Smuggler Nation (49 page)

Resilience and Adaptation

In the face of this extended and expansive U.S. drug war buildup, the illicit drug trade not only survived, it thrived. By the turn of the century, more drugs were more widely available and at higher levels of purity than ever before. In the case of marijuana (by far the nation’s favorite illicit drug), 88.5 percent of high school seniors surveyed in 1982 said the drug was “fairly easy” or “very easy” to obtain. In 2000, the percentage of seniors who indicated they could easily obtain the drug was 88.5 percent—even though marijuana penalties, arrests, seizures, and so on had risen sharply. And to the extent that eradicating marijuana crops abroad and interdicting shipments at the border had succeeded, the main effect was to unintentionally give a boost to American pot growers. Partly thanks to suppression efforts against foreign supplies, domestic marijuana production mushroomed into a multibillion-dollar industry, possibly becoming the country’s largest cash crop.
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Meanwhile, even though Colombia’s most notorious trafficking organizations—the so-called Medellín and Cali cartels—were dismantled in the 1990s, cocaine exports were barely dented. Adjusting to a more hostile enforcement environment, trafficking organizations became flatter, more dispersed, and decentralized—making them harder to penetrate and eliminate. Determined drug enforcers had demonstrated that they could successfully eliminate individual traffickers who had become too embarrassing and high-profile, such as Escobar, but this did not translate into elimination, or even a noticeable reduction, of trafficking. Colombian drug entrepreneurs also diversified both in product and in clientele, producing and exporting heroin and shipping more of the cocaine supply to Europe, where prices were much higher and the market was growing.
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The drug war inescapably suffered from some of the same fatal flaws and contradictions that had doomed Prohibition earlier in the century. As was the case with alcohol in the 1920s, government policies aimed to make drugs such as cocaine and heroin scarce and expensive by outlawing them. Enforcement indeed raised prices by increasing the risks and
costs faced by smugglers. For decades the policy of drug prohibition kept consumer prices far higher than the legal price would be—and as happened with the prohibition of alcohol, this undoubtedly deterred some use. But it was unable to raise prices high enough to keep drugs out of reach. The drug war was unable to raise the cost of doing business high enough to put drug prices out of range for consumers because its success in artificially raising prices also inflated profits. And these profits provided a steady incentive for drug suppliers to remain in the trade and for new suppliers to enter. Because the drug war raised profits as it raised prices, the stick of drug enforcement that was intended to discourage suppliers simultaneously created a carrot of enormous profits, which encouraged suppliers. Such inflated profits repeatedly frustrated supply suppression efforts at home and abroad. In practical terms, this meant that “the average drug organization can afford to lose 70 percent to 80 percent of its product and still be profitable,” explained one DEA official. “How do you intend to put that group out of business with a basic policy of trying to suppress its product?”
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The drug war was doubly doomed by the mobility and flexibility of the illicit trade. Cocaine, heroin, and marijuana were relatively easy to produce, transport, and sell. The amount of money and skill needed to enter the business was not high. These conditions repeatedly made even successful drug enforcement short-lived. Smugglers could simply put more drugs into the pipeline in order to offset what they projected losing in seizures. And there were always new recruits to take the place of those arrested. Often, attempts to suppress the trade in one locale simply encouraged new recruits or veteran smugglers to set up operations elsewhere. So, while the drug war generated ever more impressive eradication, seizure, and arrest numbers that made politicians and bureaucrats look tough on drugs, this did not translate into an overall reduction in the drug flow.

In short, far from deterring the drug trade, American-led supply-suppression campaigns ended up mostly dispersing and rerouting it. Rather than pushing the trade out of business, drug enforcement had mostly pushed it around—providing a rationale to further expand drug enforcement. And as we’ll see in the next chapter, nowhere were the consequences more devastating than along the U.S.-Mexico border.

15
Border Wars and the Underside of Economic Integration

TWO OF MEXICO’S LEADING
exports were noticeably left out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA): illegal drugs and migrant workers. Instead, higher “tariffs” were imposed through more policing and fence building. But this did not change the fact that the U.S.-Mexico border was the main entry point for smuggling drugs and cheap labor into the country. This was the less celebrated clandestine underside of economic integration between the United States and Mexico at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The U.S.-Mexico borderline became not only the busiest land crossing in the world, for both legal and illegal flows, but also one of the most heavily fortified. This chapter traces this remaking of the border, the longest and most contested geographic divide between rich and poor on the planet. It was here that both the extent and the limits of government policing power were most starkly evident—setting the border-crossing rules and shaping the crossing methods and locations even if unable to fully control who and what crossed the line.

