Breathe
By Sofía Guadarrama Collado
Part One
Very few people know that in 1810, at the beginning of the War of Independence, the people of Badiraguato, Sinaloa, also took up arms, which in 1811 drove the viceregal government out of their city and declared their independence. This declaration did not go beyond that, but it remained as a record of how brave its inhabitants have been for more than 200 years.
Unfortunately for us, Badiraguato is world famous for the capos who were born on its land: Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, alias "El Padrino"; Ernesto Fonseca, "Don Neto"; Rafael Caro Quintero; Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman; the Beltran Leyva brothers, among others.
One hundred years after Badiraguato's declaration of independence, a bandit named Jesús Malverde became popular in Sinaloa. After his death in 1909, dozens of legends have been attributed to him, which have turned him into the Mexican Robin Hood and a miraculous saint among the poor and delinquents of Sinaloa.
Violence in Sinaloa increased starting in the 1950s, between villagers who fought over land with machetes. During those years, smuggling of U.S. merchandise that was prohibited in Mexico began, simply because there was no free trade agreement and legal imports were not yet common. Also, in the 60's, businessmen and landowners of very good reputation began to plant marijuana and opium, since it was not frowned upon.
According to researcher and writer Malcolm Beith, "the men in charge of the drug trade were mainly politicians or members of a social elite. Some were involved in agriculture, some in imports. They were businessmen, not narcos. The word 'narco' didn't even exist. The peasants in charge of cultivation were called gomeros or buchones.
The nickname gomero comes from the collection of opium gum.
The nickname buchón is due to the fact that the farmers in the highlands did not have money to buy salt, an expensive product in the area, so they did not consume it and, therefore, developed goiter, an abnormal growth of the thyroid gland, which is located at the base of the neck, below the Adam's apple, and which the locals compared to the gular sac in the beak of pelicans.
Today, the word buchón refers mainly to drug traffickers in Sinaloa, and buchonas to the women who often have affairs with them.
Sixty years ago, the buchones were peasants who grew marijuana and opium, while their bosses, the owners of the land, were businessmen and exporters. Among them was Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, a former policeman and bodyguard of Sinaloa's governor, Leopoldo Sanchez Celis. They were in their infancy at the time. The high-caliber traffickers were in Colombia, from where thousands of tons of cocaine and marijuana were exported. So much that they couldn't keep up.
It was then that Mexico became the halfway point between Colombia and the United States. The Colombians brought the drugs to Sinaloa in boats and planes, and the Sinaloans transported them in trucks to the other side.
But drug traffickers did not work alone. In 2010, in an interview by journalist Anabel Hernandez with a man identified as "El Informante," she published that: "those were the times when the government had almost total control over the planting and transfer of drugs. There was almost no shipment that did not pass through the permission and surveillance of the Army, the Federal Security Directorate and the Federal Judicial Police.
"The federal government permit cost $60 per kilo: $20 for the head of the military zone, $20 for the Judicial Police and $20 for the Federal Security Directorate (DFS).
"Every month a suitcase would travel around the country, making its way from the bottom, from those who directly collected the money to the attorney general's office...it would get lost from hand to hand until it reached Los Pinos".
In the early 1970s, the Colombians controlled the drug trade. The Mexicans were only the middlemen. Even so, in 1971, President Richard Nixon decreed that drug abuse was a matter of national emergency. Two years later, the DEA was created. By the mid-1970s, the Sinaloans already controlled 75% of the heroin infiltrating the United States.
In 1974 the U.S. government, with Luis Echeverría as President of Mexico, implemented Operation SEA/M, Special Enforcemente Actuvity in Mexico, also known as Operation Trizo. The objective was to locate and destroy poppy fields in Sinaloa using location technology developed by NASA and to train elements of the Federal Judicial Police to learn how to obtain intelligence information.
Operation Trizo began in late 1975, in the Golden Triangle: Chihuahua, Durango and Sinaloa. Five DEA planes, piloted by Mexicans and monitored by the DEA, scoured the area. The Mexican government had three key figures: José Hernández Toledo, leader of the Tlatelolco operation on October 2, 1968; Roberto Heine Rangel, a key player during the dirty war; and Manuel Díaz Escobar, head of the "Halcones", of the Thursday of Corpus Christi massacre on June 10, 1971. By 1977, with José López Portillo in office, the DEA and CIA had destroyed 90 kilometers of poppy.
It should be noted that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had already been operating in Mexico since 1951 against communism.
At the end of the 1970s, the purity of the heroin produced in Mexico was of terrible quality: 5%, so its sales went down the drain. Soldiers patrolled the sierra, raided houses, destroyed everything in their path and stole whatever they wanted. However, no major trafficker was arrested. Thousands of peasants [buchones] were left unemployed. Peasants who did not kill anyone, who had no weapons, who only worked, because it was the only thing that existed in the area and that had given them enough to eat and live modestly. More than 2,000 communities were left in absolute misery and abandonment since President López Portillo did nothing to create sources of work in the region. Many emigrated. Hundreds more died of hunger.
According to a testimony of "El Padrino" Felix Gallardo, "the lack of space and employment drove them to crime or they died of hunger, the children did not go to school, they were social outcasts and took jobs in whatever.... Working in the city was very different from what they knew how to do".
Malcolm Beith wrote in his book, The Last Narco, that "those who chose to stay in the sierra suffered immensely. Thousands of soldiers patrolled the sierra unsupervised, allegedly stealing crops or animals that those who had not left had managed to keep. Houses were searched and destroyed. In many cases, small villages were decimated; only a few dozen elderly villagers remained there."
The López Portillo government received a lot of pressure from the Sinaloan society asking for jobs, support for the most needy, schools, seeds to plant other types of fruits or vegetables. Whatever it took so that they could support their families.
López Portillo then decided to give the peasants their jobs back and broke off his collaboration with the DEA in 1978 and Operation Trizo was in tatters.
Immediately thereafter, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, alias "El Padrino", Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, Pablo Acosta Villareal, Juan Jose Quintero Payan, Juan Jose Esparragoza and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, alias "Don Neto" and Rafael Caro Quintero regained absolute control of Mexican drug trafficking.
To be continued...
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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