When Miguel de la Madrid, who died April 1, at 77, began his six-year term as Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) president in 1982, he inherited from his mentor, President Jose Lopez Portillo (1976-1982), a trashed economy, and a lavish and unabashed level of corruption in every sector of government. Lopez Portillo was one of three consecutive megalomaniacal presidents who had brought Mexico to it knees, destroying its economy by the end of each of their sexenios (administrations), shattering the public’s bruised confidence in critical government institutions, even in its own calloused ability to judge the sanity and harmfulness of its leaders.
Faced with this degree of destabilization, de la Madrid, who had worked in government banking and finance, but had no political experience, seemed ignorant of, or too overwhelmed, to note the bourgeoning threat of Mexico’s politically well-connected drug lords. Narcotics had become a touchy issue before. In 1969, United States President Richard Nixon launched Operation Intercept, checking every vehicle entering the U.S., paralyzing border traffic. In 1975, under Washington pressure, a campaign to eradicate Mexican marijuana and poppy fields was launched, and vast fields of plants were destroyed and hundreds of traffickers in both countries jailed. Washington felt self-righteous and Mexico felt put upon. Victory over the “problem” which threatened bilateral relations, was declared. The shrewdest traffickers — Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, Ernesto Fonseca and Rafael Caro Quintero — not only survived, but thrived. They simply moved to Guadalajara when soldiers began arriving in Sinaloa.
De la Madrid’s “moral renovation” campaign promise did bring down some obvious, expendable officials and their subordinates, but it didn’t last long. De la Madrid was sincere, but naive, suggested one long-time political hand. “To end corruption,” he argued, “would be to saw off one leg of the ‘system’.” And soon, de la Madrid reluctantly agreed that centuries-old habits could not be broken. He was recognizing the limits of his power.
But by 1978 Lopez Portillo, flouting his lack of understanding of his own culture, basically expelled the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration from Mexico. He banned DEA flights verifying the U.S.-funded, Mexican-executed eradication of marijuana and poppy fields, and disarmed the few remaining agents. Then, in 1985, under de la Madrid, longtime drug lord Jaime Herrera Herrera was arrested, and many people‘s hopes picked up that the new president was aware how the narcotics trade was undermining Mexican governance. But Herrera was sent from a Mexico City prison back to his home state, Durango, where he was released after six months. That this did not occur immediately, prompted gunmen to assassinate Durango’s public security chief, his son, bodyguard and female friend in downtown Durango as they left a fiesta for U.S. singer, Vicki Carr.
This incident, along with some one hundred other headline-making drug crimes could not have escaped de la Madrid‘s attention, primarily because the remaining DEA agents submitted detailed reports on them, and made sure reporters and editors were aware, despite the DEA’s low opinion of journalists. Mexico’s news folk were strategically paid off by government officials.
Something seems to happen to national leaders after they’re in office for a while. Lopez Portillo, before entering government, had been a professor of law at Mexico’s leading university for ten years. The first part of his sexenio was stable, rational, mirroring his inaugural address, termed “one of the best in Mexican history.” It called on Mexico to unite, heal its wounds, and move ahead as one. But the real work of governance during this generally admirable period was carried out by Jesus Reyes Robles, historian of Mexican liberalism, now the president’s Minister of the Interior. Then, it was discovered that Mexico’s oil deposits were much richer than anyone has dreamed. Lopez Portillo’s mythologically burdened imagination went off the rails. Reyes Robles soon resigned as Mexico’s economy went down the tubes with the president’s chaotic and scandalous spending in the face of falling oil prices. It was soon recognized that this administration would be even more corrupt than most people could imagine. Finally, apart from thousands of shameful, irrational, and frequently illegal acts, Lopez Portillo, in September 1982, nationalized Mexico’s banks — an act characterized by many as unconstitutional. For what appeared to be political reasons, this accusation was dropped as was de la Madrid’s inclination to bring criminal charges against Lopez Portillo.There were other troubling signs. When Mexico’s highly respected investigative reporter, Manuel Buendia, revealed connections between drug jefes and the office of the powerful Secretary of Government, headed by PRI heavyweight Manuel Bartlett, it was something a President could not know. And when Buendia was assassinated in broad daylight in Mexico City’s fashionable Zona Rosa May 30, 1984, Direccion Federal de Securidad (DFS) agents were the first police on the scene. The DFS reported directly to Bartlett. Mexican journalists campaigning for justice in the case tagged the DFS for the killing and for cleaning out Buendia’s damning office files of cases he was investigating, and of his sources. Certainly the president knew of that. Yet Mexicans at first were reluctant to believe any of these had a connection. The public forgot that Lopez Portillo’s 1976 inauguration speech, like De la Madrid’s, had inspired both admiration and deep-felt hope.
