Question- When did the Drug War Begin in Mexico? Answer – About 100 Years Ago

 

The First North American Drug Traffickers - Chinese Immigrants

The US Coast Guard recognizes Chinese Immigrants as the first recognized drug smugglers dating back to the 1870s. They were the first to develop sophisticated maritime drug trafficking networks for cocaine, heroin and opium into the US. One of the US Border Patrol’s first missions (1885) was not to focus on illegal Mexican immigration, but on illegal Chinese immigration coming in from Mexico.

The Drug Zones of Yesteryear are the Drug Zones of Today

Chinese immigrants who arrived in Mexico during the 1910s and the 1920s served as railroad workers. Some of these immigrants, however, decided to make money through illicit means.  It was also during this time some of these immigrants grew and distributed opium. Chinese immigrants formed “Tong” gangs to run the first  drug trade in Mexico. Poppy was often grown in the Sinaloa region of Mexico; Sinaloa being the home of today’s infamous Sinaloa Cartel. Ciudad Juarez, another area known for its recent high volume of drug cartel hub activity today, was a hub for heroin as far back as the 1930s. Ignacia Jasso Gonzalez, known in history as La Nacha, reportedly left the state of Durango, to Ciudad Juarez to make money after the Mexican Revolution around the 1920s. Envious of the Chinese successes in illicit trade, she and her husband began a propaganda campaign to subvert the Chinese drug traffickers by exploiting ethnic tensions between Mexicans and Chinese over lack of jobs, cultural differences and biases in order to position herself to eventually take over the networks. Matamoros, home turf to today’s Los Zetas, was known for marijuana and other drug trafficking since the 1930s. US Border security and containment to prevent the flow of drugs into the US was a problem all the way back then.

So What?

The takeaway from this little insight is that Mexico’s drug trade and internal drug conflict is not new; it has gone on for about 100 years now. What is new is the intensity and level of violence, its cancerous subversion of local and state mechanisms initially caused by a lack of effective governance. The drug trade filled a void many leaders of Mexico chose to ignore for personal profit or gain-this will be addressed in later postings. The drug culture and way of life is buried deep in the lives of many Mexicans. Any Mexican government or US government response will require much consideration and well-thought action to mitigate the potential for the conflict to go into thermal runaway. That response will understandably take generations to affect, and that response must fill any potential voids the drug trade filled. We are not only talking about eradicating crime, we are also very much talking about changing a culture for a significant number of Mexican citizens.

Cheers, SWOT Hunter

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31Aug12