At first smuggling from Mexico was more decentralized than that from Europe, hence harder to police. A myriad of small-time smugglers organized a large number of small-scale runs across the border, thereby minimizing the costs of any one seizure. The influx of American dollars into the Sinaloan heartland enriched and transformed the gomeros, who were increasingly called narcotraficantes (or narcos for short) to signal their elevation in status from mere poppy growers to wealthy international smugglers. They began to adopt a style befitting their new station; in Culiacán they fashioned an entire neighborhood, called Tierra Blanca, and filled it with ostentatious houses.
The operation that broke out of the pack, however, was headquartered in Durango. The Herrera Brothers had been in the business since the 1950s and had established an outpost in Chicago, composed of other members of the extended and extensive clan. Now, with surging U.S. demand, it swelled to major league proportions and by the mid-1970s was moving more than ten tons a year, with a gross retail value of $2 billion. Most Herrera heroin was driven up from Durango to Chicago (a forty-nine-hour nonstop trip) hidden in compartmentalized gas tanks. As the “Heroin Highway” terminated in the Windy City, Chicago usurped New York City’s traditional domination of the wholesale market: roughly a third of the product remained in Chicago; the rest was shipped around the nation on commercial flights. In Durango, the efficient organization of what was now being called the “Mexican Connection” was overseen by members of fifteen interrelated Mexican families, headed by patriarch Jaime Herrera-Nevarez. Managers oversaw the hiring of campesinos, the distribution of poppy seed, the development of new production areas, the oversight of gum collectors, the management of labs, cutting, and shipping. Profits were repatriated — cash was smuggled back in the same gas tanks or increasingly sent via wire transfer (using money orders and Western Union) to financial institutions in Durango City, as much a wholly owned subsidiary as any company town in the United States. Net income after wages, bribes, etc. (which Lupsha and Schlegel estimate at $100 million a year) was invested in ranches, land, dairies, apartments, and resort developments — a tremendous, if illicit, boon to the Mexican economy.
Up north, during Richard Nixon’s presidency (1969–1974), a tremendous amount of energy was being expended contesting the growing influx. Nixon revived Harry Anslinger’s War on Drugs. Psychoactives were again associated with a feared social group — this time the large chunk of American youth that had begun smoking weed, getting high while chortling at late-night screenings of the Anslinger era’s Reefer Madness (1936). Not even Nixon still believed that marijuana drove people to rape and murder, but he did believe, as did many cultural conservatives, that cannabis was doing something worse — undermining American civilization itself.
On July 14, 1969, Nixon sent a Special Message to the Congress on Control of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, in which he declared “the abuse of drugs” to be a “serious national threat to the personal health and safety of millions of Americans.” Americans were not sufficiently aware of the “gravity of the situation,” the President believed, which was why “a new urgency and concerted national policy are needed at the federal level to begin to cope with this growing menace to the general welfare of the United States.”
At the same time, Nixon sent administration officials to Mexico to persuade their counterparts to spray herbicides on marijuana and opium crops. Mexican authorities refused, even those sympathetic to Nixon’s project, fearing the ecocidal consequences: they pointed to the frightening side effects Agent Orange was producing in Vietnam. Balked, Nixon launched Operation Intercept in September 1969, overseen by Attorney General John Mitchell and largely devised by G. Gordon Liddy (both of later Watergate fame), with the (unannounced) goal of bullying Mexico into acquiescence. Two thousand inspectors began meticulously scrutinizing each car that tried to cross the frontier, searching (sometimes strip searching) each person, each vehicle, each piece of luggage (including purses and lunch boxes), backing up traffic for miles, in effect shutting down the border. After twenty painful days and a blistering barrage of complaints from all quarters, Nixon called it off. But it had worked, just as Anslinger’s tactics had. Mexico was strong-armed into launching another Great Campaign (like that begun in 1948), this one submissively entitled Operation Cooperation. Nevertheless, Mexico (which called the joint program Operación CANADOR, an acronym of cannabis and adormidera [poppies]) was able to forestall U.S. demands for aerial defoliation by increasing its own efforts at manual eradication. Mexican soldiers were allowed to hack away at opium poppies and marijuana plants with sticks or machetes, at the price of allowing American law enforcement to enter Mexico and conduct surveillance of their operations.7
Nixon now turned to legislative action, winning passage of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, which consolidated previous federal statutes and increased the authority of federal narcotics agents. Title II — the Controlled Substances Act — provided the legal basis for a war on drugs. As his reelection campaign approached, Nixon plowed ahead, stirring up a full-scale moral panic. Bulling his way past the embarrassing findings of the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse he had established in 1971—it reported there was no evidence marijuana was harmful or addictive and recommended decriminalizing possession — he insisted (in June of that year), using wildly inflated statistics, that the “drug traffic is public enemy number one,” against which “we must wage a total offensive, worldwide, nationwide, government-wide.”
In 1973, once safely (he thought) returned to the White House, Nixon created the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) by executive order. Subsuming the rotted-out Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, along with other agencies, its assigned mission was to “establish a single unified command to combat an all-out global war on the drug menace.” Nixon resigned in 1974, but the DEA — whose raison d’être was permanent war on drugs — would long outlive its creator. At its outset, the DEA had 1,470 special agents and an annual budget of less than $75 million. Today, it has 5,235 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.