To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War by John Gibler Read Free Book Online Page A

prescription for most drugs. The 1919 Volstead Act inaugurated the Prohibition Era that included alcohol and lasted until 1933. Harry Anslinger was the first ever U.S. “drug czar” and ran the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962. Anslinger pushed for and defended the criminalization of marijuana from 1937 on with disinformation, lies, and bullying. He accused medical researchers who published a report finding that marijuana use “does not lead to any physical, mental, or moral degeneration,” of being, “unsavory persons engaged in the illicit marijuana trade” (quoted in The Pursuit of Oblivion ). Anslinger’s tenor coincided with perhaps the first instance of the Central Intelligence Agency knowingly funding and arming drug traffickers, in this case Corsican gangs, to attack trade unionists and communists organizing among dockworkers in Marseille.
    In the 1950s and ’60s, millions of Americans experimented with drugs. Vibrant countercultures emerged within a broader movement of discarding the norms and mores of a rigid, racist, and oppressive society. Those of the dominant culture responded by further demonizing drug use, conflating all forms of protest against racism and the Vietnam War with criminality—drug use—and launched the so-called War on Drugs.
    Two months after taking office, Richard Nixon set up the Special Presidential Task Force Relating to Narcotics, Marijuana and Dangerous Drugs. The task force, in a June 6, 1969, report, said that Mexicans were “responsible for the marijuana and drug abuse problem.” The task force recommended that Mexico “be forced into a program of defoliation of the marijuana plants.” How to force them? Kate Doyle of the National Security Archive, put it this way, “The weapon used to bludgeon Mexico into compliance would be a massive surprise attack on Mexico’s border by U.S. law-enforcement personnel, code named ‘Operation Intercept.’”
    On September 21, 1969, Nixon launched Operation Intercept. The plan was simple; rigorously inspect every person, car, and plane arriving in the southern United States from Mexico. This virtually shut down the 1,969-mile border. Nixon did not inform Mexican President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz—who oversaw the army massacre of hundreds of students in Tlatelolco Plaza on October 2, 1968—of his plans. The unilateral decision incensed Mexican officials. The border traffic jams and the economic threat to Mexican exporters brought the Mexican government quickly to unequal and unfavorable negotiations. Mexico dispatched a delegation to Washington. and by October 10, the Díaz Ordaz administration had “convinced” the Nixon Administration to call off Operation Intercept, while the Nixon administration “convinced” their Mexican counterparts to join Operation Cooperation and through it the United States’ War on Drugs—a term Nixon used publicly for the first time on June 17, 1971.
    Seven years after Operation Intercept, in September 1976, the Mexican government launched a military defoliation program called Operation Condor. Five thousand soldiers and 350 federal police, working together with thirty U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents stationed in Mexico and using forty airplanes—some from the United States—attacked and destroyed tens of thousands of acres of marijuana fields in Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Durango, and Guerrero.
    At that time there were no known transnational drug cartels in Mexico. The relatively small marijuana growers and traffickers in Sinaloa, however, fled Operation Condor and relocated in cities across the country. Operation Condor burned marijuana fields, but it also prompted the geographical dispersion of marijuana growers and traffickers from the rugged, isolated mountains of Sinaloa to the cities of Guadalajara, Tijuana, and Ciudad Juárez. Also, as soon as the Operation Condor soldiers went away, people replanted the burned fields.
    Before Operation Condor, Sinaloans grew marijuana in