Over fifty years ago on June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon declared to the Washington press corps that America had a new enemy—narcotics. “America’s public enemy number one,” Nixon claimed, “is drug abuse.” To fight it, it was necessary “to wage a new, all-out offensive.” Within days, U.S. newspapers took up the metaphor. The U.S. was now engaged in a “war on drugs.”
Nixon’s speech marked the beginning of a new era of American drug policy. His announcement would lead to the mass imprisonment of domestic drug users from the 1980s onwards. But the real effect of Nixon’s speech occurred abroad. Here, rhetoric became reality; metaphor got real. Nixon’s speech let drug cops off the leash. And it sparked off a wave of extreme violence, which many drug producing countries in Central and Latin America are still living with today.
Nowhere was this militarization of the drug effort felt more than in Mexico. By the end of the 1960s, the country produced around 90 per cent of the booming marijuana industry. And after the French police raided the heroin factories of Marseilles in 1972, Mexico’s traffickers moved into producing heroin for a growing market of returning Vietnam vets and post-hippy addicts.
From 1971 onwards hundreds of American drug agents descended on Mexico’s border smuggling hubs. First, they came from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD). And when that folded in 1973, they were agents for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). They often teamed up with Mexican soldiers and federal police officers (PJF), now flush with money and equipment paid for by the American government.
For fifty years we have known little about this initial campaign or its effects. Most U.S. and Mexican reports were classified. Neither the American agents nor the Mexican drug cops were keen to brag about what they were doing. Yet, over the past eight years I have tried to piece together the reality of this first stage of the war on drugs. My investigation has taken in new declassified documents, the oral testimonies of former cops, drug traffickers and Mexican farmers, and an extraordinary transcript of a 1975 grand jury investigation into BNDD practices. Together, for the first time they offer the grim picture of the effects of Nixon’s words did south of the border.