Authors: Ioan Grillo
America’s stakes in the drug war were raised even higher with the February 2011 murder of U.S. agent Jaime Zapata in the state of San Luis Potosi. Zapata, working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, was attacked by alleged Zetas, who surrounded his SUV on the highway. When Zapata pointed to his diplomatic plates, a gunman retorted, “Me vale madre,”—a phrase that can be most closely translated as, “I don’t give a fuck.” Zetas shot Zapata and also wounded his partner with two bullets. It was unclear if the ICE agents were deliberately targeted or had just happened to drive into a Zeta area. But whatever the motive, the first murder of a U.S. agent in Mexico since Camarena put the spotlight on America’s mission south of the river.
As presidential candidates vied to lead Mexico in 2012, political think tanks on both sides of the border questioned what a new drug-war strategy could be. Why did so many arrests and seizures only inflate violence? they asked. How could Mexico train better police? Why did drug gangs have an endless army of narco assassins? To answer these questions, one needs to look at the inner workings of the Mexican drug business and what drives it to the relentless killing. We now turn to this flesh and blood of El Narco.
PART
II
CHAPTER
8
Thus ended my career as a smuggler, —a career which however it may be calculated to gratify a hard and enterprising spirit and to call forth all the latent energies of the soul, is fraught with difficulty and danger; in following which many and various have been the expedients to which I have had recourse in order to escape detection, baffle pursuit and elude the vigilance of those indefatigable picaroons which everywhere line our coasts.
—
JOHN
RATTENBURY
,
MEMOIRS
OF
A
SMUGGLER
, 1837
To a hard-core drug aficionado, the evidence room on the Mexican army base in Culiacán, Sinaloa, would be a wet dream; it has enough crystal meth, cocaine, grass, pills, and heroin to keep a human being stoned, tripping, high, low, spun out, and seeing fairies for a million years. And then some.
It is a fort within the fort, protected by barbed wire and closed-circuit cameras, which, we are reminded, will be recording our journalist visit one sunny December afternoon. While they call it an evidence “room,” it is actually the size of a warehouse, with no windows and one hefty steel door. Every time this portcullis is opened, federal agents cut off special seals, and when it is closed, they put on new ones, to make sure—and show us—that no troops are pilfering the goodies. On the streets of American cities, the treasure trove would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
General Eduardo Solórzano guides us through the chamber of sinful substances. He is a squat and square-jawed soldier in his fifties with glasses perched on the end of his nose and a black vest packed with beepers, radios, and cell phones that he keeps barking into in a curt, commanding tone. He accompanies his tour with comments in measured military language while occasionally getting excited at finding samples of rare types of narcotics amid the bags, bricks, and bundles.
As we step inside, a cocktail of mystic toxic smells greets us. To the left, towers of cling-wrapped marijuana loom above our heads. To the right are huge sacks of cut-up ganja plants and enough seeds to give birth to a forest of psychedelic weed. Walking forward, we stumble into a pile of giant, blue metal saucepans of the type Mexicans use in restaurants to cook up broths such as posole and consommé. General Solórzano lifts up a lid of one and flashes a knowing grin: “This is crystal.” He smiles. The white sludge of raw methamphetamine fills the pan like a foul stew of ice and sour milk. In a corner, we catch sight of a much older Sinaloan product, black-tar heroin, which looks like jet-black Play-Doh, oozing out of yellow cans.
An inventory neatly lists the name of each type of drug next to a quantity in kilos; they currently total more than seven tons. Periodically, a bureaucrat in an office somewhere will sign the order for a certain batch of heroin or marijuana or crystal meth to be carted away and burned on a bonfire. But stocks are quickly replenished by a steady supply of new produce garnered in weekly raids on safe houses scattered all around Culiacán and in nearby villages and ranches.
On the afternoon of our visit, one such load conveniently arrives for us to photograph. A truck rolls up and young soldiers move with military orderliness to unload hundreds of brown packages into the warehouse. General Solórzano grabs one, reaches into his black vest for a box cutter, and carefully slices a triangle in the packaging to reveal white powder crammed into a brick shape.
