Mexican Drug War Progress?

Mexican Drug War Progress?

It wasn’t but just a few years ago that Mexicans coming up here were mostly two groups, the marijuanos and the braceros. The braceros were honest people who came to this country, the country of their dreams, to work hard for less money than the poorest American workers are paid. They appreciated the opportunity. They were not murderers, rapists, or thieves, but people with the family values to suffer risk and hardship. Because of them, the agriculture of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas was made profitable, and our economy flourished. It was pretty hard on the Mexicans, but they could still earn enough to send home more money than they could make back in Mexico. Everybody was happy with the arrangement.

What the marijuanos brought into this country is a highly desired commodity, highly desired by tens of millions of Americans. Though it is not addictive, and nothing is stopping anyone from quitting it, those millions all agree that it is such a benefit in their lives that they say it is forbidden to them unrighteously, and they are willing to become outlaws to exercise what they believe should be their right to do, and they buy it and smoke it. It was about the only thing a Mexican could carry on his body and smuggle up here which he could be certain he could get a good price for. The Mexicans who grew the marijuana lived out in the country, and they had a good protective relationship going with their local authorities, and because they were growing the only possible money crop on the land, they could afford to send their children away to college, perhaps even to travel like American tourists do. Everybody was happy with the arrangement.

At some point somebody in American politics started getting up steam among working voters complaining about seeing Mexicans with jobs and food stamps, when they were paying the taxes, and how somebody should stop the Mexicans from coming across the border. The politicians didn’t want to let on they knew the farms would fail if they had to pay legal wages, so they had two solutions to the problem. One was the California system. When you find Mexicans without papers, you put the women with American-born children into state housing, and you put the men in jail as dope smugglers and deadbeat dads. You’ve also got the Texas solution. You put up a keep-out sign and make the river run red with the ones that don’t. That seems to be the Arizona solution too. They are down there making themselves a Taco Curtain, two fences with the ground cleared out in the middle, a DMZ. That’s a De-Mexicanized Zone. I was in Vietnam, on the DMZ, where we had the First Cav Division, my division the One-O-Worst (yes, we were the baddest), the US Marines, a fleet of Navy jets, and Air Force bombers that flew five hours to get there and dropped more bombs on each mission than a whole squadron of B-17s, and we still couldn’t keep people from getting across that strip of enforced border. Do we really want that in Nogales, and Laredo?

A few years ago the American drug companies who keep marijuana illegal because it can compete with their products put the pressure on the Congressmen they own to give money to the Mexican government to arm their DEA and send them out to make a real shooting War On Drugs against the people growing and smuggling marijuana. One way or another, that was pretty much everybody. To a good old Texas boy like George Bush, getting the Mexicans to solve his smuggling problem for him by shooting each other on the other side of the border was not just the most effective thing possible, it was funny as hell. Twenty thousand wetbacks and Mexican dope dealers have died down there, and we haven’t fired a shot. Then they blame the murders on the marijuana. Them good old boys are laughing their asses off. If that ain’t Drug War victory, I’ll kiss a pig.

The entire local economy of the northern states of Mexico is built on the smuggling and labor markets, legal and illegal. From highly placed officials to local estate dons, to the soldiers and the campesinos, there was a structure which peacefully and successfully conducted trade in a market which everybody must pretend they know nothing about, but everybody is making money doing. Suddenly there’s an invasion, with the trucks and the helicopters, and men with sharp new uniforms and machine guns, and people are shot, and arrested. People are betrayed, and imprisoned, and they become vengeful enemies of other people, and where before they were peaceful and loyal citizens, even if technically outlaws, they become truly the enemies of the state, filled with hatred for their own country’s government, and especially for ours. There is chaos, and they are at war.

The structure of connections which grew, marketed, and distributed the marijuana was suddenly disrupted, but the most fundamental truth is still true. Marijuana is still the only crop the common people can grow there for which they can make more money than doing brute labor.

Suddenly the dons, the estate holders, are gone, and the commissioners and deputies who maintained the protected order are gone too, killed or arrested. Crops are destroyed, and the growers must go farther underground, farther out in the country. There is a market which still must be served, however, if the economy is to survive with or without the gringos’ war. Suddenly there is hard competition for the seats of power, for the protection of product, and the protection of place in the market. The enemy of them all is the terrible killing machine the Americans sold their government, with its helicopters and black-armored robo-soldiers. They are also the enemies of each other. Each of them has been taken into the dark rooms and made to betray the other. Each of them has lost someone, betrayed by the other. Now they are truly at war, a war among themselves, and against an invincible high-tech overlord that comes in like from outer space and punishes them by killing the survivors, and destroying their fields and homes.

In such an environment, there is only one structure of organization that can survive such odds, and that is what is called Gangism. When I was a boy, the first thing we learned in the Cub Scouts was The Law Of The Pack. There were rules you did not break, nor fail to obey. You advanced by accomplishment in defined goals. As in a close family church, or a military unit with esprit de corps, the others are like brothers to you, but closer than brothers. Their fate is your fate, their fight your fight, and their respect your only desire. Akela is the leader, the top wolf in the pack, and when he speaks, all the other wolves stand up straight and listen. It is about loyalty and obedience, and being true to the values and goals of the order. The gangs are like that, but more so. They are truly wolves, and not packs of donkeys or babbling geese, or even good dogs. Wolves. The real wolf leader is not a discussion moderator. He could kick all the other wolves’ asses, and if you don’t want to take him on, you roll over and wag your tail. The price of disloyalty is to be torn apart by the other wolves, or at least, banished from the pack. When the pack hunts, you eat. When the pack fights, you kill or die.

