Histories of Drug Trafficking in Twentieth-Century Mexico
Histories of Drug Trafficking in Twentieth-Century Mexico
This work brings together a new generation of drug historians and new historical sources to uncover the history of the drug trade and its regulations. While the US and Mexican governments developed anti-drug discourses and policies, which criminalized both high-profile traffickers and small-time addicts, these authorities also employed the criminals and cash connected to the drug trade to pursue more pressing political concerns. The politics, socioeconomic relations, and criminal justice system of modern Mexico have been shaped by these public and covert policies as well as by subnational histories of drug production and trafficking. The essays in this study explore this complicated narrative and provide insight into Mexico’s history and the wider contemporary global drug trade.
With a nasty irony, contemporary Mexico’s most important phenomenon, the drug trade, has been the least historically understood. This book changes that. The methodological, conceptual, and empirical heft of Histories of Drug Trafficking in Twentieth-Century Mexico make it essential reading for scholars of modern Mexico.
A cutting-edge, boots-on-the-ground approach to researching drug trafficking provides us with new insights gleaned from archival collections only recently opened to the public.
A groundbreaking book.…At last, a history of drugs in Mexico that goes beyond kingpins and explores instead the complex network of complicities, political interests, cultural determinants, and economic ramifications underpinning the trade.
Wil G. Pansters is a professor of social and political anthropology of Latin America at Utrecht University. He is the editor of Violence, Coercion and State-Making in Twentieth-Century Mexico: The Other Half of the Centaur and La Santa Muerte in Mexico: History, Devotion, and Society (UNM Press). Benjamin T. Smith is a professor of Latin American history at the University of Warwick. His works include The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade; The Mexican Press and Civil Society, 1940-1976: Stories from the Newsroom, Stories from the Street; and The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico: Catholicism, Society, and Politics in the Mixteca Baja, 1750-1962 (UNM Press).
List of Illustrations
Chapter One. Writing Twentieth-Century Mexico’s Drug Histories
Wil G. Pansters and Benjamin T. Smith
Part I. The Emerging Prohibition Regime: Policies, Policing, and Popular Vices
Chapter Two. "Pressure-Response" and the Origins of Mexican Drug Prohibition, 1912-1920: A Reassessment
Isaac Campos
Chapter Three. Popular Vices and Revolutionary Restrictions: Drugs and Mexican Society, 1910-1920
Ricardo Pérez Montfort
Chapter Four. Drugs, Control, and Corruption: The Antinarcotics Police in Mexico City, 1920-1947
Nidia A. Olvera Hernández
Part II. Drug Trafficking, Social Relations, Political Protection, and Law Enforcement during the Mexican Miracle
Chapter Five. La Nacha, the Godmother of Border Trafficking: Transnational Drugs and Gendered Power in Ciudad Juárez, 1920-1960
Elaine Carey
Chapter Six. Highs and Lows: Drug Trafficking in Baja California, 1930-1960
Benjamin T. Smith and Wil G. Pansters
Chapter Seven. Policing the Drug Trade: U.S. Narcotic Agents in Mexico (1936-1963)
Carlos Pérez Ricart
Chapter Eight. "Rayando la bola, cortando la rama": The Production of Opium and Marijuana in Sinaloa (1940-ca. 1975)
Juan Antonio Fernández Velázquez
Chapter Nine. With a Little Help from His Friends: Juan N. Guerra, Smuggling, and Drug Trafficking in Tamaulipas and Nuevo León, 1940s-1960s
Carlos Antonio Flores Pérez
Part III. Drug Trafficking, the Drug War, the Dirty War, and the Unintended Consequences
Chapter Ten. Caciques, Traffickers, and Soldiers: Drug Trafficking in the Cardenista Territory of Michoacán (1960-1970)
Salvador Maldonado Aranda
Chapter Eleven. The War on Drugs, Counterinsurgency, and the State of Siege in the Golden Triangle (1977-1982)
Adela Cedillo
Chapter Twelve. Grupo Sangre: Drugs, Death Squads, and the Dirty War Origins of Mexico’s Drug Wars
Alexander Aviña
Chapter Thirteen. Heroin, the Herreras, and the "Chicago Connection": The Drug Trade in Durango, 1950-1985
Nathaniel Morris
Part IV. Conclusions
Chapter Fourteen. Drugs, Crime, and Violence in Modern Mexico
Alan Knight
List of Contributors
Index