“Cocaina!”
he says triumphantly. A lab technician quickly proves him right. The white-coated specialist conducts the test using a portable kit, which looks like a car toolbox. He selects a vial of pink solution, mixes it with a small sample of the captured blow, and it instantly turns blue—indicating a positive match.
General Solórzano, a foot lower than me but with shoulders twice as broad, turns round and stares me in the face. “Taste it,” he says, unsmiling. “Go on.” I look round at the other officers, agents, and technicians to see if he is joking. They all have sturdy straight faces. So I dab my little finger onto the cocaine brick and stick it into my mouth. Cocaine has an unforgettable bittersweet flavor, neither tasty nor disgusting, like a prescription medicine you cautiously swallow and are then relieved that it isn’t so bad. “You will feel that your tongue falls asleep,” General Solórzano says, a grin now spreading across his face. “This is pure, uncut cocaine.” My tongue certainly does feel numb. And I also feel a little giddy. But then again, maybe that is from walking in the hot sun. Or maybe it is from earlier in the day when we watched soldiers cut up a whole field of captured marijuana and set fire to it, sparking a golden green blaze that unleashed clouds of ganja smoke wafting off into the horizon in these arid, jaggy mountains.
I once interviewed the chief FBI officer of a major city on the U.S. side of the Mexican border. Before I turned up, he had taken the trouble to read some of my articles. Speaking with a thick New York twang, he told me he had spent fifteen years by the Rio Grande making cases against drug traffickers. He went on, “I enjoyed your stories. When I get new recruits, I tell them that is exactly the way not to look at the drug business.”
I betrayed a miffed look. What had I got wrong? I asked. He replied that it wasn’t that I had got anything wrong. It was that the points I focused on were not going to help make cases. In our journalistic vision of the Mexican drug trade, we see stories of colorful kingpins and shifting maps of cartel territory. But on the ground level, the drug trade doesn’t see that. It is about movement of narcotics, pure and simple. Drugs get produced, transported, sold, and snorted. Just follow those drugs and you make cases, he said. Forget about folk stories of kingpins and carefully drawn maps of cartel boundaries.
He made a good point. Stripped down its basics, El Narco—or Mexican drug trafficking—is just an industry. And like any industry, the mechanics of making and selling products are more fundamental than the companies and CEOs calling the shots. The evidence room in the army base in Culiacán is a fantastic display of this industry. It shows the colossal fruits of drug trafficking: tons of produce in hundreds of different packets and pans. Who knows how many different cartels or kingpins put money into these goods? And who cares? These mind-bending substances have passed through thousands of hands in fields, laboratories, on ships, airplanes, and in trucks. And they all end up together in one room, being shown off to journalists to demonstrate Mexico’s fight against trafficking, but having the reverse effect of illustrating how incredibly productive the country’s industry is.
Mexico’s drug industry never sleeps. Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, somewhere new plants grow, chemicals react, transporters carry loads, burros cross the border. And every day, somewhere in the United States, Americans buy drugs that passed through Mexico and inhale them into their lungs, snort them up their noses, or inject them into their veins. Kingpins rise and fall, teenagers experiment, and old addicts overdose, and all the time the drug machine keeps ticking on with the steady rhythm of the earth circling the sun.
We all know the Mexican drug trade is so productive that it is one of the country’s biggest industries. It rivals oil exports in helping stabilize the peso. It directly provides thousands of jobs, many in poor rural areas that most need them. Its profits spill over into a number of other sectors, particularly hotels, cattle ranches, racehorses, record labels, football teams, and movie companies.
But as an industry we have little reliable data on it. Mostly we have estimates. Then we have more estimates based on estimates, x factors multiplied by y factors creating misty, doubtful numbers passed off as statistics. Both the media and officials help feed the misinformation machine. We all love to pack a story or press release with figures.
Forbes
magazine estimates that Chapo Guzmán is worth $1 billion—conveniently bang on the number with straight zeros. So what is their magic formula for that number? Pretty much, a wild guess. Back in the 1970s, DEA said that Mexicans temporarily controlled three quarters of the American heroin market after narcs hit the French Connection. A year later, it said that Colombian marijuana dealers controlled three quarters of the American weed market after they hit the Mexicans. What a statistical coincidence! Or is three quarters just a standard estimate that really means a whole lot of drugs?
