A Narco History. Carmen Boullosa

then segued into working on a bean and corn plantation. In the mid-1970s he moved to the neighboring state of Chihuahua and started growing marijuana on his brother’s ranch. Over the next five years he expanded his operation, buying up other local ranches, and amassing a fortune. By the early 1980s he was running the gigantic Rancho Búfalo—a 2,500-acre tract of desert land on which perhaps seven thousand campesinos labored, under conditions of virtual slavery, raising immense marijuana crops that were dried in twenty-five football field–size sheds. Yearly production—valued at $8 billion—was big enough to supply the U.S. its entire annual demand. By 1981, Caro Quintero was quite capable of making fabulous payoffs to police commanders in the state of Chihuahua, to regional politicians, to the military, and above all to Miguel Nazar Haro. A nasty piece of work, infamous for his role in the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre and for the part his “White Brigade” death squad played in the Dirty War, Nazar Haro was appointed chief of the DFS in 1978. By the early 1980s, following the new trend toward concentration, Caro Quintero had allied himself with two other kingpins who had been industriously opening up a whole new drug front, once again thanks to their northern neighbors.

      In the 1970s and 1980s, cocaine wildfired across the U.S.A. While grass had been associated with political dissent, the counterculture, peace, love, and mellow, the disco drug conjured up glamour, speed, sex, business, and money. Lots of money, as its markup was spectacularly higher than pot, and generated billions upon billions of dollars. At first the profits flowed not to Mexicans but to the Colombians whose country’s climate was ideal for coca leaf cultivation. Colombians not only manufactured their product, they delivered it. Mobsters in Medellín flew most of their cocaine directly to Florida, a nine-hundred-mile straight shot, airdropping their parcels at sea, from where they were retrieved and rushed ashore in speedboats—as during Prohibition booze was smuggled in from cargo ships parked on Rum Row, just outside the three mile limit.

      Presciently, the Colombians launched something of a pilot project in the early 1970s devoted to developing a supplementary route through Mexico. At first they relied on two non-Mexicans to develop the prototype operation. Their direct contact was a Honduran, Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros, who got the cocaine to Mexico and there turned it over to Cuban-American Alberto Sicilia Falcón, a Tijuana-based gangster, who moved the product across the border. Sicilia Falcón was no ordinary gangbanger. He had quit Cuba for Miami after Castro’s arrival in 1959, and was trained there by the CIA to participate in raids and weapons-delivery runs to his former homeland. According to Scott and Marshall, he relocated to Mexico in 1972 and with help from his DFS connections—the DFS and CIA having a close working relationship—he established an operation that unloaded Matta’s Colombia product in California. At the same time that presidents Echeverría and Nixon were ratcheting up their anti-marijuana and opium efforts, a $5 billion–per-year cocaine enterprise sprang into being, along with a collateral money-laundering operation provided by Mexican and U.S. banks. Indeed, Sicilia Falcón’s Tijuana fortified base of operations, “The Roundhouse,” was protected by a coterie of DFS agents armed with AK-47s.

      Sicilia Falcón’s luck ran out in 1976 after DEA agents penetrated his operation, flipped some of his traffickers, and got the Mexicans to arrest him. (This was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that the DEA and CIA worked at cross-purposes.) Convicted, and dispatched to rot in jail, Sicilia Falcón became the first drug kingpin to be taken down; he was, after all, a foreigner.

      With Sicilia Falcón now history, Matta cultivated relations with the rising stars among Sinaloan gangsters. Among them were Rafael Caro Quintero (the maestro of marijuana), Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, and primus inter pares, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo. A Culiacán native born in 1946, Félix Gallardo had joined the Sinaloan judicial police, served as bodyguard to the governor, then sidled into the drug business, departing Sinaloa for Guadalajara after Operation Condor. Once the Matta connection was established in the mid-1970s, he and his associates became the premier couriers in Mexico of Colombian cocaine. Still, up to the early 1980s, their transshipments accounted for only 30 percent of the coke consumed in the United States. What sent them into hyperdrive was the election in 1980 of Ronald Reagan.

      7 Among this round’s unanticipated consequences was the discovery by drug traffickers that if the border could not be driven through, it could be flown over, which would soon lead to their adoption of an airborne delivery system. Operation Cooperation also had the effect of eliminating less-capable smugglers, thus consolidating power in the hands of bigger, better-financed criminal organizations like the Herrera brothers’ operation. And in the States, a considerable number of youths responded unexpectedly to the short-term marijuana famine by shifting to LSD.

      8 In 1979, the Herrera Organization was targeted directly, but though thirty-nine kilograms of heroin were seized, and three Chicago-based bosses were captured, the top leadership and the organization itself sailed on into the 1980s, until 1988, when Operation Durango led to the capture of Jaime Herrera-Nevarez. By then, however, the organization’s next generation had diversified into cocaine and methamphetamine, and soldiered on.

      9 During Condor, owners of plantations that had received unofficial official approval flew flags on their fields to signal pilots not to fumigate but to spray water and fertilizers; drought conditions were prevalent, and some argued that it was the weather, and not the eradication campaign, that was responsible for much of the drop-off.

       CHAPTER FOUR

       1980s

      Reagan cast himself as a law and order man, ready to reverse the wimpy policies of Jimmy Carter, who indeed had pulled back from Nixonian fanaticism. In this Carter was responding to the growing disinclination of middle-class parents to have their children locked up for marijuana use, which few still believed to be a menace, unlike Reagan who, channeling Anslinger, declared it “probably the most dangerous drug in America.” Unluckily for Carter, cocaine use had exploded on his watch, allowing Reagan to run successfully as a reincarnation of Nixon. Once in office he relaunched the war on drugs. In January 1982 he created the South Florida Task Force to go nose-to-nose with the cocaine barons. Headed by Vice President George H. W. Bush, the task force brought in the army and navy, and put Miami vice in its crosshairs.

      It worked. Surveillance planes and helicopter gunships throttled the hitherto wide-open Colombia-Florida connection. Seizures cost Medillín drug lords hundreds of millions of dollars. But there was a fix ready to hand: the Colombians simply abandoned their direct shuttle service and increased the flow through their Mexican pipeline. At first the benefits were chiefly channeled back to South America; Forbes magazine would estimate the personal fortune of Pablo Escobar, the number one Medellín smuggler, at $9 billion, making him the richest criminal in history. But increasingly the Mexicans shifted from being simply a well-paid smuggling service to demanding and getting full partnership status. Soon Félix Gallardo, Fonseca Carrillo, and Caro Quintero were providing 90 percent of the cocaine pouring into the ever-expanding U.S. market, and laundering back an estimated $5 billion a year. Twenty million dollars flowed through a branch of the Bank of America in San Diego in just one month.

      It was in 1984 that the DEA began referring to the triumvirate as the Guadalajara Cartel, echoing the by then common reference to the Medellín and Cali Cartels. Though the term evoked the tremendous wealth and power of these entities, it was somewhat misleading. The conventional meaning is a consortium of established corporations or states aimed at eliminating competition and its unwelcome handmaidens, price wars and shrinking profits. OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) was the era’s premier example of such a price-fixing federation. It is true that the Guadalajarans had effected a coalition—indeed, they had established a monopoly—but it had conjoined individual gangsters, or cliques of gangsters, not giant political or economic institutions. Still, the name stuck, though the participants themselves never embraced it.

      “Cartel” was misleading in another sense, in that it left out the centrality