Mexico is, according to the U.S. State Department, “a major supplier of heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana” for the U.S. market and “the transit point for more than one half of the cocaine sold in the U.S.” It is also a major money laundering site: The State Department reports that “In recent years international money launderers have turned increasingly to Mexico for initial placement of drug proceeds into the global financial system.”[1]
- The Mexican attorney general’s office estimated that the gross annual income of Mexican traffickers was about $30 billion dollars a year in 1994. Analyst Andrew Reding points out that “even if that sum is exaggerated by a factor of two, [it] vastly outstrip[ped]oil earnings”—some $7 billion for the same year.[2]
- The amount of money laundered in Mexico is so great—estimates range from 4% to 20% of GDP—that if laundering were successfully stopped, it could touch off an economic crisis worse than that sparked by the 1994 peso devaluation.[3]
- According to researcher Carlos Loret de Mola, the drug industry directly employs some 360,000 Mexicans. Nor should the work-generating capacity of the drug control forces be underestimated: The DEA reports that 20,000 Mexican soldiers take part in poppy eradication operations on any given day. [4]
Mexican sociologist Luis Astorga notes that “drug trafficking in Mexico began about sixty years before the Colombians got an important share of the [U.S.] drug market.” Opium poppy has been cultivated in Sinaloa since the 1880s, with exports to the United States soon occurring through Mexicali and Tijuana. By the 1930s, “marijuana production could already be counted in tons in states like Puebla, Guerrero and Tlaxcala.”5 Mexico now produces about 2% of the world’s opium supply, most of this converted into heroin sold in the western part of the United States. It continues to be one of the top foreign suppliers of marijuana to the U.S. market.
In the 1990s, Mexican traffickers began to replace the Colombian cartels as the final importers of cocaine into the United States.6 This represented a major expansion of the Mexican role in the Latin American drug trade, as well as a significant increase in income for the Mexican traffickers. Even more recently, the Mexicans reportedly began to work with the Colombians to import Colombian heroin into the United States, and to make use of more sophisticated Colombian refining techniques to improve Mexican heroin production.[7]
Mexicans are also increasingly involved in methamphetamine production, in the United States as well as in Mexico. According to the DEA, in 1994 Mexican groups began operating “‘super labs’ (laboratories capable of producing in excess of 10 pounds of methamphetamine in one 24-hour cycle) based in Mexico and in California.” Many smaller meth labs also operate in Mexican border states, particularly Baja California.[8]
Astorga stresses that “since the beginning of the drug business” the best-known Mexican traffickers appear to have had close relations with high-ranking politicians and, since the Mexican Revolution, with the state party system created by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). “Controlled, tolerated, or regulated by mighty politicans in northern [Mexican] states, drug trafficking seems to have been a business that was developed from within the power structure,” a situation that continues to this day. In last year’s NACLA Report on the Drug War in the Americas, journalist Julia Reynolds detailed the ties between Mexican banks and politicians and the drug trade in the era of PRI presidents Carlos Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo.[9] In this issue, we report on how political power is linked to the drug industry in Guerrero and other centers of poppy and marijuana production.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JoAnn Kawell is the editor of the NACLA Report
NOTES
1. INCSR, 2001.
2. The figure is cited in Andrew Reding, “Mexico’s Timid Fight Against Drugs,” Journal of Commerce, March 11, 1996. Reding notes that 1994 was the last year the statistic was released.
3. “Lesson for those who want to deny funding to terrorists,” LatinAmerican Weekly Report, September 25, 2001.
4. Loret de Mola interview, “Narcotráfico: el motor de México,” La Prensa, Managua, July 16, 2001. U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, “The Mexican Heroin Trade,” April, 2000, http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/intel/20014/20014.html , p. 5.
5. Luís Astorga, “Drug Trafficking In Mexico: A First General Assessment,” Management of Social Transformations Discussion Paper No. 36, http://www.unesco.org/most/astorga.htm His El siglo de las drogas, (Mexico: Espasa-Hoy, 1996), is a general history of drugs in Mexico.
6. U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, “Drug Trafficking in the United States,” http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/intel/01020/index.html
7. DEA, “The Mexican Heroin Trade.”
8. DEA, “Drug Trafficking in the U.S.,” p. 8.
9. Julia Reynolds, “When Prohibition Meets Free Trade,” NACLA Report , Vol. XXXV, No. 1, July/August 2002. Available online at http://www.nacla.org/art_display.php?art=458
