Mainstream media in both Mexico and the United States lost a useful opportunity when they produced the internet era’s requisite undernourished obituaries (the best: Associated Press) of former Mexican president (1982-1988), Miguel de la Madrid, who died April 2, at 77. He and his presidency are both basic and critical tools to understanding Mexico today – but not because de la Madrid was a dramatically innovative, or transformative chief executive. He is pertinent today primarily because his former long-ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), is expected to return to power in the mannequin-like figure of Enrique Peña Nieto, former governor of the State of Mexico, which surrounds Mexico City. And because Latin America’s drug war isn’t working, Peña Nieto, whose PRI has a disastrous past of colluding with drug traffickers, is making grand promises to overhaul the current policy and reduce violence in general.
De la Madrid became president in the wake of three PRI presidents whose misdeeds were key factors in the toppling of the PRI’s 71-year reign in 2000: Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1964-’70), Luis Echeverria (1970-’76) and Jose Lopez Portillo. (1976-’82). Each of these three left a legacy of economic chaos, bloody oppression and deep national psychological scars.
De la Madrid, often called a “caretaker president” and the “gray president,” also has been termed a “discrete and respectful man” who seemed to want, above all, a calm presidency. Yet he had been a career government bureaucrat, serving brutal, seemingly psychotic men long enough to know there was no chance of that. Diaz Ordaz’s “Tlatelolco Massacre” and Echeverria’s Corpus Christi Day killings, Lopez Portillo’s six hallucinatory spendthrift years were too fresh in the public mind. Another reason: while de la Madrid was trying to calm Mexico in the wake of the economic/social collapse created by Lopez Portillo, the country’s cottage industry of drug production/transport was being transformed. It became much larger, richer, more dangerous, and so versatile it would challenge the government, though the de la Madrid administration preferred to ignore this.
De la Madrid, like his mentor Jose Lopez Portillo, had no political experience. He had studied law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), worked at Mexico’s central bank and taught law at UNAM. From there he moved to the Treasury. Next he moved to Pemex, the government-owned petroleum monopoly. After that he held several posts in the Echeverria administration. Thus he was exposed to the iniquitous underbelly of that era’s methods of governance.
Citizens welcomed him into office, supported his “moral renovation of society,” which they mistakenly believed signaled a war on corruption. Perhaps de la Madrid in some corner of his heart wanted that election slogan to be true, but even the most good-willed president, with his monarchical power, could not overturn 463 years of bad habit, the unrelenting grip of conquistador-born custom so tightly woven into Mexican political culture.Example: It’s Mexico City in the 1980s. I am visiting two State Department friends at the U.S. Embassy when a phone sitting between us rings. It’s snatched up by my female friend. Her male partner slips a note pad and pencil in front of her. He glances at the large clock on the wall and adds the date and time to a list on a yellow legal pad. A plane, so heavy with a cargo of cocaine that it’s moving slowly en route north toward the U.S. border. He picks up another phone and joins in an agitated conversation. Both are insisting in rapid Spanish that helicopters recently given to Mexico by the United States, now on a tarmac in northern Mexico, be put in the air and the outlaw plane be tracked and forced down, and reliable police alerted.
None of this happens. The official on the other end of the line reports there is no fuel for the helicopters. That, even though fuel has been supplied, and by written agreement that those craft are to be kept ready to lift off at any moment. Mexican officials in Mexico City are called. My friends track the cocaine shipment as it moves closer to the U.S. border. But this opportunity is doomed by indifference, and, of course, corruption.
This was not new. The hopes of many knowledgeable people, American and Mexican, that de la Madrid once in Los Pinos (Mexico’s White House) might do a little house cleaning had already faded. Dramatic reason for that had been issued from Guadalajara. On December 2, 1984, four U.S. Jehovah’s Witnesses disappeared while knocking on doors and passing out religious literature in an upscale neighborhood in the Jalisco capital. Then in February 1985, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent and his pilot were kidnapped there. They were never again seen alive. As DEA agents worked to find out what happened, Francisco Fonseca, spokesman for Mexico’s attorney general, declared, “This is not a Mexico City problem. This is a Guadalajara problem.” Even before this bit of surrealism, it had become clear that de la Madrid was not going to clean house.
The name Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo had become important for he was responsible, ultimately, both for the airborne cargo and the unresponsive law enforcement response. He was a bodyguard for the governor of Sinaloa until 1980, and associated with many of the “prominent families” in that state, while becoming known to the DEA as a middleman specializing in the transport of drugs. By mid-1970 Colombian drug runners were switching their activities from Florida routes to Mexico. Gallardo was the deal-maker in that switch. He introduced the Colombians to the cunning drug dealer, Ernesto Fonseca, and the young Sinaloan drug producer and distributor, Rafael Caro Quintero. Gallardo also introduced Fonseca and Caro Quintero to top Guadalajara and Jalisco politicians and police officials, as well as arranging for federal protection.
De la Madrid evidently had his hands full trying to pull Mexico out the vast financial hole his mentor, former President Jose Lopez Portillo, had diligently designed. Mexican historian Enrique Krauze, who knew de la Madrid well, has kindly said that the new president had confused prudence for passivity. On the ground in Guadalajara – to DEA agents, journalists and knowledgeable observers – that didn’t fit what was going on.
By the time de la Madrid had taken office in December 1982, Gallardo’s organization was transporting up to two tons of cocaine a month. Meaning that numerous Mexican officials, in Mexico City, Guadalajara and along the drug runners’ northern route, were colluding in – and profiting from – that thriving enterprise. Diligent DEA agents in Guadalajara had reported on all this to their superiors in Mexico City and Washington. No one seemed alarmed. As president, Jimmy Carter never demonstrated interest in DEA activities. His successor, Ronald Reagan, was fixated on Soviet and Cuban activities in the “third world.” In Washington, drug wars in Latin America were seen as a menace to big banks, multinational corporations, and the Treasury Department, where representatives of these entities argued that Latin nations owed corporate U.S. lenders billions of dollars. DEA field agents (prohibited from carrying side arms in Mexico) resided in mists somewhere below “secondary interest.” This willful ignorance, and Mexico’s denial – quite different than “prudence” – was to cost both the United States and Mexico dearly.
In June 1985, after a long string of critical defeats at the hands of both U.S. and Mexican politicians and bureaucrats, DEA agents seemed to get a break: the arrest of Jaime Herrera Herrera, son of legendary drug lord, Don Jaime Herrera Nevares. Don Jaime, born in 1927, was head of an ambitious Durango clan of heroin traffickers that reached deep into the United States. He had relatives all along a route to a “distribution family” long resident in Chicago. When the French Connection fell, Herrera labs and distributors were ready to furnish desperate East Coast dealers with all the product they wished. The clan’s advantage was its reproductive capacity and years of experience, including courting and employing scores of politicians. During World War II, the United States needed medicinal morphine, a by-product of heroin. After the war, Herrera and his brothers saw a civilian market in the United States and created a lab and distribution operation. By the 1980s, it was estimated that, through intermarriage, the organization numbered some 2,000 blood relatives and 3,000 associates. In October 1978, because of feuding in his own organization, Jaime Herrera Nevares turned himself in to General Raul in Guadalajara. Don Jaime was sent to Durango. He was freed six months later. (This is the first of a series.)