Monday, November 03, 2008
In 1939 and 1940, Hitler rose to power and thus in the early forties began World War II. The US went to war with Germany and its allies. Germany controlled Morocco and Turkey, countries that at that time exported its opium to make morphine to the United States. Morphine is a well known pain killer used in surgery and as a drug to numb pain in the battlefields as well as the surgeons operating room.The United States needed a new source of opium and morphine. Top US scientists quickly discovered that the opium poppy grew in perfect climatic conditions in the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Durango and Sinaloa.
The US and Mexican government signed agreements to grow opium in the Sierra Madre Occidental of these states and employ rural farmers for low wages. And thus, the cultivation of poppy began in the isolated sierras of Durango, Chihuahua and Sinaloa. A new, cheap source of morphine had been found. But poppy bulbs are also used to make something more sinister than a painkiller: Its also used to make Heroin.
After WWII was over, soldiers wounded on the fronts came back home addicted to morphine and marijuana. That is when the Mexican campesinos began their illicit business, smuggling Morphine, and marijuana cultivated in the sierras to the US border where there was a huge demand for the drugs. The rural, crude laboratories of Durango were good for making Mexican black tar Heroin. Sinaloa and Durango in the fifties and sixties then began making huge quantities of drugs, the farmers no longer poor, making thousands and even millions of dollars of the drugs they had learned to cultivate in such fertile land. No more corn or beans would be planted in these lands. Amapola (poppy) and marijuana became the cash crops.
The Sinaloan traffickers soon moved from their rural ranchos to ostentations mansions in the Tierra Blanca neighborhood of Culiacan, the state capital. Tierra Blanca became their fort and center of operations. Others moved into Las Quintas. Culiacan now saw brand new Cadillacs and Lincolns on its main avenues, along with a explosion of violence. Murders were rampant and Culiacan gained the title "Little Chicago".
The US government by the late sixties and early seventies began an anti drug campaign, started by Pres Richard Nixon. Mexico responded by starting Operation Condor. In 1977 the Mexican military descended upon the Golden Triangle of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua, torturing and killing the campesinos, imprisoning others, burning marijuana and poppy fields and spraying the ground with pesticides. Now, not even corn or beans could be grown.
Operation Condor forced the old time kingpins to flee Tierra Blanca and Culiacan and relocate the center of operations to Guadalajara, Jalisco. The infamous Pedro Aviles was killed by the police, and the Quintero family took control of drug trafficking in Mexico. The new generation of kingpins would now emerge. Caro Quintero, Joaquin Guzman and Amado Carrillo.
The newly relocated Sinaloans found in Guadalajara a "welcoming comittee" of rich families involved in shady dealings. These pilars of the Jalisco elite introduced the noveau riche kingpins to commanders of the Mexican secret police, the Federal Security Directorate. These comandantes introduced Miguel Felix Gallardo, Rafael Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca among others to the whose who of the Tapatio elite. Provided them with safe house, mansions for their families and muscle and firepower.
Soon the traffickers controlled Guadalajara and the capital city of Jalisco would become the trampoline for Colombian drugs into the US. Felix Gallardo established the routes and drug air traffic control from Colombia to Jalisco then to Sinaloa and the US. Caro and Fonseca ruled the northern deserts making them green with marijuana.
They reigned supreme for years, all under the protection of the Secretary of State, Manuel Barlett Diaz, Secretary of Defense, Juan Arevalo Gardoqui and the boss of the DFS, Antonio Zorrilla Perez.
The so called War on Drugs, the one that started because of an American idea back in the forties, still rages on.
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