Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [97]
The Mexican adjuncts of the Colombian organizations soon began to mature, becoming more sophisticated and independent.96 The year leading up to NAFTA, 1993, was also the year Amado Carrillo Fuentes, aka “Lord of the Skies,” founded the Juarez Cartel. A year later, the DEA estimated that 80 percent of cocaine destined for US markets was entering through Mexico, making that country the new center of the Western Hemisphere’s narcotics trade.97 A confidential report called “Drug Trafficking, Commercial Trade and NAFTA on the Southwest Border” produced in 1998 by Operation Alliance, a task force led by the US Customs Service, found traffickers were using “commercial trade-related businesses . . . to exploit the rising tide of cross-border commerce.”98 Phil Jordan, a former DEA official, explained, “For Mexico’s drug gangs, the NAFTA was a deal made in narco-heaven. But since both the United States and Mexico are so committed to free trade, no one wants to admit it has helped the drug lords. It’s a taboo subject. . . . While I was at DEA, I was under strict orders not to say anything negative about free trade.”99
Dermota connected the dots: “In the crucial period straddling the inception of NAFTA, Mexico’s imports of legal goods from Colombia increased from $17 million in 1990 to $121 million in 1995, while Mexico’s trade with the United States doubled.” Clearly much of the increased trade was cover for Colombian traffickers, many of whom own and use legitimate companies to move cocaine into Mexico. In 1995, Dermota asked the US ambassador to Colombia if American officials worried that free trade might increase the flow of drugs. The ambassador explained, “It was felt by those who supported NAFTA and by the Clinton Administration that using the argument that any increase in trade could increase drug trafficking and money laundering was not a sufficient argument to overcome the need of the United States for increasing markets for its exports abroad and also to engage in greater trade with countries of the region.”100
By 1996, the DEA described a Mexican drug federation made up of four major cartels: the Tijuana Organization, the Sonora Cartel, the Juarez Cartel, and the Gulf Group. By the end of the decade, the Tijuana and the Juarez cartels were said to be strongest. Cocaine was still produced in the Andes, but heroin poppies and marijuana were being grown and processed in a few regions of central and northern Mexico, particularly in the states of Michoacán, Sinaloa, and Chihuahua. The cartels’ organization and diplomacy allowed the new breed of traffickers to sink deep roots into the political power structure and the fabric of everyday life. Corruption deepened in profound and dangerous ways. The post-NAFTA traffickers became increasingly professional and intertwined with the state.
Robert Collier, then foreign editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, painted a grimly humorous picture of the quotidian police corruption that now marked life: “At federal police headquarters . . . virtually all the agents wear heavy gold jewelry and gold watches and drive their own late-model, four-wheel-drive vehicles. Three shoeshine boys permanently work the station’s hallways, keeping a sparkle on the agents’ alligator-skin boots.” When Collier asked a cop how he could afford a new Jeep Cherokee on merely $500 a month, the officer replied, “I save a lot.” When Collier asked a Federal Police commander, who was busy busting small marijuana farmers, about Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the commander explained, “I’m not aware of any problems with Mr. Carrillo. . . . There are no major trafficking organizations here in this state.”101
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, methamphetamine also became part of the industry. Again, it was a crackdown north of the border that pushed the action south. New restrictions in the United States on the sale of the cold medications ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, the primary ingredients for methamphetamine production, pushed