The U.S.-Mexico Drug Trade — A Tale of Enduring Myths

With Mexico recently in the news due to the killing of 'El Mencho’, who led one of the country’s largest drug trafficking networks, all the old myth-making and language—flattened, inaccurate portrayals that demonize Mexicans, and conveniently leave out America’s role—has returned in news headlines and analysis.

Few stories have such enduring appeal as that of Mexican drug ‘warlords’ (language never used for illicit drug business conducted inside the U.S.) and ‘cartels’ (historians and scholars have written extensively about how drug trafficking does not operate like a cartel in Mexico), and now, the term being profusely used by the American president, ‘narcoterrorists’.

It doesn’t matter that there are hardly any facts to back up the tales. As Chilean novelist Roberto Bolano said: ‘People see what they want to see, and what people want to see never has anything to do with the truth.’

Mexican and Mexican-American historians who have written deeply-researched books on the U.S.-Mexico drug trade are rarely given space in mainstream media.

A few thoughts below on this.

1. Americans are the largest consumers of illegal drugs in the world — this is the U.S-Mexico drug trade.

It is the United States’ enormous appetite for illegal narcotics (e.g. they consume ~40% of the world’s cocaine), that makes the production and sale of these drugs in its neighboring Mexico an incredibly profitable business. A vast majority of Mexican drugs (80%+ for many narcotics) find their market in the U.S.

This unending demand, coupled with the wage difference between the two countries, is what fuels drug trafficking—not some innate moral failing that somehow only plagues those living south of Rio Bravo. Demand creates supply, not the other way around; one of the best reads on this is the myth-busting book The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade by historian Benjamin T. Smith. It is the story of how the U.S.’ unending demand for narcotics first shaped, then transformed the economy, social makeup, and politics of modern Mexico.

Mainstream U.S. narratives would have us believe that drug production is somehow in Mexico’s DNA, and that the former’s growing drug addiction is not its own alarming and urgent public health crisis.

To illuminate the financial incentives created by this trade between two grossly unequal partners, consider the fact that the annual median wage in Mexico can be made by growing a single marijuana plant or a window box of poppies. (This is representative math from Smith, if growers sold wholesale directly to American consumers which, in reality, they cannot).

As long as the U.S. continues to ignore its drug consumption problem, and the incentives created by it continue to exist, not much will change in the world of drug trafficking.

2. Corrupt U.S. state officials, border patrol, police, military, and the CIA are essential to this drug trafficking.

The U.S. drug war narrative has us believe that the corruption that makes drug trafficking possible exists south of the Rio Bravo. But corruption does not stop at the border. If it did, such high volumes of trafficked narcotics would not make it across.

The profits from the drug trade have been just as attractive and tough to resist for those in the U.S., as for Mexicans.

And yet we hear significantly less, and often, not much at all, about U.S. corruption. Notwithstanding the racialized coverage by U.S. media, one reason we hear less about it is that U.S. Grand Jury transcripts and spy files remain classified. It is only through unofficial leaks that corruption on the U.S. side are exposed. In contrast, much of Mexico’s judicial documents and secret service transcripts are declassified, giving us a lot more evidence of corruption.

In Dope, Benjamin T. Smith writes:

Mexican corruption has attracted headlines and oversimplified cultural explanations. “It is as eternal as the Aztec sun,” declared one Mexico foreign correspondent. And it has become firmly entrenched in the myths surrounding the drug trade. Yet, as I also discovered […] stories of hard-nosed sheriffs and principled drug agents mask similarly entrenched corruption on the U.S. side. Just as in Mexico, the enormous profits from the drug trade have been tough to resist. And they have persuaded many agents from local law enforcement, Customs, the DEA, and the CIA to either look the other way or overtly protect the trade. However, unlike in Mexico, American observers have been resistant to investigate these claims or declare any systemic fault.

These aren’t a few bad apples on the U.S. side; it is systemic and institutional. Evidence of involvement by U.S. senators and the CIA is ample.

In 1968, the FBN (Federal Bureau of Narcotics), the first dedicated drug agency in the U.S., was disbanded due to corruption at its New York Office. 30 agents resigned—the corruption involved agents selling drugs, keeping contraband for personal use or sale, stealing money intended for informants, and failing to enforce drug laws.

Without the involvement of thousands of U.S. customs, DEA, and local police officers, so many illegal narcotics would never make it across the border.

3. Counternarcotics policies have failed to regulate drugs, but succeeded at fueling violence.

Decades of the U.S. war on drugs have had limited long-term impact. Most recently, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum decided to extradite 29 leaders of Mexican trafficking organizations to the U.S. Both the U.S. and Mexican state actions and policies are designed not to end trafficking, but to manage public reaction, media headlines, and calibrate according to domestic politics and needs. Both countries—but in particular the United States—benefits from a continued state of violent confrontation between the Mexican state and local criminal organizations.

