The history of drug trafficking in North America is also the history of its prohibition, the punitive machinery replicated in Mexico north of the Rio Grande, whose effectiveness after so many years is more than questionable. It is the grand construction of our era: drugs are a public safety issue, the world needs powerful anti-drug agencies to neutralize it. Any attempt to change the paradigm has come under the sword of the Guardian, the United States, manufacturer and exporter of hegemonic ideologies.
In One Hundred Years of Spies and Drugs (Debate, 2022), academic Carlos Pérez Ricart illuminates part of the great tsunami, the operational aspect of the doctrine in Mexico, embodied by agents and corporations from its northern neighbor. For a century, US government officials have cracked down on drug manufacturers and traffickers in Mexico. The arrests of Rafael Caro Quintero or Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán are just the latest examples of a non-stop operation marked by improvisation, according to the author.
Divided into two parts, the book first deals with the origins of the presence of US agents in Mexico, the first border crossings in the mid-19th century both sides of the dividing line… And also the origin of the production and trafficking of opium and marijuana and later of cocaine.
The author devotes the second part to four anti-drug agents whose lives illustrate the story of the misunderstandings caused by the War on Drugs in North America. Pérez Ricart talks about Al Scharff, a criminal turned customs officer during WWI; Joe Arpaio, the self-absorbed and racist Arizona sheriff who made a career for himself with the DEA in Mexico in the 1970s, and Héctor Berréllez, a cowboy-looking cop who lived like a marquis on the Sinaloa coast for years and kept records of the illegal practices bequeathed to their Mexican counterparts.
But above them, of course, stands the figure of Enrique Camarena, the touchstone of relations between the two countries since his assassination in Guadalajara in February 1985. It was never known why he was killed, but Sinaloan traffickers were known to live in in the capital Jalisco they did it, for example at Caro Quintero. There’s no way to talk about the hemisphere’s anti-drug operation without drawing on his character. And that’s where the conversation begins.
Questions. Camarena appears, you say, as a “vanishing point,” an inevitable figure.
Answer. Camarena is our Kennedy. We think we know what happened, as does Kennedy. I am fascinated by the spectacle around it. I thought I couldn’t write this story without him. So I wanted to tell what we all think we know, go into everything that was known about him, and then separate narratives, ideas, and realize that we know very little.
P Very little?
R Everyone has used it to their advantage. The DEA used it because they were about to disappear at the time. The Mexican government is trying to stop DEA activities in this case. Many journalists have made careers around him … And in reality it is a simple story built from coincidences. He wasn’t the main agent, before he died they shot a superior, they followed others from the Guadalajara office… There are four or five other people who could have been killed. And then the facts show that they didn’t want to kill him, they don’t put a blindfold on him for nothing. His death is an accident and everything built on it is fascinating, the diplomatic war… Camarena was the dead man who justified his existence. Although his personal story seems boring to me, I couldn’t start any other way.
P Before Camarena, Joe Arpaio hosted in Mexico.
R His story allows me to address the constitutional racism of the war on drugs, the inherent racism of several of those agents. Note that three of the four to whom I devote a chapter are migrants or first generation, as in the case of Arpaio, who comes from an Italian family. He illustrates the anti-immigrant agenda very well. He’s an abominable character. I was angry with him.
P noticeable
R I didn’t like him, I tried to be objective, but with him… Besides, his character is well documented. He is also a professional liar. I would have liked to interview him, I tried, but he didn’t want to. He wasn’t a sheriff anymore, he was a candidate… He was always a failure, even at space travel [después de su paso por la DEA, Arpaio y su esposa vendieron asientos para futuros vuelos espaciales]. I spoke to people who knew him and I didn’t know anyone who spoke well of him. His times in Mexico are dark. I have traced and documented many of the things he said and none of them are true. And yet he was the head of the DEA here.
P Well, but there was a time, as you write, when the US paid more attention to Colombia than to Mexico.
R Yes, but it’s Operation Interception that puts Mexico in the crosshairs. [En 1969, un par de años antes de que lanzara su guerra contra el narco y cuatro antes de que naciera la DEA, el Gobierno de Nixon ordenó registrar exhaustivamente los carros que quisieran cruzar la frontera sur]. Then Mexico stops being important and then becomes important again. But the first intelligence programs were there then and he had to manage them. But in the end, Arpaio represents something else: the improvisation, the lack of professionalism, the amateurism of these agents… Arpaio is arrested by the local police. A very ill-prepared guy. Drug policy then, as now, is made by very ill-prepared, unprofessional agents. US drug foreign policy is not planned, it is a series of improvisations.
