexico. The PRI would employ it as a domestic secret police, tasked with surveillance and repression of dissidents, populists, unionists, Marxists, communists, and other “subversives.”
The DFS quickly strayed into PGR territory, using anti-drug operations as a device for quelling social movements and PRI political adversaries. The DFS also became actively complicit in regulating and profiting from the flow of narcotics to the United States. Colonel Carlos Serrano, a PRI senator and close friend and adviser of President Alemán, had been instrumental (notes Stephen Niblo) in creating the DFS and retained considerable power over its operations. He was believed by the CIA to be “an unscrupulous man, [who] is actively engaged in various illegal enterprises such as the narcotics traffic,” though this was no bar to the CIA’s working with him. The actual head of the DFS, Colonel Marcelino Inurreta (who had been trained by the FBI), and his top deputies were suspected by the U.S. State Department of being deeply involved in moving marijuana and opium.
In 1948, the Mexican government announced a “Great Campaign” to destroy illegal poppy plants. Police agents — supported for the first time by a contingent of soldiers — launched the effort in Sinaloa. During the 1950s the campaign was extended into Baja California, Sonora, Jalisco, Durango, Morelos, Guanajuato, and the Yucatán. Measured against its putative eradicationist goal, the campaign was largely ineffectual. The illegal plantations were scattered over a vast territory and growers who were discovered often bribed officials to leave their crops alone. But the effects of the campaign were nevertheless sweeping. The federal state had succeeded in prying drug policy enforcement from the hands of local caciques, drawn it to the national level, and shown drug dealers exactly who was their new boss. This had the additional if unintended consequence of centralizing the drug trade as well. Local traffickers soon realized that survival and prosperity now depended not only on winning protection from municipal and state authorities but required coming to terms with federal forces — the federal police, the military, the DFS, and PRI officials. That in turn required agglomerating into larger organizations, and expanding their horizons beyond the Sinaloan heartland to embrace the entire country.
CHAPTER THREE. 1960s–1970s
In the 1960s and 1970s, this expansion of the drug industry was boosted further by developments in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East.
Marijuana — which had been the particular province of relatively small slivers of the U.S. population (mostly hipsters, urban blacks, and Mexicans) — now became an item of mass consumption. The boom in usage had an immediate impact on Mexican growers, providing them with a stable price and a steady demand, market advantages traditional crops like beans and corn could not match. Sinaloa alone could not meet the burgeoning demand, and farmers started raising it in neighboring Durango, then over in Jalisco, then in southern states like Oaxaca and Guerrero, transforming marijuana production from a basically low-key Sinaloan operation into a high-volume national industry spread over a dozen states. By 1975, the country was supplying about 95 percent of all marijuana consumed north of the Río Bravo.
Transformations were afoot in the opiate world as well. The heretofore reigning “French Connection” had been based on the transport by Corsican gangsters of raw opium purchased legally in Turkey to laboratories in Marseille, where it was processed into heroin, and then conveyed to New York, from whence mafiosi injected the drug into the continental commercial bloodstream. This complicated system had been set in place back in 1947, as Alfred McCoy has demonstrated, courtesy of the youthful CIA, which had backed Corsican gangsters against the French Communist Party in their battle to control the Marseille docks. By the late 1960s, when the U.S. was getting 80 to 90 percent of its heroin through this network, anxieties about the communists had subsided, while those about heroin dealers had grown, and anti-drug forces gained the upper hand. In 1972, encouraged by the U.S., Turkey banned opium growing. Though they reversed themselves in 1974, by then a series of spectacular busts had seriously crimped the connection, triggering a heroin drought in East Coast cities.
The period was also marked by spectacular corruption cases. Not long after a 1971 film (hailed an earlier record police seizure of drugs in New York City, it was revealed that most of that confiscated heroin had been spirited out of the New York Police Department Property Clerk’s fortress and replaced with flour and cornstarch. Later, another three hundred pounds of stored heroin and cocaine, $73 million worth, flew the police coop, making it the then biggest robbery in United States history. The great bulk of the elite NYPD Special Investigations Unit (popularly known as “the Princes of the City”) was cashiered for corruption.The French Connection)
The feds, too, were wracked by corruption. As Douglas Valentine shows, Anslinger’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics was honeycombed with it. This was a state of affairs from which he averted his eyes until his retirement in 1962, only to have it blow up in a 1968 investigation, which demonstrated that the bureau was itself a major source of supply and protection of heroin. The report was suppressed, as Edward Epstein notes, but virtually every agent in the New York branch was indicted and convicted, fired, or forced to resign. The remains of Anslinger’s operation were subsumed in 1968 by the new Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD) placed within the Justice Department. This successor agency was itself soon riddled with corruption. So much so that its chief appealed to the CIA to help clean up its house which, the CIA agreed, had been “heavily infiltrated by dishonest and corrupt elements, who were believed to have ties with the narcotics smuggling industry.” In a parallel to events in Mexico, the regional office of the BNDD achieved a symbiosis with local mafiosi, accepting regular bribes to arrest only those dealers nominated by syndicate, which allowed federal agents to accumulate impressive arrest records and rapid promotion, while eliminating unwanted competitors for the mob.
With the French Connection disconnected, retailers looked elsewhere for wholesale suppliers. Mexico was the obvious choice, given its proximity to the United States, DFS willingness to ride shotgun for traffickers, an ideal geography and climate for a quality product, and an underclass of needy agricultural workers. The switchover happened rapidly. “Mexican mud,” a brown tar-like heroin, began flowing north. Estimates suggest that in 1972, Mexico had supplied between 10 and 20 percent of the U.S. market for heroin; by 1975, this had increased to between 70 and 90 percent of a market that had itself (William Walker notes in his Drug Control) nearly doubled in size.