However, the Mexican drug industry is so important that we have to try to come to terms with its scale. The most solid figures are from busts on the United States’ southern border. These are physical quantities of dope on the scales that can be compared year after year. And it is clearly being trafficked from Mexico to provide to American users.
The overall seizures confirm, just in case anyone doubted, that a shitload of narcotics are moving north. In 2009, customs agents tossed cars and walkers going through the official ports of entry to nab a total of 298.6 metric tons of marijuana, heroin, cocaine, and crystal meth. Meanwhile, border patrol agents who roam deserts and rivers seized a whopping 1,159 tons of marijuana, along with 10 tons of cocaine and 3 tons of heroin. These are enough drugs to get hundreds of millions of people wasted and would have been worth billions of dollars on street corners. But nobody can say how many tons of drugs they didn’t catch. That number, the most important one, becomes another unknown.
These border seizures have held up year after year. Back in 2006, customs nabbed 211 tons of drugs; in 2007, it to swung up to 262 tons; in 2008, it tilted back down to 242 tons; then in 2009, it shot up to 298 tons.
1
Customs agents say the latest high may be the result of more agents, but they can’t be sure; it could mean smugglers are busier. What is clear is that President Felipe Calderón’s war on drugs and the thousands of shootings, busts, and massacres are not slowing the narcotics heading north.
On the border with Ciudad Juárez, drug seizures did fall as violence exploded—from 90 tons in 2007; to 75 tons in 2008; and 73 tons in 2009. But they were still higher than the 50 tons seized in 2006 when there was a fraction of the number of assassinations. Over on the San Diego–Tijuana crossings, seizures went up from 103 tons in 2007 to 108 tons in 2008, when fights between rival cartel factions left record piles of corpses.
This may seem all sound like masturbatory bean counting. It really isn’t. These cold figures have frightening human implications: Mexican drug cartels can still operate at full capacity while they fight bloody battles with each other and the government. In the drug business, it seems, a war economy functions perfectly well. Gangsters can go on having downtown shoot-outs with soldiers, leaving piles of severed heads, and still be trucking the same quantity of dope. That doesn’t bode well for peace.
The formula for Mexicans to make drug money is hard to beat.
Take cocaine. A Colombian peasant can sell a bundle of coca leaves from a two-acre field for about $80. After it goes through its first simple chemical process, known as a
chagra
, it can be sold as a kilo of coca paste in the Colombian highlands for about $800. This paste will then be put through a crystallizing laboratory to become a kilo brick of pure cocaine—like that General Solórzano showed me. According to the United Nations, such a brick in 2009 was worth $2,147 in Colombian ports, rocketing up to $34,700 by the time it got over the U.S. border, and $120,000 when it was sold on the New York streets.
2
The traffic and distribution of the drug, the part run by Mexican gangsters, nets a 6,000 percent profit from the narco to the nose. If you calculate the cost all the way from the farm it is 150,000 percent. It is one of the most profitable businesses on the planet. Who else can offer that kind of return for your dollar?
Mexican cartels have emissaries in Colombia who place their cocaine orders. But Mexican gangs get Colombians to actually deliver the disco powder to them in Mexico or Central America, especially Panama and Honduras. The way the business has developed has made Mexicans traffickers the top dogs over the Colombian producers. DEA Andean Bureau chief Jay Bergman explained it to me using more great metaphors:
“Who really calls the shots in a global supply-and-demand economy? Is it Mexican cartels or Colombian cocaine suppliers? Is it the manufacturer or the distributor?
“In a legitimate economic model, is it Colgate or Walmart that calls the shots? It is actually Walmart who says, ‘This is what we want to pay for it, this is a unit price, this is when we want it delivered, and this is how it’s going to be,’ and Colgate’s position is, ‘As long as we are making a profit, as long as we are not losing money, we are willing to work on those terms. And the more you can move my product, the bigger discount we will give you, and you get to really call the shots. Tell us where you want it, tell us how you want it, put it on the shelves where you want it, just get it sold.’ … That is the evolved cocaine market we are dealing with.”