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.
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 of the Mexican state. The Guadalajara Cartel prospered largely because it enjoyed the protection of the DFS, under its chief Miguel Nazar Haro (1978–1982), and his successor José Antonio Zorrilla Pérez (1982–1985). The DFS provided bodyguards for the capos; ensured drug-laden trucks safe passage over the border by using the Mexican police radio system to intercept U.S. police surveillance messages; and handed out DFS badges with abandon. (DEA agents could not help but notice that every time they arrested a high-level trafficker he was carrying DFS credentials.) Nazar Haro did yeoman’s service for the Guadalajarans until he was tripped up by his own greed. In 1981 the FBI arrested him in San Diego, having caught him smuggling autos into the U.S., a collateral business his drug profits rendered unnecessary. True, the CIA got him sprung—insisting he was an “essential, repeat, essential contact for the CIA station in Mexico City”—but Nazar Haro was now blatantly tarnished goods and axed accordingly. His replacement proved a more than adequate successor, though Zorrilla Pérez would later prove an embarrassment and be sentenced to the slammer for thirty-five years, having been found guilty of ordering the murder of a prominent journalist.
As it turns out, the Guadalajarans received further crucial support from yet another state—the government of Ronald Reagan—this time not inadvertently (as with the unanticipated consequence of shutting down the Miami corridor) but done on deadly purpose.
From 1982 on, CIA and White House apparatchiks (like Oliver North and Elliott Abrams) were looking for ways to circumvent a U.S. Congressional ban on further assistance to the Contras, the U.S.-supported paramilitary movement seeking to topple Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. One idea they hit upon was to covertly ferry arms to the Contras via Mexican drug dealers. Félix Gallardo, at that point running four tons of cocaine into the United States every month, provided “humanitarian aid” to the Contras in the form of high-powered weaponry, hard cash, planes, and pilots. Indeed a Caro Quintero ranch became a training facility, run by the DFS—the CIA’s faithful Mexican affiliate. In return, Washington looked the other way as enormous amounts of Mexican-processed crack cocaine flooded the streets of U.S. cities, the super-addictive, mass-marketed drug wreaking havoc in poor communities, and triggering an Uzi-driven competition for market share that sent crime rates spiking..
The DEA was becoming increasingly frustrated by DFS and CIA closeness to the drug cartel, which was growing daily in strength and power. DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, who had been working out of Guadalajara since 1980, had been barraging Washington with complaints about the gangsters’ protective cocoon. In November 1984 he was able to prevail upon a DFS rival, the Federal Judicial Police (PJF), to raid Rancho Búfalo. When 450 men backed by helicopters destroyed the fields and burned ten thousand tons of marijuana, the cartel leaders—enraged—kidnapped, tortured, and killed Camarena. His body was eventually found in a shallow grave on a Michoacán pig farm.
The DEA went ballistic. First they tracked the killers. Caro Quintero had escaped arrest at the Guadalajara airport by waving his DFS badge—Zorrilla Pérez was cashiered for giving it to him—but was eventually captured in Costa Rica, tried, sentenced, and jailed. So was Fonseca Carrillo, but for the moment Félix Gallardo remained in hiding. Then the DEA went to the media with the truth about the DFS and its symbiotic relation with the crooks it was supposed to be suppressing. The American agency had known this all along, of course, but had sat on the story because, in Reagan’s administration, the CIA’s anti-communist card trumped the DEA’s anti-drug hand. More, they made public the corrupt involvement of senior PRI politicians, a blow to the party’s image and credibility. In response the Miguel de la Madrid government (1982–1988) dissolved the entire DFS. Some agents and police commanders were sent to jail, but many simply changed uniforms and joined other federal agencies, either the old established PJF or the new CIA clone, CISEN (Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional or Center for Research and National Security).
The scandal of Camarena’s murder boosted the DEA’s political clout in the States. Not only did it win an expansion of the agency’s bureaucratic empire, it propelled passage of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which required the executive branch to annually certify that any country receiving U.S. assistance was cooperating fully with U.S. anti-narcotics efforts, or taking steps deemed sufficient on its own. (Thus did the U.S., the world’s largest consumer of illegal drugs, set itself up as judge of other countries’ progress on solving a problem the U.S. could not.) If the country in question failed to measure up—and Mexico was an obvious target—it
