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

Sinaloa and smuggled it into the United States. After Operation Condor Sinaloans grew marijuana in Sinaloa, Sonora, Chihuahua, Guerrero, Michoacán, Jalisco, Durango, Zacatecas, and Baja California and smuggled it into the United States. Sinaloans controlled every major drug-trafficking organization that grew throughout the 1980s. Sinaloans would run the Guadalajara Cartel, the Tijuana Cartel, the Juárez Cartel, and, of course, the Sinaloa Cartel. The Gulf Cartel burst onto the scene in the early ’90s with the rise of Carlos Salinas and the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). La Familia Michoacana would declare its independence in 2006 and be all but dismantled by January 2011.
    Cocaine money built Miami in the 1970s, but by the early 1980s, the blood in the streets got to be too much—homicides in Miami went from 104 in 1976 to 621 in 1981—so the U.S. government decided to push the gunplay out. Enter Reagan and his War on Drugs. The Reagan administration shut off the direct trafficking routes from Colombia and the Caribbean into Florida with a massive deployment of federal agents. The drugs kept coming. No Miami nightclub went without blow. The Colombian cocaine smugglers looked to Mexico and its long and desolate border with the United States. Thanks to Operation Condor, the Mexican marijuana traffickers from Sinaloa had built networks along the length of the border for marijuana smuggling. The pot kept coming, more than ever, and now with cocaine from Colombia.
    Reagan’s drug war consolidated the racist underpinnings of prohibition into a new racial caste system, as Michelle Alexander argues. It also expanded upon the U.S. hemispheric “security” policy—or counterinsurgency proxy wars—and its unsavory drug habit. It has been well documented in books like Alfred McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade that the Central Intelligence Agency was involved in trafficking narcotics in Southeast Asia throughout the 1950s and ’60s and in Afghanistan and Central America in the 1970s and ’80s to fund anti-communist death squads. Throughout the 1980s the CIA also supported counterinsurgency wars in Nicaragua funded from cocaine smuggling. Robert Parry and Brian Barger were the first reporters to break the story for the Associated Press in 1985. Reagan administration officials launched a personal defamation campaign against both reporters and drove them out of the AP. From April 1986 to April 1989, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics and Terrorism held hearings and investigated the allegations of CIA involvement in supporting counterinsurgency forces in Nicaragua involved in cocaine trafficking to the United States.
    The Subcommittee report, released on April 13, 1989, found, among other things, “involvement in narcotics trafficking by individuals associated with the Contra movement” and “payments to drug traffickers by the U.S. State Department of funds authorized by the Congress for humanitarian assistance to the Contras, in some cases after the traffickers had been indicted by federal law-enforcement agencies on drug charges, in others while traffickers were under active investigation by these same agencies.” The three main newspapers in the United States buried short articles in their back pages: Washington Post , page A20; Los Angeles Times , page A11; New York Times , page A8. Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review that “the Kerry Committee report was relegated to oblivion; and opportunities were lost to pursue leads, address the obstruction from the CIA and the Justice Department that Senate investigators say they encountered, and both inform the public and lay the issue to rest.” Reagan administration officials mocked the Subcommittee chair, Senator John Kerry, and the media followed suit; Newsweek famously called Kerry a “randy conspiracy buff.”
    In July 1995, after publishing an