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Foreword
Many books have been published during the last
few decades about drug trafficking and drug traffickers, but few have risen
above the limitations of the true crime genre. For the most part, these
works offer little more than insights into the greed of particular individuals
and their partners in crime, and the consequences to the players and their
victims. Many of these works tend subtly to glamorize an activity that
has become one of the real scourges of modern times. It is refreshing therefore
when a book comes along that goes beyond this narrow focus and gives the
reader not only an individual morality play, but also broader perspectives
and conceptual tools for understanding its destructive origin. One such
book - and a great read at that - is this book.
Drug Lord is a riveting portrait of Pablo
Acosta, the scar-faced Mexican padrino who controlled crime along a 250-mile
stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border. It is a linear work that traces the
drug lord’s rise from humble beginnings, his rapid ascension to power through
murder and treachery, his smuggling of 60 tons of cocaine a year into the
United States, his struggles to defend his expanding empire against rivals,
the betrayals and over-indulgence that fostered his downfall, and his dramatic
death at the hands of the same police system that had been giving him protection.
Drug Lord would be a worthy story even if
it had been limited to biography this is in fact the first inside look
at a Mexican drug trafficking organization ever published. But Poppa’s
book is much more. By following the life and career of Pablo Acosta, the
granddaddy of Mexican cocaine traffickers and mentor of Amado Carrillo
Fuentes, the future "Lord of the Skies," Poppa lays out a brutal truth
that many in Washington D.C. still refuse to believe. Namely, that drug
trafficking in Mexico is controlled from the top by key agencies of government,
political institutions and key officials among the elite. The drug kingpins,
despite their riches and violence, are merely pawns in this system, the
front men and the fall guys. They are the expendable employees and are
like Aztec princes of old who were allowed to have their time in the sun
but whose hearts were cut out in ritualized sacrifice when the glory days
were over.
Poppa deserves credit for recognizing the
fact that protection for drug trafficking in Mexico is deliberate and that
is organized along administrative and jurisdictional lines. The success
of Pablo Acosta in reaching the pinnacle of organized crime power was not
simply the product of violent individual entrepreneurship and gang leadership
ability, but was actually the result of a license, a franchise given out
by Mexican state and federal government officials to drug traffickers in
return for a large percentage of the take and other services. Thus, Poppa
was among the first to understand that this was not the work of a few bad-apple
politicians and policemen, but was the product of an embedded system of
organized corruption that runs from Mexico City through the state capitols
and government officials down to the regions where the traffickers operate.
It was a system known as la plaza and is useful to quote what the
author has to say about this at length here, for it forms the conceptual
fabric of the entire book:
For decades Mexican
informants tried to explain the idea to their law-enforcement contacts
in the United States. When somebody had the plaza in Mexico, it
meant that he was paying an authority or authorities with sufficient power
to ensure that he would not be bothered by police or by the military. The
protection money went up the ladder, with percentages shaved off at each
rung up the chain of command until reaching the Grand Protector or the
Grand Protectors in the scheme.
To stay in the good graces of his powerful patrons, the
plaza holder had a dual obligation: to generate money for his protectors,
and to lend his intelligence gathering abilities by fingering the independent
operators - those narcotics traffickers and drug growers who tried to avoid
paying the necessary tribute. The independents were the ones who
got busted by the Mexican Federal Judicial Police, the Mexican equivalent
of the FBI, or by the army, giving Mexico statistics to show it was involved
in authentic drug enforcement. That most of the seized narcotics
was then recycled - sold to the favored groups or outrightly smuggled by
police groups - was irrelevant. The seizures were in fact made and
there were headlines to prove it.
Sometimes, the authorities would protect their man from
rivals; other times they would not, preferring a variety of natural selection
to determine who should run the plaza. If the plaza holder
got arrested or killed by the authorities, it was sometimes because he
had stopped making payments, or because his name had started to appear
in the press too frequently and the trafficker had become a liability.
Sometimes international pressure became so strong that the government was
forced to take action against a specific individual - regardless of how
much money he was generating for the system.
It was a system that enabled the Mexican political and
police system to keep a lid on drugs and profit handsomely from it at the
same time. |
This, in a few clear and concise paragraphs,
is the history of drug trafficking in Mexico for at least the last three
decades. Because of such insights, graphically illustrated in the
life and death of Pablo Acosta, Poppa’s book rises far above the level
of anything that has ever been written about the subject. It
is a deft allegory, a bold paradigm, a courageous denunciation that
cuts through the smokescreen of official posturing, blanket denials,
and sophisticated cover-ups.
