Despite continuing problems between the DEA and the federal officials of Mexico, the Mexicans continued the program. Mexico needed the foreign aid. The United States sent millions of dollars south in equipment and cash. American dollars bought aircraft for the Mexican army. Mexican antigang agents trained in the FBI academy. Mexican police chemists received specialized instruction in the laboratories of the DEA. As many as fifty DEA field agents operated in liaison with Mexican law enforcement.
But in the first five years of the antidrug campaign, the production of Mexican heroin and its transport to the cities of the United States multiplied by a factor of ten. Narcotic agents in the United States succeeded in capturing hundreds of couriers and middle-level gang captains, but the arrests did not break the syndicates. The Mexican federalesreported the imprisonment of thousands of farmers and couriers and gangsters, but the syndicates remained intact and operating.
Then a series of crimes alarmed then-President Escheverria. At the time when he initiated the most progressive land-reform program in the history of the Republic, Mexican officers found Colt M-16 assault rifles, stolen from Army installations in the United States, in warehouses around Mexico City, only miles from the National Palace. Elsewhere in Mexico, gang leaders broke out of police cordons using LAW rockets and Uzi submachine guns. The hired gunmen of landowners executed campesinos with silenced MAC-10 special-purpose machine pistols.
Federaleslearned from DEA informants that the drug syndicates wanted military weapons in payment for heroin. When the minister of the interior reported this detail to President Escheverria, the president sensed a link between the weapons and the increasing opposition he faced to his land reforms from the wealthy elite of the nation. He could not prove an association between the right-wing opposition denouncing him as a Communist and the drug syndicates importing thousands of military weapons. He ordered a secret investigation but did not wait for the findings.
President Escheverria ordered the Mexican army to break the drug trade.
Operation Condor assaulted the heroin empire of the syndicates. Two thousand elite soldiers entered the vast wilderness of the Sierra Madre Occidentals. They patrolled on foot, they launched airborne assaults against gang strongholds, they employed short-takeoff-and-landing planes in their effort to seize the hidden airstrips of smugglers. The DEA provided vehicles, communications and a hundred field agents. With the aid of American satellites, Mexican planes sprayed poppy fields with defoliant.
Before the end of President Escheverria's term of office, Mexico forced the syndicates into retreat. Mexican heroin disappeared from the United States. No more military weapons came south to threaten the Mexican democracy.
Then President Lopez Portillo took office. Lopez Portillo governed a Mexico exuberant with the flush of sudden wealth.
Mexico had oil.
The federal government of Mexico no longer needed foreign aid. The administration of President Lopez Portillo had no time for cooperating with the North Americans.
President Lopez Portillo initiated the most ambitious program of economic development in the history of Mexico. He financed multibillion-dollar industrial— and agricultural-development programs with the petro dollars flooding the Mexican treasury.
Americans played no part in these programs. However, the DEA reasoned that the rural programs, as the developments reduced rural unemployment and poverty, would undercut the heroin subclass. Fanners with irrigation systems and fertilizers would not need the illicit money earned by the red poppies. Teenagers with good jobs would no longer risk their freedom to earn a few hundred dollars carrying kilograms of heroin north.
But the next six years became a period of corruption and theft unparalleled in the history of crime. Dollars and gold surged into foreign bank accounts at the rate of millions of dollars a day as the leaders and upper-class elite of Mexico looted their nation of petroleum wealth.
The construction of mansions became a major new industry. The elite competed with one another in extravagance. The suddenly wealthy joined in the displays.
The chief of police of Mexico City, appointed to his post by his friend Lopez Portillo, built mansions in Mexico, the United States and Canada. His official salary of sixty dollars a week also bought race horses, discotheques and Cadillacs.
The government salary paid to President Lopez
Portillo reportedly paid for a mansion of thirty-two hundred square meters, containing theaters and libraries and swimming pools, valued at fifty million U.S. dollars.
In the last year of the Lopez Portillo administration, Mexico collapsed under the burden of international debts. Inflation robbed the Mexican people of their savings. Millions of unemployed and underemployed Mexicans fell into desperate poverty. Hunger and malnutrition became common.
As President Lopez Portillo left office, he stated, "I have nothing to be ashamed of."
Starving poor seized towns. Wage earners, working double shifts for pesos that could not buy food for their families, organized strikes, seizing factories and closing down the cities. The destitute farmers, the workers, the hungry middle classes threatened class warfare. The wealthy fled to their estates in Spain.
The new president of Mexico, Harvard trained and receptive to the guidance of economic advisors — Mexican and American — saved Mexico from chaos. He asked the people of his nation for patience and courage. The forces calling out for revolution granted the new president time to purge the criminals and renegotiate the foreign loans.
But poverty and hunger remained.
Soon Mexican heroin returned to the United States.
6
Leaving the blue mirror of the Gulf of California behind, the jet passed over the agricultural projects spread around Ciudad Obregon. Black ribbons of asphalt roads and silver lines of irrigation canals divided hundreds of square miles of green into rectangles. Company installations — worker dormitories, equipment sheds and warehouses — clustered at the intersections of roads. Trucks and worker buses marked fields where lines of laborers hunched over the rows, harvesting cotton and vegetables. To the north, a dirty smear of smoke marked Ciudad Obregon.
Throughout the flight, Miguel Coral had remained silent except when asked a question. He responded in monosyllables and short sentences, speaking Spanish if Blancanales questioned him, answering Lyons and Gadgets in English. Now he stared down at the fertile lands.
"That is why I became a drugerro," he told the North Americans.
Lyons looked down on the fields. He saw only endless rows of crops glittering with water. "What are you talking about?"
"Water and land," the gang soldier explained. His words came slowly, with resignation. "The rich and the foreigners get the land and the water. Mexicans only work."
"So you killed some cops. Did that get you the land you wanted?"
Coral looked at Lyons, not with anger, but studying him, as if attempting to understand the blond man who sneered at him. Before Lyons could speak again, Blancanales spoke to the Mexican. "Yesterday you told me you wanted to buy a rancho outside Hermosillo. Is the land there like this?"
"There is the land of the companies. That land is always green. Then there is the desert. My father had twenty acres of sand and cacti. He drilled for water, but they did not find water. He borrowed money from the bank for a deeper well, but he did not find water. The bank took his land. The bank and the government brought water, and now a foreign company grows tomatoes there. I wanted green land, so I ran the drugs to the border. I made money, but never enough to buy land with water. Then the police wanted to take my marijuana for their own gang, and then my dreams were over."