A lot of the language used to talk about traffickers and cartels is confusing, perhaps even intentionally misleading. Take “turf wars”—struggles over what in Spanish is called la plaza, the main square. Turf wars go back to the earliest days of Mexican drug trafficking. But it wasn’t traffickers duking it out: it was policemen and politicians. They wanted their piece of a protection racket.
The government war on drugs in Mexico wasn’t an import from the United States, at least not in the beginning. A century ago, an authoritarian Mexican government decided to crack down on a drug that had come to be associated with poor and indigenous users. Introduced in the sixteenth century by the Spanish, who wished to grow hemp for rope, cannabis gradually gained a Mexican name, marijuana, and became a home remedy. It became the drug of choice during the Mexican Revolution. In his myth-busting and perversely enjoyable history The Dope, Benjamin T. Smith relays one theory about where the word originated: “Juan was the name given to the average Mexican soldier. His camp wife was often termed María, María-Juan became Marijuana.” Mexico banned growing and selling the herb in 1920, before the United States did. Mexico also banned the importation of opium, which prompted enterprising farmers to start planting poppies in the Golden Triangle, an area of northern Mexico that now produces a healthy portion of the United States’ cocaine.
Once the United States banned marijuana in 1937, running it across the border became good business. Mexican families smuggled alcohol, then marijuana, then cocaine. According to Smith, the Mexican government began cashing in on the trade, too. The first protection rackets emerged in northern Mexico, creating a model that persists today: policemen and politicians take regular payments to look the other way when certain people move drugs, then crack down on their rivals. Everyone is happy: there are arrests to publicize, and those in on the arrangement make plenty of money.
Smith writes that some of the early protection rackets helped fund schools and infrastructure, especially in Ciudad Juárez and Baja California. Later, local politicians tended to line their own pockets. But the traffickers wouldn’t pay up without persuasion. If that proved violent, all the better: protection rackets could be made to look like crackdowns. That’s where the “drug war” violence began. Drugs had to be made illegal; traffickers needed to learn to accept being shaken down. Smith writes of an early governor of Baja California, Esteban Cantú, who decided that imposing the change involved “an unpleasant errand. To prove his antinarcotics credentials and persuade traffickers to pay up, Cantú killed a group of established traffickers.”