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UNIQUENESS OF MEXICO

At least four factors set Mexico apart from its drug-producing neighbors to the south, creating an environment for drug control. First, Mexico is the only country in the Western Hemisphere that produces significant amounts of opium poppy and HEROIN with little use by its people. Although large numbers of its people abuse marijuana and INHALANTS, Mexico may be the only opium-producing country in the world with almost no domestic market. Yet, Mexico shares a 1,900-mile (3,057-km) border with the U.S.—a country that has one of the world's largest and most lucrative markets for heroin.

Second, powerful drug rings have bought power and influence in several Latin American countries, yet, unlike their Peruvian and Colombian counterparts, Mexican drug traffickers have no symbiotic relationship with ideological, terrorist-oriented, political factions—whose goal is to change the prevailing political order. Nevertheless, during the 1990s drug-influenced political corruption became a very public problem, one which contributed to the election of President Fox in 2000.

Third, growing opium in Mexico is relatively recent; it has always been illegal and involves only a small number of citizens. Illicit opium and marijuana are grown not on privately owned plots but on open unowned (hence, government) land, largely as extra-cash crops, not as subsistence crops. If these illicit crops were all destroyed, growers would not starve. Unlike coca—which is a legal crop (that can provide the raw material for an illegal commodity) and has been cultivated for centuries in Bolivia and Peru—Mexico's opium crop has never become the center of a social, cultural, or agricultural economy.

Fourth, Mexico is a relatively wealthy country with vast natural and human resources. Mexico has shown its ability to build an infrastructure to implement an ongoing drug-control campaign. Beginning in the mid-1970s, Mexico started the world's first successful herbicidal opium-eradication program, which continues today. However, these strengths have been severely tested, as an economic downturn in the 1990s and increased drug trafficking has strained the nation's ability to control drug crime.

CAMARENA MURDER

Drug control has been an important issue between the United States and Mexico since the 1960s. The abduction and murder of U.S. DEA agent Enrique Camarena in Mexico in February 1985 elevated the drug issue on the bilateral diplomatic agenda of the two countries. The murder focused public attention on the perhaps decreasing effectiveness of Mexican drug-control efforts and represented a turning point in U.S.-Mexican relations. After Camarena's murder, drugs became a confrontational issue at uncharacteristically high levels of the two governments. Both the U.S. secretary of state and Mexico's foreign minister discussed the murder and subsequent government response as a paramount diplomatic issue; drug control was no longer treated only as a law-enforcement issue between the two countries. In response to continuing U.S. pressure, the Mexican government took a series of actions that resulted in the apprehension and incarceration of the several drug traffickers responsible. Nevertheless, tensions between the two governments remained high throughout the 1990s, as trafficking and corruption increased.

HISTORICAL ROOTS

Mexico's international drug-control efforts have their roots in the SHANGHAI Convention of 1909 and the Hague Opium Convention of 1911-1912. In 1923, Mexico's President Alvaro Obregon prohibited the production of opium and condemned what was then widespread and increasing drug-induced violence. In 1934, President Cardenas del Rio created the first centralized narcotics administrative unit in the government.

After the United States entered World War II in 1941, Mexico was asked to provide opium for the war effort, since it was processed into MORPHINE, a medication used extensively for war-related wounds. In both Mexico and the United States, HEMP was grown to fill U.S. military need for rope and cordage; hemp is processed from Cannabis sativa, which is also used as marijuana. By mid-1943, opium constituted the most profitable cash crop in Mexico's northwestern state of Sinaloa. Despite Mexico's efforts to control the production of these crops after the war, drugs were grown, processed, and smuggled into the United States from Mexico.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mexico soon became the major supplier for the illicit U.S. heroin market when Turkey prohibited opium cultivation and the French Connection had been ended. Consequently, in the fall of 1969, the U.S. BUREAU OF NARCOTICS AND DANGEROUS DRUGS (the predecessor organization of DEA) and the U.S. Customs Service initiated Operation Intercept—a three-week operation that subjected every person crossing the border in the San Ysidro, California, area to intensive baggage and body searches. The economic losses and dismay on both sides of the border prompted termination of the operation—but not before focusing attention on the volume of drugs entering the United States from Mexico. The Mexican government then began to locate and manually destroy the poppy fields—the source, at that time, of all the heroin produced in the Western Hemisphere. Originally, the search for poppy fields was made in small planes that flew over mountain zones where crops were suspected to be growing on remote plots of government land.

Prior to 1975, once the poppy had been spotted and the approximate location registered in official correspondence, military squads were sent to destroy the plants by cutting them down. In 1975, the Mexicans began to use the most modern technology—a system called Multi-Opium Poppy Sensing (MOPS), which used multispectral sensing cameras on board low-flying aircraft to read and print images from the electromagnetic spectrum. In nature, every substance emits its own unique electromagnetic waves that can be read on the color spectrum using special cameras. The fields were then destroyed by aerial application of the contact herbicides 2, 4-D and paraquat. By the 1990s, a fleet of nearly 120 aircraft were being used.

MEXICAN GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE

Organizationally, the Mexican attorney general's office plans and implements the drug-eradication campaign. Nearly 700 civilian pilots, mechanics, communications experts, and technical personnel make the campaign as effective as possible—working specific zones and sectors, with a coordinating office in each zone. Forward operating bases connect all the zones to Mexico City via a sophisticated communications system. Mexico's military is also used to stop the illicit cocaine that transits Mexico from South America to the United States, exchanging intelligence and training, and destroying clandestine trafficker landing strips.

ERADICATION RESULTS

Between 1982 and 1989, Mexico's rapidly deteriorating economy, bureaucratic inertia, technical inefficiency, poor management, low morale, complacency, and corruption led to the decreased effectiveness of the eradication program. Countermeasures by growers who planted smaller fields, at higher altitudes, under cover of foliage, during more than the two traditional growing seasons, further decreased program success. In the mid-1970s, the eradication campaign was managed in large part by specialized organizations of both governments (Mexico's attorney general and U.S. law-enforcement units). In the mid-1980s, the Camarena murder took the campaign out of the strict purview of the specialist law-enforcement agencies and into the diplomatic arena. In the 1990s, the drug-control efforts increased to include interdiction of South American cocaine traveling through Mexico but destined for the United States. In 1991, the Mexican government increased its eradication of opium by 40 percent over 1990; and its eradication of marijuana by 60 percent. The drug eradication program has had dramatic results during the 1990s. Marijuana production dropped steadily during the 1990s, while opium production dropped to its second lowest level in the 1990s. Nevertheless, the U.S. government has found that most of the cocaine and much of the marijuana, heroin and methamphetamine consumed in the U.S. comes through Mexico. Mexican drug networks control a substantial part of the illicit drugs distributed in the United States.

(SEE ALSO: ; ; Drug Interdiction; International Drug Supply Systems)

JAMES VAN WERT

REVISED BY FREDERICK K. GRITTNER