Smuggler Nation (52 page)

Further complicating the challenge of organized migrant smuggling along the border was an unintended side effect of U.S. efforts to stop the maritime smuggling of Asian migrants. As officials began to target the use of boats to smuggle Asian migrants into the country in 1993, much of the smuggling was diverted to other routes, including land routes through Mexico—a strikingly similar replay of the dynamics of diverted Chinese migrant smuggling a century earlier. The arrival of Chinese smuggling boats, most notably the
Golden Venture
in 1993,
attracted tremendous media attention, provoking a law enforcement crackdown. Smugglers reacted by using less visible transportation methods and routes. As Meissner noted, “We’ve stopped that illegal boat traffic, but there are still a lot of people coming from Asia, mainly through Central America and Mexico.”
⁴¹
Chinese migrants paid up to $30,000 for the trip, often going into indentured servitude in the United States to pay off the debt. A typical boat from China landing in the northern Mexican state of Baja in 1993 carried human cargo worth $6 million.
⁴²

As migrant smuggling became a more organized and sophisticated enterprise in reaction to tighter controls, this served to justify tougher laws and tougher enforcement. The number of smugglers being prosecuted mushroomed. In San Diego (the busiest federal court in the country for migrant smuggling cases), prosecutions increased from 33 in 1993 to 233 in 1996.
⁴³
More punitive sentencing guidelines significantly increased the length of prison terms for smugglers. The INS was also given new enforcement powers to target organized smuggling, such as federal racketeering statutes and the authority to use wiretaps and undercover sting operations.

But the U.S. border crackdown did not create a shortage of smugglers. More risks translated into higher smuggling fees. And as the risks for smuggling rose, so too did the incentive for smugglers to use more dangerous methods to avoid law enforcement. This partly explained the increase in high-speed chases and accidents that resulted when smugglers tried to circumvent INS checkpoints along the highways leading north from the border. It also helped to explain a particularly creative but cruel smuggling trend: because the law did not allow jailing illegal migrants with children, children were sometimes bought, rented, or stolen to facilitate the crossing. The children were then often left to fend for themselves on the U.S. side.
⁴⁴

Greater enforcement also increased the efforts by smugglers to bribe or buy entry documents from those doing the enforcing. And as smuggling groups became more sophisticated and profitable—as a consequence of the higher demand and cost for their services and the heightened risks involved in providing these services—the capacity and means to corrupt also grew. So even though the border was more heavily policed, it was also more corrupt, with some of those responsible for
policing also engaged in informal toll collecting. But the profits and payoffs from migrant smuggling paled in comparison to those of the border’s biggest smuggling business: drug trafficking.

The Mexican Drug Connection

The entry of drugs into the mix of smuggling activities in the early twentieth century profoundly changed the dynamics of law enforcement and evasion across the southwest border. U.S. drug prohibition gave a major boost to Mexico’s nascent drug-export sector. Marijuana had been grown in Mexico since the nineteenth century, and in the first decades of the twentieth century Chinese immigrants brought opium growing to the states of Sinaloa and Sonora. Restrictive U.S. drug laws were eventually matched by similar laws on the Mexican side of the border, including a ban on the export of heroin and marijuana in 1927. In practice, however, there was little real enforcement. Moreover, during World War II the United States encouraged Mexican opium production (for morphine) and marijuana production (hemp for rope) as part of the war effort.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Mexico was the main marijuana supplier for the U.S. market, but it remained a marginal player in the heroin trade. In the early 1970s, however, Mexico’s share of the U.S. heroin market rose sharply, not simply as a result of high consumer demand but because of U.S. antidrug initiatives on the other side of the globe. When the Turkish government, under pressure from the Nixon administration, prohibited opium production and implemented a strict control program in 1972, more production moved to a logical and much closer alternative: Mexico. In other words, the unintended feedback effect of targeting Turkey and severing the Marseille “French Connection” was to partly transplant the opium-production problem to America’s backyard. Mexican brown heroin was of lower quality, but it was also cheaper and more accessible, especially on the West Coast.