Only the gangs are disciplined enough, and ruthlessly violent enough, to survive against the power of an armed DEA. Therefore, the new organizations that succeed the old ones will be gangs, instead of the post-feudal estates of yesterday. In America’s jails, new gang members are recruited by pointing out that those without their protection are prey to the black gangs, and the skinheads with the swastikas on their faces. Their families are identified and placed under pressure by agents on the outside, and they are made to understand the law of the pack is neither voluntary nor democratic. To be admitted, they must accept the demands of blood-in, blood-out loyalty. They must commit crimes that bind them for life, and they know if they try to leave, they will be hunted down and killed by their former brothers, and their families will be killed. This produces an organization of great power and implacable will. There is nothing surprising about this idea. It is the foundation of the Catholic Church. You must agree to take part in the murder by ritual sacrifice of the innocent Jesus to get in, and if you commit heresy or disobedience, you are burned at the stake. Blood in; blood out.

Certain big changes were done to the market by making war in Mexico. Marijuana is not easy to smuggle. It requires lots of land to produce, it is large in volume, it smells strong, and for its weight, is very low profit. It is favored by a clientele that are generally peaceful and easygoing, and likewise is grown by people who just want to be peaceful farmers. Its use does not lend itself to the gang system of social structure or marketing. The Mexican marijuana market has dropped off to almost nothing, and the quality of what gets through is very low due to the processing needs for smuggling. That is not grounds for congratulation, however, as it has been replaced by something which is truly dangerous, terribly and unquestionably lethal. Even heroin is not a drug that lends itself as well to the gang system as this new horror. Most people who use heroin are not desperate criminals, and only the weakest few actually destroy themselves with it. When a heroin user has a good supply, and he is in control of his addiction, he is at peace, and able to conduct a regular life. He is a threat to nobody. It is only when his supply is cut off that he becomes desperate, and dangerous.

However, there is a drug which is perfect for the life of the gang, and that is methedrine. It does not require a large agricultural base, and so it does not profit the common growers in Mexico, nor suffer their vulnerability to interdiction by the DEA. Great amounts of it can be made quickly in small movable laboratories, from products that can be bought on the open market (from American pharmo and chemical companies). It has almost no smell when finished, can be compacted into a very small space, and is easy to smuggle. Even a small amount is worth a lot of money. It is the most addictive substance ever created, and its users are most dangerous when they have it, as they are driven to action by a feeling more powerful than adrenaline. Like the extreme use of cocaine, it is an ego expander, and its users come to feel themselves invincible, and their thinking unchallengable as revelation. They feel no pain, suffer no fear, and they have great delusions which drive them to fight and to kill ruthlessly, for the thrill, and for the right to tattoo another merit badge on their chests. When they are suffering from withdrawal, they will do anything, literally anything, to get it. So, of course, will their clientele. An organized gang of angry Mexicans which traffic in methedrine to an American clientele they hate is a calculating predatory monster with which there is no reasoning, no compromise.

A few years ago we had a Mexican problem, we thought, because we had basically good people coming up here selling marijuana and working for the lowest wages in a country they hoped someday to live in. Now we have Americans dropping dead by the thousands from the cruel addiction to the methedrine, and we have prisons full of Mexicans who are being forged into cadres of highly organized extreme homicidal death squads who hate America and Americans, and from any reasonable point of view, justly. Instead of the open border and peaceful relationship with our nearest and should-be-best neighbor which I enjoyed growing up in New Mexico, we now are arming our border with robot airplanes and soldiers with guns, fanning the flames of racism on both sides, and making another nation of people our hated opponents.

We have made enemies not only of those Mexicans who are trying to get across the border, but of those who are already here. There are about fifty million of them, some born with citizenship, some with papers, some with millions of dollars and powerful positions, and some who have nothing but their hunger and their rage. I like to say Mexicans make good Americans. I know them to be good family-oriented hard-working people who make the best of friends. They are also a people with the cultural heritage of the Mayans, for whom the celebration of death was the very fabric of their society. The people of Aztlan accepted the idolatry of the Catholic Church precisely because it is a cult of human sacrifice. As the toreador in the arena demonstrates so gracefully and so cruelly, Mexicans are a people who dance with Death.

Like our Muslim problem, today’s Mexican problem is our own Frankenstein. What the anti-Mexican right-wing Drug War proponents and the left-wing social-services client-group-creators in and out of government have given us is already ten, a hundred times worse than the pot mules and chile pickers against whom we started this blood bath, and it is just beginning. Al Qaida was once just a small club of effete religious intellectuals who conceived and executed a single elegant tactical plan. As a result of the reaction of the same American leaders to that mission, there are now thousands of them, enemies we created who were once our friends. Take a lesson, for likewise, I warn you, to arouse the spirit of Mexico against us is to awaken the Jaguar.


James Nathan Post

If you happen to love the Mexican and Hispanic culture as I do from growing up in Billy The Kid's rugged and rowdy old Mexican border hometown of Mesilla, you might enjoy this book of humorous and heartwarming stories from the days of old New Mexico.

Three Tales In Lastima