El Narco by Ioan Grillo

Vargas Llosa calling it the “perfect dictatorship.” 18
    The PRI system relied on corruption to keep ticking over smoothly. Businessmen could pay off small-town caciques , who could pay off governors, who could pay off the president. Money rose up like gas and power flowed down like water. Everybody was happy and stayed in line because everybody got paid. Historians have noted this paradox in Mexican politics—corruption was not a rot but rather the oil and glue of the machine. 19 In this system, heroin money was just one more kickback flowing up. The drug market was a fraction of the size of today, and officials didn’t see it as a huge deal. It was a misdemeanor—the way many people today view pirated music.
    Manuel Lazcano—the student who had been in the race riots—remembers this attitude as he rose up in the PRI political machine in Sinaloa. He explains how he knew many of the people who took over the Chinese opium business.
    “Things started slowly. I like to think that people were not conscious of the harm that they were doing. At the beginning it was like something normal, a minor crime, tolerable, passable. Similar to going to Nogales and bringing back a case of cognac.” 20
    Sinaloan opium output rose dramatically in the 1940s, Lazcano remembers. Like many others, he says the growth was due to a mystery customer who paid in dollars for vast loads of poppies. The generous client, he says, could have been Uncle Sam himself.
    The notion that the U.S. government systematically brought Sinaloan opium during the Second World War is the classic conspiracy theory in the early Mexican drug trade. In today’s Sinaloa, politicians, police, and drug traffickers all talk about such a deal as pure fact. The Mexican Defense Department also describes it in its official history of the drug trade printed on the wall at its Mexico City headquarters. However, U.S. officials vehemently denied the deal at the time.
    The conspiracy theory goes that the U.S. government needed opium to make morphine for its soldiers in the Second World War. The American army was certainly handing out bucketloads of morphine as its troops bled from Japanese and German shells. The traditional supply of opium poppies for this U.S. medicine was Turkey. However, the war cut off supply lines, with German U-boats roaming the Atlantic sinking merchant vessels. The U.S. government thus turned to the Sinaloan gummers and cut a deal with the Mexican government to let them grow their poppies.
    Lazcano remembers the ease with which friends shipped opium paste north in the period as indication that a deal was on.
    “I knew several people from the mountains. They were friends of mine that grew opium poppies and after harvesting them they would go to Nogales dressed as peasants with four or five balls in a suitcase or in a rucksack. The curious thing is that at the border they would go through customs without any problem, without any danger—in sight of customs guards. They handed in their goods where they had to hand them in and returned completely calmly; it was obvious that they let them go past.” 21
    An American journalist visited Sinaloa in 1950 and found that sources in business and local government all confirmed the pact. He wrote an inquiry about it to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the agency created in 1930 to better coordinate American antidrug efforts. The FBN’s director for its first thirty-two years was Harry Anslinger, a hard-line drug warrior. Anslinger responded personally to inquiries about the pact, saying the theory is “utterly fantastic and goes beyond even the wildest imagination.” 22 Mexico’s finest narco-ologists have also been unable to dig up any conclusive evidence that the deal ever took place, and some question whether Mexican authorities made it up to ease their own conscience.
    Whether Uncle Sam helped or not, the Sinaloan opium trade certainly bloomed. Sinaloans gained such a reputation for production of the mud