Five myths that Narcos propagates about the drugs war
You can’t escape signs of the narco economy in Latin America, it affects everything. Why is Costa Rica so expensive? Because narco violence forced rich gringos out of the Mexican coast and down to the Costa Rican coast. Why are there so many sky scrapers in Panama City? Because Colombian narco-traffickers used the city to launder their huge profits. The estuary of drug money and violence runs through the entire continent.
But we all see the narco economy through myths, or what one writer called the ‘narco-imaginary’. I’ve been watching the Netflix series, Narcos, which brought narco culture to millions of viewers. As I watched series after series, I wondered: how true is the version of history that Narcos and Narcos: Mexico presents to us? Are the DEA definitely the good guys, or could they actually be the unwitting bad guys here, disrupting organized crime and creating violently disorganized crime in their Quixotic quest for a world free of drugs?
To find out, I asked my friend, Professor Benjamin Smith of Warwick University. Ben has spent his working life studying Mexico, writing four books about it. The latest is The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade. Ben spent years in Mexican archives, interviewed over 30 DEA agents, and pieced together the history of the Mexican drugs trade going back a century. We discussed five myths that Narcos propagates about the narco economy.
The drugs trade is run by corporation-like cartels
Narcos propagates the idea of drug cartels as these discrete commercial units, like corporations, which manage the entire drugs business from growing to distributing and selling. ‘Cocaine Inc’, as the media dubbed the Cali cartel in the 1980s. But Smith says:
The Mexican cartel is something very different. It’s like the Mafia. It’s an organization that charges everyone in a drugs economy for protection. They’re less like a corporation and more like a quasi-state, an organized extortion system. And they demand extortion money just the drugs market but for any market — coffee, avocados, restaurants, you name it.
Indeed, he says he first got the impulse to investigate and write about the drugs trade, and realized it was something that was affecting the whole of Mexican society, when a friend of his who ran a famous bar in Oaxaca was killed by the Zeta gang, for refusing to pay an extortion tax. ‘He had nothing to do with the drugs trade’, Ben says.
A lot of the violence in Mexico in the last 20 years hasn’t been so much for control of the drugs trade, he says, as for control of these quasi-state protection rackets. What is the policy implication of this analysis?
Weirdly this comes down to taxes. The government has made a decision not to have a huge tax base. What it needs to do is increase that tax base, increase the power of the state, and take away this rival tax group.
2) Take out the king-pins
Another myth propagated by every series of Narcos is that the drugs trade is run by cartel bosses, ‘king-pins’, and that the best way to tackle drug crime is to take down the king-pins. That’s the strategy you see in every narco drama, when they pin a bunch of photos on a wall, with arrows pointing to the master-mind at the top of the organization. Gradually, through the series, they get closer and closer to the king-pin, and then finally take him down, in a blaze of publicity.
This mirrors the actual strategy the DEA pursued. Smith says:
The king-pin strategy emerges somewhat organically when the DEA takes down Escobar and the Cali Cartel in Colombia in the 1980s, and by the early 1990s its written in stone: ‘This is how we disrupt drug trafficking networks — we take out the people on the top’. The idea being that thereby you reduce the drugs coming into the States. This strategy peaked in the 2010s in Mexico, where famously the Mexican government took out 130 of the 140 king-pins in the drugs trade, after which the homicide rate went through the roof and the price of drugs on the street went through the floor. So effectively what this is, is very good for the right-wing media. But in actual fact it’s incredibly ineffective for bringing down addiction rates, overdose rates or homicide rates, or for raising the price of drugs.
In fact, one paper suggests that violence rises after a king-pin is taken down, as it disrupts a settled economy and increases competition. The other reason violence may spike is that, to bring down a king-pin, the DEA encourages and coerces members of a drugs network to inform on each other. Smith says:
It’s difficult to infiltrate closed networks of narcotraffickers. You need informants to do it. That informant slips apart the bonds of trust on which these networks are based. This causes enormous amounts of distrust and paranoia, and they end up killing each other. The classic example would be Chapo Guzman of the Sinaloa Cartel — a big cartel where they’re all related. In 2009, he sells out some of his compadres, and as a result, the Cartel splits apart and start killing each other. That’s deliberately engineered by the DEA. It leads to loads of arrests but more killing and no reduction in the consumption of drugs.
This brings us to myth three.