In her book ‘Los Zetas Inc’, Mexican political scientist Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera identifies many of these beneficiaries: the U.S border economy, the U.S. border security/military-industrial complex, arms-producing companies, the international banking system, and corporate capital, especially international oil and gas companies.

She also explains how arresting kingpins increases violence:

“Mexico has extradited many people under pressure from the United States in the context of the ‘kingpin’ strategy (which prioritises the elimination of the heads of criminal organisations). But that strategy hasn’t worked because when you remove the head of an organisation, it fragments and the power struggle generates a lot of violence,”

She continues: “[..] the ‘war on drugs’ has historically achieved nothing: neither reducing violence nor protecting victims. In a militarised government, with the National Guard under the Ministry of Defence, talking about victims is impossible, they have been forgotten.”

Similarly, Smith, the author of Dope, says: “Violence, then, is not so much in the DNA of trading in narcotics as in the DNA of prohibiting the trade.”

4. U.S. neoliberal economic policies forced upon Mexican farmers decimated its agrarian economy, and strengthened marijuana and poppy growing.

Economists, political scientists and sociologists—both U.S. and Mexican—have published data for decades on how US-driven neoliberal policies—particularly NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) in the early 1990s—have been largely unfavorable to Mexico.

In its wake, one of the hardest hit sectors of the Mexican economy was its agricultural sector. This was monumental for a country like Mexico, where agriculture accounted for 7% of GDP and 24% of employment, compared to only 1.6% of GDP and 2% of employment in the U.S.

Over the next decade, the impact of this unequal and forceful integration systematically restructured Mexico’s agrarian economy. NAFTA’s terms vastly increased the import of cheap, subsidized U.S. agricultural products, wiping out the profitability of staple crops like corn and coffee for rural farmers in Mexico. Millions of agriculture jobs were lost (the official number is 1.3 million). Corn imports forced countless Mexican farmers to migrate, and local prices for corn plummeted (a 66% drop for local corn prices), while dependence on imported food skyrocketed. Similar analyses done for other Mexican crops such as wheat, soy and beans painted a bleak picture. As with the entire agricultural sector, specialty crops did not recover their pre-NAFTA value until 2007. NAFTA-led restructuring of the agrarian economy also led to new forms of land ownership, based on rent-seeking, and control of land ownership by foreign investors. NAFTA was largely disastrous for Mexican workers in all sectors—real wages in Mexico remained largely stagnant or saw limited growth for over two decades after the agreement took effect.

This loss of productive capacity and low profitability for the agricultural sector (especially in the production of corn, a pillar of the Mexican agrarian sector for generations) led to abandonment of crops that had traditionally provided income to thousands of farmers, and led to downstream effects such as the strengthening of alternate crop cultivation, particularly the opium poppy and marijuana.

Other economists have pointed out that the U.S. insistence on painting Mexico as unruly and infiltrated by drug cartels, is meant to justify its economic paternalism towards the country. Alfredo Carlos at U.C. Irvine calls it ‘a relationship that can only be called imperialism as the United States has sought increased capital penetration.’

It should be pointed out here that the Mexican government itself first petitioned for NAFTA, and it met with criticism in the U.S. Congress (but always had strong support from U.S. multinational corporations because it promoted and protected their interests). The neoliberalization of Mexico has met with intense dissatisfaction among the workers’ population, and there is increased talk of the critical need for the Mexican government to protect its rural and small farmers from the surge of cheaply imported U.S. agricultural products—such as renegotiating to increase subsidies for Mexican corn and beans producers of corn and beans, and exemption of farmers who farm under 10 hectares.

5. The U.S. smuggles assault weapons into Mexico, leading to a radical increase in drug-related homicides over the past fifteen years.

The final point to consider is this: 70% to 80% of weapons seized from drug cartels in Mexico are trafficked from the United States. This amounts to roughly 250,000 firearms—high-powered rifles and assault weapons, that are illegal to buy in Mexico but widely available in the U.S—that are purchased in the U.S. and trafficked into Mexico.

Any discussion of the drug trade that does not take into account the critical need for the U.S. to pay attention to this illegal arms trade originating from within its borders, is ingenuous at best. In this context, the Mexican government has even initiated legal action against U.S. gun manufacturers, arguing that negligent sales practices contribute significantly to cartel violence.

Of particular note here is the ‘Fast and the Furious’ weapons scandal during Obama’s presidency, where 2,000 firearms were intentionally smuggled into Mexico by U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), with the stated goal of using them to trace leaders of Mexican drug organizations. The ATF lost track of these weapons, and the fallout came to the surface after two rifles purchased through the operation were found at the murder scene a U.S. Border Patrol agent. President Obama asserted executive privilege in 2012 to protect documents related to the operation from being released to Congress—the only time he used this power in his presidency.