Partly because of prodding from Washington, in 1975 Mexico launched the most ambitious eradication effort ever undertaken by any country. The results were impressive, drastically reducing Mexican supplies of marijuana and heroin to the U.S. market by the late 1970s. Yet it did not take long for the Mexican drug trade to adjust to the
new enforcement environment. Production of marijuana and opium again rapidly expanded (this time in more dispersed and less visible plots), and by the mid-1980s Mexico was an increasingly important transshipment point for South American cocaine bound for the U.S. market. The full significance of this change and its impact on the border region would not be recognized until years later.

Washington’s escalating drug war in the 1980s focused on the influx of cocaine through South Florida, treating Mexico as a sideshow. The Maginot Line–style strategy in the southeast did not significantly deter drug imports, but it did influence the location, methods, and organization of drug smuggling. Its most important impact was to push much of the traffic to the Southwest, making Colombian traffickers increasingly reliant on their Mexican counterparts. In other words, the U.S. drug war offensive unintentionally empowered Mexican traffickers. The end result was a redistribution of power within the international drug trade, with the world’s most powerful traffickers now next door just across the border.
⁴⁵

Testifying at a House Foreign Affairs Committee task force hearing in October 1987, Assistant DEA Administrator David Westrate noted that the enforcement crackdown in the Caribbean had redirected more cocaine shipments through Mexico: “Now that’s got a serious downside, other than it opens a major theater for us to address, which is the southwest border.… It also has produced a strong linkage between the Colombian major drug organizations and Mexican drug organizations—a connection we did not have before. And I think that clearly is something that’s going to cause us fits in the next couple of years.”
⁴⁶
Put differently, the main result of the U.S. interdiction strategy was to create more business for Mexican smuggling organizations and more work for law enforcement.

Apparently the lesson learned from the experience in the southeast was the need to replicate the strategy in the southwest. Coast Guard Admiral Paul Yost testified: “The more money that you spend on it, the more success you are going to have in the interdiction area.… We did that in the Caribbean for the last two years, and I’m sure that what we’re about to do on the southwest border will also be extremely successful. It is also going to be extremely expensive, and the success-expense ratio is going to be a very direct one.”
⁴⁷

But measuring such success was politically tricky. At a 1987 Senate hearing held in Nogales, Arizona, Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) summarized the situation: “Now, I understand that we’re shooting at floating targets. I mean, you do well in the Southeast and they [traffickers] move to the Southwest. We’ll load up the Southwest and what happens next? Nonetheless, we have to continue the war on drugs. And for us to sustain the resources, you have to have a few field victories of significant size that are measurable.”
⁴⁸
The reply by Customs Commissioner William Von Raab was predictable: “The seizures, which are your typical measure of success, are impressive.” Pleased to hear that some progress was being made in controlling the border, none of the committee members questioned what these measures of success actually measured.
⁴⁹
At the same hearing, Von Raab acknowledged that “there is good news and bad news” in increased drug seizures: “The good news is that we are catching more drugs because we are getting better at doing our jobs. We have more resources. The bad news is that we are catching more because more is coming across.”
⁵⁰

Meanwhile, the business community along the southwest border was increasingly nervous that heightened drug checks, which caused congestion and traffic jams, were impeding legal commerce. The president of one brokerage firm told a congressional committee, “The significant increases in commercial and civilian traffic coupled with the need to address the drug problem are creating a disastrous situation for manufacturers, importers, and border city retailers.” He warned, “If U.S. Customs is going to service the needs of the commercial sector and civilian sectors and at the same time increase their surveillance and interdiction programs for drugs, international trade and relations are going to suffer irreparable harm unless the appropriations for improved facilities and manpower are provided.”
⁵¹
Such worries reflected the dilemma that U.S. officials had partly created for themselves: they had transplanted much of the cocaine flow from South Florida to the U.S.-Mexico border, but efforts to harden the border against illegal trade collided with the policy goal of facilitating the expansion of legal trade with Mexico.