P The case you mentioned of Dr. Salazar Viniegra, head of toxicology and mental health under President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940), who proposed a more public health approach to drugs comes to mind. He wanted the state to keep the state monopoly on morphine, he fought to demystify marijuana, he even prepared a reform of the Drug Addiction Ordinance, which Cardenas signed. But the US government blackmailed him by halting drug exports to Mexico. That’s it.
R Yes / Yes. But be careful, the drug policy is not unreasonable for the United States, everything stems from an imperialist logic, the US officials had their channels of implementation in Mexico, through conservative politicians. Salazar is often hit by the newspapers. That’s why I say Mexico hasn’t Americanized its politics, it’s a mix of imposing it and empowering local actors. Drug policies were not imposed, they were proposed, accepted and assimilated.
Carlos Pérez Ricart with his book “100 Years of Spies and Drugs” in the hands of Mónica González Islas
P One of the most recent diplomatic accidents related to the War on Drugs was the arrest of General Cienfuegos in Los Angeles a few years ago. Later, Mexican prosecutors estimated that the evidence the US had collected was not even enough to prosecute him.
R Do we see the US as the gold standard when it comes to burden of proof? It’s not just Cienfuegos, it’s Zuno [cuñado del expresidente Echeverría, vinculado al caso Camarena]the doctor of Camarena [que trató de mantener vivo al agente en su secuestro y tiempo después, agentes de EE UU lo secuestraron y se lo llevaron a EE UU para procesarle]. This shows that the monopoly of negligence in the manufacture of cases is not Mexican.
P One of the things that surprised me about the book is that the supposed revision of the agreement for foreign agents to operate in Mexico that sparked the Cienfuegos case actually repeats what had already been approved in the 1990s.
R DEA agents have two ways of acting in Mexico, the formal, consular agents, who have always been in their 50s, and then the TDA, which is primarily associated with offices in the southern United States, which do not respond to the central logic of DEA operation in Mexico but have more specific goals in the country. It was very difficult for me to understand this. Suppose the Calexico (California) office has a methamphetamine investigation in Mazatlan and sends its agents there to investigate. These agents are not licensed, the Mexican government does not know. And it may be that even the DEA operation in Mexico is unaware of their activities.
This happens again and again, often with conflicting interests. This operation may conflict with another from the New York office… Even with antagonistic actors, those in Calexico may have informants from one criminal group and those in New York from another. It’s a lot messier than we think. This lack of rationality creates a violent dynamic. I think a lot of the violence in Mexico comes from there. I insist that the DEA’s success is its failure in Mexico. Because their offices in San Diego or New York may be successful, but they leave behind a powder keg because they leave behind fragmented groups and conflicts.
P Does a world in which the DEA and similar agencies lose weight seem possible to you?
R The DEA is one of the last enclaves of opposition to drug reform in the United States, to the point that they reach the absurdity that marijuana can be smoked locally but the DEA prosecutes it. The DEA is an authoritarian enclave, but it can be dissolved. And it is done when its political economy is under attack. Much of the resources that the DEA uses to pay salaries etc. come from the Narco. They benefit directly from the motivations of their struggle. They are the main actors of prohibition because it gives meaning to their existence. The last thing they want is to live in a drug-free world. It is the same as the Church understanding us. Without sin it does not exist. You need sin to exist.
As a result of this thought, I mention the case of Osiel Cárdenas, the former Gulf Cartel capo, at the end of the book. The DEA catches him and he agrees to give money, among other things. And it’s money not for the victims, but for them! This book allows us to take a closer look at the concept of corruption. I don’t know if this concept achieves what I want to call it. Because that’s different, even though it’s the same thing. It is not corruption in the sense in which we use it. But when a state agency takes advantage of illegality to maintain legality or to say they are maintaining legality, it is very serious. For this reason, in my next works I want to talk about how the judicial processes of the United States resort to illegality to build legality. Maybe because peace is made of shit.
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