The southwest border had long been a smuggling gateway, yet it was not until the 1990s that the policing of smuggling became a high-profile and high-intensity militarized border campaign commanding enormous public and media attention. This was partly an unintended feedback effect of past policy choices, including a shift
in cocaine trafficking to the southwest border in response to the South Florida interdiction buildup in the 1980s examined in the last chapter. Mexican drug smugglers, it turned out, were the leading beneficiaries of the U.S.-led offensive against Colombian trafficking organizations and their Caribbean cocaine-shipping routes. Business also boomed for Mexican
coyotes
—people smugglers—thanks to a tightening of U.S. immigration controls that made it much harder for migrants to cross the border without hiring a professional smuggler. Yet as we will see, this was part of a much older and larger pattern of government interventions inadvertently creating a thriving cross-border smuggling economy.

An Economic Relationship Founded on Smuggling

The popular assertion that we must “regain control” of the border falsely implies that there was once a time when the U.S.-Mexico line was truly under control. Although most of the attention today is on the illicit flow of drugs and migrants, smuggling was a defining feature of the border long before these particular flows were even a concern. Indeed, much of the U.S.-Mexico economic relationship was founded on illicit trade, with a great deal of it flowing from north to south. High tariffs and minimal enforcement meant that much of the goods entering Mexico following independence in 1821 was contraband.
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Guns and ammunition also flowed south, with Mexican authorities bitterly complaining about the American “traders of blood” who profited from supplying Plains Indians engaged in cross-border raiding and plundering.
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After the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, trade with Texas increased sharply, much of it in the form of smuggling. Moreover, as we saw earlier, thousands of fugitive slaves smuggled themselves across the border until the end of the American Civil War, and during the war the easternmost point of the Mexican border functioned as an outlet for the smuggling of Confederate cotton to Europe.

Setting up official ports of entry along the border and deploying customs agents to run them reflected the ambitions of government authorities to filter and impose order on all cross-border trade and travel. All crossings in the areas between the ports of entry were by definition classified as illegal. But the locations of the handful of officially sanctioned
crossing points along the vast and sparsely populated borderline—sometimes with hundreds of miles between them—were often inconvenient for large numbers of borderland residents, many of whom simply continued to go about their daily border business as before, though this was now treated as unlawful. At the same time, the arrival of the railroad in the late nineteenth century connected border towns to national markets and greatly facilitated and accelerated the cross-border movement of goods and people—licit and illicit—including, as we saw earlier, the smuggling of Chinese laborers barred from legal entry.

The tremendous challenge of imposing controls on border crossings extended not only to goods and people but also to livestock—especially unauthorized cattle crossings. As ranching spread along the border, cattle rustling (stealing and smuggling cattle) became a huge law enforcement headache on both sides of the border. Also troublesome were stray cattle wandering across the line, with retrieval often complicated by inflexible customs agents treating the “self-smuggled” animals as contraband cattle for which duty payment was owed.
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The first government-erected border fence, along the Baja-California border in 1909, was designed to inhibit the movement of diseased cattle rather than people or goods—though the latter would become the focus of the
urban fencing projects that sprang up during the 1910–1920 Mexican Revolution and then remained afterward.
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Figure 15.1 Smugglers crossing the Rio Grande, as U.S. customs agents watch from the bushes.
Harper’s Weekly
, September 4, 1886 (Library of Congress).

Of greatest concern during the Revolution was the smuggling of arms and ammunition into Mexico, continuing an old pattern of the United States serving as the favored weapons supplier during periods of social and political unrest south of the border. In South Texas, customs collector Robert Dowe complained that merchants along the border supplied “all comers with arms and cartridges even when aware they were used for revolutionary purposes.”
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In one smuggling scheme, the rebel leader Pancho Villa bartered confiscated cattle for American weapons. One particularly creative gunrunner, Victor Ochoa, used rubber bladders to float large quantities of ammunition across the Rio Grande at night from El Paso to Juarez.
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Washington deployed tens of thousands of troops to the border in an effort to stem the flow of arms, impose order, and enforce neutrality laws.
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Even as much of the demand for smuggled arms dried up with the ending of the Mexican Revolution, the demand for smuggled alcohol shot up with the introduction of Prohibition in the United States in January 1920. Smugglers therefore adapted to the new market environment and simply switched from one commodity to another. Various types of booze—ranging from tequila to mescal to rum—had long been smuggled into the United States from Mexico, but to evade taxes rather than prohibitions. The introduction of Prohibition turned alcohol smuggling into a much bigger, more profitable, and more violent border business. And as smuggling boomed, so too did the policing of smuggling: the size of the U.S. Customs force was fairly small until the Prohibition era, when the number of inspectors along the border rose from 111 in 1925 to 723 in 1930.
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More intensive enforcement of Prohibition transformed the illicit trade in alcohol across the border. In south Texas, for example, the trade was initially dominated by Mexican
tequileros
, smugglers on horseback who used mules and donkeys to carry their alcohol supplies across the line in remote areas. Yet even as border authorities were increasingly effective in their operations against the
tequileros
, by the late 1920s they were simply replaced by more sophisticated and violent bootleggers transporting larger volumes of alcohol by car and truck along road networks. Effective enforcement against the
tequileros
, in other words,
unintentionally helped pave the way for the rise of a new and more dangerous breed of smuggler.
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