Drug Trafficking in Mexico - Discussion Paper 36
Management of Social Transformations - MOST
Discussion Paper No. 36
Drug Trafficking in Mexico: A First General Assessment
by Luís Astorga
Table of Contents
Abstract *
Legality and Prohibition *
Drug trafficking and political power *
Sinaloa and the gomeros *
Operation Condor *
The Camarena affair *
Drug trafficking organizations *
The military in anti-drug activities *
Money laundering *
Drug seizure, destruction and use *
Drug traffickers’ corridos *
Conclusion *
Abstract
Media commonly presents Mexico’s drug scene as a perfect copy of the Colombian model, ignoring, among other points, that drug trafficking in Mexico began about sixty years before the Colombians got an important share of the American drug market, the different political systems in both countries, and the historical and structural relationship of subordination of drug traffickers to political power observed in Mexico. The lack of more academic research in Mexico on drug-related problems is another reason for replicating totally mechanically Colombian particularities to the Mexican experience. And last, but not least, the U.S.A. government discourses (both those made by McCaffrey, the U.S.A. drug tzar, and the DEA) on drug issues in Mexico, and in many other countries, have succeeded in imposing a kind of symbolic domination. They have become, more than the Mexican government discourse on the same subject, the official versions of what has to be perceived and believed by the public opinion about the Mexican case.
Those discourses are never completely objective nor politically neutral and have created some misunderstandings and frictions between the two governments. Despite the overwhelming information and common places generated by U.S.A. officials and reproduced world-wide by the media about drug trafficking in Mexico, there are still many questions that some social researchers are posing and trying to answer. These concern in particular the historical sociology of the phenomenon in the country, the U.S.A.-Mexico relations on drug issues, the subculture of drug trafficking, drug use, and the dynamics of the relationship between drug traffickers and political power. The objective of this paper is to show a synthetic, comprehensive vision of those drug-related problems in Mexico since the end of the last century.
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