3) America is an innocent and virtuous victim of the barbarians at its borders, and the DEA are noble knights fighting the evil narco monsters
In some ways, and with some qualifications, this is the story that Narcos tells. Yes, Narcos does show the machinations of the CIA, and the collaboration of the DEA with Colombian paramilitaries, but nonetheless, the story is narrated by DEA agents, from their view-point. The series’ show advisor is ex-DEA agent James Kuykendall, and he is a ‘big promoter of the DEA and its mission’ according to Smith.
Smith says:
This is one of the last remaining myths of the drugs war: the DEA are the good guys taking down the really evil people, the mass-murdering psychopaths. But what I suggest is the DEA helped create these mass murdering psychopaths.
He found an ‘old boy’s network’ of DEA agents and interviewed around 30 of them. He says that, on the whole, they are bitter, angry, and even ‘broken’ over their role in the failed war on drugs. ‘They’re often Mexican-Americans, and they’ve spent their whole career putting away people who look like them. They got into the DEA out of a sense of mission — perhaps a loved one died of an overdose. But they feel that what they’ve done doesn’t actually help.’
And what they did wasn’t always legal. He says:
The DEA has a very loose remit, it has looser rules than the US military or the State Department. It basically flits from being a diplomatic arm of the US to doing active investigations. A lot of them are semi-illegal. A lot of their work in Mexico is entrapment, which is illegal.
Did they use torture or extra-judicial killings? ‘It’s difficult to know. We know that in Mexico, extricating confessions through torture has gone through the roof since the 1970s, when the DEA got involved with Mexican drug policing.’
Narcos shows the supply side of the economy, but doesn’t focus much on the demand side — ie the United States’ bottomless demand for mood-altering drugs, particularly since the 1960s counterculture, which Smith describes as ‘jet fuel for the Mexican drugs economy’. He adds:
I recently read a book called Deviant Capitalism, which argues that a lot of what we now think of as neoliberal capitalism is introduced by the hippy counterculture. They turn up in villages around the world, throwing around money, and suddenly these villages are hooked into a globalized market. You’ve got a village in Afghanistan producing the weed smoked in San Francisco. It’s a weird mixture of capitalism and exoticization of the foreign. It’s the modern disease, in a way.
The American demand for drugs is itself connected to the weak medical and welfare system in the United States. Illegal drugs are a quick way to medicate mental and physical pain, in the absence of affordable healthcare.
And it’s also the case that one American export has been flowing into Mexico and causing hundreds of thousands of deaths: guns.
Smith notes that in 2004, the US changed its gun laws to make it easier to purchase certain types of guns. A year later, Mexican drug-related homicides started to soar. A researcher in president Obrador’s government has done research suggesting that, a few months before every big cartel war, there’s a massive bump in gun sales in the city over the border.
Smith tells me:
It’s really noticeable. Even here in southern Mexico, I meet mates who are now tooled up. No one had a gun when I first came to Mexico. It has one gun store, on a military base. Yet it has some of the highest levels of gun ownership in the world. In the 1990s, 17% of murders were caused by firearms, most people were killed with machetes. Now it’s 80% of murders. It’s way easier to kill people with guns, and it’s far more likely that random passers-by will also get shot.
Now, the Mexican government is trying to flip the script: The president of Mexico has attempted to change the narrative: it’s not Mexican drugs killing American youths, it’s American guns killing Mexican youths. The government has even brought a civil court case against US gun manufacturers, who they are suing for $10 billion.
So we should question the story of the virtuous Americans and the degenerate Latinos at their periphery, which one finds in so many western narco-stories. There is corruption, vice and human frailty on both sides of the borders.
4) Kiki Camarena was killed by psycho narcos, supported by corrupt Mexican politicians, and this led to the redemptive violence of the American war on drugs
This is the story told in season one of Narcos: Mexico. It tells the true story of DEA agent Enrique ‘Kiki’ Camarena, who was abducted, tortured and murdered in 1985. His torture and murder caused outrage in the American media and spurred Washington to launch a new round of its war on drugs. Three leading members of the Guadalajara Cartel were arrested for his murder.
In Narcos: Mexico the blame is laid at the feet of Rafael Caro Quintero, a member of the cartel. He’s portrayed to be a drug-crazed out-of-control Mexican Indian, who is used by shadowy figures high in the Mexican government who fear that Kiki knows too much.
This doesn’t make any sense. Why would a government minister order the killing of a DEA agent, which would spark a major crackdown? Ben says: ‘Was Camarena killed because he revealed that figures in the Mexican government were involved in the drug trade? People knew that already.’