As a clever allegory, it shows that Mexico’s
drug kingpins are, in truth, simply the replaceable cogs used and exploited
by an official system of political and governmental corruption and control.
Replace Pablo Acosta’s name with that of any drug trafficker, past or present,
and it is the same story. Thus Poppa’s Drug Lord is the biography of Rafael
Caro Quintero, the Guadalajara drug thug who was arrested after U.S. pressure
over the murder of DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena. It is the history
of Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo or of Juan Garcia Abrego, traffickers who
lost their plaza franchises and their freedom after changes in Mexican
political administrations. It is the profile of Rafael Aguilar Guajardo,
a trafficker-turned-Mexican-federal-security-police-
commander who was assassinated two days after threatening to reveal
his high-level Mexican government contacts. It is the career of Amado Carrillo
Fuentes, the famed "Lord of the Skies" who died recently under surgery
after indicating he was shifting his operations from Mexico to Chile. It
is the story-in-the-making of the Arrellano Felix brothers of the so-called
Tijuana cartel, currently the big names in drug trafficking today. The
names are many. The story remains the same.
These insights and the persistent bravery
that it took to uncover the truth easily rank Poppa as one of the most
extraordinary journalists of the last decade. Indeed, the history of the
origin of this book is almost as gripping as the book itself. A prize winning
journalist and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Poppa arrived as a border reporter
and correspondent for Scripps Howard News Service in 1984, a time of political
turmoil in Mexico and fear that a revolt in northern Mexico was just around
the corner. He explored the election-rigging practices of the Institutional
Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI, the party that emerged from the
Mexican Revolution that has monopolized power even to this day. Very quickly,
Poppa began to see the connections between crime and the institutionalized
power system. He wrote numerous reports on the theft of American automobiles
by Mexican federal and state police agencies, providing photographic and
documentary evidence. Later, he began to see the connections between the
traffickers and the PRI’s federal and state police agencies. The entrenched
interests quickly took note of this unwanted exposure. Soon, he was being
portrayed on a state-controlled Mexican television station as a CIA spy.
Reams of "Wanted" posters bearing his photo and branding him as an "anti-Mexican
agitator" were being handed out from Mexican state police agencies. Each
published report brought fresh threats against the author, threats that
culminated in the kidnapping and torture of an American news photographer
by one of the border traffickers and a promise to kill Poppa in reprisal
for stories that he had written.
In response, the author’s news organization
bought him a handgun and sent him on the road. That allowed him to get
out of Dodge while things cooled down, but at the same time to explore
the growing cocaine trafficking corridor that was appearing through north-central
Mexico. He ended up in the stronghold and hideout of Pablo Acosta, then
one of the most powerful drug traffickers of northern Mexico, feared for
his reputation for killing rivals and then dragging their bodies behind
his Bronco through the desert until there was not much left except a shredded
torso. Poppa spent two days with Acosta, tape-recording hours and hours
of interviews with the fearsome trafficker, who spoke of murders, smuggling
and protection between drags from crack-laced Marlboros and swigs of El
Presidente brandy. When the newspaper reports based on the meeting were
published, an embarrassed Mexico City sent a squad of crack federal police
after Acosta. They trapped him five months later and killed him in a machine-gun
battle reminiscent of Vietnam for its intensity.
A few months later, Poppa wrote one of the
most comprehensive newspaper series ever written up to that time on the
nature of crime in Mexico and its ties to the government of Mexico, a report
that led to an invitation to testify before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee
on Investigations. Simultaneously, two of the most notorious traffickers
named in the series, Rafael Aguilar Guajardo and Gilberto Ontiveros, put
up $250,000 in cocaine to have Poppa kidnapped, taken into Mexico, and
killed. This threat was picked up by an informant of the the U.S. Customs
Service. Federal agents warned Poppa of the threat and advised him to take
precautions. Poppa, in turn, reported the threat to a United States senator
who turned to the U.S. Customs Commissioner for help. The threat was investigated
from Washington, the information was determined to have come from one of
the service’s best placed sources in Mexico. Several days later, Poppa
was invited to the Customs enforcement office in El Paso where he was shown
a memorandum that had been sent to every enforcement office along the border,
giving the American feds instructions to inform their counterparts in Mexico
that the United States intended to shut down the border from San Diego
to Brownsville if there are any further threats against the reporter. Two
days later, Customs learned that the traffickers had withdrawn the $250,000contract.