Feuds between well-armed drug gangs erupted far from their home turf — not in Sinaloa or Durango. The media, which was both bought-and-paid-for and politically intimidated, often treated such internecine shoot-outs as isolated occurrences. And it seemed that the federal government viewed them as competitive dustups between competing bands of criminal gangs. Just as many seemed to view drug trafficking as a marginal, naturally corrupt money-making vocation satisfying the debased appetites of a decadent gringo society.
Eruptions of drug-related killings seldom generated much thoughtful analysis by serious minded people. If a North American journalist brought up the subject with Mexican journalist acquaintances, usually it was blithely dismissed as unimportant. Of course, that wasn’t true, and both parties knew it. But like the federal government, many Mexicans weren’t eager to talk about it.
Then came the disappearances of the four Jehovah’s Witnesses, December 2, 1984, in an upscale Guadalajara neighborhood, where they were proselytizing. January 30, two young Americans disappeared when they walked into La Langosta, a popular seafood restaurant on the corner of two of Guadalajara’s main thoroughfares. It was said to be owned by Sinaloa drug barons. But the two young men didn’t know this, nor that Rafael Caro Quintero, a particularly vicious Sinaloa trafficker, had invited a group of associates to a party at the Langosta that night.
He mistook the two American for DEA agents. They were brutally killed on the spot and their bodies buried in Bosques de Primavera park.
Then the car of one of the locally stationed DEA agents was shot up. Not long after, DEA agent Enrique (“Kiki”) Camarena and his Mexican pilot, Alfredo Zavala, disappeared. At last the president could no longer ignore what was happening to his country. Yet as DEA agents in the field worked to put pressure on the DFS and Mexican Federal Judicial Police, officials in Guadalajara and Mexico City, and on the U.S. Embassy, things seemed stalled. On the Mexican side, cooperation was tepid, slow, maddening. The de la Madrid administration, in the opinion of numerous legal and law enforcement officials, did not investigate the case with all possible resources or energy. Caro Quintero, accused of ordering the murder of the missing Americans and the brutal torture and murder of Camarena and Zavala — among other crimes — was allowed to escape by a high ranking Mexico law enforcement officer. Eventually, he was arrested in Costa Rica, then extradited back to Mexico. Here, he gave a lengthy confession and was sentenced to 40 years in a maximum security prison in the state of Mexico. After 25 years there, a judge last year ordered him placed in Jalisco’s lower security Puente Grande penitentiary outside Guadalajara.
De la Madrid always insisted that the United States had interfered in Mexican internal affairs in solving the crimes committed by Caro Quintero and his associates. Some Mexicans — far from the crime scenes — agreed.
But they did not agree with de la Madrid about his behavior on September 19, 1985, and the days following. That was when the worst earthquake in the country’s history hit Mexico City. De la Madrid was virtually absent in the days immediately following the quake. Some knowledgeable people in the mid-ranks of government said that the president, his family and close advisors had gone into hiding when the 8.1 terremoto commenced. When he did appear he “spent more time down-playing the disaster than addressing the destruction, and the wounded citizenry of the capital, said one Mexican observer. The few police, army and government personnel who finally first appeared were said to be sent to help dig out factories, banks and other businesses, rather than aid survivors. De la Madrid, “showing the frozen heart of the system,” declared that he would not request aid from other nations, certainly not from the U.S. Nearly 50,000 people were killed. The civil population — primarily young people and women — immediately filled the streets to rescue injured quake survivors, organize teams to get the injured to those hospitals left standing and to make-shift emergency centers providing medical care. These citizens dug out survivors, handed out supplies and shepherded some 200,000 homeless to shelters. Many Mexican analysts have said that the government’s ineptitude and heartlessness contributed to the ruling PRI’s ultimate downfall. (This is the second of a two-part series.)