A dramatic sign that the Mexican drug trade had not only recovered from the crackdown of the 1970s but transformed into a more violent and corrupting enterprise was the 1985 murder of DEA agent
Kiki Camarena in Guadalajara. The affair sent U.S.-Mexican relations into a tailspin. The most visible and immediate U.S. response to Camarena’s disappearance was Operation Intercept II in February 1985, involving intensive checks on traffic entering from Mexico and even a partial closing of the border. Its primary purpose, however, was not interdiction but rather to signal disapproval with Mexico’s antidrug performance. The diplomatic crisis worsened in 1986. In January, Mexicans were shocked by the DEA-orchestrated kidnapping of Rene Verdugo Urquidez to the United States to stand trial for his alleged role in Camarena’s murder. And on March 8 most of the customs houses on the border were temporarily shut down; the official reason given was the need to search for drugs and weapons being smuggled into the United States by Libyan terrorists.

Heated congressional hearings on the Camarena affair turned into a public platform for a much broader interrogation of official corruption in Mexico. For the first time, the U.S.-Mexico war on drugs also became a full-blown cross-border war of words. Although the entrenchment of drug-related corruption in Mexico had long been well known, it was not until the killing of Camarena that U.S. officials publicly pointed fingers at specific individuals within the Mexican political system and security apparatus. Growing alarm over drug-related corruption in Mexico fueled more general anxiety over the security of the border. The House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control sponsored a series of hearings in the Southwest and concluded in its final report that the border was “totally out of control and threatening not only to the region itself, but to the entire country.”
⁵²

The fallout from the Camarena affair sparked changes on both sides of the border that would have long-lasting consequences. In Washington, Camarena’s murder was an important impetus for the U.S. Congress to mandate, as part of the sweeping AntiDrug Abuse Act of 1986, that the United States make foreign economic and military assistance, votes in multilateral lending institutions, and trade preferences contingent on “full cooperation” with U.S. antidrug objectives. In Mexico, meanwhile, investigations into Camarena’s death embarrassed the Mexican government by exposing close links between traffickers and the security apparatus. Largely because of
pressures from Washington, the notoriously corrupt Federal Security Directorate was quickly disbanded; and Rafael Caro Quintero, the trafficker accused of being responsible for Camarena’s murder, was arrested.

Partly to appease and impress Washington, the Mexican government boosted its antidrug spending. The percentage of the attorney general’s budget devoted to drug control rose from around 32 percent in 1985 to more than 60 percent in 1988. At the same time, Mexico continued to expand the role of the military in crop eradication. In 1987, this involved some twenty-five thousand soldiers—up from only five thousand in the late 1970s.
⁵³
Following the U.S. lead, President Miguel De La Madrid Hurtado officially announced that drug trafficking was a national security threat.

These changes were merely a prelude to President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s antidrug initiatives. Salinas’s main agenda—sweeping market reforms and building a closer economic relationship with the United States—depended at least in part on projecting a new image of Mexico’s drug-control effort and taming American anxiety over the flow of drugs across the border. Fortunately for Salinas, he had key allies in Washington, reflected in the celebrated “spirit of Houston” that emerged from the November 1988 meeting between the recently elected presidents Bush and Salinas.

Yet even as Salinas and Bush began to craft a new and closer economic relationship, the clandestine underside of the relationship was rapidly changing as well. Mexican marijuana and heroin exports were already generating billions of dollars by the late 1980s, making drugs a sizable export industry. But the heightened role of cocaine in Mexican drug smuggling dramatically elevated the financial stakes of the trade. So long as the heroin and marijuana that traditionally dominated the business of drug smuggling across the southwest border were produced within Mexico, Mexican drug smuggling remained primarily a local and regional business. The percentage of cocaine entering the United States through Mexico had been negligible in the early 1980s. But according to the State Department, by 1989 nearly a third of cocaine exports were rerouted through Mexican territory; by 1992, more than half; in later years, as high as 75–80 percent.
⁵⁴
Whatever the actual amount, the trend was unmistakable.