Operation Snowcap was the code name for DEA’s 1987 multinational cocaine-control effort in Central and South America. The approach was twofold: to seize large amounts of cocaine and to cripple Colombian distribution routes that passed through Guatemala. By almost any measure, Snowcap—coupled with operations to limit distribution via the so-called Caribbean Corridor feeding the Miami port of entry—was a huge success, resulting in a dramatic decrease in the amount of Colombian cocaine entering the United States. But Snowcap also had an unforeseen consequence: it redirected the distribution of cocaine from the Colombian cartels to what were then small-time Mexican narco-operations.
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.