July 14, 1969, Nixon sent a Special Message to the Congress on Control of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, in which he declared “the abuse of drugs” to be a “serious national threat to the personal health and safety of millions of Americans.” Americans were not sufficiently aware of the “gravity of the situation,” the President believed, which was why “a new urgency and concerted national policy are needed at the federal level to begin to cope with this growing menace to the general welfare of the United States.”
At the same time, Nixon sent administration officials to Mexico to persuade their counterparts to spray herbicides on marijuana and opium crops. Mexican authorities refused, even those sympathetic to Nixon’s project, fearing the ecocidal consequences: they pointed to the frightening side effects Agent Orange was producing in Vietnam. Balked, Nixon launched Operation Intercept in September 1969, overseen by Attorney General John Mitchell and largely devised by G. Gordon Liddy (both of later Watergate fame), with the (unannounced) goal of bullying Mexico into acquiescence. Two thousand inspectors began meticulously scrutinizing each car that tried to cross the frontier, searching (sometimes strip searching) each person, each vehicle, each piece of luggage (including purses and lunch boxes), backing up traffic for miles, in effect shutting down the border. After twenty painful days and a blistering barrage of complaints from all quarters, Nixon called it off. But it had worked, just as Anslinger’s tactics had. Mexico was strong-armed into launching another Great Campaign (like that begun in 1948), this one submissively entitled Operation Cooperation. Nevertheless, Mexico (which called the joint program Operación CANADOR, an acronym of cannabis and adormidera [poppies]) was able to forestall U.S. demands for aerial defoliation by increasing its own efforts at manual eradication. Mexican soldiers were allowed to hack away at opium poppies and marijuana plants with sticks or machetes, at the price of allowing American law enforcement to enter Mexico and conduct surveillance of their operations.7
Nixon now turned to legislative action, winning passage of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, which consolidated previous federal statutes and increased the authority of federal narcotics agents. Title II—the Controlled Substances Act—provided the legal basis for a war on drugs. As his reelection campaign approached, Nixon plowed ahead, stirring up a full-scale moral panic. Bulling his way past the embarrassing findings of the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse he had established in 1971—it reported there was no evidence marijuana was harmful or addictive and recommended decriminalizing possession—he insisted (in June of that year), using wildly inflated statistics, that the “drug traffic is public enemy number one,” against which “we must wage a total offensive, worldwide, nationwide, government-wide.”
In 1973, once safely (he thought) returned to the White House, Nixon created the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) by executive order. Subsuming the rotted-out Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, along with other agencies, its assigned mission was to “establish a single unified command to combat an all-out global war on the drug menace.” Nixon resigned in 1974, but the DEA—whose raison d’être was permanent war on drugs—would long outlive its creator. At its outset, the DEA had 1,470 special agents and an annual budget of less than $75 million. Today, it has 5,235 special agents, 227 domestic field offices, foreign offices in 62 countries, and a budget of roughly $2.5 billion.
Despite his humiliation of Mexico, Nixon was not without his supporters there, most particularly President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964–1970), who was very much on Nixon’s cultural wavelength. Personally revulsed by marijuana-smoking Mexican students, he proclaimed the universities to be “full of garbage and filth!” But like Nixon, Díaz Ordaz had deeper worries, rooted not only in personal rigidity but in perceived challenges to PRI power. Many of the rising generation saw the one-party state as repressive, its socialist rhetoric masking an actually existing authoritarianism. Like Nixon, his partner in paranoia, Díaz Ordaz equated political dissent with communist conspiracy, and he lit into those urging democratic reform—writers, journalists, editors, disaffected workers, and particularly students.
In 1966, Díaz Ordaz sent paratroopers to occupy universities where students had mounted demonstrations. In 1968, incensed by insubordinate street protests that threatened to blacken Mexico’s image on the world stage just weeks before the country was to host the Summer Olympics, he dispatched armored trucks to disperse the thousands camped in the Zócalo, generating images that evoked those of Prague youth confronting Soviet tanks. Next, Díaz Ordaz orchestrated a massacre of students who were demonstrating in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, a neighborhood in Mexico City, unleashing the army, police, and paramilitary gunmen who fired rifles, bazookas, and machine guns into the crowd from all sides. Two thousand were rounded up, stripped, and beaten; some of them were disappeared; estimates of the dead (indeterminate as bodies were trucked away and burned) ran as high as three hundred. The massacre sparked national and international outrage.
The 1970 shooting of Kent State students protesting Nixon’s escalation of the Vietnam War into Cambodia was a pale echo of the Tlatelolco slaughter (in Ohio four were killed, nine wounded), though it did provoke a nationwide strike by over four million students. Similarly the emergence of the Weather Underground, and their bombing campaign in the early 1970s, was a shadow of the turn to armed resistance in Mexico by urban guerilla groups opposed to what they considered a brutal and unresponsive regime. What had no northern counterpart was the emergence of rural rebellions, feeding on a growing crisis in the agricultural sector.
In the mountains of Guerrero, Lucio Cabañas, a Ayotzinapa-trained teacher-turned-revolutionary, forged a small force dubbed the Party of the Poor that engaged in kidnappings and bank robberies to fuel an armed rebellion. By 1971, the new president Luis Echeverría (1970–1976) had dispatched twelve thousand troops to the region. Though he developed closer ties with socialist governments in Chile and Cuba and offered refuge to victims of the infamous Operación Cóndor, Echeverría remained adamantly opposed to allowing guerrilla groups to develop within Mexico, and he dispatched DFS agents to infiltrate various leftist organizations. In 1974, after Cabañas kidnapped a multimillionaire PRI senator and candidate for governor, the president upped the military presence to twenty-four thousand. The army carried out sweeping roundups, interrogations under torture, and disappearances. In the municipality of Atoyac de Álvarez alone, the military disappeared some four hundred people. Cabanas was killed that year in a shootout with soldiers.
Echeverría’s relationship with the U.S. had not been particularly warm, and he had been reluctant to expand the ongoing Operation Cooperation (CANADOR, in Mexico) inherited from his predecessor. But in September 1976, just as Echeverría was passing the presidential torch to his chosen successor, José López Portillo (1976–1982), his government did so. The turnabout was due partly to the insistence of the United States; partly to concern at the surging size of the drug industry (which then covered some six hundred thousand square kilometers, and included roughly thirty thousand opium plots, some of them exceeding forty acres); and partly out of alarm at the rising levels of trafficker-related violence. In Culiacán, gun battles on downtown streets had become daily fare, and Sinaloan papers were packed with complaints about the rising narco threat. The PRI was also dismayed by agrarian unrest—widespread land seizures and armed defiance of authority by desperate campesinos, hard-pressed by a deepening agricultural crisis. The two problems were in fact conjoined, as tens of thousands of these farmers had entered the drug economy and were prepared to defend their new economic lifeline at gunpoint.
The state decided on a full-scale ground assault, and green-lighted the up-till-then rejected U.S. urging of an aerial spraying campaign, as well as authorizing U.S. reconnaissance flyovers of the target area. The new López Portillo government’s stated aim was “the total elimination of opium poppy cultivation and maximum cooperation with the United States and other countries in the endeavor.” The Mexican attorney general predicted the end of drug trafficking in six months. Left unannounced was the determination to crack down on rural insurgents under cover of the anti-drug campaign. The program was soon renamed Operation Condor, the nom