Why was there such a massive media and political reaction to his death? Smith says:
DEA agents died in Mexico all the time. They got shot all the time. But Kiki’s death was brilliant for the Reagan-era war on drugs. It cleansed the DEA of two charges. One, being racist — Kiki was a Mexican. And two, torture — because Kiki was tortured. When it happened, the DEA was losing power in the military and the FBI. Kiki’s tragic death was used as a brilliant piece of propaganda for the drugs war.
Who was behind his killing? We don’t know. One theory is that he ‘may have revealed that the CIA was using Mexican narcos to sell drugs into the US then channel the profits to the Contras in Nicaragua.’ In fact, an ex-DEA agent, Hector Bellerez, has supported this theory in an Amazon docuseries, The Last Narc, which also criticizes James Kuykendell for his policing. Kuykendell is now suing Amazon and Bellerez. So you have two ex-DEA agents putting forward two different theories of who killed Kiki Camarena, one in an Amazon series, the other in a Netflix series. That gives us some sense of how murky ‘true crime’ TV’s version of history can be.
5) The drugs trade is always brutally violent
In some ways we want it to be so. Narco culture has become like video games — a dream zone where men, hemmed in by feminism and bureaucratic capitalism, can play out their fantasies of unfettered male violence and excess. But the Mexican drugs trade wasn’t always as violent as it is today.
There are two aspects to the Mexican drugs market — trafficking to the US, and selling it at home. Before the 1990s, Ben argues, there was barely any domestic drugs market. There was an unofficial arrangement between the drug traffickers and the government — sell the drugs abroad, and we won’t come down on you hard. If narco traffickers got caught, they spent a year or two in prison.
Three things changed from the 1980s onwards. First, the DEA started to take the ‘war on drugs’ a lot more seriously. They infiltrated drug networks and got narcos to inform on each other, with various forms of coercion including the threat of long sentences in US prisons and the seizure of narcos’ assets.
Smith tells me:
Trafficking involves cooperation and trust. It helps if they’re friends or compadres or a family network. It doesn’t tend to be very violent, until the DEA infiltrates you, turns your compadres into informants and threatens to extradite you, which raises the stakes. Before the 1990s, what’s the point of selling out your mates for a few years in a Mexican prison. There’s very little violence connected to trafficking until the 1990s. After the 1990s, if the DEA are going to put you in a US prison for decades and take all your money, you might as well sell out your compadres.
Once the narco traffickers started to inform on each other, they also started to kill each other, and the trade became a lot more violent.
Second, the protection racket economy became more fragmented, as the PRI ruling party lost its monopoly on power. Third, drug gangs became much richer, through the sale of Colombian cocaine into the US, and they started to replace the state as the chief extortioner / taxer in some regions. Fourth, competing gangs started to sell in Mexico — to tourists and to locals — and to fight for local drug turfs. The competition for that domestic market is what has driven a lot of the violence of the last decade.
The situation today is very bad — rough estimates suggest 150,000 Mexicans have been killed in drug-related violence in the last 20 years. Journalists, politicians, students, tourists, no one is safe from the violence. But history teaches us nothing lasts forever. In Colombia, for example, I visited Medellin in February, which once had one of the highest homicide rates in the world. Now, its homicide rates are below where they were before the cocaine business took off. The city has been revitalized, for the time being, by a canny combination of deals between the competing gangs, and state-backed welfare and public infrastructure projects. The infamous Barrio 13 is now the site of tourist tours and craft beer bars. The gangs are still there, they still extort local businesses, but for now the neighbourhood is flourishing, relatively speaking.
Ben is not holding his breath that a similar renaissance is right around the corner for Mexico. President Obrador has declared the war on drugs over and says he plans to legalize marijuana. But Smith thinks:
In all honesty, I’m not entirely sure it will do a lot of good. At the least, people with minor drug infractions won’t go to jail. And it will stop some of the street fights over marijuana. That’s obviously a good thing. But unless you legalize meth, crack and heroin, it’s a drop in the ocean. It won’t help people who are taking drugs because they’re in deep psychological and physical pain. What you really need is proper medical and social services. It’s not a coincidence that at the same time the NHS is going through a crisis and it’s very difficult to get a therapy appointment, the UK is also going through an overdose crisis.
And the gangs are not just in the drugs business. They’re mainly in the extortion business. To combat that, Ben suggests you need a stronger state with a bigger tax base. But then, a series called Taxes would probably attract fewer viewers than Narcos.
You can watch my interview with Professor Benjamin Smith below, and buy his book here.