It was at that point that Poppa quit newspaper reporting
to began his year-long investigation into the Pablo Acosta organization,
work that led him into the heart of the biggest cocaine corridor ever created
in the Western Hemisphere. The results are this book, first published in
1990. Even before the book came out, Poppa was back in the newspaper business,
at work only ten blocks away from the international bridge to Ciudad Juarez
and the office of one of the former drug lords of Ojinaga, one of Pablo
Acosta’s predecessors, who had become a commander of Mexican Customs in
Juarez.
The author was on the trail of one of the
worthiest stories of our times, that the real problem facing the United
States as a drug crime victim is a governmental system south of the border
of exploitation and corruption that controls and manipulates the traffickers
for the benefit of the system. The result has been a flooding of North
America with drugs and the pervasive misery and social disruptions they
have caused. At the time this book first came out, the north-central Mexican
state of Chihuahua was already being used as the main corridor for bringing
cocaine to the United States. The governorship of Chihuahua, the Fifth
Military Zone in Chihuahua City, the Federal Police headquarters there
and the state police agencies throughout Chihuahua, not to mention the
key federal agencies such as Customs, were securely under the control of
this embedded protection system. It is estimated that 400 tons of cocaine
were flown into northern Mexico from Colombia during the first two years
of this operation. Of that, 22 tons were discovered in 1989 a warehouse
in Sylmar, just north of Los Angeles. Much of these truths have subsequently
come to light.
The history of the last seven years, therefore,
has been the history of the corroboration this incredibly fascinating work.
Hardly a month goes by without some new revelation. Many of the people
in Poppa’s book continue to make the news, such as Guillermo Gonzalez Calderoni,
the Mexican federal police commander who hunted down and killed Pablo Acosta.
This top-ranking Mexican federal police commander later defected to the
United States. In exchange for safe harbor here, he passed on information
to the FBI about his government’s drug trafficking involvement, including
details of fabulous wealth the brother of the Mexican president at the
time was amassing thanks to protection he was giving to a Gulf Coast trafficker,
and the scheming by this presidential sibling to buy up an entire port
on the Gulf of Mexico to facilitate drug transhipments. Poppa was the first
to write about Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Pablo Acosta’s partner and successor
who eventually became the most powerful of the Mexican drug traffickers
of the 1990s until his freakish death this year while undergoing plastic
surgery. Scandals involving Mexican generals on Carrillo Fuentes’ payroll
have made the headlines.
In light of all of these revelations, it is
indeed interesting to listen to the self-serving speeches of Mexican presidents
blaming the drug trafficking problem on consumption in the United States.
The most recent example is President Ernesto Zedillo’s demand that the
United States make "reparations" to Mexico to make up for the "filthy mess"
drug consumption in the United States supposedly caused down there. Poppa’s
book is a valuable tool for correctly interpreting these grotesque distortions.
Such rhetoric is likely to grow in frequency and hysteria the more the
truth about the mafia nature of the Mexican system comes out.
The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they
grind fine. Things are changing in Mexico. The major parties and institutions
and elites and their embedded systems of corruption are still in place
but cracks in the structure are showing. The Revolutionary Institutional
Party is as faltering and shaking as the Communist Party was in the Soviet
Union a decade ago. Elections in July of this year created new coalitions
in Congress and for the first time have opened the door to investigating
and cracking the system of corruption and its connections to trafficking.
Whether this opportunity can be successfully exploited, however remains
to be seen. For the elites and institutions of Mexico, particularly the
military, which is likely to fill and control any vacuums in drug trafficking,
are extremely powerful. We are likely to see many traffickers and drug
lords like Pablo Acosta come and go, and plaza franchises change hands
all along the border before we see real change in the Mexican system. Thus,
while Poppa’s book tells a story at one point in time, it is still as relevant
and important reading today was when it was first written. For, while the
players change, the play continues. And sad to say, most Americans and
many policy makers in Washington still do not understand.
Drug Lord is an exciting and important book
which can help to change this. I urge you to read on.
-- Peter A. Lupsha, professor emeritus and senior
scholar, Latin American Institute, University of New Mexico
October, 1997
Albuquerque |
