Narcotrafico

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 topolitical 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, havesucceeded 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 ofdrug 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.


Legality and Prohibition

In the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, drugs such as marijuana, opiates andcocaine were commonly used in Mexico, specially opiates, basically for medical reasons. Laudanum and other opium derivatives such as morphine and heroin, as well as pharmaceuticals such as cocaine, coca wines and marijuana cigarettes were prescribed by doctors and easily obtained in pharmacies, popular markets and even hardware stores. The authorities were concerned about the quality of theseproducts and tried to protect the consumers. Addicts were considered as ill persons not as criminals (1). There had been some attempts to control laudanum, poppy and marijuana commerce since 1870, but they did not succeed (2).

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the U.S.A. government was very active in the international arena, trying to convince other countries to accept opium control andcreate special laws to punish the offenders. The Shanghai Conference in 1909 for opium control was the beginning of the U.S.A. diplomacy on drugs. The Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, approved in the U.S.A., aimed at controlling opium consumption, was a sort of founding reason to expand American official perceptions and laws on drugs world-wide. At that time, the Mexican revolution was takingplace. Revolutionary leaders in Mexico were more interested in political survival than in controlling opium trafficking which was of, not an important or special concern for them. Prohibition on one side of the U.S.A.-Mexican border and legal commerce on the other created the conditions for drug trafficking.



Drug trafficking and political power

The most important illegal plantscultivated in Mexico were poppy and marijuana. Coca plantations did not exist. For many decades opium trafficking was the main source - but obviously not the only one - of Mexican traffickers� revenues, the source of their primary accumulation. In the state of Sinaloa, people invented a special word, gomero (7), for opium traffickers. As David Musto says, even though there were some marijuana users in...